I fell into the field of design almost by accident. It was never my intention to study design or to work in the design field. After 15 years of working in design, but never really acknowledging it, I had created websites, databases, and a whole bunch of other technologies and tech businesses but never really considered design as being part of my work. I think that the field of design helps us capture the variety of different decision points that happen whenever we’re creating something new. It’s really about your intentions. What do you intend to do when you set out to try to achieve a goal? Design is really wrapped up in exactly that. What is your goal? What are the decisions you make along the way to achieving that goal? What are the outputs and outcomes that result from that process? Now, I say outputs and outcomes for very specific reason because when we think about outputs we can think about the direct result of a process. What is produced during a process? If we’re creating a website, the output is a website. Outcomes are secondary, broader impacts that occur after your output has been produced. When I think of outcomes, and we go back to the website example, creating a website can be the impact the people who are using it. So, what does that look like? How has their daily life changed? The process of design, as well as those outcomes and outputs, comes down to being very critical and scrutinizing our decisions, the decisions that we make along that process, and trying to understand how our decisions affect outputs and outcomes? Again, let’s go back to the website, if I make a decision on and I make a decision to include a video on that website, the output is that video, embedded in some way on that website. But the outcomes are the ways in which people interact with that video. The decision-making processes that occur along the way of producing that website and that content can significantly impact the experience of the people who use it. I think in technology development, we get hung up a lot on the output side of things. We want a list of requirements, more or less a recipe that we can follow as tech developers and produce an output, and that’s it, end of the story. I think we can take it one step further and really think critically about design and consider those outcomes. What are the experiences of the people who are using this website? We can talk about the same thing in business. If I think about the business development process and I think about the output, the output might be registering your new business, or it might be the business model itself, or it might be the web presence of the business. But the outcome is the impacts of the business on the users, on the people whose lives are affected by your products or services, as well as on society as a whole, as well as on the planet, as well as all the different dimensions that are related to your business. So if I were developing a business model and I wanted to make sure that there’s definitely a market for my service, then I would want to make sure that I interview people who would be my potential customers whether that’s other businesses or consumers themselves. But if I neglect to take into consideration, my suppliers, then the business that I create may not be economically, socially, or environmentally sustainable because I haven’t taken into consideration the entire supply chain and instead just looked at my customers. It’s important when we’re taking design into consideration that we’re not just looking on the output side of things but we’re looking on the outcome side of things as well and that we’re taking design seriously because all of those decisions can affect what we produce and how that changes the world around us. I really think about design not only as the conscious decisions but also the unconscious, the subconscious, decisions that we make. I may not intend to damage the planet when I create my new business.
