GUILLERMO WECHSLER

The Illusion of Controlling People

I recently put together a short document showing how "having control of people" in an organization is tangibly having a set of well-designed, robust action pathways for some business roles. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

McDonough's Articulation of Design Principles

In my previous post, I mentioned three sets of design principles. Below are William McDonough's interpretations of two sets of tacit design principles for organizing social production. I took them from his book, Cradle-to-Cradle. Of course, these are imaginary recreations. However, they are interesting because they map "social intelligence."
Design Principles for the Industrial Movement: Design a system of production that:

1. Puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year
2. Produces some materials so dangerous they will require constant vigilance by future generations
3. Results in gigantic amounts of waste
4. Puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved
5. Requires thousands of complex regulations--not to keep people and natural systems safe, but rather to keep them from being poisoned too quickly
6. Measures productivity by how few people are working
7. Creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burying or burning them
8. Erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices

Design Principles for a Community of Ants As part of their daily activities, ants:

1. Safely and effectively handle their own material wastes and those of other species,
2. Grow and harvert their own food while nurturing the ecosystem of which they are part,
3. Construct houses, farms, dumps, cemeteries, living quarters, and food-stroage facilities from materials that can be truly recycled,
4. Create disinfectants and medicines that are health, safe, and biodegradable,
5. Maintain soil health for the entire planet.

A Failing Transparency of Design Principles in Health Care?

There are three layers of design principles out of which people design. I have begun to articulate them in this document. As always, read this blog, take a look at the document, and send me your suggestions.

The three principles are:

1. Theoretical Design Principles: These are the discourses and theoretical distinctions to observe, evaluate and act in the phenomenological domain in which the design is taking place. For example, if you are going to design mortgage lending services, the underlying theoretical principles out of which you would design would be financial theory, risk theory, organizational theory, cognitive biology, phenomenology, etc.


2. Ethical Design Principles: These are the basic ethical values of a particular historical period which shape your design. For example, today, in the domain of Open Source, companies don't design and build proprietary products controlled and shaped by themselves. They instead share their intellectual property with users as a way of getting feedback, building a stronger network, and improving their service.


3. Projectual Design Principles: These are the principles that define the value proposition a particular company or collective is willing to deliver for a particular set of communities. These principles are often implicit in the business model of a company. Google promotes user-generated-services; consequently one of their projectual principles is to release the code of some of their services. Dell supports market standards; consequently one of their projectual principles is avoid defensive R&D and defensive functionality in their product development.

At the HAAS School's Business in Health Care Conference, there were many intelligent, innovative, and devoted members designing and innovating in the health care system. As I mentioned in this post, Suzy Jones from Genentech spoke about innovation in the company. She showed, among other things, that Genentech did not believe in separating the know-how from the people producing that know-how. And in investing in the people, Genentech not only got more know-how, but built a new sense of trust and collaboration with people thinking about the same problems. The company has this fundamental design principle for expanding collaboration into innovation networks. Now, they are designing new types of contracts--new protocols of communication--that have produced a new common sense and a new thinking about managing vast networks of collaboration with deals built on mutual trust, sensitivity to mutual concerns, and some alignment of priorities.

In contrast with this design approach favoring vitality and decentralization, we have the implicit design approach of most of the health care reform proposals.

Currently, the health care system is organized based on a centralized top-down design criteria. Teisberg and Porter declared three basic theoretical principles, which are 180°s from what mainstream players are thinking and talking about now, as fundamental to designing a health system. These principles are:

1. Redefining the relation between the major constituencies of the system and putting the patient at the center.


2. Stimulating value-added competition in opposition to zero-sum competition.


3. Promoting information transparency and customer access to personal data.

By working with these principles, it doesn't mean you can't review them later on, but they have been proposed as a new frame to designing health care services.

Currently, the health care debate is lacking the perspective of questioning the design principles that are in the background. We claim that there are implicit design principles which are harmful. By not listening to, and unsettling these theoretical principles, anything we build on top of them will produce more complexity and enormous waste, regardless of the good intentions and the magnificent skills of the thousands of health professionals working to improve the field.

From Print to the Web to PFs

PFs: Personal Fabricators.

Neil Gershenfeld is conceiving a new capability to put together the world of software design and the world of machine design in his Center of Bits and Atoms (CBA) at MIT. The basic idea is that we can design in a computer (cadcam) and “print” three dimensional objects using a network of supersonic jets of water, powerful lasers, microscopic beams of atoms, and probably in the future some nanotech manufacturing. This new unity, based in the idea that the universe is literally a computer, is called PF, paraphrasing the PC. As he described it, what is emerging, is a new Renaissance, a new sort of mass literacy were the focal aspects are not anymore reading and witting, but “mastering available means of expression.” Some of consequences of these experimental practices are:

1. Re-connecting the production experience in a unified practice of conceiving, designing, producing and using an artifact.


2. Empowering people to control the technological environment in which their communal life thrives.


3. A new type of just-in-time, on-demand teaching and coaching (in opposition to the current pushing-content, just-in-case form of education).


4. Expanding the value of collaboration. He said about this new style of collaboration: “once a student masters a new capability, such a water-jet cutting, or micro-controller programing, they have a near-evangelical interest in showing others how to use it.”

Nothing about this is totally new, with the exception that is growing in the historical moment in which there is Internet, there is an Open Source economy, and there is the GNU GPL to give a legal framework to new ways of collaboration. Even more interesting, his labs are replicating around the world, especially in low-income, resourceless communities in Ghana, India, or Boston's Tent City...with results as astonishing as those of the highly educated MIT students.

Design Principles for the Renaissance 2.0

The subject matter of designing is about producing a new unity that expands value, by supporting emerging social practices. Competent designers claim that there are three ways in which we relate with those unities: we design them; we produce hem; and we use them. Neil Gershenfeld, in his book FAB, added a new dimension that precedes the design phase. He called it, “conceiving” the new unity. So, basically, in the process of bringing a new artifact or mechanism to fruition in our markets or communities, we go through four phases.

There is an old tradition – which is declining-in which those phases are understood as a lineal process, with a clear beginning and end, discrete gates -or funnels- in which specialized roles hand-off their tasks for the phase, and let the next role continue the process. This tradition has produced a common sense in which the central challenge is to produce a rigorous description of the conditions of completion of one phase, so the new phase can be carried out smoothly and autonomously by a team endowed with a new set of distinctive skills and capacities.

The “conceiver” is the role that is able to specify what is missing for a particular community of people, dealing with some particular historical concern. It is the role Pasteur played in opening up the space for microbiology and vaccines. It is the role George Bissel played in the visualization of the oil industry. It is the role of Edison in envisioning power networks and public electric light. It is the role Paul Baran played in the conception of the Internet. It is the role Jobs and Wozniak played in anticipating the world of the PC. The conceivers are the people that unsettle old paradigms, and articulate fundamental aspects of the design challenge: what is missing? what is possible?

The “designer” is the role that specifies the new unity so it can deliver the services it was conceived for. The designer defines the key components of the new unity, its assemblers, and interface. Let's say that this is the role played by Ford with his line of production-based manufacturing, or by Taichi Ohno with the Toyota Production System. It is the role played by Dave Walden, Bob Kahn, Frank Heart, and Severo Ornstein -among others- in specifying the first four location nodes of Internet in the late sixties.

The “producer” is the role that is able to interpret the specifications of the designer and to assemble, prototype, test, adjust, implement and make the new unity replicable, reliable, sustainable, and economically viable. Examples are: Standard Oil, Westinghouse, Toyota, Apache and Linux.

The “users” are the ones that transform their practices in order to experience, produce and distribute increased benefit and value. Basically: you, me, us, them. The traditions linearly organized around these phases, which deepened the division of labor. And the specialization of roles in each of these phases are producing significant waste in today's world -for instance, the Product Requirement Process in software development, or the IT documentations on “customer needs”, etc. As Time Magazine noticed in 2006 by naming “You” the person of the year, “user-generated” artifacts are occupying an increased portion of the value generation in our economies and communities.

Many of the wastes can be transformed into interesting possibilities of innovation if we change our understanding of phases as a lineal production line, and we think about them as observers, articulated in networks of conversations. Conceiving, designing, producing and using are an endless unfolding process. All the time, artifacts show up to us as part of our conceiving, designing, producing or using experience. A couple of years ago, Peter Schwartz mentioned to me when I was trying to articulate my notion of Service Design, that in his experience, designing was a lot less relevant than discovering from different perspectives. It took me a while, but here is what I now think he was pointing to: the emergence of the “user-generated” culture, which basically means a design culture that can have good, rich, authentic conversations about our experience with artifacts, social practices, and designing across the old-tradition silos.

The Most Simple I Can

Designing is about the articulation of what is missing in a particular space of social practices; the visualizations of the unity that may fill the void; the definiton of its key components; the definition of the assemblers and interphases that link the artifact itself and it with the whole. Design is about prototyping and discovering. Most of the time, the artifact is radically re-evaluated by the social practices in which it shows up. Design principles are shaped by the historical imperative of its epoch. Successful designs open up a new world and make the designed artifact transparent.