Daniel Santos’s Design Truth
“It doesn’t matter if we keep accumulating different knowledge and experiences if we don’t make room for reflecting and tracking progress. In other words, if we don’t make room for learning. Learning (and education) are the key to keep pushing us to ask each other some tough questions.”
Could you tell about the biggest influences on your approach to design?
The shortest answer I can give is people are my biggest influence. Of course, there have been books, talks, lectures, and people that I’ve come across that have widened not only my approach to problem-solving as a designer but also my view of the world.
The long answer is that this question is a very ontological one. I mean it’s rather challenging – at least for me – to look back and aim to find out who and what influenced me to be who I am today.
Throughout my design career, the diversity of projects I’ve been involved with and the outcomes I was expected to deliver, have played a considerable influence on my approach to design. But looking back there’s one thing that remained constant: the eagerness to ask and understand why things are like they are. I mean, I could literally be the living representation of my favourite design joke:
Q:How many designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Why does it need to be a lightbulb?
This said, while I worked in crafting user experience in digital products, where I was tasked to design interactions, I would say the biggest authorities at that time were the following:
1 – The Ethos: Bauhaus which amplified the maxim “form follows function” to a standard that is still a religion for most designers today. And of course all the Gestalt theory.
2- The universality: Also, in a more recent page, Dieter Rams’ design principles were a kind of soft heuristic I would use to reflect on the work me and my colleagues were doing.
3 – The structure: Last, the guidelines, the rules, the architecture (and, obviously the beauty) in the work of the modernist graphic designers, like Massimo Vignelli, and the legacy they left us. Whenever I needed to dive into complex work such as UI components, Design Systems their work would be a great source of inspiration
As I transitioned to Service Design, the scope and application of my work started to become way broader – as did my appetite for more information regarding my existential questions on how to navigate this often foggy discipline. I have a huge army of people related somehow to service design who had a tremendous influence in shaping the way I approach design nowadays. In no specific order I can mention the following:
1 – Tash Willcocks, the best facilitator I’ve ever met. Our work, as designers, has a lot to do with creating compromises and modulating contexts. Tash can teach us so many things. But the greatest influence she still has on me today is that I always try to amplify the best a room full of people can give to enable real collective intelligence dynamics. The smartest person in the room is always the room, right? Tash does this like no one else.
2 – Lauren Currie, one the field’s visionaries (co-founded Snook a social innovation and service design company) and lately, at NOBL.io. She has been helping organisations to develop more effective, more meaningful, and better cultures (which is one of the key aspects for successful service design delivery). Lauren was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her services to design and diversity in 2017.
3 – Lou Downe, who just announced new challenges. What Lou and the brilliant UK Government Digital Services team have done during the last ten years in terms of building design capability in the public sector and having governments being more efficient at delivering services is beyond any measure. The international design community, working in the public sector, will be harvesting on its ripple effects for a long time.
I could mention Mike Press, an amazing storyteller with an immaculate track record in academia, lobbying for design internationally and working for the public sector and non-profit organisations, or Adam StJohn Lawrence, one of the biggest activists in the field and one of the people that has been doing a lot for Service Design – a true inspiration to someone like me, trying to build communities locally.
I could easily write a list of twenty to thirty people whose work, opinions, and stories have had a tremendous influence on me.
Did you always have a keen interest in design and what was it that led you down this path?
Yes and no.
Yes, I had an honest and genuine interest in design from an early age – I was 7 years old. Let me tell you how it started: I have a cousin (Jorge Marques, who’s also a designer, a brilliant one btw), and we would build our own board games. This was the late eighties, before we had computers and played video games. We built our own version of table football; we started with simple bottle caps and paper goal posts; then we created different pitches, drawing them on back the back of our bedroom rugs. After that, we decided to create clubs and give players a name, a number, and even football kits painted with markers, made to fit inside the bottle caps – we would draw new football kits every new season.
Finally, we created a championship between these ‘clubs’. When we felt all of this was not enough we gave it a touch of Championship Manager, and started transferring ‘players’ from one squad to the other. We even developed our own bookkeeping records. Nowadays, everyone knows that ‘Play’ has a fundamental role in Design. At the age of 7 and 10, my cousin and I were just discovering that empirically, by applying the design process to our play.
But, if I am honest, I must admit, that especially before going to college, I didn’t have a clear idea of what design was.
I think, besides my childhood inception into co-designing my own table games, what led me to become a designer was the drive of always asking “Why?” which, ironically, can quite often be perceived as childish and silly.
Asking “Why?” took me to take some considerable tangents on my career – the most exciting one was probably the years I spent in India. I mean, I’m not a design practitioner who has built a career exclusively working in the same area of expertise for the last 15 years! I kind of admire the people who have done that; I mean, I see a lot of compromise in developing a career around vertical and specialized knowledge (going in depth) in only one field.
In my case, I have this restlessness that forced me to expand my world-view, empirically. I needed larger horizons, before deciding in which area I would drill down to a level where I could consider myself to be an ‘expert’. It took me quite some time, and looking back I’ve realised it was a path I needed to follow. Through the years, from UI to UX, from UX to Academia, from Academia to Service Design, I was, unknowingly, a service designer in the making. Or at least that’s the lie I tell everyone, including myself.
Asking “Why?” (or sometimes “Wh
Asking “Why?” (or sometimes “Why not?”) can be a risky game. You can end up in places where you find out disturbing epiphanies (they call it insights in the industry) about yourself and the world.
What major lessons have you learned since you began your work?
It might be insubstantial, but to answer this I’m going to use an excerpt of a 1932 poem by the greatest Portuguese modernist writer, Fernando Pessoa.
In this poem called “A morte é a curva da estrada”, the last two lines are so engraved in me that they become one of my self-reflective mottos: “No one has ever been lost. Everything is truth and path.”
In my opinion, these two lines are humbling and clarify beyond any dispute of what learning really is. In abstract terms, everything holds a potential learning opportunity within it. This allowed me to draw three essential questions, such as:
1 – How does one can make better-informed choices about what to learn?
2 – How does one make room for learning, in a continuous way?
3 – And, the last and trickiest one: how does one learn to unlearn?
These are the probably the toughest questions that, at the moment, I still interrogate myself with.
Definitely, a skill I think I’ve developed throughout the years is the capacity of making better (or harder) questions. If I had to choose one major lesson that would be it: knowing how to make better questions
But hey! If you ask this same question some years from now, most likely you’ll get a different answer.
What have you changed your mind about over the course of your journey into design?
In one word: results.
It doesn’t matter if we are doing great work and all the right people are not benefiting from it. It doesn’t matter if we are using the most efficient and innovative approach to solve problems if the main goal is to make shareholders happier, hence richer. Nothing against profit, but 2019 reality is telling us profit-driven decisions are not sustainable.
Please tell us about your ‘agnostic’ approach to creativity. How do we embody this attitude and use it to make ourselves better or more ‘real’ designers?
One of the archetypes that hits me on the nerve the most is making design a synonym of creativity, or having creative ideas, or even worst the expression creative problem-solving. It annoys me in myriad ways.
First of all, it’s not because these are false claims – they are mostly true – but because it is a simplistic and misrepresented way of portraying design as a practice. Secondly, and the most critical point, it defines creativity as an exclusive capacity of designers, but nothing could be further from the truth. I know lawyers and butchers way more creative than some of my colleagues.
To design something is more than having ideas. The idea is not the Holy Grail of creativity, looking at problems and solving them in a new way is. This misconception people have about the design practice ends up mutilating important parts of the design process itself, reducing it, perhaps, to its least important part, which is, of course generating ideas.
An idea without research is just an idea. An idea without a prototype is just an idea. An idea is the most abstract part of the design process. It’s the least valuable from a technical point of view, which aims at building successful outcomes, yet is the most powerful from a storytelling point of view, which aims at inspiring and building shared understanding. That’s why the idea, as the building block for creativity, is so glorified – it’s an inspiration token.
But the thing is that an idea, in its verbal form, as a narrative only, is almost worthless. People will project their own mental models and cognitive bias when hearing an idea. But people will relate with an idea in a totally different way if they experience it in some tangible way (prototype) and even more if this is somehow connected to their behaviours, values, expectation, and motivations (along with all the sort of things that can be raised by research).
There’s a short exercise made by Lego SeriousPlay, we use in workshops, or in cross-organisational meetings called What the Duck. We use it as a prompt to reflect on the challenges of not making ideas tangible to validate their success, or about the problem of not having enough diversity in the room, or the common mistake of assuming we know all we need to know to do our work, when in most of the cases we don’t. We need to be aware of these pitfalls. There is no practice that owns creativity because it is a human characteristic that has been with us since the cradle of humanity.
For instance, let’s say we, a design team, are working on a project with lawyers because it involves their technical expertise: We have done our research, we have identified good opportunities to explore and we are now at the stage of generating ideas. What shall we do to be more “real”? Instead of just locking our design team in a room to generate ideas, we need something else.
We need something that challenges our own status quo of “creative people”. We must be agnostic in our approach to creativity and having other people or agents perceived as “non-creative” in the room – just like lawyers. We must build trust with these people and bring them to a place where they will feel comfortable co-creating ideas without a design team, or even on their own. This doesn’t happen night overnight. No relation is built that way.
As said, for designers to become trusted agents we need to be good at building relations with different people in all sorts of environments and backgrounds. What we do is not rocket science, but not everyone feels comfortable writing post-its and sticking it on a wall. To accommodate the diversity of perspectives, we need to design tools and methods where the learning curve is adjusted to our audience.
Asking someone who is barely literate to dot vote ideas on a wall; or not asking someone who’s highly educated and used to dealing with huge amounts of information in a logocentric way to make a mood board of their emotions, etc. These requests might not work because they uncover soft spots of participants. It’s not that they can’t do it. They just need time, confidence, and trust, which are three of the main aspects one uses to build a relationship.
Definitely, a skill I think I’ve developed throughout the years is the capacity of making better (or harder) questions. If I had to choose one major lesson that would be it: knowing how to make better questions.
How can designers use imagination to explore tension and release in the gap between chaos and order? How can we use imagination to take us to new places whilst still being grounded in reality? How do we find balance as human beings?
The work of a designer is around finding order in chaos. Actually, again it’s a very human characteristic – striving to find order in the apparent chaos – and it’s something that’s been around for a long time; the Fibonacci Sequence or the Golden Circle are good evidence of this.
I like to think of the dualities of chaos/order, imagination/reality, and natural/artificial as something that asks us to develop two different skills: focus and resilience. Speaking in dualities is somehow limited in terms of possibilities due to its binary approach. From this perspective, I like to think of focus as a periscope that emerges from the depths to give us a report of what lays at the surface, hence giving us options to choose.
In this sense, the focus is the destination or expected (imagined) destination one has to draw before starting the dialogue between these dualities. From the point-of-view of resilience, let’s consider a litre of water as a metaphor.
We need to go on a brief tangent here, now: imagine that you put the amount of water, one litre, in three different glass containers, where can see the water level inside it: a milk bottle, a jar, and a beer glass. Then you are asked to draw just the shape of liquid inside the glass container. What are the results? Most likely three different shapes of the same amount of water – one litre.
In this sense, resilience is this capacity for assuming different shapes, according to the surrounding context, without losing the identity and whatever defines us as a person and professional.
We need both resilience and focus to explore the gap and tension between chaos and order. Focus to drive us to the desired outcome; resilience to adjust to the bumps on the road and remain intact. Amongst other skills, attitudes and behaviours, in my view and experience, focus and resilience are crucial for public sector innovation and essential for experimental problem solving.
Photo credit: Associação Porto Digital
How can ‘trouble-making’ make for better design in your point of view?
Trouble-making is an expression which has ignited passionate discussion about what it really means. I guess, since then, I stopped using it as an alias, at least with the sense I was giving to it. The last thing I wanted was to discuss the “tool”, instead of the “outcome”. For my non-native mind and understanding, trouble-making is the act of challenging the status-quo, but not in a shallow, arrogant or even nasty way. In my vision, it can be a witty way to shake up things a little and having new conversations regarding old problems.
Would you say that our interpretations about ourselves and the world limit our capacity to design something real?
Yes, absolutely. Our mental models, cognitive biases, views of the world, cultural background, language, and habits are some of the key elements of which our identity is made of; we need to be as aware as possible of these and mitigate their influences to the minimum. I don’t believe it’s possible to eliminate such influence completely – that would dehumanise the outcomes of our work, therefore making it unreal.
Being aware of our own biases takes us half-way to avoiding unethical outcomes, like that one of the Facebook employee who tweeted a soap dispenser that only works for white hands. The soap dispenser uses sensors, (they use near-infrared technology, I guess) to detect a hand underneath it and release soap. The sensor sends out invisible light and releases soap when a hand reflects light back to the sensor. But these sensors fail to detect dark skin tones, because they can cause the light to be absorbed instead of bounce back. This is a design problem (even if it happens because of the choice of technology), because an efficient testing and prototyping phase that measured how effective the sensor was with different skin tones should have detected this critical problem.
The unintended but foreseeable consequences of situations like this or this and many others can be really damaging, not only for a company’s reputation, but for the dignity and sense of self-respect of end users.
We, designers need to be held accountable for the consequences of our design. Running a basic heuristics checklist with questions such as: “Is your design based on field evidence?”; or “Was your design tested in a real environment with real users?”; or even “Did you recruit a diverse group of people for the tests to analyse the full spectrum of user experience?”, can help designers understand how their own mental models and cognitive bias might be affecting the final outcome.
Is Service Design an ethical act? Can business ever really be ‘ethical’?
I’m not sure what you mean with “ethical act” but according to how I’ve interpreted the question my answer is “Yes, SD is an ethical act”.
One of the biggest drivers for SD capability is business. We live in a time where services take up between 70% and 85% of most of the economies of the world’s developed countries. So, of course, the narrative of user-centricity and organisational efficiency at the bottom line is just another way for businesses and markets to optimise outcomes – in other words, to produce more value with less investment.
But businesses, in their limited and defined nature, are not the sole promoters of SD capability. If we look around, from climate change to the crisis of democratic values, from the catastrophe of war refugees to the emergency on acting upon antivaxxing impact, “we live in an age of sticky problems” as Dan Hill said. The world is full of new wicked problems which the old and unethical way of decision-making won’t help solve.
I’ve been observing, participating in, and recording what I call, very prosaically, “transformation in the design discourse” where there is a common denominator which is ethics.
I think very few people, in the modern world, are against making a profit per se. They are, as I am, against unsustainable business models, exclusive access to opportunities, unfair distribution of taxes, income, and power, etc. – just to quote some issues that are often times linked to greedy businesses.
But times are changing profit-from-purpose businesses are on the uprise and guess what they are bringing to the picture in a greater measure? That’s right, ethics!
So, yes, SD is and will continue being, hopefully, an ethic enabling act. Also, that’s why I’m working in the public sector, which in many countries is the largest employer and the key player for the way our businesses are developed. Together with a bunch of talented and motivated people, I’ve been playing a role of local Service Design activist, founding a local community Service Design Portugal and co-founding the chapter of Service Design Network in Portugal.
But it’s not only SD communities. Recently I’ve seen and participated in interesting debates around ethics in UX and start-up related communities. Good friends, like Phill, are launching ‘ethics’ tool kits. So again I don’t think SD can claim ownership of “ethical acts” but it definitely can make a steady contribution towards bringing it up to speed.
The world is full of new wicked problems which the old and unethical way of decision-making won’t help solve.
What are the key elements of community dynamics we need to support to build a better world? What barriers do we face here?
Enrique Allen, the co-founder of Designer Fund, presented a simple framework about this topic, which I consider paramount. Earlier this year, I even delivered a lightning talk during the first day of the Global Service Jam at Porto where I shared how at Service Design Portugal we are applying these 5 key elements to build and grow our community:
1 – Purpose: the living arena for all our cognitive and confirmation bias. We like to be surrounded by like-minded people with whom we might create compromises to achieve a common goal.
2 – People: the building block of any community. We create a sense of belonging with people with whom we share common views, culture, values, and objectives, etc. Our connection and engagement with these people grow stronger if supported by practices that reinforce these similarities but also celebrate the diversity within.
3 – Practice: the rituals of the community. We establish routines and shared practices by realising the benefits we’ve got from them. One of the most cherished trade-offs is creating a safe place where people trust each other.
4 – Place: the channel where things mostly happen. We need a place to meet, physically or virtually, and practice the rituals of our community. Repeated routines and exposure can help to grow a sense of belonging and make room for organic and independent (non-curated) relationships to flourish.
5 – Progress: the moment of reflection, evaluation, and recalibration. We know it’s hard to keep people committed to communities due to their ‘extracurricular’ nature so we need to acknowledge and design the motivation for people to join and keep coming back. The community as a whole needs to be prepared to recalibrate its purpose so it can stay relevant.
Is focusing on building a ‘better’ world part of the problem? Does the world need saving and are designers the only ones who can lead the way towards doing this?
I think we – designers – are still not doing enough. I mean Doing not talking. We can keep having sectoral gatherings and summits, where we share experiences and learning, where we all motivate each other to do ‘better’ work, and praise Design and all its transformative potential. Inspiration is good, but what we really need is the demonstration. Right now, reality is demanding that from us.
We need to show, not tell why Design has a widespread value for people, businesses and society. We need to show, not tell why organisations can build successful evidence-based outcomes which have greater transparency and acknowledged co-ownership. We designers need to go beyond the ‘passive’ role of just understanding people (users, clients, stakeholders, business owners – whoever the word ‘people’ means to in its specific context).
Over the course of many years, designers have been claiming they don’t have a seat at the table, to influence the ways decisions were made. Now, designers need to develop agency to build coherence and consensus around the table; designers need to be able to facilitate conversations about what a successful outcome is and build a shared understanding around it.
And yes, despite everything, we need to bring bottom-up (users first) and top-down (organisational compromise) perspectives together and work on being able to influence how people and organisations will benefit from those shared decisions.
How do you define social innovation? What is its relationship to the ‘social good’?
I’m just someone that pays close attention to social innovation; I wouldn’t consider myself as someone who has a track record that allows me to define social innovation. I know that I will always follow and try to learn from people doing things differently to obtain different results – which are not only ‘making money’.
I like to think of the dualities of chaos/order, imagination/reality, and natural/artificial as something that asks us to develop two different skills: focus and resilience.
Have we lost the capacity to ask the unanswerable questions upon which every civilisation before us has been founded?
No, not at all. If I understood the question correctly, I think never before have so many asked the overwhelming amount of unanswerable questions we are asking ourselves today.
Some years back, Matt Ridley brilliantly demonstrated in a Ted Talk called “When Ideas Have Sex” that “the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas.”
One of my favourite parts of that talk is when he compares an Acheulean hand axe and a computer mouse – which have exactly the same size and shape (they were both design to fit the human hand, which is evidence that ergonomics is something that has been around since the dawn of humanity).
The hand axe was made of one single substance about 1,5M years ago and lasted for half a million years; the mouse was made of many substances (metal, plastic, silicone, etc.). The hand axe can be made by a single person, from its raw material to the final artefact; whereas to make a mouse, from the raw material to its components and final assembly, many different people and organisations are involved. There wasn’t anyone in the audience, nor is there anyone in the world, who can build a computer mouse alone. This is quite intriguing, isn’t it?
Ridley says this combination of different technology and the accumulation of various ideas is the secret to understanding the world. He thinks the answer is the ability to exchange. Humans are the only animals who have the habit of exchanging one thing for another; no other animal does it. And it is this exchange of ideas that transforms human cultures into combinatorial and cumulative ever-changing and ever-evolving entities.
Some may say that we have become so “cog-wheeled” into our own chambers of expertise and development that we’ve lost peripheral vision. I think this is a simplistic and pessimistic way to look at things – because specialisation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Ironically, the more specialised we get the more exchanges we can make effectively.
But there is a particular angle in the question I’d like to explore. It doesn’t matter if we keep accumulating different knowledge and experiences if we don’t make room for reflecting and tracking progress. In other words, if we don’t make room for learning. So, again, I think learning (and education) are the key to pushing us to ask each other some tough questions.
Would you say that the roles we play in the design process (‘designers’, ‘stakeholders’, ‘service users’, etc.) limit the potential we have to get the best results from what we design? What do we need to change to surpass any barriers here?
Let me use public services as a token for this one:
It’s a tautology, but to innovate in the system of public services, we need to do things differently. Like Einstein said and the internet glorified “The significant problem we have cannot be solved at the same level they were created”.
The way we do it – and I believe it’s the right one – is by leaving the office! People stay in a lot in the public sector. By going outside, on-site, we can learn from different perspectives, to get deep insights, to radically reframe the problem and the context where it happens.
To expand the scope and build a shared and practical understanding of the problem there is this idea of ‘co-design’ we like to apply. Here we co-create with the relevant stakeholders so we can make ideas tangible. One way of doing it is to develop prototypes that can be tested and refined (the idea of iteration).
What we learn from the testing stage will increase confidence in the decision-making process, making it more trustworthy, transparent, and participatory. Governments need to be pushed out of administrative and bureaucratic traps. There is a proven need for Service Design and that’s why we are working in this sector.
It doesn’t matter if we keep accumulating different knowledge and experiences if we don’t make room for reflecting and tracking progress. In other words, if we don’t make room for learning.
How does politics get in the way of design? What can we do about this if anything?
Just like politics get in the way of any other practice.
Politics are almost a pre-condition of any organisation. Any professional, not only designers, needs to learn how to navigate politics and stop looking at the bogeyman that is coming to take away their well-being and performance.
Even organisations who adopt radical policies of collaboration and transparency have their issues with politics. My takeaway is where there are people, there will be politics. It’s better to embrace it.
One can still fight the ‘bad’ politics -those ones that contaminate the culture of whole organisations – from within, by applying, for instance, the five core principles of behind Service Design: user-centricity, co-creation, sequencing, evidencing, and holisticism.
Mapping co-creation session results against research findings, for the Citizen Shop project, with Filipa Costa (photo credit: LabX).
What things and moments couldn’t you live without?
Just one, my family who are simultaneously my springboard and safety net, beyond dispute. Every day reinforces upon me the self-realisation of how privileged I am.
Starting parenthood less than two years ago is also proving to be the most challenging and rewarding project I’ve ever been involved with – by far! Whenever I think I got it right, something happens that forces me to unlearn and relearn everything again.
What’s next for Daniel?
A lot is happening at the moment in my personal, professional, and ‘communal’ life. I don’t know exactly what will be next, but I have a strong impression it’s going to be transformative and provoke ripple effects.