How important is the eco-system to the process of design?

According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, there are over 30,000 new products introduced every year, and 95 percent fail. One of the core tenets of design is to create functionalities, not features. This approach broadens possibilities when thinking of solutions, and concomitantly demands a thorough understanding of the problem space. If one thinks only in terms of creating an app or a product, for instance, it is easy to get absorbed in the technical act of bringing that idea to reality. However, it is always more important to ask why one is creating this, and for whom, how is it going to be used, how might it be misused, etc. These answers can be found by developing an understanding of the ecosystem around the problem space.

As you move up the value chain from standalone products like a shaving razor or a website to smartphones, software platforms and converged solutions, the degree of complexity of related cause and effect influences around the solution space increases dramatically. The same solution may be used simultaneously by people across the world, in dramatically different socio-cultural realities, or by people with little to no experience using ICT enabled devices. Take the example of Uber - fundamentally a digital service that connects a rider to a transport, but to be effectively usable by everyone, the design of this service is adapted constantly for the complex markets the company operates in. In India, for instance, Uber has rolled out services customised to our habits and conditions - from accepting cash for payment and launching Uber moto - which uses motorcycles instead of cars for cheaper rides and faster movement through traffic jams - to launching an entirely new version of their app called Uber Lite - which is designed from the ground up to work on phones with limited memory and even in bad network connectivity. This continued innovation ensures business success amid stiff competition, and can entirely be attributed to developing a thorough understanding of the ecosystem the company operates in.

When asked how he would spend his time if he was given an hour to solve a problem, Einstein is supposed to have said that he’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and alternatives and 5 minutes solving it. This is also the design process we are taught in design school. However the exact opposite is true in the various industries that engage with designers - such as in IT where concepts such as 'agile', 'lean UX', and others have shifted the focus to build first, fix later (through iterative improvements). In this scenario, time to market is the primary concern, and an incomplete solution is retroactively corrected after launch, as more and more information becomes available about the product's failures and pain points. This approach works for complex products or usage scenarios that can't be completely researched or tested for, like voice assistants and smart speakers, but can fail spectacularly in other scenarios if applied indiscriminately.

Doing effective ecosystem-level research is a highly involved process that takes time and sometimes requires the organisation to play the long game. Facebook is especially good at deep research in target markets across the globe, their research teams comprising of different disciplines - from ethnographers and historians to design researchers and technologists. The payoff is plain to see, developing deep insight can give organisations a solid foundation for continued innovation by continually creating solutions that are good for users and good for business.

Another often overlooked side to the problem is the ecosystem within which design as an activity functions - and the challenges therein for designers to deliver effective solutions. Awareness of the range of impact that design can have is still often limited to asking for last-minute aesthetic interventions to make products sale-able. Only a fraction of companies recognise the vital importance of design and give it a seat on the board. There has only recently been a global awakening in industry to the transformative power of design for business, society and environment, and it looks like the only way to overcome this on a wide scale is to integrate design thinking into schools today, so that tomorrows graduates enter industry and society with a clear understanding of the potential of design in bringing transformative change, especially considering the potentially catastrophic scenarios arising out of climate change.

This article was originally written for Architectural Digest India, November 2018.