Camden Council (Design Group Project) Dropbox

In the very first Design lecture, we explored the logic behind good and bad design examples, which gave us an initial idea of what design actually is. Designing does not only mean giving form to physical objects, but also to abstract challenges, such as designing a process for Camden to engage the local community in a dialogue about changes in the built environment. It’s a creative, messy and squiggly process towards a desired outcome. Design thinking, a term shaped by Tim Brown, enables innovation “by a thorough understanding of what people want and need in their lives”1. Throughout the essay, theoretical design concepts are put into context through examples from the team’s experience gained during the Planning Sprint with Camden Council.

The Creative Design Process

1 Tim Brown, ‘Design Thinking’, Harvard Business Review 86, no. 6 (June 2008): 84–92.

2 The 4 key phases of the design process can be visualized by the double diamond shape. From: http://dstudio.ubc.ca/toolkit/processes/

The ‘Double Diamond’

Divergent thinking: Collecting lots of information and generating lots of ideas by reviewing many sources and exploring many possible solutions.

Convergent thinking: Reviewing an array of information and possible solutions in order to bear down on a problem and begin to answer it with increased specificity and precision.

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Visualisation of the ‘double diamond’ design process and its four phases

Note: the design of each subsequent page indicates whether or not the phase involves divergent (<) or convergent (>) thinking.

3 Lucy Kimbell, The Service Innovation Handbook: Action-‐Oriented Creative Thinking Toolkit for Service Organizations, 1 edition (Bis Publishers, 2015).

The problem space needs to be well-defined in order to focus research efforts. For example, Camden Council specified the problem as a service problem of missing interaction during the planning of the built environment – Camden residents find it hard to communicate their opinion regarding new

applications just as the council finds it hard to gather satisfactory application feedback.

Hence the first step is to discover the problem space. What’s the team’s current understanding of the actors and the ecosystem they are in? How does the service process look in detail? Furthermore, visualizing drivers of change helps to gather team knowledge, reveals potential disagreement and lack of knowledge.3

To gain further understanding of the problem, access any related data bases on the

topic, like surveys or industry reports. Next, go out into the field to check if your previous thoughts hold true in practice. During the Planning Sprint our team, the “researchers”, interviewed Richard Simpson, a Camden resident and former planning officer. We tried to mine as much qualitative data as possible about his experience interacting with the council and the planning process, his personal story and motivation by simply using pen and paper. Recording the interview with his permission allowed us to revisit key . remarks. Our two main outputs included raw data for a persona (who he is, his

Phase 1 – Discover by Researching Experiences

abilities, hobbies, etc.) and a user experience map. Alongside, we were able to better clarify the problem space, allowing us to focus on what’s driving the issue at hand. Written on post-its, this is what the persona and user journey map looked like:


Creating personas to better understand how individuals interact with the planning process

Example of one of the created personas developed the discover phase



Another example of one of the created personas developed the discover phase

4 Simon Roberts, Guest Lecture on User Research (BASE King’s Cross, 2016).

Challenges & opportunities for managers

Among the key challenges are the depth of the problem space and objectivity in research. Regarding the former, service problems consist of many aspects that determine how good or bad the user experience turns out. Given resource limitations, managers need to decide on what sensible limit(s) to set in the problem

space and where. From guest lecturer Simon Roberts (Stripe Partners), experienced design research consultants are constantly challenged by objectively gathering user data. According to him, practice in foreign cultures, an ethnographic perspective and being “child-like” facilitates objective, user-centered research.

The main opportunity for managers lies in revealing reasons to the problem previously unseen or unthought-of. The idea to go out and enter the user's natural environment enabled Stripe Partners to, for example, understand the subtle needs for batteries when camping. “When you go camping with a group of people, you can get your eyes and ears and senses focused on a whole range of things that are involved in that [the problem].”4


The second step is defining insights about how people experience changes to the built environment and the Planning process. Here, we start focusing on a specific target group and generate informed ideas targeting them. Switching to a convergent thinking process depends on finding patterns across the raw data coming from different sources and expressing it systematically. For this purpose, we categorized user groups based on their level of interest and engagement in the Planning process using a working framework. This visual tool was key for deciding which user group to prioritize. We recognized the opportunity for delivering a scheme that overcomes the barriers that keep the small business owners, our team’s target group, who have a high interest in Planning, from engaging with the process.

After defining the problem space with a focus on our target group comes a creative stage of idea generation. When researchers have a limited understanding of the stakeholders in a problem, the ideas are limited to being educated guesses. Co-design was the method we used for developing a real understanding of the users and confronting ideas with the real world for the first time. We collaborated with Lucy Kimbell, whose father owned a corner shop and we had the opportunity to map out a typical day of a small business owner. It was more than a unilateral learning experience; it was a reflective interaction that helped us capture a new way of looking at the problem.

Phase 2 – Define for moving from insights to ideas


Working framework for people’s experiences with planning

5 Dorst, K. (2015: 52-53) Frame innovation: Create new thinking by design. United States: MIT Press.

Our conversation gradually developed into a “reframing” activity. Kees Dorst says that “The most logical way to approach a paradoxical problem situation is to work backward: starting from the only “known” in the equation, the desired value, and then adopting or developing a frame that is new to the problem situation.”5 We started off with our desired value as getting small business owners engaged in Planning, but after finding out the positive dialogue the shop owner has with his regular customers, we discovered a new opportunity: getting both groups engaged by using shop owners to bridge the gap between the council and the local residents. The co-design workshop helped us reframe our problem situation around this new desired value and turn our immature ideas into tangible concepts after which we started sketching out concepts as a preparation for the next phase – Develop. Challenges & opportunities for managers

Categorizing raw information is hardly ever a binary process since the information comes in very fragmented and unstructured forms. It is also challenging for managers to engage in co-design activities since it is usually very difficult to find users who are willing to take part. Defining the problem space helps managers to get a clear view on the challenges their business faces. Managers can also highly benefit from using an approach similar to co-design, since working with the stakeholders (customers/employees) to generate ideas results in much more thorough solutions.


6 Hasso Plattner, ‘Experiment Mixtape. Advancing Your Solution via Prototyping’ (StanfordDesign School, February 2012) 7 Shops visited on 3rd February 2016: Ben’s House, Jai news, Sport Nutrition

The development phase is all about prototyping, which is the process of turning the messy, squiggly conceptual ideas and explorations in phase 2 from the mind into the physical world. For designers, it is an iterative process centered around building different low-fidelity versions (MVP) of the idea which would allow users to experience and react to them.6

After identifying the target personas (small business owners), each member of our seminar group generated a unique prototype for their concept. We saw the prototypes taking on various physical forms like drawings, colourful post-it notes and so on. However, the prototype with Lego humans standing on a colourful hand-drawn A3 paper grabbed everyone’s attention immediately. From this, we found out that prototypes allowing user manipulation and interaction are most effective for collecting feedbacks. Therefore, we improved the concept idea and created a second prototype for the design game by re-drawing the playing field, keeping the Lego humans and included colourful post-it notes that users could pick up and move. These interactions would allow designers to gain empathy insights and learn about the further possibilities at minimal costs.

Our prototype design game served as an extremely efficient tool to engage users’ interest, initiate the conversation and reduce miscommunications. Our team visited 3 shops7 and experienced little inconvenience in engaging the shop owners because the interviewees were generally willing to engage with our prototype.

Phase 3 – Develop through prototyping


Evidence of engaging with target personas, for example small business owners

Interacting with the public and receiving feedback on our prototypes

8 Quote from Camden resident recorded on 5th February 2016 at BASE KX

Challenges & opportunities for managers

Prototypes are intended to be further developed, therefore it should be generated quickly at a low cost. Thus, a challenge for managers is to not focus too much on specific features, hence spending excess time or resources on building prototypes therefore delaying the development process and increasing costs. Another potential challenge for managers is that users might think that the prototype is the finalized system, and therefore expects the system to be perfect or become too attached to ideas which were only included in the prototype for consideration purposes. Opportunities for managers include allowing them to turn their ideas into interactive ones. As users tend to not have time or don’t want to think about complex concepts, managers can turn dull text into interactive prototypes, which lets users understand the concept better, hence yielding more detailed feedbacks. Prototypes could be a powerful tool for managers, for instance, after our interviews with the Camden residences, one of the participants said that “I feel like I have spoken out and expressed my opinion so much more just now than what I would usually”8, and this was because the prototype represented an efficient and comfortable channel for communication and feedback.


9 ‘Co-‐design and prototyping’ presentation, UCL Guest Lecture: Jocelyn Bailey (Uscreates), 02/02/16

As we move from the development to delivery phase we return to convergent thinking. Once feedback from prototyping ideas has been gathered and acted upon we are able to focus on how best to present our proposed solution. The delivery phase is about clearly and concisely explaining a concept. You must show that the design brief has been met whilst demonstrating that you have carefully considered all factors regarding the environment and actors within the ecosystem.

Phase 4 – Concept synthesis and delivery

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Elaboration of what the ‘delivery’ phase of the ‘double diamond’ design process entails

10 Madsbjerg, C. and Rasmussen, M.B. (2014) The moment of clarity: Using the human sciences to solve your toughest business problems. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press: 63

z

Christian Madsbjerg, of Red Associates, recalls how managers tend to view creative design: “…[they] don’t care about small incremental ideas… [they] want ideas that are crazy, weird, and never ever seen before. Ideas have to be really, really new.”10 And that’s something that delivery must consider. Not just taking these messy, squiggly ideas and presenting them, but displaying these originally squiggly ideas, as developed, widely considered, plausible and coherent concepts.

In our case, delivery took place in the form of verbal presentations using visual aids– these ranged from PowerPoint presentations to hand drawn diagrams and adapted prototypes. Each team of approximately six presented at least twice to members of the Camden Council and a range of other people committed to understanding how to better encourage engagement with the planning process:


Image taken from the Camden Council website

11 Tim Brown, ‘Design Thinking’, Harvard Business Review June 2008: 4

After the presentation, the floor was opened to a short Q&A session where the council and others interested or involved with planning were able to ask questions and offer feedback. I found this very useful. It really allowed us to interact with the council, explain how our concepts had come into fruition and emphasize how our ideas could increase engagement with planning. Receiving feedback was also key as it allowed us to reconsider our idea from different angles. Despite this being the delivery phase, design still remains an iterative process. As Tim Brown of IDEO, an award-winning design innovation consultancy firm, says: “Projects will loop back through these [key phases of the design process]... more than once as ideas are refined and new directions taken.”11


Example of us delivering our proposed solutions to Camden Council

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Challenge & Opportunities for Managers Sometimes a challenge for managers can simply be saying no. It is common for management teams to invest substantially in enlisting creative design aid. For this reason, managers can come under pressure to back an idea in order to justify their investment. It is important to consider that the delivered concepts are intended to inspire and change the board’s perspective, not necessarily to be implemented exactly as they are. A key benefit of delivery is that it allows managers to not just consider proposed concepts, but also the ways in which these ideas can be further improved and/or combined with one another. Management teams have the opportunity to amalgamate intelligent, smaller ideas into extensive solutions with wider scopes.


Bibliography

1.) Tim Brown, ‘Design Thinking’, Harvard Business Review 86, no. 6 (June 2008): 84–92. 2.) ‘Design Processes, The University of British Columbia’, accessed 6 March 2016, http://dstudio.ubc.ca/toolkit/processes/. 3.) Lucy Kimbell, The Service Innovation Handbook: Action-Oriented Creative Thinking Toolkit for Service Organizations, 1 edition (Bis Publishers, 2015). 4.) Simon Roberts, Guest Lecture on User Research (BASE King’s Cross, 2016). 5.) Kees Dorst, Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015): 52-53. 6.) Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen, Moment of Clarity (Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014). 7.) Hasso Plattner, ‘Experiment Mixtape. Advancing Your Solution via Prototyping’ (Stanford Design School, February 2012), http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/experiment-mixtape-v8.pdf.

Quotations/photos from members of public (with permission):

- Quote from Camden resident recorded on 5th February 2016 at BASE KX - Shops visited on 3rd February 2016: Ben’s House, Jai news, Sport Nutrition

Word count (excluding titles and captions): 1978 words

Documents

Camden Council (Design Group Project) Dropbox