[Sigia-l] Measurement (was: Design and Religion)

[Ziya Oz]

John Fullerton:

> Apart from that, I think the things that Edwards W. Deming (father of
> Total Quality Management) said influence me. One example is him saying
> many times, "How could they know?" meaning how could management know if
> a process was working efficiently without having statistical information
> to base their decision on.

Fast Company in its The 2006 Masters of Design issue delves into inductive,
deductive and abductive reasoning and how design stands wrt business:

Roger Martin's Tough Love

This tension between business-as-usual and business-by-design is not new, of
course. Many businesspeople have long regarded designers as mere stylists.
More than a few designers see businesspeople as Neanderthals all too willing
to forfeit quality for the sake of profit. Their mutual pique springs from a
fundamental difference in the way each side thinks about creating value:
Corporate types, by and large, seek to fuel growth by building from
bulletproof, reproducible systems; designers generally attempt to do so by
imagining something new, different, better. That difference can be seen as a
trust in reliability on the one hand and in validity on the other.

A reliable process--which tends to attract folks in finance, engineering,
and operations--produces a predictable result time and again. This is
business as algorithm: quantifiable, measurable, and provable. It hews to
that old management adage, "What doesn't get measured doesn't get done."
Wal-Mart, Dell, McDonald's --each started out with a novel idea, yet each
went on to standardize every aspect of its operation and blow it out across
the United States and then the world, creating billions of dollars of wealth
along the way.

A valid process, on the other hand, flows from designers' deep understanding
of both user and context, and leads them to ideas they believe in but can't
prove. They work in a world of variables: the unpredictable, the visual, the
experimental. Great designers worry less about replicating a successful
process than about producing a spectacular solution. Design leaders like
Panasonic, Timberland, and Bombardier have grown exponentially since their
inception, yet each continues to put a premium on judgment, experience, and
gut instinct.

Valid thinking demands an inspired leap of faith. Before John Mackey
launched one of the country's first supermarket-style natural-food stores,
for example, nobody could prove that Whole Foods Market would succeed at
all, let alone become the most profitable food retailer (in terms of profit
per square foot) in the United States. But Mackey did it anyway. As the
computer scientist Alan Kay put it so memorably, "The best way to predict
the future is to invent it." And that is what design-centric organizations
do: They peer into the needs and desires of their customers, identify
patterns of behavior, refine ideas that tap into those behaviors, then push
into the unknown--or at least the uncertain.

<http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/109/open_design-tough-love.html>

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem