Visioning Tools

The core DIEC tool sets are also supported by three visioning tools.

Consequences Lab

The Consequences Lab is a new element of service design which looks into the mid to long-term future and creates scenarios and artefacts that help us explore the “consequences” of technologies, business models and social trends. The aim is to foster responsible design practice and to start a win/win where being minded of consequences from the start gives organisations the chance to build in virtue alongside quality, satisfaction and good financial results.

Based on the premise that problems and issues persist far longer than the solutions man devises to answer them, the main purpose of the Consequences Lab is to create a comprehensive awareness of design concepts and their context through multifaceted exploration of future possibilities. Potential users for the Consequences Lab include policy makers, business leaders and others whose responsibility is that of ‘practical visionary’.

Consequences Labs – reflection as well as productivity?

An essential role and responsibility of the DIEC courses and projects is that they engage students and practitioners in activities that are reflective as well as productive. Informed by the need for design to examine the effect it will/may have on the world and to open its horizons to engage with wider contexts, the Consequences Labs aim to question rather than answer, to explore the possible rather than specify the probable.

With reflection, iteration and outputs at each transition point between Discovery, Generation, Synthesis and Enterprise, a project team will use a Consequences Lab to assess the final outcomes and put them into the context of the more obvious measures of outcome such as U2DE2 and ROI. Each new project would necessarily include a review of the “permanent problem” even if it were addressing a time-specific project.

An example of Consequences Lab methodology would be Marshall McLuhan’s “Tetrad Model” for examining future technologies. McLuhan’s method is to view the technology and its context and to examine the effect of this technology by asking questions of its relation to the past and the future. This creates four considerations (the technology, its past and future, and the context and its past and future). For our purposes, we can consider technology in its broadest sense to mean human artefacts and systems designed for practical purposes.

The Tetrad invites examination of both the opportunities and the risks inherent in a technology. The opportunities are explored through a focus on the future and past of a technology. The first is the most common mode of consideration, looking at the future enhancements that the technology could produce. Added to this is the potential for retrieval of value from the past. The risks are explored through examination of the past and future of the context of the technology, what existing value could be obsolesced and how the technological enhancements might reverse and become problems in the future.

Problem Workshop

Addressing design outcomes that designers and planners of the past have visited upon today’s generation, the Problem Workshop will employ the thinking of the Consequence Lab, Enterprise and Experience Studios to build a new future on inherited reality, enhancing strengths but minimising inherited negative consequences. Obvious examples of markets for the Problem Workshop are the offshore industry, the automotive and chemicals industries, the fuel and energy sectors and any others with overhanging problems that are the legacy from the past.

Experience Studio

Based on theories and practices developed at the AIGA - the National Design Centre in New York which “seeks to set the national agenda for design in its economic, social, political and cultural context”, the Experience Studio targets design in the present, by shaping the things we use. Design in its current form has been defined as “inscribing cultural meaning into artefacts”. Design is very good at making things useful usable and desirable, and there is still a need for design that makes the perceived difference such as that between a Rolex and a Swatch. It is the designer’s skill in understanding the cultural implications of material, form, process, colour and finish that gives an object its status. Design ranges from inscribing cultural meaning into the things we own, to inscribing cultural meaning into new forms of value. Service design is rooted in the established disciplines of interaction design and experience design. Experience design from the AIGA promises a “different approach to design that has wider boundaries than traditional design and that strives to create experiences beyond just products or services.” As part of new design thinking, the Experience Studio extends the potential of service design with its perspectives of a product or service viewed across the entire lifecycle with a customer, from before he or she perceives the need, to the point at which he or she discards it. Experience design works on the basis of individual rather than mass market relationship and an emotional engagement as well as a financial one.

The markets for the Experience Studio are all existing providers of service ranging from an airport to a hospital, in public and private sector service and any product manufacturers that want to redesign their products from a service perspective.