Box102: Third Time Unlucky

I missed a week last Wednesday because as you may have seen, I had some pretty bad medical news. ‘Not as bad as it could be’ said my ever-cheery consultant but honestly it’s hard to look at the third time my leg has broken and not feel devastated. The details are tedious but essentially I was given a loose all clear in June/July and was even getting back to cycling. Then in mid-September I was in a lot of pain after a trip, left it a while before seeing physio who thought it was probably muscle but said to speak to the consultant if it didn’t get better. It didn’t. So now we’re back on action stations for a potential third surgery.

Design, u k hun?

The news leaked out this week that IDEO is laying off a bunch of staff and thinking about pivoting. Fast Company have done an initial post-mortem which covers all sort of things from AI, to the high rates they charge, to the in-house capacity that former clients now hold. The meta-narrative, which has been emerging for a while, is the retreat of ‘design thinking.’ While I’ve been avoiding looking at my phone I’ve caught glimpses of earnest posts on LinkedIn from people who like UX so I guess people are feeling a bit squeaky-bum time as the giant of the industry takes a decline.

It’s hard to place what this slight untethering feels like. As you might imagine, I’ve rarely approached the words ‘design thinking’ with anything but contempt but the hurting of the leviathan still hurts. Why is ‘design thinking’ so abhorrent? It proposes that design is just a thing you can do. You can do a 6-day course and call yourself a designer, you can follow these 7 steps or this double diamond and innovate better or something. Design is all about intuition and play and like almost literally any other profession; skill emerges through experience.

I don’t know anyone trained as a designer who calls themselves a ‘design thinker;’ they just happen to be a designer with a brain. I don’t know a single one that gets a project and reaches for their double diamond. This idea that an entire domain of expertise can be turned into a tool roll you can put in your back pocket and pull out at UX conferences is not only stupid, but actively harmful to the profession and the work.

What design thinking and IDEO achieved though is a broad, mainstream acceptance of design as an ontology; a system of understanding the world, of knowledge production. That knowledge is produced through the leveraging of the designer’s expertise to uncover new insights. Most often that takes the form of; ‘I wonder what happens if I stick this thing to this thing? Oh that’s interesting, that could be useful for this!’ In other words; intuition, play and experimentation. This is different to the scientific method of testing hypotheses in being open-ended and spontaneous.

Thanks to IDEO and others, design is everywhere. I’ve compared it before to how icky ‘the digital’ sounds to millennials and younger; it’s all just… stuff, there is no ‘digital.’ The question is what happens (and appears to be happening) when this is also true of design. When there’s no ‘design thinking’ because everything is just design now; we do design in policy, in health, in interactions, transport, systems, sustainability etc. etc. etc. Surely at some point everyone is just using design as they do digital.

This is where that flowering of real design needs to occur. The double diamond was a useful Trojan Horse to get it in the door, to get people to grasp what this weird, craft-like thing was. Now how can we get folks comfortable with dropping the formulaic pretence and getting used to imagination, play, experimentation and the critical avenues that opens up.

At least Dan Hill has a perfectly-timed salve that’s more representative of how I think design should work. One day I will do a proper thing on making people ok with imagination and play for design. I have a few speaking engagement coming up. Maybe that’s a good opportunity.

Recents

I had the opportunity to contribute to this year’s Common Design Studio, a project I help establish in my former role. I attended the briefing and then the feedback crits and made a five minute video about the theme this year; air. I was back on From Later here. And there’s a new job in our team at Arup for a marketing and comms manager here.

I have a lot of upcoming talks but If you’re in Copenhagen or thereabouts on 20th November please consider coming along to this amazing speculative design workshop we’re running with the Danish Design Centre.

On 24th November, I’m doing a small event on ‘Urban AI‘ with my Arup hat on at UCL. I’ve been working with folks in data science and digital at Arup to help develop an AI strategy for a few months. It’s been really fun and productive and (you know me) I’ve obviously been pushing the critical shift entailed by it rather than hyping it as new ‘productivity’ tools. Unlike some Foresight work it’s also been easy to get people involved because everyone has a conception of AI and wants to do something.

We’re also looking to work with a Wales-based creative on a project exploring the future of flood resilience in the country. Have a look here for more info.

Short Stuff

• I too was a little surprised at how quick Noah Smith was to defend Marc Adreesen’s populist screed. Dave Karpf has stepped in to analyse Smith’s response. The crux of it is; the optimism/pessimism isn’t the key dimension so much as if you’re passive or active; in other words, you can believe that technology might do amazing things for us it’s just whether you think that happens through the mysteries of the market fully unleashed as Andreesen does, or whether it happens through strategic regulation and policy making that distributes the gains of technology fairly.
• David Lowery is on Corridor Crew’s new ‘Directors React’ series. Not bothered about much but I adored the Green Knight so really interesting hearing about that.
• Benedict Evans doing a bit of thinking about where on the Excel to Command Line continuum LLMs sit.
• Apparent breakthrough in space solar.
• You saw this but Boston Dynamics stuck a bunch of stuff together to give Spot personality.
• The White House’s executive order on the safe development of AI. I need to go over all the stuff from the AI summit at some point. It’s obviously super relevant.

Ok, I’m drained, exhausted, distracted and also – to add insult to literal injury – have a cold coming in. I was supposed to be giving a talk today but it’s just going to have to wait. I can barely open my mouth to drink coffee. I love you though and thank you.