DTM Podcast #1: Reflective Practice

Show Notes
This podcast features an interview with Kees Dorst, Professor of Design, at the
University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. The interview is followed by a
discussion between Peter and Mieke, who talk about some of the things in the
interview that resonated with them. Below are some key references for you to follow
up on the ideas that are talked about.

Kees Dorst is one of the best-known current figures in design theory and
methodology and a former student at IDE. He has published many highly-cited
papers, and one that is mentioned in the podcast is his early study of how expert
designers think: Creativity in the Design Process: Co-evolution of Problem and
Solution. He has written many books on design and the recent book that he
mentions, Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design, is fast becoming a key
work for designers. He is also a founding director of the Centre for Designing out
Crime in Sydney and gives some examples of the work that has been done. The
Centre produces nice animations showing the methods behind the work that they do
in Frame Creation and Framing.

The major person that is talked about through this podcast is Donald Schön, who
was hugely influential in design (and many other fields) with his book The Reflective
Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. The book is written in a very
accessible way and is worth looking at (particularly the study of an architect and their
student (Chapter 2) that Mieke mentions in the discussion). You can explore further
aspects of Schön’s work on reflective practice through the following papers on:
framing, seeing as, design as a reflective conversation, and types of design thinking.
A lecture that Schön gave to designers in 1989 explaining his theory in detail with
lots of interesting examples is also worth watching.

Another person that Kees mentions is Herbert Simon, a Nobel prize winning
economist who was deeply interested in design in the 1960s and 70s. His classic
book is The Sciences of the Artificial which Kees describes as more of a rational
approach to thinking about designing and design processes. The book is an
essential reference work for design theorists and is packed with ideas about design,
human behaviour, complexity, and many other things.

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Podcast Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Peter Lloyd: Hello, everyone. I'm Peter Lloyd.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Hi, everyone I am Mieke van der Bijl.

Peter Lloyd: And this is our first podcast for this year's DTM course, the first of a
series of podcasts looking at different aspects of design theory and methodology.
This first podcast is about reflective practice, which is one of the ways that we're
framing the course.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: When we think about theory and methodology, we
often tend to think about specific methods that designers are using, but the way that
we think about this subject is more broadly about how are designers actually
designing. The theory of reflective practice is a really useful theory to look at how
designers are designing and it's been used by both practitioners and researchers in
the field of design.

Peter Lloyd: Yes, it stays very close to the way that designers think about the way
that they work, I think, which is what makes it a useful sort of frame for the course in
terms of theory. There are quite a few aspects to reflective practice, too many to
explore in this podcast. If you look at the show notes, there are further references to
follow up that you'll hear about. But we're going to start with an interview with
someone called Kees Dorst.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Kees Dorst is a professor who works at the University
of Technology in Sydney. He's one of the key figures in the design research field
when it comes to understanding how designers are designing. And he has also used
the theory of reflective practice in his work. In the 90s he did a famous study on how
expert designers are actually designing, how they are thinking and how they are
working.

Peter Lloyd: So Kees is an important person in the subject area. He's done a lot of
really good work, I think, especially in the area of design thinking. So Kees is a big
person to talk to, I think. And he's also someone that has a history of being at Delft.
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So I'm really looking forward to what he has to say. Before we begin the interview,
we should say that it's also in two parts. The first part is about reflective practice,
we'll have an interview and then we'll have a discussion afterwards, Mieke and I. The
second part is about something called co-evolution, which is a bit more about the
process of design, but that's in the second podcast so we'll talk about that then.
Okay over to...

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Sydney!

INTERVIEW

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So we are in Sydney this morning at the University of
Technology, Sydney, which is where I used to work before I moved back to the
Netherlands and started my job in Delft. And I'm here this morning with Professor
Kees Dorst, first of all welcome Kees.

Kees Dorst: Thank you.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Great to see you again. And thank you for making
time for us. Maybe, first of all, can you say something about what you do here at
UTS before we start talking about design theory.

Kees Dorst: Well, just to introduce myself, so my name is Kees Dorst I studied
industrial design engineering and Delft a very long time ago, but I also studied
philosophy in Rotterdam and I've been fascinated in sort of doing design work but
after having started my design firm, I sort of realized that I kept thinking about it too
much. So I also started doing research into how does design actually work? And
through sort of many different things I came to be interested in how expert designers
think and how they solve their problems and what their strategies are and what their
methods are. And particularly interested in looking at how they create new
approaches to problems, new frames, actually using design and design thinking
across many different fields and looking at design slightly differently by using design
processes as hosts for practices from many other disciplines to come together. So
that's what I do.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Ok. So we're going to talk a little bit about that
application of design outside the traditional design field later. But I first want to go

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back a little bit, because we're talking about how designers design basically in this
course and one of the theories we're going to use is the theory of reflective practice
developed by Donald Schön. And I know you have used that theory quite a bit in
your work. So could you explain what that theory means?

Kees Dorst: Yeah. So happy to do that. So I've sort of met Donald Schön and
worked with him a little bit early on in my career when I was still doing my PhD. And
Donald Schön, his background is in philosophy, he then became a consultant and
then he became a professor at M.I.T. in Boston in the Urban Planning Department.
So he's got this philosophy and design background. And he was really fascinated on,
sort of, how do people think about problems? how do people think about issues?
And he realized that a lot of the education at M.I.T. was very much a classic
engineering education, so lots and lots and lots of knowledge. And then people
would graduate and get into practice and actually have to learn the job more or less
from the start up, because they hadn't learned how an engineer thinks, they just
learned to make the sums. So he was sort of at M.I.T., quite a controversial figure
because he said it should be about professional practice. But then we should learn
what a professional practice is. And what do practitioners actually do?

So he studied many different fields. If you look at the book The Reflective
Practitioner, there's doctors in there, there's engineers in there, there's architects in
there, et cetera. So he was looking not particularly at design, although he was close
to design fields, but at how does how does professional practice actually work? And
he's sort of, looking at that thinking pattern from his philosophical perspective, he
said, well, practitioners actually do several things. One of the things they do is what
he calls reflection-in-action, which means that when you are doing something and
you're a skilled person, you're very quick in adapting what you do to the situation
almost without knowing it. So on a very moment-by-moment basis, you're doing the
right thing. That's what he calls reflection-in-action, which is almost, it's very intuitive,
it's based on experience. And then he said another thing that practitioners do is,
these professionals do, is a reflection-on-action, which is more explicit. So you're
working on something and at some point you're wondering 'am I going in the right
direction? What do I need do to change? Is this going to be fruitful or am I ending up
in a dead end if I pursue this direction?'

So that's what he called reflection-on-action. And there's basically, if you read his
books, there's a little bit of a process of four steps. That's sort of what, according to
Schön, first thing that a practitioner does is he names the important elements in a

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situation. So what is actually the matter here? What are the key things that I should
worry about, that I should take into account. Then they frame the situation, which
means that they look for an approach into the area to sort of move forward. Then
they move, so they do those moves. So in design work that is they do design. And
then they reflect on those moves and say, is this going in the right direction? So do I
need to sort of look at different frames because this frame isn't getting me
anywhere? Am I looking at all the important things or do I need to go back and name
other things in the situation and prioritize them as important? Or have I just made a
wrong move and do I need to loop back and sort of revisit that move? So that's how
you steer through a process like that. So what he actually more or less models
design as is a learning process because you go through many of these learning
loops and you more or less learn your way towards a solution. So that's the core of
his theory.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So when you when you're talking about reflection-in-
action and these learning loops, you mention the four steps: name, frame, move,
reflect. That still sounds quite abstract. Could you give an example of that?

Kees Dorst: He names a couple of examples in his book but let's say, we've done a
project here in the Designing Out Crime Center, which was about an entertainment
area, Kings Cross. And the problem there were people named that problem
regionally as this is about alcohol-related violence. So people go out, people get
drunk, there's violence in the evening. That's all sort of hanging together. And that's
a very particular frame already, because if you say that something is alcohol-related
violence, then you link the violence to the alcohol and then if you want to reduce the
violence, you do that by reducing the alcohol. In the end, with the Designing Out
Crime Research Center, we went to Kings Cross and one of the first things we
realized was that the reason that all those measures didn't really help, didn't really
work, was that the violence that we saw in Kings Cross actually was not alcohol
related. So that's where having the wrong frame for a situation or a frame that is not
fruitful, actually sends you in completely the wrong direction. So that's where we
started out by saying what other frames could be used to actually understand the
situation better or in a different way. So that was the start of our project there. So
what I like about what Donald Schön does is that he highlights that you're always in a
frame, you're always approaching something in a certain way and just being
conscious of that: 'I'm doing this because I'm thinking about it in this way' already
helps to question that. And I think looking at what expert designers do. So my
research was sort of travelling around the world, visiting expert designers and

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studying what they do. They spend an awful lot of time, maybe 70, 80 percent of
their project on looking at their problem. Because they know that once they have an
interesting and original entry point into the problem, that once they've got a new
frame, the solutions follow very quickly. And they're all really good because they are
actually based in new thinking. So I think framing is a really important aspect of
design and it's good that Donald Schön has managed to highlight that.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So this is a really great example of how a new frame
was used in this context of the entertainment district and the crime problems there,
now I'm not sure how many product designers would work on these kind of
challenges. Are there also examples from product design when it comes to framing
and how that works?

Kees Dorst: Well, the funny thing is, as I said, you're always in a frame and a lot of
the originality in product design doesn't come from a creative person brainstorming a
wonderful solution it comes from new approaches to problems. So you could almost
say that almost every good design is an example of reframing in that sense, or
there's an element of reframing in it, which is also why if you look at design
competitions the people that win design competitions are always people that have
taken the original brief a little bit for a walk and done something slightly different, but
clever and they always get told-off by the people that didn't win because they didn't
hold to the brief, yet the competition was actually about creating new approaches
into problems. Because that's what designers can bring. And that's what designers
bring time and time again.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So the framing is really part of that reflection-in-action
part or do you also use it in what he calls the reflection-on-action?

Kees Dorst: You also use it in reflection-on-action because in reflection-on-action

when you realize that you're going somewhere where there's not many solutions,
having to re-frame is one of the key things that often happens. But it's, let's say that
Schön's theory, when it first was published in 1983, it became very popular with
designers very quickly because people sort of recognized something in this
description of design that they hadn't seen in the earlier phase models and more
rational processes. It also fizzled out a little bit after a couple of years because, yes,
people realize this and recognize this, 'this is actually how I think, this is somebody
who understands me', which is really important. But then saying that everything
happens in these learning loops is not very practical because it makes it very hard to

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plan. And Schön has also been quite abstract in how he describes how people get to
frames. He says that frames are based on experience, which could be true, but it's
not very helpful because then to make a good frame you just need a hell of a lot of
experience probably. And if you say that frames are unoriginal, then they can't be
solely based on experience. So on the one hand, his theory really hit the design field
as 'yes, finally somebody understands what we actually do because we don't
recognize ourselves so much in the linear design model processes. On the other
hand, now that we do see that recognition and see that understanding, what do we
do with it?

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So when you say these linear design models those
where the models that existed before this theory came out?

Kees Dorst: Yeah, those were models, they basically came from practice, from
people that had to sort of plan out design projects and actually show to their clients
or show to their bosses that what they were doing was not just a mess, but was a
number of activities one after the other, so those became phase models of design.
And then Herbert Simon came up with, coming from an A.I. standpoint, they wanted
to program design into computers, and this is late 1960s so not very sophisticated
computers, but that means that you have to do a lot of thinking to do it well. And he
sort of rationalized that as a rational problem solving process. So design was
modeled as this rational problem solving process. And then Schön said, well, you're
missing the point about practices when you do that. So you can also look at design
in this other way. So it was a very fruitful time because you had several competing
theories and people had to think about it, decide, or use one and then use the other.
So that that was sort of, design research at that time was sort of based on these two
paradigms.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: And I know you studied those in your PhD, which I
think is quite interesting, can you explain a little bit what you did in your PhD and
how you studied what designers do?

Kees Dorst: The story behind my PhD is that I was running my own design firm and
I had this young designer that I had hired, and he was in a conceptual phase trying
to get a project done. And I realized that he was just messing about. Basically, he
wasn't getting anywhere. And I also realized that when I wanted to sort of guide him
a little bit and help him, that the only thing that I could do was basically say 'I would
do it differently'. And I found that very unsatisfying - don't we know this? So I went

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back to my professor in Delft and I said, I want to know everything about how
integration happens in product design. And they said, 'well, we don't know either'. So
that's called research, and you can get a room, and probably the books that you
need and figure it out. So I started doing my research into how does integration
happen in product design? How is it possible that product designers when you've got
a very messy problem area with lots of stakeholders and technology is there,
ergonomics is there. It's all these different things, that product designers manage to
make a fairly simple product in the end that actually encapsulates all of those things
and creates great value. So how do you come from all that complexity to a certain
simplicity? So that's integration. So I was really interested in that. So that's when I
started studying integration and by basically giving designers an exercise to do - a
design brief and taping them and seeing what they were doing, it's called protocol
analysis, and I saw them wrestling with integration, I saw them reaching integration,
so I was completely fascinated as a practitioner. But then I used the rational
problem-solving way of looking at design to try and trace this, pinpoint where does it
happen? And I couldn't. And I thought OK, that means that, I mean these designers
are obviously right, they're in practice, they are doing it. But apparently our way of
looking at it is limited in a way that I didn't realize. And in that time, Delft as an
education, rational problem solving was basically what you learned as 'this is design'.
And I said well there must be other ways so that's when I met Donald Schön and
became fascinated in also using that other way of looking at design. So in the end,
my PhD turned around and became the comparison between those two paradigms,
with still integration as the point of comparison. So I was still looking at integration
from those two perspectives, but it became much more about the paradigms
themselves than about integration in the end.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So you compared Herbert Simon's paradigm to

Donald Schön's paradigm and looked how that played out. And what was your
conclusion from that study?

Kees Dorst: Well, of course they're both valid in their own way, and they're both
valid for different uses. Also that you shouldn't confuse them. Just pushing them
together in one thing makes for a very messy thing. But it led, for instance to, as I
said one of the problems with the Schön paradigm of reflective practice is that it's all
learning loops and you can't plan anymore. In the end, I worked with a firm in Boston
called Product Genesis, and for them we made a hybrid planning model where if you
were a design firm, you've done projects in a certain area for a number of years, so
you actually know that there are areas within your design project that our quite linear.

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You're not going to learn there, you're just going to do what you're good at. So in that
hybrid planning model, those are planned linearly. And then there's these areas
where you know that there's newness because you don't have the experience of we
just don't know yet. And that's where we planned in learning loops. So we tried to
actually accommodate also the learning, because the problem with design plannings
on the whole is that if they are too linear, all the learning is the really fascinating stuff.
That's where things really develop, that's where originality happens. But if you don't
plan that in and you plan design just as a kind of best case scenario of activities from
a problem to a solution, you're going to do all that learning in the evenings and
weekends and under the shower, et cetera, instead of being planned as part of the
work that you do. And it's actually the part of the work where you have the most
added value. So you should protect that and not just do that over the weekends, et
cetera. I was always surprised, one of my design firms was in Eindhoven, and you
could sort of see the lights on in all these design firms in Eindhoven very late in the
evening. Also when we needed information, we just used to call each other all the
time until late in the evening, because you knew that everybody was working late
always. And that's because basically everybody had sold a project on linear
planning. But that's not how it works. So you've been unrealistic and you then have
to pick up that slack by working in the evenings and over the weekends, et cetera.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Would you say that's one of the more practical uses of
this theory, that you can actually better plan your design process and also explain to
others what you're going to do in those learning loops?

Kees Dorst: Yeah, I think that's really, really important. And then the second
weakness of the Schön theory, at least that I saw was that he never told you where
frames were coming from. So that's when I started studying expert designers. How
do they get to frames? So that became a frame creation methodology. I really
believe that what Schön has done is very important, but there's a couple of big gaps
in there that make it impractical. And so let's try and make that more practical.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: The way you explain it now framing is really key to
coming up with new solutions as well.

Kees Dorst: Yeah, one of the things that I found sort of doing this, working with
these expert designers, studying what they do is, one of the things I've found is that
they never brainstorm because brainstorming is going random on the solutions,
trying sort of lots and lots of lots of different solutions. Which is fun to do, and it's

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very good and it's a nice team activity. But then the next step, of course, is clustering
those and selecting which solutions you go on with. Well, if your view of the problem
hasn't changed, you're going to use the old view of the problem as that kind of filter.
So you're probably throwing out lots of possibly interesting things, because you're
not you haven't thought about the problem in any new way. And what I found with
these expert designers is that they take a long time, they spend a lot of energy and a
lot of time on trying to create new frames. And then once you have a new frame,
every solution that comes out is interesting. So they've got no need to go completely
random on solutions because they're quite focused and deliberate about, OK, if this
is the new frame, what does that lead to, ideas wise?

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So you're saying expert designers are really good at
framing. So now if you are a Masters student studying industrial design engineering,
how can you can also become really good at framing?

Kees Dorst: A lot of it as being aware that you're framing, that you're always
framing, and starting to question that so there's a lot of reflection that has to go on.
You can do that alone or you can question each other and just ask 'why?'. That's
more or less the key thing, because the moment you start asking 'why?' and you go
back to 'oh, this is the reason we do this!' You can immediately see other possibilities
coming from that. I mean framing is something that people naturally do. And of
course, in your normal life, you also reframe. So it's not 'new' in that sense, it's just
that it's really important in design and it's really important in design to recognize that
that is happening, because it's also happened before you know it. The moment you
use words like, for Kings Cross, 'alcohol-related violence', you've looked yourself in
completely. There's only one type of solution possible. And people just use that to
talk about it as if that is the problem. So be very aware of those frames and see
whether you can shift them. But that requires real sort of moments of stepping back
and thinking, 'OK, why am I saying this in this way?' Or if you're talking to a client or
to a supervisor, 'why is that person talking in this way?' What is their view that they
have behind this? What is their, what Donald Schön would call, the underlying
background theory that they use to describe this? If you can break that one, if you
could break into it, you can find other types of solutions that people that are within
the theory just can't think of.

DISCUSSION

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Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So we've just been listening to the interview I did last
week with Kees and I've been thinking about it. And Peter also has listened.

Peter Lloyd: Yes, I thought it was really interesting. I thought he covered some
really interesting stuff from a design point of view. I think one of the things, that he
talks about Donald Schön a bit, but one of the reasons I like Donald Schön and I
think Kees likes Donald Schön too, is that he has these little phrases that really sum
up what it's like to design. So one of his his famous phrases is 'the problem of the
problem'. So it's not just about the problem that you're trying to solve. There's an
underlying problem that you're trying to get to. That's one of his phrases. And the
other one that I like is, he quotes Plato actually, which is how do you know that what
you found is the thing you didn't know? And that really gets across the idea that
you're exploring something in design and you're trying to learn new things in order to
know that what you find in the end is is the right thing. So there is this whole learning
process that goes on, but there are various different types of knowledge, I think, in
the design process. Kees mentions engineers get knowledge. I think he means sort
of 'fact' kind of knowledge. Whereas this other kind of process knowledge, the
knowledge about what you gain from experience, and that's what Donald Schön
encapsulates in his famous book, The Reflective Practitioner, but other other work
too.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Yes, that's also what I remember from first reading
The Reflective Practitioner is one of the things that I really like that, I think Schön
describes in the first chapter, is that we have a certain idea of how we are looking at
what knowledge is. And the kind of technical way of looking at knowledge excludes a
lot of knowledge that happens within a design process. So Donald Schön, he's
explaining that that the old view of knowledge and practice is, regardless of the
profession that you're in, is that you go to university, you learn all this knowledge and
theory, and then once you go into practice, all you have to do is just apply that theory
that you have learned and you will be fine. So, for example, doctors, when they go to
university, they have to learn about diseases and illnesses and medication and
treatment and those kind of things. And all the evidence that's out there, then once
they go into medical practice, they know how to do that.

Peter Lloyd: There's a whole practice of just doing the subject or, you know, doing it
professionally.

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Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Exactly. And that actually doing it professionally is
something that we don't traditionally regard as knowledge or knowing. And the theory
of reflective practice basically explains that there is a lot of, I think Schön calls it
'knowing-in-the doing' or 'theory-in-action' is also a phrase that he uses. Which I
think is very, very useful because it's in that learning process that you get to an
answer. So very often a doctor, when there's a patient in front of them, they can't just
say, oh, you know, the diagnosis is this because I can find it in this book. And
therefore, the answer is that. Now very often a doctor also has to experiment and
work out what's really going on.

Peter Lloyd: I think that's the basic process that Kees described the 'naming,
framing, moving and evaluating'. He concentrated a lot on framing, and how
important frames are, and that's true. But I think that that process is one of
experimentation. You're trying to understand something in a certain way and you're
trying to see if your understanding makes sense by experimenting. So that's the kind
of moving aspect of it. Schön talks a lot about 'surprise', when you try something out
in designing and it doesn't quite go like you think it's going to go. There's an element
of surprise, but that surprise generates learning. And the learning process in design,
I think, is one of the most important things that Schön really articulates well. And
Kees talked about that, there's an aspect of design where you 'learn your way to a
solution', he talks about. That's a nice phrase. You start from a point and you don't
quite know where you're going to end up, but you know you're going to learn more at
the end of the process than you did at the beginning. That's an interesting thing to
think about.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: I was also thinking about this whole idea of rational
problem solving. So Kees was mentioning that at the time that he did his PhD a lot of
design education was addressed around this idea of rational problem solving, which
was when I was a student. And to make that explicit what it looked like was, for
example, if I was going to design a water bottle - I have a water bottle here in front of
me - I was asked to explore the problem space.

Peter Lloyd: Break down the problem...

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: So you know, what are other water bottles that are on
the market? How much water do people want to drink? How do they want to clean it?
And then you translate all that learning into a list of requirements. Then you do a
divergence phase where you come up with different solutions through a brainstorm.

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And then you select the best solution based on your requirements. And then you go
on developing that solution through a more detailed process. So that's what we call
the linear process. First go to your problem, list of requirements, solution. I actually
think a lot of that is still in the educational programme. When I graduated that was
still the way I was thinking about design. At the same time you kind of, as a designer,
you always feel like there's something more right? And I like what Kees is saying, all
this thinking that happens in the at night and under the shower.

Peter Lloyd: I think that's really important to emphasize actually, because I think he
really captured that idea that, it's all very well that design is about learning and, you
know, you have these little insights in the process, but you also have to plan. You're
dealing with a client, you're working in a team of people. They need to know what the
plan is, and fitting those two things together, the planning side of design, which is the
sort of more rational, you know time planning, process planning sort of thing. And
then the learning, which is a bit more, you know, it happens in the shower, it
happens in the bath somewhere, somewhere where you're not expecting it, or just as
you're about to go out the house. Trying to plan that into the process is very, very
difficult I think.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Yes, I mean I've experienced that myself. I also had a
design studio in Sydney alongside my job in the university. And just trying to sell
design that is always difficult because you can never really fully plan the design
process. But if I were going to design a water bottle, I would say, if I would do that
through a process of reflective practice, I would not start with the idea of a water
bottle, because if you ask for the design of the water bottle, what you will end up with
is something that looks like a bottle with water in it. But if you think about the problem
behind the problem, you could say people are looking for something that can get
them to drink water wherever they are. They already start to think more broadly
about this idea. And then it could also be one of those water bubblers, where you
can just go and get some water or it could be a…

Peter Lloyd: A service or something...

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: A service, or a backpack with water.

Peter Lloyd: I thought that was interesting when Kees was talking about framing,
one of the things that Donald Schön mentions is this idea of 'seeing as', sort of
seeing one thing as another thing, as a way to understand a problem slightly

14
differently, to get underneath the problem. And we'll actually come onto that in
another podcast, we're gonna be talking about that more specifically. One of the
other things was that Kees mentioned experience and expertise. He mentioned the
idea that coming up with a good frame is based on experience. But how do you get
experience? It's that experience paradox.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: It's interesting because Kees is saying that one of the
downside of Schön's, or shortcomings so to say, in Schön's theory is that he doesn't
really say how you get to a good frame. And then Kees has written this book, Frame
Innovation, in which he describes the frame creation method that he mentioned in
the interview. He basically describes a method, a step-by-step method that he says
people can use to come to better frames.

Peter Lloyd: So that's where you can start from, basically, I think the the idea of
expertise is that the more experience you get, the better the frame, the more frames
that you can think of, or the more creative you are, the way you can view problems in
a different way and things.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Yeah, it's definitely something you can practice. So
I've worked with this frame creation method quite a bit and as a designer I find it
very, very useful because it just helps me to explain where I am in the design
process. It doesn't help people who are not designers to actually come up with good
frames. So even though it's got like nine steps in there, and it's been sold to people
as being something that can help you to good frames, but my experience is you still
need experience to actually use it.

Peter Lloyd: Or to work with experienced people too. I think in The Reflective
Practitioner, Donald Schön's book, he analyzes conversations between students and
tutors to see what's the tutor actually saying to someone, and how are they
understanding that thing?

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: That's a particularly interesting thing, because for the
students who are listening, if you have time and are interested, that's an interesting
chapter in Schön's book, because it's a chapter of which describes a discussion
between an architect and a student architect. And for me it's actually very difficult to
understand what's going on and I think it's because I am not an architect, and I don't
understand the language of architects, and it really therefore shows the expertise of
the architects.

15
Peter Lloyd: Yeah, I think one of the things that he sort of says is that tutors are
very good at getting you to ask your own questions. So it's not necessarily, you're
not trying to solve a problem for someone it is basically well, you ask me what
question you want, and then you go away and find the answer too. I think a lot of
reflective practice about awareness. It's about awareness of the different ways that
you think and awareness of when things don't go quite how you think they're going to
go, how you respond to that, I think Kees referenced some of that.

Peter Lloyd: A lot of the things that Kees touches on in this podcast, and that we've
also talked to a little bit about, we'll carry on in other in other podcasts too. I think
they are themes that will reoccur. The reason that we chose reflective practice to
start off was it covers a lot of the concepts that we want to talk about in the course,
but in more detail. We haven't touched on things like improvisation and repertoire
and process and dialogue. All these things are in reflective practice, but we'll come
onto those in future podcasts in more detail.

Peter Lloyd: OK thanks Mieke.

Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer: Thanks Peter

Peter Lloyd: I thought that was a really great interview, lots of insight and I look
forward to hearing more from Kees in the second part of the interview.

16
DTM Podcast #2: Co-evolution

Show Notes

This podcast is the second part of an interview that features Kees Dorst, Professor of
Design, from the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Further details about
Kees can be found in the show notes for the first podcast. The interview is followed
by a discussion between Peter and Mieke, who talk about some of the ideas in the
interview that they found interesting.

The second part of the interview focuses on the idea of ‘co-evolution’ that Kees
developed along with Nigel Cross in their 2001 paper: Creativity in the Design
Process: Co-evolution of Problem and Solution. This is the idea that designers
explore problems (or ‘problem spaces’) by proposing solutions. Kees starts by
contrasting this type of thinking to more ‘linear’ ways of working, before going on to
talk about how this kind of working can be difficult to understand for others in
organisations and what to do about it.

Several of the ideas that Kees talks about will form the subject of future podcasts –
what it means to acquire experience and expertise in design, for example, and how
to get others to participate in design processes.

One reference that is mentioned in the following discussion between Peter and
Mieke is a famous paper by Jane Darke: The Primary Generator and the Design
Process This is a study of how expert architects generate very quick solutions to
architectural problems when they visit the site of where a new building should be.
That is, they develop an understanding of the problem through thinking of a solution
– co-evolution, in other words.

Right at the end of the discussion Mieke refers to the idea of ‘provocative prototypes’
– prototypes that deliberately try to provoke a better understanding of the problem in
social design contexts. You can find out more about this in her recent paper:
Problem Framing Expertise in Public and Social Innovation.

17
Podcast Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Peter Lloyd: Hi Podcats! I'm Peter

Mieke van der Bijl: Hi, I'm Mieke

Peter Lloyd: And this is the second DTM podcast. This is basically the second part
of an interview with Kees Dorst. The first part was on reflective practice. If you
haven't yet listened to that I'd recommend going back and listening to that before you
listen to this one. This is quite a short interview that we did on a subject called Co-
evolution, but it's distinct from reflective practice so we thought we'd have it as a
separate podcast. What we're going to have is about a 10 minute interview with Kees
Dorst, carrying on from before. And then another discussion about some of the
things that he talks about and some of the theories that he mentions. So let's hear
the interview...

INTERVIEW

Mieke van der Bijl: So we've been talking about reflective practice and about
framing. The last thing I wanted to talk about is the idea of co-evolution of problem
and solution. So there is a very well-known journal in our field, Design Studies, and
one of the most downloaded papers in that journal has been for many years for the
paper you wrote together with Nigel Cross about creativity in the design process and
the co-evolution of problem and solution. What does that mean - co-evolution of
problem and solution?

Kees Dorst: The history of that paper came out of the work I'd done studying these
expert designers. I sort of realized that what they're doing is really interesting. Let's
say in the classic problem-solving way of looking at design, you start with the design
brief and then you do all of your design work and you get to a solution and heh
you're finished. But if you look into those design processes, yes, you start with a
design brief and you come to a solution, but you realise that it's not quite the right
solution and you actually need to go back and look at the problem slightly differently
because you've hit a dead end. Then you go and create another solution. So the

18
problem and the solution are both moving in design, which is different from what
often happens in engineering. In engineering people tend to work in a fairly rational
problem-solving, fairly linear, way. But in design the problem and solution are both in
play they can both change. I think that's a key aspect of what design can bring to
other fields at the moment. A lot of fields, we are very, very stuck. We're not solving
our problems very well at all. And you can say, well, that means that we need to hire
designers to make more solutions. Or you can say, well, we need to actually hire
designers to help us through the possibilities that there are and to also look back at
the problem and see how that shifts and changes. So that's a key aspect of what
designers do. Studying it in detail you realize that an idea is not a new solution. An
idea is actually a kind of bridge, a link, between a certain view of the problem and a
solution. Because design is very propositional. You go ‘ok IF this is the problem, then
that could be a good solution’, that doesn't work, bla bla bla. OK, let's change how I
look at the problem a little bit. Hey, wait a minute. There's a solution there - YES.
And that's the sort of adrenaline rush that you get when you have an idea. Is this
kind of feeling of 'click', something clicks together, and what clicks together is
actually a view of the problem and a possible solution. And a bridge between those
is what we call an idea.

Mieke van der Bijl: So it's the fit between the problem and the solution. One of the
things I always find difficult when it comes to co-evolution, I recognise that in all the
design products I've done and I've studied as well is that co-evolution makes
planning so difficult because we tend to plan a project as well. First, we do our
problem exploration and then we create a problem definition and then we start doing
a brainstorm and generating ideas and then we compare whatever we've designed
to our problem definition. How do we work with [co-evolution] as designers?

Kees Dorst: The problem that design has is that it has to try and fit somehow within
a world that thinks in a very linear way. About problem-solving about what projects
are. What design actually brings is this kind of non-linearity. It's these learning
processes, it's this co-evolution bit. So that's one of the reasons that often design
departments in big firms or within R&D departments are very closed off. So you can't
enter. Officially that is because we have to protect the ntellectual property and all the
great ideas that are developed there. In reality it's also to protect those designers
from interference by people from the organization itself. Because if people come in,
in a phase where you are still working with your propositions, going 'if this...' it will
look very strange to them. Why don't you guys solve this problem? Well, we're
actually in a design process which is completely different. So there's a lot of

19
misunderstanding around design. And that's where design tends to shut itself off a
little bit or organize workshops. It's very hard for design to work out there in the
world. Sometimes it needs to be a little bit of a bubble.

There's a great example, years ago, there was actually the design of the new Dutch
passport. Designers were working on this and they're trying to find new technologies
that would make it harder to fake passports. They were basically just going around
with some technical experiments and graphic experiments to make it really hard to
fake. The problem was that it took them a while to get somewhere and then one of
the testing institutes leaked that the tests had failed, of the new passport. Well, that
was actually one of, I don't know how many tests that they were doing to get to a
good solution. That became questions in Parliament and the minister had to show up
in Parliament and defend why the project for the new passport was taking so long.
And it basically wiped out all of the design freedom for the designers so they
basically had to go with the thing they had then, which was still in development, and
start just producing that because it was not acceptable to keep experimenting. And
that was not a very good design for the new passport. So then the whole project has
failed and you think, that's what happens with these kind of things.

Also I was a designer at Volvo before, and in Volvo they realised that ok, you've got
the design department, which makes all these wonderful sketches and stuff, and
then you've got the production, which is the big machine. And whatever the design
department comes up with, the people in production always start redesigning that a
little bit to make it easier to produce, which upsets the designers because they see
the quality of their design go down, or what they see as the quality of their designs
and the production people go 'well, we can't help it, we need to make this them thing
and what you've sketched for us is just not going to work'. So the idea was that, OK,
let's avoid that, because that's a big interface, there's a lot of time that's being lost in
that space. Maybe you do lose design quality in that space. So let's try and repair
that by having people from production also involved in the early design phases,
because they've got all of this knowledge about what works and what doesn't work in
production and they can then inject that into these early design phases. That didn't
quite work because in these early design phases you're going 'oh it could be like this,
could be like that, there are several possibilities and maybe this is cool'. The people
from production were basically just sitting there with their arms crossed going: 'what
should I make?' They weren't interested in exploring things or in several solutions or
whatever. They were just what do I need to make? Tell me what I need to make and
I can tell you whether it's good or not. So that's a huge cultural difference, and that's

20
within the same firm, people that have sort of collaborated for a long time, but they're
still there in completely different cultures.

So the idea of having a design space or giving design space to play around with it -
'could be like this, could be like that' - is quite important. Some firms are very good in
creating the design space. Other firms are really, really bad at it. And that means that
whatever you can do as a designer is very, very limited. You don't have much
freedom then.

Mieke van der Bijl: What you're explaining is that the way that designers work
through this co-evolution of problem and solution, this kind of learning process, is
quite different from how people in other professions work and that sometimes
clashes. And in your work, also in my work, when we apply design in kind of the
social field and also working with public sector and social sector organizations,
governments, who also tend to work in those linear ways, how do we deal with that?
Is this creation of design space the best strategy to deal with that?

Kees Dorst: On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, no. When you create a
bubble where design sits, you also create an interface. And that interface can be so
hard to get through, that whatever you create in your bubble is just not going to
happen. So the more transparent you can be, the better it is. What I often find is
what I try to do with people from non-design disciplines that are going to be taking
the ideas forward, or that we're going to be working with later on. I invite them into
these design processes, but we have this rule here which is basically 'hats off'. So
you're not there as the representative for marketing, you're just here as somebody
with ideas. Because designing, framing, co-evolution, it's not strange. It's just that in
a lot of professions, people get scared of it and they've organized it out, and they
pretend to be much more linear and much more rational than they actually are. So
creating a space which has a good design culture in a way that is approachable for
other people is really the way to go, because you do need them to be involved. You
also need their expertise. I mean, in that sense Volvo was right in trying to get those
people involved. It's just get them in as they are, that doesn't work. So you have to
explain to them very carefully what you do. I mean, a lot of what designers do in
practice is about teaching people things. It's about explaining things. It's about
explaining about different ways of looking. So make it as transparent as you can,
because that's where you're not going to create that awful interface that you
otherwise have to get around.

21
Mieke van der Bijl: Yes that's very clear.

Kees Dorst: Which means that design problems become more complex. And the
question is, does the traditional design way of working actually work for these very
complex problems? And I think that's a real thing we have to ask ourselves. Because
you see that often very complex problems are now given to the engineers and they
solve it in a technical way. But I think all these complex problems also have a human
side. So you'd wish for design to be able to engage with them. But there seems to be
a bit of a ceiling in our way of working about a complexity that we can actually deal
with, that can actually achieve.

On the other hand, if you look at some of the biggest creative processes that are
happening at the moment, they're in animation. If you look at making a feature length
animated film, that's thousands of people in a creative process. And they've done a
really, really good job in organizing creativity on that scale. It's even bigger than what
I've seen in Volvo in the car industry. But then we haven't even looked at that
because we've always said, 'well, animation that's a bit of entertainment...' but
there's technology development in there. There is so much that is happening. And it
turns out they have a very layered way of working. So they've got different layers of
architecture, because the last thing you want is somebody to just sit behind a screen
and start clicking and making a funny figure or something. That doesn't work. So
that's very, very sophisticated, things that have already been developed up in
practice that we just don't know about.

Another thing that I find comes mostly from interviewing architects is that these
famous architects, owners of these famous big architecture firms - Norman Foster,
Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry, those kind of people. They have a very interesting
role in those firms that we haven't quite understood yet, because the last thing that
they should do is get directly involved in projects. When the big boss says
something, everybody else stops thinking, that's not a good plan. So they need to
empower their people to do the kind of projects that fit within what the firm is doing.
And it's not management, as you would learn, an MBA. It is actually about the
content. But they're kind of curators of knowledge in the firm and it turns out that
they've got really interesting practices to make that happen. They go across many
different things. They go up to, let's say, what kind of pictures do you have on the
wall in your design firm? Well, those are basically the projects that you still want to
think about because they signify something very important but they're also
challenging. Why do you do exhibitions? Why do you do competitions? That's

22
because that gives you a certain freedom to actually think more broadly than you
could normally do within your projects. And they're very much made for the people of
the firm themselves to keep challenging yourself, to keep developing new ways of
working, new ways of thinking.

That's a whole different level of designing. To me, those people are still designing.
It's just they're designing the environment in which their type of design can happen.
And often what you see in design schools, the first thing you tell students is design
happens in projects, and projects go from a brief to a solution. Well there are layers
to that, there are other layers of designing that sit around that. If you look at design
firms that I know in Holland than in other places, there are some firms that are quite
weak because they are just projects, people running from project to project, and
making money and having fun, et cetera, et cetera. But it doesn't seem to be a build
up of knowledge on top of that. There doesn't seem to be a sophistication in the way
of working, etc. So they just keep doing what they do within their projects. They miss
what to me is a whole other level of design that is also very, very important. And that
in the end gives a firm its profile, it gives its longevity and its also an intellectually
interesting thing.

Mieke van der Bijl: Well, still a lot of work to do for us!

Kees Dorst: Yes.

Mieke van der Bijl: Thank you so much Kees, that was very informative, thank you.

Kees Dorst: Ok, you're welcome!

DISCUSSION

Mieke van der Bijl: Ok, so that was the part of the interview that I did with Kees,
which was on co-evolution of problem and solution. I think this is a really, really
interesting and important topic for designers to understand. In fact, I think it's so
important that I developed a course a couple of years ago on design for public
servants, and one of the subjects in the course I ended up calling co-evolution of
problem and solution.

Peter Lloyd: Ha ha

23
Mieke van der Bijl: Which the public servants found a little bit difficult to understand,
but one of the things that I find really interesting about this theory is that when we
talk about experiments in design and prototypes, we often tend to think of these
prototypes as just testing a certain solution so we can improve that solution. Whilst if
we use this theory of co-evolution of problem and solution, we see that actually this
experiment or this prototype is not so much about the solution, but really about the
connected problem, or the way we frame the problem, so often through these
experiments we learn a lot about a problem, not just about the solution.

Peter Lloyd: Yes, in the interview Kees says 'design is propositional' and I think
what he means by that is what designers are very good at is exploring problems
through suggesting solutions. You suggest a solution in order to find out what you
think the problem is. That's a very distinctive way of working and that doesn't fit
easily with other people's ways of working, particularly what he described as linear
ways of working, in organizations to, because an organization likes to know when
things are going to happen, they want to know what the process is. That's what
design thinking brings, the connection between a solution and a problem. A lot of
people in other disciplines think that there are problems that need solutions. There's
a phrase which is is an engineer comes to a designer and says, 'we can build any
car that you want, but we don't know which car to build'. And that's what the designer
brings is that idea that you can work on a problem, but in a kind of solution focused
way. The other thing I quite liked in in Kees' interview was this idea of what value
designers bring. It's sort of clear that other people think they bring this value, but they
don't really understand HOW they get that value, or in how to invest in that value or
even, you know, where to put the designers. So there there's an element of, you
know, if an organization values design, it has to protect the designers, and that
creating that space or that bubble that Kees said that's a real challenge. To actually
account for what designing is to other people.

Mieke van der Bijl: I mean it's quite paradoxical because, on the one hand, we're
saying like 'oh, nobody understands us' and then on the other hand, we're saying,
'well, you know, we need to be protected'. Just put us in this, what Kees calls a
design space. But then we're essentially creating a bubble that only creates more
distance between designers and other professions. The question is do we really
need a separate space? Because then the framing is almost like, okay, we have to
teach people - that's literally what Kees is saying - we have to teach people what
design is. But I think it's also a bit problematic because we're just thinking about 'no

24
one understands us, we just have to teach others'. We're not really thinking about
others at all. We should also maybe ask engineers, or any other kind of professional
we're working with, how do YOU work? How is what you are doing different from
what we are doing? and what would you like to learn from us? So create more of a
conversation rather than saying 'I just need to teach you how I am thinking'.

Peter Lloyd: When you think about acquiring experience or what expertise brings is
that you just have a natural repertoire of solutions to draw on and you begin to
recognize certain types of problem. It's not just designers that do this, but as people
get more experience in their day-to-day life, or whatever professions that they
choose, they begin to recognize OK this is a particular problem-solution. Maybe this
is the right solution to go with, so as you acquire experience, you naturally become a
bit more solution-focused. There is a very famous study by someone called Jane
Darke who wrote this paper called 'The Primary Generator' and she did a study of
five or ten architects, experienced architects, and she took them to an architectural
site and got them to talk about how they would tackle the problem. She said very
quickly, they say 'OK the light is over here, the elevation is over here', they quickly
map the problem landscape and then they come up with a solution. You know, we
should put this over here and that over here, and that forms the basis of their
solution so they're very quickly thinking of a solution in order to tackle the problem
and take it further.

Mieke van der Bijl: I'd like to add to that, because I know Jane Darke's paper and
the idea of the primary generator. Indeed, that's one of the drivers this kind expertise
like designers they use these primary generators, some people call it principles,
based on all the projects they've done before, they have this expertise. But they also
found that they use research. In those studies people don't talk about all the
research that designers nowadays do, they really do go out and explore and use
their ethnography or context mapping of whatever techniques they use. They use
solution-driven design, so the provocative prototype. Some of them use what I call
reflection tools in their design process, all kinds of maps that they use in their
process. So there are kind of different ways in a design process, different types of
inputs that designers can use in that problem-framing process. I think that expertise
and the use of solutions are really quite key things and quite different from what
other people might use in their practice.

Peter Lloyd: I think that the interview covered a lot of things that will be familiar to a
lot of people struggling with problems and thinking about solutions and how they fit

25
one another. As with the first podcast, and as with the podcasts to come, we write
some show notes which give you all the references, the things that we talk about that
we think might be of further interest to you. So go and have a look if you want to
follow up any of the ideas that we've been talking about. Have a look at the show
notes. Ok that's it for the second podcast, thanks very much, Mieke.

Mieke van der Bijl: Thanks Peter, very interesting!

26
DTM Podcast #3: Design Fixation

Show Notes

Nathan Crilly has written a lot about the phenomena of design fixation that is
discussed in the podcast. Two very recent publications of his, in volume 64 of the
journal Design Studies, are a good place to start. One is of case studies of creative
discovery, and the other summarises the theory of design fixation to date. The key
early work Nathan refers to – Design Fixation - that first identified the design fixation
phenomena in 1991, is by David Jansson and Stephen Smith.

The Six Hats Method is a method, devised by the famous creative guru Edward de
Bono in his 1985 book Six Thinking Hats: An Essential Approach to Business
Management, which helps people to think in different ways about a problem. Each
hat represents a thinking style – for example ‘gut reaction’, ‘opinions of others’,
‘planning and objectives’ – that you adopt for a fixed period to make progress in a
complex problem-solving process.

Project Implicit is an international collaboration between researchers who are

interested in implicit social cognition - thoughts and feelings outside of conscious
awareness and control. The goal is to educate the public about hidden biases and to
provide a “virtual laboratory” for collecting data on the Internet. You can take an
‘implicit association test’ to see where your biases might lie at the following link:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

The 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman summarises the work
of two key psychologists – Kahneman and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky –
who have spent their careers looking at the many different ways that human
decision-making can be biased, and the poor outcomes that result. Their work has
been hugely influential in many areas, including ‘nudge’ theory.

27
Podcast Transcript

Introduction

Peter Lloyd: Hello, it’s Peter Lloyd here. I hope you’re enjoying the DTM course so
far, I’ve talked to a few of you and it certainly seems like it - do let us know what you
think. This is the 3rd DTM podcast and the subject that we’re going to talk about is
what’s called Design Fixation, a form of psychological bias that can affect designers
when they design.

The podcast features Dr Nathan Crilly from the University of Cambridge in the UK
who has researched and written a lot about design fixation so I’ll let him explain it far
better than I could. 

First of all, we’re going to hear an interview I did with Nathan for about 15 minutes
followed by a 10 minute discussion between Mieke and myself about what he said.
So it’s not a long podcast but it is packed with detail and I should warn you that
Nathan is quite a fast talker so look at the transcription in the show notes if you miss
what he says. Anyway I hope you find it interesting and here we go...

Part 1: Interview

Peter Lloyd: I'm here in the studio with Dr. Nathan Crilly, who is a researcher from
the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and he is a one of the world experts on a
phenomena called design fixation, which is a cognitive bias which affects human
behavior and therefore all designers. Welcome to the DTM podcast Nathan.

Nathan Crilly: Thanks for having me.

Peter Lloyd: Can you give me an example, first off, of what design fixation is and
and how will it affect designers when they design?

Nathan Crilly: Sure. So design fixation is generally described as an instance where

a designer is trying to be creative, trying to come up with new ideas, but in fact their
previous knowledge and their experience and things they've seen are restricting their

28
imagination. So instead of exploring as widely as they could, they're remaining a little
bit limited. So if we thinking of an example being here in Delft. So if you were asked
to design a new type of bicycle storage facility and you're sketching ideas and you're
trying to come up with new ways you could do it. There's a good chance your ideas
will be influenced by all the bicycle storage facilities you've already seen, such as the
ones at Delft train station or outside TU Delft. So you're trying to come up with new
ideas, but you already know all this stuff. You have these expectations as to what
bicycles are, how they should be stored, how people use them, and whilst you're
trying to think broadly you might find that certain features of pre-existing solutions
keep recurring. And that's that's great if the solutions are good, maybe it doesn't
matter too much. But it could be they're not very useful or not very useful for your
new idea. And yet those ideas just sort of stick around. So design fixation is often
described in that way, you want to come up with something new, but your
imagination is being inhibited by the precedent that you've seen or the knowledge
and experience you've got.

Peter Lloyd: So we don't start from a blank page. The page already has a few things
on it that we either get rid of or try and find our way around?

Nathan Crilly: Whilst experience and knowledge is generally thought of as a good

thing - the more experience you have then the more expert you are - generally
expertise is a double edged sword so it can enable very skilled performance within
your area of expertise, but it can restrict your ability to think of things outside that
area of expertise. A lot of the studies of expertise look at that conflict: when expertise
is good and when not. So if you're a designer, you might be expert in all sorts of
products, you might be expert in your own work. And that's useful because you can
use that prior knowledge, but it also might have a restricting effect as well.

Peter Lloyd: So even if you're experienced, you can suffer from design fixation?

Nathan Crilly: Yes, so in the work that we've done, especially when we speak to
expert designers, one of the things that they've learnt to recognize over the years is
recognize their own susceptibility to fixation

Peter Lloyd: Getting hung up on an idea that you can't get rid of?

Nathan Crilly: Yeah, you don't recognize you're hung up on it, which is the big
problem. You tend not to be aware of fixation. You tend to be excited by the idea you

29
have and you think it's good and you keep developing it, and all the time you think
you are exploring different options, but in fact you're staying on a narrow path. And a
lot of the time that's very helpful. You don't want to necessarily question everything
all the time. And often in commercial work, you're not being paid to endlessly think
about all the different options for how you can interpret the brief or how the different
product options or whether it should be a service rather than a product. You can
explore some of that to some extent. But the client, if you have an external client,
won't just pay you for endless exploration. And so it can be very adaptive and
productive and efficient to operate in a somewhat restricted way. And the problem
comes when it's not adaptive.

Peter Lloyd: So is there a theory of design fixation? How does it relate to other other
work? It sounds like psychological phenomenon?

Nathan Crilly: Design fixation is an instance of a much more general set of

phenomena which are called cognitive biases. And these are a large set of biases
where what you see as a systematic, as in a reliable and reproducible form of
behavior, so a systematic form of behavior where people don't perform entirely
rationally, where the information that they are considering in the decisions they may
make are biased in a particular way. And so this is cognitive biases research that
has been going on for decades that has tended to focus on relatively narrow aspects
of decision making. So you have to choose one thing over another or you have to
estimate a number. I think the interesting thing that design fixation research adds to
that is it looks so much more open ended problems. So biases in creative work
rather than just biases in decision making. And of course in professional practice, in
design, both of those are relevant. You have to make decisions that are binary
decisions, for example, but you also have to explore the problems and solutions
you're working on. There is a thing called satisfaction of search, so once you're
looking for something, when you find it, you're very satisfied and you might not
search for something else. You might see that in airport baggage handling. Once
they find the knife, they don't see the bomb. Or you see it in X-ray scanning on
multiple fractures. If they find one break in the bone and they miss the other one
because they were just looking for something and when they found it, they felt the
search was over. There's lots of different categories of bias.

Peter Lloyd: So as a practicing designer, you can imagine, I think we've all been
through this process where you're in a sort of creative mindset and you sort of think

30
"yes it's all fitting together really well, I've got the solution kind of thing, but that can
be a dangerous position to be in as well as as a good position.

Nathan Crilly: Yeah I think that's likely to be, there's at least two variants of this.
One is that you're going to get fixated, if you're looking at solution fixations, you're
fixating on an existing solution. It could be that it's someone else's solution or it could
be your solution. And it seems that there's more risk you'll get fixated on your own
solution than on someone else's. Design fixation is normally described in terms of an
individual designer or a small group of designers being fixated on what they're
working on. In fact, designers in professional practice, they have to manage other
people. There might be someone else who's fixated, even if they're not. Or it might
be the client arrives and the client is already fixated on their interpretation of the
problem or their solutions they think are most likely to work. Or it could be you
present a product to the market, and the market, or the customers, are already
fixated on their idea of what that product should be. So understanding fixation
doesn't just influence your own creative practice, but can influence the way in which
you try to interact with other people who might whose own fixation might influence
your work or might influence its reception. So there are a couple of theories that are
relevant to design fixation. One is psychological ownership that when you develop an
idea, you feel you have ownership over it and you protect it like one of your
possessions, you want to defend it and some of the creative methods, the six hats
method, for example, tries to get around that. So there's psychological ownership
where we develop an idea, you're very attached to it, sometimes that's also referred
to as the IKEA effect

Peter Lloyd: The IKEA effect?

Nathan Crilly: The IKEA effect as in once you've made something yourself it means
more to you.

Peter Lloyd: Oh, I see, yeah.

Nathan Crilly: The other thing is the sunk cost effect. So once time, energy,
resources have been sunk into an investment, and that could be an investment of
developing an idea or financial investment, it doesn't really matter, you tend to make
your decisions about the future based on the past, based on previous investments,
even though they're not relevant to what you might do in the future. So design
fixation is explained by both of those ideas in different ways. So a design individual

31
or a design team working through a project have already sunk various costs into that
idea, and they also might have ownership over that idea. And those two factors in
combination mean that you might be implicitly very defensive of it and might not even
recognize the alternatives.

Peter Lloyd: Yes

Nathan Crilly: In this conversation we've focused on solution fixation, so you come
up with a good solution to the problem and you get fixated on that. But you can also
think about problem fixation where your interpretation of the problem is limiting in
itself and you might think about problem reframing, which is a way of de-fixating from
your problem interpretation. And you can think of process fixation, as well, where you
have a certain way of working through a design process and you could be fixated on
that process.

Peter Lloyd: But to some degree, you can't help, I mean, you have to have some
solid ground in your process. You can't help being fixated, it's almost like fixation is a
way of holding yourself firm while you explore the the area around you somehow.
But those those places where you hold yourself need questioning and need
changing from time to time.

Nathan Crilly: Yeah, like I said, this is adaptive. So if we were always questioning
what the problem really is, what the process is to solve it and what the solution might
look like, then we wouldn't make much progress. But it's a matter of if those things
just stay fixed forever, then all sorts of creative options are not being explored.

Peter Lloyd: So there's a balance there. I suppose there's a recognition that as

people we have these biases inbuilt that can benefit us because they help us
progress in something, but they can also hinder us.

Nathan Crilly: A lot of the design, creativity, methods and design methods more
generally can be seen as ways to overcome or manage design fixation. So you can
look at the various rules that are applied to brainstorming sessions. They're really,
although they're not always framed this way, they're a useful way to challenge
design fixation and the same with systematic methods of exploring problems,
exploring solutions and documenting those explorations. For example, morphological
charts. You can speak to professional designers who say it's a good way of
systematically changing that 'yes, I've already understood that that's an idea I'd

32
better move on to the next one. Designers use lots of tools in their work. It could be
that they use sketching or they use CAD tools or it could be they use something like,
yes, morphological charts or something else. There's various tools and techniques
you can use. But one of the main tools the designers are using, especially during the
more creative aspects of projects, is they're using their own mind. And in the same
way that understanding the strengths and weaknesses of various tools is useful
when you're deciding whether to sketch something or use a CAD tool. It's also useful
to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your own mind and your own
instinct, so a lot of the work on cognitive biases and design fixation reveal very
clearly to us what the mind might sometimes be inclined to do. For example, to fixate
on.

Peter Lloyd: How we deceive ourselves in certain certain ways.

Nathan Crilly: Yes, so that deception applies across all aspects of human behavior.
If you know that the cognitive tools that you're using are, and the processes that you
might be involved in, are biased and are subject to various weaknesses, then you
can use the other tools that are available to complement that. So in the same way
that you might do some sketching to show a rough sketch to a client so they don't get
hung up on the details of a CAD model and you as a designer might choose when to
move between sketching and CAD. You also might choose when to move between
brainstorming and morphological charts because you know the strengths of one and
the weaknesses of the other. And all of those are to try to manage the deficiencies of
the way that people think. You could use those creative tools, but you could also try
and reflect on your own previous experiences as a designer, try and recognize in
retrospect, the times when you might have been fixated and the costs of that and the
avenues you didn't explore. And then try and use that to improve your performance
in the future. So it's become more aware, more literate in your own propensity for
fixation. And, through reflection, challenge that in the future.

Peter Lloyd: So it's about raising awareness and be able to reflect on yourself.

Nathan Crilly: There's various aspects of of bias training where one of the stages is
to try and reveal the individual's susceptibility to bias. I mean, one of the cognitive
biases is called the bias bias where we're biased to think that other people are more
biased than we are!

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Peter Lloyd: And there's also unconscious bias too, equal opportunities for male,
female, different ethnicities, that you're unconsciously more biased towards certain
populations than others. And the fact is, of course, you're obviously not aware of it,
but when it's pointed out, then you can change your behaviour. You can build in
specific mechanisms that stop that happening.

Nathan Crilly: Unconscious bias seems to be the name that's been given to those
set of social and the demographic forms of bias we might have.

Peter Lloyd: But that might that might mean in a participatory process where you're
thinking of which stakeholders can be involved in this process, you're using a method
that says, you know, go and go get specific user groups to come in or engage with
different types of people in the design process they're going to tell you different
things. Could the way that you select those people be another form of fixation in the
design process?

Nathan Crilly: So anywhere where you might be making decisions about people so
it could be hiring, it could be interacting with the client, it could be hiring members of
a team. Then you'd expect what's commonly referred to as unconscious bias to play
a role just as it does in other hiring decisions in other organizations. So there's a
there's a thing called Project Implicit run by Harvard, where anyone can go online
and they can participate in these online studies that will give them some feedback on
what their apparent level of unconscious bias is for, male female, for example, or
racial groups, age. The idea is that by getting feedback on the fact that you
individually my exhibit one of these biases, you can reflect on that use as a form of
self-training.

Peter Lloyd: Speaking as a designer I know that design fixation exists, how can I
avoid getting fixation? What would be the things that I would do to stop being
fixated?

Nathan Crilly: So I think there are probably three different approaches you could
take. One is you could use the various design and ideation and creativity tools that
are available. So put them all into into one set, and you can use those tools. The
other one is you can try and either form diverse groups or bring in external
perspectives and people who might challenge what you're doing. There are some
nice examples where a group is working on something and someone else comes in
and questions "why are you doing that?" And it's because they're from a different

34
background, they're a physicist or a chemist or a social scientist or something, and
they just have a very different perspective on things. And then the third one, which
seems to be in some ways conflicting advice, is either stick with it and keep working
on it and work against your own biases, or take a break from it and do something
else and give it some time to disappear. I think on that last point, it's either if you're
freshly fixated on something it's good to take a break from it. But if you're working on
something for a long time, it might be the need to really just knuckle down and keep
going to challenge that fixation rather than taking a break because you've taken
plenty of breaks already.

Peter Lloyd: So where should people interested in exploring design fixation a little
bit more, Where would you recommend they go to?

Nathan Crilly: I think cognitive biases in general are interesting and relevant to
design practice, even if it's not the ideation stage. There is a famous book called
'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Daniel Khaneman. Typing in 'types of cognitive bias' or
'categories of cognitive bias' into your preferred search engine will bring up some
nice, neat lists that are a lot shorter than that book and will let you identify the types
that you think might be relevant to the sorts of work that you do.

Peter Lloyd: Thanks very much. Thanks for talking to us.

Nathan Crilly: Thanks for the chance.

Part 2 Discussion of Interview

Peter: So that was Nathan, He speaks quickly!

Mieke: He speaks very fast! First of all I thought it was really nice that he was here. I
think it's one of the good things of working in a university and working at TU Delft is
that we've got all these people visiting us, and then sharing all the things that they've
learned with us, which is more inspiring than just reading the articles they've been
writing.

35
Peter: When I said he was a world expert, I wasn't underestimating him he really has
written a lot about and thought a lot about it. Y ou can tell how coherent he is about
it. What was the sort of one thing that you took out?

Mieke: Well, the one thing I have been thinking about is why have I not really looked
into fixation before? Even though I'm a design researcher, I'm really interested in
designing. Fixation has never really been on my radar. But then I realized that
fixation is actually not the same as being stuck in a design process. It's the opposite.
It's you know, you're so fixated on something and having a good idea that you don't
even think about that anymore, that you mind may be fixated or that you might be
biased. And then I started thinking about, you know, when I could have been times
that I was fixated but was not aware of it. And then I started thinking about this,
about the podcast we're making, because, you know, this is essentially a design
process. We are designing, you know, a course, DTM. And I think quite early on in
this process, the idea of creating a podcast came up. It came from you and I thought
it was really a good idea. Now we've been sharing that with people, I think in an
enthusiastic way. But now I was suddenly thinking, hey...

Peter: Whether there are other ways to do this?

Mieke: Yes. I we maybe a little bit too fixated on podcasts and what would be the
way first to find that out, and if we were fixated, what should we do to get kind of
beyond this idea of of a podcast?

Peter: Yes, I mean that's where design methods come into play. They force you to
think in ways that you wouldn't normally think of. Maybe generating more alternative
solutions at the start of the process. I think Nathan makes the point that one of the
ways not to be fixated is to get external people looking at what you do, giving them
the opportunity for them to make critical comments.

Mieke: So have we done that?

Peter: I think so in the process of making a proposal, showing it to certain people,

sending it around, getting feedback on the proposal - you're testing the validity of the
idea.

Peter: So we talk to the people here who know all about blended learning, who
seem to be excited.

36
Peter: I think it's also a certain point fixation is about commitment. Once you're
committed to something, it's very difficult to leave that commitment. Nathan talked
about sunk costs. You're invested in something and then you invested in making it
work whatever, you know, ignoring other evidence. Recognizing the beginnings of
that process is the key for fixation. I you're in a comfortable process and you feel that
you're getting enough input, I don't think it's something you should be too worried
about but I think it's just a phenomena that can happen.

Peter: The thing that I took from [what Nathan was saying], the one thing that I liked
Nathan saying, was that the mind is a tool. We use these tools in designing, but also
your mind is a tool and it has certain limitations and certain advantages and
understanding those limitations in using methods or using other techniques to get
around those limitations makes for a better design process.

Mieke: So we don't always need a morphological scheme or a brainstorm session,

we can use our minds as well as a tool. And if we would not have fixation, that would
also not be good because then we would never commit to anything. That's the other
thing is, cognitive biases have advantages and they also have disadvantages. So it's
good to be fixated to a certain degree, you know, to frame a problem in a certain way
and to go as far as you can with that. But then the disadvantage with that is if it lasts
too long, and you get fixated on something that's not going to work in the end, then...

Mieke: I did go to the website that Nathan mentioned, Project Implicit, the Harvard
study, to see what my cognitive bias was. You have to choose a test, so I looked at
the test for if you have any cognitive bias in terms of if you relate mental illness to
danger.

Peter: Do you mean mental health means that you might be in more danger or?

Mieke: No, this is actually about mentally ill people. So if if you meet someone who
is mentally ill…

Peter: That they're more dangerous?

Mieke: If they are more dangerous or not, yes. So very sensitive topic. There are lots
of tests like that, you know, related to race or to gender, and all those kind of biases
that we really don't want to have. But, you know, there are all these signs that show

37
that you do have [these biases]. So there are these specific tests that can test you
on this particular type of bias, but I was wondering if there was maybe also a test
that can test your level of fixation in a design process? Is that possible or is it just
really depending on the design process you're in?

Peter: I think there is research that attempts to do that. How useful it is I'm not sure! I
think it's much more about being aware that there are possible effects and not
necessarily where you are on the scale.

Mieke: No, it's not like, you know, you go for a job interview as a designer and you
know, you have to take the test first to check if you're not too prone to fixation!

Peter: Exactly, I think a lot of it is the environment related, there are a lot of
situations where you might or might not be fixated. I think the original paper that the
Nathan mentioned was basically about showing people an image and then getting
them to design something and that image reappearing. So they'd seen something
and they they couldn't get it out of their heads when they were designing something.
So that's a very specific situation. And although it must apply in other in other
situations, too, I think having a single measure is just simplifying things a little bit too
much.

Mieke: Yeah, and also not useful like you say. I think the most important thing we
learn from this is what we can do about fixation. How can we become more aware of
our potential fixation? And then if we are aware, what we what can we do about it?

Peter: And I guess trying new methods. Trying new things, in the process, helps you
to explore things that you might not have thought of exploring. So trying a new
method, I mean Nathan mentioned taking a break, but I think just trying something
different for a while gets you out of a habit of, a way of thinking. So I think that also
helps.

38
DTM Podcast #4: A Short History of Design Methods

Show Notes

Mieke talks to Peter about his knowledge of the history of design methods. She then
discusses the interview with Annemiek van Boeijen, one of the editors for the Delft
Design Guide, available in the IDE bookshop, with a second edition coming soon.

Peter recently published a paper called: You make it and you try it out: Seeds of
design discipline futures which presents the ideas he talks about in the podcast,
describing the development of design methods from the early 1970’s to the present
day. His inspiration is the classic Design methods: Seeds of human futures by John
Chris Jones. The introduction to the 1980 edition of Jones’ book is especially
interesting as it reflects on how his original methods were received, and illustrates
how he embraced chance-based methods of design.

Peter also mentions another well-known work in design methods called Dilemmas in
a general theory of planning by Rittel and Webber in which they give 10 key
characteristics that define design problems as ‘wicked’. This is a term that has
recently become popular again as ideas about complexity in design have resurfaced.
Peter mentions the conjecture – analysis model of designing which is described,
along with other models of designing, in Models of the design process: Integrating
across the disciplines by Norbert Roozenburg and Nigel Cross.

Nigel Cross is one of the leading figures in current day design methods and a former
Professor at Delft (he was also a major figure in the development of design thinking).
You can read the lecture he gave when he left the IDE faculty: The method in their
madness: Understanding how designers think where he makes the straightjacket /
life jacket distinction for design methods referred to by Peter.

In the discussion following the interview Mieke mentions the Delft service design firm
Muzes as experts in using context mapping.

39
Podcast Transcript

Introduction

Mieke van der Bijl: Hello everyone, welcome to another podcast about design
theory and methodology. Today we're going to talk about something that is at the
core of design theory and methodology, which is design methods. And we will ask
the question, do we need to design methods at all? If you've listened to the other
podcasts, you will be familiar with our format by now, which is that we start a podcast
with interviewing an expert. And today, I'm interviewing a very special expert,
Professor Peter Lloyd. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Lloyd: Thank you very much for having me!

Mieke van der Bijl: So today is a little bit different because Peter is the expert today,
which means that I will interview Peter first and then I will discuss this interview with
someone else. And that person is Annemiek van Boeijen. Annemiek is one of the
authors of the Delft Design Guide, which is a book full of design methods.

So Peter, you are a professor of integrated design methodology here at TU Delft and
you are an expert in design methods. So just out of curiosity, where does your
interest in design methods come from?

Peter Lloyd: That's a good question. My PhD was in psychology, studying the
processes of design thinking, literally the cognitions of design thinking and how
designers design. And at a certain point I realized I was in the middle of a discipline
that was much richer than I thought it was. I was studying the psychology of
designing, but then I stumbled on design methods, and design methods being about
how designers *should* design. I was looking at how designers *do* design and
design methods are about prescribing a process or how designers should design. I
started in the midpoint of a discipline and then sort of worked backwards and
forwards and realized how intertwined those two things are: how designers do
designing and how they think they do designing and how we educate designers to
design.

40
Mieke van der Bijl: You're saying there's a difference between how designers do
design and how designers should be designing or how we educate designers. Let's
get straight into it: do we need to design methods at all?

Peter Lloyd: They're very useful in some ways. It's in educational situations that I
think probably where design methods are most useful because you can really be
disciplined about following certain phases and you can build that into an educational
program. So, you know, you can assess things at various points. And actually they
get to the heart of what design methods are about, which is externalizing information
in the process. The original idea for design methods was to get away from intuitive
kind of design processes where people just made all sorts of judgments, and no one
really knew how they were making those judgments or why they were making those
judgments. What a design method does is force you to actually externalize
information, gather information and then make it social some way - to discuss it. And
in education that's what we do as teachers, we assess work.

So a design method is a really good way of instructing people into the phases of
design and the different things that you can you can do in design. I think we do need
them in design education. I think the case is less clear for design professionals in
practice. You know, if you pick up a book on design methods, if you go to a
bookshop or something, which I quite often do and I page through the books and I
think: "this is an interesting method, that's an interesting method". I don't know how
many people actually sit down with a book and work through from page one to page
ten, going through a method. I tend to think of methods as types of knowledge that
people have come up with. If you have a sustainable design method, for example, it's
sort of a way of getting your idea of what sustainable design should be across to
someone who doesn't know anything about it, in a more experiential way. I tend to
see them less as scientific rational processes and more a representation of a certain
kind of knowledge.

Mieke van der Bijl: So in a way, that's almost like a design method as a way of
explaining how designers do design.

Peter Lloyd: They're really very good at forcing you to do something that you
wouldn't normally do. And I think that's another aspect of them. We all have our
limitations, we all have our ways of doing things, and a method is essentially doing
something that someone else tells you to do. Following a process that they told you
to do based on their knowledge. They might be an expert, they might not be an

41
expert, it's the idea that you're being taken to somewhere that you wouldn't have
naturally gone to if you weren't using the method. It gives you a more complete
understanding of a problem situation or, you know, different types of solution that
you might generate and how to look at them.

Mieke van der Bijl: One of your expertises is the history of design methods. Let's
talk a little bit about that. Where do design methods come from and what have been
the most important developments in design methods?

Peter Lloyd: I think like all histories, it's how far you want to go back! You could
probably go back to the ancient Greeks and Greek architecture. I think really
something like the Bauhaus was where people began to look in terms of methods. It
wasn't really a movement about methods. It was about something else. But I think
people began to look a bit more systematically at what design was really about. The
starting point for me is a famous conference called the 'Conference on Design
Methods' that was held in 1962 and that had a number of people from America, from
Europe and the UK coming together. It was a post-war conference. During the
second world war, lots of scientific methods had been developed for analyzing
complex situations: operational research, how to shift military gear from one place to
another. Logistics. There were these scientific methods. And this conference brought
together a bunch of people that said the world is getting more complicated. We need
methods to understand how complicated the world is getting. We want to move away
from these intuitive ways of designing, this craft-based way of designing. The field of
ergonomics was already moving that way in terms of a more scientific basis of user
experience. This was that kind of idea applied to methods.

For about 10 years there was quite a lot of development of different kinds of methods
in architecture, in engineering and industrial design, lots of different disciplines.
There was a famous book that came out in 1970 by a guy called John Chris Jones, it
has the lovely title 'Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures'. That was really the
first collection of design methods, like a very early Delft Design Guide. If you pick it
up in the library, it's a collection of tools, methods, approaches of how to break
design problems down. So that was a key point in the history of design methods.
What happened after that is quite interesting, too, because people began to look at
these methods and say: "hey, this is a really good way of designing. We can really
make it a scientific and rational process". That forced people to sort of think there
was a right way and a wrong way of designing. This wasn't the intention of these
methods. The intention was to externalize knowledge. The intention was to make the

42
information on which you're basing your decisions explicit and discussable. And
there was a big reaction to that. John Chris Jones was a bit horrified by the way that
his design methods were taken in very rational, scientific ways. He actually went
back on his methods and said this is not the way to design at all. He started to
embrace chance and basically said, well, you know, you can use a method or you
can use chance. If you have a decision to make, you can just leave it to chance. And
what that teaches you is that when chance makes a decision for you, you know in
your heart whether that's the right or wrong thing to do. You have this kind of
dialogue with chance processes. He really went the other way and said there's all
this kind of prescription and order in the design process, or you can just leave it all to
chance. And chance is another way that takes you to places that you wouldn't
normally go to. And that's what he started exploring. He had this nice quote, I've got
it here, which is about his original design methods. He says: "rationality, originally
seen as the means to open intuition to aspects of life outside the designers
experience became, almost overnight, a toolkit of rigid methods that oblige designers
and planners to act like machines, deaf to every human cry and incapable of
laughter." I think that kind of sums up the process where science comes in and
everyone thinks "it's scientific". What's left out is all the things that makes design
interesting and enjoyable.

So there was a kind of reaction to the original design methods. One of the key
reactions was a paper by two people called Horsed Rittel and Melvin Weber in 1973.
They conceptualized this difference between design and science. They said science
is really aimed at solving 'tame' problems, problems that we can break down - we
can do some science, we can put it all back together again, and we kind of know
what we're talking about. They said design is not like that. Design is about 'wicked'
problems. Wicked problems have a number of aspects to them that they listed,
there's nine, ten or eleven - they're worth looking at because they're all interesting.
Things like you can't think about a problem without thinking about a solution. There's
no right or wrong answer, there's only a kind of better or worse answer, there's not
an optimal answer to design problems. They also came with this idea that, in the
solving process, the knowledge for solving a design problem isn't just in the head of
the designer. There's a much more equal distribution of knowledge in design
processes. They really started off this idea of participatory methods in design. Where
you draw on the knowledge of other people and actually the design process is a kind
of birthing process and a method is a kind of midwife for that process, where you're
trying to bring something about or facilitate something as a designer. You're not the
person that's really coming up with all the ideas, you're drawing ideas from lots of

43
other people and helping this product that you're working on to come to life
somehow.

So that was the second phase, I would say. The third phase is really back to
intuition. Really looking back at how designers do actually work. That was when I
started doing my studies. What is it that designers actually do that is distinctive? One
of the key papers that I came across was the idea that designers work in this way
that's called conjecture - analysis.

Mieke van der Bijl: That sounds very abstract!

Peter Lloyd: Yeah. I suppose some of the design methods were based around the
idea of analysis - synthesis. You spend a long time analyzing a problem and then at
some point you come up with a solution. And this description of design really turned
it round the other way and said, no, what designers do is they come up with
conjectures, proposals or propositions and then really work out what the
consequences of those things are. That's intrinsic to our way of thinking, to think in
terms of what can we do? and then what will that mean? Rather than, let's do a big
analysis and then work out what the solution is. It was the opposite way around. And
I think that was quite a powerful way of saying that methods sometimes work with
people, but sometimes they work against people when the actual ways of thinking
are different somehow. It really hangs around this idea of description and
prescription. A description is how designers do design. Prescription is how designers
should design. A method is really telling you you should design in this way, a
description is really much more, let's just see what the diversity of people are doing
when they follow a design process.

Coming up to the present day, I think there's been a much sort of more social
expansion in design methods. What we now see in design is many more voices
coming into the process, and a less rigorous, prescriptive process. It's a bit more you
kind of make it up as you go along.

Mieke van der Bijl: You mean that it's more like bits and pieces, you can use this
method or that method...?

Peter Lloyd: Yes

Mieke van der Bijl: You can pick and choose which method you want.

44
Peter Lloyd: You can design your own design method now, because there are so
many methods around and so many methods that you can use. You can even go
back to John Chris Jones' book and sort of construct your own process from that.
That is much more flexible. Also in education we've seen that, if you look back to
Delft 15 years ago, the book that everyone had to learn was Norbert Roozenburg
and Johan Eekels book Product Design: Fundamentals and Methods. That was part
of the curriculum. You really had to go through the book as a student.

Mieke van der Bijl: I remember that from when I was a student!

Peter Lloyd: A lot of people remember that and the fact that it was in an educational
context really made people remember things, even though they kind of fought
against the ideas: 'why do I have to design like this? analyzing the problem and then
coming up with three solutions and choosing one'. So I think even that sort of
developed. I worked with Paul Heckert and Matthijs van Dijk in developing the VIP
method for their VIP book, and that was an interesting process to go through
because that suddenly opens up a different way of designing too. Those two
approaches, among the many that are on offer at Delft, really kind of represent two
different ways of going about designing.

Mieke van der Bijl: If I'm a student and I'm new to design and I want to become a
good designer. I want to learn more about design methods. Where should I start?

Peter Lloyd: That's a good question! There are obviously a lot of books about
design, the Delft Design Guide is one, and I mentioned John Chris Jones' book. I pull
that off the shelf quite often and look through that. Design methods are things that
don't really go out of date somehow. Now you can get lots of websites that list design
methods. If you do a Google search for design methods, it brings up lots of starting
points for identifying methods. I think just trying some of those methods out, seeing
which ones sort of intuitively appeal to you, and then trying to work on them.

Mieke van der Bijl: I'm thinking about my own practice. What I've mostly done is,
you know, I do read a lot because I'm also an academic, and I guess I've applied
things in my practice that I thought, this sounds interesting, let's give it a try. But it's
only when you apply it lots of times and really can embed it in your own design
process that it becomes meaningful and you can do something with it.

45
Peter Lloyd: My colleague Nigel Cross, who is another good reference by the way,
he's written a lot about design methods. He has a very famous book called
'Engineering Design Methods'. He has this phrase that design methods are life
jackets. They're not straightjackets. They're not designed to restrict you and constrict
you into a certain way of thinking, they're there to sort of help you get through a
design process and think wider than your own thoughts. I like that idea. There is a
tendency to cherry pick design methods. When you see books full of design
methods, it gives the impression that you can just pick them up and put them down.
And I think, as you've suggested, it's much more about finding out which ones will
benefit you. You have to kind of seriously engage with them, I think, and actually be
frustrated by them and then work out what what they can do for you. Whereas I think
if you spend, you know, a couple of hours reading something and trying it out and
thinking, well, this doesn't work, I don't think you've really given the method a chance
to work for you.

Mieke van der Bijl: I like the metaphor of the straightjacket as well. When I was
doing my PhD in user-centered design, I often heard from design practitioners who
were saying: "stop developing design methods, we don't use design methods!". And I
think it's because of this older notion of design methods as a straightjacket that
doesn't give you that flexibility.

Peter Lloyd: I think the way that methods are generally represented, just basically
boxes and arrows and you sort of see all kinds of schemes, sometimes you have
circles and squares. They give this impression of something that's overly scientific
somehow, it doesn't fit with how you experience the world, these strange
explanations and block diagrams, they're not intuitively things that people really want
to use.

Mieke van der Bijl: It's interesting because I know a lot of those books as well, there
are catalogues full of methods and toolboxes and the websites I know as well. But
it's interesting that we're just looking at methods in terms of books and in terms of
websites like in the way they've been written down.

Peter Lloyd: Yeah, that's a good point.

Mieke van der Bijl: Wouldn't there be other ways to convey methods? Like the DTM
students, they're now working on video...

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Peter Lloyd: That's a great point but it's not something that I've looked at much. But
video is a great medium to show essentially a time-based process or a time-based
method or maybe things like animation I think is a good way to illustrate how
something unfolds over time. When you see it in a book, you tend to see an overview
of everything and think that you can take it in all at once. Whereas something that is
revealed in time through video... or through podcasts, that's another medium maybe
where design methods could be developed! I think there's some potential there, but I
haven't I haven't looked at that.

Mieke van der Bijl: That will be exciting to explore then in this course. Well thank
you very much Peter, that was very insightful to learn a little bit more about the
history of design methods and talk about if we do or do not need design methods. So
thank you very much.

Peter Lloyd: Thank you very much, Mieke.

Discussion of Interview

Mieke van der Bijl: Ok. So that was the interview I did with Peter. Today I'm here
with Annemiek van Boeijen, who is an assistant professor here at TU Delft and
Annemiek is also one of the authors of the Delft Design Guide that most of the
listeners will probably know. It is a book full of design methods which were
developed here at TU Delft. Welcome Annemiek!

Annemiek van Boeijen: Thank you for inviting me!

Mieke van der Bijl: So you listened to the interview with Peter. What did you think?

Annemiek van Boeijen: I liked it. I think he raised some important points, the
question of what is the relevance of design methods for designers. And I liked also
that he raised this quote from Jones, his reflection on methods and that he finally
concluded, yeah, leave it to chance, that was kind of intriguing also. OK, now what
are we doing with this Delft Design Guide? All full of these methods and tools...

47
Mieke van der Bijl: That we don't really need it!

Annemiek van Boeijen: We don't really need it, but I think we need it somehow.
And I think not only for education.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah, I had that same view, actually.

Annemiek van Boeijen: I think for educators it's a tool to help them to educate, it's
their lifeline maybe in all these different projects that they need to coach. But actually
in education I think there is also a pitfall that there is still too much focus on methods
and processes. It's finally about results and the effect that you want to have with your
design.

Mieke van der Bijl: So how do you think that coaches should use design methods in
their work?

Annemiek van Boeijen: Carefully, I think, and I agree with Peter that there is a very
personal component in design and what design is - there are many ways to Rome, to
a final result and I think coaches need to be sensitive for the individual differences
and balance also between what works for a novice designer and what doesn't work.
That's because these methods also frame a way of thinking, it's a window to a
certain way to go. They are actually also very normative. They tell already how you
should look in a certain way. That was also interesting to hear from Peter. That he
said you have this 'should' and 'do'. Are methods designed to do something or are
they prescriptions of what we should do? There I think coaches need to be careful
because some methods are developed because the researchers, they saw what in
practice what people do and what works and what doesn't work. But at the same
time in education it's easy to say, OK, so you should do it like that. And then I think
you don't send the right message also to your learner.

Mieke van der Bijl: I'm just wondering, like, if you're a student and you want to learn
design, how do you then find something that aligns with the kind of designer that you
want to be, it's actually not so easy. We ask students that in the assignment for this
DTM course, they have to develop what we call a practice manual for their future
design practice. So really think about what they want their future design practice to
be like.

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There was this one thing that that really struck me when I was listening back to the
interview where Peter at a certain stage says that design methods they're not
straightjackets they are life jackets. And that really frames a design method as
something for a novice designer when they're stuck, they can hold on to it and make
sure that they can swim. But I was thinking that's not always true, because indeed,
you know that for young designers, that's often very useful. But there are many very
experienced designers that use design methods all the time, and they don't use them
like life jackets. For example, thinking of Muzus, one of the service design agencies
here who are really expert in context mapping. I don't think they would see that as a
life jacket. They're just really experts in using methods within their practice. I was
wondering in the Delft Design Guide, is there a difference between methods that are
more for novice designers and others more generally applicable?

Annemiek van Boeijen: That's a good question. They are some very general
methods in the Delft Design Guide like observations, interviews and in many
disciplines they do this. So it's here too in the Delft Design Guide, because many
people learned how you do an effective observation, an effective interview. So why
not learn from others? And I think they're very generic in a way. Maybe some life
jacket methods could be some creativity methods, that you use when you’re stuck.
You feel like, yeah, synectics is not really easy, it's very obvious people like to
brainstorm, but if you want to go deeper or you want to, you're really stuck or you
think, yeah. Here we feel there is something else, but we want to explore this. And
then maybe it's kind of a lifejacket in that sense. Or decision methods. When you are
with a lot of stakeholders and you feel like, yeah, here we have to convince also
stakeholders to make it very clear I cannot follow just my intuition.

Mieke van der Bijl: I was also thinking of the double diamond, which for me is
typically more a life jacket for novice designers, that’s really a good model to explain
to people who have never done design before that design is very much about
exploring the problem space just as much as it is about the creative space, but if you
compare that model to how expert designers design they don’t design that way. In
another podcast we talk about how with expert designers the problem and the
solution co-evolve, so they don’t wait with their solutions so to say, until they’ve done
that first diamond of the double diamond, but if you're new to design then it is
impossible, because it's such a non-linear process. I think that method is a very
useful method to learn how to become a designer. But in that sense, it sits in a bit of
a different category than context mapping, for example, which is a method that, you

49
know, doesn't teach you how to design just a really useful way to explore the
problem space and to go very deep into what people need and what they dream of.

Annemiek van Boeijen: Yeah and also generative

Mieke van der Bijl: Generative, yes

Annemiek van Boeijen: Yeah, actually, in the Delft Design Guide, in the beginning,
we explain why we have this collection of all these methods? Why are they here?
We raise three reasons. One is really to support people in design, so it's helping to
realize your design goal. The second is to organize your process. And the third one
is to justify an account for the work to project stakeholders. We actually distinguish
three reasons.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yes.

Annemiek van Boeijen: It's also a common language. You can talk about why
you're going to do something, and of course you want to be paid for it - if you do
context mapping you need to explain to your stakeholders like, this is needed
because... bla bla bla. And then they need to pay you in practice.

Mieke van der Bijl: That's what Peter also said when he was talking about
externalizing the information in the design process.

Annemiek van Boeijen: Yes, in all these methods there is really some, erm, that's
also interesting that Peter raises - knowledge, there is a lot of knowledge in it that
you actually put on the table in cooperation with others.

Mieke van der Bijl: So are you saying it's a way to gain knowledge but also make
that explicit in a way that you can share it and everyone kind of understands what's
going on?

Annemiek van Boeijen: Yeah, that's it's not a black box so much.

Mieke van der Bijl: Maybe that's why we have more methods in product design
compared to other design disciplines because it's mostly a collaborative process?

Annemiek van Boeijen: So many different disciplines to come to a good outcome.

50
Mieke van der Bijl: Yes. So thank you very much Annemiek, that was very
interesting and I'm looking forward to the new Delft Design Guide!

51
DTM Podcast #5 Metaphors and Creativity
Show Notes

Mieke talks to Nazli Cila from Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences about the
use of metaphors in product design. She then explores this topic further in short
interviews with designers Renée Schuffelers and Willem Mees van der Bijl, and in a
discussion with Peter in the studio.

Nazli Cila studied the way that metaphors are used by designers to convey a certain
meaning in the aesthetic design of a product. In her thesis she included some
recommendations for designers. She also published an article with Paul Hekkert
titled Handle with care! Why and how designers make use of product metaphors,
that discusses the potential of metaphors as well as the risks and pitfalls associated
with their use.

Nazli referred to the explanation of metaphors and the Synectics method in The Delft
Design Guide.

Throughout the podcast the work of Lakoff & Johnson was mentioned, in particular
their well-known book titled Metaphors we Live By.

Mieke talked about the work of Megan Pee Suat Hoon on the use of metaphors in
problem framing and how we naturally connect different experiences when
generating metaphors through what is called ‘image schema’. Megan used a case
study from the work of Hernan Casakin in which an architecture student used
Beethoven’s 9th symphony as a metaphor for the design of an urban pathway.

Finally Peter mentioned a podcast by Barbara Tversky discussing her book Mind in
Motion: How action Shapes Thought. The book is about how our thoughts and the
way we experience the world are connected, particularly the way our bodies move
through space. For example, she links the idea of ‘mapping’ to an area of the brain
that looks after both the location of physical things in space but also to the
connections between ideas. The book is a rich source of ideas and thoughts and
connects to how metaphors are often based on our individual experiences of the
world.

52
Transcript

Mieke van der Bijl: Welcome, everyone, to another podcast of design theory and
methodology. Today we will be talking about metaphors and the way we can use
metaphors in design. And therefore, I'm interviewing Nazli Cila today. Nazli is a
researcher at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Before that, she was a
post-doc here in Delft and she also did her PhD here in Delft. Welcome Nazli.

Nazli Cila: Thank you so much.

Mieke van der Bijl: So you wrote a thesis which we have on the table here today.
It's called Metaphors We Design By - the use of metaphors in product design. So I'm
curious, where does that title come from?

Nazli Cila: [00:00:57] Yeah, it is actually a reference to the seminal work of Lakoff
and Johnson, metaphors we live by. And the main message of the book, it is about
how prominent metaphors are in the way of our thinking. So actually we understand
abstract concepts by metaphorical thinking. And this is something we have as an
innate ability. So I wanted to refer to that.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:01:28] My first question is what is a metaphor and why is it
relevant to design?

Nazli Cila: [00:01:34] A metaphor is an association between two things, mainly

concepts. And what you do is that you use properties of one concept to define the
properties of another. This is very fundamentally in the language. So let's start with
the language example. For example, you say that every child is a snowflake. So
what you are doing is that you are trying to use the properties of a snowflake to
emphasize a property of a child, which in this case probably means unique or
delicate or something like that. So the same idea you can also use in design and
actually designers use them really a lot. So I can make this cup look like a bird,
which is really not a very good metaphor. But in order to emphasize something about
this special cup and designers really use these references to distinct entities in order
to make their design communicate a message.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:02:45] So you take properties for one concept or thing and
then you apply it to another thing. And then if we're looking at design, you're saying,
well, we're taking the properties of this concept, then we applying it to a product.

53
Nazli Cila: Yeah

Mieke van der Bijl: What is a good metaphor?

Nazli Cila: [00:03:03] So that is actually what we have been trying to reveal in my
thesis. And we did a couple of studies about it. And one of the important properties is
that your metaphor, the idea behind it let's say, should obviously come from a novel
association. But this association should still make sense. That is one of the criteria.
So what does this mean? This is one of the examples I use. Let's say you're
designing a garlic press and you make it look like garlic. So this is not mind blowing,
as you might say, because it's something that's obvious, but it makes sense. So this
is one extreme. In that case, the metaphors become a bit dull. The other case would
be let's say you're designing a garlic press that looks like a microphone, for example,
which then doesn't make sense. What is the relationship? So maybe it's novel, but
you cannot understand. So we say that you should try to strike a balance between
novelty and making sense, appropriateness. This is about the idea behind the
metaphor and also the way that you put something, this reference, physically in the
form of the product.

Nazli Cila: [00:04:20] You also need to find a balance. If you really make this garlic
press literally look like a garlic, let's say the same size, the same texture, colour, it
starts to become really gadgety or a bit kitschy. When you are applying that form,
you should strive to abstract is as much as possible, but still make the reference
identifiable. Through some experiments we also validated that for the most aesthetic
metaphors there is a balance between subtlety of the reference, but still identifiable
referencing should be there. So these are the two main components, of a good
metaphor. And one more thing. We use usually as designers metaphors to
communicate the meaning through the product. So let's say that I want to
communicate that this chair that I'm sitting on is a very light chair. I can use a
metaphor to convey this lightness and I can think of what are light things and make
this like a property, I can communicate it prominently. I can use, for example, a
feather is something light or like a cloud is something light or a bubble is something
light.

Nazli Cila: [00:05:38] So I should choose a good source that communicates this
lightness in a prominent way. Then I can carry it to the design of the chair. So that's

54
another thing of a good metaphor. That what you are referencing should be a good
fit.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:05:58] Did you study also if design practitioners use
metaphors and how they use it?

Nazli Cila: [00:06:07] We had one study where I was comparing the behaviour of
expert designers with novice designers. And what we have seen is that expert
designers are much quicker and also maybe better to find novel yet appropriate
associations. I think they are really able to see connections between things quicker
than the novices, which means that this is a skill that you can actually practice and
gain through time. The more experience you gain in designing, you are better at
noticing connections between things to make your design stronger and richer.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:07:07] So you're saying that the more experienced
designers, they are very quick at recognising these connections and these patterns.
So if I am a design student and I want to learn how to work with metaphors. How
would you suggest they get started?

Nazli Cila: [00:07:26] I think really explicitly trying to build connections between
things and you can really try to, for example, if you are trying to solve some sort of
engineering problem, let's say create a mechanism for a product, you might try to
look at in which other products or things that this mechanism can be used. So in the
Delft Design Guide, we had an example. If you are designing a new ventilation
system, maybe a termites mound, the way that they build their mound and how they
like these ants make the air circulate can be quite a good inspiration for your
ventilation system mechanism. So you might really try to look at nature or other
domains, very similar problems are solved. There are some methods, for example,
Synectics is a method where you explicitly look for connections with other things.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:08:30] So so you're saying that you start start looking in
other domains, for example, nature. Do you think that designers have a certain
preference maybe for certain domains, for example that there are certain designers
who work a lot with nature?

Nazli Cila: [00:08:47] I cannot generalize. I think nature is usually a really rich place
to look for sources, but also it doesn't necessarily have to be. Metaphor is something
very subjective, but also it comes to you in a very natural way. I don't really know if

55
designers always start saying: today I will use a metaphor. No, it comes to them
more naturally when they are looking for solutions.

Nazli Cila: [00:09:21] And once they have this idea that actually these things are
similar and maybe I can get inspiration from that, then I think my advice would be
starting from that moment and try to make that metaphor stronger by trying to make
the form a bit more subtle and a bit more elegant and try to not make that
association very explicit.

Nazli Cila: [00:09:46] So if you are designing a garlic press, you're still designing a
garlic press, not the garlic. So you should really try to be more mindful about these
kind of aesthetic decisions that you're taking.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:10:02] So it's still quite challenging, I guess, for a novice
designer if we are saying metaphors, they come naturally.

Nazli Cila: [00:10:10] They do! really! In the study that I worked with maybe 40
novice designers, and I really didn't have to explain to anyone what a metaphor is or
how they should put it in their products. They all knew when I told them: your task is
to use in your design a reference to another entity. And they all created quite good
things out of this. So it's an innate quality, I think.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:10:40] You've been talking about the application of
metaphors to the design of products. Have you also looked into how designers use
metaphors in problem framing?

Nazli Cila: [00:10:55] Not in my work, but there's really quite a big body of
knowledge in that field, of course. Because metaphor or analogical thinking let's say,
is one of the foundations for creativity and creative thinking processes. So there's
really like a definitely a lot of work in the psychology literature for example. In that
case, you can really use metaphors or analogies to solve a design problem or to
frame your problem. But at the end, we don't necessarily have to see that metaphor
in the way that you execute your product design. So you more use it to identify what
problem you're dealing with. And then you lay it aside. It's more like something for a
designer to help himself or herself. That is definitely a very valuable tool. My work is
more about the metaphors that we actually see at the end of the way that the product
has been executed.

56
Mieke van der Bijl: [00:12:01] It's more about the aesthetics, the meaning conveyed
through the product.

Nazli Cila: [00:12:05] Exactly.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:12:09] So you just told me that after your phd, you did post-
doc work here and then you moved to the University of Applied Sciences in
Amsterdam. Do you still use metaphors in your current work?

Nazli Cila: [00:12:26] Not in the way that I have been using them during my PhD.
Now my work is a bit more about smart products and designing them for health and
empowerment, to make people be able to deal better with difficult situations. I used
metaphors to identify the current status of how smart products are right now
perceived. I use three metaphors. Some of the smart products are like collectors.
They just collect data and present this data back to you. And it's up to you to what do
you want to do with it? Some smart products I call actors. Based on this data, they
make an intervention in your life. So you have to negotiate with them and they act on
that data. The last type of metaphor I call creators. These products are very strong
agents in the sense that with the data they even create, it's a bit futuristic scenario,
some additions on themselves. So I have collector, actor, and creator type of
metaphors to categorize smart products. It has really helped me to provide an
overview. Of course, it's not like I'm actively using them to design, but it has helped
me to frame it.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:13:56] If students who are studying design want to know
more about the use of metaphors. Are there any particular resources you would like
to point them to?

Nazli Cila: [00:14:10] There is quite again some work in advertising and graphic
design. They also obviously use metaphors quite a lot, visual metaphors. And most
of the time the principles that we are dealing with are similar. Also Lakoff and
Johnson's work that we talked about might be useful because especially for
designing intuitive interfaces or intuitive interactions, their work might be very
valuable because they are basically painting a picture of all the innate metaphorical
associations we have in our heads as human beings. For example, if something is
'more', we associate it with 'up'. It is something basic and obvious. When you're
designing interfaces and you have to put a button that translates 'more' into 'up' of

57
something else. For these kind of design situations, they are really nice things that
you can integrate in your intuitive design.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:15:19] Great suggestion. Thank you very much.

Nazli Cila: [00:15:25] It's really my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Mieke van der Bijl: So that was the interview with Nazli Cila. After the interview, I
was really interested to know a little bit more about how designers use metaphors.
How do they think about using metaphors? So I also went out and I interviewed two
designers and asked them if they use metaphors in their design process. So the first
designer is Renee Schuffelers. Renee is a social designer.

Mieke van der Bijl: Hi, Renee. I'm making a podcast about the use of metaphors in
design. Do you ever use metaphors in your designs?

Renee Schuffelers: Yes. I think I use them a lot, but it's more really intuitive and
almost. Well, you just do it and you don't think about it anymore. I've been working
for a Social Housing Corporation and they wanted to come up with new ways to
make it more social and so that people would meet each other. But then I thought,
well, you can make it also like a pop-up kind of thing. And we use containers. We are
in the harbour. That's maybe more literally that we translated this into a pop-up area
in the middle of these three flats where people could gather. It was for them, it was
totally new because they were thinking in a fixed way. Just like we have to rebuild
things permanently. But by thinking of Pop-Up it was more convenient for them, and
yet they were able to think in a different way. It opened up the design space.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah. So a pop up as a temporary meeting space. And then you
use the shipping containers to turn that into a design.

Renee Schuffelers: Yes. Because it was in Rotterdam. You know, the harbour city.
So it's really nice to use this.

Mieke van der Bijl: So there is another metaphor in there that you use the identity of
Rotterdam as a large port.

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Renee Schuffelers: Yes, exactly. In the shipping containers. Yes, they come and
go. And you can put more of them. You could add things, add functionality. So that
was really nice.

Mieke van der Bijl: The second designer is Willem Mees van der Bijl. Willem Mees
is a designer of medical devices. And I also asked Willem the question if he's using
metaphors at all in his design process.

Mieke van der Bijl: So, Willem, do you ever use metaphors in your design process?

Willem Mees van der Bijl: Yes, we do. We've been using metaphors for a while
now and we're using them to identify new opportunities.

Mieke van der Bijl: Can you give an example of that?

Willem Mees van der Bijl: So we're using metaphors, for example, when we're
trying to create insights in, on one hand, what's meaningful to people and then trying
to understand those feelings and insights better. So, for example, we were looking
for improved ways to deal with medical equipment. And for example, when you're a
technician in the radiology lab, a radiographer, the machines every year are
introduced with more and more functions. The first reaction for designers to keep
them safe and user friendly is to remove functions. But of course, radiographers wish
to have access to all those functionalities. And we also were trying to use technology
to actually have the machine automate the process. But this was a bigger threat for
the radiographers because basically the machine was taking over that job and that
was not appreciated. So we were looking for metaphors. And rather than the
machine taking over the whole procedure, the radiographers also were very worried
that the care for the patient was being jeopardized. So they said, I'm responsible for
the patient's care and health and I really would like to be in control there. And then
we said, OK, where can we find situations where technology is helping us but you're
not losing control? And one of the metaphors we discussed was, for example, when
you drive your car and you plan a route, you're using your GPS system or a
navigator and the navigator, you tell the system where you would like to go. The
navigator plots a route. And it tells you to go straight. But if you want to turn right.
You can. And when you turn right, it doesn't get upset and it doesn't really correct
you. It actually changes the route, plots a new route and takes it from there. And
that's also something that we introduced in the medical device. And we came up with
a medical device that doesn't show all the functionalities and features on the device

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interface. So usability and safety is improved, but it's still up to the radiographer or
the technician to plot the route. So basically set where you would like to go. And then
the system proposes steps that you go through and offers you the tools and buttons
that you need. But if you would like to adjust the route and use different functions,
you can, and then a different route is plotted basically.

Mieke van der Bijl: That's a great example.

Mieke van der Bijl: So after interviewing Nazli, Renee and Willem, I went back to
the studio here in Delft to meet Peter to discuss what I had learned. And we started
out with discussing the interview with Nazli Cila.

Mieke van der Bijl: So that was the interview with Nazli. Peter,what did you think?

Peter Lloyd: I thought it was a really good interview. I like the way that she
described the kind of theory of metaphor and the different application areas. I mean,
it's a slippery concept in some ways, isn't it, because it applies in solutions, but it
also applies in the process of producing solutions. I think the main thing that she
describes quite well is that a metaphor is a means for seeing something as
something else. And I think in the design process, we've talked about framing in
other podcasts. Metaphor is the real engine of creativity in the sense that it's the only
way that you can go forward in some ways that you replace one concept with
another concept. But how do you get there? It's, to use a metaphor, it's like a
stepping stone kind of metaphor. You've got to move from concept to concept and a
metaphor does that for you.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah. I think maybe that's a nice thing to talk a little bit further
about because Nazli mentioned this, but most of her research, of course, was about
how metaphors can be used to express a certain meaning in a product. And I think
this creative aspect of using metaphors in a design process and in problem framing
is also a very interesting aspect of design. In fact, it's the topic of one of my PhD
students, Megan Pee Suat Hoon. She really looked into that creative process and
she calls it the creative lea. Nazli was also talking about how expert designers, these
metaphors kind of naturally come to them and she really tried to understand where
they come from and to what extent that is kind of natural. And what she found, Nazli
also explained this, is that the metaphors, they usually come from another
experience. So basically what happens is we're encountering this design situation,
we have a certain experience of that design situation. And somehow there's a

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pattern in this design situation that we recognize from another experience we've had.
And that's kind of how that connects.

Mieke van der Bijl: What Megan saw in her research was she basically looked at
designers going through the design process. And then at a certain stage they would
start using metaphors and then try to find out, you know, what was happening there.
And she said there are basically two different cases. One is a case where a designer
explicitly starts looking for a metaphor. And the other case is where that happens
kind of more intuitively. So in the first case, it's related to, for example, what Willem
was explaining. And he was saying that they were explicitly looking to explain a
certain experience through a metaphor. So he mentions the example of the
radiologist. They wanted to stay in control, but still wanted to be able to do all those
other things. And then they were sort of looking like, what is a situation where you're
really in control, but you still get support? And then they got to the idea of a driver in
a car and that then eventually led them to using this metaphor of a navigation
system. So it was very, very much for them an explicit design process.

Peter Lloyd: I think the idea of experience generating metaphors, I think that's an
important thing because a few of the students have asked how do you get
experience? Where do you get the experience from? And how do you use
experience? And I think Nazli was talking about nature as a source of metaphors,
and I think it relates to the theory in that you have a source for the metaphor and a
target for the metaphor. The idea that you only have to walk and look around in
nature to find a metaphor.
So, although that's an experience, it's not necessarily dependent on having a lot of
experience. So, it's sort of knowing where to look for metaphors and knowing how to
use them in your process.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah, that's interesting because I tend to think it helps if you
have if diverse experiences and kind of look beyond your core domain. So, as a
designer, don't just look within the domain of products, but look, for example, in
nature. But you're right that it's also about using those experiences and seeing them
as a source.

Peter Lloyd: Yeah. Also, right at the end of the interview with Nazli there were a
couple of things. One of the things was she was talking about using metaphors as a
sort of way to think about your process, but that doesn't necessarily appear in the
product at the end of the process. The image that conjured up is sort of building

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scaffolding around a building and then erecting the building and then taking the
scaffolding down afterwards. So the metaphor is a scaffold that helps you get
through the design process somehow. And the other thing was that she referenced
Lakoff and Johnson, which is one of the books that I have on my shelves and is a
really nice book. There's some really nice ways of tying everyday experience to
metaphor. She referenced the idea of more being up. But up and down is a spatial
metaphor that we use for lots and lots of things. And they mentioned, when we're
happy, we're up, when we're healthy, we're up. When we're in control, we're up. One
of the things they mention is that rational is up and emotional is down, tying that idea
of emotion and rationality to a spatial metaphor, being up or up or being down. It's
quite interesting in the light of the discussions that we've had about rational
processes and evolution.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah, I also I like the more is up connection. I also know that
from Megan's research because I was like, well, of course more is up. What are you
talking about? Of course. But actually it's not. If you think about it, there's no logical
reason why more should be up. And Megan, she explained it as, for example, if you
fill a glass of water, then more water means that the water level goes up. So that's a
way that we connect more to up. And it's so engrained in our language.

Peter Lloyd: In our language, in the way we think about ourselves and our concepts
that until it's pointed out. You just don't realize that you're doing these things.

Mieke van der Bijl: Exactly.

Peter Lloyd: I think as a designer, once you realize this, you can really you can
really make things more meaningful and explore different kinds of metaphor and
what they do in your process.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah. There's one other interesting thing that I'd like to mention,
which is what Megan found with regard to the natural way that designers came up
with metaphors and she connected this to the idea of image schema. So I'm not sure
if you're familiar with image schema, but image schema are basically patterns that
underlie our experiences that make it possible for us to connect certain experiences
that seem to be quite different to each other. And so, for example, one of the well-
known image schema is the path. So there are lots of experience in our life that we
can see as a path. It means it has a beginning and has an end and there's kind of
interconnecting parts. So that can be a physical pathway. But it can also be a

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journey. You know, we go we go for a walk has a beginning and an end. And there's
one really great example that she found in an article by Casakin, which I will also
share.

Mieke van der Bijl: So Casakin, he describes this case of an architecture student
who wanted to design a pathway in an urban space. And I'll read it out because I
have it here. The design brief was for student designers to develop projects in a
dense, mixed use neighbourhood situated in a real city. The brief also requires
students to describe the itinerary of the pathway and define the special spatial
relationships between the dwellings and the public urban spaces. And this student
then connected this to the experience of listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony,
which doesn't seem like, you know, it would not be something that I would have
come up with. What Megan says is well, this image schema of the path you also find
in listening to music. Listening to music also has a beginning and an end and it has
connected parts. And this student he said, well, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
apparently has a very specific melody. So has different melodies that are connected
to each other. And then the music kind of fades at certain points. And he used all
these characteristics of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to then design this pathway.

Peter Lloyd: Is that the symphony with ta ta ta ta.

Mieke van der Bijl: I don't know Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but there's kind of all
these drawings here of what that space then eventually looks like.

Peter Lloyd: Linking the musical representation to the physical representation.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah. But he really used that experience. What I find interesting
is first of all, this concept of an image schema seems to explain where the
connection comes from. So this pattern of a pathway you experience in listening to
music, but you also experience this pathway literally on this pathway in this urban
space. And secondly, that you need to have this experience of listening to
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in this case and then also using that experience to
connect the two together. So I guess that this student really loves listening to
classical music and really understands these patterns because if you didn't
understand the melody, then he wouldn't be able to actually translate that into
something meaningful.

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Peter Lloyd: Again, drawing on an experience that you've had, which is not
necessarily that you have expertise in something. It's just something that you enjoy
doing that you can you can draw on. There was another reference. I mean, the idea
of sort of music being a source of metaphors and the idea of spatial metaphors to.
There's a researcher called Barbara Tversky, and she wrote a recent book called
Mind in Motion How Action Shapes Thoughts. And it's all about how the way we
experience space and the way our bodies experience moving, is a much richer
source of ideas and thoughts and really how we think about ourselves than
particularly language-based analysis of what we do. It's a really, really interesting
book. And I think it adds to the work of Lakoff and Johnson in a really nice way. And
she's also done studies of designers, too. So I think that's partly where she gets this
idea from. The experiential nature of people really helps to bring that into creative
process.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:32:18] Do you mean our bodily experience?

Peter Lloyd: [00:32:21] It fits better with how we think in a sense that we think when
we're in motion. We wave our hands. I'm waving my hands around now. You know,
it helps me to articulate things. So it's much more about thinking as a way of
performing than simply being an intellectual process where I just speak words to you
and there's no movement.

Mieke van der Bijl: [00:32:48] I hope you enjoyed listening to this podcast about
metaphors. We heard Nazli Cila talk about the use of metaphors in designing
meaningful products. And we heard Renee Schuffelers from Reshuffle and Willem
Mees van der Bijl from IDE group talk about how they use metaphors in their design
process. I would like to thank them all for sharing their expertise and experience with
us. If you would like to know more about what has been discussed. Please have a
look at the show notes. There are a number of resources there that you might be
interested to look at or listen to. This was another podcast in the Design Theory and
Methodology series hosted by Peter Lloyd and myself, Mieke van der Bijl.

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DTM Podcast #6: Participation in Design Processes

Show Notes

Peter talks to Jocelyn Bailey, an expert in using participative processes in the design
of complex social systems. Jocelyn has worked with members of the UK Parliament
to raise awareness of design approaches to solving complex problems, she has
worked with USCreates, and recently completed a PhD thesis on emerging practices
of design in the UK government. In the interview they talk about the different ways of
including people in the design process and what can sometimes go wrong. They also
discuss problems with finding the right people to codesign with, and appropriately
representing specific population groups. Following the interview Peter and Mieke
discuss the difference between participation and codesign, why sometimes not
including designers in a codesign process can work better, and why designing your
own method is best.

During the interview Jocelyn mentions several key references Participation: The new
tyranny, by Bill Cooke and Uma Khotari, was published in 2001. Thomas Markussen
is a teacher and researcher at the University of Southern Denmark looking at issues
of participation in design processes he recently co-authored a paper looking at the
democracy of healthcare. Josina Vink and Katarina Wetter-Edman have published
work in the area of codesign, power, and participation. One of their recent papers
was Staging aesthetic disruption through design methods for service innovation. A
good resource that Jocelyn uses for codesign inspiration is Liberating Structures:
“microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust … quickly fostering
lively participation in groups of any size”.

In the discussion after the interview Mieke talks about a codesign project called The
Future of Fish, a non-profit ‘change incubator’. There are some good videos
explaining the codesign involved in the project. Mieke also talks about how to tackle
complex systems through codesign in her blog.

Peter talks about the participative work of Hilary Cottam, the controversial UK
Designer of the Year 2005. Hilary worked with the UK Design Council to produce the
‘Double Diamond’ model of design, and has worked on many difficult social design
challenges.

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Podcast Transcript

Introduction

Peter Lloyd: Hi, everyone, it's Peter here. This is the sixth DTM podcast. In this
podcast I talked to Jocelyn Bailey, who is an expert on participation and using
participative practices in design and codesign. We touched on quite a few subjects,
but hopefully you'll find it interesting and, as with other podcasts, it's followed by a
discussion between Mieke and I where we pick up on various things that Josslyn
talks about and gives some further references to the subject area. I hope you enjoy
it, and here we go...

Part 1: Interview

Peter Lloyd: Joining us in the studio today is Jocelyn Bailey. Jocelyn has spent a lot
of time working with the UK government, really trying to convince them of the
benefits of taking a design approach to some of the problems that governments have
particularly in the area of policy. Her research area is also in design for government,
too. But she is an expert in participation and codesign and she work for an
organisation called UScreates that use these collaborative approaches in working on
complex policy related problems such as homelessness, child obesity, health
screening, things like that. You're an expert in how to involve people in the process
of design, which is why we're talking to you. Jocelyn, welcome to the DTM Pod.

Jocelyn Bailey: Thank you very much for inviting me. Very pleased to be here.

Peter Lloyd: My first question is, how do you approach the idea of participation,
when you get a project brief? How do you start thinking about involving people in
solving a complex problem?

Jocelyn Bailey: Well, first of all, we would introduce the idea of participation into a
project brief that might not have specified it because we would argue that that would
be a different or better way of finding out more about the problem or about coming
up with some ideas and solutions.

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Peter Lloyd: You recommend that to the client?

Jocelyn Bailey: We might actively sort of propose that to a client, even if they hadn't
asked for it. But in terms of then thinking about how it works within a project or a
process, I suppose we'd start off by thinking about what we were trying to achieve
and then who we might need to talk to or hear from in order to understand a
particular problem in various different dimensions. There's this idea of
'representativeness' that you might want, or statistical reliability or whatever the term
is, that you might want to, if you know that there are as X proportion of people
affected by this issue, then you'd want to talk to a representative sample of those
people. However, I think our approach would be to try and talk to people with lots of
different perspectives on the issue as a way of getting a more, a broader set of
insights about what might be going on. And also, I suppose, assuming that social
problems or social issues are not subject to laws of statistical probability.

Peter Lloyd: Can you give an example?

Jocelyn Bailey: For example, with homelessness if the challenge is to think about
what to do to help a particular council reduce homelessness in its area, you might
not only want to talk to people who are experiencing homelessness, but also people
who are not experiencing homelessness, but perhaps people who seem to exhibit
some of the same characteristics as those people who are experiencing
homelessness and yet are not homeless.

Peter Lloyd: So you have to think quite carefully about the characteristics of the
people that you want to involve in the process, so is that quite a big part of the
process?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yes, we wouldn't necessarily do all of that before we began the
project, but that would be the front end of a project would normally be thinking about
doing a little bit more research about what is the nature of the problem we think we're
working on and then trying to work out what are the dimensions of this that we want
to find out about, and who might be able to inform us about that and sometimes
thinking quite laterally or creatively about who that might be.

Peter Lloyd: When you're putting your projects together, do you have any working
theory or do you draw any on any particular theory around participation and
codesign?

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Jocelyn Bailey: Some of the stuff I've just said comes from thinking about how to
identify subjects in an ethnographic research process. We do, I suppose, draw a little
bit on some ethnographic theory, but in a very light touch way. Generally, I would say
we are, although I was definitely working with people who had PhDs in this subject
area but as an organization we were quite atheoretical in terms of how we went
about doing what we were doing.

Peter Lloyd: Approach things...

Jocelyn Bailey: Yes, and certainly how I learned how to do things was sort of by
osmosis. Watching and copying colleagues and doing projects with them. It was
quite practice-based in a way.

Peter Lloyd: You had a kind of working theory of how to do things?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yes, we definitely had certain things that we would do that we felt
would make the process go smoother. For example, we would always brief people
before, on the phone, have a conversation with people before they turned up at the
codesign workshop, whatever it was we're doing. We would always try and dress the
room to make it feel welcoming, actually, whether that's sort of buying some flowers,
making sure there's tea and coffee and that kind of thing, making it a nice welcoming
space. And we would have a bit of a discussion at the beginning about some of the
etiquette around codesign, ways that we would like people to be in the workshop in
order to sort of optimize the codesign process. For example, sharing ideas rather
than keeping them in your head, for example, or listening to everybody else's idea
and not blocking other people's ideas, building on things that other people said. We
had a whole list.

Peter Lloyd: So in a way you're sort teaching people certain behaviors?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yes, I think if we'd had longer, then perhaps we wouldn't have been
so explicit about saying these are the required behaviors. But because quite often
you don't take up too much of people's time actually, there was a certain expediency
to just saying this is how we would like everybody to behave, please. Yeah. And
mostly people kind of responded quite well to that. Then we would be doing certain
activities as part of the codesign workshop but we would normally start off with some
kind of warm up thing that helped everyone relax a little bit or just loosen up a little

68
bit. If we wanted them to draw something, we would start off with the drawing activity
or if we wanted them to think creatively about something, we'd start off with a sort of
lateral thinking activity.

Peter Lloyd: So you're using a basic theory of psychology in a way that people are
more communicative when they're relaxed and they're happy. You’re creating an
environment where they can they can perform essentially?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yeah, absolutely. There are also some other things I would say
about, we did one codesign process with about with over 100 people. That was far
too many!

Peter Lloyd: What problem were you working on?

Jocelyn Bailey: We were trying to establish a kind of social / professional

community within a particular bit of the health service. A bunch of professionals who
all work on the same thing, but in different organizations and we were trying to create
a social network for them to all link up. The organization we were working with had
recruited a large number of these people to codesign this thing that they were all
going to be part of, but there are limits to how many people you can meaningfully do
codesign with, because there has to be a sense that everyone in the room has heard
and understood the things that the other people in the room have said, or at least if
they haven't heard what everyone said, they've heard, you know, maybe what a third
of the people have said. Each individual has a sense of the range of views and ideas
and experience in the room and are therefore able to accept why a particular
outcome of the codesign process is the way it is. But with hundreds of people, the
outcome, or an outcome, may look wildly different to what a group of 10 people
working together have come up with, and therefore they can feel quite alienated from
the whole process. I think there are sort of practical physical limits to the numbers of
people it is really possible to do it well with.

Peter Lloyd: You're also creating a listening environment as well as a talking

environment?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yes, and a kind of social space as well.

Peter Lloyd: I had a question around how things work out in practice? What's the
best participative process that you've sort of been involved with and what can go

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wrong and, sort of a follow up question is, when things go wrong, do interesting
things happen? Is that more interesting in one way than things going right?

Jocelyn Bailey: Often, just as a basic principle, things always go differently to how
you've planned them. There are two ways of dealing with that. One way is to not plan
too carefully, which if you are happy improvising, I think is totally acceptable. The
other thing is to have lots of contingency plans. I've seen people who are
comfortable with one or the other. I think they're both actually acceptable ways of
doing things, as long as you always accept that probably what you're going to end up
doing or, things will turn out differently to your idea

Peter Lloyd: What you'd planned?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yeah, exactly. In terms of sort of good and bad outcomes, I think
what a good and bad outcome is slightly depends on what your agenda is in running
the codesign process. If it's basically about finding a solution to a problem and that's
the brief that you've been set by a client, then lots of things that might happen in a
codesign process where it goes slightly awry might feel incredibly unhelpful.
Whereas if you were a design researcher or a community organizer or even a
student running a project where there isn't necessarily a client with a specific brief
that you're beholden to, that might be, the things that go wrong or the ways that
things go off-piste might be really interesting. I think generally things that I think are
good, whatever the kind of context is: I think if at least some of the people there feel
like they've learned something or have a different perspective on an issue, as a
result of having been through a participatory process then I think that's always a
good thing. Like learning is a good thing.

Peter Lloyd: The idea is that you've created an open environment that allows people
to speak their minds and that other people see that as insightful?

Jocelyn Bailey: That people might have learned something from listening to
someone they would never normally get to hear from, for example. I think there's
also a nice thing that happens where, people often say that they are not creative or
that they're not artistic or they can't draw or sort of make these statements about
themselves, which are sort of, obviously they've learned that from somewhere, but
they're also inaccurate. And it's a shame really because I think all human beings are
creative. And I think giving people license to just exercise that muscle that they don't
normally get to exercise even for a short time in the context of a codesign workshop

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is a liberating experience for people and they often find that quite a positive thing,
even if at the beginning they're not very comfortable about the idea of it. A thing that
looks like a good thing, which often I'm a bit wary of, is the sort of high-energy and
positivity at the end of a workshop where people have gone through a process and
come up with a solution they're really excited about. But it's always a virtual solution
and what the codesign process or the codesign workshop doesn't take you through
is the much trickier, messier task of actually implementing things. I think that kind of
high point at the end of a codesign workshop can be a bit misleading.

Peter Lloyd: A false dawn?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yes, and often things don't get implemented after that so
everyone's very pleased with a virtual outcome, and I think that is something to be
wary of.

Peter Lloyd: And when things go wrong, what tends to happen?

Jocelyn Bailey: Normally that has to do with people not sort of behaving in scare
quotes the way that they're supposed to. And that's normally to do with the fact that
people have very different perspectives and interests and agendas on an issue. And
that's perfectly valid and there are some codesign processes where it's okay for
those things to be surfaced and it's okay for conflict to arise.

Peter Lloyd: So sometimes people refuse to take part?

Jocelyn Bailey: Sometimes people might actually refuse to participate. Quite often
what happens if you're doing a codesign process within an organization people might
have been sent along to participate and they may not be there willingly, and that's
not always a very good basis on which to be proceeding.

Peter Lloyd: So you've got some people there that don't really want to be there or
they don't agree with the premise for being there?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yes, and then they sort of will opt out or refuse in various different
ways. There is this concept, a term coined by Cook and Khatami, they talk about the
tyranny of participation. Participation or participatory practice is something that's
been introduced in lots of different fields. Basically, their argument is that there's no
congenial or positive opposite to joining it. So if you don't agree with the terms on

71
which the participatory process is happening, and you decide that you don't want to
participate, then that's always perceived as a negative, or anti-social or unhelpful or
there's no kind of way of that being positively understood, which is why they refer to
as the tyranny of participation. There is this kind of slightly socially coercive thing
about participatory processes that you then also find people reacting to because they
can sense that they are being enrolled in something and they're not quite sure what it
is, but they are not sure if they want to go along with it.

Peter Lloyd: There are lots of kind of issues around the edges of the
straightforwardly "participate in my creative process and everything will be fine" kind
of thing?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yeah, it's an incredibly messy thing to try and engage with. I think
the longer I've done it, the more I've been able to do something that approximates to
what is described as the platonic ideal of a codesign process but it’s still never
happened.

Peter Lloyd: Do you have any sort of tips, tricks, techniques, methods that you use
or could recommend?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yeah. One thing I've observed is this tendency to, there's a
tendency to assume that there is a set of methods out there which, and there
definitely are methods out there that you can use, but you can also just invent them
yourself. That's kind of your job to design the thing, design the tool that you think is
going to give you the outcome that you're looking for, not just sort of take something
off the shelf from elsewhere. There's a really good thing called liberating structures,
which is a resource of practical methods and tools to do with groups of people on
problem solving.

Peter Lloyd: Is that a web resource?

Jocelyn Bailey: A web resource yes. In terms of thinking through some of the
issues around codesign. That's what you'd want to then go and look at some of the
academic literature for. People like Thomas Markussen has written quite a lot about
democracy in politics and codesign, participatory design. Josina Vink and Katarina
Wetter-Edman have written about politics and power and ethics in codesign. In terms
of other tips and tricks and things that I use, one analogy or one metaphor that I find
really useful is to think about it like designing a game. There are certain moves that

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the set of players are going to have to make. You need to sort of think those through
ahead of them, like and you don't quite know what they're going to do but there are
some probable pathways they're going to follow, and to just think, okay, so if I'm
asking them to do this thing at this point, where is that likely to lead and what needs
to happen after that in order to then get us across the finish line

Peter Lloyd: Altogether across the finish line.

Jocelyn Bailey: Altogether across the finish line, how might I shepherd this group of
people towards that particular outcome? And is what I've got planned going to do
that or do I need to think of something different on the spot?

Peter Lloyd: So almost without them realizing they're going from stage to stage and
you're sort of managing that experience, but not that they would really realise?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yes, but not in a kind of Machiavellian, puppet master type way,
because you also want to be open to the things that people are saying and what's
actually going on for that group of people. Another helpful metaphor is just to think of
yourself as the host. And you want to try and be quite a skillful host, you want
everybody to have the airtime to speak and to say what they think and to feel
comfortable and to actually have a good time as well. And that's a set of skills that is
a different set of skills to the sort of designerly set of skills.

Peter Lloyd: Creating a stage, a comfortable stage for people?

Jocelyn Bailey: Yeah, hosting a comfortable sort of social happening.

Peter Lloyd: That is quite a different range of skills that you've developed, from
starting off as a designer into a different kind of design but different kinds of abilities
too.

Jocelyn Bailey: Yeah, it draws on a very different part of my brain to the bit that
learned how to design architectural layouts.

Peter Lloyd: OK, my final question is about sort of representation in a way, who you
get to participate in your processes, So I'm thinking of people that are very hard to
reach. I guess in homelessness, homeless people are quite hard to reach. But if you
need people from different ethnicities, people from different genders, people from

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different countries or with different expertise, it is difficult to get a mix of people and
I'm wondering how much that mix of people that you get actually affect the outcome.
So how much those people that you get in the room actually represent the things that
you you need representing?

Jocelyn Bailey: It's always going to be imperfect. You're never going to be able to
get exactly the perfect set of participants. I think one thing that's really important is
just to think through what the rationale is for who you're involving and why you're
involving them and definitely avoid tokenism. There is an argument that doing it
imperfectly is better than coming up with ideas on your own with input from nobody.
'Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good' or whatever that saying is!

Peter Lloyd: Okay, I think that's a good point to end. Thank you very much, Jocelyn,
it's been great talking to you.

Part 2 Discussion of Interview

Peter Lloyd: That was Jocelyn Bailey, it was good talking to her. I think she's got a
lot of experience particularly in working at high levels of government. But you're also
very experienced in participation, Mieke. I wonder what you thought of the interview?

Mieke van der Bijl: It was really nice to listen to Jocelyn talking about her work. I
know her work a little bit and it's interesting to hear how she talks about politics and
democracy and those kind of things. One of the things that we really need to talk
about when we talk about codesign is the history of this, because something strange
is going on here, which I think is causing a lot of confusion. So the terms, 'codesign'
and 'participatory design', they are kind of being intermixed, but they're actually quite
different things. Participatory design is quite an old term, it's got a Scandinavian
tradition.

Peter Lloyd: I think it goes back to architecture, too, in the early 70s with
participatory approaches trying to get past the tyranny of architects deciding
everything for the people that were inhabiting their buildings.

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Mieke van der Bijl: That's right, and particularly in in workplace design. And it was
this kind of democratic ideal that if you are designing something - a workplace for
workers - then those workers should have a say in whatever you were designing. So
that was really the democratic part. But also, you know, they realized quite quickly
that if they were doing that, they were actually generating much better designs as
well, that were much more usable and useful. And people were much happier in
those workplaces. So this idea of participatory design then also started gaining
traction in the design of computer systems and human-centred design and really
understanding that when you involve people in your design process, you will get
better outcomes, apart from this democratic ideal.

Peter Lloyd: So that they're feeding ideas into the design process for the designer to
draw on somehow. It's a kind of wider pool of ideas?

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah, that's how I would probably explain it. And what's
important to mention there is that the designer is in charge in the end, even though
there is a democratic ideal. You involve people in the process, they participate so to
say, but they are not creating a design. Now, codesign, which basically means
collaborative design, has a very different origin. I mean, we've been talking about
collaborative design for a long time and there have been many studies about how
designers from different disciplines work together collaboratively to create a design.
In industrial design we would typically look at how a multi-disciplinary team involving
product designers, marketeers, engineers all work together and collaboratively they
create a design.

Peter Lloyd: Which really is every design process, in practice every design process
is collaborative.

Mieke van der Bijl: That's right. There's no such thing as a non-collaborative design
process, at least not in the type of design that we're doing in this faculty. In that case,
there's not one person who is in charge. This is really essentially a collaborative
process. Now, since design has become more popular in a public context and public-
sector context, but also social context, this idea of participation has gained traction
very quickly, because of course this democratic ideal is very important. If we are
going to design stuff here for people, then we should involve those people in the
process. Somehow that has become codesign and a problem with it is, and I think
that Jocelyn explained that in a way, is that if you involve people in the process as

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part of this democratic ideal, but you call it codesign, then people are going to expect
that you're actually going to design something together in this process.

Peter Lloyd: And that's going to be the outcome?

Mieke van der Bijl: That is the outcome. That is the goal. So then people are often
disappointed. You know, when this virtual solution that Jocelyn calls it, is not going to
be implemented. The other side of that is that I often see with students here, the
Masters students when they're graduating. There seems to be some kind of idea that
you have to do a codesign session. And then what I ask students: "why are you
doing that?" They will say: "well, you know, there will be lots of ideas that are
generated there and then I will choose one of those and work with that". But then
when I ask them, you know, what is your role as a designer if you're leaving it up to
those people to design something for you, and those people are not even designers,
then that's always an important question to ask.

Peter Lloyd: I think that's what I was trying to get to in the interview, that the political
bits around the edges of codesign processes, but also participatory processes where
there's a, not exactly a hidden agenda, but someone has to make decisions at some
point. It's sort of like the premise that you get people into a room to collaborate and
what their expectations about what the result will be. But who's really going to make
the decision? In a lot of political processes, I think Jocelyn talked about
homelessness, I think they presented a solution but it wasn't taken up by the local
government. Some other political process can take over and just sideline the result.
And that can be really disappointing.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yes. And I think it's important to clarify that when you invite
people to a session like that, that it's really to get a better sense of what the problem
really is. I mean, that's what Jocelyn was saying at the start, this is really about
gaining an understanding of the problem. And it's different from ethnographic study
because in in these sessions, you often have people actually create something and
you ask them for ideas. But the goal is not the idea in itself. It's why they create the
idea and why they think it is a good idea. It's really, again, input for a broader design
process. Now, what you're seeing is quite important about the political aspect of it,
because this context that Jocelyn is talking about is quite different from a regular
design process where you have a lot more to say as a designer. You do need to
think about who is making the decisions here and if that person should also be there
in that process.

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Peter Lloyd: But also one of the key decisions that I talked about with Jocelyn was
who you invite and how representative they are of the group that you're trying to get
to. Certainly in the history of product design, user-centered design, we've created
this concept of the abstract ‘user’. The user is the center of the process. But who is
that user? Normally, it's whoever is around you. You have to be quite thorough and
rigorous to really get to the people who are actually going to use your products and
see how they use the products in the process of developing that product, too. We're
in an educational environment. The users are whoever is around, which happens to
be students. You're conflating one category of person with another category of
person. I think that's an important thing that has to be said: how you get these people
and who they actually represent, and whether that's useful in your process, is
important.

Mieke van der Bijl: Absolutely. The other thing that plays out in this public and
social space is that you don't just invite users, the people who are going to be
affected with whatever is being designed, you also invite people who will start taking
action. They're more active people in this in this context, which means that you need
to also help them create solutions or interventions, whatever you want to call them
that's going to work for them.

There's a really nice example by a lady called Cheryl Dahl, she started this initiative
called The Future of Fish, which was about the challenges around overfishing and all
the ecosystem problems we have in the oceans about the biodiversity of fish. What
she did was she brought a lot of entrepreneurs together who were then trying to do
something about this complex problem. They all knew that on their own there was
not so much that they could do. For example, she worked with a chef who wanted to
cook with more sustainable fish, but she also worked with fishermen and she also
worked with people who were kind of in the middle, working at fish auctions, for
example. She then invited those people together and organised this codesign
session. The outcome of that is not just one thing, it's multiple things that those
people can take on and then start taking forward. And she also has a really
interesting process, or interesting principles of who to invite, so who should have a
seat at the table? So firstly, that is those people that are going to do something. They
are people who can deal with ambiguity. They are willing to take risk. She has a
really nice video that I will share in which she talks about the same thing that Jocelyn
mentions, she calls it 'No Jerks'. So no one who's going to cut off that creative
process. And lastly she says, I don't want designers - no designers! - because I don't

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want designers to then come up with ideas that my people can't work with. I find that
really interesting when you talk about codesign; it's so many different things.

Peter Lloyd: I think it can lead to a lot of different places too. it. You can have these
processes outside of design departments, designers, outside the design industries
too, which I think is interesting. You're drawing on people's natural ability to want to
solve problems and to use their experience in suggesting solutions.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah, but it doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with
design. It's much more about, you know, a creative process. Oh, what can I do as an
entrepreneur to address this issue, what kind of tools do I have? Is that really still a
design process in the sense that we've been talking about it in this podcast?

Peter Lloyd: One of the references that I had is Hilary Cottam, who is a UK based
designer. She was awarded Designer of the Year in 2005. She's a sociologist and
she was one of the designers of the double diamond process. She worked for the
Design Council in the U.K. and came up with the double diamond model. I've
interviewed her before and she said, we came up with this double diamond thing, we
didn't know if it was going to work! But she is really good at getting the right expertise
in the room. That's her real skill. She's worked on the prison system in the UK. I think
she's worked on problems of old age and loneliness, things like that. She selects
very carefully who you have in the room. She does work with designers, so there are
designers in the room, but also architects and people that have real insight into the
systems that she's working with. She somehow brings them all together and creates
solutions that are really good solutions. She's really impressive, I think.

Peter Lloyd: Do you think there are any limits to participation in terms of what
problems can you work on that are better not solved with participation or codesign?
Or do you think it always provides some positive effect?

Mieke van der Bijl: Well, we even did codesign with the design of this course if you
remember! That's a difficult question...

Peter Lloyd: Because I suppose comparing it to the platonic ideal or the ideal
design process where the designer decides everything, you know, everything, every
detail, the all-seeing architect.

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Mieke van der Bijl: I think it's always useful to have people participate in a process,
to be honest, but not participation for the sake of participation. I've had discussions
with Paul Heckert about this. He doesn't really believe that you need participatory
design at all because designers are skillful enough to design the products
themselves. And I'd probably agree with that. But when you're looking at design in
more complex spaces and you really want to understand that problem space, then
it's always useful to involve people, not as designers, but just, you know, to
understand that problems.

Peter Lloyd: I thought Jocelyn made a good point when she said that you're the
designer, you should design the tool yourself, not use other tools. Perhaps that's the
design process - designing the design process. The real talent is the ability to design
a process that's going to deliver an outcome that you don't expect or that you don't
have a lot of control over. But you do have a lot of control over how you design the
process. So it is control in a different way.

Mieke van der Bijl: I would agree and I think you can actually use your design skills
there because it's also about the framing again. Really about why do we really want
to do this? What do we want to get out of it? How do we really frame this session? Is
this a political session? Is this really a design session? Is this a session to
understand the problem space? Is this a session to build relationships? I think that's
true that the design of that session is a is a real skill.

Peter Lloyd: OK. I think we should leave it there. This really sparks off a lot of ideas
doesn't it about a lot of problems and how we can bring other people into that
process. Thanks, Mieke.

Mieke van der Bijl: Thanks, Peter. Very interesting.

DTM Podcast #7: Design Expertise

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Show Notes

In this penultimate DTM podcast Peter talks to one of his colleagues at Delft,
Professor Matthijs van Dyke. Matthijs is a Professor of Practice and co-author of the
well-known Vision in Product Development (ViP) method. Matthijs is not only an
educator though. His main job is working at the design business he co-founded:
Reframing Studio in Amsterdam, where he has built up considerable expertise in
design working with major clients and organisations. In the podcast Matthijs reflects
on his changing role in the business, what his core expertise is, and why he doesn’t
think that trying to categorise people into different levels of expertise is useful.
Following the interview Peter and Mieke discuss what they think about design
expertise, pulling out some key themes from the interview with Matthijs. Total
running time is 35 minutes.

Peter introduces a book by Bryan Lawson and Kees Dorst called Design Expertise
(also mentioned in the Assignment 2 description) which gives an overview of how
designers develop across many different disciplines. There are some excellent case
studies of how top designers work – a recommended read. The different ‘levels of
design expertise’ that the book quotes is from a paper by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus
called Expertise in Realworld Contexts which is an insightful look at why it is difficult
(or impossible) to encode human expertise into computer code. Bryan Lawson has
written much about the design process and the expertise of designers, and Mieke
mentions one of his papers about how designers make sense of new situations
through their experience: Schemata, Gambits and Precedent: Some Factors in
Design Expertise.

Peter mentions a bestselling book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers: The Story of
Success, which amongst other things discusses the idea that becoming an expert
‘only’ takes 10,000 hours. Finally if you want to follow up on the cooking
documentary that Peter mentions, ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’, it is currently playing on
Netflix.

Podcast Transcript

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Introduction

Peter Lloyd: Hello, it’s Peter Lloyd here. This is the penultimate podcast in this
year’s DTM series and it's about the idea of expertise and particularly design
expertise - what is it? how do you acquire it? and what distinguishes a novice
designer from an expert designer?

First of all I talk to Matthijs van Dyke, a fellow Professor at Delft, but more
significantly someone who has considerable expertise in design practice. And as in
the other podcasts, after the interview Mieke and I pull out some of the key themes
and mention some useful references for you to follow up on to find out more about
design expertise and expertise in general if you’re interested.

Finally, a word of warning about the sound quality in the interview. Although Matthijs’
microphone was working fine, my microphone decided it didn’t want to work so I may
sound a bit further away than normal. Once you get used to it, you probably won’t
notice but I thought I’d confess up front. You got the important guy!

Anyway, enough of me talking and on with the podcast...

Part 1: Interview

Peter Lloyd: I'm here in the studio with Matthijs van Dyke, who is the founding
director of Amsterdam based Reframing Studio, a professor of practice and mobility
design at Delft, and a co-author of the book Vision in Product Design. Matthijs has
many years of experience working as a designer across a huge range of briefs.
We're going to talk about what that experience means in terms of the expertise he's
acquired. So welcome to the DTM podcast Matthijs.

Matthijs van Dijk: Thank you. I feel honored.

Peter Lloyd: Very nice to have you here, and we've worked together before, so we
know each other quite well. I wanted to start off by asking what kind of projects does
Reframing Studio work on? Can you tell us a bit about the studio set up and clients
that you work with?

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Matthijs van Dijk: What we do nowadays is that we're just very interested in society.
It's not that we start from a societal problem, but that we start from a societal theme.
And it's really nice not to start from a problem, but more from a from a boundary like
'information in society' or ‘psychiatric health care and society’, so it's of value free
frame you start to work with.

Peter Lloyd: Are you working with a client?

Matthijs van Dijk: When you work with a client. Yeah, I think what we do is mainly
to describe a boundary of research. Because we really don't know yet what we will
come up with. The only thing that we know are the steps we take from A to Z. And
that's what we sell to the client. The client is often a little bit confused about their role
in future society. They want to understand future society, and by understanding
future society, they also can kind of decide on what kind of role they want to play in
future society.

Peter Lloyd: So they come to you with a question?

Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah, but it's more about understanding their role, than
understanding a problem. That's a completely other thing.

Peter Lloyd: And what kind of clients do you work with?

Matthijs van Dijk: It's all type of organizations, but they have to have a specific size
because the work we do takes a lot of time. So small organizations often do not have
the capital to start working with us. Think of national governments, city governments,
big corporates, non-governmental organizations or foundations. I think it's also
related to organizations who've never seen a designer before. I really like to go
there.

Peter Lloyd: How do they find you?

Matthijs van Dijk: They don't find us! ha ha, I think we're more proactive over there,
we're interested in a societal issue and then we start doing research on who's in
charge and then we start conversations. Often an assignment is more an end result
of a conversation than of a sales project.

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Peter Lloyd: So I want to quote something from the ViP book which is relevant to
that question. You say quite early on in the book that (I quote) "I started working with
ViP in 1995, and it's like any innovation process. It took 15 years to implement and it
took me 10 years to sell the expertise to clients." And I wondered how has the
expertise you sell changed over the years?

Matthijs van Dijk: I think there's not a lot of things that changed but maybe there are
some steps that are easier to execute because of tools we have developed. When I
listen to those words in the book that was published in 2011 and written between, so
five years before, it still makes sense. It took a lot of time and effort to put that new
way of working...

Peter Lloyd: Into a business and a practice.

Matthijs van Dijk: Exactly. I think it's true that organizations understand better what
that type of process can mean for them. But on the other hand, the process didn't
change at all. It's still the same thing. And maybe by making things a little bit more
explicit and by understanding yourself where the emphasis is when working for a
client, because when you think of ViP, it's different steps. I think in the beginning we
always presented it as just following those steps. But maybe you have to say it's not
those steps, but there are three very important stages. It's understanding a likely
future world. It's taking a stance and understanding what world you desire for. And of
course it has to be realistic. And then the third thing is to come up with interventions
that make that transition happen. And I think that's a much more simple story than
kind of explaining all eight or ten steps that are on the line, ViP.

Peter Lloyd: Do you always work with the ViP method with a client - is that what
reframing studio does?

Matthijs van Dijk: Yes, what I experienced when you start to create content before
you have any organization it doesn't work. So I have a dialogue with a client or an
organization. We just talk about things and then we understand together we have to
start doing something. We always work with ViP, also because there are so many
other organizations who work in another way that we are just not good at, so we're
good at ViP and there's a lot of work to be done in relation to ViP and I fully
understand that the whole world doesn't want to work with ViP.

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Peter Lloyd: But it's kind of a philosophy as well as a... philosophy is the wrong
word, there's a kind of worldview behind it?

Matthijs van Dijk: I fully agree, so in principle you start to explore how future society
looks like without taking into account the existence of the organization you work for.
It is disconnected from the organization you work for. If the organization doesn't
allow that type of exploration, it's not going to work. And the big consultancies, of
course, they start from an organizational point of view often. They start from inside
and look outside and we start from outside and then want to understand how it
affects everything on the inside.

Peter Lloyd: You describe it as a very easy process. You know, you meet clients,
you have these nice conversations. But I wonder what you feel that the expertise that
you've built up over the years is. I mean, when you start off, if you think back to the
first years of your practice, how is that different from now What do you really feel that
you've kind of got expert in?

Matthijs van Dijk: I think we're not afraid anymore of any complexity. When you
think of 20 years ago, we thought maybe we should avoid that specific theme
because it's just too complex to start working on. And I think we're unafraid at the
moment, so we created so much self-confidence that this process will help us out,
that we don't care anymore how complex that first kind of, so the complexity of where
we start from, we don't care anymore.

Peter Lloyd: And when did you realize that you had that confidence?

Matthijs van Dijk: I think that evolves very naturally. You automatically kind of
constantly increase the complexity step by step and before you know it, you're doing
things that you thought of 10 years beforehand that you could never do. It's a very
natural thing. And you do not reflect on it. I think it's also kind of triggered by that you
feel excitement yourself by constantly increasing the complexity of issues you work
on, because otherwise things become boring, too. It's not that a small, less complex
theme is boring, don't get me wrong. But I think from a more human point of view,
there's a tendency to constantly increase complexity.

Peter Lloyd: Do you think now, if you compare it to where you are now with where
you started from, do you think in a different way? Do you see things in a different
way when you design?

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Matthijs van Dijk: People often think that when you make things theoretical, people
do not understand things anymore. But it's exactly the opposite. Those theories, they
help you to truly make good decisions and to understand what you do and why you
took that stance.

Peter Lloyd: It sounds like the way you are describing what you do is that you're
constantly learning new things, things are coming along and you're able to bring
them into your work somehow.

Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah. What you can say is that each step in ViP, you can see it
as a concept or deliverable. But behind every deliverable is a theory. And those
theories, they can really help you understand how to develop those deliverables. And
I think what happens is that those theories become more and more nuanced and
profound.

Peter Lloyd: So the more you think about them, the more complicated they get
maybe or the more they resonate with you or...

Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah, the more delicate your understanding is. If you wake me up
in the middle of the night and you ask me: ‘give me some kind of theories on how
people perceive an object’, then I will give you an answer.

Peter Lloyd: Ha ha

Matthijs van Dijk: Yes, that's really stupid. And maybe it's not even true. But I think
it's true and it helps me designing stuff. And it helps me to explain to an organization
that design is not something that is is a choice from a designer's point of view, but it's
a choice you make for someone else.

Peter Lloyd: How do you organize the projects that you have? How many people do
you have working at the moment?

Matthijs van Dijk: 14

Peter Lloyd: And are you part of every project?

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Matthijs van Dijk: No, so my role changed in the last year. I'm more the dialogue
starter and it takes so much time to start a project. So the first kind of encounter you
have with an organization, the time between this first encounter and starting a project
often is three years or something. And I'm kind of this guy starting to work to start
this dialogue and to maybe lure people in. Maybe luring is the wrong word, but
maybe sometimes it is.

Matthijs van Dijk: Yes, bringing in people and connecting with people?

Matthijs van Dijk: Connecting with people but based on stories. What I do is
storytelling, but more on the theoretical point of view and how it can be of help for an
organization.

Peter Lloyd: Do you have specific mechanisms or techniques for reflecting, either
personally or as a studio?

Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah, I think we're in the middle of redefining what that could be
because reflecting, we did mainly from a content point of view and I think from a
process point of view, it's much more interesting. And the thing is, so when you're
under a lot of pressure, we have just so many things to do and then it's often only
content, content and then you reflect on content because that's what you deliver in
the end. And now we fully understand if we don't reflect on the process and how we
work together and how we make this working together more of an appropriate
concept, then maybe in the end content will suffer from it. So we're in the middle of it,
to do proper reflection.

Peter Lloyd: So I had a question. There's a book by Brian Lawson and Kees Dorst
called Design Expertise and in that book they quote a philosopher called Hubert
Dreyfuss who has this model of the different scales of expertise. They have a scale
that goes from ‘novice’ to ‘beginner’ to ‘advanced beginner’ to ‘competent’, to ‘expert’
to ‘master’, and then to ‘visionary’ at the end. And I wondered, where...

Matthijs van Dijk: That's stupid! I don't like that scale at all!

Peter Lloyd: Oh, why not?!

Matthijs van Dijk: You can be visionary as a novice!

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Peter Lloyd: I was going to ask you where you'd put yourself on that scale.

Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah, that's a difficult one.

Peter Lloyd: It's difficult to say that you're a visionary! I notice in the book that you
say that some of the VIP approach was based on talking to visionary designers, too.

Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah, in the beginning, but the thing, of course. What for me is
very important, when you look at visionary designers, what they do...

Peter Lloyd: I wondered about that. I was going to say, as you get more
experienced, are you able to play more? And take more risks maybe, or you
describe sort of embracing more complexity, but in a sense, is that is that just playing
with things in a way where complexity tells you something?

Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah, but it's also playing in increasing complexity, because what
you do, you put even more elements on the table because you say we're going to
play. You allow yourself to maybe not know what you do. And that's very interesting.
But in the end, playing is about increasing complexity. And I really like that. And
that's where people sometimes make a complete kind of, they have a
misunderstanding about what play is all about. They think it's about lightness or
rules, less rules. And still I really like to think about how you should develop as a
designer is a very interesting question, I think. So that's why I don't like it when you
say visionaries at the end.

Peter Lloyd: It's not a mechanical process of going from one state to the other, it's
not that, you have elements of all things at every stage?

Matthijs van Dijk: I truly believe that we have to sell design as being visionary,
because that's what design is all about in principle. If you only say in the last stage of
your career you can do what design in principle is for, I think that's a bad story!

Peter Lloyd: Well talking about learning. I wondered as you are a professor here at
Delft too what the crossover is between your practice in reframing studio and the
teaching that you do at Delft. How does that crossover? Is that the VIP method that
crosses over?

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Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah, it is. And it's also about the storytelling of ViP. I think, so
what I feel now is that concepts that are not so easy to grasp, it's really necessary
that you have to tell them in all kinds of different ways, so there's not one explanation
of ViP. But maybe there should be 10 or 200! And the more there are, the better it is.
That's maybe the opposite of how we started with it because we were always saying
this is ViP and this is what it is. But the funny thing is if you see reframing as how
Kees Dorst sees it, you kind of look at it from a different perspective. I think this is
what I do nowadays that I can kind of like explain ViP from ten or fifteen different
perspectives. I can turn it around, flip it over, I can start from everywhere, I can start
from everywhere. I really enjoy that.

Peter Lloyd: So when you work with students, you're able to take different positions
in order to understand their worldview and bring that out.

Matthijs van Dijk: Yes, I can empathize with them because then I see OK, this is
not going to work, so I have to I have to use another type of entrance or another
story or another analogy or another. And then I just do it differently. I'm constantly
looking for this, you want to create this relationship with the students? And every
time it's a unique relationship, so you have to be careful that ViP is not so strong that
it doesn't allow for that unique relationship anymore. And that's what I'm capable of
doing now.

Peter Lloyd: It's interesting because you're describing the expertise that you've
developed as a teacher too, as well as the expertise that you've developed as a
designer.

Matthijs van Dijk: Yeah and again, so my role as a designer. I'm not responsible
anymore for the content of all the projects we're doing, I've got a completely other
role. And I had to adapt to that role, too. I hated that role in the beginning. I just
hated it. And then I had to rethink myself in relation to the studio.

Peter Lloyd: I think there are some architectural practices, maybe, where they
develop a certain way of thinking about the world through the projects that they take
on. And then the people that start those practices become slightly more distanced
from the actual realities of producing the projects. They're thinking all the time about
where projects fit and how they fit into their kind of longer-term vision for the studio
or the business.

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Matthijs van Dijk: It's true. Yes, it's something like that. And then the most difficult
thing is that the quality of the work you deliver is studio effort. You don't want to
become this architect, that one person, because then you're dead as an
organisation. So it's very interesting how the people working within Reframing
Studio, they are so much better in executing projects now. And this is, of course,
what I also tell the organizations I start this dialogue with. And again, I'm only a
conversation starter.

I think that's a good point to end on. Matthijs, thanks very much, it has been a really
interesting discussion. Thanks for joining us.

Matthijs van Dijk: So when we start this I can't stop anymore, as you notice. I'm
going to stop now!

Part 2 Discussion of Interview

Peter Lloyd: Ok. That was Matthijs van Dyke from Reframing Studio. I must admit, I
really enjoyed that discussion. It didn't quite go where I thought it was going to go,
but I thought we touched on some interesting areas. What did you what did you
think?

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah, it was great to listen to. In general I really love people
who are talking about their work. If you ask them, you know, why do you do this work
and why do you love this work? You always get really great stories. I also really
enjoy that when I was listening to this podcast.

Peter Lloyd: And what have you learned in your work, too? Because I think that's
really nice to hear from people that are really experts, and we'll come on to talk about
the model of expertise later. But to really get them to think about what they actually
do differently from when they started off. It's something that they probably don't do
that often. You need the question, don't you, to actually start thinking about that?

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah. And he had some really great examples of that as well.

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Peter Lloyd: What were the things that stood out for you then in the interview?

Mieke van der Bijl: Well, you know, this podcast obviously being about expertise, I
thought it was interesting you asked the question about if he thought of himself as a
visionary and then he didn't want to answer that question, which I totally understand
because I don't think anyone would think of themselves of a visionary or if they would
think of themselves as a visionary, they wouldn't say it right!

Peter Lloyd: That's what I said it is difficult to describe yourself as a visionary.

Mieke van der Bijl: It's a very strange thing to say about yourself! but I really liked
how he was saying how his work had become much more about, I would say,
relationships. He was saying one of the things that he does on a daily basis is
building relationships with clients. And that's a real skill how you go through this
dialogue with clients. And he was talking about how he works with students as well,
so there's kind of a relational aspect there as well, how you help students through
this process. And he was even talking about the studio work, it's not about individual
design projects. We do it as a studio. "I don't want to be the architect" which I think is
a really interesting way of looking at it, maybe that's how we think of architects as
being kind of the single architect and not bringing their team along. But I really like
this relational aspect.

Peter Lloyd: That was something that Kees mentioned in the first podcast or the
second podcast, the idea that you can have a business and have projects, but when
you know how those projects run and you're a director of a business it has to be
about something else. I think Matthijs described that quite well you know, this idea of
starting conversations often three years in advance of getting the projects, I think,
and actually thinking about where you want to be positioned within a societal context,
all those sorts of slightly bigger questions that he now gets the time to think about
and explore with potential clients.

Mieke van der Bijl: And I think that's real skill, real expertise. We tend not to talk
about these softer social skills in terms of building relationships, but that really
requires asking the right questions and good listening. I think it's something we can
do more about in our educational program as well.

Peter Lloyd: I thought it was interesting how he described his relationship with
theory. He mentioned theory a few times, which I thought was interesting - behind

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every stage of the process there's a theory and that was one of the expertises that
he said he'd acquired over the years. He can have a more nuanced idea of the
theory behind certain steps and he can articulate that to clients. I think at one stage
he said he was a theoretical storyteller, he uses theories to tell stories. It's interesting
in a course like design theory and methodology. You tend to think of theory as an
abstract, not a very useful, thing. But actually, in his context, it is really useful. It
helps persuade people, it helps convince people to invest in your organization.

Mieke van der Bijl: The other thing I really liked was the way he was talking about
ViP, particularly in relation to the expertise levels, but we'll get to that in a moment.
We often tend to think about novice versus expert designers. How I often explain it is
I often use the metaphor of dancing. I mean, there's many different metaphors we
can use, but if you want to become a dancer, you know, first time you step on the
dance floor, especially in ballroom dancing or latin, you kind of have to count, like
one, two, three, one, two, three. And you are really conscious of what's happening.
But when you become more expert that kind of counting you no longer do, and it
becomes much more intuitive into.

Peter Lloyd: Fluent, Fluency.

Mieke van der Bijl: Fluency, yes. So that's something we see in design as well. You
know, when you when you first start designing, you follow all the steps. But the more
you do it, the more fluent you become. And I really liked what Matthijs was saying,
because I think that might even be an expert level further, I don't know, but he was
talking about VIP and how they used to say that there's only one way to do ViP and
it's this way. And it's a bit about, you know, these are kind of the steps, this is how
you have to count and this is how you have to do it. Whilst now he's saying no
there's like many different ways you can do it. So it's more like a framework. And it's
up to the designer how to work with that. And I think that's real expertise when you
can let go of that dogmatic way of doing design.

Peter Lloyd: So let's talk about the model of expertise I introduced in the interview
with Matt. One thing that I've always been quite interested in is this classification of
expertise as 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers refers to it.
Basically, if you spend 10000 hours on anything, then by definition you're an expert,
because within that time you've had to practice so much, and you've become fluent
so much, and you've thought about the subject so much. It's just an amount of time
invested in something. When you think of your lifetime as a designer, how many

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hours that you're going to naturally spend thinking about design and solving design
problems, if you stick with the profession, you'll end up becoming an expert at some
at some point. The model is is from a philosopher called Hubert Dreyfuss and has six
levels of expertise. It starts off with novice. It goes to advanced beginner, competent,
expert, master and visionary. I think the first thing to say is that it's really helpful to
not think of expertise just in terms of novice and experts, because that's a dichotomy
that doesn't really help you. Either you're a novice or an expert. Of course there are
other stages in between. And I think particularly in an education, it's interesting to
think about how do you get from a novice level to being an advanced beginner?
What are the things that you have to acquire? And from advanced beginner to
becoming competent? And those things are much more about learning techniques
and becoming fluent in certain activities...

Mieke van der Bijl: And recognizing situations, those kind of things. I recommend
that people listening have a look at those different levels of expertise, because I think
it's quite useful. One of the things that I like about, I think it's in this book by Bryan
Lawson and Kees Dorst, is that design consists of many different expertises. It's not
just being a designer, for example how Matthijs was talking about building all these
relationships. There's a specific expertise or idea of how we talk about framing, for
example, or it might be about visualizing. So most people, they would sit on different
levels of expertise, on different competencies or skills.

Peter Lloyd: Actually, I think that's a real sign of someone gaining expertise is that
they're able to isolate different bits of the whole system. If you ask someone about
designing, they're able to talk about one very particular component of designing and
how that operates, rather than talking about the whole thing. I think if you are
someone who has less experience, you know what's the design process, there's a
natural inclination to say, well, it's this Double Diamond process, which covers
everything but doesn't really tell you the small details that quite often matter in a
design process. And so that ability to really focus in on details and ignore the rest of
it and practice that little one component and then link it to other kinds of things that
displays someone developing expertise. The metaphor I like is cooking, you know,
because it starts off with how to boil an egg and you know, you can't even boil an
egg. But then you go right up to the top chefs to see what they do, There's a sort of
mid-level of following recipes. And I think recipes are quite a good analogy with
design methods because you have different stages and you have to add ingredients
but there's a lot of 'feel' involved. And as you get more experience, you kind of know

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the ingredients that work together: if you have to put in a bit more olive oil or a bit
more flour or something like that. And you develop your taste, too.

Mieke van der Bijl: You're flavour balance.

Peter Lloyd: Yeah. There's a really good cooking program on Netflix called 'Salt,
Fat, Acid, Heat'. They are the four components of cooking that form the basis of
every food. And what the top chefs do is manipulate those four components. It is
really nice because it's simple. But as you see in the programme, the documentary is
much more complex than that. The other thing that Hubert Dreyfuss writes, that I
thought was really interesting, was about intuition. The paper is called Expertise in
Real World Contexts and it's really a paper that asks the question 'what is expertise
and can we capture and put it in a computer? That's what the underlying question is.
They say, no, we can't really do this. And this is a paper about why, why we can't
really do this. But at the beginning, they say (quote) "expertise is based on the
making of immediate, unreflective situational responses. Intuitive judgment is the
hallmark of expertise." And I think that's really interesting because design methods
are all about getting away from intuition somehow. But if expertise is all about
intuition, then what role do design methods play? And I think it's interesting to sort of
think how design methods get you to a point where you can let your intuition takes
over. That's what I'd look at, you don't start off being intuitive. Basically, your training
gets you to the place where you can start trusting yourself and being more intuitive
and I think Matthijs described in the interview about play, you know, being able to
play with things and not being afraid to embrace complexity and all those sorts of
things. I think what he was describing there was, you know, I use my intuition a lot
more these days than I did in the past.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah. I mean it's that term 'intuitive judgment'. What does that
mean in design? Because we use it quite a bit. I think also in design theory, we talk
about judgment. But does that mean that we're judging the design situation?

Peter Lloyd: I think you're judging a number of factors. So I sort of think of myself as
an educational designer, I guess, and the educational courses that I work on, that
we've worked on together. When I'm making a judgment, I'm sort of thinking of what
the consequences will be, but I want them to be interesting consequences that have
a number of layers. You know, they might go one way or they might go another way.
And you create this sort of container for that somehow. It's not certainty that I'm
looking for, it’s just: is this going to go an interesting way? Does this setup lead to

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interesting things? And that's just an intuitive sense of: "yeah, I kind of know what
people are like, and if they use this thing to do this, then something interesting will
happen."

Mieke van der Bijl: I think that's also related to how we build expertise because we
build expertise in design by doing lots of design projects. I don't know if it's Brian
Lawson who says that when a designer faces a design situation, new problems
situation, they recognize patterns from the past. I think also Donald Schon talks
about that. I guess that's that kind of intuitive judgment. You can recognise there are
things there that you have seen before. And it doesn't mean that you have evidence
that it's going to work, but it gives you that sense of confidence that you know...

Peter Lloyd: Yeah, yeah. I've been here before and I know what the variables are
here.

Mieke van der Bijl: Even though each design situation is unique and different,
there's always a pattern there that you can recognize.

Peter Lloyd: I think expertise, for me it's an interesting podcast because it brings a
lot of other things together in design methods. The whole point of being at university
is to get better at something and actually you want to feel that you're developing
through your life. For me it's like a key topic to embrace and to think about and that
we'll come back to in Assignment 2. Some of the things that Matthijs talked about are
things that will be relevant in assignment two for the Practice Manual.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah.

Peter Lloyd: Ok, so thanks Meike. I think that was a good discussion, we touched
on some really interesting stuff and as with the other podcasts, we'll put all the
references in the show notes.

Mieke van der Bijl: And next time you interview an expert ask what they're expert in
and on which level they would position themselves.

Peter Lloyd: Exactly, yes. Good one. Ok, bye.

Mieke van der Bijl: Bye.

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DTM Podcast #8: Future of Design Methods

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Show Notes

In the final DTM podcast Peter talks to Elisa Giaccardi, Professor of Interactive
Media Design at IDE, about what design methods will look like in the future. They
talk about how artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing the design
process from something that is ‘user-centred’ into something much more dynamic.
Elisa introduces the idea of how humans and computers can design together through
‘co-performance’. They also touch on the ethical issues involved when dealing with
non-human intelligences.

The interview is based on a paper by Elisa called Technology and More than Human
Design which explores how technology is impacting the design process. She
mentions her PhD supervisor Roy Ascott, who has been a strong influence on many
well-known designers and artists throughout the world. On page 6 of his book Art,
Technology, Consciousness he talks about the idea of ‘seeding’ that Elisa refers to.
She also quotes from the much-cited social anthropologist Tim Ingold, who writes in
his book Correspondences about different modes of interaction between humans
and non-humans. Ingold has published many interesting books touching on the
cultural and contextual aspects of designing.

In the discussion Mieke mentions the work of John Seely Brown, who was director of
the world-famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). In a video titled Sense-
making in our Post AlphaGo World he explores the “rapidly changing, broadly
connected and radically contingent world and the lenses needed to frame, or
reframe, the challenges that technological advances have pushed forward”.

Peter also mentions an idea called ‘negative capability’, the ability to embrace
uncertainty and be comfortable in situations of ambiguity. The idea originally comes
from the Romantic Poet John Keats! This short blog post provides more context and
further links to explore the subject.

Podcast Transcript

Introduction

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Peter Lloyd: Hello it's Peter here. This is the final podcast in this year's DTM series
and in it we explore what the future might hold for design methods and particularly
how A.I. and data will change the process of design. Or maybe not? First of all, I
talked to Elisa Giaccardi, a Professor here in Delft, and someone who explores how
cutting-edge technologies are changing the way we think about designing. After the
interview, Mieke and I try to figure out the future and surprisingly returned to some
familiar DTM concepts. Perhaps the future isn't so different to how we design now?
Well, to find out the answer to this question, we'd better get on with the podcast...

Peter Lloyd: I'm here in the studio with Elisa Giaccardi, who is a professor of
interactive media design here at IDE in Delft, and also professor of post-industrial
design at Umea University in Sweden. So you have a two major roles, but you're
also an expert in artificial intelligence and designing and we're going to talk about the
future of design methods and design processes. So welcome to the DTM podcast,
Elisa.

Elisa Giaccardi: Yes, thank you, Peter. Thank you for having me. The expert in
artificial intelligence and design might be a little bit too much, but I certainly am very
interested in in artificial intelligence and disruptive technologies in general.

Peter Lloyd: You've recently written a really interesting paper that you gave me to
read getting across the idea of more than human design. We'll come on to talk about
that in more detail, but my first question was, how did you come to be interested in
A.I. and design?

Elisa Giaccardi: Yes, I have always been quite fascinated by technology because
I'm interested in how humans communicate and interact and through that build reality
around themselves. Today, more so, that happens through technology. Any kind of
technology that does have an impact on how we communicate or how interact. For
me, it's absolutely fascinating. Then I started to look into digital networks. Early on,
looking into Web 2.0 architectures, social media, Internet of Things, now artificial
intelligence it is kind of a natural...

Peter Lloyd: You've had a long history of exploring technology? I

Elisa Giaccardi: Yes

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Peter Lloyd: In your paper, to quote from your paper, you say something that I
thought was really interesting, actually, and it is that the design process is no longer
something that happens before production. We're very used to having the idea of
design that produces something at the end of it or the process results in a product at
the end of it.

Elisa Giaccardi: Kind of a stabilizing process with something at the end.

Peter Lloyd: Can you describe what you mean by that?

Elisa Giaccardi: Yes. So the kind of design as we know we don't often teach it,
particularly in our bachelor programs, really comes out of the logic of industrial
production. And when we used to design chairs for mass-production we needed to
make sure that what we were designing was right and we developed ways of doing
that, methods for prototyping iteratively and trying to minimize risks of mass
replicating faults or shortcomings in what we were designing. But the kinds of
technologies that we have now, like data technologies and artificial intelligence in
particular, really challenge and are very different from that kind of logic. What
happens is that not only what we design can be constantly updated at a lower cost.
Before if we didn't get it right, then it was a problem; all the thinking and all the
testing has to be done before production, because changing something afterward
was very difficult and complicated and very costly. And now not only can we do it in a
more agile way, but the very product that we are experiencing is coming into being,
so to speak, at runtime. Is assembled at runtime. So my Netflix looks very different
and behaves very differently than your Netflix because it comes together as
something that I can experience in the very moment of use, and it feeds on that use.
With these type of technologies that are based on information and data, the
distinction between production and consumption is almost dismantled. And design in
a way continues in use and after use and it fits into that.

Peter Lloyd: What you're describing is a much more fluid... there's more fluidity.
We're very used to the idea that at the very beginning of the design processes, those
are the decisions that you have to get right for production because they're cheap to
make at the beginning, but they're expensive to make at the end. But that turns
around that whole process into something. What are we actually designing then?

Elisa Giaccardi: What are we actually designing? We are designing conditions for a
certain type of interactions and experiences to come to expression or for certain

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value propositions to become with interacting with the product or with the service.
There is a fluidity. There is a malleability that is intrinsic to the different type of
material that we're working with. But there is also, I like to think of it as a more
probabilistic character to what we make.

Peter Lloyd: Can you give an example of a product? Maybe in healthcare or

something like that?

Elisa Giaccardi: For example, there is this startup in the UK called Vitality, and I
believe you can call it as often it is referred as an Intertech, it is using data
technology to monitor people's physical activity and then use that to provide a certain
type of insurance plan and benefits. And so that insurance plan does not exist prior
to you buying the wearable, wearing it and performing everyday activities or
exercising, taking walks and so on and so forth. In that sense, it's probabilistic
because there are of course a set of parameters that are set. But the outcomes of
that is not necessarily always predictable.

Peter Lloyd: Defined.

Elisa Giaccardi: Defined completely upfront.

Peter Lloyd: It's more like setting a sequence of... or a set of parameters, in motion,
as a as a kind of design or rough design and then seeing what happens. It's constant
prototyping.

Elisa Giaccardi: It is, yes, it's sort of a constant prototyping. Roy Ascott, who was
my PhD Supervisor a long time ago, used to call it a kind of seeding, seeding
conditions. And in some cases, these may be parameters. In other cases, might be
constraints for a certain type of interaction, but it's seeding rather than planning
ahead completely.

Peter Lloyd: I think it's really interesting, just the idea that we in education we're still
teaching a design process is very much aimed at a certain product and an outcome
and assessing that outcome. But the loops are...

Elisa Giaccardi: It's really tricky because in a way we need and want to be able to
anticipate, to an extent, the outcome, but we cannot fully, completely anticipate it at
design time so we need to be able to anticipate, not the outcome in and by itself, but

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the type of interactions that may feed into certain type of outcomes or produce a kind
of consequences. And that’s a shift that I don't think we're conceptually and
methodologically really prepared.

Peter Lloyd: There are two aspects that you talk about in the paper, which I think
are really interesting. They're sort of at different ends of the design process. One is
the idea that we're used to the user or the person being at the center of a design
process. You know, we design for people. The design process is aimed at sort of
understanding people's requirements. That's one aspect to design. Then the other
one is the stakeholders in a process and how we bring various groups to participate
in the design process. You know that maybe a client, it may be certain user groups
or manufacturers. But we're used to this idea of thinking about stakeholders. And I
want to kind of explore those two concepts. First of all, the user, what does it mean
when you, you're not having that that user at the center of the process anymore?

Elisa Giaccardi: They're actually very interesting questions. I never really, I guess,
try to articulate it in that way, but it is quite interesting. The critique of focusing on the
user is, not so much because what people want or need matters less, but because of
this logic or industrial production that has informed the way in which we think about
design. We still approach the design of these type of technologies and the products
and services platforms that come with it as something that is there to be used and
consumed in a certain way, according to a particular intention. But because of this
intrinsic character of the object of design, which is probabilistic. The reality is that
there is not just one single use. There are many different uses. And if you take, for
example, Facebook is quite a classical example. The way in which it makes sense to
me as a certain type of user might be for how it allows me to curate certain events or
certain relationships in my life. But for another user, or shall we call it stakeholder, it's
instead about the data that I can use for advertising purposes.

Peter Lloyd: They're kind of unknowable uses?

Elisa Giaccardi: The same system is basically serving the needs of many different
users, many different stakeholders.

Peter Lloyd: And then the device is trying to understand that use somehow or
respond to it?

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Elisa Giaccardi: Yeah, it does offer a value to all of them, all at the same time.
Yeah. And so maybe we need to think in terms of stakeholders rather than just
simply users.

Peter Lloyd: That leads me onto the stakeholders, which I think you make a really
nice point, which is that when we think of participation in design, we think of it as a
kind of democratic, that you're giving people different voices in the design process.
But when one of the participants in the design process is an artificial intelligence, it
gets rid of that idea of democracy because they don't have any rights. Or we're not
giving them any rights to express themselves. So how does that affect the
participative process?

Elisa Giaccardi: Right no, I think it's an important distinction to be made. The claim
that we make in that article, that in order to move forward in how we think of the
conceptual space that we need for dealing with this new type of complexity, and we
talk of intelligent products, artificial intelligence, being a participant in the design
process, it's not because they have a moral stand in the process, because they need
to being voted on on the basis of that moral standing. But because the data-driven
logics that come with machine behavior are logics that we do not fully understand
because they...

Peter Lloyd: They're sort of intelligent on their own terms it's a non-human
intelligence.

Elisa Giaccardi: Exactly. They participate in making things. In making your Netflix
come to life, in making the price of your next Uber ride. In making your insurance
plan. They take part in that. And in a way they are actively involved in the design
process and they do it according to logics and perspectives that are non-human. I
just want to be able to understand them and account for those, and factor them into
the design process. And for doing that I need to bring them to the table in a different
way than just thinking of them as tools that I can use for a specific purpose because
that's just not what happens. We have developed methods and techniques to
interrogate those kind of logics and to try to understand them and factor them into
the design process.

Peter Lloyd: I think you make a good point about, human participants in design
processes have some sense of responsibility too. Whereas artificial intelligent
agents, they're responsive, but they're not responsible. They're reacting in the same

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way that we react to situations, but they're not responsible for the decisions that they
make.

Elisa Giaccardi: But that's where it becomes interesting, right, because they're not
responsible in moral terms. But there is this beautiful quote, but by Ingold that says
that ultimately all responsibilities are a matter of responsiveness. I can be
responsible only when I can respond. So even if for a moment we bracket a notion of
morality as a way to understand responsibility and we start considering responsibility
as the ability to respond, I think he becomes very interesting because then also
machines may have different ways of responding or tuning their responses. And that
could be quite an interesting design challenge for us.

Peter Lloyd: I guess we're used to the phrase of codesigning. The idea that
everyone contributes something, you have a phrase that's 'co-performance'

Elisa Giaccardi: Co-performance, yes.

Peter Lloyd: Which I really like, because it suggests that you really have to do
something a little bit differently. With co-design you sort of think everyone in the
room kind of knows what they're doing or what the purpose is, with co-performance it
is much more of a sort of exploration.

Elisa Giaccardi: But I think also that the co-performance really is about the interplay
between humans and machines or non-human entities. And it's an idea that is
fundamentally based on the acknowledgement that the kind of things that a human
and a machine can do - quote unquote - well or quite differently. They're quite
different. Co-performance is a way of taking advantage of that complementarity, but
it's very much positioned in use. You could also say the co-design continues after an
initial design phase with these types of technologies. In another article I talk about
this sustained co-creation that's enabled by these kinds of technologies between
humans and machines. But the co-performance really stresses the element of how
we contribute to shaping certain type of social practices together.

Peter Lloyd: I really like that. We've been talking around the idea of responsibility.
The interesting thing about how processes and methods might develop in the future
is they become ethical questions that they embrace ethical issues to a much larger
extent than I think then design methods have in the past, which I think opens up
interesting discussions. We're used to thinking of the design process as about

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anticipating consequences or being able to somehow predict consequences. And we
try to limit unintended consequences. We want to limit accidents happening and
really back to the user, we want the user to have this experience that we've intended
them to have. Does embracing artificial intelligence in design, does it open up
unintended consequences? Is it more liable to that?

Elisa Giaccardi: I think that, or at least let's put it in this way. I hope that by better
understanding machine behavior, we can account for those unintended
consequences better and in a way what I think is needed is not so much developing
ways that can help us really fully anticipate these consequences in terms of
outcome. But understanding what are the distinct rules for the interaction or for the
way in which different, let's say, stakeholders participate in the design process, one
that is ethical, one that gives enough handles for humans to still be autonomous in
their decisions, or that gives enough space to find meaning in the outcome of that
specific interaction. In a project, for example, that we have just wrapped up last year,
we did take some of these ideas into practice, and in doing that we really critiqued
what we thought was quite an ethical push of using, in that case, machine learning
as a way to impose a certain type of behaviors on to elderly people, which was the
specific target for our project. We're looking into assistive technologies for older
people, and how using machine learning can become instead a way of empowering
them. When you understand that there are different ways in which you can design
the algorithms not just for accurately predicting the outcomes, but for facilitating
certain type of interactions in daily life. And in this case, we are just very simple and
resourceful strategies that older people often put in place to cope with their aging
skills. So how can machine learning reinforce that? Facilitate that? In that sense, I
would say that the ethical uptake is what we refer in that article that you read, as an
ethical know-how, rather than an ethical know what?

Peter Lloyd: Thinking about the future: what will a design method of the future look
like? How will designers interact with them, if we think now that methods are things
that we write down in books and on websites. I think maybe it's useful to think in
terms of which bits will become more automated? It's very difficult to think about AI
isn't it? It automates these things that you're not quite aware of...

Elisa Giaccardi: I mean there are already aspects of the design process that are
automated and I think we will see more of that. But then again, going back to the co-
performance, what are we good at and what machines are good at certain type of
data collection or parameterisation? That can very easily be done by machines,

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right? Even benchmarking, for example. But any interpretation of the data, or the
patterns that are extracted, for example, through machine learning, any kind of
sense making, that is not something that you can fully automate. What I think that a
method, assuming that methods are not fixed and that you need to appropriate them
and make them yours. What a method of the future might look like, perhaps thinking
of some of the methods that we have developed so far to deal with this are methods
that help you to gain access to these non-human perspectives. For example, we
have developed a way of conducting ethnographic observations that we called thin
ethnography where we can either add sensors and software to objects of everyday
use to understand how they are already connected before being connected to the
Internet and how that type of ecosystem will have implications for how people will
interact with the product or to interrogate existing products. For example, right now
we are being asked increasingly to use some of the techniques we've developed, like
interview with things, to look into the biases that are built into conversational agents.
You can imagine a method that helps you gain these insights. It challenges you to
consider things that you thought were not relevant, not only that you couldn't see
because they're a different scale perhaps, but also that you perhaps thought were
not remarkable or not relevant for that specific problem. And indeed they are.

Peter Lloyd: You describe a whole range of design outcomes, you tend to think of
intelligence as a computational thing? It is a computational thing, but it doesn't only
apply to interactive products. It could be something like buildings or cars. You know,
the parameterisation and the suggestion by a computational agent of certain
solutions and that dialogue or the co-performance that you mention.

Peter Lloyd: That partnership…

Elisa Giaccardi: I can see that developing in the future as much as, you know,
something like a design method bot sitting on your worktop, monitoring your
performance and telling you what to do.

Elisa Giaccardi: I mean, I think that certainly what we will see is the rehearsal of
these new partnerships. If we take the idea of machine intelligence seriously, we can
imagine that there will be an array of methods and ways to bring that intelligence or
that type of perspective to the table in the design process, as co-ethnographer, co-
designer, as just a way to question maybe certain choices. But I see it very much as
a dialogue, not so much to automate the process, which of course it will happen, but
it's more of a tool.

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Peter Lloyd: The co-performance.

Elisa Giaccardi: The co-performance, the hybrid design partnership. The hybrid
sense-making process.

Peter Lloyd: Because I think in some sense a design process is, it's a c0-
performance in the sense that you when you have other people in the process,
you're trying to work out what form of intelligence they have somehow. It might be
expertise, but it might be, you know, the believability of the things that they say in the
process. And I think the artificial intelligence, it's the same thing. You're trying to
work out what that intelligence can do, you can set it certain problems and it can
solve them within, you know, five hundred milliseconds.

Part 2 Discussion of Interview

Peter Lloyd: So that was Elisa. It was quite a complex and abstract discussion. I
thought it touched on quite a few sort of philosophical issues almost. And I have to
say that I did f$%k up with the recording. I missed the last bit of the discussion.
There was only a little bit more and I did thank Elisa at the end.

Mieke van der Bijl: It did sound like it ended very abruptly!

Peter Lloyd: I wondered what you thought Mieke.

Mieke van der Bijl: It made me think. I really liked her thinking, this is not usually a
way I think about design. And I know you are also interested in the role of
intelligence and artificial intelligence in design methods, because if we're talking
about the future of design methods, I guess I've always been looking at it from the
other side. And it's nice to kind of bring the two sides together. When I say the other
side, I mean that what we've seen over the past 10 years or so is that design has
really expanded in terms of its application areas right? So more in the areas of what
can design do for businesses and for what it can do for society in general. And I've
actually studied how designers are kind of adapting their design methods and

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practices to this new expanded field. But what Elisa was talking about is more how
technology is changing design at the same time. It's actually quite interesting to
compare those things and bring those things together.

Peter Lloyd: It was interesting when you think of a computational future, how many
familiar concepts you can talk about, too. We talked about stakeholders and co-
design in a slightly different way, it adds this different aspect to the discussion in
terms of introducing a different intelligence and the idea of a computer, or
computational intelligence, being a stakeholder in the process. It makes you do a
double-take doesn't it? You know what would that be? One of things I thought right at
the end of the interview there were two concepts that I thought were interesting to
pick up on and that was, one was when you talk about machine learning and
obviously a lot the course has been about learning, you know, learning in the design
process. And the other thing, right at the end, Elisa mentioned the idea of dialogue,
too. And I think there were two of the fundamental things that we wanted to introduce
in the course, the idea that design is this kind of dialogue and also that the design
process is a learning process. I wondered, you know, bending back to the first
podcast about reflective practice, that using computers in this way makes you kind of
reflect on what you're trying to do and what you learn and what other intelligences
learn during the process.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yes, and how that in turn just comes in to those learning loops.

Peter Lloyd: Yeah. And what kind of dialogue you actually have with people?
Because I mean in a sense it is an artificial distinction between people and
computers, because people are very different, too. I think we talked in the interview
about in a co-designed session, you're trying to work out what kind of intelligence
other people can bring into the discussion. Not everyone is equal. Are they trying to,
you know, they bring their expertise in and you in a sense, you're trying to work out
what that expertise can bring and how you can work on the design together.

Mieke van der Bijl: One of the things I was thinking about is I read an article a year
ago about the term artificial intelligence. So when the first car was introduced, it was
not called a car, was called a horseless carriage because they could only compare it
to a carriage with horse. When artificial intelligence was introduced, it's always been
called artificial intelligence. As in, you know, it's similar to what people do. But
actually, it's artificial. It's not that. But if you think about it's really something
fundamentally different because it's not a different version of a human being it just

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brings something else in. If we're talking about dialogues between human beings
and different types of stakeholders and designers and computers, then what does
that type of dialogue really mean? I mean, there's still a lot we need to learn. We're
still learning a lot about dialogue between human beings. Let alone when you bring
other types of intelligence in.

Peter Lloyd: I think looking back over the last maybe 25 years, I mean, since CAD
was introduced in the 70s, we've been used to using computational tools. I think
Elisa mentioned it too, this idea that computers are a tool that we can use and that
we use in a sense to reflect with. We have that kind of dialogue. Especially the more
intelligent CAD these days, it gives you options. You can set a range of parameters
and you can follow a kind of a process that you work with the computer in
developing. What I got from that interview was that we're going up a level here, that
they're not passive tools, they're much more kind of active tools. And actually
computers are participating in the process of design.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah. And it doesn't end, actually. You know, a CAD that's
something you use before the product is there. But here we talk about technology in
the products that's continuously designing and changing.

Peter Lloyd: Exactly, yeah. That was really striking. We know that data is the future
and I think that opens up all kinds of questions about the use of data, the collection
of data, how things collect data and understand human behavior. Those things are
also caught up in the idea that we're trying to... you know, design becomes much
more fluid and diffuse. You know, it's like you're trying to manage this moving stream
of data somehow. A designer of the future is going to have to be able to understand
and kind of manipulate... during the interview I had the feeling that it was much more
like playing. Design will be much more about playing and sort of seeing what
happens but within certain ethical boundaries, I think that's always going to be
something that humans bring, an ethical stance designing.

Mieke van der Bijl: It reminded me of this talk of John Seely Brown from Xerox
PARC when he was talking about how fast society is changing, how fast technology
is changing. And he says we're basically living in exponential times because things
are changing so fast that no one can become an expert in anything and everyone will
always be a newbie. So that's quite a scary thought. But he says all you need to do
in these kind of contexts is that you need to adapt. You need to constantly adapt.
And I think that's what's also happening to design. You know, with these new

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technological developments, we as designers, we need to constantly adapt. And
that's an interesting concept, because what does that mean then for students who
are studying design? You know they're studying these different design methods. But
I think we should also be teaching them, or learning together how we can actually
adapt to a changing world.

Peter Lloyd: Yeah, it's that sense of, I think the term is negative capability where
you're happy in situations that are ambiguous. You can live in those situations and
you can you sort of play with them. You don't get stressed when things aren't
resolved. And I think that's an ability that designers, you know, good design have
that anyway I think. But the idea that a method is this thing that you can grasp hold
of, this kind of life jacket that's going to save you, because it's a very structured
process. Maybe that's not true in the future. That's an old way of designing, that idea
of user-centred design that Elisa was trying to kind of shift away from, the idea that
right in the middle of a process is this set of user needs that you're trying to fulfill.
Once you turn that around and actually the design is all about exploring user
experience and, design is a bit more automated. The abilities and capabilities you
need change quite a lot, I think.

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah. Something that complements that is that in my research,
I'm looking at how designers deal with complexity in the world, not necessarily in
technology, but just that we're dealing with complex societal challenges. And one of
the things that we're seeing is that designers are more and more focused on
relationships between people. Not just users, not just stakeholders, but relationships
between different stakeholders. And the tensions that this causes and the
opportunities. One of the examples is I started this project, which was for primary
school teachers and what we could do to help those teachers do their job better. The
first approach was, well, let's just design a product or something that can help those
individual teachers. But they ended up designing a speed sharing event, an event
where teachers come together, learn from each other, and through that means can
do their job better. So that's a good example of using the relationships between
people.

Peter Lloyd: And I think in a way, you're setting up the conditions for design to
happen.

Mieke van der Bijl: That's exactly right

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Peter Lloyd: That's what I think Elisa was talking about. You know, she talked about
seeding the design process. As a designer you just choose the important things in a
kind of an abstract way. And you set things in motion and then you allow design to
happen somehow. You're not in control of the process. You're kind of in control of
the process because you set up the process. But there are outcomes that you won't
expect.

Mieke van der Bijl: You need to be able to deal with that ambiguity, like you said.
We need to think about the world in a different way. Creating platforms or things that
enable or conditions. I think it also requires humbleness, because if we're not humble
about what we're doing, then we won't really learn. If we're talking about adaptation,
how do you adapt? You adapt by also learning from others, also from other
disciplines, for example. I think the future of design methods, we will also be working
much more with other disciplines and maybe feed into each other's disciplines.

Peter Lloyd: One of the future design methods that Elisa talked about that I thought
was interesting, was to try and understand what's happening from the perspective of
a thing, an observing thing, like a temperature sensor or something that's collecting
data about human behavior, I can't remember what she called it was it digital
ethnography or something?

Mieke van der Bijl: Yeah, I know the work. I think she used a kettle.

Peter Lloyd: Yeah. Yeah. Where it where you're trying to put yourself in the shoes of
a physical thing to understand what it sees as an example of a new method. I think
that that's quite interesting. Exciting times ahead.

Well, it's clear that I mean, the data science aspect of it all and the data that's
generated. What I was quite interested in is when we began to touch on the ethical
aspects and how often ethical aspects come up in this kind of discussion with data.
The final thing that I thought was interesting was the idea of co-performance, too. I
hadn't really come across that term before the interview and I suddenly thought that's
quite a nice way of describing - even design without computers it's quite a nice way
of describing design as a sort of performance. That you're trying to stage something
in setting up a collaborative process. And there is a kind of performance of gestures
and language, and there's a kind of theatre of designing that's implied in that term. I
think it quite accurately captures some of the more physical aspects of designing
somehow?

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Mieke van der Bijl: If design is co-performance are designers more like directors?

Peter Lloyd: Playing roles…

Mieke van der Bijl: Oh they're playing roles, are they actors?

Peter Lloyd: Well it opens up that that metaphor of theatre. It's quite a good one for
design. Yeah, direction and role playing and the dialogue aspect I think comes in
there too.

Mieke van der Bijl: Okay. Acting classes? No, absolutely.

Peter Lloyd: Well I think the third video, I think some of the videos that we've seen,
the students have taken roles and acted out those roles. I've always thought that's a
useful way of trying to understand situations that you haven't experienced is actually
try and put yourself in those shoes. I think a discussion about the future of design
touches on lots of things outside of what you'd naturally think of. I thought the
interview was good in eliciting those discussions.

Mieke van der Bijl: Well the other way to think about it is if we talk about the future
of design, we can see all those changes. But it's also interesting to think about what
is it that will stay? Will we still be designers? What is design? Yeah, I think the more
we're changing, the more we need to clarify what design really is.

Peter Lloyd: Good point to end on. Okay. This is our final podcast.

Mieke van der Bijl: Oh no!

Peter Lloyd: Well we may have we may have one more podcast, just giving our
thoughts on the course. But that probably won't be for a few weeks. But this is the
last content podcast. I've really enjoyed talking about all these subjects. I do think the
podcast is a good way of introducing people to the different aspects of designing.

Mieke van der Bijl: I've really loved making this podcast. I'm definitely going to do it
a lot more in the future. And yeah, I really enjoy the discussions we've had in this
little studio, this little box here.

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Mieke van der Bijl: It's been great, thanks Mieke.

Peter Lloyd: Good fun.

Mieke van der Bijl: Thanks, Peter.

Peter Lloyd: And bye everyone, thanks for listening.

Mieke van der Bijl: Bye!

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