Changing the change

Here are four kinds of design. They form a hierarchy of contribution, with
Design Research at the highest level.

Let’s start at the bottom with General Design Awareness. Do you remember
what happened when desktop publishing emerged in the 1980s? All those
notices on pin boards at the office about the picnics and social events had
been written by hand before that, and then suddenly they were printed from
laser printers and composed on WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
screens. Everyone was suddenly a graphic designer, choosing fonts and
composing layouts. At first the tendency was to use lots of different fonts on
the same page, and to completely fill the surface with type. Over time these
amateur designers became more aware of the skills of graphic design; they
started to choose fewer and more appropriate fonts and leave some white
space around the text. The tools that democratized printing had the effect of
increasing the general design awareness of many people who had never thought
about fonts and layout before, and as a result they started to respect the
talents and skills of the professional graphic designer. A similar effect can be
expected as mass customization allows people without college level design
education to make design decisions about products.

Professional designers operate at a more sophisticated level, having mastered
Specialist Design Skills. They are expert at deciding how to do it, how to create
a elegant solution to the problem posed by the constraints, but they expect
the context that they operate in to be decided by someone else, probably
the boss or the client. This expectation wastes the value of design thinking,
and reduces the stature of the contribution made by designers. Why not
apply interdisciplinary design thinking to deciding what to do in the first place?
That change is overdue! Particularly with the challenging problems posed
by the complexity of design contexts in the world of digital technology and
global connectivity, the application of teams can help to set the brief for
development, to harness design thinking in order to decide what to do.

By developing interdisciplinary design thinking we can encompass the process
of planning and management, but we are still woefully immature when it
comes to knowing how to know. The whole area of Design Research is infantile
in scope. An important opportunity in the context of Changing the Change will
be to move design research forward faster and more effectively, so the we
discover more about how to know and how to communicate the results of that
knowledge.