Perspective 2.0

#Atemporality : blogging as we go on

Today I claimed my heritage. I was proud to state teh names and achievements of my forbears. For those of you who will read this and understand, remember that these are but fleeting words, here today, gone next week ;p Literally.

Quite.

Moving on. Oh hell, let me tell you a story, a little piece of humanity.

Today, I was humbled to tears when Nandini Lakshman (oh just google her) pointed out my contextual role and place in the complex innards of India's business families. As has been said, size doesn't matter. Kinship ties aer stronger than water.

Open letter to my readers

(thank you, Luke Wroblewski aka LukeW)

I'm probably in deep doo doo, but here goes. I've been struggling with the concept of does "design aid the commoditization of innovation?" since the last few days. And I've talked to everyone I know about it. Now I have to figure out what to say in response to this provocative statement.

Well if you must ask, here is how I would frame the same essential concept in most beneficial to all manner:

Design can aid the transfer of knowledge of innovation and methods across the barriers of culture, contextual knowledge, variations in literacy and language as well as socieconomic strata.

This will be my next self selected problem to solve.

After this post, I will be found either on Core77 or at my little corner of the Aalto Design Factory, Espoo Finland.

That's the good news. The bad news is that this blog is gonna die anyway. Mmm I think the last day is the 23rd of March, 2010. Happy Birthday, mon ami.

A little indulgence

Glamour shots a week before my 44th birthday ;p

Sidewalk superintendents making me laugh

Emerging Futures: dealing with the unknown

I've been silent of late as I've been looking for my voice, I find it changing and not yet bold enough to speak. Emerging Futures Lab is under transition right now and may have a new role to play. After all, our collective emerging future is one that involves each and every one of us, not simply those in the BRIC or the BoP. A concept I've been exploring is looking at 'emerging futures strategy' - how do we deal with the unknown. Perhaps this is the space where the combined toolkits from business and design and engineering can provide us with way to seek solutions?

A video snippet on dealing with unknowns from the UK's Open University program on design thinking.

India: Emerging Leader

Recently, Niti Bhan pointed me in the direction of a blog post by Grant McCracken in which he argues that China is to India as Wal-Mart is to Target.  So I got to thinking about this old debate.

Of all the emerging economies, China and India seem to be compared most frequently, primarily because of their rapid rate of growth and potential for future leadership on the world stage. China has established herself as a formidable power in the manufacturing of mass market consumer goods, hence the comparison to America's Wal-Mart. While this has brought immediate economic success, I and plenty of others question how sustainable this model of fast cheap production really is and what it is that India brings to the table that China does not.

I have always felt that India has greater potential for meaningful success and leadership of world change than China, but the barriers to realising that potential are held systemically within Indian culture. India has a long history of sensitive questioning,  re-intepreting the tangible and the intangible to find new ways of looking at the world and surviving in it. This adaptability, in my opinion, is the key ingredient for successful innovation and leadership. The ability to respond to challenges and seize opportunities with intellectual sensitivity lends itself to thoughtful solutions in design and business to meet the needs of a wide range of audiences at home and, perhaps, abroad.

But, after living in India for some time, I struggle to reconcile the corruption there and the cultural forces in India that keep some advancing in life and others down. This is as great a barrier to successful leadership as innovative thinking is to enabling success. More importantly, it prevents a lot of good work from being completed or even seeing the light of day. I have asked myself why I care so much and if I am imposing my Western view of 'fairness' on a situation where it is neither relevant nor appropriate. Perhaps India's unwritten system works just fine as an ecosystem of its own. And who am I to say it should be otherwise and impose my own solution when there is plenty wrong with my own country?

Part of what's wrong with my own country is that it is a shell of a society that is no longer able to produce necessities to sustain itself. England always relied in the Empire, fair enough. But America once could take care of itself. Now it is a nation of foreign consumers and most of them don't think twice about where their stuff comes from. So, are Target consumers any more concerned with where or what their purchases come from than Wal-Mart consumers?

Form>Function>Understanding = Designer's perspective

Hm, feels like I finally figured it all out. Let's take a moment to back in time to what LukeW drew on his wall: (sorry for grabbing it whole but you did frame it so well :)

Designing with Vision

March 8, 2007by Luke Wroblewski

This week I caught a talk by Philip Haine from Obvious Design about Designing with Vision. Philip outlined how some products that seem to ignore the "best practices" of design turn out to be breakthroughs, while others that are designed by the book suffer from mediocrity. He also addressed why product design processes often suffer from have radically shifting requirements. According to Philip the answers lie in understanding product vision:

• Product vision is the missing discipline (marketing, design, development, etc.) in the product creation process. It has a profound effect on the outcome, is a source of innovation, and can override design quality.
• A solid product vision makes requirement gathering easy and gives clear guidance to design decisions.

Defining Vision

• Vision is a loose term but its outcomes are quite tangible: better designs, smoother process, and break through products
• Vision is a high-level requirement
• Vision is the selection of which problem to solve. It means making a choice
• Vision is a way to define a problem as a set of needs you are trying to address
• Creating a vision is a design process
• Every product has a vision whether implicitly or explicitly stated

The Design Pyramid

• Design: the only piece of pyramid that is visible to users
• Requirements: the specifications of what a product must accomplish
• Vision: the definition of a problem by which needs you are trying to solve
• Understanding: research or intuition about those needs
• It’s a pyramid because all layers above depend on what is below them
• Design is hard because there is so much invisible stuff that feeds into it (requirements, vision, understanding)
• For good design to happen you need the groundwork to be done
• If you have a clear idea of vision & requirements, the design just kind of pops out or reveals itself
• The design pyramid applies to functional design problems (not aesthetic issues)
• Requirements shift so frequently because new insights come in at the understanding layer
• The pyramid is recursive: it is set for a product but also applies to each feature within the product
• Disruptive innovation happens at Vision & Understanding levels

Bad Design

• The right product vision can override the design layer, but it rarely happens the other way around
• Products that use the right best practices may turn out mediocre while those that break the rules may become runaway hits
• If they are missing the discipline of vision, even the best design processes can’t help.
• Product vision & research is the driver (golf metaphor). Usability testing is the putter. [This was eloquently stated by Jim Leftwich on Functioning Form]

USN Scenarios:

• Used to understand the needs that build a vision
• User: customer/stakeholder
• Situation: or context or characteristic
• Need: that results from user+ situation
• Situation answers why something is needed and by whom
• USN scenarios separate the problem from the solution
• Need to be concise: necessary and sufficient

Applied Design Thinking

DF conversation with Lassi A Liikanen, circa 3rd February 2010

This post will continue but lets start the conversation on practice of design thinking instead of definition. Great, we wanna do it. Now what? Comments? Thoughts? Your perspective, experiences and/or point of view? Lets cocreate this conversation/observation.

Ok, I can program in Basic

In fact it just struck me that I sometimes write using Basic syntax - giggles like an idiot *rolls eyes* - so I don't know if my weird trend of posts of late, nothing even remotely BoP like would lose me a bunch of followers/subscribers? Oh well, who knows, there will be the usual shrinkage when I switch back to www.nitibhan.co on my 44th birthday. Four years too late, but I'm kinda semi retired from fieldwork now.

Otoh, I have an excellent team of user researchers in the emerging growth markets of the future, mainly women (who rock) so don't let the above make you hesitate to contact me.

On Silence,

Harvester of Open Minds by Ariel Brierly

Dancing in between - cultures, identities, roles, languages - and living in liminality have been core themes in my explorations of creation and innovation, uncertainty and future. As one more culture seeps through, it shows me the role of silence, the inbetween, you could say, of the dancing motes of conversation that I once found to be the heart of the Eureka moment or "aha".

From September 2005,

From the Greek limnos, meaning "threshold," liminality describes an in-between time when what was, is no longer, and what will be, is not yet. It is a time rich with ambiguity, uncertainty, and the possibility of creative fomentation.

And from October 2005,

I further posit that, then, if the above is true, the indefinable "magic", the unknowable "eureka", are the actual moments when the brainstorming session begins, and the collaborative voices of the design team, talking back and forth to each other, shaping and tweaking each other's verbalized prototype thoughts and concepts, brings to life innovation. So while design, alone, may not be the whole answer, design, however is a significant part of the answer. As in chemistry, the catalyst, design in this case, or designers to be factual, trigger the eureka process. Hence, it works when designers alone are working together on a problem, and it works even better when design teams collaborate with their client's teams, hybrids, if you will, to act as the catalyzer in the mix of ingredients for the chemical reaction to begin. And that is why, many directors of design (that we'd interviewed for a forthcoming article on core77) at client firms emphasized the need for "the right chemistry" and building relationships. It is as simple as having faith in the vendor to deliver the promised goods. With the word "promise" being key.

The thinking seems outdated, in some respects I've evolved beyond the need to look at business profitability alone and now consider aspects in a holistic manner, in terms of systems of things but there seems to be a hint that I need to go back and reread and rethink and rewrite, to bring uptodate the seeds that seem to still echo value.

So, to punctuate the silence,

Design, is inherently a philosophy or a system of values first, and it's implementation, in whatever form, second.

Essence encapsulated 2010

Holistic solutions for the collective future will require a multidisciplinary approach and a flexible mindset. One that is open to new ways of making, doing, creating. One that is willing to seek solutions from any and all sources, allowing for the give and take of knowledge. One that will look for solutions that can address the needs of people and the planet not simply the profits that are crucial to every business. ~ Design for an Emerging World, July 2007, written for the Torino World Design Capital 2008 website