I registered for COMM486J, The Sauder dStudio, because I was intrigued by its name. What would be the course content? What is studio learning? And most importantly, what is design? I trekked trough the first few weeks of class because I was engaged in the course content and inspired by my fellow classmates. And yet I still asked myself – what is design?
What is design?
One often views design as a typical means of prototyping a physical concept. For example, architects are traditional designers, engineers build designs, etc. But what do I, as an OBHR student and aspiring HR consultant, design? Herbert Simon said it best, “all occupations engaged in converting actual to preferred situations are concerned with design.” Brilliant. What Simon and Schon suggest is that designing is not just about building a physical product, it can also be transferred across disciplines and made relevant in the field of commerce as well. Particular to the area of HR consulting, the design process is extremely important. Traditional Human Resources Management is more about the management of a company’s human capital. However, HR consulting spans much greater than management, in fact, it is all about design. Designing HR strategies that are long-term focused and sustainable. Designing HR change management structures that are prototyped in one office and then transferred across the entire organization. Design is evidently an essential part of HR consulting – who would have known?
What is most interesting about Schon’s article is his analysis about the language of designing. The language of designing includes an ample amount of dychtic utterances such as “here”, “this”, “that”, etc. This got me thinking. Does the language of designing, and the usage of this language during the prototyping process, impact the fundamental design process? Conclusion: yes! I realized that the language of design impacts the designer’s perspective during, specifically, the prototyping process. The language of “this/it/etc” puts the designers subconscious in a first person perspective. Lets draw an example from the area of HR consulting. Let’s assume that I’m in charge of redesigning the working space for a bank teller. Let’s put some constraints on the issue: square footage, available of power plugs, safety and distance from the security cameras, distance to the assistant manager’s office, etc. If I approach the design in a first person perspective, I am naturally more inclined to make the design more user friendly. I will avoid designing a process where the employee cannot reach “that cabinet” or is too close to “this coin drawer”, etc. The simple use of designing language can make a designer either more active in the design process (stepping into the employee’s shoes) or more passive (designing a process without being user-centric).
Being an active designer relates to a common design theory called “reflection-in-action”. Active design thinkers always approach a problem with two key mindsets: 1) every problem is unique and as it’s own set of unique characteristics, and 2) past experience is valuable but experimentation is key. An active designer understands his or her limitations with regards to past experiences. They understand that because every problems has an unique set of characteristics, there must be a unique solution to this particular problem. Hence, relying on past design experiences and solutions are valuable but not sufficient enough to gain a best-fit answer. What is valuable is experimentation. Reflecting on the outcomes of each experience, while holding different variables constant, is the key to making subtle alterations to the grand the design that sometimes has significant outcomes.
What is most interesting about this active style of designing is it’s link to innovation. Innovators are commended for being attune to active designing. Continual experiments, using past experiences, trying to fit the best-fit solution to a key of unique issues, and most importantly, for having the uncanny ability to be user centric. User-centric thinking is critical in the world of HR consulting. And being innovative is the basis of consulting isn’t it?! Interesting opportunity there…