Strategic Design Programs, RISD x Infosys WongDoody
Innovation sprints for experience designers, technologists, and business development experts
Assistant Director of Strategic Design & Programs at the RISD Center for Complexity, a department of RISD Strategic Partnerships
Innovation sprints for experience designers, technologists, and business development experts
Since technology firms started acquiring design agencies, the challenge of integrating design into a value position that exceeds downstream delivery or execution has set to be met with an industry wide standards. Infosys approached the Rhode Island School of Design in an attempt to leverage the academic world toward finding a path forward for Infosys as it integrated its newly acquired design firm WongDoody. Our team and my position was created to answer this question. We began with a model that was based on a 4 week, in person workshop for technically oriented workers from across backgrounds from management to full stack developers and experience designers.
How do busy innovators fit skill development into their existing commitments?
Timing is everything and an organization’s best people can’t step away from their desks to develop new capabilities. Covid disrupted an assumption that development required expensive retreats with weeks or even months away from business as usual. When life went remote so did we, and the impact was positive in two ways. First was the cost savings. Travel and accommodation is an added expense on top of investments in the organizational partnerships that make knowledge sharing and creation possible. Second is the benefit of integrating workshops into the regular work day. Insights from business as usual make new techniques, concepts and habits grow under the conditions of the real world. We found the work improved with these changes.
What concepts and methods from design are actually valuable to innovation ecosystems?
The answer is different for creatives working with technologists working on delivery teams, and for hardware innovators or people in business development roles. Our team began focusing on creative practice that was most familiar to workers with a design background. These workers were seen a the point of entry to advocate for opportunities to expand simple interface projects to more advanced projects where solutions were undefined and opportunities were open for exploration between the firm and its clients.
We found that more analytical methods were picked up quickly by technologists and businesses development workers. For these audiences we focused on a critique of the status quo language of design thinking to prepare them to unwind client requests for a packaged formula to deliver the killer app or product. Next we focused on material analysis to disrupt the attachment to desk research as the only source of quality insights. Once they were ready to take on a project, we introduced systems thinking and scalar framing techniques to widen the aperture of their opportunity vision. For advanced participants we introduced the concepts from design futuring which can break the debate with clients who have an attachment to a specific outcome, and help arrive at more sophisticated future state visioning.
Select images from the Agency workshop which establishes habits of observation and documentation of the built environment, followed by design briefs to put new habits into practice, first on a business innovation challenge then on a project process challenge.
I highly recommend checking out “In Studio” by Helsinki Design Lab for examples on running design sprints.
“The Reflective Practitioner” by Donald Schon is always on my desk when I’m advocating for building new capabilities in a business driven workforce. His arguments against formula based problem solving are very useful.
“Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum makes a great case for collaboration as a source of generative value in innovation contexts.
Issue 5 of the “Journal of Design Strategies” offers a clear and thorough look into my MFA training at Parsons, and still rings true over ten years after it was published.