The design career shift from how, to what, to why
Early on in my career (which, for reference, begins in 1993), most of my efforts went into figuring out ways to do things. I was given a brief or a request, and I'd figure out a way to make it a reality. In those early days my work was very hands-on, technical, and practical. I managed networks, helped troubleshoot software problems, did digital photo retouching (for magazine covers and print publications), hand-coded websites in HTML, Javascript (and eventually CSS); and optimised graphics for web delivery.
In late 1999 and early 2000 my work began to shift. I was still figuring out how to do things, but I was increasingly being asked to decide What we should be doing as well. I became more involved in defining and prioritising problems; determining courses of action to address them; understanding strategic intent of the business and where different parts fit within that whole.
2001 saw me undertake a Masters in eCommerce, which in those days involved topics like supply chain integration, online ordering, inventory management, channel conflicts; IP, taxation, and currency management. A lot of that was unknown or at least unresolved at the time, and so there was a lot of figuring things out needed, and a lot of discussion with IP and taxation lawyers.
By 2003 I'd added an MBA to the mix - I won't go into that - and was finding most of my time taken up with those What questions, with less and less time spent on How questions. I managed project teams who took care of the implementation details, and my role was to ensure we stayed on track with that intent.
It's interesting to look back on that period to see how it represented a transition from Interaction Design and interface development into Service Design and Service Delivery, and how that set me up for the subsequent shift to Strategic Design.
If I can characterise Service Design as a complicated form of designing What needs to be done (and then How), then Strategic Design might be characterised as a combination of Why questions, with a dose of What questions thrown into the mix. This has been the bulk of my work over the past decade or so: helping organisations to see and understand Why they're doing things, and then helping them to re-align What they're doing to best match.
Between 2021 and 2023 I worked primarily on a single project. My job, looking back, was to constantly remind the team (all 1,100 of them), of their overarching Why, and how their implementation decisions impacted on their ability to deliver against it. I leaned heavily on the direct feedback of the people impacted. Their words carried a great deal of weight, played back to the team with stark clarity.
My journey through Design need not be everybody's. The work of getting the fine detail involved in how things work is critical to the success of a product or service. The details *are* the product, to borrow from Charles Eames.