Design is too often seen as a pursuit to improve the world in an objective manner, although I believe it is a deeply value driven process with no absolute best solutions available. Designer is always the source for values which in turn drive decision making in design practise whether one admits that or not. Unfortunately these values are usually left untangled and they end up affecting the design unconsciously and usually resulting only in cosmetic tweaks. Thus, designers are not always aware of their own values and the effects they have on their design work.
I imagine that by actively engaging the designer in a self-dialogue about values, it is possible to break some of the givens of design (i.e. those implicit truths that are not challenged or even noticed when the process of design starts). This can (only?) happen by taking apart the objects and environment of design: the user, the needs, the solutions and the current products. Deconstructing all of these at the same time may prove to be difficult or at least cumbersome, so I suggest that designers be selective. I have chosen to the user space (i.e. living environment of products) and partially also the current products as targets for deconstruction.
This means that I need to lay another layer on top of my evolutionary speciation theory - the layer of values. The idea is to combine the process of speciation into product design through the use of a loose analogy from evolutionary biology and drive the development of new product ideas through designer's values. In short, I need to design a design process that would imitate some aspects of the process of speciation while using designer's values as guidelines as to what kind of a product (and user) one hopes to develop.
Activating values has proven to be a problematic exercise. What are values, how do we access, use and refine them? How can they be rendered visible? These were some of the questions that I have pondered and which I have been forced to leave unanswered for most part. I have settled on a simple and pragmatic definition of values as: those beliefs or principles, which their holders consider as guiding principles (for living) and upon which they try to act. This defines values quite broadly and also doesn’t help to answer how we access them or how they are created or modified. In trying to render values visible I have quickly come to the conclusion that valued judgements and their explanations are some form of manifestations of values and as such interesting as an object of scrutiny. Therefor I have tried to incorporate value judgements and explicit explanations about them into my design framework.
My attempt at layering value judgements on the evolutionary speciation framework is quite straightforward. I need to change the environmental conditions of a product in order to guide its adaptation to a deviated existence. This can be achieved by changing the user and the culture of use, which define most of the conditions for products. Changing the user is a suitable process to inject designer's thinking of her values as it makes the traits of the products more concrete through a picture of a user. People don’t generally have difficulties on passing judgements on people and their actions, so I figure that value judgements about user is the obvious place to start. This way the designer can also come to understand that the user is not something static and that design decisions always affects users and cultures of use.
This calls for a bit more explanation. Consider that a designer wants to design a product that is good for doing things in category A, but not necessarily good for things in category B. Furthermore, assume that the designer would be appalled if she found out the product was used for category C as well. Now, how does one go about designing such values into the product that support certain kind of actions? One approach is not to design the product first, but to define the user first: how does one use the product, for what purposes, what kinds of patterns of action form from these and how do they tie with other (perhaps existing) cultures of use?
This approach of defining a product by defining its user is beneficial for at least two purposes. First, it makes it easier to think about value judgements in design when one can work with a picture of a person. Second, it enforces a positive type of use of the product rather than trying to prevent a negative type of use. As an added benefit, it makes the designer explicitly think about her values towards the user and their roles in design. I hope that the process will also produce a sufficiently deviated picture of a user that serves a fertile soil for growing new products.
Activating values from within the designer is often difficult although at the same time I think it is partly automatic. As cultural beings people are value driven and make judgements and decisions based on different evaluations of situations, actors, motives and expected results. Designers have to make a lot of assumptions about their users as they cannot know users inside out regardless of how they try: they make subjective interpretations of users and also at the same time constrain their observations to particular actions or properties of users. Designers make subconscious judgements about their users that they are not aware of themselves and may still they believe in the pursuit of objectivity and truthful representations.
Personally I think that this fallacy of objectivity is something I want to break away from. If designers indeed make at the very least implicit value judgements and cannot help being subjective, wouldn’t it be more fruitful for them to be aware of at least some of their own judgements while guiding them to something that they thought was constructive. I believe that this might be possible through a self-dialogue of values in which a designer has to explain to herself the reasons for making certain type of assumptions or design decisions.
Getting down to values is still not as easy as I had hoped it would be: I had noticed from even my own thinking that baring one’s values is often considered to be somehow embarrassing. On one hand designers often think that nobody is interested in their values and on the other hand people are not accustomed to designer speaking with a very personal voice and explaining things based on her own values (this role is often reserved for the artist as a separate entity from designer). Furthermore I have had to combat the post-modern value relativism that in it’s most extreme form resorts to “anything goes” type of thinking that undermines the whole idea of basing design decisions on values explicitly.
In a better situation designers would discuss about their values and their decisions out in the open and their perspective would be even attached to their products as a part of the product description. However, designers often work alone so I needed to support a value dialogue method that could at least partially be carried out alone as well. I also understood that while this was an important part of the process of deviant design, I could not use all my time coming up with the value tool. I had to believe in the designer’s willingness to try out my method how silly or trite it would seem. At the very least I had to try it out myself.
Having decided that values could be an interesting and perhaps motivational source for mutation in the process of deviation, I faced two major problems. When and how should be values introduced into the design process? Changing the user seemed like a promising conceptual phase, but how to go about it?
I’m still not sure that I have arrived at an acceptable solution, but a proposed solution nevertheless. The idea is to help a designer have a self-dialogue about possible user ideas through her own values. The designer takes an existing picture of a user as a starting point and reflects her values against that picture. This can be done through deconstructing some existing script’s assumptions about users (needs, actions, values, etc.) and labelling them based on designer’s feelings towards them. These labels then need to be explained (in writing) so that the designer becomes more aware about her own assumptions and thinking about users. These assumptions can then be altered once they had been made visible. The value based initial design phase and the following deviant design phases are outlined in the process brief.
Before describing the process of deviant design I must explain some concept that I had formulated along the way. These concepts hopefully better explain my thinking of how I believe that new products are born (not designed). In my thinking designer is but one part of the three tiered system where design, marketing (or scripting) and the user form the actual product.
I had formulated a three phased idea for product formation. Initially there is a designer with a problem. The designer tries to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of this problem through design challenge to which she proposes a solution (i.e. at this point it is a proposition, not a real solution). This proposition can then be offered into the market along with a script that explains to users how this proposed solution could be used (e.g. usually marketing, but not limited to that).
Users then experiment with this proposition while adapting it to their own needs. Once successfully adapted the proposition becomes an actual solution (perhaps for a few individuals only). In case the solution is successful enough and several new generations of propositions are based on that and if they are similarly adapted then a culture of use is born. This culture of use slowly defines how the solution is used, for what purposes, by what kind of people and so forth. During this process people become users (because use is now defined) and the solution turns into a more stable entity called a product. This product is supported by this culture of use and a way of seeing the product as it is used.
In a way the product and user base/culture of use form a mutually strengthening system that is highly resistant to deviation both in culture of use and in the product itself. The product can easily define limits to it’s own use and this strengthened with a shared way of seeing the product makes it harder for people to come up with new uses or try out those uses on the product. In effect, appropriation after the initial phase is usually harder for those people who have become users through being engulfed in a culture of use.
Through this shared way of seeing and using, the product itself is also highly resistant to changes. When people see and use a product in a certain way possible new features may go unnoticed or used in accordance with the products current role. This way it becomes increasingly harder to bring out deviating propositions to the market. New propositions are easily seen as representatives of current product classes (in case they don’t differ enough) or they are abandoned as too radical and difficult to use (in case they differ too much from the current product classes).
While it is customary to talk about products right from the beginning of the design cycle I think the model I outlined above is supplementary to this use. Initial products that designer propose are proposed solutions or product propositions. These became solutions or product solutions after they have been successfully used in real life use. Eventually these product solutions form a basis of a more stable product that has its clearly defined personality or nature. Even though people are dealing with products in each phase I think it’s more descriptive to use supplementary terms like proposition, solution and finalised product. Actually, this isn’t too different than talking about product prototypes, product sketches or products ideas. They’re all some forms of manifestations of products, but it would be simplistic to call all of them just products.
Evolutionary biology offers parallels to the above three-tiered model of propositions, solutions and products. Gene drifting in a population results in new members of the population (i.e. propositions), but these are not as themselves a new species onto themselves (i.e. a new class of products). These new deviated members of the population go through the process of selection to the environment (appropriation). Successful members are fit for the environment (i.e. solutions) and pass their genes (product core concepts) to further generations.
When a sufficiently large number of these deviated members become reproductively incompatible with the original population (i.e. conceptually remote enough not to be mixed with earlier products), they can be labelled as a new species or sometimes sub-species. Through the process of forming living, mating and survival characteristics of their own (i.e. culture of use) a deviated sub-population becomes reproductively incompatible. As a result of this speciation process (forming of a new product) the species itself as well as the environment supporting it are changed. In fact, speciation often requires (radical) living environment changes in order to get started.
This radical change of living environment is the clue for deviant design. Product ideas and solutions live in the culture of use populated by humans who act in the roles of users. By modifying these users and hence the culture of use, we also modify the living conditions for designed products. By designing for users that we would wish existed, we guide the solutions towards our own values and use them as a starting point for finding differing solutions to common design problems.