WHERE DESIGN IS GOING AND HOW TO BE THERE:

ABSTRACT FROM AN ARTICLE BY CHERYL HELLER

JANUARY 3 2013

She is a pioneering communication designer and business strategist, and has twice been nominated for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communication Design.

Design requires approaching a situation with an open mind, free of preconceived answers, which sounds simple but is not. It includes mapping and modeling—illustrating relationships, making hidden connections explicit. Making things visual enables people with a different ethos to see the same thing; unseen truths and insights are revealed.

Design creates the tools required to understand information, to compare and experiment, providing access to learning.

Design involves play, putting restrictions aside, imagining, waking up hopeful every day because it is always possible to create something new. Being unreasonable when being reasonable will not suffice; loving the pain and accepting the insecurity of not knowing the answer.

Design is prototyping—making things without being attached to them, hearing what’s wrong, building again on what’s right.

Design is craft—creating beauty, elegance, refinement that touches and satisfies, and that becomes embedded in people’s daily lives.

Design is continually learning and fixing. It’s working iteratively and remaining awake to the evolution that needs to take place.

Design is social. It’s public, engaging people in ideas. It works at scales, and with ideas that affect multitudes of people through theater, exhibits, public platforms and programs.

Design inspires people, wakes them up, helps them know things about themselves and the world that they had not noticed before.

Be the translator. Because generalists see issues from multiple perspectives, it’s easy to assume that what’s obvious to them is obvious to everyone. Don’t assume that.

Help business to change. A recent study by LRN revealed stunning gulfs between the way C-suite executives perceive the culture within their organizations and the way the rest of the company perceives it. It severely limits the organization’s ability to evolve. That gap in understanding uncovers a need and an opportunity for design. Business is where we work, business executives are who we know. It’s where to begin.

Put all these skills to use in shaping the future. Turn the circle around. Facilitate change in unexpected places. Everything that can be improved upon is an opportunity for design, beginning with conversations. Maggie Breslin, a designer who worked at the Mayo Clinic for years, is a great believer in the design of conversations: “I see enormous opportunity for design in health care to create the spaces for doctors/providers and patients to have difficult conversations. I think those difficult conversations are the key to developing a health care system that is less expensive, of higher quality and more efficient; in short, everything we say we want the health care system to be.”

Create meaning. It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the stupid economy. Ours is alarmingly one dimensional, which is why it’s so fragile and unrewarding. The value that can be measured by more than money is the purview of design. In fact, MFA Design for Social Innovation faculty member Lee-Sean Huang says that “one definition of a designer is someone who creates meaning.”