>> So this goes to how do you think about design.
A lot of designers have a model of design,
which begins with looking at some current situation and
framing that situation in some way to abstract out core issues and
to, in that sense, define an opportunity or a problem.
And almost at the same moment, to then define a flip side of that,
what the solution to the problem might be.
And then from there, to make it concrete, make it manifest.
So this can be see as a two by two where the first layer,
the first row is the concrete world, and then there's an abstraction of that,
and you have the concrete world today in the first column and
then you have the abstraction up above that.
And then you move over to, all right, now I'm translating the abstraction of
the problem today into an abstract notion of how I could solve that problem and
then they make it concrete, so you have this bridge.
It's curious, there are quite a number of designers that use that model.
It shows up in practice,
it shows up in instituted design, many places.
It appears to have been developed almost simultaneously by several people,
ran into.
I published something about this right into
who's a designer involved in park and some other interface stuff.
He said, hey, I have one of those.
Well, this model of moving from concrete to abstract and
then from abstract to recombining things back
to concrete is very similar to a set of models
that obtain in the world of organizational
development or knowledge management.
And there's a clue in there, the idea of an organization
developing knowledge in the cyclical fashion moving
from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge,
taking explicit knowledge and recombining it.
Moving from that explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge,
that is putting the invention into practice,
but that cycle is a learning cycle.
And what this suggests, I think,
in a way demonstrates is you can think of design as a learning cycle.
Now, I don't think many designers would find that particularly novel, but
it's interesting to see that in the models of these different practices and
the models of design practice and then the models of practice around knowledge
management or organizational development, that the models are isomorphic.
And I think that tells us something, and it becomes a way
of thinking explicitly about design, particularly design in it's role
in large organizations as a process of knowledge building.
And it's interesting, I think, to frame work around
innovation within this larger context of knowledge building.
So rather than seeing innovation as, gosh, this thing that we want to have happen
here and here, but to just say, look, we really want to create a culture in which
we think deeply about how do you scaffold knowledge building in the culture.