When you’re designing an identity for a relatively young company like Normative, you have to consider not only the present, but also the ways in which the company might extend itself. Our new style guide is built around the Normative assertion: it’s how things should be. Rather than a…
The Idea There are many popular “design decks” in existence today. However, most of them are inaccessible (expensive, require shipping, hard to find). To address this market/user need, we have begun to develop an app platform for iPad that makes many types of decks available to designers in…
“But the desire for “down time” suggests that successful design is more this kind of appeal. It is also building in the ability to “cut off” or disconnect from all those distant events. It allows people to engage wholeheartedly with what is in front of them in that moment.”
I helped run (and participated in) a Design Fiction workshop with Torch Innovation and Scott Smith of Changeist yesterday. It was a great day that was preceded by a great lecture on “Provoking the Future by Making It” from Scott.
I realized something yesterday: at some point over the past year or so, we stopped making client presentations (that’s a PPT deck in a hotel lobby I was in recently). I don’t mean we stopped sharing ideas, content, outputs, deliverables, but we don’t really do “presentations” like we used to, instead we share insights and facilitate activities.
Last week four of us facilitated, and participated in, what’s become a regular activity for us: the persona workshop (in that same hotel). Because much of what we deliver are tools meant to be used in the practice of design, the presentation format just doesn’t work. The introduction of design tools to client teams versus documentation presents an inherent need to demonstrate how to use the tools, and thus, makes everyone part of the design process.
In this particular instance, we did a scenario design activity to get team members excited about, and using, personas. In teams, participants had to design a future scenario by acting it out and role playing with their persona at centre stage. Also known as bodystorming, this activity got participants out of their chairs, thinking like the customer, and testing ideas to see if they might work in the “real” world.
But it wasn’t the final scenarios that were most valuable in all of this. I was so happy when one of our clients commented that it was really time spent working out the design of the scenario, having conversations, reviewing persona details, drafting ideas, throwing them out, testing ideas by bodystorming and realizing they don’t work (or that they do) that is critical. The upfront time spent “designing” the scenario is like a microcosmic design process the group goes participates in to come to a good future scenario to be presented to the group. This is the activity of prototyping. Here are some of the elements that made this a success:
the brief: what is the “problem” you are trying to solve?
the teams: multi-disciplinary groups of people dedicated to “solving” the problem
the environment: the right tools, defined space to work in, good lighting, time constraints, work table
permission: participation of senior level management
We just got the print proof for Normative Design and Torch Innovation’s first Design Research: Methods, Techniques, Outputs deck. This set is specific to Customer Research, and in the future we’re going to expand the deck to include Business Research and Competitive Research. The…
Humanitarian design needs co-creation and partnership
I read an interesting post by Bruce Nussbaum at Fast Company about whether or not American and European humanitarian design is a new form of imperialism. I think there’s something to this and immediately agree that a co-creation approach, and forming the right partnerships with the people/designers who are actually from, and live in, lower-income countries is critical here.
Some organizations are working really hard at this by setting up frameworks that are built to assess the success, need, validity, etc. of humanitarian design efforts before just assuming something will “help” people in need. I heard a great talk at the Design Research Conference by Kevin Starr of Rainer Arnhold Fellows about designing for impact and meaning about just that.
I know of a great example of bridging the gap between high-income and low-income countries in the realm of healthcare. One of our clients here at Normative, a large hospital in Toronto, is creating research networks that connect doctors and practitioners in North America and Europe with doctors and practitioners in African and South American countries. The research networks share knowledge about childhood disease in an effort to eliminate senseless infant deaths due to things like Malaria. And, yes, there has been much collaboration between doctors and practitioners on BOTH sides and not just solutions handed down.
