Making decisions in large no-profit organizations benefits from structured facilitation. A Human-Centred Designer like Antonella Pastore facilitates the process of understanding the complex setting, gathering all diverse points of view, mapping information flows and processes, and convening all people to create a shared understanding.
In a CREAZEE Sprint, I discussed with Antonella a former illustration of her roles in Italian. Then we decided it was worth redoing it in English by summarizing her journey and highlighting some of the most interesting aspects.
Enjoy a video interview, also published as a podcast, in which we leverage an engaging work of exploration, reflection, and analysis of a crucial role: the Human-Centred Designer.
Reflecting on my search for an audience, I realized that I can focus my communication efforts on real people around me. The first “persona” is myself. It’s one of the many possible personas, meaning, when addressing my content to myself I am intentionally orienting my communication to things and topics which interest me. In a similar fashion I can look around me, to people close, friends and acquaintances. What do we share? What interests do we have in common? How can I research some of the topics relevant to them and produce meaningful content?
It would be a “bottom-up” approach to select very specific topics to investigate, research and detail so I can make explainer content, for me to learn better, for them to appreciate some relevant knowledge.
That’s the part when the old dear Design Thinking approach becomes useful. How do you know what to design if not researching what your users want, need, desire?
In the end I should be more intentional and propositive in spending quality time with people I love trying to learn them better. It can be an occasion to have life experiences together, improving our bounds, bettering us as persons. It seems to be a great motivation to learn, develop relationships, acquire knowledge, develop new content and create new opportunities. Isn’t that exciting?
Call anybody you can reach to, even a family member is fine. Prepare on the screen the prototype, the mock-up, the demo of the visual artifact you’ve just created and you want to have feedback on.
Do not make any introduction, do not give any explanation: call the chosen tester and ask a direct and straightforward question: “What do you see?”.
As the first thing you want to have the first reaction, you want to listen to their thinking process. When they start to describe what they see, do not make any reaction, do not judge, do not answer. Keep on asking “and then?” or “why?” or “what does it make you think of?”. Ask only open questions to elaborate on what they are seeing and feeling.
Only when you are satisfied and their patience hold, if you feel like, ask them more specific questions like: “Do you like it?”, “What do you like?”, “What don’t you like?”.
And only at the end try to give context, application, and audience: “How do you see this ‘thing’ in the context of conveying this ‘message’ to these ‘people with the objective of achieving this ‘communication goal’”?
Congratulations, you had the chance of receiving brutally honest feedback.
Before considering rebuilding a solution because old, it’s wise to evaluate the differences between the existing system and the new version to be designed. Even if there are many components with several interdependencies it might be convenient to evaluate a piece-by-piece update rather than scratching everything and starting back from zero.
How shall we decide if we should redo it from scratch or adapt the existing one?
Plan to invest a limited amount of time to map the most connected and relevant part of the system to the one to be and see if it is relatively straightforward to translate between the old and the new or if there are too many differences or new pieces or a lot of old pieces to be completely removed.
If you discover that there is a high ratio of unchanged parts or slightly adapted components versus the novelties you might consider updating and upgrading the old rather than starting from scratch.
In very complicated systems, if you discover that the update is more convenient than the rebuild you might save a lot of time and resources.
It’s not your desires, your hopes, your expectations, your opinions, your impression, your intuition, your experience, your imagination, your fantasy, your speculation, your creativity, your luck.
It’s the facts doing the talking.
You need to be humble to read the language of facts in an objective way. What did actually happen? How is that different from what you wanted?
There, in that difference, you have a chance to learn, adapt, change direction, start from scratch or quit.
I want to talk about the process of ideating solutions by speculating on possibilities and exploring the realm of what could be done without checking too much what can be done. When you create beautiful presentations of imagined artifacts and objects, you have the power of persuasion. You can persuade interested people to buy it, to be convinced that is a good solution because it is beautiful. And through the simulation of how it works, you can even have a high fidelity simulation of how to interact with it.
So you can show what would happen if that solution would be implemented in the field of your problem.
It is exciting, encouraging, and it can be used to sell the further development and creation of it. When you finally convince the investor or the client to buy it, then you have to do it. And when you pass from the visionary, the presenter, the salesman, and the designer who conceived such a wonderful and aesthetically pleasing solution, then it’s time to do it. You’re going to the business, the resources, accounting, the financing and the development. So you need to talk with the the builders.
That is the time when you have to be really humble as a designer, you need to establish fair and honest and straightforward relationship with the builders. Because if you have had the chance of talking very little with them about the solutions you have been selling, you need to be respectful of the constraints that my might emerge when building it. There’s actually another iteration of designing. That’s real co-design that finally you can do because that’s the proof of the building. So what about all of the features imagined, the workflows and the stories you’ve been telling about the interactions of this product?
Can they be done for real and with what limitations?
Are they actually working as intended? Have you covered all the possible ramifications and implications when thinking about the beautiful presentation told in a nice conference room in 30 minutes?
This is a very delicate part of the project in which you have to carefully reconsider the initial design choices because there was no time for growing bottom-up the solutions together with the client. This is reality. And so sometimes, if not most of the time, it’s not possible to do proper user research, create user stories, ideating, creating prototypes, and iterating them.
This is the first real prototype you are building. That is not a mock-up but a functional prototype where the real features. You’ve been creating, an inventory of specs and requirements you’ve been compiling are finally coming into reality.
You need to be very patient as a design leader, as a manager, when you are sharing finally what was a demo presentation and now became a spec for developers. In that case, developers have the right and the chance of becoming designers because they have the right of critiquing and reviewing the initial user interface decisions made to adapt to the real development of algorithms and interface widgets, and library components. So that’s the more grounded and down to earth collaborative design that’s happening during the execution of the project, the development.
The project now changes shape according to this more present forces that are not just business, accounting, leadership, management, and design, there’s now also development. That’s the reason why developers should be always present during requirements gathering but even during the synthesis of user interviews and user stories and epics because they need to have a say before architectural and decisions are made.
So you have a chance of integrating and enriching and adapting to this new context by adding more frequent and deeper interactions between designers, developers, and the end users. By doing that, you have a higher chance of creating a successful product for all the stakeholders.
As a design coach I work to ask questions, not to give answers. If I don’t educate my coachees to find their answers their own way I will fail. Still, I’m often asked for an opinion, what do I think? What’s the best course? What can be done? What should we do? And I am supposed to either guide my team to the right answer or to facilitate their way to it.
When I tend to cut it short and say what I think, straight to the point, I am going away from my coaching role and becoming more a leader consultant. If I have a long-term relationship with my team, after an important foundational period to get acquainted, fine-tuned and aligned, I position myself on the leading edge of the spectrum. It’s only when I reflect on my practice, I dedicate some alone time to consider the journey, the possible scenarios and the forces in the field that I step back and move again on my coaching role.
It’s not easy to balance multiple roles while working with the team. I find it useful listening carefully to each team member in a systematic quick review at the end of each coaching session. When I see most if not all of them aligned on the perspectives that I see without me pushing too much I understand we are making a good job, together.
And I also realize that I’ve reached a good balance as a designer, coach, leader and consultant.
When I am in this happy position I can keep myself from giving straight answers and, humbly, replying “I don’t know”. I am sure I won’t get them stuck because I will facilitate a discussion and a process through which we can explore possibilities and, if needed, set up experiments to discover possible answers and learn from them.
This requires more time, the feedback loop is longer, but together with providing more robust answer to my team I am also, and more importantly, educating them to work towards discovering the answers themselves.
When I can do that I feel satisfied as a member of a team growing towards their maturity and independence, also thanks to my contribution.
You have the ultimate idea for a solution. You’re excited, full of energy, and you have put all of your resources into its implementation. You gathered the best collaborators, you have a fantastic place to work, you have your roadmap, and you can already see the success knocking at your door.
But people are not getting it.
You need more than 30 seconds to explain how it works. Each time you pitch it, you say different things with slightly different meanings. You focus on its inner workings, on technical details. You talk about what potentially could do shortly.
People come, they get amazed at your presentation, they wonder about the possibilities, and then they play with it. Some of the parts are not immediately clear to use. Some of the rebranded names for everyday things are difficult to grasp at a glance. Some rough edges here and there are not helping with the overall experience.
And they go. They turn away on their shoulders to never come again.
You have lost them.
What’s the problem?
You need to communicate your idea using the language of the people you want to attract.
Use simple, familiar names for the key features (when you’ll be famous, you’ll have your chance to invent new verbs based on the name of your solution). Plan an onboarding process, precise, linear, straightforward that would take your customers by the hand towards all of the magnificent spaces of your designed space. Make it foolproof. Make it engaging. Make it fun.
But most of all: it aims at providing real value to real people. What is the tangible benefit you have measured? How are people enthusiastic about your solution? Are they coming back every day to spend time with it? Are they getting the promised value?
If you cannot answer one or more of the previous questions reliably, you might have a clear need in a more robust and well-structured design process. It’s not too late, you can still leverage all the creative and material investments you have made in your dream idea. You need to adopt and adapt a design process based on people’s real needs, make assumptions about the value you want to provide to them and validate your idea with measurable outcomes.
Do not follow your intuition alone. Design your success.
Design is easy if you know how to do it, Bruno Munari used to say.
Too often, I hear somebody talking to me about design as something strictly related to the visual appearance of things. While color, texture, shape, form, volume, configuration, layout, typography, and many other visual qualities are a matter of design, we should clarify that we are talking about Visual Design or Graphic Design.
There’s a more comprehensive, high-level, and maybe even purist definition of design that we need to consider: design is a process to build something. Design aims to be systematic and systemic in putting something in the world that can solve a problem or mitigate it.
Isn’t an illustration or a book layout a design problem? Of course, it is! But it is a part of a bigger problem, called: communication. Some designers argue that beauty is a vital part of design and that it should be the first goal of a designer to create something beautiful.
That is why design should not be improvised. There are steps in the design process involving creativity, imagination, fantasy, diverging with our creative minds to visualize parts of the problem, and possible ways to solve it. But it’s just a part of it.
While art exists to raise questions and create problems, design, in its purest form, should live to find answers (or better questions) and to solve problems (or find better ones).
If you don’t want to reinvent the Universe from scratch and waste your life doing the same errors and discoveries that others already did, study, research, and adapt the best design process for the context of the problem you want to solve. And design solutions that are effective, efficient, and pleasurable.
Follow a design method to build solutions that are effective, efficient, and pleasurable. You might risk winning the “Compasso d’Oro.”
Kristel van Ael talked about Systemic Design, the differences and similarities to Design Thinking and she introduced the Systemic Design Toolkit, a tool to help using the methodology in business contexts.
Namahn is Humanc-centred design agency in Brussels, Belgium.
Systemic Design Definition
Systemic Design integrates systems thinking and human-centered design, with the intention of helping designers cope with complex design projects (also called Wicked Problems).
Traditional design methods are inadequate to face the recent global challenges stemming from increased complexity as globalization, migration, and sustainability.
Systemic Designers need improved tools and methods to design responsibly while avoiding uninterested consequences/side-effects.
Wicked Problems involve multiple aspects, multiple parties, multiple interests and perspectives. They show no clear link between cause and effects.
See how we failed with poverty reduction, waste management, migration, pollution and climate crisis.
Limits to Growth. Donella Meadows.
The problem with Reductionist Thinking
From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price.”
—Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline.
Unintended consequences
The Cobra Effect. An example of unintended consequences.
Unintended consequences are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen.
Unexpected benefit: A positive unexpected benefit (also referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).
Unexpected drawback: An unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).
Perverse result: A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse).
How is COVID 19 an intended consequence?
What is Systemic Design?
What is Systemic Design?
Systemic Design lays at the intersection of Design Thinking and Systems Thinking and aims at helping designers to face complex problems.
By zooming out to understand how the parts of the system influence each other.
By zooming in, co-designing, with the stakeholders, the components that can leverage Systems Change.
Design Thinking has a focus on the parts, products and services, to create optimal User Experiences.
provides a structured problem-solving process
Puts people on the center
Hands-on, co-creative, cross-disciplinary
allows to learn and improve through prototyping, and testing
Systems Thinking has a focus on the whole, on the interaction of stakeholders, products and services aiming at influencing the emergent behavior of the system.
to identify non-linear relationships (see also Circular Design and Circular Economy)
It’s open ended, shaping the conditions for change. With the Systems Thinking approach you need to focus on creating an environment conducing to the emergence of the changes that you aim for.
The Systemic Design Toolkit
Built by Namah in collaboration with shiftN, MaRS and SDA, the Systemic Design Toolkit is a methodology and a library of tools based on academic research and human-centre design expertise.
It’s based on the principle that Systems Change should be co-designed and co-created within the system and with the actor of the system, preferably, with the stakeholders in the same room. And provides tools to foster dialogue between the parts without requiring participants to master its inner working and principles.
The structure of the Systemic Design Toolkit. Diagram.
The Systemic Design Toolkit is composed by seven steps and includes more than 30 tools.
Framing the system (Systems Thinking)
Listening to the system (Design Thinking)
Understanding the system (Systems Thinking)
Defining the desired future (Design Thinking)
Exploring the possibility space (Systems Thinking)
Designing the intervention model (Design Thinking)
Fostering the transition
Framing the system
You cannot change what you don’t know: generate shared understanding of the current context and identify the stakeholder to involve.
Map the rich context of current practices, trends and innovative initiatives.
Listening to the system
Analyze the interactions between the actors by identifying hidden relationships.
It’s a way to communicate the essence of your field research.
Actants describe archetypical relationships.
Understanding the system
Develop a shared understanding about forces and interdependencies in the system to discover the leverage points.
Create a system map, “make the system visible” by visualizing its structure and the relations between its components.
Defining the desired future
Align the stakeholders on the Value Proposition. What do we want to change and how? What is the future we are imagining?
Co-Design an ideal desired future (better thinking about “futures”) by imagining how we want to improve the future context of individuals, organizations and society.
To give sense to the whole process designers need to explore different types of possible intervention by making sure they are covering the big picture emerged by the initial research activities.
A brainstorming activity to craft an intervention strategy in which you explore the leverage points in a system.
Designing the intervention model
Investigate how interventions connect and reinforce each other to envision an effective strategy for change.
The intervention model represents the DNA of change. Interventions are Design Concepts that will enable Systems Change.
Fostering the transition
Plan the transition towards the desired goal by moving from the Minimum Viable Product (maybe the Minimum Viable Solution in this case) to the full implementation of the intervention model.
The roadmap for transition is a tool to plan the implementation of the interventions, in a way that transformation happens step by step.
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