2024 DNDA Laureates, V-shaped people, and pitfalls of a design process

2024 DNDA Laureates

I am on the board of advisors for the Don Norman Design Awards (DNDA). Today, we released the DNDA 2024 Laureates. This impressive list of organisations pushes boundaries to create a meaningful, sustainable, humanity-centred world. To paint a picture of the type of winners, consider the project Palliative Care in a Tribal Settlement: Developing a Community-Centred Model.

“Our project aims to bridge the equity gap in accessing palliative care by focusing on those who live on the margins. It works with chronically- ill patients and their family members from the tribal (Bhil) communities living in a remote part of Maharashtra, with limited access to healthcare. It demonstrates that communities can be capacitated to respond to distress arising from serious health suffering, through management of physical pain, psycho-social and emotional pain, and financial distress.”

To make their work concrete, consider the story given below. This is what HCD+ is all about.

Congrats to all the winners ??. If you are in the US from November 14 to 15, you can attend the 2024 DNDA Summit in San Diego.

Move over T-shaped people. Welcome V-shaped people!

Jeroen Kraaijenbrink (via David McLean)

“Being a specialist is great, but both from an individual’s career perspective and from an organizational perspective, we need people who are versatile and agile. Who can do more than just their primary job. Who can switch roles and grow. This requires them to have adjacent expertise in areas close to their core area.”

Amen!

(Is design) stuck in the steps?

Shreshth Kapoor explains that although a design process has benefits, we must recognize the context and signals that call for a different approach.

“The models we are teaching are not design. They are models. If someone walks away from our educational sessions believing there are five simple steps to design, we’ve failed.” — Jon Kolko

The only way to break away from this mindset is to adopt a questioning culture, which requires psychological safety to express creative confidence. Now we know why we seldom break away from the process.

Shreshth offers 5 tips:

1. Challenge the mindset & be flexible
2. Understand the core concept of the process & understand the step you plan to do next, before jumping into it
3. Adapt to the context
4. Talk, collaborate & align expectations
5. Experiment. Measure impact. Improve

Internal reflections

I have been meeting different people over the last few weeks to get a realistic picture of the market. I see two approaches to business: margins and potential. Some people are fixated on margins - the profit they can make at every step, while others are looking ahead at the potential upside of a decision. The majority of them are margin-seekers and I can see why. Margin-seeking is based on existing knowledge, is low-risk and time-bound. These people will spend the money on a project with a clear ROI. Then there are the potential-seekers. They are interested in exploring possibilities. They don't have a definite end point; instead, they want a spectrum of benefits. I am going to write a deeper article on this, but for the moment, just think about which position is geared towards incremental innovation and which towards transformation.

Quote worth remembering

“We are?stubborn on vision. We are?flexible on details.”

- Jeff Bezos on being mindful and aware when things are not working.