Permission to design slowly
By Gregory Ronczewski
The house next door sold a couple of months ago. A scary moment. You never know who will move in, but it looks that we are lucky again. As the new family settles in, they hired a carpenter to do some work around the fence and decks. One guy, but the pace of changes the property goes through, is stunning. He moves around, taking down the old deck and setting up new structures, there is no rush, just a steady flow. And the results make us stand in the window with eyes wide open.
Watching such a professional applying skill is a pleasure. The carpenter moves around with a drawing pad, takes down measurements, spends time calculating things, and then, within a matter of hours, new pillars are up and structure of a new balcony is raised and attached to the house. I better get his contact information should my deck require attention, which I am sure it will, in this weather anyway.
I often feel that we are all rushing things. The pressure to deliver faster and faster is overwhelming. Multitasking, time management and billable hours. Sounds familiar? I found this little story somewhere on the net. A client is complaining that a freelancer's bill was high for just a half an hour of work. I spend ten years studying so I can do the work in thirty minutes was the answer. You are not paying for thirty minutes - you are paying for the whole ten years. It sums it up quite a bit. Is it about speed or quality? Or both? And also, if you go deeper into the process, the quality often is a factor of time. For sure, sometimes, in my design practice, I got lucky, and the very first concept is a keeper. Usually, though, it takes time to align your thoughts. It's a process that can't be rushed. I often become nervous and upset that "the ideas are not coming." But then, if I look at how much time I spend on it, it becomes evident that it's not enough. Some incredibly creative individuals can just blast their way through projects. They don't need any processes. It is a combination of talent, knowledge and skills.
Design takes time. Although we can follow processes that are put in place to help, at the end of the day, the design research has to be done. The information needs to be sorted, distilled and noted. The new concepts drafted and examined, and the iterative circle starts again. No matter how quickly we want to move on it, it just needs time to mature. And it looks that I am not the only one sharing this sentiment.
In a recent issue of Applied Art Magazine, there is a piece written by Dr. Paul Hartley, Beyond Design Thinking. He asks critical questions related to an overly-simplistic process of Design Thinking, which is supposed to guarantee the desired results, sacrificing in its operation the richness of design research. There are many Design Thinking courses which, upon completion, have trained designers in processes and not in design.
"... as designers, all we have to do is to find the need, decide what to do, and then change the world. The rest is just academic. Design Thinking teaches us that you don't need the training to do the research, you just need to be in the world."
Hartley writes that currently, the design research is focused on finding unmet needs and gaps, which is not what it should be looking for because studying this cannot provide a good foundation for design. According to the author, it is better to see people's lives as complete and functional and direct the effort towards finding novel interventions, which are intrusions, not solutions. Perhaps it explains the success of some innovations which are not "improving" but provide "an alternative." I am not sure if I fully agree with every point in Dr. Hartley's article. Still, the conclusion fully aligns with my perception of design research - we, as designers, need to be "being out there" more often and instead of using academic-based methods, we need to understand life as it is. Again, time is a critical factor. Good design takes time.
Here is a thought. The inspiration came from an article published by the late Terry Laughlin—the founder of the Total Immersion swimming technique—in 2012 titled Permission to swim slowly, and I think a general concept applies to design as well. To swim faster, you need to try to swim slower. "Giving myself permission to swim slower made a clear difference in enabling me to swim faster." If you want to see what Total Immersion is about, look at Shinji Takeuchi, the most graceful freestyle swimmer.
When we concentrate on deadlines, on the fact that the client is waiting to find fast the design solution, we are missing a lot. Or during the design research, when we jump at the first finding, any finding for that matter, to base our concept on, we are not doing our job as well as it can be done. Instead of advancing us towards the desired solution, we may end up in a dead-end. When you slow down, you start noticing essential details.
Funny enough, the most effective advertising uses this technique. Commercials with less information, ads that do not require us to apply deep thinking, or System 2 thinking, are the most successful. Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, describes the two operating systems in our brain responsible for everything that we encounter. "System 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically, and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode. When we relax, our senses are far more receptive, and for design, it means seeing things that are not obvious — not the needs or gaps, but novelties that lie beyond.
In 2001 the struggling network called Cellnet was rebranded to O2. For four years, they ran bubble style commercials with a cryptic message "see what you can do." They managed to become the biggest phone company in the UK, beating Orange and Vodafone without cutting their prices, any technical advantage, or exceptional promotions.
When we relax, our senses are far more receptive, and for design, it means seeing things that are not obvious — not the needs or gaps, but novelties that lie beyond.
