Active Design

By David Dunne, adjunct senior fellow at the Beedie School of Business.

As you settle into the firm, yet cozy, seats in your brand-new BMW, you immerse yourself in your surroundings. The smooth feel of the steering column as you gently caress it: uncannily, it seems to caress you in return. The new-car smell, that chemical bouquet that shouts opulence and sensuality louder than words ever can. The coloured lights and indicators, meticulously arranged to appeal to the eye and to the soul.

A little later in the day, you report at the hospital for a minor procedure. For the two hours you expect to be there, parking your new BMW costs $15. Inside the building, it takes you 20 minutes to find the unit you are looking for: the signage is intermittent and confusing, and there is nowhere to ask directions. On arrival, you are told that there is a one to two hour wait but it may be longer, and that you should not leave or you will lose your place in the queue. The staff are disinterested and would rather be anywhere but here; the décor is dismal, the grubby magazines a year old.

Every product, every service, is also an experience. A new car is an experience, and, for good or bad, health care is an experience. Education is an experience; life on a reserve is an experience.

All are designed. For some experiences, like a new BMW or a high-end spa, design is undertaken consciously and actively. Much of life, however, is passively designed: a designed experience remarkable for the lack of attention paid to design.

What if we decided to be active designers of our world? To improve, consciously, the experience of everyday life, the environment, our public institutions – especially among those who are currently ignored or alienated?

If we became truly conscious of our role as designers, we would make different decisions.

We would look carefully at how the system we design affects those who use it. When Disney designs the experience of Disneyland, it does so with an eye to the emotions of its users: the excitement, exhilaration, fun that families have and how it brings them together. Ritz-Carlton pays meticulous attention to making its guests feel special – and also how its staff, another group of users, feel about serving them.

At the other end of the scale, experiences that are not designed actively, but passively, can be demeaning. Bridgeable, a Toronto research and design firm, conducted extensive research into the world of people with obesity (PWO’s). They found that PWO’s face “structural humiliation” on a daily basis due to the misfit between their environment and their bodies. The result was alienation and low self-esteem.

We would frame issues from alternative perspectives. Instead of designing a provider-centred healthcare experience, we would track how a patient moves through the hospital and how it appears through their eyes. We would look for points where the experience could be improved, costs reduced, or both together – and yes, that is possible. Doug Dietz, an engineer with General Electric, accomplished it by designing an MRI machine in a children’s hospital to look like a pirate ship. With a better experience for patients, sedation rates dropped from 80% to 10%, leading to improved safety and massive savings in costs. Some of the kids were even heard to ask, “Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?” after their MRI.

We would recognize that mistakes are opportunities to learn – and we would actively seek to make low-cost errors that reveal truths. In other words, we would let go of the need to be right, and focus on the need to learn. We would use our hands, eyes and ears to create physical models of our ideas and expose their flaws.

At Google, designer Tom Chi used a combination of coat hangers, chopsticks, hair bands and other everyday items to create fast prototypes of Google Glass, a revolutionary digital interface you wear on your head. Doing so allowed his team to rule out some aspects of the design that were not worth pursuing and to amplify others that looked interesting.

Working with seniors, a team from the University of Virginia used methods that ranged from simple paper sketches to interactive Flash-based tools to prototype a health monitoring system – here again, the use of simple tools gave the seniors the opportunity to interact and comment as the design progressed.

But the biggest thing we would design is our own way of thinking. We would curiously seek out opportunities to improve our lives and those of our fellow human beings. We would look at the seemingly impossible and find possibility; we would see constraints as opportunities instead of barriers. We would know that the mental models we construct of the world are only that, models, and seek to improve them by understanding the models of others. We would be relentlessly curious, looking at the world “as if everything needs fixing”, as Ralph Baer, the inventor of the video game, put it.

If this sounds like an idealistic agenda, I will confess to a sliver of idealism. But only a sliver. Active design may be hard, but it’s nothing really new: it is about becoming conscious of what we are already doing, and taking action to improve it.

RADIUS, the Beedie School’s initiative in active design, promises a transformative educational experience for students and transformative experiences for society. Students use design methods to work through such challenging problems as sustainability certification of wood products and helping build sustainable economies in First Nations communities. The business opportunities that come out of these and other design projects will be incubated into actual business ventures that make a difference in the real world.

In the words of Donald Berwick, “every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”. If we want better results, we cannot afford to be passive: we must take on the challenge of active design.

David Dunne is adjunct senior fellow at the Beedie School of Business. Together with Beedie adjunct professor Shawn Smith, Dunne founded RADIUS, a new interdisciplinary social innovation lab and venture incubator based at the Beedie School of Business.