Lost history - UX Podcast

A transcript of S02E08 (318) of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Zoë Rose to discuss the lost history of creative thinking methodologies and the story that lies behind brainstorming.

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Tristan Schaaf.

Transcript

Computer voice
Season Two, Episode Eight.

James Royal-Lawson
Hello, I’m James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
And I’m Per Axbom.

James Royal-Lawson
This is UX podcast. Nice to have you along. We’re here in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening to us all over the world from Cyprus to Slovakia.

Per Axbom
Zoe Rose is a UX designer with a diverse background in the field. Her career began in the UK where she worked for organisations such as the BBC, Cambridge University Press, and gov. UK, as well as various startups.

James Royal-Lawson
After moving to Melbourne, she continued her work with companies like seek and PwC, before becoming a UX trainer, a general assembly, and

Per Axbom
And in late 2018, Zoe relocated to Canberra, and established her own training company. Great question, focusing on user experience design and designed for disability.

James Royal-Lawson
Also, around I think it was 2018 she gets was a guest on this podcast.

Per Axbom
Yes, true.

James Royal-Lawson
We talked about accreditation within UX. But this time it’s rabbit hole time.

Per Axbom
As a lovely time.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we really jumped down a rabbit hole with Zoe. A bit of a history lesson, a fascinating history lesson and a deep dive this one.

Per Axbom
And I think if you assume that you know where the Double Diamond originated, or even Design Thinking originated. Think again, because your mind is about to be blown.

James Royal-Lawson
In a previous episode of UX podcast, we talked to Chris McCann, about brainstorming, and the at least mine in Pers aim with that episode, was kind of to help us fix brainstorming, you know, a practical correction for something we’d been misusing. Well, definitely now as designers, but probably for an awful long time. And yes, we touched on the history. But I think when we when Chris anyway, because I didn’t bring the history of I think it was Chris that brought the history up. When we touched on the history, I think it was used mainly as a tool for correction, rather than a kind of deliberate investigation and exploration into what lies behind brainstorming and and unpacking some of the stuff connected with it. Was I that was what you I mean, you got in touch with us to bring up other aspects of brainstorming that we hadn’t included.

Zoë Rose
Well, do you know what? Those criticisms that you just made of brainstorming, they are really valid, and they’ve got a really great precedent. Because the criticisms of brainstorming started within about a year of brainstorming being invented and released to the public. So we can date Yeah, I know. So we can date that back to 1953. With a book called applied imagination by a guy called Alex Osborn, he’s the guy who kind of came up with a method, wrote it down had a really popular best selling type of book with it.

James Royal-Lawson
We did actually, yes, you mentioned him. And that was it was mentioned and then used as the tool for correction rather than diving deep down into actually what?

Zoë Rose
No, no, there are there are some things that are hard to get your hands on to and some things which only exist in really lossy JPEGs. So I feel like the lossy JPEG is the is the age dark and paper of our age, like there is the internet, which is just awful quality these days, and really hard to find.

Per Axbom
And some of the things I’ve been enjoying most about following you on LinkedIn, Zoe, is how you’ve been telling us all about; Well, the double diamond maybe started a bit earlier than everybody thinks. Tell us a bit about research. How you’ve been doing this because I’m so impressed by I mean, some of it must have been so hard to find as well.

Zoë Rose
Ahh yes, some of it was very hard to find. I gave a talk last year on this topic, which I gave the cheerful title, creative thinking methodologies, a lost history. And I kind of cursed myself when I gave it that title, because some of it actually is kind of lost and is quite difficult to research.

James Royal-Lawson
But kind of think you think things aren’t lost anymore? Do you think you can find everything on the internet? It’s kind of like, what you what you automatically said, we’ll find it. But, no.

James Royal-Lawson
I wonder if that is that the kind of result of like book scanning and some of the books scanning is done as images rather than I mean, back when I was at university, of course, you had to have microfiche and you had the machines where you you got the right bit of plastic out of an archive somewhere and put it into a machine to read the copy of it. But now we’ve lost the job instead.

Zoë Rose
That’s a robust technology. I respect to microfiche. Yeah. So one thing that we can say for sure about the double diamond and its correlates creative thinking process model that a lot of people are familiar with ideos design thinking, which is a nice little five step process. It is relatively straightforward to trace both of those to a common ancestor. That ancestor exists in world came to be in 1967. However, the ancestor had ancestors, the ancestor the ancestor, one of them is Alex Osborne’s diverge converge brainstorming process. But the ancestor of that ancestor was the concept of diverge convert itself, which came into American thinking at the end of World War Two, based on some psychological research being done to assess pilot aptitudes by a man called JP Gilford, so the ancestor has an ancestor has an ancestor. And it turns out the ancestor of the ancestor of the ancestor has a much older ancestor than that, indeed, I’d love to tell you a bit about that 1967 model.

Per Axbom
Go for it.

Zoë Rose
Okay, go on. Great. Okay. So, in diving in the Double Diamond, we all know it, it goes, diverge, converged. COVID converge with a problem statement in the middle. And we’ve got our discover, define, develop, deliver all good. Over on the IDEO side. We have let’s see. Have I memorised it? I don’t think I have. It’s what is it empathise is the first one does anyone have it off the top of their heads?

Per Axbom
Not off the top of my head.

James Royal-Lawson
Not at the top of my head. I know that hexagon.

Zoë Rose
Oh the hexagons Oh, I hate the hexagon so much. I am old enough and I have enough HTML in my little mind to say that is not a set of hexagons, that is an ordered list you use the O L tag and then you just said.

Per Axbom
So empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test.

Zoë Rose
Thank you very much for that is it exactly. So obviously those two are different. One has four steps, the other has five steps. One has the diverge convert model the other is an ordered list pretending to be a bunch of hexagons. Superficially, they have nothing in common. The thing that they do have in common is a earlier model called the Osborne pons. Creative Avlon palms creative problem solving process, which is a five step process like ideo where each of the steps was divided was represented as a diverge converge diamond Like the double diamond. Now, the Osborne of Osborne pounds is in fact Alex Osborn, the man who invented brainstorming.

Per Axbom
Although this is so fascinating.

James Royal-Lawson
Design thinking is brainstorming.

Zoë Rose
Ah, it’s well you know what, Osborne actually got really annoyed about that. Because I, you got annoyed about a lot of things, bless him. He was a really, very much like a madman type guy. He was an advertising executive, he had the bristle creamed hair. He looks like he’s always smoking cigars. I’ve never seen a photo of him smoking cigars. It just feels like he should be like, he’s that guy. So he got really invested in Creative Problem Solving as a business slash academic pursuit. After the success of his brainstorming book applied imagination. And he got really frustrated with people who thought that brainstorming was the be all and end all because as we know, as designers, it’s absolutely not like you can’t do the entire process. Just by coming up with an idea, you actually have to do the thing where you flesh it out, right? All those stages, like you don’t prototype in brainstorming, you don’t test in brainstorming all those phases that we see in the in design thinking. They’re just not there. So as far as Osborne was concerned, brainstorming was a really terrific process. But it was only part one part of a creative problem solving process that actually got to the bit where at the end, you’ve solved the problem. And that’s what the Osborne Pons creative problem solving process was for.

Per Axbom
You said something earlier, this is how it came into American culture and American knowledge. Because what I think is one of your main points is what really gets me is how how, how we accept these tools as truisms, in the design industry, without even thinking about whether they are even valid or possible to employ in every context in every culture across the world. So and we don’t even care about where who actually invented it, and why did they and in what context were they operating?

Zoë Rose
Absolutely couldn’t agree with you more Per and the thing that I find really interesting about this is that the idea that you can have a process that exists outside of context is actually contextual, right? It is contextual to a culture. So what we find in I’m not American, I’m Australian, I live for a long time in England in the UK. One of the things that we find in American culture where we’re seeing these processes emerge, but we also find in Australia, in the UK, in very rich, very industrialised predominantly English speaking countries. These are actually very individualistic cultures. So there are different ways of assessing culture, which are themselves intensely cultural. But if you use for example, the Hofstetter culture, compass, right, which is a tool, all tools are problematic, but it’s a tool for assessing culture, you’ll find that those three cultures that I just named, really come in very high for individualism, they come in very low for context. So Americans like to say things like, get to the points cut to the chase, you know, all that stuff about like, skip the context, I don’t want to hear it, I just want to get to the meat that is a cultural perspective. And it’s not one which is shared by I don’t know most of the world.

So it is, I think, a legacy of the point, which is probably fading a bit now where American culture dominated a lot of other cultures, that we can look at something like a process model and go, Oh, yeah, that’s got no context that’s got no history. That’s just a thing which exists, it has descended from the heavens, it’s completely universal. And we don’t need to ask where it came from, or what the underlying beliefs and structures were, that brought it to us. And as a case in point I mentioned before JP Guildford’s research into pilot testing aptitudes, which happened in World War Two. He was a psychologist, and the thing that he was really, really interested in was, in fact, personality, which is the attributes of the individual. So individualism is at a very literal level, baked right into these processes. But it’s not the only culturally determined thing that it’s…

James Royal-Lawson
Okay, that’s there’s a pause there waiting for us to kind of say what is it like?

Zoë Rose
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
But before before you do get into that, though, I was just wondering. So is there a point with… our industry just filled with models? And oh,, just you know, the arguments to do with them is also as big as the list of models that we have. But is there? Is there a, is there a point where? Or is there a starting point for a process or a model that is so simple that it can be detached, or sufficiently detached from its cultural context? In a word is the problem, I think what I’m trying to ask is, where does the problem start? Is it at the very, very beginning? Or is it when we start fleshing these out?

Zoë Rose
What an interesting question. So can I summarise your question was the question Can there ever be such a thing as a an a cultural approach to problem solving? Is that the question?

James Royal-Lawson
I think that is a that is a good way of summarising my question in a into an answerable form.

Zoë Rose
Okay,

James Royal-Lawson
So I think I think my question is actually far too far too broad, and general to actually probably give you a chance of answering it.

Zoë Rose
James, I think the answer is maths.

James Royal-Lawson
Oh, interesting.

Zoë Rose
I think the answer is maths too. Because if if we are solving a problem that involves humans in any way, it’s always going to there is no such thing as an a cultural human. There is no such thing as an a cultural human, I’m pretty sure there are some historians of mathematics, who would actually be screaming and jumping up and down. For me even saying maths because I’m pretty sure that maths has cultural aspects to like, when we find things like the invention of zero, which happened in India several 1000 years ago, I think that they I think I’ve read something saying that even the invention of zero wasn’t possible, without the cultural context of Hinduism. Right. And the idea of nothing as being a thing that you could understand. So I don’t think it might even be a mess. You know, what, James, I’m gonna go out on a limb, I’m going to say, No, I’m gonna cut to the chase. And I’ll say, no.

James Royal-Lawson
No, I think the math answer is an excellent one. Because you’re quite right. I mean, there. That is something which one we’re getting beyond humans into, or into more into science of physics, the laws of physics, I guess what we’re talking about with with maths, then, then, yeah, we’re detaching the complexity that comes with life with humans. So yeah, maybe you know –

Zoë Rose
What’s really interesting. I’m actually I’ve just recently started my a master’s by research in design competency frameworks. And one of the things that I’m looking at there is quite a structured and almost mathematical approach to how we can know that somebody else can know something, as a really interesting thing that comes out of some of that is that it’s very easy to know whether someone knows how to plug in a microphone, because you can watch them with a plug and see if they can plug in the microphone, it’s very easy to tell someone knows how to open a jar, you give them a jar, right? Or you can see if they can open them all out. So where it gets difficult that the second that you are inferring a state of mind from an action, right, rather than simply observing a behaviour, fundamentally, you can’t do it.

And whence the more complex a problem solving behaviour is, the more contextual it is. Right? So it’s very easy to it’s very easy to work out like it’s very easy to put out a cap on a bottle, right? But the act of designing a better model will always be contextual, to the use of the bottle, the materials, the affordances of the bottle, the the equipment that you have to hand, the how bottles are using the culture that you’re creating them for. So it’s I think it is correct and appropriate to say that the more sophisticated problem solving is, the more it is contextual. And I think it’s also correct and appropriate to say that cultural context will always be part of the context of complex problem solving, both of the person doing the solving and the environment they’re solving for.

James Royal-Lawson
I think we talked a while back to Stephen Fleming and about cognition. And and in that chat, we talked about the concept of mind reading. And I think, for me anyway, I can see how this connects to that. And the understanding that someone understands and what they how they react is all part this mind reading process, the design is, is a huge amount of mind reading. And that then becomes cultural and contextual, because how, how I expect you to react depends on my ability to read your mind.

Zoë Rose
Yep. For sure.

James Royal-Lawson
And that’s the same for users and and so on only designed situation how well we think the solution be even even with testing depends on how, how our ability is to interpret to read the minds of the ones that we’re working with.

Zoë Rose
And necessarily for users and and so on only designed situation how well we think the solution be even even with testing depends on how, how our ability is to interpret to read the minds of the ones that we’re working with. Do you know what’s interesting about the the brainstorming process, though, is that when it was invented.

Per Axbom
Go for its tell us, I love how you’re giving us these pauses. And I just want to know, I just want to know Zoe.

Zoë Rose
Alright, so here’s something that’s interesting about the brainstorming process, culturally speaking. Now, we’ve already described Alex was born. And we know he’s got that slicked back hair and the madman thing going on. He’s like a razzle dazzle ad man. And we know that he’s a pretty committed capitalist, he’s really invested in the 1950s American experience. And we know that that experience is highly individualistic, highly competitive, people competing with each other. And we know that it just doesn’t have much of the way of like, collaboration is not a highly valued thing. That’s it’s just not part of the ethos. But isn’t it strange that in this environment, the approach that Osbourne came up with actually was intrinsically and profoundly collaborative? So he doesn’t have brainstorming is something you go off in a room and do by yourself? He says, no, no, it’s got to be done in a group. Right? It’s got to be done in a group.

And when you’re in the group, you have to use the perspective, very specific about this, of non judgement, judgement withholding, you’re not allowed to bash anybody’s idea or knock it down. As a matter of fact, you have to Yes. And the idea is that you come across in a brainstorming session useful. It’s only build up and up and up and up. Now, that is really, almost exactly the opposite of the culture that he was from and that he was working in, which is absolutely fascinating, because it puts in us as us in a position to ask, Well, why, why is that now just for the record, or he himself absolutely denied this. So there’s actually a big bit in the book that explains that it might look like the process is collaborative, but what’s actually happening is that, you know, people are like being inspired to compete with each other to generate a better ideas. So Osborne’s commitment to, like, the competitive mindset is really deeply embedded here.

James Royal-Lawson
So much so that he’s actually goes into denial, even though —

Zoë Rose
Absolutely he’s like literally denying the very obvious fact that it is a collaborative process. I guess he’s just that culturally committed to, Yeah, to to competition.

James Royal-Lawson
Which is fascinating from, from this discussion about context and cultural context, that he can be so much denial about, it’s the I mean, the elephant in the room, isn’t it?

Zoë Rose
Absolutely. Well, there’s a hint. Now, I haven’t actually been able to track this all the way down to a definitive statement, we can say, Yes, this is an actual definite thing that definitely happened, for sure. But there’s a hint of where this idea sequence might have actually come in from. And it’s written in the second edition of the book, where he says that this kind of conflict, this kind of thing isn’t actually new. It’s not new at all. For example, for hundreds of years, Hindu teachers have been using the practice of prayer by Shanna to to, like, in their religious practice, and I read that and I went, Oh, that’s very, very interesting.

And I tried googling it. And I got absolutely nothing back whatsoever. Because I was Googling like, an English transliteration of a language that I is not written in, in European in Roman letters, or how was it subprime in letter? No, it’s Roman numerals. What’s the alphabet? Latin alphabet, not even written in the Latin alphabet. But very, very fortunately, I know a designer in Mumbai and I was able to call her up and she said, Ah, I think if I think that might actually be like a Sanskrit word, which is a very ancient language that a lot of contemporary Hindi speakers can kind of understand the same way that I can. Ish understand old English, Middle English, I can’t actually understand old English at all. It’s incredibly difficult.

And I follow through, I asked another couple of people I knew and I followed a couple of leads, and I went down a couple of rabbit holes. And what I came up with at the end of that was that and some people will have work this out already. Hello to everyone who’s worked it out already, it seems likely that what Osborne was referring to, is something called Prashna. Which is Prashna, yes. Which is a practice of respectful question answer a question asking to occur in order to develop a greater and deeper understanding of what is being said. So rather than accepting blindly what you’re told, it’s your responsibility within the context of this practice, to ask… you don’t just go yep. Okay, got it. I’ll just walk away and believe you. It’s correct and appropriate to ask respectful questions in order to deepen your insight.

So not a contradictory form of questioning, but an expanding form of questioning. So I actually, I think there’s a decent enough reason to think that the collaborative non judgmental group process that we see in the brainstorming, which is so contrary to everything that was happening culturally around when it was invented, might actually have come from India and ancient India at that, specifically, the Bhagavad Gita, which is where prashna is set out.

James Royal-Lawson
So that’s fascinating. What we see as a creative process, potentially has its roots in a teaching process.

Zoë Rose
Yes, I love that. Brilliant. Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Which is fascinating.

Per Axbom
It’s good, isn’t it?

James Royal-Lawson
And also, yeah, I mean, now we’re talking about what 500 plus years at least,

Zoë Rose
Oh, right. So I’ve been down the rabbit hole on this one, too. It’s a little bit contested, but definitely more than 500 years, maybe more like 1200. But this again, the idea of the the idea of the text being written at the specific date, is also part, the idea that this specific text would be written a specific date in a way that we can track down is itself guess what, you know, it’s coming cultural, right? Because not all religious texts work that way. There’s a really interesting analogy as well, that I, I see in the work of another man. And I’m very aware that a lot of the people we’re talking about here are literally white American men. In the historical context of the time, those were the people who had the time, energy and funding to do this work. So here we are, and that’s what’s going on.

James Royal-Lawson
And it’s those models that we’re kind of fighting against, or working through or exploring. That is the that is the the table of things that we have to choose from at the moment. And this is an important part of that work to go beyond it.

Zoë Rose
Well, here is hoping. But for anyone who’s ever done, what the Americans call therapy, or what in Australia, we would call counselling for anyone who has ever made use of a suicide crisis line, and for a lot, but not all of people who have gone through standard or more common treatments for for drug addiction. The person who came up with a lot of the those practices was also operating in the 1950s, and was also really interested in creative problem solving. And his name was Carl Rogers. Now, I’m going to admit to just being a massive fan of this guy, I think he’s incredible.

The if you’ve done any counselling your life, you will probably have had a potentially frustrating experience of the counsellor refusing to tell you their opinion on anything. And if you ask them to your their advice, they won’t tell you. And if you ask them what you should do, they double triple quadruple will not tell you. And that is because the Algerian philosophy that they’re drawing from is actually one that says that people have the power to solve their own problems. Everyone has the power to solve their own problems, and to solve your problems is a creative act. So Rogers was actually working quite closely with and around and in the same circles as pawns. And Osborne and everyone else who is operating in Creative Problem Solving because even though it seems like there should be million miles between a suicide crisis line and the double diamond in both the practitioners key job is creative problem solving, or helping someone else facilitating creative problem solving.

Now, I’ve already said that I’m a big Rogers fan, and I absolutely am. And you can read fascinating biographies of this man. But one of the most interesting things about Rogers for me is that he grew up in one of those staggeringly strict Christian sects, one of the ones like you get in Kevin Bacon Footloose, where you’re not allowed to do dancing like that kind of a thing. And what No, it’s true. So one of the formative experiences of his life was actually a trip to China. He went to China, with the YMCA, young man, Christians Association as a young men, were all of a sudden is this person from this incredibly conservative world, he was exposed to people, ideas, concepts, approaches, that didn’t exist in his close as well before that, and he changed his relationship with with his cultural knowledge and afterwards, but isn’t it interesting that the practices that Rogers brought which we have in our practices in counselling and psychology now, again, non judgement, observing things in the state and way that they are being able to assess the feeling emotions as separate from reality.

Those were ideas that are not culturally present in the culture that this man grew up with. And yet he was the one who brought them into the field where where we use them in Western nations still today. And I think there’s a very good argument to be made for saying that the ideas that he was exposed to, in this transformative trip to China, were part of that and that we’re beneficiaries of that culture, those of us who use these services and practices today.

Per Axbom
Very nice. One of the first taglines for this podcast was breaking down silos. And it came out of the frustration that James and I had of attending UX conferences where we’re in we realised that even designers keep actually saying that, Oh, everybody’s working in a silo. And they themselves are working in a silo, because we’re just using our own thinking, our own design thinking, which we sort of invented that we say, and try it, start trying to apply it to all these other silos and say, this is the way we should work. And this keeps happening and it hasn’t stopped happening. It’s just it’s almost like it’s getting worse. —

James Royal-Lawson
And the frustration becomes a loop.

Per Axbom
Exactly! So is this what is happening, that we are adopting things from other cultures, and making them our own, and then applying them back onto those cultures?

Zoë Rose
Yeah, I think that’s happened quite a bit. Actually. I mean, I’m, I’m all for like, I think that it’s brilliant to to learn from other people. I’m a designer, of course, I think that’s a good thing to do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be any good at this job. But yeah, I think this, this, I think, I history is what it is, right? There’s the the moving finger, right? And having written moves on, you can never change it. And the ways that different different cultures merged is the way that different cultures come together is itself a historical construct, we can’t go back to 1963 and say, hey, everybody did you know you’ve actually got to throw around a little bit of credit here, but as contemporary practitioners, we can look backwards and go, Oh, check that out. That was actually a merge the whole time. That was actually a coming together. It wasn’t necessarily given any credit at the time, but as like, serious, thoughtful practitioners, and it’s now maybe we could give a little bit of credit, where it’s due potentially, I think that I don’t I think that it is a wonderful thing for culture to learn from each other. I just absolutely love it. I also think that recognition is an intrinsic good, basically, whether it’s what we’re doing now or what we used to do. Recognition is an intrinsic good.

Per Axbom
And I think what you were saying about with the intersection of therapy and design, it becomes so interesting to me. Sometimes I work as a coach, and it’s the same process that the same non judgmental attitude, which means that what I’ve been saying is that as a consultant, people expect me to have answers, but I don’t want to give answers I want people people to learn how to solve their own problems. And we keep coming with all these models from design saying, I’ll solve your problem, this is how we do it. But that’s not what I should be doing. So I’m using the model wrong. In the same way that Aspen got frustrated, we were using the brainstorming process wrong. So we keep using it wrong, because we’re using it within our own culture and context. That’s my conclusion now.

James Royal-Lawson
And also he was, back to the madman thing and the capitalism, or rather this, the marketing side of things he was selling. So you know, it’s an incentive to keep on selling and that we’ve seen so many times that you, you have not gotten a incentive of all the time to explore, sometimes you have an incentive to deliver.

Zoë Rose
Yes, I would agree with that. And and something that I think is under mentioned, and underrecognized, is that if we look at those five Design Thinking steps, none of them is the ethics step. If we look at the Double Diamond, there’s no checkpoint where we identify whether this is something that you should actually do or not. And I’ve got a fabulous book on creative thinking methodologies around here somewhere, I’ll send you the link. But it does an assessments of all the creative problem solving frameworks that have really been floating around in in the English speaking world since about like 1929. So there’s quite a few of them. And one of the metrics that the book actually assesses on the basis of is this one is this a model that incorporates values, and almost none of them do every now and then you’ll find a model that has something to say about ethics or values, but it virtually never happened. So one of the really reassuring things about looking at the history of creative problem solving is that it’s actually very consistent.

There are quite a few variations. But the idea that you should understand the problem before you start solving it, the idea that you should generate more solutions than you’re going to use the idea that you should test that’s actually really consistent stuff. It doesn’t seem to change much for 100 years. I love that because it means it’s actually pretty reliable, and it’s good. So that’s, that’s a fantastic thing to see from the history. What is staggeringly disappointing is the total and ongoing absence of incorporation of ethics into the models themselves. Because that which isn’t in the process doesn’t get done.

Per Axbom
Exactly. That which isn’t measured in value doesn’t get done. So if it’s not even visible.

Zoë Rose
Absolutely. It’s not on the page. It’s not on the page. It’s not in the model. It’s not there.

James Royal-Lawson
What we value is cultural.

Zoë Rose
But yes, I would love to see a movement towards incorporating ethics, I really, really would. All right. So, do you know when Design Thinking dates to? The answer is 2001. It’s so IDEO, most of their clients were startups and early tech businesses who all crashed and burned and lost all their money overnight. And IDEO didn’t really have any that their client base was gone. It was it was, it was just gone, gone away. And they had to pivot really quickly to work out if there was anything else they could actually sell. And what they worked out they could sell was not their services, but the service of their services, they worked out that they could sell their process. And that’s actually where design thinking comes from. In an uncanny twist. Back when our friend Alex Osborn and his cigars came up with the idea of design thinking the first time that wasn’t 1953, it was 1938. And he came up with design thinking because his advertising agency was going under. And he needed like a new he needed a really amazing new process to get themselves to get himself out of a potential bankruptcy for his company. And he came up with this great process and he sold the process instead. And that’s an almost perfect parallel with the emergence of design thinking in 2001 when it comes from IDEO.

Per Axbom
Wow, I love that. I think we I love knowing all this. I don’t know what I’m gonna deal with it right now. But I know I love knowing.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, we’ve flipped between design process therapy, ethics, culture, history, marketing. I mean, we’ve a long, long list of things that we’ve we’ve touched upon now with with this little discussion and lesson that we’ve had.

Zoë Rose
Well, you can’t accuse me of silo thinking.

Per Axbom
Exactly. Oh, absolutely not.

James Royal-Lawson
But it’s been absolutely wonderful things here. And like process now we’ve got a lot of things to unpack, and I’ve got so many rabbit holes to jump into. Thank you. So thanks so much for joining us.

Per Axbom
But it’s been absolutely wonderful change here. And like process now we’ve got a lot of things to unpack, and I’ve got so many rabbit holes a job. Thank you. So thanks so much for joining us.

[Music]

Per Axbom
I think what really gets to me in this interview is this realisation that we can, we can look at a model and think of it as zoe said, as this universal thing. And you forget that there are so many underlying beliefs, so many values or structures that underpin it. So anything we’ve created, that is a model is based within the context of a culture.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, for me, that’s the big takeaway here, again, is that we look at all these simple models, these simple templates, all these things that we use, and we, we don’t consider the cultural underpinning of them. And that that is unavoidable, as we’ve learned and heard now talking to Zoe that, you know, we can’t detach these tools from their cultural roots. And our cultures are not universally, you know, the same.

Per Axbom
I’m now thinking of why finding which is so popular in the design space. And people ask, Well, why do we use design thinking? Well, because IDEO thought of it? And nobody asked, Well, why did they think of it?

James Royal-Lawson
Yes, okay, really pointed out to us after the interview that interesting parallel between Osborne and IDEO is that both of them came up with their, you know, their famous tools, or brainstorming and, and design thinking, when they were under threat of bankruptcy, I think there were there was fighting for their survival as such, they came up with ideas to help pull them through that. So. So these tools that we use, that we think, I guess, on the surface are there for, for Christian of good, I guess, they’re there for the survival.

Per Axbom
So like, you, like you were insinuating their products of capitalism there. That’s why we have them here

James Royal-Lawson
Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. But again, this is this is part of the history of these tools. And, and, and part of the unwrapping of those tools and understanding of them. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not just the culture they’re built upon, which in both those cases is an American culture. It’s also the aspects of the economic culture, that is also based in baked into that culture, that is part of them.

Per Axbom
And of course, the frustrating thing, or frustrating, I don’t know, but the thing that you need to be aware of, and that you need to take to heart at all times, working with the double diamond and all these design tools is that when you’re trying to apply it to a culture that isn’t your own, that may not work, that it may just clash with the values that are present there. Because you can’t work with those steps. It made me think of informed consent, when we did that interview, thinking about how cultures don’t even understand the concept of informed consent. So how can you even ask for it? Yeah,

James Royal-Lawson
and I think this is where we can, we can sometimes maybe think a tool doesn’t work. But tool is wrong. And, and it might, it might not actually be that it’s broken, doesn’t work, or so on. It just might be that, that we’ve got a cultural difference, which really highlights the cultural underpinning of that tool.

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
So you know, it’s not, it’s wrong, but it’s not wrong, if you see what I mean.

Per Axbom
Right. And I do appreciate how she also talks a bit about how everybody has the tools to solve their own problems, which essentially means that sometimes we’re trying too hard ourselves as designers to solve other people’s problems for them rather than with them. And this is, of course, something we talk a lot about when talking about collaborative design.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that’s the intersection of therapy and design, that there is a lot more in common than maybe we first realised but you you’ve done training to be a coach, we know plenty of people who have worked in design and UX, who have gone on to do you know, work within coaching, which I suppose highlights the the skill set overlap the the passion desire links to both of those career paths.

Per Axbom
You’re just trying to get closer and closer to the person you’re trying to help each time almost. So what have you picked out for us for recommend listening, James?

James Royal-Lawson
Well, I picked two but then you’ve thrown the third one into the mix by mentioning informed consent. Oh, yeah, exactly. We did, which is very much relevant and worth listened to after this, but of course, that chat that inspired Zoey to get in touch with us to, to. Well, to offer this idea for an episode was our chat with Chris McCann about brainstorming that we did back in episode 285 of series one. And we also mentioned a few concepts that we brought up during our chats. But a year ago, we Stephen Fleming Know thyself about cognition. That was in episode 305, So it was series one.

Per Axbom
and our episode with Kim folds and Joyce ruffler. Named informed consent is episode 301. So if you want us, James and Per as part of your next conference event or in house training, we are offering workshops, talks and courses to inspire and help you grow as individuals, teams and organisations. Just get in touch by emailing Hey@UXpodcast.com

James Royal-Lawson
You can actually just get in touch anywhere if you want to just chat to us. add some of the points we made here or volunteer to help us.

Per Axbom
Well that’s a nice thought. Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
Why was the maths book crying?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James, why was the maths book crying

James Royal-Lawson
because he had so many problems.

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Zoë Rose recorded in June 2023 and published as episode S02E08 (318) of UX Podcast.

transcript