Let me tell you about
21st century design, 'cause hey, we're in the 21st century. But designers, well, a lot of them are still in the 20th century. If you look at design education, the traditional design education comes from a school of
usually art and design, or sometimes architecture, art and design. And you learn this craft of design, you learn the wonderful skills
that make beautiful objects that we love to look at, and
love to hold, love to touch. Those are physical objects. And, you know, inside
there's often a computer and so how do we make it so people can actually use the system and understand what's going on, and design the interactive graphics? Or how do we design a procedure, or how do we design a service, and that's not covered
in traditional design. In fact if I'm designing a
service like being you know, in a waiting line at a
bank, or at a cafeteria, or at customs control, I
don't need those craft skills, I'm not building anything that's going to be beautiful to look at. But I do wanna build
something that takes account of all of the needs of all the people. Service design is a fairly new discipline. But to me, it's sort of
the basis of the future because service design introduces two wonderful new components. One of them they call the journey map, in which I look at what it feels like, and what I have to go through from the time I, as a customer, say, come into a store, or a bank, or for that matter, the customs. All the different steps I must go through and what I must do in
order to get through, that's the journey map. But I actually wanna do that journey map just not for the customer,
but also for, say, the person who interacts with me, and the first people they interact with, and the underlying systems
that must be ready. So in a cafeteria, where
they're supposed to cash here, but there may also be
waiters of various sorts, and there's somebody who
has to prepare the food, and then somebody has to
deliver it, and take it away, and clean the tables. There's a whole range of people and things that have to work. And so in service design, we
invented the service blueprint. And the service blueprint
has two dimensions, the vertical, the horizontal. The horizontal is
basically the journey map. It's in time. The vertical one is all
of the different things that we interact with that
make it into a system, and how they change over time. So it's basically the journey map for each of the different components. And we can superimpose on top
of that the emotional response of each of the individuals as
they go through their journey. So where did those skills come from? How do we teach those, and
what else is necessary? Now the sidelight, recently
I've been looking at what I consider the best
designers in the world, and interestingly, a large number of them were not trained to design. Some of them have undergraduate
degrees in physics, or various engineering
or medicine, or English, doesn't matter, because this gives them a broader understanding of the world. And then when they start doing design, they bring this wide range
understanding of the world to their practice. Whereas if you go to a
dedicated design school, you don't learn about the world. You just learn about the craft of design. So I wanna change design education. I wanna have design education, not just designing a new lighting system, that's important, but
traditional design can do that. I don't wanna lose that,
I love beautiful objects. But suppose I'm called into
India to design a new sanitation a new sewerage treatment
and water treatment for a small village and isolate it. No electric supply, no existing
water supply at the moment, they don't have sewers installed,
the people are very poor. How would you do this? The real issue though is, how would you help the people do it? And what are their needs
and their capabilities that they bring? Because if I was asked to do
the same problem in Africa, or for that matter in
some of the remote areas of the United States, same problems, but I would have different solutions. So how do we teach people? How do we instruct the future
designers of the world, the kind of information they
need to understand the culture, the needs of the people,
to work with them, to let them dictate what is being done, and not be told by us. That we have to deal with the economics, we have to deal with local conditions, we have to deal with the politics. All of this, it's more of a
management job in many ways than a design job. But designers are the ones who
are best equipped to do this. Designers think broadly. Design is a method, not a
set of special components, and so what we must have in design, we must learn how to work
with people from all, well, all sorts of areas,
like the politicians, like people who live there,
like the healthcare workers, like the people who are sick, like the people who provide jobs, like in sanitation with
how do we rip up the city to put in sewers, who maybe
we don't wanna do that. And some other solution besides sewers. What about water? How do we get clean water
there, without electricity? That's the future of design, working on what we call complex
socio-technical systems. And that's what we should be teaching to our young, aspiring designers.
This is what Business Analysts do. This describes my wife's BA job exactly. Process analysis, knowledge translation, and change management.
Needs more animations, and low contrast text.
And why is he visible immediately in the video without you having to fast forward past lots of empty space?
And why no background music?
I cant stay focused on just one thing for that long!
Maybe if they cut back and forth to close ups of parts of his face and bits of clothing every 5 seconds?
That would really really help, I think.
Besides, what is he like 40?