Creativity is not a scripted act. It often urges you to let go of trying too hard, especially when seeking to place constraints on how creative outputs unfold. That is the beauty of it. Whether it’s creating a new product, a tool, or a community, there is always a degree of unpredictability to how they will manifest. But that makes room for “happy accidents” or “odd outcomes,” as we call them. Our latest episode dives into the worldview of a designer. Kevin Richard shares an insightful perspective on the role of tools and the dynamics of communities.
In my conversation with Kevin, he touched upon two key pointers on how to design something meaningful:
A PERFECT TOOL
Tool creation can take a great deal of time and effort. It’s not always rewarding, and, frankly, it’s a never-ending process. Part of tool creation is deciding when the tool is good enough to perform in a real context. It’s extremely difficult to create a one-size-fits-all design tool.
There’s a fine balance between the tool and the people using the tool – facilitators and participants. It is really hard to say how the tool helps, but you could imagine that it supports achieving certain results. In my experience, the tool doesn’t have to be perfect anyway. If it’s perfect, it’s perfectly fine-tuned for a specific context, and you know it’s highly unlikely to work for many other people or in many other contexts.
OPEN SPACES
Kevin describes the Design and Critical Thinking as an open space for genuine exchange:
“The mission of the community is to create knowledge and understanding at the intersection of various disciplines and practices and for that purpose I do feel like it’s important to create those bridges and to create these ways to gather people around some common understanding.”
A community is not just a structure held in place by rules, clear vision, and purpose. It’s a space of experiencing a sense of belonging without feeling pressured to behave in a stiff manner or fear of being judged for your ideas. Often, common sense is enough as a foundation.
“I hope it creates a good and soft addiction to the idea that you don’t know what will happen and that you might leave the session with more thoughts and more ideas than what you had in mind when you arrived.”
How we develop the community further relies on exactly that opportunity found in a happy accident. Here’s a link to the interview with Kevin. Below is the full transcript of our conversation (with minor edits). I hope you find it as insightful as I did!
Daiana: Hello and welcome to our new episode of ODD Owtcomes. Our discussion today concerns design communities and the hurdles of tools creation.
Becoming a designer doesn’t always follow a standard course. You don’t become a designer just by studying Design or simply getting a job in “Design.” It takes conscious effort, continuous learning, and a persistent curiosity to better oneself. The Design and Critical Thinking Community has become a space that opens discussions around these key aspects of being a designer and how we can become better at it, but it doesn’t stop there. Kevin Richard is the founder and the initiator of some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had for the past year, so today, I’ve decided to bring him as a guest on ODD Owtcomes to share a few insights with us.
Hi, Kevin! Welcome to ODD Owtcomes, and it’s awesome to have you here! Can you tell us about yourself and what you do outside the community?
Kevin: Thank you for the invite! I appreciate that we can discuss tools and communities – these are two really important subjects. So, I identify myself as a designer, but officially, my title today is Customer Experience Manager in an insurance company in Switzerland. I basically do, think, and listen about stuff around design, innovation, organization, and agility. And I like the idea of mixing all of that on the same plate to see what happens.
Daiana: We’ve witnessed and participated in many activities alongside the community. The people who attend the virtual chalets keep coming back because there’s a certain atmosphere and energy to them. What makes the Design & Critical Thinking Community special? Could you tell us the story of how does a community come to be?
Kevin: I think that this community is what we can call a happy accident, in the sense that it was not planned, and it is not managed. It’s something that unfolds as it goes. This is what I like about this community – it’s not scripted. I don’t personally decide what comes into the discussion. We happen to discuss something new every time, which makes it really interesting.
I had this idea of having a place where we could discuss many different things right in the middle of the pandemic. I think it helped because most people were at home, and it was easier more than ever to create something fully online and have people participate. People had time, and they wanted a distraction from the day-to-day home office. What makes the community special is the fact that we host sessions that create a rhythm. People know that there’s a session every two weeks, and if they want to come, we can discuss anything, and we don’t necessarily prepare in advance.
I hope it creates a good and soft addiction to the idea that you don’t know what will happen and that you might leave the session with more thoughts and more ideas than what you had in mind when you arrived.
What is special about the community is exactly that: the rhythm, the fact that there is no management, and that it is a place for testing ideas. We tried different ways of having conversations, ideating, and building on top of each other’s ideas. This is also what I find interesting and not so common, to be honest. Especially when it comes to Design. The communities are usually centered around tools, methods, and resources, but this is not really the point of our community. We do share a lot of things, that’s for sure. But when we discuss, it is really to create reach and unexpected conversations.
Daiana: I think this emphasis on the question and the manner in which the discussions happen as less of a debate and more as an exploratory journey made us really enjoy each other’s presence. During this past year, one of the questions the community has been exploring and could never quite settle on was: what is a designer? What do you think made all of us try so hard to answer this question?
Kevin: In fact, I don’t think we meant to ask this question. It appeared to be somehow important, probably because the terms “design” and “designer” can be understood from so many different perspectives and backgrounds. Some people self-identify as designers, while others do not but actually do things that designers do, whether they acknowledge the fact that they are designers or not. It’s an interesting question. After coming together to some definition of what Design could be in a broader sense, by necessity, we need to ask the question, “how do designers work?”. We need to define, at least for ourselves, what it means to be a designer and if we think we fit into this definition.
Personally, I feel I am a designer, and I think it explains best what I do. But I know that there are people in the community who don’t think of themselves as designers. I’m fine with that because I think we can still find some kind of alignment. We can find ourselves at the intersection of what we are doing, where things are coherent, and, at the same time, we can maintain our different perspectives. In the end, I do feel like it’s interesting to reposition what is Design and what designers do in our understanding of the world.
Daiana: You’re always curating valuable sources and ensuring the community is well-fed with good content, but alongside that, you design your unique methods to apply to complex environments. Your explorer’s framework is becoming quite distinct now and very fitting into the design debate. What I want to ask you is: why exploration? And for those, who don’t know about your work, could you tell us a bit more about what the explorer’s framework is?
Kevin: So, why exploration? That’s a good question. I don’t yet have a clear answer to that question, but I can tell you where it comes from. Design practices today are mostly focused on achieving an output in a timely manner that is clearly defined. The issue with most of the practices that revolve around a goal is the fact that they tend to assume what is needed as an outcome. You start from the assumption of what you should deliver. It is not true for all practices or methods, but it is largely shared, and when you work as a designer, there’s always some expectation of what should be delivered. In that sense, some people don’t see the value of having critical discussions about what we are doing, why we are doing it, for whom, or whether it is the right thing to do. To bring more critical thinking and conversations, you need time, and you need others to understand why it’s important to ask yourself if the frame you are using is the proper one or whether the space you are mapping isn’t, in fact, too narrow.
I had these discussions with people working with me on projects, and I realized they had a really narrow and output-oriented understanding of Design. Therefore, I wanted to introduce something different. I like using metaphors to create this kind of perspective shift about design practices. Then, by accident, I put together some ideas I’ve read here and there. This is where the idea of islands and we, as explorers, came from. At first, it was just about describing things using the metaphor and sticking to this metaphor to make sense of what I am doing as a designer.
Being in this exploratory mode doesn’t mean you necessarily remove yourself from biases, but you get to create enough distance between what you are doing and what you are looking at. This “explorer state” helps you see that people are living on this island – to use the metaphor –and the island is the problem or the challenge space that you are trying to solve or tackle. Realizing that those people are confronted with this challenge every day helps you become more humble about what you know or what you don’t know. It is to have a more epistemic approach to exploration.
Daiana: I know you’ve been working on a template for the “Island,” and you tested it in some of the regular sessions. Given that our greatest creative investment at Owtcome goes into tool creation, I would like to know your thoughts on what makes a good tool and what you consider a priority in Design? What makes it so exciting and yet so difficult to put into practice? Is there an optimal number of iterations a tool needs to go through before it’s ready to help anyone?
Kevin: Those are really tough questions! First of all, I’m used to creating tools that serve only a specific purpose at a given point in time. I’m not attached to my tools, but I understand that they influence my perception. We need something to help converge towards an idea or develop different ideas. I know many tools, and I even created some of them, but I know that they are clearly influencing my choices and how I will do my work. But to answer your questions, there’s no explicit process for creating these tools. Sometimes, you know reliable toolkits, and they are quite easy to put into practice because others have used them too. You can take and apply them without difficulty, but they are limited to some kind of standard use. They might not properly fit your context and what you are trying to do.
One approach is to tweak a given tool and make it your own by appropriating it to your specific context. But sometimes, you realize that all those tools will introduce many other things and unnecessary biases that you don’t want to have. The other approach is to say: “OK! Let’s do our own!” You know what kind of results you want and what visualization might help you go in that direction. You shape the tool around those principles to lead you to certain results and offer some form that you know will bring a visual aid to the participants to go through the process.
Keep in mind that you don’t know the results people will get from using your tool; you just know the kind of result you want people to generate through it. You need to create constraints that will help them go in that direction. This is where you need to practice and find out what works best for different people. I don’t have a clear answer because it’s so difficult to say you do this set of things and ta-da! You have a tool. You can follow a step-by-step approach to create a tool, but you need to try it several times to test if it works.
To your question, how many iterations do you need: I feel like there’s no end to that process. You could improve it for a really specific case. Through several iterations, you might end up with an efficient tool for generating results in a specific situation or context, but it is not useful in other contexts. At some point, it will require adjusting and tweaking to make it work in other contexts. Iterations might need to happen everywhere, so it’s hard to say.
In some cases, you know there’s a big issue with the tool that you experience when using it. That might require a real, radical iteration. Then, there are other times when you know the tool is not perfect, but you rely on your experience handling this kind of situation anyway. That is to say, “OK, we know it’s not exactly perfect for this kind of work, but we know we are capable of managing this kind of exercise anyway.” There’s a fine balance between the tool and the people using the tool – facilitators and participants. It is really hard to say how the tool helps, but you could imagine that it supports achieving certain results. In my experience, the tool doesn’t have to be perfect anyway. You don’t care to make it perfect because there’s no point in doing that. If it’s perfect, it’s perfectly fine-tuned for a specific context, and you know it’s highly unlikely to work for many other people or in many other contexts.
Daiana: I think you’ve touched on some of the fundamentals of how we need to approach tool creation to make sure we don’t get lost in the process. At the end of the day, a tool is not there to do the work for us but support us in doing our work better. To my last question, is there something you’d like to tell our listeners as a parting thought, like where is the community heading or you and your future aspirations?
Kevin: I won’t fall into the trap of doing something I don’t want to do with the community, which is to PLAN. I have ideas and wishes for the community, but they don’t come with strategies that I want to apply. I feel like it already is like that. But what stayed with me from the beginning was to create a space where people can create their own spaces and discuss whatever they want. I hope that the members don’t have to rely on me or anyone in the community to explore new ideas and try new things. For me, the community is an open space. People are here because they agreed to join this space to discover new ways and ideas.
I would like to see these spaces emerging more often in the community. I also know that a few people in the community always start new things, as most people follow. I’m not worried nor want to plan for it, but I think we can lay down the structure or constraints for this to happen. If it doesn’t happen today, it’s because something might be missing or something that exists might prevent these things from happening. I think we will find a way to do it, but it will come when it comes. Otherwise, I don’t want the community to be only a provider of tools and frameworks.
The mission of the community is to create knowledge and understanding at the intersection of various disciplines and practices, and for that purpose, I do feel like it’s important to create those bridges and to create these ways to gather people around some common understanding.
This also applies to the tools and frameworks. We already have the library, but maybe the library can grow into something different too… I don’t know. We will try things and see what happens.
Daiana: Thank you for your answers today! I hope our audience received enough food for thought and is now tempted to join the Design and Critical Thinking Community on LinkedIn and the Slack channel to join us for a virtual glass of wine in the Kumospace.
Kevin: Thank you for inviting me, for your questions, and for being such an active member of the community because, without you, Krasi and others, I don’t think the community would be the same. Thank you very much for that!
Daiana: The work we are doing is primarily changing how we think about ourselves and our clients. We think being a designer is not a mere role you undertake. It’s a way of relating to the world from a creative standpoint, trying to solve problems, and most importantly, understanding that we need to work together. We become better designers when we learn from one another. We begin with people, but our priority is to create for the benefit of life and the environment, not at the expense of it. That is the motivation behind creating tools for collaboration: to help innovation teams think more critically and have more open conversations to reach better outcomes.
I hope you will join us for more episodes as we uncover odd and humbling pathways into the future!
Links to the D&CT community:
https://designcriticalthinking.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/design-critical-thinking/