Prototyping and the design mind rely heavily on provisionality. A solution or idea, even if insanely great, is never finished, never perfect, never the best. Design solutions express the best thinking, processes, tools, materials, and choices possible at a particular moment. A moment later, the mix that gave rise to the solution has changed and new possibilities for improvement are available. Also, the moment the design solution is free to be tested by the world, the number and variety of tests rapidly exceeds what any designer could accomplish or anticipate. Every test throws off knowledge and, if feedback was part of the design as it should be, the design solution will continue throwing off knowledge about new design challenges and ways to improve the design solution.

As design thinking continues to escape the design studio, we’ll notice a shift in what we mean by “done” and “finished.” The objects, processes, and policies — artifacts of design solutions — that surround us will liquefy a bit. This liquefaction is not the chaotic, rapidly accelerating change that frightens us. Beginnings and endings, roles, identities, and cultural norms will continue to become less rigid and more plastic.  Selected and deployed design solutions will continue to perform as we develop our ability to see the lessons they are throwing off while being tested in the world. Provisionality in practice and thought allows us to accept and use the design solutions we have and see the opportunities for building the new solutions we need.

Expansive planning models, carried out over large spans of time, need to be built for failure. What was true (or assumed true) on Day 1 is unlikely to remain valid over time. By Day 93 or Day 500, a variance, large or small, between the model’s reality and actual reality will be present and, eventually, quite noticeable. Long- and short-term planning need to account for this reality variance. Part of building better plans beings with thinking about necessary failure, micro-models, and feedback loops.

Necessary failure. Reality variance contributes to model failure, but eliminating or reducing reality variance only enhances the model’s changes of meeting expectations. At Day 1, the model will have been tested, prodded and broken as it was created. These are safe failures. When the wheels fall off on paper, that’s OK (inconsequential failure); when they fall of at 120 mph, that’s less OK (failure with consequences). A model’s robustness reflects its ability to handle failures with consequences that are both predictable and unpredictable.

When a model does what we want it to do over time, we consider that a success. What we really want are models that outperform themselves; we want beautiful failures. Part of beautiful failure involves micro-modeling and feedback loops.

Micro-modeling. The success or failure of any large-scale model depends on the people executing it and, specifically, their ability to create the small, nimble micro-models for day-to-day actions. The quick pen and paper sketch of known information and available resources, the problem to be solved, and how to make that solution real means that people are keeping the inconsequential failure rate high. A higher inconsequential failure rate results in models that have eliminated some potential for consequential, in-the-wild failures. Some failures with consequences are unpredictable in both nature and magnitude.

How can strategic minds incorporate necessary failure and micro-modeling into large-sale plans? They can make sure that when systems speak, people are listening and prepared to respond with a better system.

Feedback & feedback loops. Feedback is information generated by our actions. For feedback to be useful, the information returned must be timely (if your parachute doesn’t open, you need to know now), clear (parachute tangled or not deployed?), contextualized (my parachute or a parachute?), and concise (you don’t want to wade through information on location, temperature, wind speed, and altitude to find your parachute status).

Having feedback that is timely, clear, contextualized and concise is worthless if it isn’t connected to micro-models and large-scale models. Micro-models, given how often they are created and adapted regularly incorporate feedback since they are based in part on the information available when they are created or modified. These feedback loops occur between models, at model inception, and not within them. Inception feedback loops help us make better models. Micro- and large-scale models designed to incorporate internal feedback loops make themselves better as they function in the wild.

1. What problem am I trying to solve?

Brilliant solutions that meet the wrong need are useless. Developing a clear expression of the challenge faced, its constraints and opportunities, and your needs and preferences is an early stage essential for the solution designer.

2. What resources do I need to solve it?

Designed a clever solution without the means to implement it? Yeah, not so clever. Check what resources you have and secure those you might need. Working with these constraints is a big part of solution design.

3. Who do I need to collaborate with?

Think about what kind of team you’ll need to create, test, implement, and maintain your solution. Involve them from the beginning. Teams don’t function very well unless everyone knows they are on the team and why.

4. How will I prototype, test, and refine the solution?

Prototype: Build your ideas into something you can stress, strain, and break without real-world consequences. Each build-break-fix cycle will make your solution exponentially stronger.
Test: How can you make the prototype tests realistic as possible? The closer you come to real-world testing, the better the data and ideas your tests will be.
Refine: Look back at your problem, resources and collaborators. Has anything changed based on your prototype testing? Adjust as needed and prototype again.

5. What feedback will tell me how well my solution works?

When your solution goes live, how will you keep making it better? Who or what will provide feedback on how it performs in the wild? What do you need to do to convert that feedback into action? Good solutions are never finished and only complete when they include robust feedback loops.

Being human, we like to take perfectly exceptional systems and flood them with mediocrity. Slideware like PowerPoint and Keynote are a great tools for presenting, discussing, and annotating visual information. They are also great tools for diluting your message and placing unnecessary barriers between you and your audience.

Here are seven ways to save your next presentation.

Data Viz challenge guidelines for a good visualization:

It might be better to think of them as rules. Try imagining how you can create an excellent data visualization, visual explanation, or presentation without one of these elements.

Guidelines and challenge details: datavizchallenge.org

The analogy game is a simple way to generate new ideas and solutions. You may have a tough problem or challenge. You might be analyzing a business, writing about leeks, or designing a prosthetic device. The analogy game takes you out of what you know—your area of expertise is also where your biases and blind spots flourish—and into areas that reshape what you know in surprising ways. Analogy games reveal fruitful next steps, additions, reconfigurations, or subtractions. They can lead to radically new ideas or extremely elegant solutions.

What You’ll Need

a stack of 3×5 cards, paper, pens, scissors, tape

Getting Ready

1. Cut 10 cards in half.
2. On each half, write one of these words: machine, organism, social relationship, hierarchy, network, ecosystem, country, equation, story, virus. This is your Analogy Card.
3. On one (and only one) card, describe your idea, problem or challenge. This is your Start Card.

Play!

Flip your Analogy Cards word-side down and shuffle them up. Draw a line down the center of a piece of paper.
Now flip over a card from your Analogy Deck and ask yourself, “How is my Start Card like the Analogy Card?” Tape the card at the top of the line down the middle of your piece of paper. Write your answers on the left and draw them on the right. Draw a reactance a few inches high and about page width after each answer. Repeat these steps for each Analogy Card.

Conversion: the Key to the Analogy Game

After working through an Analogy Card or all of them, walk through the sections on your paper and ask, “How can I incorporate this into my idea or solution? What is this saying about what I need to do or learn?” Write and draw answers to this in the rectangle you drew after each answer.

In groups: Each person does one analogy card. Results are shared in small groups. Groups share their conversions.

Variations: Time limits. Additional Analogy Cards. Using multiple Analogy Cards in each round. Writing or images only.

ANALOGY 1: How is printing an object like printing a document? Result: additive manufacturing, 3D printing, and rapid prototyping.

ANALOGY 2: How is building a skin graft like printing a document? Result: Skin printing. An “ink” cartridge filled with skin substrate that “prints” a skin graft or bandage based on a 3D scan of the injury.

ANALOGY 3: How is building a road like printing a document? Result: Road printer.

Yes, you heard me, road printer. You know those nice patterned brick roads all over Europe? The ones that are more durable than asphalt and allow precipitation to more easily return to the water table? You can build these roads with a machine that rides over the graded area and prints road. The “print head” is made up of three or four people inserting bricks at the top of a road-width slide in the pattern that they want on the road. Due to the curvature of the slide, the bricks’ weight and gravity do the work of making them fit together snugly at the bottom of the slide where they arrive on the ground. http://www.tiger-stone.nl/index.php/multimedia/filmpjes

Analogy is one of many key tools in design and innovation. The more radical the analogy, the more likely we are to find ground-breaking solutions and ideas.

Any space can be a thinking space, but thinking spaces are areas intended for thinking and creativity. Meeting rooms, workshops, laboratories, and artist studios are great thinking-space examples. These spaces are intended to shelter particular kinds of communication and creativity. The laboratory, workshop, and artist studio are usually well-suited to the mental and physical tasks of their inhabitants. Meeting rooms and collaboration areas in offices are usually dismal failures.

Offices are usually designed with command and control in mind. Areas where people come together usually have a dissemination locus with various reception fields. Most commonly, the dissemination locus is at the end of a long, rectangular table and just in front of a whiteboard or screen. The reception areas are pretty much everywhere else with a chair. You can find the dissemination locus by walking into a conference room and asking, “Where would the boss sit?”

This basic design problem, the dissemination-reception problem, affects the thinking that the space promotes, the nature of the ideas expressed, and how people respond to ideas. The dissemination-reception problem’s nuances are different for different groups, but one strategy that goes a long way is expanding the dissemination locus.

The dissemination locus can be expanded by:

1. Using modular furniture. Ditch the big rectangle for smaller tables that can be wheeled around or removed entirely. The room can then be reconfigured to match the ideas: classroom, small groups, round table, etc.

2. Whiteboard everywhere. There’s no point in having a surface in a meeting room (or office for that matter) that you can’t write on or easily post ideas on. Design firms know this. Our large corporate clients often do not. Wall-to-wall magnetic whiteboard costs a little more to build and maintain, but the ideas people create and share will pay for the investment. Plus, you’re paying for those walls, shouldn’t they be working for you.

These two solutions, along with an abundant supply of paper, pens, sticky notes, markers go a long way to making an office meeting room a real thinking space. Add a little collaboration and communication training, and people can fully escape the dissemination-reception trap.

What Vignelli speaks to is the power of process, a solid thought process, to solve a variety of problems. Design tools—line, curve, color, type, image, sketching, modeling, proportion, the grid, the layout—are employed in various ways throughout the process. A solid process helps the thinker understand the problem or challenge at hand in its uniqueness, investigate its history, and play with ways of addressing it. A solid process does is not a stock way of creating design, business, political, or any other kind of solution; a solid process helps you see the unique situation at hand, work through and identify a solution, and make that solution real.

Understanding Vignelli is essential for designers, but also valuable for anyone interested in better thinking and a living example of the power of process.

Vignelli Interview with Debbie Millman @ Design Observer
Vignelli’s design principles are summarized in the book, The Vignelli Canon, available as a free PDF.

Ray Elder, a designer and design professor, list 34 typography sins to avoid. Matthew Butterick created Typography for Lawyers, a great website and guide to incorporating excellent typography into documents. While he focuses on legal documents, the principles apply equally well to business, technical, and other documents.