...when 140 characters are not enough

This is the third installment from my capstone paper. The prior two entries were the Abstract and the Introduction. You are encouraged to read those first but feel free just to start right here. As always, your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated. This is a work in progress. I will be devoting most of the Spring semester on this project.

Approach and methodology
As innovation and technology have become pervasive, not only in our professional but also our personal lives, the role of design has become increasingly more important. As a newly enrolled student in the HCI/d Masterʼs program, I began to discover that design is much broader in scope than I realized. I usually thought of design as a smaller part of a larger whole such as interaction design, website design, graphic design, software design, interior design, fashion design, or art design.

HCI/d is one of many disciplines situated within the domain of a much larger discipline classified as “design”. This had a profound impact on me. I started to see that there was a language that could be appropriated to generate a deeper understanding of past experiences and for use in future endeavors.

The Big Picture
While discussing the HCI/d program with an associate several weeks into my first semester, I commented that I thought HCI/d would be the MBA of the twenty-first century. Most graduates of this program go on to find careers as interaction design practitioners. However, the design concepts, theories, and principles we learn equip us to perform many different jobs that require solving ill-defined problems, problems that have good and bad solutions and are consequential. These problems have an infinite number of solutions, each one is unique, they are symptoms of other problems, require the designer to make rational choices that they are liable for, and do not have singular solutions (Rittel and Webber 1973).

This predisposition has motivated me to explore the rationale behind it. I am hoping that my research will allow me to develop a more structured understanding of the practical applications for design thinking and the use of design principles and concepts in fields that are not traditionally considered to be design-centered.

In a sense this project is an auto-ethnographic study of my two years as a Masterʼs candidate in the HCI/d program at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. As such, this study is largely derived from substantial secondary research of articles, papers, blog posts and books that appear to have some correlation to design. This research has started to identify how design principles are appropriated across various disciplines. It has also revealed what characteristics design shares with other disciplines and what characteristics are unique to design.

Reflection-in-action and double-loop learning have been integral design principles that have been applied to this process. There has been an almost endless questioning of the norms, rules and objectives of this project. New information continues to shape and mold the problem, turning it into a new problem.

Focus on Social Media
Initially, I thought that the primary focus of this project would be directed towards social media and how it could be used to promote design thinking within organizations, specifically business organizations. This predisposition was rooted in the notion that the emergence of social media and Web 2.0 technology made it easier for people to express their ideas, generate critiques, reflect-in-action and clarify or re-define problems.

Social media has been adopted within business organizations for marketing and customer service purposes. It seemed that this might introduce an opportunity to integrate it into the corporate culture and organizational structure in order to facilitate design thinking. New areas of study such as Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business Design are rapidly emerging (Hinchcliffe 2006; Dachis, Kim et al. 2009).

However, upon reflection, it became clear that all organizations are always mediated. Social media is just one more method by which this mediation can be appropriated. While the tools of social media may reduce barriers and help to overcome obstacles that organizations face, they are still just tools. The effective appropriation of those tools is determined by broader theories and principles, many of which are grounded in design.

Design Research
Design as a discipline has been formally studied for a little over forty years. Most design researchers consider that it began with the inception of the Design Research Society and the Conference on Design Methods (Jones and Thornley 1963). The escalating advancements of technology and innovation along with the disruptions noted above have provided a tremendous incentive as well as opportunity for the expansion and growth in design research. Over the past four to five years, design research has matured substantially. It is no coincidence that this has occurred simultaneously with the emergence of Web 2.0 technology and social media.

Many recent articles state that “design” and “design thinking” are hot topics in the business world. Stanford Universityʼs new Institute of Design, the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, as well as popular success stories at Proctor & Gamble and GE may lead one to agree with this. However, a trend report of Google searches for “design” in the Business category show that Facebook and YouTube are trending stronger than design. In addition, “marketing” is still almost three times as popular as “design” [Figure 4]. Design in the business community may be getting more attention in some arenas but there is clearly much more opportunity for an increased presence overall.

In Search of Clarity
Most of the research that I have conducted so far has been comprised of scanning over a dozen books, reading blog posts on almost one hundred different blogs, and reading countless papers and journal articles. In addition, I have conducted numerous personal interviews with design students, design practitioners, and people whose professions are not considered to be traditional design jobs. I also had the opportunity to attend two conferences and numerous talks sponsored by the School of Informatics and other programs on campus.

The overall objective of this research has been to gain deeper insights into how and when people appropriate design based principles and thinking in the tasks that they perform. In addition, I have tried to determine the degree to which they identified these actions as being “designerly” as they were doing them. I am hoping that by continuing this research, I will be able to help increase the efficiency by which people utilize design principles as well as facilitate the effectiveness of extending design thinking into areas that are not usually thought of as being design jobs or functions.

References
Dachis, J., P. Kim, et al. (2009). Social Business Design, Dachis Group.

Hinchcliffe, D. (2006). "Web 2.0 definition updated and Enterprise 2.0 emerges." Enterprise Web 2.0, from http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=71.

Jones, J. C. and D. G. Thornley (1963). Conference on Design Methods. Conference on Design Methods. J. C. Jones and D. G. Thornley. London, Pergamon Press.

Rittel, H. W. J. and M. M. Webber (1973). "Dilemmas in a general theory of planning." Policy Sciences 4(2): 155-169.