The Changing Design Process

The shape of the design development process has changed over the last few years with the emergence and growth of a very large ‘front end’ also known as ‘fuzzy front end’. The front end is made of the many activities that take place in order to inform and inspire the explorations. In the fuzzy front end, there is no clear path on how to proceed and there may be many divergent paths to explore before any questions can be answered. It is often not known whether the deliverables of this process will be a product, a service, an interface or something else.

The goal of this exploration is to define the fundamental problems, identify opportunities for design and to determine what should not be designed. Working in the fuzzy front end of the design development process on problems is a growing territory for designers and design teams.

As the front end of the design development process has been growing so too has the gap between the front end and the back end.

There are actually two gaps.

The first is the gap between the designer and the user.

This gap happens when designers design things that people don’t need or don’t like or can’t figure out how to use. Designers are well aware that they are designing for others but lack the means to do this well. Most designers today acknowledge that they cannot exactly know what the user would say or do.

The second gap is the gap between researchers and designers.

The gap can be a source of conflict or misunderstanding, which might be due to differences between people from different disciplines.

So while the fuzzy front end provides the context for design exploration, it also introduces gaps and barriers relating to the expertise of people working together.

So who are the real experts when we talk about designing and innovating for future experience?

The real experts are the people we are attempting to serve through the design process, not the designers, researchers or business people. With the shift in mindset, we can invite users into a fuzzy front end of a design process and move towards ‘designing with them, not just for them’.

The move from designing for to designing with requires dramatic changes in the roles that people play. These changes related to both designers and to those served by design. In the recent past, we see that designers served industry while people played the roles of customers and consumers.

Moving up the timeline, as the user-centered designer where the attention shifts towards the future users but the mindset is still one of designing for them.

Designers need to change in their role to become ‘facilitators’ of the ‘co-designing’ process and the future users become ‘participants’ in that process.

Design need to serve both industry and the people, in fact, the change in role relationship and the different objectives for designing are causing a radical rethinking and remaking of the design process.

Related posts:

A neural network is a network of neurons inside animal as well as human brains which helps in communicating. This article is about artificial neural networks which are computing systems inspired by…

Between Oct 2020 and Jan 2021, Talent and Growth Department (TNG) decided to experiment and brought forth very different initiatives with respect to what it had been offering so far. We were very…

I have an unused Chromebit that I want to play videos stored on my macbook pro. “ChromeOS SMB network file share with MacOS” is published by Stephane Bounmy in Mac O’Clock.