Design in Production
Why design does not stop at the drawing table and what that means for how we build organizations.
Design in Production
Why design does not stop at the drawing table and what that means for how we build organizations.
Victor Papanek opened Design for the Real World with a provocation: there are few professions more harmful than industrial design. Not because designers have bad intentions, but because the design process is systematically disconnected from the consequences of the design. A chair is designed, produced, sold and used. The designer is involved in the first step. The consequences of the remaining steps, the back that hurts, the material that cannot be recycled, the production worker who develops repetitive strain injury, those are someone else's problem.
Donald Norman shifted the perspective in The Design of Everyday Things by showing that bad design is not the result of incompetence but of a system that treats user experience as an afterthought. A door you pull when you should push is not the result of a stupid designer. It is the result of a process in which the designer never saw how people use the door.
Design in Production, the concept I have developed across sixteen chapters, centers on precisely this problem. Design does not stop at the plan. Design happens in production, in use, in adaptation, in failure and recovery. The drawing table is the beginning, not the end.
For organizations, the implication is direct. A reorganization plan is a design product. It is drawn by consultants, approved by executives and rolled out across the organization. But the real design happens on the work floor, where people interpret, bend, sabotage or adopt the plan. Anyone who does not see that as part of the design process misses the most essential part.
The DIP method posits that every design has three phases that occur simultaneously: conceptual design (what do we want), production design (how do we make it) and use design (how is it lived). Most organizations stop at phase one. The organizations that truly change operate in all three at the same time.
Sources: Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World (Thames & Hudson, 1971); Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, revised edition, 2013).
Source: Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World (Thames & Hudson, 1971); Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, 2013)