Designers in Innovation - Time to practice what we preach
The Alloy team developed the BT Whole Home app and device in parallel with packaging to achieve a fully-coordinated end to end User experience.
Gus Desbarats, our founder and former chair of BIDA has provided his own perspective on BIDA’s Designers in Innovation webinar
‘Great to see so many designers of all ages at the recent BIDA webinar listening to an excellent speaker line up. Phil Gray and Mat Hunter need no introduction; Ben Griffin (an Alloy design alumnus) has been doing a great job at Innovate UK promoting design investment in a very rigorous intellectual environment, Professor Peter Childs reminded us that we can also be contributing to designing businesses and ventures at scale, citing the success of the UK chip and games industries and Jo Barnard did an excellent job highlighting the strategic value Industrial Designers bring to start-ups.
I was especially relieved to hear Bettina Von Stamm, who shares my longer term-perspective on this sort of event, express, in the nicest possible way, how much we still seem to be talking about the same old topics in the same old way. I share her pain, and might not have been as polite about it.
While the Design Council, DBA and DMI have done excellent work promoting the value and effectiveness of design, their data only provides ‘correlation’; evidence that ‘better than trend’ business results and strategic design investment often happen to together. However, as any scientist will tell you, correlation doesn’t prove ‘causation’. To quote a timely example, user trials of a vaccine will tell you when they do or don’t work but they don’t provide all the knowledge needed to create a vaccine in the first place. For that you need to drill into the detail of WHY things work.
Design Thinking has done a great job explaining HOW we do things, although at a fairly trivial ‘paint by numbers’ level, but it doesn’t do much to explain WHY our methods are so effective.
As a professional qualified in both Engineering and Human-Centred Design, in my 4 decades of practice, I’ve seen 1st hand how the absence of a ‘WHY our stuff works’ knowledge foundation has held back everything from the salary prospects of Human-Centred designers in industry to the effectiveness of budget pitches. Old habits like positioning us on the basis of attributes like creativity or practices like rapid-prototyping also just add to the confusion and get in the way of better routine collaboration between the Human-Centred design sector and the more technical/scientific/commercial sectors that are the backbone of business and innovation.
Now, more than ever, youth entering the profession needs better guidance on WHY design works to ensure they reach their full potential. As a profession we need to step up collectively in 2 areas:
1) Practice what we preach 1: listen to our audience I support BIDA’s call to action for an event in which we bring in business people to share their feedback on WHY they think Human-Centred design has worked for their organisations.
2) Practice what we preach 2: share insights from our collective experience In her blog about the event, Jo Barnard made the point that we don’t share enough about our experiences. I agree. Looking at the Zoom screen on the BIDA call I saw a group of colleagues with, many many hundred years of collective innovation experience. As a rough estimate, in the course of my career I’ve led teams that have converted well over £50M direct investment in us into commercial returns amounting to many hundreds of millions. Others on the call have achieved even more. Before we disappear into our sheds, it might be a good idea to find a way to capture our stories about what has and hasn’t worked, and WHY. In the meantime, I recommend mentoring. I’ve found it very rewarding, although, sadly, also quite alarming.’
