What is Design and why it is important

From: seilamgoh, 2 years ago

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Based on Tom Peter's book "Design"

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What is Design?

Q/A session on 'Design' with Charles Eames(1960s designer)

Q: What is your definition of “Design?”
A: A plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose

Q: Is design an expression of art (art form)?
A: Design is an expression of purpose. It may later(if it is good enough) be judged as art.

Q: Is design a craft for industrial purposes?
A: No-but design may be a solution to some industrial problems

Q: What are the boundaries of design?
A: What are the boundaries of problems?

Q: Does the creation of design admit constraint?
A: Design depends largely on constraints

Q: What constraints?
A: The sum of all constraints. Here is one effective keys to the design problem – the ability of the designer to recognize as many constraints as possible- his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints – the constraints of price, the size, of time etc., each problem has its own peculiar list.

Q: Does design obey laws?
A: Aren’t constraints enough?

- Courtesy - 'Designing Interactions' by Bill Moggridge

Tips to improve Productivity and sustain it

Thursday 8 PM: Sipping hot chocolate coffee in a neighborhood cafe, I started scribbling into my messages tab in Basecamp, and ticked off work done from the day’s agenda. I am Raj and I manage a small team of designers for an Insurance customer for the past 6 months. It has been a happy ride, so far with interesting vibes.

This is a short reflection of our best practices that made us sleep in peace everyday, ensure that our productivity stayed high, and have fun doing our work by embracing the constraints. We broke a few rules, introduced a few new rules and realized we are so good together as a team.

The 4 things we focused for improving Productivity:
1. Recruit the right people with right talent for the job
2. Set the expectations, put the right guy behind the job and focus on people's strengths
3. Motivate individuals to perform and provide them ALONE time
4. Provide them the right tools for the job


And we nurtured a healthy work culture and environment….. Lets look into the details…

1. Hunt that perfect team and set the sail!
Build a team of people who are passionate, enthusiastic and have a great positive attitude towards life. Recruit for attitude, skill and talent. If you have someone who is unhappy and is there just for a paycheck, he is a devil’s advocate. He will cut progress, play black sheep and hamper the overall momentum and instigate unnecessary complications.

There is no use hiring someone to fit for an urgent project need, and put up with him for the rest of the year, trying to train him and mould him.

“Training is the tax you pay for a lousy recruiting policy” - someone

Rather we hired people with skills and talent and who have delivered consistently in their previous engagements. The Interviews happened over few weeks. Its good to invest that kind of time at the beginning rather than breaking heads later.

We did not add more people or swap resources as the project progressed Brooks’ law: Adding people to a late software project makes it later.

Sidenote:

2. Project Management 2.0:

“Titanic Captain blamed for Wreck. Ice warning ignored. Distress signals ignored” San Francisco Chronicle, May 29, 1912

“There is only one Steve Jobs, one table-pounding visionary who can refashion whole industries with a wave of his hand.” – Fortune, on Steve Jobs

Yes, its the captain of the ship that matters. His decisions, his style of execution, and decisions. Take the scenario of how Titanic sunk because of someone who ignored all suggestions and risked the passengers, or how apple shoot beyond stakeholder expectations because of its stunning CEO Steve (often referred to as a tyrant) who returned to the company after a bad eviction.

Gallup interviewed more than 80,000 executives around the world and found that ‘People don't leave companies but they leave managers’. When a bad boss fails in his commitments, doesn’t recognize his performing team member and fail to leverage him, employees start falling apart towards a downward spiral and become highly unproductive.

Another key issue is when the boss focuses on employee weaknesses instead of strengths. We are all used to these traditional phrases: “I expect you to become X, You are weak in A, B and C. I will put you into those training programs to fix your shortcomings"

So here is the misguided maxim: “You can be anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough”

Actually it should have been: “You cannot be anything you want to be. But you can be a lot more of who you really are”

We made very few rules, set the outcomes and left the means to the team.

We had all our team members take up Dr.Donald Clifton’s Strength Finder assessment to understand the team members' strengths and enable them to become better at it by honing their skills through training and workshops. Its all about Management 2.0 (when everything has a 2.0 why not management??). We are not alone on this. We were inspired on this from Google.

Data to support the fact that focusing on Strengths works for most of us:

If your manager primarily Ignores You, the chances of you being disengaged are: 40%
If your manager primarily Focuses on your Weaknesses , the chances of you being disengaged are: 22%
If your manager primarily Focuses on your Strengths, the chances of you being disengaged are: 1%
- Courtesy Strengths Finder 2.0

Sidenote:

3. Leave me ALONE will you? :

Lets talk about the science of interruptions

"Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically."
- A scientist of human-computer interactions

Many of us actually spend a lot of time in meetings and teleconferences or calls when we should be actually working. Remember the last time you sat for one good stretch and accomplished something?

In our project, We ensured that we will not have any calls on Fridays. We will not talk to each other or disturb each other on that day. Everyday we will mark our calendars with Leave me alone time.

“When you need uninterrupted concentration time, you just stick A BLUE flag in your desk’s IN TRAY so that everyone can see it and knows that you’re not to be interrupted. No phone calls, no questions – you’re basically not there.” – Ryan C, Carson Systems, on Getting Things Done

Sidenote:

4. Its the TOOLS you stupid:

“Federal Reserve economists recently released a study showing that the use of IT and the production of IT products have contributed approximately $50 billion in productivity output annually since the mid-1990s. – From a Forrester report”

"For many users, simplicity now trumps power. Linda Stone, the software executive who has worked alongside the C.E.O.’s of both Microsoft and Apple, argues that we have shifted eras in computing. Now that multitasking is driving us crazy, we treasure technologies that protect us. We love Google not because it brings us the entire Web but because it filters it out, bringing us the one page we really need. In our new age of overload, the winner is the technology that can hold the world at bay." - Technology writer Danny O’Brien

Productivity is inversely proportional to the Time taken to execute a task.

This is where we found a great tool which was god sent. Beyond helping us to get the things done, it helped a lot to manage our project better, to understand who does what, who owns which work…and so on..It saved us enormous amount of time searching emails, notes, and MOMs

I am referring to BASECAMP a great project management/collaboration tool from a small nimble firm called 37Signals.
“GET PROJECTS DONE” is the caption that instantly inspired us to explore the tool.
Take a tour: http://www.basecamphq.com/tour

Fig: Dashboard view of Basecamp

Basecamp’s key features instantly helped us collaborate better:
1. DASHBOARD - shows you all your clients and projects on one screen
2. OVERVIEW - The bird’s-eye view of a project. What’s late, upcoming, and fresh.
3. MESSAGES - Keep your communication centralized. No more shooting emails back and forth.
4. FILE SHARING - Upload files, categorize, sort, track versions, share deliverables.
5. MILESTONES - Keep track of what’s due, when it’s due, and who’s responsible.
6. TIME TRACKING - Keep track of the hours spent on a task or a complete project
7. COMMENTS on MESSAGES - Communicate back and forth on a given message. Like email but simpler and centralized.
8. TO DO Lists – Make lists, add items, assign responsibility, check them off when you’re done.

Closing Notes: Team culture:
1. Allow anyone in the team to speak up and discuss his opinions.
2. Every team member gets to answer a survey every six months to rate his leader’s performance. Best managers are those that build a work environment where the employees answer positively to these 12 Questions
3. Every team member is requested or rather enforced to take a mandatory vacation. He will not be allowed to carry it forward. Just to ensure that he has a quality time away from work.
4. We brainstorm once a quarter to award the team members who perform consistently well.
5. Meetings are considered toxic and anti-productive. Any meeting called for should have a clear agenda and definitely not more than 30 minutes. And an alarm bell goes at the end of 30 mins
6. Team outing and team building activities are encouraged once a month, based on the kitty But we encourage a pinball game and food at a decent restaurent compared to a 5 star dinner
Sidenote:

………
Thursday 10 PM: My phone blinked and reminded me to pick the laundry way back home. I closed the laptop and walked into the cold night. As the breeze whistled I was reminded about a quote by the visionary Thomas Edison:

“There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something.”
……………………………………………………………………….
References and anecdotes:
1. Maverick by Ricardo Semler
2. Strengths Finder by Tom Rath
3. First break all the rules – Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman
4. Getting Real – by 37 Signals
5. Getting Things Done - David Allen