Why Did We Call this Book Intersection?

When Jenifer Niles, then my editor at Morgan Kaufmann, proposed that name, I was intrigued.

This is a book about design, clearly. But it touches many adjacent or related areas, by approaching problems from different perspectives, aiming to bridge viewpoints and concerns, and connecting design to today’s complex social ecosystems.

Therefore, the title expresses very well one of the key themes of this publication: looking beyond the immediate task, beyond your own comfort zone and background, beyond a briefing or project scope, and embracing viewpoints and practices other than your own.

Intersection gives you a thinking model, a methodological framework, and a vocabulary to do just that. It is a resource to apply design thinking and practice to challenges you consider relevant and important to tackle. It promotes both a mindset and an approach that enables you to take a step back, and look at the big picture of everything that matters when approaching a difficult design challenge. The face of companies, organizations, public services, and other types of enterprise is changing. Formerly clear lines are fading away—between online and offline, internal and external, owned and shared, customer and user, social and business, branding and operations. When thinking holistically about a complex challenge, such distinctions just don’t seem to make much sense anymore.

One of the immediate consequences of these shifts is the need to align, bridge and connect; more and more professionals are calling themselves architects, designers, or consultants. If you are among those, you inevitably face the challenge of transforming ecosystems, regardless of your particular background, focus area, or level in an organization. Such systemic challenges go well beyond the problems of designing products, web sites, or services in isolation.

This is not a hands-on book promoting definite methods or tools to be used in such a setting. Instead, it is about the interrelationships and dependencies between the various concerns you will meet, and how to align different conceptual decisions on common course.

Every design process in such a setting involves acting in a space of great uncertainty, making a series of conceptual decisions, and producing real outcomes. It means taking risks, embarking on a journey without a defined end, and chasing opportunities as they emerge. It requires working closely with your peers, partners, stakeholders, users, and customers, as well as developing a clear vision of where you want to be. I wrote this book to help you with that task. And, more important, to have some fun in tackling your particular design challenges at the intersection of business, technology, and people.

Milan Guenther

May 2012

The Story Behind this Book

In 2007, I attended a talk at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Nancy, France, where I was spending a year as a student. The presentation was about a new campus that would bring together three independent schools, planning their joint future to educate the next generation of graduates. They should benefit from a vivid exchange between a school for art and design, a business school, and a technology institute, with joint classes and projects that crossed the boundaries of disciplines.

The team around Parisian architect Nicolas Michelin presented their idea of the new campus, with models and renderings of the buildings and their surroundings. They began their presentation with a thinking model, a system of interconnected concerns that drove their decisions—light, space, materials, social life, ecology, wayfinding… all aspects that have to be brought together in one coherent vision.

I have been involved in many different projects between User Experience, Information Systems, and Communications in the enterprise. The complexity of different concerns to be addressed, and the interplay of viewpoints always struck me as the most difficult challenge in design.

So I began drawing a model of what matters to my work, what has to be aligned and brought together, and I have revised and refined it over the past few years based on experience and many great conversations. This book is about that model.

Design, Strategy, and The Enterprise

When I attended design school, the term strategy was not used very often. To some design students, using design and strategy in one sentence seemed like a contradiction, mixing artistic merit with the quest for profits.

In practice, and regardless whether for profit, the relevance of strategy to design work cannot be undervalued. We have seen design projects produce results that were great by themselves, but that fail completely to deliver on the intentions of the clients commissioning them. Such projects are usually doomed even before they begin, by pre-determining the outcomes that they are expected to deliver.

Designers are used to being asked to deliver web sites, mobile apps, logos, or other things, working with a long list of ready-made requirements, or beautifying something existing, even when the problem to be solved actually lies completely elsewhere. Concerns that were considered to be outside the scope of the design project lead to random decisions in neglected areas, ultimately producing misaligned concepts and leading to failure and overall disappointing results.

At the same time, the scope of design work grows rapidly, from visuals to interactive systems and services. To step up to this challenge, designers today look beyond individual artifacts to the entire experience with a brand, a service, or an organization. Key to this is a dialogue about the strategy behind a design initiative: understanding, questioning, rephrasing, and clarifying the goals to be achieved with a task is what makes a design initiative relevant to the problem to be solved.

At eda.c, we have experienced both the failure of projects due to predetermined results and a constant expansion of the scope of our work. One concept that we found particularly relevant to exploring the actual problem behind a briefing, and setting the true scope of a project, is the notion of enterprise.

What exactly is an enterprise? Although there is no agreement on the definition and meaning of the term, it is used widely in the areas of business and IT, and has also been adopted in the world of Marketing and Branding. While the individual definitions vary, all uses share a common basic premise: that key challenges companies and other organizations face are best tackled by addressing them in a holistic and coherent fashion.

In Intersection, the enterprise can be seen as the space of market players, people, and stakeholders across the ecosystem that an organization is embedded in. It comprises the structures put in place to facilitate exchanges and transactions, such as services, channels, systems, processes, and decision rules. It provides the setting for the tools, systems, artifacts, or media we produce to address this audience.

And, finally, it also encompasses the variety of motivations, meanings, experiences, and personal contexts we are designing for in the end.

Who Intersection is For

Looking at the enterprise level means understanding one’s work in terms of the overall system. This book is for everyone involved with designing and transforming enterprises at that level and scale:

Executives and strategists looking to apply strategic design in their organizations, developing products, services, models, structures, and systems as part of a bigger whole, driving performance and competitiveness

Designers and architects working on design challenges that require expanding their view on the enterprise as a playing field, looking beyond particular domains, projects ,or intended outcomes

Consultants and technologists being caught between the views, concerns, and interests of their clients and stakeholders, and looking to employ strategic design to generate a way to move forward

Entrepreneurs and visionaries faced with the challenge of creating their enterprise from scratch, making the right decisions with regard to all relevant concerns and making their vision tangible

Intersection is especially for you if you are not exactly clear how to describe what you do, if you are always struggling with your official job title, or always creating your own roles. For some of us, this ambiguity is a part of our professional lives, and serves us well when navigating the complexity of an enterprise environment. This book is your guide on that journey.

How Intersection is Structured

This book includes 10 Chapters and is organized into three parts.

Part 1, comprising Chapters 1 to 3, describes the thoughts behind the messages of this book, and provides the basic thinking to understand enterprise-people relationships, interdisciplinary work, and a design approach to strategic challenges.

Part 2 consists of Chapters 4 to 8 and describes the Enterprise Design Framework, the main part of Intersection. It takes you on a journey across the 20 aspects we found relevant in strategic design work on the enterprise level, starting at from a set of Big Picture questions to develop a conceptual Design Space, to finally come to a Rendering of results.

Part 3 is about the practical side of strategic design work, with Chapter 9 mapping the framework to a typical design process and Chapter 10 describing challenges of organizational design practice.

The Case Studies at the end of Chapter 1–9 tie the abstract concepts and ideas to real-world illustrations of design work and the aspects applied. Some are taken from our work at eda.c; others are not.

Finally, a total of 24 approaches to strategic design challenges are portrayed throughout the book. They describe professional practices, knowledge areas and disciplines that pertain to the concerns being discussed in this book.

How To Use Intersection

As an introduction into strategic design, and the various domains, disciplines, and approaches you might encounter when tackling design challenges on the enterprise level—this works by reading in a linear way or a rather chaotic fashion, however you prefer

As a link between otherwise disparate concerns, and a way to align them, making professionals and stakeholders work together, see commonalities and differences, and enable cross-disciplinary collaboration—starting with an aspect close to your own field and going on from there

As a guide in challenging projects, helping you to ask the right questions and showing up ways to make conceptual decisions in a complex space of intertwined aspects—looking at the aspects you find the most relevant in your context and exploring the references to others

As a reference for aspects and concerns that you find important in your projects, pointing you to related thinking, professional disciplines, approaches, and methods—using Intersection like a dictionary

As a thinking aid to come to an overall vision of where you want to be, making the journey from exploring the environment of your challenge, constraints and opportunities, to finally decide on outcomes and their introduction into the enterprise—mapping the framework to your context and going through the aspects to be addressed