Insight and Ideas
By: Charles L. Owen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology
Monday February 11, 2008
Almost everyone is familiar with the famous Edison quote: "Genius is 1
percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration". To know much
about Edison's life, is to know that was certainly true for him - and
many other creative individuals when you take the time to learn
how they worked. Yet, there is still a strong sense among many
that great ideas come to the gifted in the way lightning strikes,
unpredicted and unexpected.
Insights as Idea Sources
In my experience, great ideas more likely come from great insight.
The insight may also seem to come suddenly, but it almost always is
preceded by solid spade work involving observation, experimentation,
thoughtful reflection and search fueled by curiosity and almost
relentless questioning. The analyst who repeatedly asks the question
"why?" is most likely to be rewarded with insight.
It is through answering the why's that we set foot on the trail to
insight. Insight is penetration, a view of the inner nature
of things. That view may reveal pattern - recognition that when
certain conditions are present, particular events almost surely
follow. At other times, an insight may be more about mechanism,
establishing how a cause or chain of causes generates a certain effect.
Sometimes it takes the form of a structure or a model that shows
how phenomena relate to each other. It can also be about process -
the steps that lead one set of conditions to change to another.
As complex and mysterious as it is, getting an insight is not anywhere
near enough when it comes to planning or designing systems. Complex
systems consist of many designed elements and relationships, all
of which can benefit from insight. Understanding a system's potential
users alone can provide a wealth of good insights easily able to shape
innovative new directions. The problem is capturing them and making
sure they get into the planning process. How insights are transferred
from the aha! event to a usable form of information is an important
part of the answer.
Some time when you have an opportunity, ask about the research conducted
for a project. Nine times out of ten you will get some variant of
this answer: "right over here", and a hand pointing to a filing
cabinet. In the filing cabinet will be reports, publications,
ethnographic video tapes, copies of articles from journals, photographs,
web screen-dumps, downloads and a wealth of other archived remnants
of what was probably an extensive fact-gathering research activity.
The problem is, this is data - undistilled - in its original form.
It may have had great value in shaping the search, informing the
planning team and even revealing insight, but in its original form,
it does not enter the information stream in a way suitable to have
impact in the several places it should. Worse, if it is considered
at all, important details are likely to be forgotten, even mis-remembered.
Data is not information. Information acquires its value through
distillation, interpretation and the revelation of insight. At its best,
information has surprise, and one measure of its value is how much.
A crucial step in the analysis phase of planning is the recognition
of insight and the thoughtful communication of it in a form usable
in the information flow.
An Insight Document: The Design Factor
In Structured Planning, insights are thought through on one-page documents
called Design Factors (see the Figure). As in other phases of the process,
standardization is deliberately applied to the way in which information
is presented, so that it can be readily contributed and used by anyone
working with the planning process. A Design Factor document actually
contains more information than just an insight, but we will get to
that shortly. From the insight standpoint, the information is distilled
into an Observation and its Extension.
Observations are succinct, usually one-sentence statements expressing
the essence of the insight. In "Covering User Needs", I introduced
the idea of Observations as qualitative information elements and the
evolution of their form through experiments with different formats
seeking greater information content and more natural grammar. A form
we use frequently introduces a condition and then completes a pattern
by noting the effect that the condition typically produces. For
example: "While moving through open spaces, crew members may
inadvertently contact equipment with their feet." This was a surprise
to the designers of Space Lab; switches were being turned on and off
unintentionally! We picked up this insight from their reports and used
it in work we did for NASA on Space Station.
The form of the Observation isn't rigidly constrained to the condition/effect
format, however. As long as there is insight, the statement
has value. An example of another form is the Observation from the
Design Factor in the Figure: "Ill-maintained equipment drives riders away;
well-maintained old equipment often may attract them." This had
direct bearing on concepts that we developed for Chicago's CTA transit
system.
The Extension section of the Design Factor is used to carry on the
discussion. Experience has shown that considerable value derives from
distilling an insight to a single sentence. Through this process,
what is important and not so important gets sorted out. But communication
may also suffer from the distillation, and we found ourselves far too
often asking "why" and "what do you mean by that" questions of Design Factor
originators. The result was the Extension section, where these kinds of
questions can be answered, and the insight augmented with additional
information on causes, effects, relationships, contexts, associations,
etc. that help to explain why the phenomenon exists.
Combining Insight and Ideas
The Design Factor document, as earlier suggested, also contains other
useful information. Contrary to the design model that suggests that
the path of development progresses neatly from analysis to synthesis to
evaluation in discrete steps, Structured Planning is much less
firmly partitioned. During the information gathering activity, when
understanding and insight are being sought, the analyst is expected to
think about solutions in the midst of finding problems―and to
apply some practical screening at the same time as a preliminary form
of evaluation. Thus, the Design Factor document in one place contains
ideas as well as insight. The document's design takes inspiration from
the fact that when an insight about a problem is gained, it is often
easiest then to see solutions for it.
The bottom half of the Design Factor form is devoted to ideas. On the
left, the view is strategic. In the document in the Figure, two
strategies are given for using the insight that well-maintained old
equipment can have charm: (1) care for old equipment, and (2) emphasize
its charm. On the right, ideas for specific implementation of the
strategies are given names as titles for "solution elements" - potential
component concepts for a system solution: Identity-Element Maintenance
Crews (teams that would be assigned to specific equipment to maintain
as their own), and Highlighted Antiques (older devices, equipment and
environments spotlighted with placement, lighting, painting and other
attention-awarding means). The titles are place-holders for more
detailed discussions and explanations documented separately. In my
next article I will talk more about this and how best to capture ideas
quickly and efficiently when they occur.
Insight is the motive force. In advanced planning for system concepts,
hundreds of insights are needed. The reward is true innovation across
the system. Making the effort to distill data to information and to
standardize its communication has a big payoff. And the payoff
continues beyond the project. Companies and institutions across the
country lose highly valuable information every day as employees retire,
change jobs and otherwise move within the organization or leave it.
The data stay - the memos, plans, reports, drawings - but the
reasons why things were done the way they were, disappear. The
qualitative information - the why’s, the insights - go. Probably
billions of dollars worth of information are lost every year because
there is no qualitative knowledge base to match the quantitative
systems that most companies and institutions possess.
Design Factors are elements of that kind of knowledge base.
Charles L. Owen is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Design,
one of the six academic units of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago.
There, Mr. Owen conducts research and teaches semiannually in the MDes, MDM
and PhD Design graduate programs.
Back to Articles, including BPM, SOA, BDM, BA & OP
|
