There are a number of elements that are common and fundamental to a solid design education. These include studio courses, a combination of methods, theory, and practice, small class sizes, and room for growth through informed trial and error. But what about producing founders, entrepreneurs who will start their own companies to drive social change through interaction design?

You’ll typically find the founder-model of education in business schools, where students end their programs with a pitch or “demo day” that displays their new idea to a group of potential investors. How about combining this with a user-centered approach to social innovation?

In this article, I’ll describe the intent of this approach we have at the Austin Centre for Design (AC4D), articulate some of the results, and offer some reflections on challenges I see our alumni — and future designer-entrepreneurs — facing as they continue to push their companies forward.

The Intent: Disruption

In a word, the intent of our educational model is disruption. At AC4D, we intend to empower our alumni to make a difference in the world, using the persuasive, thoughtful, and provocative ualities of design (or “design thinking” combined with “design doing”) as the mechanism. We feel strongly that design is a powerful force in shaping human behavior and culture, and that this force can be directed. The qualities of this discipline are largely evident and embraced in our corporations – look no further than the humanization of technology offered by Apple, and our willingness to celebrate their every new product launch. Apple asks, and elegantly answers, a question: how can we best design technology to support a popular culture and lifestyle?

But there’s another question that we ask, and strive to answer, and this question is more important: what should we design, in the first place?

But there’s another question that we ask, and strive to answer, and this question is more important: what should we design, in the first place?

The answer to this is disruptive, and controversial, for three reasons.

First, it implies that we can (and must) place a value judgment on our productive efforts as designers, and that not everything is equally worth our time and attention. Put another way, it implies that we must judge the value of a design. We’ve all likely heard that it’s “not ok to judge”, or that we “shouldn’t be so judgmental.” And if design work is judged at all, it’s commonly evaluated based on superficial qualities of aesthetics. Instead, let’s provoke our students to find their own answers to this question, and to examine the societal value of a design.

The answer may be difficult and threatening. It pokes at our careers, and for many of us, our careers are representations of ourselves. But if we recognize the power of design, and also recognize the finite length of our careers, we arrive at an interesting place – a place that demands we focus only on the most pressing, demanding, important, and critical work.
Consider that, in your career, you have about forty or fifty good, productive years to work.
Should you really be focused on creating a new UI for a thermostat? A new facade for a banking website? A new operating system for a mobile phone? Or are there other things – things that are more financially, culturally, or spiritually more valuable – that you could, and should, be doing?

Second, by questioning if all design efforts are equally valid, we force a conversation of cultural relativity, perspective, and shares values. We spend a lot of time discussing the qualities of values, morals, norms and ethics. We examine examples from other cultures, learn about and practice methods of empathy through ethnography, and discuss and debate the various methods of “designing with” vs. “designing for.” Again, these are challenging conversations. They threaten our views of a marketplace with produced goods and obedient consumers, they challenge the view of designer as rockstar or god, and they fundamentally change the skills a designer needs to be successful. If we are empowering others to design with us, the things we make, tools we use, and way we talk about our work changes dramatically. It’s not about “making the perfect thing” – it’s about providing enough tools that other people can make their perfect thing.

Finally, our initial question – what should we design, in the first place – alters the conversation about “career.” When we start to question the fundamentals of our industry and the economic system that contains it, we arrive quickly at a rejection of “corporate vs. consultancy”, “job titles”, and the other baggage of our jobs. Our students may still end up in traditional jobs, but our ideal outcome is that they go on to form their own paths by starting their own for-profit or double-bottom line enterprises. We emphasize financial independence, where students can support their operational costs and avoid the pitfalls of traditional nonprofits with their endless cycle of grants. This requires fundamentals in accounting, budgeting, and estimating demand – all skills taught in business skills, but things rarely covered in design courses. And it requires a degree of confidence, something that’s hard to teach in any program.

The Results: Four Successful Companies

Our process has been successful. In our first year, we converted four projects into companies. These are described, briefly, below.

• Patient Nudge
  After observing the limited time and resources case workers have to manage an increasingly large at-risk population, Ryan Hubbard and Christina Tran developed an online compliance and persistence tool. This tool – Patient Nudge – allows a care provider to automatically check in with a large population via SMS, aggregate results into compelling visualizations, and identify outliers in the data.
• Hour School
  Through participatory design research, Ruby Ku and Alex Pappas observed a dramatic change in self-esteem when the chronically homeless were empowered to teach something to their peers. The homeless have skills – often robust technical skills, such as information technology or medical abilities – yet are rarely provided an opportunity to utilize these skills in support of one another. Ruby and Alex developed Hour School, an online service that identifies people in your social network who can teach specific skills, and helps support the creation of impromptu classes.
• OneUp
  As Kristine Mudd learned more about the homeless teenagers in Austin through immersive research, she identified a particular at-risk group – teenage girls – as exhibiting signs of low self esteem. This lack of confidence made simple tasks – like opening a bank account or applying for a drivers license – seem impossible. She developed OneUp, an online tool that breaks down these tasks into small, manageable pieces, rewards the girls for completing these tasks, and shows them a sense of measurable progress.
• Pocket Hotline
  While conducting ethnographic research at a local shelter, Chap Ambrose and Scott Magee observed an overwhelmed and poorly trained desk attendant try to answer a variety of questions about services and operations. Through a process of prototyping and testing, they’ve developed Pocket Hotline, a distributed call center application that routes customer support calls to volunteers’ personal cellphones. They’ve spun off a variant of Pocket Hotline for the Ruby On Rails community — Rails Hotline —  which has generated some great press.

Nudge Project

The Challenges: Sustained Focus

I’m excited to see our educational model leading to success, and I hope other design programs begin to tackle some of the fundamental issues I’ve described above. But as I reflect on our first year, there’s one main challenge that I see in combining interaction design with social entrepreneurship. That challenge is on sustaining the focus, passion and interest of our students after they graduate.

Roger Martin describes the knowledge funnel as a progression from mystery to algorithm. Designers (and other passionate, curious people) look at the way things are, see a mystery, and wonder how they can unpack it, understand it, fix it, or improve it. Good businesses manage to package their efforts into an offering, and then duplicate this offering over and over and over. This emphasizes efficiency, with a focus on cheaper, better, faster. Martin notes that designers typically lose interest once the mystery is gone; for them, the most exciting and interesting part is solving the problem, not operationalizing their solution.

And this poses a problem for designers acting as entrepreneurs: how can they remain focused, passionate, and excited during the process of packaging, refining, detailing, and producing the actual offering?

Wow can designers acting as entrepreneurs remain focused, passionate, and excited during the process of packaging, refining, detailing, and producing the actual offering?

Our students ended their education with working prototypes of their ideas, and with a roadmap towards a successful commercial launch. But that roadmap requires months of hard work, always with an eye on an idealized end state and with blinders on to the churn and chaos of the world around them. And simply, this focus is hard. Very hard. Incubation efforts exist to help, and we’ve explored our own formalization of incubation. But fundamentally, this seems like the largest challenge for programs like ours, and it’s a problem I look to the community for help and support in solving. How can we better support design-driven entrepreneurs as they formalize their companies, drive towards their vision, and act to drive large-scale behavioral changes? What support structures, services, and new tools can we offer them as they pursue their dreams?

I’m proud to be a part of what’s emerging as the new design, a form of design that’s rigorous, empathetic, and magical. This new form of design helps to disrupt conservative models of commerce, and rejects assumptions related to “career path.” I hope we can help formulate community-driven guidance for the new generation of entrepreneurs, those focused on social change and on bringing innovation to problems worth solving.

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Header image CC David Roessli

This month Jon Kolko’s newest book ‘Exposing the Magic of Design’ will be released. It focuses on design synthesis: a way of thinking about complicated, multifaceted problems of this scale with a repeatable degree of success. In this article Jon shows us what it’s all about.

The Backstory

With the help of publications like Businessweek and Harvard Business Review, ethnographic research has become increasingly familiar to those in the business of innovation – generally, those engaged in new product development embrace research as a mechanism for arriving at a new product, system, or service. Not all agree on the power of the research in large-scale change, however, and the ever-provocative Don Norman stirred quite a controversy with his article Technology First, Needs Last . In this article, Don leads with the succinct: “I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.” The response from Bruce Nussbaum – one of those responsible for bringing an awareness of design to a larger audience through the publication Businessweek – was vehement: “So it is within an intellectual spirit when I say that Don Norman draws erroneous conclusions from the weirdest atavistic analysis I’ve seen in a decade.”

A year later, I offer an observation to both Don and Bruce: as you assess where innovation comes from, you have both overlooked a critical element of the design process, one that fundamentally connects research to form-giving, and one that is repeatable, methodical, rigorous, and dependant on a reflective, immersive, and rich relationship with culture and society. Design Synthesis is where innovation comes from, and it has both a rich history of both theory and method. Unfortunately, neither the method or the theoretical underpinnings are commonly taught or discussed, and so most designers and only a very few engaged in business and technology have acquired a formal way of entering into synthesis, embracing the chaos inherent in the process, and then communicating the outputs of synthesis in a meaningful manner. I offer in this article a brief introduction to the process, with the shameless intent of bringing awareness to my new book that dives deeply into the connection between design research and innovation.

An Introduction to Synthesis

Synthesis in design involves the combination of two complicated entities: the designer and the design problem. During this process, the unique qualities of the designer (her experience, expertise, and the complexity of her design and personal experiences) and the unique qualities of the designer’s frame of the design problem (the inherent constraints and her mental model of the problem) engage in a dance of process, creativity, and often, conflict.

A brief consideration of synthesis reveals two main benefits to the reflective designer. First, synthesis acknowledges the complexity of the designer, and it begins to hint at what makes a “good” designer “good.” Through the designer’s experience, he has been able to develop knowledge that extends beyond the domain of a specific design sector (mobile, Web, pharmaceutical, retail) and into the actual process of design. With a fair degree of autonomy, an experienced designer can therefore understand, rationalize, and better frame a given design problem. The designer develops unique constraints that are not part of the original client brief and understands how these constraints directly contribute to his ability to solve the given problem. Secondly, synthesis acts as a foundation upon which the “magic” of design occurs. This is the cognitive rationale for why design happens. It explains why designers are able to take incomplete data, manipulate it in various ways, and invent things that are relevant, innovative, or appropriate.

In the generative stages of a design problem, designers often turn to pencil sketching on paper to think through the various nuances. For example, to visualize the appropriate form of a new touch-based cell phone, an industrial designer will sketch in three dimensions and in orthographic (or plan) view, often laying ideas on top of one another and switching between a stylistic approach to a more pragmatic, component-based investigation (looking at the actual elements that might need to be contained within the phone, such as a screen, a keypad, and so forth). At this ideation stage, the most high-level design problems have been defined, so the designer is problem solving. That is, the designer knows what he is creating—a phone, and not a toaster or a printer—and he knows the general constraints of the object (it has a certain-size touch screen and requires a certain-size battery to power it, and so forth).

But consider the previous stage, in which the high-level design problems are defined or identified. Why isn’t the designer creating a toaster, for example? It may be that the company in question has a high degree of competency and history in creating mobile phones. Or the company may have developed a new technological approach to building low-cost touch screens, so it is trying to find new applications for it. Or it may be that the company has identified, through research, a new opportunity for producing a touch-based phone.

Where do these discussions happen, and who has them? Typically, these types of considerations are made by directors of marketing and technology. These organizational structures control a big budget, which they (often independently) assign to whichever projects and programs they deem to be most strategic. Once they have made the decision, a product team is assembled. Eventually the product “trickles down” to the designer, who then begins to sketch what the item might look like.
But with the recent popularity of the phrases “design thinking” and “innovation,” designers have been asked to participate in these strategic conversations. Designers are increasingly expected to discuss not just how to solve a problem but also which problems to consider solving. They are increasingly pressured to speak with clarity about product launches, strategic product road mapping, competitive marketplace trends, short- and long-term revenue opportunities, partnerships and sponsorships, and other issues related to the business of design.

This presents a great opportunity for designers to move from a tactical role to a strategic role, where they are valued not only for their ability to produce but also for their ability to think and analyze. Yet even at these more fundamental levels of a design problem, there is an implicit expectation that the designer is designing—producing things that are visual and tangible, that trigger additional discussion and that evoke emotive responses. Essentially, if a designer is to enter the boardroom, she is expected to bring something unique to the boardroom discussions.

What are these unique things? What does the designer do or make while attempting to find and understand problems at a strategic level?

Design synthesis generally describes this aspect of design, where the designer is not yet solving a problem but is still doing, and making, in an attempt to understand complexity. Synthesis is an intellectual approach to creativity, and it can offer a rationalization for repeated business success and a set of tools for moving from research to specific and actionable design ideas. Because synthesis is tied to logical processes of managing complexity, it can be communicated throughout an organization and used to substantiate the seemingly “magical” world of design and design thinking.

A designer attempting to produce an innovative design will conduct research focusing on the experiential, emotional, and personal aspects of culture. This research will describe an opportunity—design research acts as problem finding. The research findings may be captured in PowerPoint presentations or described on a whiteboard. Either way, the research has allowed the design team to gather data within a constrained problem space.

Translation and Sensemaking

Design is that act of problem solving—of appropriating formal qualities into a new design idea that fulfills the stated criteria and adds value to the human condition. Design synthesis, then, will translate the opportunity into specific design criteria, or a set of elements that must be present to afford a cohesive and concrete design. The synthesis will describe the solution; design synthesis is the process of problem understanding. Although data gesture toward an opportunity, data are frequently thick and convoluted, overwhelming and incomplete. The data alone lack contextualized meaning, and so it is difficult to decode data in their “raw” state. Synthesis is a sensemaking process that helps the designer move from data to information, and from information to knowledge.

My new book ‘Exposing the Magic of Design‘ offers both theory and methods to better make sense of complicated situations and approach complex problems with a new and thorough approach. You will be able to bring rigor to what has traditionally been an “intuitive” and haphazard process, to rationalize and better substantiate design decisions, and to articulate that path succinctly. This is the link between research and innovation, and it is this link that connects ethnography and new product development. Research alone does not create an innovation, disruptive or otherwise. Through the culturally sensitive and flexible process of synthesis comes a rigorous and repeatable manner of driving towards powerful new products, systems and services.

After teaching at Savannah College of Art and Design for close to five years, I found myself with over four hundred alumni, and I keep in touch with a large quantity of them through email. A strange pattern started to become evident in our communications: a lot of them are unhappy.

Our Passionate Youth

Students would contact me and describe how miserable they were with their jobs, asking for advice on new career paths or even entirely new professions. It wasn’t that their bosses were mean, or that their working hours were awful; it wasn’t even the larger issues we’ve all dealt with in the business context, like the misappropriation of designer as stylists, or the prioritization of technologists over designers. Instead, I began to hear how the benefits of ‘flow’ and ‘being creative’ and ‘solving really hard problems’ were being grossly outweighed by feelings of insignificance and irrelevance. My alumni were at the forefront of design, working at major consultancies and the heart of the Fortune 500 – and they didn’t feel like their work was meaningful.

I think many of us have confronted a similar feeling in their career, and we’ve rationalized meaning into our jobs. We’ve told ourselves that we were making the world a better place by making objects of beauty, or by increasing the usability of software, and that seems to satiate the concern, at least temporarily. Or, we’ve embraced management, and tried to mentor and guide other designers who were struggling with skills, theory, or career path development. And in many cases, even if these things didn’t pay off, we’ve stuck with jobs that we weren’t particularly fond of, because we had mortgages to pay and families to feed.

But for my alumni, and for the graduates that make up the 55 million millennials in the US, this doesn’t cut it. As a gross generalization, they don’t want the kids, the house, and the two car garage, and so they also don’t want the platitudes of staying the course and doing what you don’t want to do and it’s just a job. Simply, they feel entitled to a career that’s important and that contributes in a meaningful and powerful way to build a better world around them. As they find themselves in a workplace where they are designing diapers, or websites, or even the coveted jobs of designing cars and shoes, the realities of a career supporting destructive, consumptive behaviors just doesn’t seem to jive. And as they watch the banks collapse and the government flounder and the earth implode, they seem to experience a sense of personal longing – a longing for a job that matters.

This isn’t hyperbole. This is the conversation I’ve had over, and over, and over again with my alumni, and I’ve come to a simple conclusion. The creative class of 20-25 year olds won’t be satisfied playing under the old rules. Their goal and primary motivator isn’t financial capital or social capital; it’s personal recognition of meaning. This isn’t surprising, given their cultural backdrop of reality TV and Facebook profiles, and I’m certainly not the first to point this out. But the most interesting part of this desire for recognition is how it relates to the need to right the wrong and fix the broken. There’s a need – an entitlement – to work on big projects, projects with impact, and to be publically and loudly recognized for their creative efforts.

The creative class of 20-25 year olds won’t be satisfied playing under the old rules. Their goal and primary motivator isn’t financial capital or social capital; it’s personal recognition of meaning …  a need – an entitlement – to work on big projects, projects with impact, and to be publically and loudly recognized for their creative efforts.

Our Broken Educational System

Combine this pattern in the guise of modern design education, where integrated efforts between business and design are somehow seen as novel and well intentioned design educators dread the  curriculum council and petty turf war of tenure. Close to six years ago, when I was proposing a Contextual Research Methods course at Savannah College of Art and Design, the Dean of Liberal Arts essentially filibustered the course, blocking its passage through the approval process for close to a year. The reason? He felt ‘ownership’ over all aspects of research, and since no one in the design department had a PhD in Anthropology, how could they possible teach a course in contextual design research and ethnography?

These silly displays of infighting are present at nearly every educational institution in the world, and it’s against this backdrop that the aforementioned entitled students find themselves looking for direction and guidance. To be blunt, they don’t care about the credentials of their teachers; they care that their teachers are knowledgeable and passionate. They aren’t looking for incremental aspects of change that play in the context of the old guard; they see through these small steps forward in a time that requires new approaches and new passion.

There are some fantastic educational programs that have reacted to the changing space of design. New transdisciplinary efforts at Parsons have great potential; existing efforts like the KaosPilot School in Denmark serve as a template for new educational models. But these programs are the exception, and the design students graduating from schools of Art and Design are still learning the tired design-as-form-giving approaches of Bauhaus-driven foundations.

Students at universities frequently suffer the same lagging curricula, as the pace of academic change is slow. A few schools have managed to keep pace with industry, or even lead industry in a particular direction. The well known d.school program at Stanford, under the leadership of  David Kelley and Larry Leifer, and the Rotman School of Management, under the leadership of Roger Martin, have helped advance the role of designers in corporations to unprecedented levels of access, and have helped substantiate design as an independent and worthwhile endeavor.

These programs prepare students for bringing the intellectual power of design to the boardroom to solve the gnarly problems of corporate strategy.

But what if the same educational model was presented with a focus exclusively on transformation of our world around us? The students are clamoring for it, and the world is seemingly ready to embrace a model that doesn’t position corporate vs. consultancy, with the occasional NGO thrown in for good luck. This isn’t even a new idea, as it was fundamental to the design philosophies of Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek, and taught (to me, and countless other generations, at Carnegie Mellon) by Richard Buchanan and Craig Vogel.

Transforming the Wicked Problems

It’s in response to these students, and to these traditional problems of academia, and in the spirit of Buchanan and Vogel’s teaching that I’ve started a new educational institution: The Austin Center for Design. The program is entirely focused on Interaction Design and Social Entrepreneurship, with an explicit spotlight on designing for massive change and social innovation. The center exists to transform society through design and design education. This transformation occurs through the development of design knowledge directed towards all forms of social and humanitarian problems.

I have no misconceptions that designers can ‘solve’ massive problems, or even approach them on their own without collaboration from other disciplines. But I feel strongly that designers make great agents of change and can champion new and novel approaches to old and tired problems. The best indicator of design success, in my experience, is a passion to make an impact, and I see a generation that is wildly passionate about addressing social problems.

I feel strongly that designers make great agents of change and can champion new and novel approaches to old and tired problems … and I see a generation that is wildly passionate about addressing social problems.

I hope other educational institutions can escape from the lackadaisical pace of academic change, and I intend to publish the entire curricula that is developed at AC4D to help support other like-minded faculty who may be stuck pushing the curricula-change rock uphill. The problems to tackle are big enough to escape ego; one school can’t possible support the talent necessary to mitigate the large-scale social problems of poverty, equality of education, or health and wellness.

These are problems worth solving.

Top image: One Laptop Per Child / cc attribution 2.0

If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”. It lies instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture in a positive and lasting way.

Brand is a phenomenon that has emerged over the last century as a method of differentiation and control, with marketing beating a drum of “brand messaging”, “consistent impressions”, and a single “brand value”. User Experience is a more recent unicorn to chase, with designers claiming to drive business success through a focus on a prescriptive customer experience. There is a long history of extremely fragile collaboration between the offices of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the traditional shepherds of behavior-by-design, as designers become enamored with brand embodiment in products, and marketers striving to “own” the product specifications, features and functions. The fragility of the bond is obvious, as both groups frequently disparage the other in both private and public venues. As blanket generalizations, designers describe marketers as less honest then themselves, and disparage the Product Requirement Document as a laundry-list of jargon and nonsense. Marketers, in turn, often view designers (and by proxy, the product itself) as a means to an end; the goal – revenue, market share, and brand equity – will be achieved through business rules, not through creative endeavors.

Both groups are to fault, and both groups are perilously ignoring the huge potential at their fingertips. As members of both groups cling to brand and UX as differentiators, they have mistakenly focused on control as a means of generating revenue. In fact, neither brand nor UX will serve as the driving force behind financial success in the coming decades. “User experience” is just a new name for old thinking, and “User experience practitioners” exhibit the same hubris that has long plagued “brand thinking”: the large name-as-mindshare mentality that a company can own a space, a segment, or even a consumer.

clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency

The Problems of Brand and User Experience
For most of the twentieth century, brand – and the marketing machine that created it – ruled the culture of developed countries. The earliest parts of the 1900s boasted brands built around industrialism and production, and these acted as literal and figurative crests, positioned as major pillars of production. The mid part of the century led to the family-focused brands positioned as domesticated icons of class and consumption. And the late 90’s exposed global brands, dominated by large, faceless and relatively unknown holding companies making profit simply by waiting for an opportune time to offload a company to another company. Yet the rules of the game are in deep flux, due to sustainability, a credit meltdown, and an awareness of humanitarian efforts in developing countries. The basic, fundamental properties of major brands are increasingly questioned, as evidenced by the disparaged and embattled Ford and Citibank, and the questions of these mega-brands are more commonly rhetorical and pejorative.

In spite of this, brand equity facilitated by market share is still a goal of the Fortune 500, and it is common to hear clients – both marketers and UX professionals – speak of “winning” in relationship to the user experience.

Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization

Simultaneously, however, clients struggle with the reality of brand complacency. They describe how their customers have become familiar with a particular brand-purchasing behavior, and continue to perform that rote behavior based on circumstances. This includes placement on the shelf, color of a label, and the realization that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. There is no “relationship” with the customer; this is a fragile connection that is the consumptive equivalent to taking the same route to work each day. This is a scary reality to face, as brand complacency implies a dependency on switching-costs as a means of retaining market-share. Brand complacency indicates a trend towards commoditization.

The Threat of Commoditization
A commodity is something that has no qualitative differentiation. Mass production drives commoditization within a particular product line, while the traditional “bunch and swarm” mentality of the marketplace drives commoditization across product lines. A desire to create a new set of interactions is an urge to escape this push towards sameness. Innovation is a business goal to produce products that have qualitative differentiation, and there are various forms of innovation – such as disruptive innovation – which are intended to produce massive qualitative differentiation.

In western civilization, the artifact is continuing to diminish in relevance and importance. While people continue to consume things, these things are increasingly a means to an end. Our relative wealth has positioned even the lower-middle class in a position where there is time for leisure, entertainment, and emotionally charged experiences.

Interesting, too, is the speed at which the digital artifact has moved from being exclusive and expensive to nearly free and ubiquitous. Software, once priced at hundreds of dollars and appropriately as scarce, is now widely available for no cost; networked services have enabled content feeds across artifacts, rendering even some services as irrelevant in the larger scheme of the competitive landscape. As an example, for many years, Microsoft offered a for-fee product called Outlook, which manages electronic mail. Google then offered a free service called Gmail, which also manages electronic mail. Then, as Google externalized the Google mail feed through a series of APIs, mail can be embedded in unlikely places – including other products, such as an instant messenger client (like Trillian), or even on other websites. The “designed product” has become less interesting and relevant, and no matter the innovations pushed by Google or Microsoft in their products, the data itself has been shifted to a champion position of value.

Behavioral Change: The Goal of Our Work
The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact, and it references a dated model of dominance – one where a company produces something for a person to consume. This is the McDonalds approach to production, where an authoritative voice prescribes something and then gains efficiencies by producing it exactly as prescribed, in mass. The supposed new model is to design something for a person to experience, yet the allusion to experience is only an empty gesture. An experience cannot be built for someone. Fundamentally, one has an experience, and that is experience is always unique.

The focus on brand and control of the user experience is an attempt to avoid the above commoditization and irrelevance of artifact

Interaction design is the design of behavior, positioned as dialogue between a person and an artifact. A person commonly doesn’t talk to an object; they use it, touch it, manipulate it, and control it. Usage, touching, manipulation and control are all dialogical acts, unspoken but conversational. Conversation is only a metaphor for interaction, but it’s a useful one. Many of the same ways we “read” an actual, spoken conversation have parallels in describing and discussing interactions between people and things. Consider:

• Both conversations and interactions have flow, and often have a beginning, middle, and end;
• Both conversations and interactions act as intertwining of multiple viewpoints. In a conversation, the viewpoints come from people; in an interaction, viewpoints are embedded in an artifact by a designer;
• Both conversations and interactions act as both methods of communication and methods of comprehension; participants both contribute to, and take from, the activity;
• Ultimately, both conversations and interactions serve to affect behavioral change in participants.

This is powerful, as it describes an implicit way of extending a designers reach – and personal point of view, or message – into the masses. It is this mass distribution of dialogue that describes culture; we build culture through our objects, services and systems, as we define behavior through interactions. This is of equal prominence to the claim of “designing experiences”, yet leaves open the potential – the need – for the people (pardon, the consumers) to actually participate and contribute in a meaningful way. The things we do in the design studio have grand significance in the world. Our design decisions – even small, detailed, nuanced design decisions – resonate for years, and usually in a phenomenally large scale. Yet because these design decisions have an impact that is diffused and quiet, our impact is hard to notice and pin down. Culture is something that’s not immediately describable; the question “where does culture come from?” is almost as large a question as “where does life come from”, and is equally as evasive.

Cultural Change: The Implications of Our Work
This is a fundamental point that serves to elevate the importance of a designer, and also serves to articulate the implicit responsibility a designer has to the world around them. It’s such a fundamental point that it’s worth making again, in a more overt manner:

1. The interaction designer designs various aspects of an artifact;
2. The designer either explicitly or implicitly hopes to change behavior in a user;
3. This behavioral change is “baked” into the artifact, and then disseminated, in mass;
4. The artifact serves as a stimulus to change behavior in society;
5. This combination of artifacts and behavior describes culture.

Every design decision – from the large and strategic decision to design accounting software, to the small and nuanced decision to use a checkbox instead of a radio button – contributes to the behavior of the masses, and helps define the culture of our society. This describes an enormous opportunity for designers, one that is rarely realized. We are, quite literally, building the culture around us; arguably, our effect is larger and more immediate than even policy decisions of our government. We are responsible for both the positive and negative repercussions of our design decisions, and these decisions have monumental repercussions.

Our Deep Responsibility
For most designers, this responsibility is hidden by the celebratory claims of designing experiences. This claim almost abdicates the long-term responsibility, as “an experience” has an end, at which time the designers’ role seemingly ends. The work is meaningful only on an immediate level of craft and creation, and while designers often take pride in a product once it has launched, they do not frequently make the connection between their creations and the culture that surrounds them. “They’ve stopped using my product – their experience is over.” Convenient – but utterly false. Because emphasis is placed on innovation or brand, designers learn to value their work based on newness or recognition; metrics for success are tied to profit and marketshare, rather than positive and long-term culture change. As the causality is extended over a long period of time, it is diffused as a single product mixes with the rest of the milieu. The individual contribution of a single designer feels muted and insignificant, as there is no feedback loop to indicate the role of an individual design in shaping culture and society.

These negative qualities of our last century’s focus on brand and experience have been forced upon the business of design and the design of business, but it is only interaction and the ability to change behavior that will serve as fundamental pillars upon which to drive successful new endeavors. We must refocus and reposition our work within major companies away from a marketing-driven focus on brand and a design-driven focus on experiential ownership. Instead, it is up to us to emphasize the value a company can provide in changing human behavior – the lasting, nuanced, intellectual, and deep responsibility we have to the culture we are building.

This requires a conscious tradeoff and reprioritization. Instead of control, we must focus on frameworks. Instead of seeking to own and prescribe a singular experience, we must strive to adapt to the peculiarities and nuances of human behavior. And instead of complicity absorbing the corporate drive towards power and brand positioning, we must acknowledge the huge responsibility implicit in our work and constantly vocalize how our work supports humanity and the cultural landscape that surrounds us. We’ve built that cultural landscape, and we owe it to ourselves and to our work to tend to our creation as it morphs, changes and adapts. As you cringe from someone talking into a Bluetooth headset on the subway, or smile as a child and mother look at photos on their phone, realize that this technological culture is ours in the making. Both the bad and good are our ongoing fault and responsibility.

Interaction 10

If you want to meet Jon Kolko in real life: he is one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 10. It is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Savannah, Georgia (USA).

Photos by: hipposrunsuperfast, Lord Jim & arquera