FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

I’ll start with a confession: I attended dConstruct and I am not a designer.  I don’t create brand identities, or create beautiful graphics, or build amazing experiences.  I manage projects.

What was I doing at dConstruct?  Thanks to an inspirational opening talk from Marty Neumeier, author of The Designful Company, I felt like this design conference is a place for people like me.

Marty Neumeier captured perfectly why I, a project manager, am not an imposter at dConstruct.  He convincingly argued that it is critical that people like me, non-designers, think like designers.

Why would a project manager think like a designer?  Because the world has changed, people want more, they want it for less, and they want it right now.  These are just some of the new ways clients are measuring the value we deliver.

The title designer is used at times with abandon, and at other times as membership of an exclusive club where creativity is the price of entry.  One of the many high points of Marty’s talk was meaningful definition of what a designer is, one that make sense in my world of project delivery, and can be lived out be me and the team here at Front.

“A designer is anyone who devises ways of changing existing situations into preferred ones”.  Para-phrased from a Herbert Simon (Nobel Prize Winner) quote.

I love this definition.  It’s wide reaching, non-exclusive, and does not preclude business interests.  In this context, if I am not a designer then I am not project managing!  If our developers aren’t designing solutions that solve problems for users in an elegant way, then they are not doing their jobs.  Being a designer is not only within every persons grasp, it is their responsibility.  What a gem!

What I really love is that this challenges traditional perceptions of a designers role as people who make beautiful things (layouts, experiences, interactions, call them what you will).  They must think of design in these broader terms, not in the narrow constraints of visuals and interactions (which can’t be neglected either).

Marty’s interpretation of design as “the magic behind innovation” was still a little conceptual for a neophyte designer such as myself, but he continued by describing how to introduce true innovation through the application of design thinking to business challenges.

The traditional model of decision making in business goes like this:  I know a, therefore I will do b.  The doing is based on previous experience and intuition.

The designers model of decision making pushes a new element into the middle of this process, one of reflection, consideration, ideation.  This creates choices, lots of them, and pushes back on what we think we know and therefore what we end up doing.  This model goes something more like this: I think I know a, but taking into consideration what else I have seen, noticed and explored, I will take what I know and combine it with the possible options and decide what to do based on that. 

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, is a strong believer that anyone, and everyone, can be an innovator through design thinking.  His article on Design Thinking in the Harvard Business Review (June 2008) gives real world examples of tangible changes that have come about as a result of changing how we approach business challenges.

Ultimately, designing changes to situations for better outcomes seems like a no-brainer, but how often do people really think of their role in these terms?

My name is Patsy, and I am a designer.  You are too, whatever your job title.