In Design We Are Quite Lazy

Why don’t we try and draw some of that knowledge into the work that we are doing to result in better things, and to make judgements about what we can do, and what we should do.

So if we are designers trying to get local knowledge about people’s particular concerns, we need to understand what we bring with us, our world views, our mind sets. And anthropology and the social sciences have been doing this for a century, so why not go and learn from them?

I explicitly try and work with anthropologists, or anthropologically-trained people who are interested in a bridge between research and action. I am very keen to talk to anthropologists to understand design as a bridge for action, and an example of how I’m doing this at the moment is working with part of the United Nations, the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, where the scale of the problem is global. In post-conflict situations – a refugee camp, or a community in a conflict situation – understanding local meaning there and making claims about what those people need and want has got very potentially dangerous consequences.

I come from an Art and Design background, but since 2005 I have been at Said Business School which is part of Oxford University. And the sort of emerging design practice I am involved in is teaching some of this stuff to MBA students. They are, you could say, a new site for this design work. This year again I have got 50 students signed up to my course, and a lot of them are really interested in learning these things. But there are very few business schools teaching it yet, so being in a business school, a management school, which is rooted in the social sciences, I have a couple of particular sets of questions that I am looking at the moment.

The first is this. We now understand that design is social – it probably always was, but that is definitely a way we attend to it now. And we know that designers start off by doing research into people, trying to understand people, their practices their experience, a sort of ethnographic approach.

But I think in design we are still quite lazy. We don’t bother going to read ethnography and understand the different ways of doing ethnography and the different underlying philosophical implications of looking at things this way or that way, and I think this has implications for the claims that we make.

The second thing I’m interested is about this question of multi-disciplinarity. We had this idea that suddenly – as if we weren’t doing this before – design is part of inter-disciplinarity when developing new products and services, and even that these could be design led, or should be design led.

But again, because we are a bit lazy in design, we don’t go and read. There's quite a lot of stuff around in management and organizational literature about what happens when different functions or different groups come together to work together. A lot of it is inaccessible, including if you are in a management school, it’s badly written or boring, but some of it is really, really relevant. So I am trying to now explore some of that literature, and understand what that might mean for those of us trying to understand roles that designers or the design approach might play in collaboration, particularly within R &D.

So there are questions there about legitimacy, novelty, how something that’s novel in one group is not novel for another group, questions of language, questions of difference, particularly how we understand difference. And again, the social sciences have spent an awful lot of time thinking about difference. Why don’t we try and draw some of that knowledge into the work that we are doing to result in better things, and to make judgements about what we can do, and what we should do.

Lucy is Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Said Business School at the University of Oxford, where since 2005 she has taught design and design management on the MBA and where she researches designing for service and managing as designing. Current projects include working with the United National Institute for Disarmament Research exploring the role of design in international public policy. Previously Lucy was an Arts and Humanities Research Council creative and performing arts research fellow at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and a tutor on the MA Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art, London. She has over 15 years’ experience as an interaction design and technology innovation consultant and design manager.