How Design Makes the World

by Scott Berkun

For good ideas to make it out of the organization and into the world, three kinds of broken organizational problems need to be overcome.

Design by dysfunction.

In Patrick Lencioni’s classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, he offers five reasons for this lack of cohesion: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

Design by committee.

Quality often declines if too many decisions are made by committee, as the person with the most knowledge and the person with the least have equal influence.

Having an empowered, specialized team to lead design decisions i...

Design by reg...

Most organizations put more rules into place naturally as they age. But at some point these rules create so much gravity that no idea can obtain escape velocity and make it out into the world.

If the budgets, culture, employees and incentives, key parts of any organizational system, don’t change, then what the system produces is also unlikely to change.

Many organizations have revolving doors at senior leadership, where big names are brought in to solve major problems but don’t last long, as they’re not given enough power to change the system that’s in place (which might be by design, as someone else might benefit from things not changing).

Legislation [is] drawn up to suit those whose job it is to check rather than those whose job it is to design. The checker requires a simple test, preferably numerical, easily applied on evidence... the checker also prefers not to have to consider more than one thing at one time. The designer, of course, requires the exact opposite of this, and so legislation often makes design more difficult.

“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

Organizations become self-fulfilling: the culture rejects progressives while reinforcing safety for people who fear change.

For people with ideas, then, success depends on their ability to find allies, make pitches and navigate through rules and cultural assumptions.

When you have a good or bad experience, it’s easy to blame the designer in drive-by style, but the root cause is the nature of the organization that hired them.

exclusion habit: a pattern of assumptions that seems to have worked in the past, but which keeps you blind to problems you’re creating.

Responsible creators must accept that they will exclude people, unless they work to prevent it.

ability bias: the assumption everyone can do what we can.

It’s one thing if culture fit means a desire to do good work, or having useful skills, but it’s too easy to confuse someone who is different with someone who won’t fit in.

Reading books or traveling yields one level of intellectual diversity, but nothing equals the power of working with people who implicitly bring those perspectives into everything they contribute.

Lazy designers used average measures of people, if they used data at all.

Some designers resist data. They like the romance of creativity as an instinctive process. People lost in this fantasy believe that data works against creativity, but that’s more drive-by design.

Good designers never make you remember anything that a computer can remember for you (except perhaps for passwords).

the more thinking a design requires of you, the worse the design.

reduce mistakes, and to make mistakes safe.

good design requires skepticism, too. Specifically, the willingness to put ego aside, and explore how easy it would be for your creation to frustrate people or serve unsavory masters.

Design is never neutral,4 or beneficial to everyone, certainly not in the way their makers presume their works will be.

Tradeoffs are central to understanding design.

often the best design comes from clarity about the compromises you will make if you have to.

the easiest way for our brains to think about value is in quantity.

The problem is that design is hard to measure in terms of quantity.

To measure design quality requires more than just looking: you have to use the thing for its purpose.

by framing the decision to be about features, which advertisements often do, it benefits the corporation that made it more than the customer.

Most designers will tell you that simplicity means value.

But our quantity-oriented brains, and our desire to get more value, tend to make us think complexity means value.

As general rule of design, the more instructions something has, the worse its design (complexity!).

People who buy things are called consumers, which implies that their primary value is what they consume, rather than what they learn, what they hope for or what they wish to contribute to society.

Good design usually means people experience flow while they’re using the designed thing, even to the point that they’re not consciously aware that they’re using a designed thing at all.

Much like how our brains actually watch films, a designer has to carefully use technology to link together different bits of information to make them have flow and feel like one unified experience.

If we’re thinking people first, we need to think about their experience, not just where “our design” begins.

Continuity: information that’s offered for one task is repeated, at timely intervals, until the task is completed or destination reached. Discoverability: the right information should be the easiest to notice at the right time, and different items should never compete for attention. Consistency: the same icons, colors and terms are always used. A “restaurant” should not become a “snack bar.” Terms, colors and other items should only need to be learned once. Clarity: the meaning of every message must be clear to as many people as possible, even if they speak a different language.

In most cases, when you notice how something is designed, the designer hasn’t done a good job.

Even the best design impacts someone, perhaps just by excluding them.

Doctors have known for a long time, at least as far back as the Greeks and the Egyptians, that noise creates stress.

designers should see how, when they design in isolation, the results are worse. Ignoring how a creation fits in with everything else that’s already here often defeats its own purpose, and makes it harder for creations that follow.

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in... a city plan.”

When designers follow this notion, their aim is always better. It’s an antidote to the poisons of design ego and to getting lost in the pleasure of building something.

Even without the challenges of designers competing with each other, a tougher problem may arise when a design competes against itself: that the success of a design leads to its own failure.

The natural response, to add more roads to congested areas, doesn’t reduce traffic.

“In cities, urban space is the ultimate currency.”