There are many ways to think about and define “design”. In the last post I discussed the history of design and the emerging idea of “design thinking.” These discussions can quickly morph into abstract concepts, so I’d like to shift gears a bit and talk about what design is and highlight some innovative practitioners.
When describing design as a discipline I look to Richard Buchanan’s “four orders of design”: communication design, artifact design, interaction design, and environment and system design (1). Buchanan is a designer, theorist, and professor at Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University where he currently teaches design to MBA students.
Communication Design includes graphic design and information visualization. It focuses on how we design symbols, signs, images and words to communicate meaning to one another.
Design Action Collective is a graphic design and communication agency out of Oakland, California. They collaborate with “progressive, non-profit, and social change organizations” to create visually engaging messages for social justice.
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| Image from Design Action Collective |
D-Rev, a product development organization in San Francisco, designs products to, “improve the health and incomes of people living on less than $4 per day.” (2) Most recently they developed a low-cost prosthetic knee that has similar features of a prosthetic knee that would cost several thousand US Dollars. Their motto is that everyone deserves products that are well designed.
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| Image from D-Rev |
Interaction Design is a new type of design that recently emerged as we began to think wholistically about people’s experience with services and products. Interaction design includes human-computer interaction, experience design, and service design, and looks at ways that humans interact with one another through process, activities, and services.
Udaiyan Jatar’s Blue Earth Network lead a redesign of the Atlanta Center for Self-Sufficiency (ACSS) job placement for members of Atlanta’s homeless population. Instead of placing ACSS’s clients into any available job, they asked the job seeker what work they were interested in and worked to find a good match. As a result of changing the service that ACSS provided their clients the 90-day job retention rate increased by 32% (3)
Environment and System design create organizations, systems, and environments (physical and nonphysical) that all the other orders of design exist in. Buchanan sees this as creating ideas and values that are core to how systems and environments operate.
Maren shared a great article about innovative CEOs. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, is re-designing the way work hierarchy is thought about. He recently removed job titles and managers in an effort to increase accountability and transparency (4). Instead employees will participate in holacracy, a series of overlapping circles of roles.
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| Diagram from TalentRocket |
While Bachanan’s four order framework is helpful in understanding the far reaching impact of design methodology he is quick to caution us not to see these orders as defining strict boundaries of design (5). Graphic designers are instrumental in describing how new systems will work (like in the image above). Industrial designers need to know about services that will partner with their product designs so that both product and service are effective. But it is helpful to broaden our understanding of design practitioners, which brings us full circle back to what is design thinking and who practices it.
In the end, we are all designing something. As MBA students studying systems thinking and ecology we will be designing services and systems that affect thousands if not millions of people. Understanding the tools at our disposal is critical to our success.
As Bachanan eloquently said, "design is a discipline that everybody can participate in. Everyone is affected by [it], and if we do it right, we increase human’s access to their own rights. Economic, cultural and social rights." (5)
