Designing for a Difference with Eleni Stathoulis
Much of our lives involves sharing news, or what is called “news delivery sequences” in conversation analysis. Sociologist Doug Maynard wrote a book on such events, looking at how good news and bad news are related in different contexts. Delivery of news is not just sharing of information. What makes information into news is that news has some kind of impact on the person either giving it, receiving it, or both. Additionally, whether news is considered to be good or bad depends on how it is worked out as it is being told. News can be either good or bad, or both at the same time.
In many ways, doing design work involves the delivery of news. Good design involves not just producing a design that is believed to be needed by a client, but also a design that meets the needs of the intended targets. It might be the case that what is believed to be needed is not what is needed after all. In order to know, we need to know how to look. How we find that out is not just by doing the research, but by actually paying attention to the results.
Eleni Stathoulis of Mad*Pow
Eleni Stathoulis, Principal of Design at Mad*Pow, has focused on how to deliver the news of research to clients to help them align project goals with user needs. In doing so, her work is trying to help organizations do the good that they talk about doing, and likely want to do, but might not understand the best path to do so.
She encapsulates her approach as purpose-driven design. At Mad*Pow, she indicated they think of themselves as helping people in their little corner of the world. Working with clients across different sectors allows them to have impact all of those little corners of the world. Regardless of the sector and industry, the key point is to focus on what was found in their research, understand why it matters to the client, and then deliver that news in a way that aligns with the goals of the project. Central to this effort is the human aspect of how their work can help.
One of the ways that people deliver news is through telling stories. Parables, for instance, are stories that have some moral involved in them that the story is meant to convey. In the qualitative research that Eleni and Mad*Pow does, it reveals the lives of the people affected by the design initiative. The ways in which they communicate those lives often involve storytelling with graphic representations of those stories and lives. Thinking creatively and visually regarding how best to deliver those messages and lessons becomes a paramount to aligning findings of the research with the intentions of the project.
Alignment, integration, and collaboration are essential to accomplishing these outcomes. Design projects can be inherently political processes. As such, the role of the designer is to help bridge any divides, convey information, remind of the goals, and keep striving for positive outcomes.
Design is everywhere, and we can draw from design principles and approaches to try to solve problems that need to be solved. Design projects and processes can help open up the floodgates of conversation, and the designer can act as the facilitator of the conversation. By working across the system to bring people together while focusing on the good that can be done, designers and design companies can deliver on the promise of experience design.