Design dis-integration Silent, Partial, and Disparate Design

Michael Porter’s frameworks for analysing and planning competitive differentiation (Porter 1980, 1985) are established ‘textbook’ tools, widely taught to business students today. As the claim of design’s strategic importance is increasingly heard, we ask where does design fit in established strategy thinking? This paper documents a proposed conceptual model based on Porter’s value chain model for strategic planning. The concept outlined is the result of the first stage of a larger study of design’s potential role at strategic level and the difficulties faced by organisations in exploiting design strategically. This exploratory phase comprised a review of literature on design management and models of strategy, followed by nineteen interviews with senior design professionals. These then informed a novel revision of the value chain diagram reflecting the strategic role of design, and the identification of three key phenomena concerning design integration (silent design, partial design and disparate design). These phenomena are also represented in modified versions of the value chain. This overall project follows a research approach based on the design research method and on procedural action research, and aims to develop a tool or method to help organisations increase design integration. This project is ongoing, and the results will be published separately. Keywords: Strategic; value chain; silent; partial; disparate; integrated</p

Reading across boundaries: interdisciplinary scholarship in design research

This paper promotes the use of scholarly approaches to design research, especially the practice of reading across disciplinary boundaries. By examining three completed projects, the benefits of interdisciplinary scholarship will be demonstrated along with a discussion of how the literature review process can be treated as a qualitative research project in its own right

Resilience: A multi-stakeholder perspective

Socio-technical systems are often designed with the explicit intention that those systems will exhibit ‘resilience’ in the face of unpredictable change. But there is often great uncertainty about what resilience really means in this context and how it can be achieved. This paper explores what can be learnt about resilience by eliciting, combining and contrasting the perspectives of multiple stakeholders of a socio-technical system. Communicating about resilience is challenging because the term means different things to different people, both within and across domains. Therefore, in this study a system mapping exercise was used with stakeholders in one-to-one interviews to structure conversations about resilience. The system maps produced with stakeholders were used to analyse the system according to three characteristics of resilience. The findings of the study draw out key themes, including the way in which stakeholders’ perspectives are influenced by their ideas about system boundary, system purpose and system timescale. This gives rise to a better understanding of the nature of change in socio-technical systems and how to design for the resilience of such systems

From modularity to emergence: a primer on the design and science of complex systems

Electrical networks, flocking birds, transportation hubs, weather patterns, commercial organisations, swarming robots... Increasingly, many of the systems that we want to engineer or understand are said to be ‘complex’. These systems are often considered to be intractable because of their unpredictability, non-linearity, interconnectivity, heterarchy and ‘emergence’. Such attributes are often framed as a problem, but can also be exploited to encourage systems to efficiently exhibit intelligent, robust, self-organising behaviours. But what does it mean to describe systems as complex? How do these complex systems differ from the more easily understood ‘modular’ systems that we are familiar with? What are the underlying similarities between different systems, whether modular or complex? Answering these questions is a first step in approaching the design and science of complexity. However, to do so, it is necessary to look beyond the specifics of any particular system or field of study. We need to consider the fundamental nature of systems, looking for a common way to view ostensibly different phenomena. This primer introduces a domain-neutral framework and diagrammatic scheme for characterising the ways in which systems are modular or complex. Rather than seeing modularity and complexity as inherent attributes of systems, we instead see them as ways in which those systems are characterised by those who are interested in them. The framework is not tied to any established mode of representation (e.g. networks, equations, formal modelling languages) nor to any domain-specific terminology (e.g. ‘vertex’, ‘eigenvector’, ‘entropy’). Instead, it consists of basic system constructs and three fundamental attributes of modular system architecture, namely structural encapsulation, function-structure mapping and interfacing. These constructs and attributes encourage more precise descriptions of different aspects of complexity (e.g. emergence, self-organisation, heterarchy). This allows researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to share methods, theories and findings related to the design and study of different systems, even when those systems appear superficially dissimilar

Representing artefacts as media : modelling the relationship between designer intent and consumer experience

The design literature contains many diagrammatic models that represent the relationship between how designers intend artefacts to be experienced and how they are subsequently experienced by consumers, users and other stakeholders. Despite the prevalence of such models, they remain largely disconnected from each other, both within and across design disciplines, and also disconnected from the models of communication whose basic structure they share. The existing models are therefore difficult to locate and useful conceptual developments are often overlooked. The consequences of this are that unnecessary effort is expended in developing representations that duplicate those that already exist or new models are developed from inappropriate foundations. To address such issues, this article reviews many of the existing models that can be found in the different disciplines that comprise the fields of communication and design. The most pertinent features of these models are extracted and synthesised into a generic communication-based model of design. This acts as both a guide to what the existing models emphasise and an integrated foundation from which future models might be developed

To Copy or Not to Copy: The Influence of Instructions in Design Fixation Experiments

Design fixation experiments often require participants to solve a design problem whilst being exposed to an example solution and instructions for how to treat that example. However, little is known about the influence of such instructions, leading to difficulties in interpreting results and understanding how the introduction of examples affects idea generation. In our experiment, participants were all provided with the same design problem and example solution, but were presented with different instructions, ranging from strongly encouraging copying the example to strongly discouraging copying. Analyses of participants’ work indicated that only the instructions encouraging copying had an effect. When encouraged to copy, participants tended to only copy the structural features of the example rather than the underlying concept. By contrast, the number of features copied was not reduced when participants were discouraged from copying. These findings suggest that there are subtle interactions between instructions and stimuli that influence design fixation

The effect of explicit instructions in idea generation studies

AbstractIn inspiration and fixation experiments, example designs are often provided along with the instructions for how participants should treat them. However, research has not reached a consensus about the influence of such instructions, leading to difficulties in understanding how the examples and the instructions each affect idea generation. We conducted an experiment in which 303 participants designed for the same design problem, while given different examples and instructions, which ranged from strongly encouraging copying the examples to strongly discouraging copying. Exposure to the examples affected the number and type of ideas generated, whereas exposure to the instructions did not. However, instructions did affect how participants incorporated features of the examples in their ideas. Encouraged groups incorporated many features of the examples, while also incorporating structural features more than conceptual ones. Surprisingly, the incorporation of features in discouraged groups was not different from that of groups given no instructions or even no stimulus. This indicates that concrete features may be easier to recognize and reproduce than abstract ones, and that encouraging instructions are more effective than discouraging ones, despite how strict or lenient those instructions are. The manipulation of different features also allowed us to observe how similar approaches to solving a design problem can compete for attention and how the calculation of feature repetition can be misleading depending on how common or obvious the features might be. These findings have implications for the interpretation of results from fixation studies, and for the development of design tools that present stimuli to assist idea generation.</jats:p