What role does ‘synthesis’ play in the design process?
It’s the missing link, halfway between discovering an original idea and using it to make something new: this video tries to explain how it works
At the early phases of the design process, you employ inspiration, research, and discovery, in order to come up with ideas. Later on, at the closing stages, you somehow manage to turn the ideas you choose into finished designs.
So why is it that the results of these two different parts of the design process so often turn out to have so little in common?
“And who is the design deity with the big earrings?”, we hear you ask:
Jon Kolko is an Associate Creative Director at frog design and the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design, an educational institution in Texas.
He has worked extensively in the professional world of interaction design, solving the problems of Fortune 500 clients.
His work has extended into the worlds of consumer electronics, mobile, web, supply chain management, demand planning, and customer-relationship management, and he has worked with clients such as AT&T, HP, Nielsen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ford, IBM, Palm and other leaders of the Global 2000.
The underlying theme of these problems and projects was the creation of a solution that was useful, usable, and desirable. His present research investigates the process of Design, with a focus on Design Synthesis and the creation of meaning.
Prior to working at frog, Kolko was a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in shaping the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs.
Kolko sits on the Board of Directors for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and is the Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM.
Kolko is the author of the book Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, and the forthcoming text entitled Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, to be published in late 2010 by Oxford University Press.
Here is a link to a paper on some themes relevant to this article by Kolko called:
Sensemaking and Framing: A Theoretical Reflection on Perspective in Design Synthesis
I think that this working theory really hits the nail on the head when it comes to cognetive design when, during the lecture, Kloko points out, “Not all ideas are equal.” I am not a designer in my job, at least not often, but when forming a project there’s lots of different paths to deal with a problem, but it takes some time to prune down what we can do into what we should do.
Btw, “abduction” in reasoning does not mean to kidnap an idea (no matter how silly it might sound.) A great deal of this sort of design approch does involve a lot of data gathering, looking for patterns, and then attempting to model a design around those patterns. Like finding what users like to see on a page; or are a lot of users ignoring a particular part of a form?
Ethnography and contextual research of the user base can reveal a lot of useful patterns to help guide designers to provide what users want — but the real magic happens when the rubber meets the road. At Motorola, they taught us to turn our consumers into complainers — get them to tell us about their experience. And then, from that experience we can develop something that works to fit their needs and interests.
Has anyone else used this method?
This guy seems interesting. I’ve done a Google search to see if I can find out any more about Jon Kolko. I came across this interview with him:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/15/jon-kolko-designer-technology-future-design-10-frog.html
He’s talking about Design that changes Human Behaviour and tells of some projects that he’s been involved with.One is a collaborative project with Frog, Pop!Tech, Nokia Siemens, amongst others and uses free text messages to raise awareness of HIV in Africa. It’s called “Call Me Back Messages” and involves sending out free text messages in the native language to encourage people to get tested for HIV.Another project that he talks about involves working with ARCH, Austin Resource Centre for the Homeless, to help the homeless get back on their feet.This brings a whole new concept to our understanding of “design” – it’s not just about making things look good – it’s about using it to help make improvements across a wide spectrum.
I deal with developers that make web designs all the time, and I can say that the process of synthsis is a part of doing the web design. Developers have their view of what the outcome of the website should be. In the process of writing the design it gets changed over a dozen times because they come to a deductive reasoning on whether what they have will work or logically it does not work. As states all insight is not good or bad but it can work for the input of development. No matter how crazy an ideal is or how bad an ideal initially starts out it can be put to use once it is dissected and practically used in a formula. I have not seen a lot a patterns form in web design to be consistent. So I must say that Kolko has definitely headed in the right direction to have a more cohesion amongst designers. With out experiences, trial and errors we would not be able to develop tools that work for us and for our needs.
What I understand from Synthesis is when you know you have certain inputs, you design a system that can transform input into the desired output. So, the idea of “desired output” is focal point in any design process. Now for design of system to be innovative, it has to be better than existing systems, if any, to get “desired output”. Sometimes, the “desired output” itself is obscure, for example, we are faced with problem of global warming (it’s an issue) and we need its solution, but the exact form of solution is obscure. Here, we are faced with an issue where to start the design process!
I like the idea of formulating “output” from a given “input”. Usually, systems are built based on a desired output, and then getting the needed input to produce that result.
Making something better is the challenge. Nowadays, innovations and inventions are produced like pancakes. What do you think is a great way to beat the competition?
Innovation is itself a vague idea. It needs to be defined in clear terms as it may mean one thing to you while another to someone else. The article I just found analyses innovation well:
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2006/id20060131_916627.htm
So again, we “innovation” can beat competition, but it need to be well defined first. In one sense, I understand innovation as creation of a design that solves a problem more efficiently, with less cost, and ease of use, though other systems / designs already exist to do the same task.
Well, you are right. Innovation has different meanings to different people. Innovation to some people may be new technology or features that can make life easier.. To some it may be a new process that can speed up things.
But for me, innovation is something that will improve a system, process or technology and produce something positive from it.