Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Designing for Awful

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One of the most profound, fun, and engaging techniques for creating an attractive service or product design is oddly focused on the exact opposite: Designing for Awful.

How to use this

This strategy is as simple as it is effective. When workshopping ideas allot some time to have participants develop ideas and designs for the worst possible version of the thing they are designing.

This is a flip of a traditional ideation session where people try to develop suggestions for what to focus on, whom, and what the best use of resources might be. In Designing for Awful, we do the opposite. It is used usually in tandem with ideation sessions that are focused on surfacing ideas in general.

This can be used to frame a service, product or describe the experience of doing something like a survey or participating in an event. It’s a simple, fun, and sometimes counter-intuitive way to surface assumptions, biases, and qualities in what we want, need and don’t want in our design.

Like any ideation-focused exercise, it must be managed appropriately. Individuals need to feel safe in surfacing ideas, free to discuss them, and preferably, offer an opportunity to share at least some of them anonymously. People generally have a lot of fun with this simple exercise.

Benefits

The benefits of this are many.

Firstly, it focuses on the things we tend to avoid — unpleasant feelings, experiences, or sensation — and thus, might be missed in consideration of our design.

It also overcomes an optimism bias. Design is largely a positive-oriented practice where we look to solve problems, not make them. Designing for Awful helps us to move around this bias by looking at what is not addressed.

This approach is also excellent for helping surface values in practice and in specific terms. To illustrate, it’s one thing to speak in a positive or affirmative tone such as a statement like “we value inclusivity.” Designing for Awful could lead us to be specific “Our service is inaccessible to someone with a mobility disability” or “it is sexist” or “our product can only be used by people who are right-handed.” By surfacing what makes something not work we are better able to see what will.

This approach is also excellent in helping, paradoxically, surface what we want by framing things in terms we don’t want. How often have you met someone who first tells you what they don’t want in something before they get to describing what they want?

This allows people to have a little fun and we find that some people are more bold and assertive with their creativity in the negative, than the positive and this technique lets that come out.

Lastly, the exercise can be a useful way to surface who needs to be at the table moving forward. We find that the need for having the voices of certain individuals, groups, roles, or departments in the discussion is better clarified when we consider how bad things would be without them.

Try this out at your next design session or team meeting as part of a check-in and you might find some laughs and some deep insight along with it.

If you want to inspire new thinking and better design in your organization for engagement and impact, reach out and contact us. This is what we do.

Predicting Next Year’s Top Story

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Foresight can involve complex data gathering, sensemaking, and design and also be something as simple as developing the headline for next year’s news.

This simple technique can get your organization started on futures thinking and provide a way to connect the present situation with trends that you are seeing in your industry and the world to strategy and aspirations. This technique gets you to imagine the headlines of the future (what people are writing or saying about your enterprise) and walking back from that or projecting forward to fill in the steps that led you to that outcome.

Setting the Stage

This is an activity that is best done as a group anywhere from 4 to 12 people and can be done in as little as an hour, although it can be done over a longer period of time in single or multiple sessions if you wish to go deeper into the assumptions and models for the future.

It’s important to frame the exercise by choosing whether you want headlines for the organization or a specific project or product. It doesn’t matter who these imaginary headlines are to be written by (e.g., journalists, industry professionals), however, it does help to imagine what context they are to be written (e.g., news media, business press, industry news outlets, professional associations, peers). Make whatever context you pick clear even if it is in multiple contexts.

Next, set a time horizon for the headlines sometime within the next 6 to 12 months.

Lastly, this is often used to frame positive outcomes. However, after you’ve determined what success looks like it is worth considering repeating the exercise at a later date (e.g., one week later) with the converse: focusing on headlines that report failures, disasters, or problems. This can help your team see threats as well as possibilities.

The materials you will need are pieces of paper (preferably sticky notes because they are easily portable and can be re-arranged) and a whiteboard or flipchart/newsprint sheets of paper and markers for a facilitator (who can be external or a member of the team) and the team/participants.

Activity

Individually, have participants brainstorm headlines they imagine for the time horizon you have set. Give them about 5-10 minutes and ask participants to strive for volume — lots of ideas — over quality.

As a group, post together (with stickies) or share the ideas that individuals have generated. This can be done by having individuals post up their sticky notes on a wall and then later organized or by doing successive round-robin reporting where everyone presents a single idea in as many rounds as there are ideas.

We suggest having the group vote on headlines that they like, elicit the strongest reactions (positive or negative), or are the most provocative. Aim for 3-5 headlines. With these headlines explore as a group some of the assumptions that are in place for this headline to come true. The aim is to answer the question: what would have to happen for this to become a real headline?

Why?

This activity helps you set and frame a goal for your organization, project or product. It can help elicit information about what kind of aspirations, assumptions, and ideas that your team has about what you are doing. It will also allow to identify what kind of relationships, resources, or facilitators are needed to get from where you are to where you wish to go over the time horizon you’ve picked.

If you do the negative case headline, this technique can help frame what kind of necessary activities are required for success and where they can possibly go wrong. it will allow you to identify threats and risks associated with what you’re planning to help account for that in your plan.

This simple technique is powerful and can be used in a single session, with multiple units, or as part of a planning exercise and the dividends are great. It’s fun, creative, and informative.

If you want to see more about what this can do, contact us and we’ll gladly help you set up a foresight scan and strategic plan for your project or organization based on this kind of futures thinking.

Better Data Collection

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With so many people working from home and using their communication devices to do many of the tasks we once did in other ways or are now doing much more often or differently it’s tempting to think: it’s a perfect time to reach people for my research project.

That might be true, but it’s also fraught with problems. Before you set out on your ethnographic journey through the lives of your stakeholders or prep Surveymonkey for its journey through the jungles of the Internet we suggest you take a pause and consider the following before venturing forward.

  1. Context counts. Every time we engage in social research we must account for context. In the current situation with a global pandemic, we don’t know what the context is. The epidemiological, social policy, economic, and communications landscape is changing day-to-day and is influenced on a global level. With so many areas changing at once, the ability to gauge or even state the context becomes nearly impossible without resorting to over-generalized or vague statements like “complex” or “uncertain”.
  2. ” Seeing is not the same as looking”. Physician and economist Anupam Jena provides a great example of how we can miss the forest for the trees without examining some of the things that are hidden in plain sight. In times of profound transformation, we might need to re-think what it is we see as that will shape what questions we ask, what data we gather, and what answers we discover.
  3. User-experience. What is the state of mind of those who are answering your survey or responding to your interview? You might be speaking to someone who hasn’t left their house in three weeks. They might have people nearby all the time. This will determine the willingness or ability to respond, the kind of answers that are provided, and the openness of the response (for example, people might not want to share highly personal data on a shared computer or where people might see them entering or speaking about it).
  4. Sensemaking. When we don’t understand the context or its entirely new we look for what we know. The challenge right now is that we don’t know what it is that we’re looking at. Unless our research or evaluation work is focused on the now and understanding how and what we are doing at this moment, about this moment, and for this moment we risk developing data that is examined through the lens of history (what we’ve done before), which will be another context altogether. We’ll be making sense of the past through the lens of today.
  5. Attention. Are we paying attention? When so much of what we are exposed to now is coming through screens — big and small — there is a likelihood that we are reading things quickly. Electronic reading is not the same as reading paper-based text and tends to encourage skimming. When what we have read is — save for the back of the cereal box at breakfast — almost entirely digital (for many of us) the likelihood of instructions being skimmed might be higher. Proceed with caution.
  6. Health. Lastly, how well are we? When the effects of being inside, isolated, and perhaps exposed to a virus are real, present and pervasive, your audience might not be in the state where the depth and quality of thought are what we need to get the responses we want. Many of us are not our usual selves these days and our responses will reflect that.

See differently, think differently and that goes for how we assess and do our social research.

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash