Tag design attitude

Entries 2 Total

Notes to Self

Dec 20, ’08 9:43 PM

Just spent the afternoon reading and had a few random thoughts:

1. A THOUGHT ON GOING TO THE SOURCE

The origin or primary source of something is very important. Hence, knowing the arts (what guides one’s thinking) is just as important than trying to learn all the methodologies that one can choose from to understand a specific subject matter. It’s like having a framework.

Some examples:

  • When looking for concepts for my thesis, I came upon “assimilation/integration” as a possible process in which culture takes shape. This came from a reading of a book on Asian American cultural politics. I was also vaguely familiar with Raymond Williams. However, Dick’s suggestion to go to the source of both authors’ inspiration, Antonio Gramsci, provided a greater insight into a more fundamental concept – “hegemony,” a complex yet fascinating topic. [download thesis]
  • Donald Schon’s “designerly ways of knowing, thinking, and acting” = repackaging of John Dewey’s thoughts on “Having an Experience.”
  • Herb Simon’s thoughts on the artificial echo Aristotle’s thoughts on poetics.
  • Thoughts around “service design” started over a hundred years ago (ex. Kodak’s “You press the button, we do the rest“).

2. A THOUGHT ON DESIGNING PRACTICE & DESIGNING MANAGEMENT

Forlizzi writes that “Participatory Design” and “Experience Prototyping” are attitudinal rather than procedural/prescriptive methods [by Forlizzi]. Is this the same way “attitude” is used by Boland & Collopy when they describe design attitude v. decision attitude in Managing as Designing? [see previous post]

Forlizzi writes, “… the Product Ecology approach involves doing fieldwork over an extended period of time” in her article to show that a comprehensive understanding of people takes time. This is an important point about design research.

However in the context of the professional world, this is not as easy to implement. Due to constraints, such as budget issues, there’s a disconnect in taking our thoughts towards action. Perhaps designing management, with a similar attitude, may help in bridging the gap between what we would like to have done to what we can get done in our organizations.

3. A THOUGHT ON USER NEEDS

A lot of people talk about being obsessed with finding and identifying user needs. When new products create new habits (ex. we need toothpaste to support the activity of brushing our teeth but this is a 20th century product that didn’t exist in, say, the 15th century), have we created a new “need” or is this something that’s been a latent need in individuals all along? If this is an example of a latent need, is there an infinite amount of needs we can design for? Probably not. Or maybe there are certain core needs that can be addressed differently with the changing times. Hmm. [see previous post on habits]

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Interpretive Management

Apr 12, ’08 9:41 PM

Learnings from Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn From Design by Richard K. Lester, Michael J. Piore, and Kamal M. Male, from Harvard Business Review, March-April 1998:

TWO APPROACHES TO MANAGEMENT

Analytical

  • managing design
  • engineering challenge: a problem that must be solved
  • goal is to arrive at a fixed and final shape
  • like an engineer
  • customer knows what she wants and needs
  • ex: AT&T – moving cellular operations out of Bell Labs and moving away from their original interpretive management approach; they stopped questioning the nature of a cellular system
  • this view often times says, “These are our capabilities, and these are the products we will produce, and these are the processes we will use to produce them.”
  • about closure, wanting to end discovery process as company gets more complex; resorts to a structured, formal organization and process

Interpretive

  • designing management
  • design challenge: open-ended and creative process, not a specific problem to be solved
  • dynamic form: embraces ambiguity and uncertainty
  • like a leader of a jazz combo (improv): about guiding emerging series of interactions, or conversations
  • good to think of customer as having no preexisting needs at all
  • ex: fashion industry – “The sense of what is fashionable emerges from a series of conversations among fashion designers, clothing buyers, key customers, garment manufacturers, and fashion writers. The conversations have neither a beginning nor an end.”
  • constantly questions boundaries of company’s core competency, sometimes deliberately straying across those boundaries

The two approaches presented by Lester and Co. are strikingly similar to Richard J. Boland’s Decision Attitude and Design Attitude discussed in the book Managing as Designing. Both approaches/attitudes are needed in organizations, however, it still remains very difficult to talk about the interpretive approach/design attitude because there is no set vocabulary (as mentioned by both authors). Business schools and management theory has been discussing much of the analytic approach/decision attitude for over a century now, but how can we address the unpredictable and complex problems of the future? Both readings agree, not with the traditional approach/attitude.

Lester and Co. write,

… as radical uncertainty becomes a more pervasive feature of the business environment – as it has in the cellular business – the limitations of a strictly analytical model becomes progressively more debilitating. The most successful managers will understand both approaches, seeing them as complementary, not antagonistic, and they will be capable of striking a sensible balance between the two … just as modern physics instructs us to think about light as both particles and waves, so too can a business organization be looked at from either the analytical or the interpretive perspective … this back-and-forth process [between analytic and interpretive], essentially interpretive in nature [emphasis is mine], is almost always fruitful, revealing new possibilities … pp. 94-5

So, we are in search of a dialectic art/discipline that deals well with contradictions and moves towards conversations. Could this be design? Here is the simplified break-down of the two approaches provided by Dick Buchanan:

Analytic

  • grammar
  • logic

Interpretive

  • rhetoric
  • dialectic

Is there a dialectic art that seeks to balance these two approaches … this may very well be Design – as Buchanan calls, “fourth-order” design.
So, what is the nature of a conversation?

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