Doing Design that Drives Change

A fundamental aspect of experience design is seeking improvement in events and situations that people encounter. If you talk to anyone who has gone into an experience-related field, they likely will tell you about how the desire to make things better for others was a key motivation. Making things better doesn’t even mean fixing things. We can think about the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If an experience ain’t broke, you might not have to take any steps to fix it. However, you can always try to improve it. After all, there isn’t a situation that isn’t in need of a little improving.  

By definition, when things are improved, they are at the same time changed. Whether those improvements end up being significant is another matter. Without being able to predict the future, we can’t say whether large or small improvements will result in significant or minor changes. It always is important to remember that big changes and transformations can come from small beginnings, such as the mighty oak from the little acorn. 

When we think about the acorn and the oak, it is important to remember that more is needed for the acorn to transform into the oak. There is the need for fertile soil, adequate rainfall, the right climate, the proper age of the acorn for planting, and other conditions essential to create the appropriate environment for its transformation and growth. On its own the acorn will never become an oak. An acorn just has ‘oak potential;’ it has within it the programming for its transformation. To realize that potential and transform, it needs some help through having the proper environment.  

We can think of culture as the human environment in which social change can take place. Culture, like a natural environment, is a conglomeration of factors that come together to create the overall surroundings and conditions in which things (i.e., people) live. Beliefs, norms, symbols, groups, artifacts, technologies, structures, laws, and even more all combine to make up culture. The exact characteristics of those ingredients, and how they get mixed together, create what kind of culture there is. 

Environmental ecosystems can take millennia to form. Human cultures and organizational cultures don’t necessarily have that long to germinate. Obviously, there are cultures that can be traced back over many hundreds of years. Compared to how long it takes for a savanna or jungle to form, that is merely a blip in time. Also, compared to a natural environment, social environments are easier to engineer. It is through the intervention of people in the social environment that we can lead to intentional and unintentional outcomes. People have the capacity to transform or change their environments. That goal becomes more or less difficult depending upon the environment they are in.  

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

When thinking about design, we can then think about the decisions that we make for that social environment in order to accomplish some kind of goal and create change. Like with the acorn, change requires a group effort from all the stakeholders in the experience ecosystem. Additionally, we need the right culture to make it more likely to take hold. 

Culture is a strong driving force in experience design in terms of whether change will be accepted. You toss something into the social milieu, you can’t always predict how to is going to go. There are constants, such as “change is hard.” What that means in practice can be more challenging (or impossible) to predict.  

Michael Kirkpatrick has spent a career doing design and trying to make change happen. His new company Centric Park is all about trying to bring that transformational potential into a reality. A lot of that work is going to be dependent on the cultural ecosystem that you are in. Different companies have different cultures, meaning that what is possible can be different between corporate contexts. Part of the job of Centric Park is to get cultures on the same page, or at least in a position to be able to make better change more possible.  

An element of this effort is to identify barriers that are in the way of that change. Another element is how to get people on the same page together and get stakeholders involved. Most importantly, we have to remember that we are doing this for people, and take them into account in all that we do. But we can’t just design for people, but you need to design with people.  

In Michael’s visit to Experience by Design, we talk about not just talking about design, but using experience design to transform business and outcomes. Specifically, we talk about how experience design needs to be a people (or human)-centered activity, constantly coming back to the question of what is best for those who are involved. Using a systems perspective, this requires the designer to take ethnographic noticings, stakeholder input, and designer vision to achieve those goals, which first and foremost includes designing products and services that will help people.   

Finally, we think about the experience designers place in the cultural and social savanna, and through design we might be able to make the acorn into the change that we’d like to see.

Listen to Michael’s appearance on Experience by Design