The ‘Lost in translation’ webinar clarified some real gaps, how do we bridge them?
Ex BIDA Chairman, Gus Desbarats has written a thought provoking and personal review of BIDA’s Lost in Translation webinar held on 12 May 2021. We’d encourage reading and responding with your comments. You can also view video content from the event via the links below:
Joe Ferry – Design Director, Belmond, ex Head of Design, Virgin Atlantic (event Chair)
Mark Bulmer – Managing Director of Global Revenue and Operations, Native Design Limited
Louise Mousseau – Portfolio Director, Impact on Urban Health, part of the Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation
Tom Elvidge – Chief of Product & CEO of Mobility UK, Arrival
Edward Hobson – Head of Design & Innovation KTN/Innovate UK/UKRI
The ‘Lost in translation’ webinar clarified some real gaps, how do we bridge them?
It was wonderful to see 200 attendees for BIDA’s Lost in translation webinar. The design commissioners and managers on the panel delivered a fresh external perspective on working with designers, chaired expertly by Joe Ferry, no stranger himself to the issues at hand.
Native’s MD Mark Bulmer framed the issues very nicely: on the one hand, wearing his ‘ex banker/investor’ hat he was emphatic that demand for innovation is big and growing, and designers are the ‘go to’ people to meet that demand. But on the other hand, when wearing his ‘Managing Director’ hat, he saw, close in, too many pretty pictures and not enough explanation of how these delivered a business return. His advice was clear: as a designer you cost money so you need to put more effort into explaining how you create a return on this investment. I agree, and go a bit further: when creativity is inspired by a deeper understanding of business challenges, better ideas flow and presentation clarity follows.
Louise Mousseau, from Impact on Urban Health, made the parallel point that while she invests a huge amount in design, more use-cases would be helpful to help explain the links between the cost of design and improved service outcomes. Refreshingly, she was also most emphatic about the importance of linking design interventions to better, more inclusive, user-experiences. Sadly, this didn’t come up more. That silence speaks volumes.
Tom Elvidge, CEO of Mobility at Arrival emphasised the ‘top down’ critical importance of design at the company. But he also made the sharper point that innovation delivery requires many careful trade-offs, always pushing for the ideal, but ultimately creating the best outcome possible within available time and resources. His core advice was that designers need to learn to do good creative work within constraints. Never a truer word spoken.
As Head of Design and Innovation at the UK Innovate KTN Ed Hobson was able to bring a useful perspective: he helps businesses across a broad range of sectors, led by people who can be quite sceptical about the value of ‘design’. His ‘home truth’ can be summed up as: avoid jargony overuse of ‘conceptual models’ and build trust by delivering a good result on the job at hand before pitching to address any larger underlying challenges. This matches my experience. I’ve lost track of the number of long-term strategic relationships that started by digging a client out of an immediate hole. But this is also quite inefficient. Design innovation is most effective when it creates seamless human experiences in which all the elements of complex delivery systems dovetail from day one. Just avoid calling it ‘strategy’; ‘service’ or ‘experience’ design are an easier fit to most situations.
This was all, good sound advice from the panel, but it does seem to highlight issues of substance rather than just communication. I was pondering this when, in the Q&A, one of the audience asked if there was as a ‘design innovation 101’ guide to the issues being discussed. Hadn’t these issues been covered before, in depth, on degree courses, reports from Government and design organisations etc? It seems the answer might be that core messages are not hitting the spot.
If so, this isn’t just a ‘lost in translation’ issue. We, as a profession, need to step up and do a much better job clarifying the knowledge young designers need in order to become what non-designers now expect them to be: innovation leaders who deliver results, for people, in the real world. I had to learn these lessons fast and brutally, at 23, in my 1st job designing for Sir Clive Sinclair back in the 80s. Later, in my Alloy days, we used to call this the ‘designer at 30’ problem and the team at Alloy still do a significant amount of training to grow ‘designers’ into ‘Alloy consultants’.
Designers need to understand a lot more about WHY they matter so much and WHY their methods work. This isn’t a short conversation, it can’t be resolved in a single post or in a half day ‘design thinking’ workshop. I also don’t think we can dump this issue back onto the education sector alone.
If we are going to equip designers to succeed in the innovation leadership role industry expects, we need to crack on with proper professional mentoring. Those of us with long track records as innovation leaders have a duty to the next generation to share our experiences, good and bad, like other professions do. This isn’t just about what works or not, it’s about which competencies can be expected to evolve beyond all recognition, and which are most likely to form the solid enduring core of a design career.
I’m up for it, as I’m sure are others of my generation. Modern web-casting will make the knowledge sharing simpler to create and access. We just need to know: how interested are young designers in (semi) retired designers collective experiences of pitching successfully for hundreds of millions of design investment on thousands of projects, then designing the organisations, processes, management methods, training, creative direction and ideation that converted this investment into results. If you do, then ‘like’ this post, and in the comment, tell us how you think we should tailor these inter-generational conversations to suit your needs. No one wants to talk ‘at’ anyone, but there is value to be shared across the generations.
As a starter for ten, I really do humbly suggest people have a look at a piece of work for the National Skills Council by a BIDA team I led back in back in 2015. It’s a thing called a ‘National Occupational Standard’. These are formal, government-approved guidelines that outline the knowledge and competencies required to work in a defined area. They represent a common ‘best practice’ benchmark’ for all the ID stakeholders. Their aim is to help create a better fit between education and professional practice. They are created by employers, under the supervision of expert ‘standards’ advisers.
BIDA was approached to refresh the existing, decades-old standard for industrial-design. We assembled a team with over 200 years of combined professional-practice experience. The team were set tasks by the standards experts. For example, we had to agree a ‘clearly distinct and useful purpose for ID, expressed in a single sentence’ and progress from there, in a series of workshops and consultations to define best-practice for delivering that purpose.
There are 13 ID standards in all. For example, the webinar panellists might be interested to know about ID standard 7. This defines what is required to ‘Create Propositions that connect market opportunity, investor goals and available capability’. We deliberately used language that would be as future-roof as possible. For example, the ID-9 standard is about how to ‘Plan simulation methods appropriate to the behaviour testing need’. The practices to do this might vary across human-centred design for hardware, software and services, but the standard describes the common enduring competencies that will still be relevant to rapid prototyping in the future to human-centered design of everything from AI and food to bio-sciences. In a fast-changing world, industrial designers need a common reference point to know what new practices are needed to remain relevant, just like our generation evolved from using magic markers to Keyshot, Figma and chat-bot simulations.
It’s a pretty dry document, aimed at educational specialists rather than designers themselves and it’s very difficult to find online so I’ve created a more accessible link to a more user-friendly slide deck overview.
If young designers have a look at the link below and align their personal development goals to these standards, their communication challenges might just start to melt away.
Gus Desbarats, May 2021