Michael Roller

Results: What Personality Types Are Designers?

About a week ago, I challenged the idea that ISFJ was the ideal Myers-Briggs personality type for designers and asked designers to take the test and submit their results. 64 designers recorded their profiles, and here are the results of the poll:

While there wasn’t one personality that was most popular, results showed a strong level of Intuition and Judging among the group. I don’t believe that having strong Sensing and Perceiving traits necessarily rules out one’s ability to be a talented designer. However, someone with these traits should be aware of these as key differences when working with other designers around them.

About half of the designers surveyed were either INTJ, ENFJ, or ENFP. I’ll follow up with additional thoughts on what these profiles mean and what design careers best map to the most popular personality types. Visit the poll if you’d like to take the quiz and record your profile. If the results change significantly, I’ll update and report the changes. Finally, there are some great conversations both on this site and on the Core77 discussion boards.

Are you surprised that designers weren’t more biased towards Introversion or Feeling traits? Do we need more Perceiving in the design world? What do you make of these results?

Tags: design thinking, mbti, personality, survey

Peter Merholz’s view: Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You

Harvard Business published a nice, if somewhat controversial, article by Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz. His viewpoint challenges the current popularity of “design thinking” and reminds us that each discipline brings value with it’s approach. To throw out other forms of thinking in favor of design’s is limiting. Here’s an excerpt:

Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing “creatives,” “ideating” tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.

But talking about only “design thinking” and “business thinking” is limiting. Me? My degree is in anthropology. And a not-so-secret truth about “design thinking” is that a big chunk of it is actually “social science thinking.” Design thinkers talk about being “human-centered” and “empathic,” and the tools they use to achieve that are methods borrowed from anthropology and sociology. Believe me, until very recently, they didn’t teach customer research at design schools. In fact, when I began working in this field, the practice of design was remarkably solipsistic — I’d have to harangue designers to care about the person using what we created.

I think that many designers are still solipsistic, although maybe less so than in the past (thanks for the vocabulary lesson). When was the last time you heard “design is a powerful tool; design can completely change the way we look at things”? I recently read Super Crunchers and those same statements, for me, are true for number crunching. Merholz’s point is a good one, which says that design has just as much value as journalism, anthropology, business, and other disciplines (calligraphy?). In my mind, the best people I’ve worked alongside are “integrative thinkers,” sympathetic to the value brought by people from a range of perspectives.

Check out the full article.

Tags: definitions, design thinking, Links

Design Droplets Interviews Ralf Beuker

Like I’ve discussed before, I very much appreciate insight on design from non-designers. Ralf Beuker is one of those people, a Professor for Design Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Münster, Germany. Check out his interview with Design Droplets. Here are a few quotes to stimulate your interest.

My first job after graduating was as a university teaching assistant for the Chair of Management of Innovation and Technology. We acted as a bridge between design, business administration and information science. The idea was to connect all three in a better way – because design, business and information sciences needed the tools, the means and understanding of how to bring ideas to market. So I’ve been working with this overlap in thinking from the beginning of my career.

If you have the management of the design function you are in the operational area. When it comes to Design Management, then you’re on the corporate end. With the CEO you don’t discuss the tiny things of why a nob or a display is placed here or there. With the CEO of a company you discuss why Apple is such a fantastic company and how you think, for example, this furniture manufacturer can become the Apple in their industry. You are designing management and giving him recommendations about which triggers or levers to pull in order to allow the company to become more competitive.

Designers really need to learn, that usually, they do not have a choice about how they enter an organisation…After the basic business needs are satisfied like where do I get my money from (financing), how do I manage the money, how do I get my stuff produced(the value chain thinking), I’m not saying that this is the right view – I’m simply giving you a picture of what the management view might be, one tiny element is design. If designers have at least thought about the business persons situation and view, it makes it easier for you to understand why, as a designer, you sometimes don’t get to the high stakes table (the board room).

Ralf offers up a reading list and also has some good visuals over at his Flickr site. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Tags: definitions, design thinking, interviews

Must Read: Becky Bermont on Design

Some of my favorite people to work and interact with are business people who (somehow) find themselves surrounded by designers. In the consulting world, we often call these people “strategists,” but I’m sure there are lots of other names for them. The reason I find them so valuable is that they help me understand how design fits into the rest of the business world, preventing me from being myopic about design. Becky Bermont is one of those people. An MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Becky now works alongside John Maeda as RISD’s VP of Media + Partners. Check out these two articles published by Harvard Business.

Learning from How Designers Think and Work

It’s interesting how Bermont developed her definition of design in essentially the opposite direction that most designers develop theirs. I remember going to a design strategy conference at IIT and being struck at how similar it felt to market research conferences. I see now that designers are people who can make information emotional and visceral, who can make a bigger impact by thoughtfully marrying form and content. They are “experience perfectionists”…

I like how Bermont peels away at the layers of design here. In my opinion, she’s getting close to the core. Design’s biggest value is using aesthetics (you can call it storytelling if you want) to generate both excitement and investment in a certain product or project. This value comes from a combination of design thinking and design making.

How Artist/Leaders Do Things Differently

I won’t lie — for non-artists like me, working in this leadership paradigm has taken some adjustment. But it’s an essential part of our collective commitment to leading our organization authentically. She doesn’t explicitly call it out, but the principles in this post are the heart of my personal definition of design thinking:

1. Passion fuels the work
2. Form and content can’t be decoupled
3. Iteration is expected
4. All failures are opportunities for course correction

Designers, in isolation, don’t always see the value of their process or their skills. At worst, they identify the wrong things as their strengths. Of course, the same goes for any business function; we’re at our best when observing and working together. Thanks to Becky and her peers for helping designers understand their true value!

Tags: definitions, design making, design thinking

A Curriculum for Business Design

Ryan Jacoby’s newish blog do_matic is all about business design, so he proposed a futuristic curriculum for an advanced degree in the subject. Bookmark this one because he comes out swinging. Even though design thinking is a bit trendy, Ryan provides it with a sense of longevity by balancing it with essential “non-design thinking” (I don’t know what else to call it). This is a great overview of everything that creative business professionals need to understand, wrapped in a cool story about a student seeking this knowledge. Some of my favorite courses (for what it’s worth) are:

1. BDES 266 | Organizational Design and Culture (Charts & Farts)
2. BDES 126 | Creating Infectious Action (CIA)
3. BDES 105 | Empathy, Inspiration and Alternative Data (Eyes & Ears / AltDat)

Finally, this comment from Ryan is an important point:

I’m not envisioning a “business for designers” curriculum or a “design for business-types” curriculum. It isn’t Design+Business or Business+Design, but instead the program would be focused on the new discipline of business design: a practical mix of entrepreneurship, commerce and art all with the “making” focus you mention.

Tags: business, design thinking

How Designers Think

In a recent post, I wrote about the four essential members of a design team. Each designer is an analytical thinker, a contextual thinker, or (most likely) some combination of both. How do designers use these ways of thinking to create products? This post breaks down the way designers think and the two essential approaches to creating good products.

Analytical thinking focuses on the product, asking key questions like, what are the components of the product or experience? How can we design them to make a better whole? Activities like product teardowns, lifecycle analyses, and in-category audits look at existing products and their components. Contextual thinking, on the other hand, looks around the product, searching for insight through the users, the environment, and everything surrounding the product itself. Contextual thinking aims to answer the question, How can we benefit users and their environment in the design of this product? Ethnographic research leads the charge in uncovering contextual insights, but there are other tools (like Victor Lombardi’s Question The Brief) that can be used to effectively develop ideas far beyond what currently exists.

Of course, product development teams need to use both analytical and contextual thinking to create great products and experiences. They often do so in a differentiated manner, with activities that emphasize one or the other. But how can you ensure that a diverse team with a range of thinkers is engaged on a project?

Integrated thinking combines analytical and contextual thinking for powerful results. Often, teams need to create tools for generating concepts that utilize a broad team’s entire skill set. If a team is a diverse group of analytical and contextual thinkers, the integrated approach helps them collaborate early on in the process. Imagine designers, engineers, researchers, strategists, and project managers working together in an immersion session.

One example of integrated thinking is Forced Association (originally introduced to me by UC’s Dale Murray). Thinking analytically, participants break down and list ideas for each of a product’s attributes, like form, color, materials, manufacturing process, etc. Then switching to a contextual mindset, random mixtures of these attributes force participants to consider the new context that these “recipes” would live in. An activity like this is diverse enough to engage the entire team, giving each team member an opportunity to use their individual strengths. The best teams know how to deploy analytical and contextual thinking individually and when to integrate them, dynamically identifying opportunities to combine their thinking for powerful results.

What experiences have you had that combine the strengths of analytical and contextual thinkers to achieve success?

Tags: design thinking, design tools

Design Thinking vs. Design Making

As DAAP defines it, design is made up of two basic components: design thinking and design making. Design thinking requires sharp observation skills, a willingness to learn (and unlearn), sympathetic attitudes, and the ability to work collaboratively. When it comes to design making, one excels by having a strong aesthetic sense, attention to detail, and visualization skills.

(Some designers are great at only one, others are okay at both, and just a few are great at both. Each of these combinations can have value to an organization if leaders know how to use them. But that’s beside the point…)

Historically, design is rooted in the more tactical design making, but design thinking is currently helping designers communicate their strategic value to businesses. Which has more lasting value? In 500 years, will the most valued designers be design thinkers, design makers, or both?

Here’s some food for thought from Dan Saffer, Bruce Nussbaum, Nick Leon, and Tim Leberecht.

Tags: definitions, design making, design thinking

Tim Brown’s Four Activities for Design Thinking

Businessweek recently interviewed IDEO CEO Tim Brown. Check out his thoughts on design thinking and the future of innovation:

I’m glad that Tim Brown is leading the way in defining design thinking, because he’s one of the most qualified people on the blogosphere to be explaining design’s role within business. Defining design thinking is still pretty messy, and we need smart leaders like Tim to offer his insights. Besides reminding us that innovation is practiced by all aspects of a business (not just by designers or scientists), he does a good job breaking down four key activities for design thinking.

Four Activities for Design Thinking:

1. Turn problems into projects, give yourself constraints
2. Look for insights outside of your world
   
3. Make ideas tangible (quickly)
4. Sell ideas through powerful storytelling

While I still think the division between design thinking and traditional thinking is blurry, this is a good breakdown of the key steps one can take to balance convergent and divergent processes.

Tags: definitions, design thinking

Strategic Aesthetics

In writing this blog, my intention is to not only capture my own thoughts but to also offer thoughtful and useful information that furthers the blogosphere’s discussion on design. I want to provide this community with something that leverages my strengths and is differentiated from my peers.

I have a new tagline: Strategic Aesthetics

Strategic Aesthetics represents my approach to being a design professional and leverages my ability to understand both the short- and long-term aspects of our industry. Strategy is defined as long-term thinking and planning. Aesthetics are properties that relate to beauty, and seem to vibrate between what is novel and what is familiar. Many designers think of aesthetics as the current trends in form, color, and texture, asking the question, “what is popular and relevant for my projects now?”

When you combine long term thinking with exceptional aesthetic execution, something powerful happens. This combination creates lifestyle products and brands, forming strong emotional bonds between businesses and consumers. I plan to study how design functions on multiple levels to create these successful experiences.

Tags: design thinking, strategic aesthetics

Design Thinking Gets a Skeptic

I’m glad to see Frog’s Tim Leberecht criticize design thinking in his recent blog post. He addresses many of the issues we discuss on a daily basis: isn’t design thinking just basic problem solving? Isn’t design thinking just good thinking? Haven’t we been doing this for years? If you’ve ever used the words “design thinking,” you should read his post and make sure you’re not part of the problem.

My hope for design thinking is that it will help us find a way to further formalize design’s process, skills, and benefits to the business world. Tim’s skepticism helps push this dialogue forward and forces us to think hard about what we designers can really offer to business that complements the work of marketing, R&D, and other functions.

Tags: design thinking