Meredith Davis describes the evolution of a graphic designer in the past as having started with art education and then proceeding to an on-the-job education in production, the emphasis being on knowing how in terms of form-making.[1] Skills needed for moving into a higher level of responsibility – moving through print production to design and executive functions in firms – came from learning from experience.

She then describes what she sees as happening in terms of the demand for newly minted graphic designers today. She senses that employers expect a level of strategy literacy and expertise in technological development and management that is of a different balance than in earlier times. RitaSue Siegel, from her position as a talent recruiter over 40 years, sees a similar evolution.[2] They may be recognizing that there is a new form of graphic designer, a break from the design archetype.

Both see important implications for (graphic) design education, without being too specific about what to do about those implications.

Trying to map what needs to be taught in schools of design, Tom Briggs, a graphic designer and professor at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, uses a visualization of graphic design development to locate what skills and contextual knowledge are required at various points in the design development process. He points out that social/cultural context is instrumental in design development. It “…may be used to inform objective characteristics of design process.”[3] He indicates that the understanding and teaching of contextual knowledge disciplines – and how they effect ideas about communication – hasn’t played a large role in design education.

The link with both Davis and Siegel’s perspectives is that he puts emphasis on the domain of “location”, the contextual knowledge that is the central component of the strategy-making expertise that characterizes the “new” form of graphic designer.

The ability to dive deeply into this contextual domain is one of the characteristics of what has come to be called “design thinking”, a terms publicized by IDEO co-founder David Kelly but widely used in the literature on design and business strategy.[4]

This is what Howard Gardner in Five Minds for the Future calls the “synthetic mind”, the ability to develop new meaning from diverse points of data in a novel way.

Briggs also briefly describes what may be called the core competencies of a graphic designer in making form – methods of inquiry and/or procedures that contribute to object definition – which include communications theory, perceptual concepts, semiotic and rhetorical analysis and mastery of visual language.

So, if there is at least a demand for a new type of graphic designer from firms doing business differently, what needs to get done for graphic designers to put them into the middle of that new field? What type of mind needs to be added to the core competencies of graphic designers? And is it teachable?

[2] “Just Doing It”, RitaSue Siegel, PDF of article in Communications Arts, 2005.

[3] Briggs seems to be implying that the importance of the contextual knowledge was not part of the assumptions that form the basis for design education until now.

[4] “Design Thinking… What is That?” By Mark Dziersk, July 8, 2008 at Fast Company Online: http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/design/dziersk/design-thinking-083107.html

And “Design Thinking” at The Institute for Design at Stanford University: http://www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/big_picture/design_thinking.html

Afghan election overdue

In a series of steps, starting with Abdullah Abdullah’s decision not to run, the prospects for a housecleaning in Afghanistan dissolved almost before our eyes. The much called for ending of corruption in the development of physical infrastructure and social services will now seem an impossibility to some. Without a strong political mandate, Karzai will have a hard time removing parts of his government and those provincial Governors  and Councils who act as barriers to getting government services to the people in the hinterlands, a phenomenon that has been described as being the major “push” factor driving the resurgence of the Taliban.

The Obama response to this will be difficult. Already delaying a decision on sending more troops while waiting for the results of the now-canceled presidential election, he has less political support to send more troops now. Several streams of nascent resistance to the enlargement of the war have emerged. The voting public was already hesitant to support an Afghan run-off election it saw as at a minimum to be messy and maximally as a sign of deep corruption. Others sense the impossibility of the country emerging from warlordism and the economic stagnation associated with it and thus an extended period of armed conflict for US forces. Still others see the very presence of US and NATO troops as an incitement to more Taliban activity.

The strategic response to this is going to require some reframing of the situation. While almost everything that we want to happen in Afghanistan is represented as hinging on military success, real economic and social service development is a critical, but seldom acknowledged, part of the dynamic. Yes, say supporters of an increased military levels, but we can’t drive development without first having security. The response, by observers in Afghanistan, is that where local government is able to deliver the goods that its citizens want, the level of security increases. Where there is poor performance by local administration, the situation remains shaky.

The link between troops and economic development may be less robust than the link between local administration and development, so the freezing-in-place of current Provincial governments, Governors and Provincial Councils, may be the biggest blow yet to the prospects of providing economic development as a key to the counterinsurgency prospects. So an important part of the Afghan strategy, reflected in General McChrystal’s August report and in President Karzai’s recent statements, is a refocusing on what happens at the very local level.

The tide of public opinion is apparently turning against the war in Afghanistan, threatening to carry off the U.S. presence there with a vigor that has only been seen at the height of the anti-Vietnam campaigns of the late sixties and early seventies. The Obama Administration seems unable to mitigate the strength of that storm swell.

The Wall Street Journal says that Americans see Afghanistan with a combination of weariness and wariness: Weary because it’s gone on for so long, wary “…because of a growing sense that the longstanding American goal of constructing a stable and effective Afghan central government that can keep Islamic militants in check is simply not achievable.”

They continue: “To battle those problems, the Obama administration will have to foster the sense that what is evolving isn’t another turn of the screw but a wholly fresh start.” (”Clock Ticks for White House to Show Gains in Afghanistan”, Gerald F. Seib, Capital Journal, Wall Street Journal, Friday September 4, 2009, page 2.)

Has Obama introduced a game-change into the Afghan conflict?

Since major policy statements in March and April and the postings of a special advisor on Afghanistan and General McChrystal as US/NATO Afghanistan commander, the publicly projected strategy has continued to be one of a military response to the gradual resurgence of the Taliban. This, despite a huge increase in development assistance to the country, has contributed to the perception that the increased effort was indeed nothing but another turn of the (military) screw, a continuation of the Bush approach to the war, albeit with higher levels of resources.

And now – in September – the public awaits yet another new strategic assessment that is predicted to be yet another uptick of troop levels -hardly a “…wholly fresh start” but a continuation of the representation of the strategy as being essentially of the military variety.

Is there already a “wholly fresh start”?

One can argue that the US has already been engaged in a wholly different strategy for some time now, beginning with the changed doctrine of protecting the Afghan population from the predations of the various Taliban groups so it could get on with “normal” living, moving away from the primacy of the search and destroy doctrine aimed at the Taliban and a huge ramp-up of development aid as part of the changes instituted since March.

Is this a “wholly fresh start”? If it is, then most haven’t recognized it as such.

Some have argued that the American public has failed to see that there is a change because the President has failed to explain the strategy. As The Wall Street Journal reported it: “Asked recently on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ whether the President had sufficiently explained U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, Sen. Richard Lugar (R., Ind.) said, ‘No.’” (”Obama Urged to Rally Support for War”, Yochi J. Dreazen and Peter Spiegel, Wall Street Journal, Friday September 4, 2009, p. 2)

The policy statement itself and the wider explication of the strategy is there for all to see, and it reflects at least some of the thinking of a huge array of contributors, including advocates for a less grand, more measured approach like Rory Stewart. A look at the scope and volume of US development assistance contracts recently awarded or in the pipeline will illustrate that the there is a development surge that is as much a part of the change in strategy as the military surge in Afghanistan. An interesting cable from the State Department, Number 1776 “New Approach to the Delivery of U.S. Assistance to Afghanistan in Support of the President’s Strategy” touches on the integration of the military, diplomatic and development efforts of the U.S. Government and of creating a more solid base for development efforts within the Afghan Government.

11.  At the regional level, there is an explicit recognition that the USG is pursuing development within the context of a broader U.S. counter-insurgency strategy.  One of our primary objectives is consolidation of a government and society that are stable, secure and confident enough to be an effective partner of the U.S.  Essential initiatives are in the East and South where we will target areas (e.g. Nangarhar, bordering Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas) in coordination with the U.S. interagency, the U.S. Forces – Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA), and donors.

12.  GIRoA national programs such as the National Solidarity Program (NSP), which is funded through the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, have full cooperation at all levels, including at the village, community, district, provincial and national levels as NSP is a bottom-up approach to development, where communities identify, develop and implement their own projects; thus, more buy-in and Afghan ownership on the ground.

State Department, Cable Number 1776 “New Approach to the Delivery of U.S. Assistance to Afghanistan in Support of the President’s Strategy”

So – assuming that American opinion would be changed by a fresh approach – why haven’t these changes registered? U.S. Lawmakers and analysts persist in seeing Afghanistan in military terms alone. Afghanistan is most frequently framed as a military operation against a fanatic, misogyinistic enemy in a drug-infused country with a corrupt government. There’s a stuck-in-a-paradigm issue here, reflecting either an ignorance of non-military efforts or a wariness of the prospective capacity of development efforts to actually move Afghanistan toward the more prosperous, less-volatile place that the Administrations promises. After all, what have development efforts done to contribute to world peace in general? And many older Americans remember purported development efforts to win hearts and minds in Vietnam.

But I think that the framing of Afghanistan as a military “condition” that can only be dealt with by military means is the more distorting of the factors. It’s leading to distorted thinking and a skewed policy dialogue.

A shift in the nature of the debate: development through security.

While the combined defense and development approach is vulnerable on a number of fronts – we can’t build an Afghan government, development shouldn’t be seen as simply an instrumental value towards counter-terrorism – introducing the fact that development is an important aspect of U.S. activity in Afghanistan changes the nature of the debate about further involvement in Afghanistan, even if it might not be a game-changer.

This isn’t a national debate that ought to be considered only in terms of a military question. It is much more than that. We need to escape from this paradigm trap, one that keeps us from considering our options and contributes to the panicky feeling that we are in a corner and need to fight our way out, or jump out of the ring, a set of choices which contributes to polarizing political fights, not well reasoned policy. Without the public recognizing the wider scope of present efforts, and future options, the danger is that all involvement, military and development, will be retracted, leaving us further away from the more balanced, alternative approach to working with Afghanistan that analysts have called for and that Afghanistan’s people need.

Increasingly, the complexity of problems, the proliferation of formally educated specialties, and the pace of globalization require that the problem solving activities involved in new product development be shared across disciplinary, cognitive, geographic and cultural boundaries.

What’s our response to the challenges of complex business concept innovation?

Designing a number of linked innovations across an entire organization requires a method of design that permits a business-wide set of design interactions. That method has to be some form of process that brings in more parts of an enterprise, is intensely collaborative, creates movement towards action and breaks down previous patterns of making decisions.

There is a whole class of business design technologies, or planning media, available to use within organizations to create concepts and direct them into business innovation. Many of the most successful large-scale innovators use varieties of such processes to move into continuous innovation modes, and strong competitive positions.

They all arose from strands of thinking that centered on changing how people work together to accomplish common aims, especially groups in large and complex organizational forms.

These processes use large-group, open-system work technologies to generate innovative ideas, model their implications for the rest of a system, challenge feasibility, and then develop designs for execution.

In what has come to be recognized as the counter-approach to command and control management, these technologies all follow some basic common principles. They all work to create common goals that embody the aspirations of the system as a whole, individuals and corporate. They engage large numbers of people representing all aspects of the commercial ecosystem in which the firm exists, including many normally thought to be out-siders, like customers and suppliers. They employ democratic norms and processes that break down existing habits of thinking and fiscal attitudes. They enable wider knowledge to be brought to bear on visions, conditions, problems, and goals.

They work because they enable conversations that would never have taken place other-wise. The conversations change the ideas, and the ideas change the conversation.

They address several of the major blocks to business concept innovation.

Alignment and a “big direction”

Organizational structures and processes are very often silo-like. In most organizations getting movement toward a radical concept seems like a pipe-dream. Vision-based planning is one approach to getting alignment. To develop a shared vision requires a strong suite of whole-system design technologies.

Shared vision replaces command-and-control in terms of direction-setting mechanisms. The typical leadership challenge of getting “buy-in” for far-reaching innovation fades in significance in this way of work. The “why?” and the “where to?” are firmly, and widely, established. Robert Fritz in his Path of Least Resistance describes the effect of having a vision this way: “When an organization chooses a result, the members can more easily mobilize the resources of the organization. The processes that will aid in the direct creation of that result are more easily found or invented and executed.”

This alignment gets a big push from the fact that the “whole system is in the room”. This fundamental shift in the way that people work, and which people are working, has a variety of effects in creating an aligning vision. Probably the most important is that it is a base for integrating innovation concepts among people with similar aspirations in hereto-fore disconnected parts of the organization. Not surprisingly, the same phenomenon surfaces competing conceptions of what is desirable and feasible to be worked out.

I was marveling at how that experience of service shaped their lives, and probably the lives of many others too. Some went radical and into the factories for a while, while others stayed on in communities, and some have scaled-up their work to touch more people. Some were worried that only the times themselves brought out the activism and that today’s college students were socially unconcerned and worse, apolitical. Others see lots of evidence of social activism in today’s world, in forms other than protest marches and Lenin’s and Saul Alinsky’s tactics, but having tipping-point qualities all the same.

At some moment, perhaps when people were recounting the adrenaline rush of the Chicago Three and the decision to strike the campus, I reflected on what was happening from an outsider’s perspective.

Were we like old soldiers bemoaning the lack of concern, of conscience, in the generations since us? Or do we see that the world is building on what we learned so deeply in the sixties? As I took notes of the conversation, I was really aware that we were following the example of many others trying to bring about social change; Some recent, like Martin Luther King; some not so, like Tom Paine, Marcus Garvey and others. We had studied them; Their words and ideas were the currency we used in talking through and negotiating how we reacted to events; their visions shaping how we thought the future ought to look.

Realizing that we had built on a progressive past, the explicit thought of the group was that we all owed something to the rest of the world, that we ought to pass things on. As Vernon Jordan said a while ago: “If you stand on the shoulders of others, you have a reciprocal responsibility to live your life so that other may stand on your shoulders.” From the conversations we had this weekend, I think everyone I met has lived their life that way. What an affirming moment, after forty years, to understand that all that intense activity was not a flash in the pan, a spark that lit the air once, then vaporized.

The knowledge economy has morphed into the “Creative Economy”.

What was once central to corporations — price, quality, and much of the left-brain, digitized analytical work associated with knowledge — is fast being shipped off to lower-paid, highly trained Chinese and Indians, as well as Hungarians, Czechs, and Russians.[1]

And the same has happened to the business of design – much has been shipped to the lower-wage parts of the world.

What has taken its place is the “creative economy” characterized by product and service innovation that is the key to growth and staying ahead of the competition. And the key to that is “right brain” kind of thinking, aka creativity. Beyond the ephemeral, this creativity is loaded with the more formalized terms of “design thinking”[2] and design strategy, more structured ways of getting consistently viable innovations. At the core of that design thinking is the notion of creating a consumer experience that is unparalleled by competitors – something that plays on the perceptions, reasoning, and actions of consumers in a way that the competition can’t or won’t match.

[2] “Strategy by Design”, Tim Brown. Fast Company, June 2005, page 3.

Instead there’s an urgent need for graduates who can identify problems and design solutions to them, and these go way beyond the narrow concept of ‘graphic design’ – graphic designers can’t tackle crime, for example unless you think a nice leaflet will do that. But as ‘Design Against Crime’ has shown, designers can. Losing the word ‘graphic’ opens up so many possibilities it’s hard to understand why anyone would resist.

Jonathan Baldwin, “Grpahic Design is dead” a summary of “Conversations and Dialogues in Graphic Design”, an international symposium defining graphic design for the future, London July 2008 at http://jonathanbaldwin.blogspot.com/2008/07/graphic-design-is-dead-long-live-what.html

Is there a new kind of business out there that is not graphic design as we have come to know it?

Let’s start with the premise that the businesses that employ graphic designers are changing. And what they employ graphic designers for is also changing.

Many firms are involved in marketing and product development that involves not simply the development of single artifacts but the creation of complex systems of artifacts driven by sophisticated and complex strategies spanning many products and aimed at distinct market segments. So let’s posit, as Margaret Davis does, that at least some of the graphic design field is changed because the businesses it serves are changed.

What they employ designers for is changed as well. The design of those artifacts – from web to print to  branding devices to product forms – may involve a number of new skills – interaction design, interface design  for example – that would very recently have been subsumed under the rubric of graphic design. The technical foundation for the graphic designer can be a good deal broader than it was previously. There is more differentiation and specialization within the field.

This in turn creates a new fitness landscape for those who work in the new complex environments. It call for them to be highly collaborative, to be able to absorb the information around them to let it deeply effect their design work. The creation of a logo will often require absorbing all the preparatory research and narrative that led to the definition of a firm’s identity. The graphic design for an ad campaign will require a sophisticated listener capable of filtering through and getting the essence of huge amounts of market research. A presentation of a design concept to a client will presume a level of strategic intercourse that requires more than a passing knowledge of strategy development on the part of the designer and an informed level of design literacy of the client.

–

What these changes represent for me is at the same time heartening and confusing. Coming as I do from a background of marketing and environments that called for a high degree of collaboration if the enterprises were to be successful, I find the higher level of collaboration not so intimidating. I speak the languages of the various stakeholders.

(the photo is courtesy of Katy Sears)