Design ... Dialogue
She was about 25 with a quiet, intent face. He was much older and apparently bored. They were in a group of 30 government employees who still had one foot out the door. I was their facilitator and my job was to help them reflect on the results of some recent customer research.
He says out loud:
This is a distraction. You could have saved yourself the trouble by asking the guys who really know the job. We’ll tell you about customers.
She looks straight ahead, blinking.
I say:
If I asked you about your customers, each of you might give me a different story and meaning. If we hear directly from customers, then we’re walking the same ground.
I survive the first round.
The mood begins to lift when morning tea arrives. Then people start to enjoy the tasks: translating the research summaries into problems-to-solve, written in their own words, brightened by sketches and cardboard sculptures. Small groups brainstorm and sort ideas and start to consider solutions that are key, complementary, and alternative, and what’s necessary to make them work.
The older guy is working with the younger woman and seems to enjoy watching her sketch out his thoughts. He asks her what she’s drawn and what it means, then shares how he reads it. He points out issues in the organisation that affect outcomes he cares about, and she has some ideas about how technology could help the processes.
When everyone leaves, I wonder whether he’s learnt something new and important about his customers. I understand his perspective, insofar as he is a technical expert. For him, the job is less about dialogue, more about direction.
In my work, small stories of finding new pathways together happen a lot. What first inspired me about design thinking was the possibility that governments and enterprises could open themselves to real dialogue. This dialogue might not only generate marketable value, but encourage the inter-relationships of people who participate in a service ecosystem. It's a very human desire to create, to explore, and to share what’s good with others.
Design is a mode of learning, and the design we enjoyed that day was an educational experience, one of creative learning together.
He says out loud:
This is a distraction. You could have saved yourself the trouble by asking the guys who really know the job. We’ll tell you about customers.
She looks straight ahead, blinking.
I say:
If I asked you about your customers, each of you might give me a different story and meaning. If we hear directly from customers, then we’re walking the same ground.
I survive the first round.
The mood begins to lift when morning tea arrives. Then people start to enjoy the tasks: translating the research summaries into problems-to-solve, written in their own words, brightened by sketches and cardboard sculptures. Small groups brainstorm and sort ideas and start to consider solutions that are key, complementary, and alternative, and what’s necessary to make them work.
The older guy is working with the younger woman and seems to enjoy watching her sketch out his thoughts. He asks her what she’s drawn and what it means, then shares how he reads it. He points out issues in the organisation that affect outcomes he cares about, and she has some ideas about how technology could help the processes.
When everyone leaves, I wonder whether he’s learnt something new and important about his customers. I understand his perspective, insofar as he is a technical expert. For him, the job is less about dialogue, more about direction.
In my work, small stories of finding new pathways together happen a lot. What first inspired me about design thinking was the possibility that governments and enterprises could open themselves to real dialogue. This dialogue might not only generate marketable value, but encourage the inter-relationships of people who participate in a service ecosystem. It's a very human desire to create, to explore, and to share what’s good with others.
Design is a mode of learning, and the design we enjoyed that day was an educational experience, one of creative learning together.
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration … into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed