Tag: DesignBrief

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Le paradoxe du design

I was in Paris last week to deliver a creative thinking workshop for engineers. I did the presentation in English and the Q&A in French — a happy balance that let me be precise in theory and looser in conversation. 

But I got a bit stuck translating ‘the Designer’s Paradox’ in French. 

The Designer’s Paradox says ‘you don’t know what you want until you know what you can have’ (McCann 2001)

Asking for help here’s some suggestions I got during the day.

On ne sais pas ce que l’on veut avoir, tant que l’on ne sais pas ce que l’on peut avoir. 

Translated back into English, this reads as ‘one doesn’t know what one wants for as long as one doesn’t know what can have‘. It’s a fair translation, but long and literal. 

Then came:

‘Savoir ce que l’on veut, ou vouloir ce que l’on peut.’

Literally — know what you want or want what you can. It’s crisper and I like the rhythm. But the meaning drifts — it’s more about choosing between reality and desire. 

Mashing these together, I came up with: 

Savoir ce que l’on veut, savoir ce que l’on peut, vouloir le meilleur des deux

Know what you want, know what you can, want the best of both. But that isn’t really French!

In searching for the French version of the Designer’s Paradox, I’ve found another. 

Translate the meaning and lose the poetry

Translate the poetry and lose the meaning. 

That’s the translator’s paradox.

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Beating a new path

You’re out walking one morning and you reach a field of tall grass. Your destination is on the other side but you can’t see a way through. So you wade in, pushing through the tall stems until you emerge on the other side, leaving a path in your wake. 

The next day’s morning perambulation you encounter the same field. Do you beat a new path — or take the one you made yesterday?

Of course, you follow the path. It’s easier. It’s the path of least resistance. 

And so it is when we develop ideas in response to a design brief. Beating a path through a sheaf of requirements takes effort. But once we have made that mental path, our brains prefer to follow it again. 

Why do the extra work of cutting a new route? 

This is cognitive ease at work: our brains tend to prefer the options they’ve already figured out over ones they haven’t figured out yet. 

There is no reason the first idea should be the best one. But cognitive ease makes it stick. So if we want better ideas, we need to resource ourselves to build beat a new path each morning. 

we have should be the best one, but cognitive ease makes it more likely that it will stick. If we want to have more, better ideas, then we need to resource ourselves — and be willing — to beat a new path each morning.

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Tools for telling the future

What began as a conversation this week on the blog about how designers predict the future has unlocked some deeper reflections on how we approach regenerative design.

Let’s rewind.

As designers, we are always concerned with the future. Our job is to imagine how things could be and shape the conditions to get there. To do this, we rely on two types of indicators:

  • Lag indicators — evidence of what has already happened. The results of past design decisions. 
  • Lead indicators — signals in the present that suggest how the future will unfold.

When conditions are stable, precedent (ie lag indicators) can be a reliable guide to the future. But in changing, complex systems, the past is no-longer such a reliable guide to the future.

In these situations, rather than predict the future directly, we can try to assess the capacity of the system we are working with to successfully respond to change.

Capacity to change — a key regenerative lens

In regenerative design we use the living world as a template for understanding how to create systems that thrive. Thriving ecosystems adapt continuously to shifting conditions. This capacity to change is a key characteristic of living systems — and is a guiding principle for engineers (and other humans) thinking about how to create thriving systems. 

In the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design, we go on to define four factors that indicate a system’s capacity to adapt:

  • Building blocks that can easily be recombined.
  • Coexistence of diverse variations to allow for different responses. 
  • Feedback loops that reinforce adaptations suited to current conditions.
  • Mechanisms for retaining and repeating what works.

From analysis to a design brief

These four factors are both analytical prompts and design levers.

When we encounter a new situation, we try to establish the extent to which each of these is present and use this as a measure of the system’s capacity to survive and potentially thrive through change.

And they can be used as design requirements, giving us factors that we can build into a design brief to create a brief for thriving. 

In a complex situation it is hard to predict the future — instead, regenerative designers seek to make things better by building in the capacity for people and ecosystems to respond together to changing situations in a way that creates thriving for the whole system.