You’ve probably noticed that content has been running hot and cold around here.

Working on the ideas behind my (still-in-process) book has been an interesting journey and led me down a succession of paths — sometimes cul-de-sacs, sometimes cliff-side strolls, sometimes tunnels of of darkness — but never boring.

After stepping away from the corporate world for the past nine months, I’ve decided to jump back in, with a vengeance.

I’m launching a new product design consultancy, called Precipice. From here on out, that’s where the action will be. So come join the conversation…

Design Sojourn’s recent post triggered my own mulling on the word process and current conversations around design thinking.

My working definition of process is a sequence of activities that result in a predictable or pre-defined outcome.

A mature process is one that is:

• repeatable,
• can be transferred to a different set of “actors” (with training), and
• is continously optimised and improved.

Processes are fundamental to any business operating at a large scale. In fact, some may argue that process IS  the raison d’être for corporations. Certainly, my career at Intel taught me that its strategic competency is in manufacturing processes, not necessarily the technological invention that people might assume.

So it’s no surprise that design has often defined itself as both “…the process and product of imagination” (Paul Rand). In design’s continual search for acceptance by mainstream business, appropriating the qualities of process is perceived as essential for success. In my previous post on the 8 Voices of Innovation, the “creative process” is called out as one of those key discourses, assuring business that “anybody can be creative if you learn these skills and follow these steps.”

But in discussing the design process, we entertain two potentially dangerous assumptions. The first is that design IS a process. The second is that there is A single, unifying design process.

Let’s start with the second one first.

Design is…

Many of the design thinking conversations today forcefully assert not only that design is a process, but that it is essentially synonymous with user-centered design processes, which unite researchers and designers (and an inter-disciplinary team) together in an iterative series of investigations, prototypes, and evaluations of design.

For example, from IDEO’s Web site:

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” —Tim Brown, president and CEO

From 18 years of experience I can attest that the different groups of people, using similar human-centric activities, in the same or related domains, will generate broadly similar ideas and concepts. That is a process for sure. And it is a process in which designers participate. But I suspect that neither designers nor business are ultimately satisfied with that answer.

Why? Because business doesn’t always need predictable or similar outcomes to what everybody else can achieve! Often, they need just the opposite.

So, there is more than one design process, then?

If a singular design process isn’t necessarily the ultimate ambition, that doesn’t necessarily mean design isn’t a process, does it? There could be many divergent design processes?

Maybe.

If you look things that purport to be a design process or the design process, there is usually a black box for “designing.”

It may not be called that, it might be called “create” or “imagine” or “ideate” or whatever… But they mean the mysterious and magical, seemingly inexplicable part that tends to reside inside individual people’s brains and hands rather than in the shared and rationalised activities of a team.

What we’ve described is a process in which design and designers play a role, but not the process of design itself.

In Design Sojourn’s presentation on Design Thinking Is Killing Creativity, he quotes Kevin McCullough’s refections on Roberto Verganti saying:

“We should remember that designers learn by doing, not by learning and practising a theory, designing involves a lot more tacit knowledge than in other areas of business. It’s therefore hard to believe that senior managers can change their thinking habits of a lifetime after a workshop or two working with designers. And, to be frank, to suggest as much devalues what designers do.”

In these models, the most fundamental acts of design are essentially a combination of talent and practice. Like a sport or a musical instrument – performance, not process.

The black box of creativity is smooth, it’s pretty, and it appeals to many of our cultural beliefs about art and subversive invention. And unlike a repeatable design process, it absolutely offers the promise of unique imagination and disruptive vision.

Seductive, for sure. But virtually unmanageable within most commercial environments.

Alternatives, then?

I’m a huge Verganti groupie and enjoy having a meal and stimulating conversation with Roberto when he comes to London. But he is generally content to let go of process completely, and instead rely on visionary leaders and cultural interpreters to transition design-driven innovation into a corporate context. I’m not quite so ready to walk away from the black box of design.

The phrase that jumps out in the McCullough quote above is tacit knowledge. All the knowledge that designers get into their brains by seeing and doing, and express back out again by building and making doesn’t have to remain unarticulated and incomprehensible.

An emergent model of design practice is taking shape. And as Design Sojourn hints at, it’s a model in which method (but also theory) take a dominant role over process.

There are methods that make tacit knowledge (otherwise known as cultural meaning) visible and explicit – available to be worked with. The analytic methods.

There are methods to imagine and shape new types of cultural meaning. The design methods.

There are methods to connect these with teams, organisations and businesses. The interpretative methods.

Those methods can be combined and recombined in an infinite number of ways, tailored to the needs of a particular context. Within that context, that sequence of activities can mature into a process, delivering manageable, repeatable and predictable outcomes. And that process will in turn shape the context, changing the business that developed it. A reflexive practice for disruptive innovation.

In other words, you don’t start with a design process. But through the practice of meaning-centred design, you can emerge with new types of  processes for your business that are unique, mature, and provide a competitive commercial advantage.

Hard to believe that almost four months has sped by since I started my little adventure. It’s been much easier for me to  fall into “angel consulting” projects with old friends who have new ideas versus buckling down on the intellectual graft of book writing.

Clearly, it’s time to change the focus and start interviewing. I’m looking for people (primarily within industry, but also happy to talk to academia, government and social organisations) who have stories to tell about successful and not so successful innovation initiatives. They could be new product development, service design, business model, or organisational change initiatives.

I’m particularly interested in situations where grand plans for disruptive innovation fell far short of the mark, and the business repercussions of that disappointment. They could be internal, open, or consultant-led initiatives.

Anybody who is struggling with the integration of  ”design thinking” within an organisation is also of interest.

Finally – the ROI of design-led innovation is a perpetual passion of mine. I’d love to talk to anybody who’s created a framework that’s become “finance-approved”.

If you fall into any of these camps, or know anybody who does, please drop me a line on email so we can continue the conversation. Also happy to pick up from comments on this post or on my twitter stream (JensonBennett).

When I heard about the Ada Lovelace pledge, I knew I wanted to participate to help honour all of the amazing women I’ve worked with over the years in science and technology, especially at Intel and at Carnegie Mellon University.

Today’s hero is Dr. Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow. You can read her official bio here, and find her presentations and videos online, talking about people, technology, culture, and the future possibilities of our digital selves.

She is a a collaborator, a leader, a thinker, a visionary, and my friend. She is also a damn fine anthropologist and relentless fighter for what’s right for technology and the people who work within it.

She is only the second woman to be appointed an Intel fellow in over 40 years. And I am pleased to be able to publicly thank her for what she’s accomplished.

OK. I’ve said it. I’m not a user-centered designer* anymore.

After getting stuck into the conversation here, it became clear my identity has shifted.

I’ve been lucky to be amongst the first wave of interaction designers and human factors specialists who earned a seat at the table, as a UX profession distinct from engineering and marketing.

And we had to do that by relentlessly using UCD methods to drive down support calls, find defects earlier, tighten development cycles, and keep usage errors from happening. And the methods work brilliantly to do that.

And then, I was privileged to collaborate with brilliant anthropologists, social psychologists and semioticians to start turning the language from users to people and contexts to culture. And we managed to push ethnographic and observational techniques to the very front end of fuzzy product design and innovation problems.

And boy, has it been fun and interesting and rewarding to do this. And we’ve designed some good stuff. Really good stuff.

But it hasn’t been great stuff. It solves problems. It fills holes. It makes things better.

But it doesn’t make things different. It doesn’t radically innovate what things mean.

If I want to design change. If I want to make change happen, I need to be more than a user-centered designer. If I want to help businesses make change happen, I need to be more than a consultant.

What’s this new thing? What’s our new movement? Where are we headed with concepts like advanced semiotics, design-driven innovation, and ideological vision?

Somewhere that still uses all the great work that’s come before in the places and the way that it works best, but that doesn’t stop in an endless loop of observe, design, test. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Somewhere we can stop the waste and that voice in the darkness saying, “it won’t make a difference” no matter how many post-it notes you write.

Somewhere we can admit that one school of thought doesn’t have to be all things to all people. That as designers and innovators, we can apply radically different approaches to radically different problems.

Somewhere we make things that people love. Things mean something to them they never could have imagined.

Somewhere difficult to get to, but just within reach.

*Or “user-centred”, for that matter.I’m not a “design thinker” either, but that’s another post!

It’s hard to talk about product design without talking about innovation. Whether you believe that innovation is just another term for new product development, an overused business buzzword that has already peaked, or THE essential element of success, the topic of change in markets can’t be ignored.

Over the years, I’ve been collecting and categorising the different conversations that are going on about innovation. It’s stayed steady at eight for a while now, but I’m excited at signs that a ninth is emerging.

It’s easiest to think of these as four pairs – one of each pair with more of a “creativity” focus and the other with more of a “science and technology” flavour. These aren’t mutually exclusive – you can participate in lots of these conversations at the same time.

The Creative and The Inventor

These are your oldest ideas of innovation, where positive change is synonymous with an individual person. The creative has artistic vision and integrity that places them in opposition to the mainstream. The inventor is locked away in their garage, churning out idea after idea, never giving up or giving into failure. Hero. Iconoclast. Self Made and Self Reliant. For every Starck and Dyson, there is an endless stream of late-night informercials and broken dreams.

Teams and Labs

Not convinced by the solitary life? Then interdisciplinary groups are where it’s at. These conversations about innovation focus on getting all the right ingredients (i.e. people) into the right context and unleashing the magic. Books like IDEO’s The Ten Faces of Innovation give you a checklist of archetypes to fill, while traditional management literature focuses on “breaking down silos” and “empowering teams.” As with a Skunkworks, it can still be a visionary quest, but this time, we’re all in it together.

Prophets and Lead Users

If the Creative lives off in their own world, uninterested in bringing others along on the journey, the Prophet is the voice crying out in the wilderness, “Here, follow me.” Gurus, seekers, and challengers of the status quo, prophets are awfully fond of asking “the right question” and getting people to shift their perspective.  Lead user innovation is also about following, but in a different direction. This is about finding the people or organisations in your ecosystem that are so fed up or overstretched that they are inventing their own solutions. Industry becomes a facilitator for commercialisation.

The Creative Process and Open Networks

Last but not least, we have probably the two most dominant conversations at the moment. Process-based innovation takes the weight off the people involved (“anybody can be creative”) and instead focuses on the steps any team can follow to build an innovation pipeline. Some of these steps may take special expertise to facilitate, but the journey of acquiring these tools and methods is as much the point as the specific innovations that arise. Open network innovation flips that proposition, by telling organisations to let go of control, and let external sources work for them. Whether it’s open source code, crowdsourced ideas, or networks of collaboration, the system does the work, like a giant hive of bees.

What Next?

I’ve flirted with and used all of these modes of innovation, but never stopped looking for something that seemed to be missing. It can’t just be about your innate talents or what you do in a stage-gate process. There seemed to be a missing piece that activated sophisticated knowledge about people and culture and transformed it into intentional business strategy.

We started trying to carve out some of this territory with our use of advanced semiotics in design, but reassuringly, other voices are starting to whisper and build into a real conversation.

Verganti’s Design-Driven Innovation model does a great job of differentiating the territory from other approaches. Grant McCracken is also pushing forward with Chief Culture Officer, highlighting the risks businesses face when they ignore cultural knowledge and understanding as a competitive advantage.

I don’t have a name for this area yet – it’s important that it not get confused with user centered design and consumer-driven innovation models. It’s not about knowledge transfer from consumer to producer, but about knowledge creation in a more sophisticated way.

So, in the spirit of all conversations, I’m asking a few questions? Are you talking about my ninth way of innovating? What do you call it?

What else are you hearing out there? Do you think I’ve missed an important conversation about innovation?

What other new conversations need to get started?

I mentioned earlier that my old team at 1HQ had been shortlisted for the 2010 Inclusive Design Challenge. Just before I left, we presented our submission to the judging committee. Design Week published a summary of all the entries in this week’s issue.

We designed “Move,” integrating emerging technologies to create an intelligent, morphing surface for eating, entertainment and independent living.

The top surface can reshape itself to do things like grip onto and tilt a soup bowl, lift objects so stiff fingers can grasp them, or form a gully to catch spills from a toddler. The bottom uses nano-fibres and electric currents to stick or un-stick itself from any other surface. It’s a futures concept – so would take 10-15 years to commercialise.

Our original ambition was to design a new piece of furniture for transitional activities, but the process led us to a new set of challenges.

Surfaces

As product designers, we love designing objects. But in this case, we shifted perspective from stuff, to the stuff that stuff sits on. Rather than requiring people to buy new things as they age, why couldn’t we change surfaces, so that the things you already have are useful and usable?

We prototyped the surface in a small, portable format, but the underlying technology could work on a kitchen counter, desk, table, airplane tray, car dashboard. Anywhere, really.

From Assistive to Adaptive

The holy grail of inclusive design is also universal design – solutions that have something to offer most people, not just those who have “special needs.” Assistive technologies are inherently niche – the available market to fund the product development is much smaller than investment required.

So this is an adaptive technology that works for anybody. Use to eat your dinner in front of the TV, entertain kids at a restaurant, or grip your drink during turbulence on a plane. But it’s also there when you need it to pick up a utensil or carry something in your lap in a wheelchair.

Not so Sticky

At first, we focused on how to get things to stick and recess. But then, it became clear that making things un-sticky at the right times was just as important. The ability to lift objects up and grant just a little bit of grip around the edges turned out to be one of the most popular features of the surface.

The integral lighting and gestural interfaces also sparked lots of conversation. Although not intended as a media surface, you could use Move to play simple drawing games, provide task lighting, or create interactive therapeutic activities that react to physical objects on the surface.

Moving On

Did the process take us where we expected? Not quite, but that’s the point. By shifting our perspective from the foreground to the background and re-defining the existing cultural meaning of assistive technology, we got to a place that ‘s much more dynamic than a piece of furniture.

Now, we need to wait until March to hear the results of the judging!

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.

My colleagues have just returned from CES, and brought me back a treasure trove of 500+ digital images and videos to consume. The press coverage gets so focused on the “what” and the “whoa” of the big releases, it’s a joy to have detailed images of textures, hinges, interaction touch points, packaging and displays to analyse at the micro level.

So, more to come as I digest. But look what caught my eye immediately:

Now that required further investigation.

Delving into the social media stream, reaction is ranging from the bewildered to the besotted, with more than a few bemused.

The Gear Crave review is more intriguing – claiming that the design language isn’t a homage to classic street style, but instead is the Chinese design team’s contemporary take on audio.

Have we reached a cultural infinite loop? A sort of trans-Pacific Groundhog Day? At what point does a semiotic echo bounce back off the wall and create a new meaning?

I literally grew up working at Intel. This means that tattooed just under my worldwide ID (not telling where!) is a template for my MBOs – management by objective. Those who know me and my similarly brainwashed husband would attest to the almost dogmatic way we use this planning structure to achieve our visions for our careers, family, and personal aspirations. Hey – it may be sad to have a kid with a balanced scorecard – but it’s worked for us.

Until now.

Turns out, sometimes the only way forward is reactionary. Throw the plan out the window. Don’t bother with a new one. Do what you need to do, as you need to do it. This is my life at the moment. The details aren’t relevant to this forum (other than explaining my long radio silence), but the implications for design and product development are.

I have alluded to it in past posts, and the jungle drums are beating louder (see Verganti, Norman, et al). Incremental and radical change don’t come from the same place, process, or mindset.

Neither is more privileged. They both make buckets of money and are fun and fulfilling to do. You do both better with designers, and design research, and cultural knowledge built in. But confuse them at your peril. They co-exist in the context of actual products and business strategies in the marketplace, but we’re talking houndstooth check here, not shades of grey.

So, when I strip away the structures of the corporation, quarterly objectives, and annual reviews from my life, what am I left with? My original tools: I read, watch, think, write, design, create, and revise, and revise, and revise some more.

I’ll share as much as I can here and through other channels, and see where it takes us.