GUILLERMO WECHSLER

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On Design

I am interested in exploring design practices, and theoretical discourses on design coming from fields as diverse as engineering, software, industrial, organizational, molecular, and architecture, among others. My main goal is to see what can make a design more effective, valuable, or economic.


February 13, 2007

The Illusion of Controlling People

I recently put together a short document showing how "having control of people" in an organization is tangibly having a set of well-designed, robust action pathways for some business roles. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

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posted by guillermo m wechsler @ 12:44:00 PM 2 comments

February 9, 2007

McDonough's Articulation of Design Principles

In my previous post, I mentioned three sets of design principles. Below are William McDonough's interpretations of two sets of tacit design principles for organizing social production. I took them from his book, Cradle-to-Cradle. Of course, these are imaginary recreations. However, they are interesting because they map "social intelligence."


Design Principles for the Industrial Movement:
Design a system of production that:
  1. Puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year

  2. Produces some materials so dangerous they will require constant vigilance by future generations

  3. Results in gigantic amounts of waste

  4. Puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved

  5. Requires thousands of complex regulations--not to keep people and natural systems safe, but rather to keep them from being poisoned too quickly

  6. Measures productivity by how few people are working

  7. Creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burying or burning them

  8. Erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices


Design Principles for a Community of Ants
As part of their daily activities, ants:
  1. Safely and effectively handle their own material wastes and those of other species,

  2. Grow and harvert their own food while nurturing the ecosystem of which they are part,

  3. Construct houses, farms, dumps, cemeteries, living quarters, and food-stroage facilities from materials that can be truly recycled,

  4. Create disinfectants and medicines that are health, safe, and biodegradable,

  5. Maintain soil health for the entire planet.

posted by guillermo m wechsler @ 3:33:00 PM 0 comments

February 7, 2007

A Failing Transparency of Design Principles in Health Care?

There are three layers of design principles out of which people design. I have begun to articulate them in this document. As always, read this blog, take a look at the document, and send me your suggestions.

The three principles are:
  1. Theoretical Design Principles: These are the discourses and theoretical distinctions to observe, evaluate and act in the phenomenological domain in which the design is taking place. For example, if you are going to design mortgage lending services, the underlying theoretical principles out of which you would design would be financial theory, risk theory, organizational theory, cognitive biology, phenomenology, etc.

  2. Ethical Design Principles: These are the basic ethical values of a particular historical period which shape your design. For example, today, in the domain of Open Source, companies don't design and build proprietary products controlled and shaped by themselves. They instead share their intellectual property with users as a way of getting feedback, building a stronger network, and improving their service.

  3. Projectual Design Principles: These are the principles that define the value proposition a particular company or collective is willing to deliver for a particular set of communities. These principles are often implicit in the business model of a company. Google promotes user-generated-services; consequently one of their projectual principles is to release the code of some of their services. Dell supports market standards; consequently one of their projectual principles is avoid defensive R&D and defensive functionality in their product development.

At the HAAS School's Business in Health Care Conference, there were many intelligent, innovative, and devoted members designing and innovating in the health care system. As I mentioned in this post, Suzy Jones from Genentech spoke about innovation in the company. She showed, among other things, that Genentech did not believe in separating the know-how from the people producing that know-how. And in investing in the people, Genentech not only got more know-how, but built a new sense of trust and collaboration with people thinking about the same problems. The company has this fundamental design principle for expanding collaboration into innovation networks. Now, they are designing new types of contracts--new protocols of communication--that have produced a new common sense and a new thinking about managing vast networks of collaboration with deals built on mutual trust, sensitivity to mutual concerns, and some alignment of priorities.

In contrast with this design approach favoring vitality and decentralization, we have the implicit design approach of most of the health care reform proposals.

Currently, the health care system is organized based on a centralized top-down design criteria. Teisberg and Porter declared three basic theoretical principles, which are 180°s from what mainstream players are thinking and talking about now, as fundamental to designing a health system. These principles are:
  1. Redefining the relation between the major constituencies of the system and putting the patient at the center.

  2. Stimulating value-added competition in opposition to zero-sum competition.

  3. Promoting information transparency and customer access to personal data.

By working with these principles, it doesn't mean you can't review them later on, but they have been proposed as a new frame to designing health care services.

Currently, the health care debate is lacking the perspective of questioning the design principles that are in the background. We claim that there are implicit design principles which are harmful. By not listening to, and unsettling these theoretical principles, anything we build on top of them will produce more complexity and enormous waste, regardless of the good intentions and the magnificent skills of the thousands of health professionals working to improve the field.

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posted by guillermo m wechsler @ 6:28:00 PM 4 comments

January 8, 2007

From Print to the Web to PFs

PFs: Personal Fabricators.

Neil Gershenfeld is conceiving a new capability to put together the world of software design and the world of machine design in his Center of Bits and Atoms (CBA) at MIT. The basic idea is that we can design in a computer (cadcam) and “print” three dimensional objects using a network of supersonic jets of water, powerful lasers, microscopic beams of atoms, and probably in the future some nanotech manufacturing. This new unity, based in the idea that the universe is literally a computer, is called PF, paraphrasing the PC. As he described it, what is emerging, is a new Renaissance, a new sort of mass literacy were the focal aspects are not anymore reading and witting, but “mastering available means of expression.” Some of consequences of these experimental practices are:

  1. Re-connecting the production experience in a unified practice of conceiving, designing, producing and using an artifact.

  2. Empowering people to control the technological environment in which their communal life thrives.

  3. A new type of just-in-time, on-demand teaching and coaching (in opposition to the current pushing-content, just-in-case form of education).

  4. Expanding the value of collaboration. He said about this new style of collaboration: “once a student masters a new capability, such a water-jet cutting, or micro-controller programing, they have a near-evangelical interest in showing others how to use it.”

Nothing about this is totally new, with the exception that is growing in the historical moment in which there is Internet, there is an Open Source economy, and there is the GNU GPL to give a legal framework to new ways of collaboration. Even more interesting, his labs are replicating around the world, especially in low-income, resourceless communities in Ghana, India, or Boston's Tent City...with results as astonishing as those of the highly educated MIT students.
posted by guillermo m wechsler @ 2:48:00 PM 0 comments