Designing is not just for designers.

In the last years design has developed beyond its original disciplinary boundaries, which creates a great opportunity for designers to work on issues in many different disciplines across society.

The creative approaches that design has to offer thereby inspire other professional fields as well. Thats why designing is not just for designers anymore. Many different fields are learning from design to build their own creative practices.

But what is a designers approach to a problem solution?

To understand this, we need to dig a little deeper and look at what kind of world we live in.

We are used to technological advancements that our parents or grandparents never even dreamed of. Some things that used to be stuff of science fiction are totally common nowadays.

As technology grows, so do new networks and connections: Everyone and everything is connected. Especially our smartphones prove that. 

But of course, as we all know: there are also downsides to this. 

When we got networked through technology, we also networked our problems and opportunities. We made them more open, complex, dynamic and networked. When everything is connected, progress actually slows down - Why? Because we suddenly have to consider far more things and there is so much to have in mind that it actually becomes harder to get shit done. Problems can be overwhelming and confusing. 

So being networked and connected brings new challenges and just relying on “best practices” (especially as designers) is not suitable anymore: our world and our problems get more open, complex, dynamic and networked as we speak. But what does that mean?

COMPLEX

A complex system consists of many elements with many relationships between them and connections and dependencies. That means, that in these kind of systems small local actions can lead to an incredibly complex chain of effects. So we need to study them and try different things out and just make assumptions and test them, because we don’t know for sure what is going to happen. We simply can’t see every possible effect something can have on the system, because of the complexity.

Sometimes, when you are dealing with a complex situation you just have to “kick the system” and see how it responds – so this is more trial and error and the structure emerges out of the process.

OPEN

An open challenge means that the system border is unclear and permeable. When we work on problems we like to draw a “Mental Circle”: On inside we put all the things that we want to think about and leave all the thing we decide to ignore on the outside.

We do this to set a frame and to create a border so we don’t get lost. But by doing that we also lose the context to other maybe important elements.

DYNAMIC

A dynamic problem changes all the time: new elements come to account and connections between element shift.

To deal with these kinds of problems we cannot isolate ourselves. We must constantly “stay in contact” with our problem and stay active and have an eye on its development while thinking about what to do next.

NETWORKED

Today nearly all our problems are networked. You cannot easily isolate them anymore because they often are interconnected, and you need to see them in this connection.

The challenges we face and the solutions we create for them are networks themselves and we have to understand that and keep that in mind.

So… this is basically the world we live in…

For our work as designers complexity doesn’t always show itself directly.

So we just don’t always see it on first sight and sometimes we tend to think conventional and develop easy solutions but these might fail, when the problem itself is a complex one. That’s why we need to shift our thinking.

But surprise: Design does already deal with open, complex, dynamic and networked problems. And that is why people from all kinds of fields find inspiration in design practices and want to adapt them into their work because they try to think differently too.

Design is not what you think it is.

The thing is... there is a big misunderstanding: Many people think design is just about the outcome: They just see the “beautiful, clever creations” we create. But designers invest a lot of time to look closely on problems and create new approaches (also called „frames“). And these approaches actually create the great solutions & outcomes.

That means, that our approaches = the true innovation.

What is true innovation?

True innovation is when Designers start to see, think & act differently and this is called „framing“.

Framing

= building/ creating approaches 
= interpreting the world in a way that leads to new actions

To stay innovative and up-to-date we constantly need to frame and re-frame new and new ideas and designer do this all the time.

We need to structure our approaches/ problem solving and we do this through reasoning, our so called “Logic of creation”, which is basically the logic behind how we act as designers.

In general, we considers the world or a system or a problem to exist of:

• ELEMENTS (people, things, services…)
• PATTERN OF RELATIONSHIPS (How are these elements connected? How do they interact?)
• OUTCOME of the process (in which the elements have interacted; an observed phenomenon; a wish, desire, state or something we want to achieve)

But how does that look for design approaches?

Designers just know something about the desired outcome or value they want to achieve. The challenge is to figure out WHAT (new elements) whilst also not knowing an HOW that we can trust to lead to our desired outcome (or we are simply not choosing one.) Elements and their patterns of relationships belong closely together, so they should also be developed parallely. 

Bottom line, we also have two unknowns that need to be developed and tested, but in conjunction to each other.
We just know the goal, but we don’t know how to achieve it or whats the best way to do it. So during the process we keep framing and reframing the problem. Designers constantly question their established HOWs in a problem situation, replace ideas and try things out and if they don’t work they try something else. This creates a new way of looking at a problem AND also a new way of acting within the problem

And this is called ✨ FRAMING ✨

The core of it.

Here i want to give you a short summary of what i just told in much detail:

• A new frame = a new way of seeing the world, new way of thinking about it and new way of acting upon it.
• Designers embrace the complexity of a situation and develop and think and then come back to their first principle: value.
• We use these values to re-anchor our thinking. This allows us to think about problems in different ways, propose new frames, playfully suggest new ways forward, test them and then loop back to reframe if it doesn’t work.
• Basically this is trial and error and also a learning process, because we learn to find our own ways to a solution and even if we were all working on the same problem situation in the end we would all have different ideas to solve it.

The Wall aka. how to dance around problems.

When we design and look for a solution to a problem, unforeseen issues may keep popping up that we need to sort out before we can proceed. 

Kees Dorst creates a metaphor for this in his book: the wall.

Why don't you engage in this thought experiment yourself for a moment?

You are a designer and have discovered mountains in the distance. All of a sudden you know that that one mountain back there is where you absolutely have to go. So you set off and every step you take brings you closer to this mountain. But suddenly a huge wall appears in front of you. It's so high that you can't see over it, let alone climb it, and when you look to the left and right you notice that it stretches for miles in both directions. You have to pass this wall in any case, otherwise you will never be able to reach your goal, the mountain. So, what do you do now?

You could walk along the wall for hours looking for a gap, or get tools and materials to build a ladder, dig a tunnel, or even tear down the wall. Maybe someone else has some advice for you and can help you? Or maybe you'll just decide that the wall isn't there at all, and then maybe it will magically disappear. And maybe, no, definitely even, you have completely different ideas how to get past this wall.

The wall is emblematic of all the problems that keep getting in our way during the design process. Each of us develops our own approaches and ideas to overcome these problems. And since the problems will always come up anyway, it's up to us how we intend to solve them. It is important to keep in mind that we can never tackle complex problems head-on. We have to dance around them, and find new ways in. 

Poster

Finally, I summarized my findings in a poster. You can have a look at it here: