An Overview of Presumptive Design - Part 1

I am essentially writing this for myself as a tool to help me learn as I work through the text and case studies, so I am sorry in advance if things don't make sense.

I know I just wrote a piece about the different types of design, but presumptive design is a little different. It is less a new type of design and more a new method for accomplishing user-centered design. 

The idea is that presumptive design (or PrD) is the fastest way to converge on a future state that you or your stakeholders really "want." PrD is a design research technique that fits into the "design innovation" framework from Charles Owen, Steve Sato, and Vijay Kumar that we have all come to love/hate. 

 
 

The premise behind how this works is that instead of starting with "sense intent" at the beginning of the project, you start in the prototyping/synthesis phase. The first thing you do is to invite key internal stakeholders to a creation session to explore different ideas using prototypes with essentially no formal research or analysis. These participatory design sessions will take the place of initial research. Then artifacts from these sessions will go in front of external stakeholders who will interact and discuss what came out of the session. After a few rounds of this, the entire design process will have been sped up by several times. The first idea behind this process is that all the beliefs and biases that exist before the project are put on the table so that everybody is aware of how people see the problem. Second, it gets things moving and allows for much more focussed formal research.

Essentially, PrD is fast and cheap.

 

 
 

But the important thing about PrD is that it should not be used to find the solution but rather elements of the problem space. PrD does not replace good analysis and synthesis, but it offers a great place to start. 

Normally a team is asked to hold off on drawing conclusions or finding patterns until enough information is available. But in PrD, commonalities emerge after only a small number of engagements. Additionally, because the artifacts are certainly wrong, the team discovers misalignments between its own worldview and those of its constituents. You don't have to live with your beliefs bundled up inside your head for months, accidentally guiding your research and messing up the analysis, until you get to the actual synthesis phase.

My biggest critique about all the methods, frameworks, and tactics that we learn at ID is that it is slow (s  l  o  w). But PrD offers a solution to this problem.

PrD is a powerful means of discovering information leading to strategic advantage through a rapid series of engagements with our constituents. The lessons learned from these engagements inform everyone on the project, from the product managers to the technologists and the UX team. One of the greatest benefits of PrD, and, ironically, its greatest risk, is how easily teams identify disruptive innovations. Because we offer our constituents views into the future, we learn where our predictions don't align with our constituents' reactions to them. More often than not, their reactions don't negate our predictions; instead they adjust them in ways we cannot anticipate. Those insights are the source of game-changing opportunities.

Fields of Design

This is going to be mostly for me. At the Institute of Design, I am very familiar with the differences between industrial design, service design, interface design, human computer interaction, architecture, etc., and I've seen versions this visual more times than I can count.

 
 

These distinctions basically tell us what we design or how we design things. However, it is also important to think about why we design things.

From a 2009 article in Core77 there are lots of types of design activity: user-centered design, eco-design, design for the other 90%, universal design, sustainable design, interrogative design, task-centered design, reflective design, design for well-being, critical design, speculative design, speculative re-design, emotional design, socially-responsible design, green design, conceptual design, concept design, slow design, dissident design, inclusive design, radical design, design for need, environmental design, contextual design, and transformative design. Essentially the authors categorize these types into four main buckets: Commercial Design, Responsible Design, Experimental Design, and Discursive Design.

But what really is discursive design? Discursive design is design which challenges the intellect of the user. While "good design" fades to the background, discursive design deliberately tries to make the user think: it is a thought catalyst or a communication tool.

 
 

In the Hugh Duberly diagram above, discursive design would be in the same area as "critical design." Critical design is essentially "design as critique," which I believe is very close to the idea of discursive design. Critical design is opposite to "affirmative design" which reinforces the status quo. 

To add onto this, there is also conceptual design, anti-design, radical design, design fiction, speculative design, and more. These are all variants on the same idea which is to make the user think.

I think this is a great piece of potential discursive design. People do not understand what it means to throw something away or use energy. It is simply to much of an abstraction to understand large numbers or the effects of many people together. A piece like this which would blow steam rings into the air over the city to communicate a physical quantity of waste being created would certainly fulfill discursive design's requirement of causing a conversation.


User Centered Design Going Mainstream

If you know me, you know that I have a thing for podcasts. A partial list of the podcasts I listen to are 99% Invisible, Radiolab, Invisibilia, You Are Not So Smart, Reply All, StartUp, Serial, TED Radio Hour, Planet Money, and the HBR IdeaCast. I will probably do a post about that at some point.

On the same note, I also have come to really enjoy explainer journalism like Vox. I know that many journalists look down on explainer journalism, but if you can find the right sources that speak to you, every segment can be engaging and educational. Many of the podcasts I listen to teeter on explainer journalism. 

Anyway, this video about user centered design was recently published on Vox, and I couldn't help but link to it here. Roman Mars from 99% Invisible plays an interesting role in it as well as Don Norman who is on the board at the IIT Institute of Design. It seems that UCD is going very mainstream.