START Designing WITH people! Stop designing AT them. 😅 Designers have been tasked with the optimization game for decades now. They filter the needs and behaviours of people through their filters, beit designer, or corporate filter, departmental politics, old fashioned principles, out dated business models, legislation and personal incentives. It’s time to stop eavesdropping and interpreting, and start collaborating and understanding! 👏
I’ve been asked to coach designing communities from time to time and it struck me that they are/ feel limited to conventions of these times: anonymous ‘metering’ of ‘users’ and ‘design thinking’. Although these are great tools to get where you are going, or to know where you need to go: they are limited by design.
Introducing the figure below: because fortunately there is a wealth of tools and means to both trigger your creative juices, find proof of greater value AND to get to UNDERSTAND your customers, partners, colleagues, society.
The figure below is a wonderful landscape of all kinds of design philosophies. On the left: use people as a source of information. On the right: invite people as co-creators. On top: using the design mindset and on the bottom: using the research rigour.
This figure is just a nugget of information from the book “Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design” by Liz Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers. If not just a good read, then it’s just a great place to validate your own notions on design.