Experts in mess

Love the problem, not your solution 

What’s your preference? The person that says: “Here’s a problem,”, the one that says: “Hey, here’s a solution,” or maybe the one who insists: “Look, here’s another five problems”?

Designers do not take any problem at face value. In fact, design is about problem-finding and questioning and identifying the real, underlying issues. Design experts spend a significant portion of their time and effort framing and reframing the problem, as opposed to solving it. Curious of mind and exploratory in spirit, designers are ideally placed to embrace the chaos inherent in any complex issue.

This brings uncertainty into the process. You need to jump to the unknown, explore, tolerate risk. But at the end of the day, what you want is to understand the problem and achieve the desired outcome, right?

Furthermore, as designers are great at making up problems, and engineers are fantastic at solving them, they are a match made in problem-solving heaven! 

Minding the gap with empathy 

We live in a time of innovation and progress. While innovation is important to the advancement of society, it also brings about disruption: fundamental changes to the ways we’re used to doing things. Social, technological and political disruption opens up societal gaps and provides a fertile ground for polarisation, and while the more analytical, scientific approaches are excellent at innovation, they are quite poorly suited to bridging these gaps.

Design, by comparison, is exploratory by nature and has the ability to pull together seemingly disconnected areas and opinions and to ultimately arrive at something new and meaningful. It all starts with empathy.  

Designers take the time to identify all the stakeholders involved. This means individuals as well as groups of people but can also involve non-human entities such as other species or living systems. Designers strive to see the world through the perspective of everyone involved. Designers want to understand the role played by absolutely everyone in the environment they are trying to model. To see how problems affect them and how they would benefit when the problems are resolved.

Designers truly are facilitators of change. With empathy and trust, they’re making change more acceptable, and thus possible. Creative problem solvers recognise that change is not just about rationality, goals, and tasks, but also our feelings, irrationalities and values. 

Get over yourself and collaborate!

In a world of increasing complexity, collaboration is king. But it’s not always easy. “People love those who are like themselves”, Aristotle pointed out, 2,300 years ago. Today, we’re still tackling the same problem: how can we collaborate despite our differences? Far too often, when we’re attempting to solve a problem, we approach the task laden with our own biases and judgements as well as the insights we’ve accumulated along the way.

In order to overcome these differences, design rejects the idea of one perfect solution. Instead, designers run their work on multiple tracks involving a series of different solutions and future visions, and what’s more, they remain in constant flux. Because of the diversity of opinions and the uncertainties we face, several desirable future visions need to be kept on the table for as long as possible. Instead of fixating on a single point of view, to the utter exclusion of competing points of view, designers encourage nuance and compromise.   

When it comes to design, collaboration means more than just tapping into the individual knowledge of the stakeholders involved. It’s about action and learning; understanding that if we are to solve a problem, multiple perspectives must be allowed to come together in a creative atmosphere. Everyone involved is a “maker” of some kind. Solutions need to be co-created for them to be embraced.

Action!

Messy situations don’t just patiently await solutions. On the contrary, they often change at a rate faster than we can act. Furthermore, the problems we face and the solutions for them tend to co-evolve. This is to say that the way you frame a problem depends on your idea for solving it, as well as the other way around — neither is stable.

To address this instability, designers take a lot of fast-paced action. The design process is about prototyping, experimenting and testing; learning about the problem and the stakeholders involved. It’s about generating new knowledge and then acting upon the evidence. Knowing what to pursue further and what to leave be.

Prototyping is also a central practice in engineering, but there the emphasis tends to be on validating proposed solutions rather than exploring new possibilities. We should make better use of both approaches!

Crisis of imagination, not solutions

Our deeply held beliefs, attitudes and values frame our thinking, and therefore determine our behaviour. Our mindset influences how we lead our lives, what opportunities we pursue, and how we react to challenges. While we are largely unaware of our own mindsets due to their intangible nature, mindsets can change. And as we increasingly live beyond our planetary boundaries, it’s becoming clear that our mindsets must change. 

However, it’s pretty difficult to change mindsets without tangible alternatives. At the moment, humanity has no positive, shared vision for tomorrow. We are simply unable to imagine a post-carbon future. We can maybe imagine a narrow thread of something positive, but it’s hard to see how these individual threads weave together to tackle the really big issues like climate change and habitat loss. And without a vision, it’s not easy to move forward. One could even say that it’s a crisis of imagination, not an absence of solutions, that we face. 

Art, design and other creative practices are great ways to foster the imagination and create alternative future visions. Shared scenarios can be created and then used as the starting point for backcasting, a method used to identify the practical steps required to move towards a desired vision for the future. It goes without saying that design methods do not offer definitive answers as to what the future will look like. Instead, they’re about enabling people to better understand the challenges and implications of our actions and to really start doing instead of just talking.  

Design can be seen as a process for transforming our mindsets and cultures. Design is never “done”. 

Smash the silos

Design cannot solve the world’s intractable problems on its own. Rather, design, engineering, business and policy must become intertwined.

We need sufficient numbers of design professionals in all areas of society, to do design, to collaborate and to bring their particular brand of professional expertise to the table. However, in addition to design expertise, we need more understanding and appreciation of, and opportunities for applying these design approaches across all structures and processes. Non-designers can be powerful advocates for a designerly mindset.

The ongoing shift towards sustainability is possibly the biggest cultural phenomenon of our lifetime. We have achieved several easy wins, but the tougher challenges remain. Design can be a key driver of this cultural transformation process. It’s an underused tool that is right at our disposal. Let’s make use of it!