Design at Scale 2021- Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design (Cornelius Rachieru)

—> Thank you for the introduction. I’ve heard so many great things about the Rosenfeld community over the last few years, and I’m eager for the chance to meet others over next few days

 

—> The goal of today’s talk is to provide a scale of complexity designers will encounter when doing modern design

 

—> Let’s begin with a historical view of design scales. Design scales provided a scaling perspective from which we look at Design and it’s impact on the world

 

—> Examples of Design Scales include those introduced by Elliel Saarinen and the “Power of 10” video by Charles and Ray Eames

 

—> In addition to these design scales, Richard Buchanan also made reference to four orders of design. Meanwhile, Jared Spool represented  design complexity as a series of layers, ranging from screen to ecosystems

 

—> There are other scales like Stewart Brand and Frank Duffy, but these four scales are what designers are primarily introduced to

 

—> So why consider another  design scale?
  • While historical models are  well known, they don’t deal with complexity and granularity we have to deal with as designers today

 

—> So what does a contemporary framing of a design scale look like?

 

—> In my own work and in explaining design scale to clients, I use three layers:
  • The lowest level is the foundational layer, or the theoretical concepts that underly design methods
  • The second layer is the artifact layer, which focuses on creating simple design artifacts and micro interactions
  • The third layer is the feature layer, which focuses on Sketching, Prototyping, and wireframes
  • The fourth layer is the product layer. This layer deals with  Advanced IA concepts, ergonomics, and human factors. It involves designing end-to-end experience across all touch points
  •  The fifth layer is the ecosystem layer. This layer focuses on the impacts of designs on the system and societal level
  • The sixth layer is the global layer, which focuses on the impact the design has at the global level
—> People built successful careers on first and second layers, like Aaron Drauplin of the Drauplin Design Company

 

—> For the the fifth and sixth layers, there are there are approaches from systems thinking and  system dynamics that can be applied

 

—> One can look at design problems either inside-out, by starting on lower levels of the scale, or outside-in,  by starting on the highest levels of the scale

 

—> Experience design has broken into the domains of product and service design, with no clear delimitation between the two
  •     Product designers are better at addressing problems at the lower-layers, while service designers are better at addressing problems at the higher-layers

 

—> The deliverables product designers and service designers provide are not the same, so let’s review the differences

 

 

—> For Product Design, the projects are led by designers, and design perspective matters the most. Designers drive the projects to completion

 

—> For Service Design, projects are co-facilitated by designers, and designers are one of many stakeholders. These projects are multi-disciplinary and multi-focused

 

—> Product Design focused on visual artifacts, with an emphasis on precise, polished, and pixel perfect deliverables

 

—> Service design focused on understanding the problems being solved, and it’s alright to be rough in designing outputs

 

—> In terms of domains like UX Research:
  • For the bottom layers little or no research is required, and research is generally restricted
  • For the middle three layers, is where UX designers excel in doing research. The design tooling has evolved a lot in many years, and the number of researchers has rapidly grown in the past few years
  • For the top two-layers research is lacking, since design and design researchers have only recently started articulating and solving problems at that scale and complexity
—> What does this mean?
  • At the feature level, our research insights are assumed to be accurate
  •  At the product level, products are bunches of features, and while some research falls through the cracks, research is reasonably accurate
  • But at the system  level, designers are dealing with multiple channel interactions, touchpoint, and actors. There is a need to balance human needs and business value. Research is spot, and populations are unintentionally left out
—> To resolve the gaps in system level design, UX design will need to partner with other research orgs like market research that have honed methods for space, which will let us be more comfortable

 

—> Once you see a system you cannot unsee it
  • If you are aware of existing systems as a concept, you will almost automatically consider the systemic perspective when it comes to design
—> Designers are good at research at lower-level since problem space and parameters are well-framed. However, in the service design realm, the problem space is ambiguous and boundary setting is required

 

—> At the  top-level of design scale , holistic approaches are name of the game, due to their complexity and non-linearity

 

—> One takeaway from my graphic:
  • Product can answer questions through design and visualization
  • Service asks questions through design, and needs to make sure you ask the right questions
—> Most of the projects spanning product design levels are built as customer experience project, which makes it easy for these items to be gravitated towards

 

—> At service design, projects are not labeled as design projects, but labeled as change management projects, or innovation initiatives

 

—> Why is this important to talk about?

 

  • If you consider how design craft is scaled in organization, it happens in the lower half of design scale
  • For designers to be ethical, we need to be system thinkers
  • If focused on things like design systems, sprints, Agile, Lean UX, we are focused on scaling simplistic projects as our results
  • In name of efficiency and predictability we are commoditizing design and designers themselves

 

—> As we follow the upcoming presentations and the Design at Scale conference, we should consider what can be done through our organization to scale design to make sure it manages the aspirations of our profession

 

Q&A

 

1. I’m curious about the placement of community and user understanding in Cornelius’s scale. I can see people taking his layers literally and starting with colors, but only later realizing a11y or cultural issues, for example.

 

—> The goal of the presentation is to provide a view of the consequences of design decisions at various levels of scale. Then designs will be better, and the world will be a better place as a result

 

—> The reason we are dealing with the impacts of negative enterprise products on society is that no one figured out the systemic impacts of these products

 

—> However, feel free to build a parallel swim-lane to organize yourselves, it would add a lot of value

 

2. How could we work with these levels but make sure we center users, communities, and empower processes like user research, co-design, IA, etc?

—> The way to work with levels is to ask different types of questions than what we normally ask

 

—> We need to ask how we are doing harm, outside of the impact we have on the primary end user
  • Since we are designing for primary users, primary users likely won’t be harmed
  • However at each levels of design scales, we have questions of secondary users who are being harmed by our design decisions
—> Important to ask  secondary communities how they will be impacted, as they will give insights much quicker and accurately then us as designers can provide

 

3. How do we organize design (and cross-functional teams) to deliver on these higher levels of scale? Can that be done internally, or does it require engaging external consultants?
—> Doesn’t matter where the knowledge resides,  as there are more modern ways of organizing design, and designing at multiple scales, when building features to a product

 

—> As my quote pointed out: “Being aware of systemic lens will change way you practice designs and how practice operates and way practice operates”

 

—> Once awareness is there, people will migrate to different levels of craft scale
  • Some people will focus on product design, and not concern themselves with end-to-end service
  • As people get more senior migrate to more strategic roles, and roles align to higher-levels of scale

4. Another way of asking my question: How do we operationalize your model? It’s a handsome model, but how do I deliver against it?

—> The model is to explain design to clients who don’t understand design scales

 

—> How we operationalize depends on your organization and on how model is framed
  • Has not seen truly large corporation that can do design on all scales
  • Has noticed that pretty much every big company now has roles related to “ecosystems” like principal designers who consider ecosystem approach
  • System-level insights are being made paramount to product design

5. Since service design is fuzzier, more atmospheric work at the system level, what’s your advice about actually executing on service design within the org?

 

—> This is alluded to in the frame work itself. Service design is multi-disciplinary approach.
  • The more collaborative the projects were, the more designers focused on facilitation and co-facilitation, there was more understanding the designers were one perspective into wicked problems
  • There’s a better chance for projects to succeed as a result
—> Service design projects are two to three year transformational projects and involve you being friends with all stakeholders in organization
  • Intersection.Group covers a lot on system design to follow insights