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.

Engagement for ideas

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Engage everyone in idea creation

Among the biggest success factors in any organizational change initiative is engaging staff and stakeholders in participating in the change process; this is true for idea generation through the design cycle to implementation and evaluation. How do we overcome the challenge of disengagement to produce productive creative, innovative ideas in our organizations?

Beyond brainstorming

Ideas are usually the starting point for any change initiative. Ideas produce the raw content of problem identification and the seeds for solution generation. Brainstorming is often the means people first think of as a way to generate ideas and explore concepts. However, there are some substantial problems with this approach and some ways around it.

Brainstorming has been widely criticized for good reasons. Among them: it favours those voices who think (and speak) quickly, speak early, often and loudly. Those early suggestions drive the conversation for what comes next, creating a path dependency that’s hard to escape once initiated. If you’re a quieter, perhaps more contemplative person, you’ll find that you are either late to the conversation or not included. From Jungian Personality Theory, this indicates a bias towards extroversion over introversion, which excludes about 40 per cent of the population according to some estimates.

This approach also favours what Min Basadur would classify as an ‘generator’: someone who’s work style preferences favour idea generation. Those from the other quadrants in the Basadur Profile, particularly ‘conceptualizers’ and ‘optimizers’ (ones who’s work style preference leans toward processing and organizing information) are less likely to respond quickly.

Ideas in private and public

Another problem with many ideation strategies is that many really useful ideas are a bit heretical or outlandish. While design thinking writers often refer to the need to generate ‘wild ideas’ without criticism or judgement, the truth is that’s a lot harder to do in practice, particularly when there are power dynamics in the room, reputations, and the real fear that comes with change and challenges to established practices. The public nature of the ideation process favours transparency, but induces self-censorship and produces disengagement for many and hyper-engagement for a few.

A solution is to have those involved in the process generate ideas independently and anonymously contribute them via a suggestion box (digital or analog). Keep the suggestion box open for a defined period — we recommend no more than one week or as short as three days. This allows time for those who are more reflective to mull through their ideas and contribute them, while those who are more quick to generate ideas will not be affected.

These are then collated independently by someone neutral to the problem and solution set and organized thematically. This has the advantage of potentially embedding some of the wildest ideas within a small set of other ideas that might seem far less threatening. If you create a category of ‘wild ideas’ the risk is that the entire category will be dismissed. A more public, but elaborate, means of doing this can be found in the CoNEKTR Model described elsewhere.

This process can be repeated over the design cycle at different stages – anywhere diverse perspectives and feedback is needed.

Overcoming biases to better ideas

The bias toward ‘rapid ideation’ in design thinking systematically excludes people in favour of a well-meaning intention of trying to avoid participants ‘over-thinking’ a problem. While that might happen, it still prevents many from engaging in the process fully because of personality, work preferences, cognitive style and social pressures.

The strategy listed above is a simple, but highly effective means of getting lots of ideas and engaging your entire team in the process. Try it out. You might be surprised what ideas come from it all.