Design Decisions: There are only four types
Too many times I’ve found myself in a project space standing knee deep in Post-it notes and prototypes asking “What does it all mean?”
Design thinking is often described a set of values, beliefs and behaviors common to the way designers approach work. Key aspects include empathy, tolerance of failure, comfort with ambiguity, collaboration, brainstorming and iterative prototyping. These are absolutely critical to great design outcomes but in my experience, the hard part is decision making time.
Decision making is when all the information generated through design thinking is put to use. Decisions on complex projects are difficult because it’s hard to use what you’ve learned to support decision making.
1) From day one of the project, the project team starts to develop project knowledge through conversations with stakeholders, design research and brainstorming.
2) At each decision making point, project knowledge is brought to bear to inform the direction of the project.
3) There is a point where it becomes very difficult for a team to leverage project knowledge to support decision making. The team is standing knee-deep in Post-it Notes and prototypes.
I hate getting to that knee deep place. It is paralyzing. When I first thought about design thinking through the lens of decision making it led me to the insight that while any design project will require that hundreds of decisions be made, each decision can be categorized as one of four basic types.
Four types of design decisions.
• Project Definition decisions set the goals and scope of a project.
• Research Planning decisions define where the team will look for the inspiration that leads to innovation.
• Design Analysis decisions make sense of what the project team has learned.
• Concept Development decisions help the team prioritize concepts for further development, from prototypes to implementation.
While each decision provides a platform for the next, project information is not generated in a linear manner. This makes it harder to keep track of what the team knows. At any given moment the team may learn something that could require re-framing the project. Similarly, from the very first moments of the project team members will have instincts about potential solutions. The non-linear nature of information generation and decision making means that the team must be open to revisiting decisions throughout the project as new information arises.
It's a non-linear process.
As a design leader I feel my primary role is to help a team navigate the design decision making process. What decisions needs to be made? What information do we need to support those decisions? What have we learned that means we need to revisit previous decisions?
As the values, beliefs and behaviors of designers find traction in the boardrooms of the worlds largest corporations there is an opportunity to leverage design to tackle ever larger problems. Enabling better design decision making is key to taking on these larger problems and making larger impact on the world through design. I hope this framework is useful in your design decision making and helps you take on bigger problems with greater confidence as it has done for me.
Thoughts or feedback? I'm at matt@bepragmattic.com
