Lead a Simple Design Process with People You Care About
Use this process to make shared decisions that meet everyone’s needs. This is an alternative to debating between a few pre-baked solutions. Read about Why I’d Rather Design than Debate.
This simplified design process is best suited to smaller challenges. The principles of design are these same, but for more complex problems, more rigor and depth should be added.
Let’s explore a simple example. How might my three roommates and I share space in our two refrigerators to fit our personal grocery items, our shared food, and meal leftovers?
Step 1. Share your notes
Each person takes turns sharing their feelings and experiences based on the questions. Listen deeply while other people are sharing, so you can propose solutions that take everyone’s experiences in account. Be careful not to suggest solutions during this phase. Focusing on a shared understanding of the situation sets you up to be more successful when you do start thinking of solutions.
Take turns sharing:
What are you observing about the situation?
What has your experience been?
What is working about your current situation?
What problems are you running into?
For example:
We have a lot of new shared food!
I don’t know where the shared food lives in your fridge. I don’t eat things because I don’t want to take someone’s personal items.
I don’t know how I can offer my unwanted leftovers to the group
Step 2. Find shared goals
You now have an understanding of each person’s experiences and identified some initial problems. To balance this out, take turns sharing about your goals and vision of success.
Design is a collaborative game, where the goal is shared success. You win when everyone gets their needs met and is satisfied with the outcome.
Take turns sharing:
What are your personal goals around the situation?
What is important to you
For example:
I want to be able to clearly see what food we have in the fridge.
I don’t want to root around in the fridge; I want to have quick, easy access to things.
I want to prevent things from spoiling.
After you have heard everyone’s goals, summarize what you have heard, and work to connect everyone’s personal goals into collective goals.
For example:
We want a system that communicates what we have so it doesn’t spoil
We want to easily know what is personal and what is shared so we don’t accidentally eat someone’s food or don’t eat it out of deference.
Step 3: Brainstorm possibilities!
Based on your understanding of the situation, problems, and your shared goals, now you get to brainstorm lots of ways you might solve the problem! Throw out lots of ideas. Record them on a whiteboard or sticky notes. Build of each other’s ideas. Combine them. Throw out wild ideas that might inspire someone else.
Design is a creative process that produces ideas that haven’t existed before. Your aim is to go beyond a win-win to a win-surprise. Don’t be surprised if you find new solutions you hadn’t thought of before!
Check your work back with your criteria in step 2. Remember to solve for the problem you have, rather than a common, yet hypothetical problem.
For example, I want to do something to make sure we don’t eat someone else’s food. We aren’t really experiencing that. We have the opposite problem, we don’t eat the food out of deference and then it goes bad. What can we do to make it clear that we want to share a particular item? We could label the shelves that are shared, so if something is on that shelf it is up for grabs.
Step 4: Run a test, learn, and make adjustments
You don’t have to have it all figured on the first try. Try your solutions out for a short period of time and set a time to have another conversation about how that went.
Photo Credit: Simon Berger
