Launching a new studio at the end of a cycle
May 15 • thought • written by James
It’s a funny time in design and innovation*. The vibe feels like it has shifted a bit.
After years of growth, Linkedin is full of layoffs. Innovation budgets are being cut. From people I speak to, big studios and consultancies are going after smaller projects.
Mood wise, I’m seeing more articles like Eudaimonia by Alex Wright, suggesting the industry has lost its way. Despite the growth of recent years, it seems like many designers feel like they are not making the impact they want to.
Obviously, the economy and the cuts are a big part of it. But, as a test, if that were to suddenly improve, would a positive economy flip the vibe back? My sense is that it wouldn’t.
So, what’s going on? And, amidst the budget cuts, why do Timo and I think it’s the right time to launch a new research and design studio?
One way to look at it is that we are approaching the end of a (long) cycle. Early adopting businesses started with user centred design and design-thinking more than two decades ago. Then the boom came, as design found its role in digital transformation and studios were bought out by consultancies. Now it’s a mainstream practice embedded within organisations, with everything that goes with that.
Launch, boom, establishment. A recognisable s-curve of adoption. Neither wholly good nor wholly bad, just what happens when an idea gets big. And it hasn’t happened overnight, Chris Downs, ex-live work, now of Normally, wrote this article in 2019, in which identified three phases of service design: making the case, building capability, and making use of it. The industry has been changing every year, perhaps the consequences have just become a bit more obvious as the economic tide has gone out.
So, what do these changes look like? Lou Downe, in her book Good Services, published in 2020, describes how the work tends to be made up of many “smaller” decisions made by larger numbers of junior people. It’s harder to draw a boundary around a meaty design challenge. It’s almost impossible to imagine a design team making progress on their own, sat in a studio outside the organisation.
It’s messier, more pragmatic, less pure. It’s harder to take a step back and see your design work on its own. And yet, in the established phase of design, this is how real change happens.
She’s writing about service design but the implications flow through to user experience design too. Best practices have been established. Many organisations have mature design systems. As a result, designers have less room for manoeuvre and there is less opportunity to take a design challenge away and work on it as a “studio”. In fact, a studio’s desire to take away a definable design challenge can cause a lot of frustration in a client used to working in a more integrated way.
This can be hard for designers. Formal training and, until recently, industry practice, tends to emphasise clear problem definition, based on user needs. It has typically paid less attention to the pragmatic considerations that come with being in a large organisation. It’s a very satisfying approach to study. And when user needs are not well understood, as in the launch phase and in the boom, then it works just fine. Now, however, in the establishment phase, where progress is made in smaller increments, it’s harder to make it work.
To get a sense of how much work we’re talking about, it’s good to compare proportions at different businesses. A rough heuristic we used at Aviva was 70% core business, 20% big bets, and 10% incubating the future (and we often fell short on the big bets and the future). If this proportion holds over other organisations then it’s fair to say the majority of design is fully established.
This, I think, is why the vibe feels different. A lot of people joined in an earlier phase of the cycle and came with different expectations. As design has settled into this new phase, a lot of them are not getting to work in the way they expect.
So, the first thing we need to do is talk about this more. That probably means changing training curricula, and perhaps changing the work we talk about at conferences. It definitely means we need more accurate job descriptions and interviews. Candidates need to see the work they’re actually going to work on, not just the fancy innovation projects.
It may be surprising for me to say this, but we can probably get some help from client procurement teams on this.
When I was at Aviva, our procurement team had a very clear idea about the challenges and risks of different design projects, and a clear view of which studios and what rates would be appropriate for each. This can be managed within studios and consultancies but, realistically, it’s more likely that we have some segmentation regarding who does what. Again, I expect to see this driven by procurement.
The second thing we need to do is ask: what’s next?
How are we going to handle the 20-30% complex problems that do not fit established design? Do they need a similar approach? Are they just bigger, more open versions of the questions we have been asking all along?
I do not think so. I think there are three characteristics, three types of complexity, that these problems share, and that demand a different approach.
The first characteristic is that the users of the service have distinct needs that have not (yet) been prioritised. Sadly, this often overlaps with and exacerbates other disadvantages, making their situation worse.
The second characteristic is multi-dimensionality, when there are just too many things going on to easily solve or even manage the problem. A lot of challenges to do with the energy transition, and sustainability in general, fall into this area, being simultaneously economic, environmental and social.
The third characteristic is a bit different. As problems get more complex and knottier, their threads can start to cross boundaries between disciplines. For example, developing a new residential neighbourhood or office block is not just an architectural or spatial design question, increasingly it’s a question of digital product design or service design. Working across the disciplines is critical but each discipline has its own practices and language and they don’t always (often) play well together.
The same is true in financial services. Simple digital journeys and ad hoc visits to branches are not going to make the connection that customers need between their finances and their lives: building financial resilience, developing positive habits, or teaching their kids about money. We need researchers, customer advocates, educators in the room with designers and architects, working together to connect the dots around a bigger vision of what banks can be for their customers (and society).
Twenty years ago it was ambitious to imagine user centricity would become the norm. Now, at the end of the cycle, as those patterns become established and stable, space is left for new patterns to form. Let’s make the next cycle ten times more ambitious.
New patterns mean new ways of working, so let lots of new studios bloom.
That’s what we have done. Timo and I have set up hidden strategy to make connections across the gaps. If you’re interested, please go and look at our website. We would love to have a chat.
*Note - For the purposes of this article, I’m referring to user centred design and innovation as practiced by studios like Designit, (where I recently co-led the London the studio) or in house (I previously helped build the global product and design team at Aviva). The roles I have in mind include researchers, strategists, and service, UX, and brand designers. Later on, I explore why we might want to widen the scope of this definition a bit.
all photos by Timo