My life has taken an unanticipated turn away from corporation and agency, and I’m starting the process of writing a book. I’ll be testing out a few building blocks here to help me get started and figure out the edges of the outline. Feel free to comment with questions and suggestions so I can make it more useful.
Up until five years ago, my practice as a designer and design researcher was largely driven by ethnographic and human factors perspectives on people, organisations and culture. We focussed on finding ways to get deeper and richer perspectives from individual people that we could use to inspire and inform the products and services we made.
I still do that. Absolutely essential.
But once I started collaborating with Diane Fox-Hill, I also found a complementary way of thinking. Starting from her perspective as a semiotician, I stopped looking just at human beings, and started looking at the trails of cultural artifacts the market leaves behind.
This means we collect stuff. Lots of stuff.
It might be products and packaging, advertising, newspaper and magazine articles, art and graffiti, conversations on blogs and in discussion forums, photos on flickr, comments overheard in the grocery store.
We analyse not just what this stuff means, but how it achieves meaning through discrete elements of design. It might be the angle of a curve, the finish of a surface, or the sounds of a hinge. These aspects all work together to create discrete bundles of communication called codes.
Once you understand how a cultural space is working, you can start to frame alternative futures within that landscape. In other words, by reshuffling the ingredients, you can radically change the meaning of things, which is when you have potential for disruptive innovation.
Lots of people are good at making new patterns. That’s essentially what designers do. What makes this different is the implicit knowledge that’s made explicit, so a team can work together. Instead of creativity residing as a mysterious talent of individuals, today’s inter-disciplinary groups can intentionally trigger surprise and delight in their audience through a rigorous, repeatable, and efficient process.
And that is cool.
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This ‘stuff’ is fascinating. Definitely a book I’m looking forward to reading.
The book sounds fascinating! Wishing you all the best with it.
Thanks for the good wishes. This is definitely a new frontier for me!