the hour-glass of day-dreaming

I have come to LOVE bus rides. Looking back I realize they are my ONLY uninterrupted time in the whole day. No phone calls - too noisy for that, no internet, I feel a strange sense of privacy in that noisy overcrowded vehicle! Its become my reading time, my daydream time, my crazy ideas time, everything.

Coincidentally I had a time management training at work in which the we discussed 'interruptions' for a long time. We discussed multi-tasking, collaborating, and all the buzz words of the new healthy flexy work culture. Our trainer was convinced that multi tasking was a myth, and that people can only do one thing at a time. It was just that some people might be good at masking the transition time as they switch from task to task - but it was still ONE task at a time. And that multitasking was actually reducing their efficiency at every individual task. While this could be debated endlessly... it got me thinking.

Working with no interruption (the black box) being on one end of the scale, and embracing interruptions as a means to step out of the black box being on the other end of the scale, is difference between my bachelor's degree in design and my masters degree in design. Let me explain this. I began studying design in the year 2000 in India. The style of working was intensive and immersive. Only ONE course was taught over two weeks/four weeks, the assignments were individual, and towards the end of the course all students would be thinking and dreaming and spending every second on only ONE problem/solution. There was no major use of the internet, and very few students had cell phones. The periods of time spent working were clear cut capsules of uninterrupted flow. The final results/design solutions were often fantastic and equally often just plain old ridiculous.

When i came to the US to study design research for my masters, things had changed. The model of design education was completely different. It seemed to be based on interruption(in a good way). We were taught four or five courses at a time and these courses stretched over a quarter, everything was team work. So now at any given time, I had five things to think about and the opinions of 20 people to consider. And I immediately saw the difference: it was SAFER. No result was ever too ridiculous. The law of averages was mitigating the one thing that scared businesses away from designers: craziness. But at the same time, The number of spikes in absolute brilliance/freshness also reduced. It didn't vanish, don't get me wrong, - we sometimes saw projects that were clear examples of multidisciplinary thinking gone right :) where the answers far exceeded the capacity of one individual.

The stark difference between the two approaches makes me wonder. We now are so busy trying to make design appear risk-free and methodical and almost predictable so that we get green signals that at times i can't help but think - are we loosing that black-box, missing that 'bus' where we meet our own ideas?

Time will tell...

The disease of forgetting...

I realized this week that its just too easy to forget how to write: how to ramble endlessly to a faceless square window, its also possible to forget how to draw, and well, who knows, I've not swam in a long time and its possible that swimming too can be added to this crazy list!

All my ideas seem to swarm around only in long bus rides and vanish into thin air when I finally can write them down. So here's the last strain of an idea before it too sinks into the quicksand of my routine.

Its been 8 months now that I'm working in a Public Health organisation. Public Health is way more interesting that you would think... It feels to me like a system designer's DREAM problem space. Public health has all the ingredients that designers love to get their hands dirty with:

1. Its system level. Nothing caters to a person - its always about a community/state/country

2. The approach is often preventive which means understanding the source of the problem

3. It is deeply embedded in understanding and influencing human behavior

The combination of these three things makes it a fertile ground for design thinking and design methods. Its not surprising that Design for Social Impact is gaining so much momentum. However, when i sit to think about how do I as a designer try to train a team of public health professionals about design methods i realize its a challenging task. Even with the vast amounts of vigor and method embedded in design research and strategy techniques, they still seem a bit fuzzy and flaky to people never exposed to design. This is not to say that these professionals do not like the RESULTS of design techniques - they usually love it.

This led me to think that as a design community two things are needed:

1. How should we start presenting design projects at non-design conferences. I usually get bored stiff in design conferences where each speaker earnestly explains how useful and indispensable design is... I feel bad that we keep preaching to the converted

2. Alternately we must make a conscious effort to discuss failures in design conferences. Recently I was amazed to find out that there is a FailCon conference every year for failed/early entrepreneurs to discuss their stories since 95 % of entrepreneurs fail. Whats our failure rate? Surely our business of innovation is not nearly as watertight as we project it to be... where do we go wrong? how could we do it better...

But to not deviate completely from Public health, the reason i brought up these two ideas was that i think it is unacceptable for us to venture into spaces like Design for Social Change without fully understanding the risk, and responsibility, and ethics of designing in this sphere. We need to start conversations with public health organisations, gauge where we can really add value, interface with other disciplines not only in tiny teams but by organizing events and debates that are truly multidisciplinary.

Or we run into the risk of forgetting that we aren't the only ones solving problems. And forgetting, as i mentioned in the very beginning is a bit too easy.