Design Lives in Intuition and Logic
Over the past couple years there has been significant discussion about design thinking and how it is impacting the business world. The spokesman are people like IDEO’s Tim Brown and RISD’s John Maeda. Public corporations like Apple, Target and Proctor & Gamble attribute part of their success in the value they place on design within business process and innovation. Dan Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” outlines how our world of analytical thinking is changing. He makes a case for the need of design to lead America into the future. Business Week and Fast Company have both gotten into the game with many articles on design thinking.
Design Thinking…What is That?
Business Week Exchange: Design Thinking
People see the buzz and the success, but it is still hard to comprehend what exactly is “design thinking”. We know this is important but why? Even as a designer this can be hard to explain sometimes. Talking with other designers we all “get it”, but when discussing it with non-creatives it can be hard to capture that “aha” moment. I recently read the book“The Design of Business” by Roger Martin. He does an excellent job of outlining the process and showing how design thinking works successfully in business. He breaks it down into two main components; analytical (reliability) and intuitive (validity). These two components need to work in a “real time” cyclical basis through the knowledge funnel. A system that captures all ideas and feeds them through three process stages till they become a working algorithm.
“The distinction between reliability and validity, is at the heart of the innovation dilemma. The goal of reliability is to produce consistent, predictable outcomes. The goal of validity is to produce outcomes that meet a desired objective.”
Again this gives a great understanding of the importance of design thinking and the balancing of analytical and abductive logic. Undersanding reliability and the need to measure, report and predict based on past events makes sense. There can be difficulty in setting up the right systems to get the data that you need. Many organizations spend vast resources to make this happen. It is effective and proven to be well worth the expense. The part of design thinking that is harder to grasp is the intuitive. Is this a matter only for designers? Do you need only to hire designers to make this work? Part of the answer is yes and part of the answer is no. If you need to make it happen right now and your company does not have this skill set, then you need to hire a designer. Most likely this is the case, since intuition and abductive logic are not supported or emphasized in our current business culture. Designers have been trained to hone these abilities, recognize their effects and demonstrate why.
You hear the term “look and feel” associated with design and separated from content. “Look and feel” is emotion and emotion lives in the world outside of logic. I spend quite a bit of time observing and listening to my clients. As I listen, I let my thoughts create images and free associations in response to what I hear and see. These are intuitions. Some of these thoughts or visualizations happen because of associations to past experiences and the need for my mind to make sense of new concepts and categorize them with other similar ideas. Sometimes these thoughts are not associations at all. They are a feeling. When I sketch, I start with these feelings, ideas, words, concepts, and attributes written down next to me or floating through my mind. As I draw and work through ideas, I might control the designing of these concepts with particular strategies. On other occasions, I do not control it at all and let things happen. It takes time, patience and practice to perfect the honing of intuition. It also takes time and practice to gain the ability to see and identify why certain elements work or do not work. This is my own knowledge funnel of implementing strategies, experience and proven techniques in contrast to seeking out new innovations and ideas in a constant feedback loop.
As a visual communicator you learn how value, hue, line, space, rhythm, relations, symbolism, composition and depth can have an effect on design. How a tweak here or there can make a vast difference on how a viewer reacts to a what they see. This is the “look and feel” that others react to, but cannot always describe why. This is what you hire a designer to do for you today. In contrast, many organizations can start down the path of design thinking by creating processes that value intuition and practice it within the organization. It may take awhile for this new process to work. In the long run the practice will create muscle memory through proven success and innovation. This success will lead an organization to trust using intuition and logic together in a design approach.