GUILLERMO WECHSLER

January 8, 2007

Design Principles for the Renaissance 2.0

The subject matter of designing is about producing a new unity that expands value, by supporting emerging social practices. Competent designers claim that there are three ways in which we relate with those unities: we design them; we produce hem; and we use them. Neil Gershenfeld, in his book FAB, added a new dimension that precedes the design phase. He called it, “conceiving” the new unity. So, basically, in the process of bringing a new artifact or mechanism to fruition in our markets or communities, we go through four phases.

There is an old tradition – which is declining-in which those phases are understood as a lineal process, with a clear beginning and end, discrete gates -or funnels- in which specialized roles hand-off their tasks for the phase, and let the next role continue the process. This tradition has produced a common sense in which the central challenge is to produce a rigorous description of the conditions of completion of one phase, so the new phase can be carried out smoothly and autonomously by a team endowed with a new set of distinctive skills and capacities.

The “conceiver” is the role that is able to specify what is missing for a particular community of people, dealing with some particular historical concern. It is the role Pasteur played in opening up the space for microbiology and vaccines. It is the role George Bissel played in the visualization of the oil industry. It is the role of Edison in envisioning power networks and public electric light. It is the role Paul Baran played in the conception of the Internet. It is the role Jobs and Wozniak played in anticipating the world of the PC. The conceivers are the people that unsettle old paradigms, and articulate fundamental aspects of the design challenge: what is missing? what is possible?

The “designer” is the role that specifies the new unity so it can deliver the services it was conceived for. The designer defines the key components of the new unity, its assemblers, and interface. Let's say that this is the role played by Ford with his line of production-based manufacturing, or by Taichi Ohno with the Toyota Production System. It is the role played by Dave Walden, Bob Kahn, Frank Heart, and Severo Ornstein -among others- in specifying the first four location nodes of Internet in the late sixties.

The “producer” is the role that is able to interpret the specifications of the designer and to assemble, prototype, test, adjust, implement and make the new unity replicable, reliable, sustainable, and economically viable. Examples are: Standard Oil, Westinghouse, Toyota, Apache and Linux.

The “users” are the ones that transform their practices in order to experience, produce and distribute increased benefit and value. Basically: you, me, us, them. The traditions linearly organized around these phases, which deepened the division of labor. And the specialization of roles in each of these phases are producing significant waste in today's world -for instance, the Product Requirement Process in software development, or the IT documentations on “customer needs”, etc. As Time Magazine noticed in 2006 by naming “You” the person of the year, “user-generated” artifacts are occupying an increased portion of the value generation in our economies and communities.

Many of the wastes can be transformed into interesting possibilities of innovation if we change our understanding of phases as a lineal production line, and we think about them as observers, articulated in networks of conversations. Conceiving, designing, producing and using are an endless unfolding process. All the time, artifacts show up to us as part of our conceiving, designing, producing or using experience. A couple of years ago, Peter Schwartz mentioned to me when I was trying to articulate my notion of Service Design, that in his experience, designing was a lot less relevant than discovering from different perspectives. It took me a while, but here is what I now think he was pointing to: the emergence of the “user-generated” culture, which basically means a design culture that can have good, rich, authentic conversations about our experience with artifacts, social practices, and designing across the old-tradition silos.