Design in business, and my future: 

Effective Design = efficient product + human centred product + simplicity.

Design is not necessarily creative, rather it is observational. In an era where everything has, “been done” and novel ideas are difficult to come by design innovation is the mostly likely place to start when seeking to disrupt an industry. (http://www.creativityatwork.com/design-thinking-strategy-for-innovation/).

 

As I look towards my future career paths either in management consulting or venture capital I am thankful that I registered for COMM 388. The design method is human centred. Whether I am proposing solutions while consulting or analyzing the potential success of a venture, humans are at the vocal point. As the world shifts from a production era to an efficiency era I feel a duty to improve over engineered products, and to remove system waste. Starting future projects with the design method will help me fulfill that duty, and minimize the potential of repeating other’s design mistakes.

Applying the design method to create a process innovation for Creative BC was particularly interesting because we didn’t create an item, but a concept. My instinct would have been that design only has a place with an actual product but now I know that using design and the design method to improve a process improves the likelihood of the process being human friendly.

When you just graduated Kindergarten: 

A refined way of thought:

I’ve always asked a lot of questions and tried to focus my thought around observation, but if there is one thing I vow never to forget from this class it is that when you think you’re finished asking “why”, ask a few more times just to make sure. Not only does it clarify a situation but it also puts you in the other persons shoes, making you, well, a more empathetic individual.
Empathy, that is the other important takeaway from this course, although I’m not as convinced on this one. The theory around empathy is that if a designer is able to actually feel the emotional pains associated with current situations that a better solution will be designed. In principal I agree, however to use empathy effectively you also have to be able to filter out baggage emotion that may be projected onto the designer by the client. How does someone know when emotion is over the top, well, experience. More specifically, experience being empathetic. I don’t think the skill can be taught, rather it is developed over an individuals life. For example, team Octagon tried to be empathetic when discovering our Creative BC problem, however we failed to use it effectively. On the contrary we became very empathetic to Karen but never once considered her bias of being new to the organization or her career background. So perhaps we weren’t empathetic at all and just thought we were, but if you ask me we simply failed to remove unnecessary emotion from her words. This was a learning experience for our team, and while that may bring us one step closer to being able to efficiently use empathy it will likely not be the first skill I reach for in the future unless in a risk free environment.
So great, Isabella is going to ask why more often and maybe try to be empathetic but probably not because she is skeptical on her abilities to use it efficiently, so what’s this refined way of thought? Well, I’m glad you asked. Unfortunately my answer may not be as exciting as you were hoping. My thinking process is basically the same as it was September 8, 2016 (see above image) just more refined and structured. Think of my original thought process as having graduated Kindergarten, and now it’s graduating grade 7. I have fancy names to call the different things I was already doing, and like anything that has been taught my process is more clear and the end product is, hopefully, more structured

Empathy side blurb – HBR on the limits of empathy: https://hbr.org/2016/01/the-limits-of-empathy

 

 

The grade 7 toolkit:

Every method taught was useful, however the following were my favourite. I believe they will offer the most value moving forward and helped shape the positive experience I had during COMM 388.

Team S.W.O.T –  By creating a team S.W.O.T. prior to starting on our project we were shown our team bias and it forced us to dig into things that none of us were comfortable with. Had we not known where our comforts lied, we may never have explored outside of our team comfort zone. For example, no one in our group described themselves as creative. Had we not have been aware of that it would have been easy to assume that creativity had no place in our process.  The team S.W.O.T also helped to confirm that the best people for each task were in fact working on that task.

Sensing Intent – This was a very helpful for us to look at similar industries to see what innovations are happening there and then to think about how they could be applied to our relative industry to achieve similar goals. I will continue to apply this to future consulting work, as well as to conduct a more thorough competitive landscape analysis.

Seeing Insight (a picture says a 1000 words) – Take a photo, take a step back, then judge. The process of taking a photo to capture an observation was not only useful, but made the act of identifying pain points incredibly easy. A few weeks after my first formal time using this technique I was lucky enough to hear a guest speaker from Lenati LLC. He emphasized the importance of observation for pain identification not only for it’s simplicity, but for it’s ability to see how systems interact, an important detail often forgotten in the design process.

Challenge fosters growth:

As with most things in life the great lessons are not learned from success but when things go terribly wrong, and that is exactly what happened with our innovation intent. It was incredibly difficult to pitch solving a problem without every mentioning a solution. As the process went on we became more focused on ways to hide that we already had a solution than on delivery a clear and concise message.

Looking back on our process I wonder if the best solution was being presented at the very end. Admittedly our team had a tendency to work backwards. We had a solution in mind and we worked backwards to find design methods that worked with our solution and strengthen our argument. I’m not sure why that happened, perhaps we struggled with limited primary information. Rather than blocking out what Karen shared with us we took her word as scripture and rushed through mode 2, know context. Personally it was also very difficult to spend enough time researching the industry landscape because I have little interest in the subject matter. This is obviously something that should not occur, nevertheless, mode 2 and the understanding the context was incredibly challenging.

On that note I will leave you with the video we watched in class on the design brief. While focused on a design brief it also summarizes our role as members of the global business community. Thank you for a great term!