“We’re now getting into a point where design is not about a static or singular experience or interaction with a product, but really an entire relationship, a set of experiences.
What’s inevitable about the creative world is that you are increasing choice. Increasing choices, not just in the marketplace, but also choices about how people want to live, what they want to do, how they want to express themselves… So this notion of choice will never go away.”
– From my 2012 design guru interview with Samsung Media at “The Future is …” IDSA Conference in Boston.
As designers, we are justifiably proud of our creative output. But we must be cognizant that every choice we create represents change, which is disruptive.
Corporations are directing more than 5% of revenue to change projects in the next three years.
100% of C-suite leaders anticipate significant changes to their workforce.
Yet only 30% have confidence in their change capabilities.
We designers need to become passionate about the dynamics of change management and the human beings affected. We design interaction, processes, emotive experiences, and services. We immerse ourselves in design research and qualitative data. We claim the mantle of empathy in the corporate environment. Yet despite representing billions of dollars in the current economy, change management is not something the design community regularly talks about. We don’t study change in school. This is not a hot topic at our conferences. Why?
Take a moment to think about the last time you went through unexpected and undesirable life changes. Think about how impactful that experience was. Think about how difficult that set of experiences – were. The solution isn’t always to design something new. Sometimes we need to examine what potential future is being erased by the optimized change we have introduced. Sometimes we need to examine the loss created by improvement, and the difficulty or learning curve introduced by improvement. We have these tools from our sustainability work, from our systems work, from our service design work, and from our design research work. We have all the tools needed to contribute to systematic change management in a meaningful way. Are we passionate enough about this field? After all, what area of human experience should fascinate us more than change?
As a discipline, we can be very nostalgic regarding our traditional visual focus and our traditional design methods and means, but as JFK famously said, “Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” Maybe we in the design community should think about changing the experience of change?
