00:14 SYDNEY JOHNSON, HOST:
Welcome back to Responsible Disruption inour Design 101 series where we're going to continue our exploration of thedesign process. I'm Sydney Johnson, your host, and today we're diving deep intothe define phase with an expert in the field, Kristofer Kelly-Frère, Creative Leadat J5. Kristofer possesses a magic ability to inspire people to dream about abetter future. He believes great design grows from the community and that hisjob is to level the playing field and create conditions where everyone canparticipate in shaping the world around them. An architect by training and asystemic designer by practice, Kristofer has staked his career on the idea thatpeople will rise to the challenge if asked a good enough question. Hisportfolio includes crafting experiences, establishing design labs anddelivering groundbreaking social R&D projects across a wide range ofpublic, private, and government institutions. Kristofer led the teamresponsible for bravery training grounds, a project with Red Deer HousingAuthority that won the 2022 Global Service Design Award. Success like this isthe result of his love for playing in the mud of ambiguity to move innovativedreams across the threshold into reality. Kristofer, thank you so much forjoining me.
01:23 KRISTOFER KELLY-FRÈRE, GUEST:
That’s a mouthful. [laughs]
01:23 SYDNEY: Yeah. Has anyone ever readyour bio out loud? Because that was some long sentences in there, but beautifulsentences.
01:33 KRISTOFER: It's so great to be hereSyd.
01:36 SYDNEY: Listeners get ready as wenavigate through the define phase, exploring the intricacies and significancein the design process. But before we get into that, Kristofer, I really want toknow what drew you to service design and the world of design in the first place.
01:49 KRISTOFER: Well, I didn't want to bean oncologist.
01:53 SYDNEY: Yeah. So we eliminated oneprofession.
01:57 KRISTOFER: Yeah, well, I said it likeseriously and not seriously. I was, you know, in high school in sort ofundergrad was really searching to find a way to make a positive impact and toget to be creative. And so many of the things that I cared about intersect withdesign, and I actually trained originally as an architect like it said in thatoverly complicated bio. But I have always found that working with communitiesto talk about what they actually care about is where the magic is. And rightnow, service design is a field that seems to really be putting a lot of energyinto translating, you know, translating communities, desires and hopes anddreams, translating different fields of expertise, whether they're engineers orinterior designers or doctors, into tangible services. And this practice is onethat can really kind of stitch those together.
02:54 SYDNEY: Yeah. Amazing. Can you tellus a little bit about your own personal approach to design and how that does ordoesn't map to a model like the double diamond?
03:05 KRISTOFER: Yeah, for me, you'll hearme explain that design is a lot like the process of life. Right. It's aboutasking what? So what now what? Which is all kind of like a learning loop. Anddesigners do that and we call it a design process. You can kind of fold adouble diamond. You fold the paper into a loop and you've got the learningloop. Scientists do that when they come up with a scientific process. Kids doit when they're playing in the mud. And so for me, I make sense of this interms of adaptive learning. So anything that's alive is learning from the worldaround it. I want more things to be alive, and that's how design sort of foldsinto that. And a double diamond is really two learning loops. The first one isthat discover and define phase and then you loop around again as you sort ofcontinue to explore what's possible and make it tangible, right?
04:00 SYDNEY: So let's talk about the define phase. Whatdoes it mean to you?
04:02 KRISTOFER: So when you when you seethe defined phase, you often see two arrows coming from a wide place and goingto a tight place. Right. It's about maybe going from in an imaginary world,infinite options down to something more focused, right. I like to think aboutit as adding another coating to the seed. If at the very beginning of yourprocess you start with a hunch that there's something possible and you expandthat out through the discover phase. Define is about understanding what thatproblem is actually about and we use the phrase reframing and in my head theimage is kind of adding another coating and actually when I draw the doublediamond, the very front end I draw a single dot in the middle. I draw a dotwith a circle around it and at the other end I draw a dot with two circlesaround it. You're continuing to layer knowledge and understanding. So thedefine phase is both about focusing and about expanding in this sort of way,and that you've deepened your understanding.
05:02 SYDNEY: Right. And what part of thatprocess do you find most rewarding? Like what does it actually look like tostart to figure out what is the right problem to reframe it and to make senseof the discovery phase?
05:18 KRISTOFER: Yeah. For me, and I thinkfor a lot of designers there is community when you get to involve them moredeeply, there's a thrill to sense making and so sense making other people mightcall that synthesis. It's about looking at the big pile of data and finding andfinding the thread inside of it. And this can be either a structured or semistructured process where you're off kind of clustering ideas, looking forthemes, finding connections you might have not noticed before because you'veasked a new kind of question in your data gathering and starting to simplifythat down into a story that sets you on a new trail. And so you know thatyou've gotten to a place where the sense making has done something when youfeel like you have a new path available to you. So rather than feeling likeyou're still stuck in the same box that you were with your original problem,that box has literally been shifted. So when we say reframe, we mean like ifyou had a painting, you put a new frame around it. That's a different shape.And because it's a different shape, you have new opportunities open to you.
06:25 SYDNEY: Right, it's a beautifulanalogy. I think something that I've experienced, I'm sure you've experiencedas well is sometimes people when they're working on a problem they really wantto stick to the original problem. They are like, well, that's the problem weset out to solve. What do you mean we're changing the problem space. How do yourespond to that or deal with that when you've come across it?
06:47 KRISTOFER: I think one of the cruxesof design which is if you picture again this funnel and at one end is infinityand the other end is one. For some people, moving towards the one is going tofeel good. It's going to feel like options are going away, worries are goingaway, it's getting less risky. You're getting more focused and for otherpeople, it's going to feel like you're losing something. Often in communitycode design, going from Infinity to one feels like you're giving things up.Whereas moving the other direction from one to Infinity you can feel if you'rea project manager, you're like, Oh my gosh, my scope is getting changed. Youknow, new variables are being introduced, risk is getting higher. And so thattension is what we have to navigate as designers. And so when I'm thinkingabout that funnel, as you move up it, if you move from 1 towards Infinity, youactually come to a place where you can draw a new funnel and maybe we can throwa picture of this in the show notes. But by kind of playing inside that space,you allow yourself to step into new places and opportunities. If we do thesynthesis well, if we do the reframing well, then the seed that you startedwith doesn't disappear. It just gets a new coating, it gets a new layer ofunderstanding. So it's less about letting go of that problem and more aboutcoloring into it. More about adding another layer of information.
08:16 SYDNEY: Yeah, that makes a lot ofsense. Can you share any stories or moments in your career that you feelillustrate the importance of the defined phase? So going through that processof synthesis adding that extra layer.
08:31 KRISTOFER: Yeah, so this is work. Ialways I like to bring up the work of other designers who I admire and KatherineZiff is an incredible designer working across North America, mostly in theScience Center and museum field and she was one of the people holding the sparkof a brand new exhibit gallery for the Science Center about 10 years ago, andwe were challenged as a team to try out all of the exhibits that we wanted tomake and her the gallery she was stewarding. They were stewarding, was supposedto be about the human body. And so we were testing all of these exhibits aboutheartbeats and size and how much water is in your body and where do babies comefrom. And all of that stuff. And as we were going, no matter what we would doand we were trying to create interactive exhibits, people would share storiesabout themselves and it was pretty remarkable how quickly you could go from aconcrete exhibit to something that had a lot of heart in it, where people werebeing very vulnerable. They're talking about life and death and their hopes andregrets. And Katherine's, you know, being a really brilliant synthesist, recognizedthat it wasn't a human body gallery. It was a being human gallery.
And I still think about that shift. Andonce she was able to name that reframe, it opened up a whole new playing fieldfor us to think about. Well, what belongs in a being human gallery that'sdifferent from a human body gallery. You can see that kind of tangibly in thekind of exhibits. There were new exhibits about how families were made. Therewere exhibits about what love means. There were exhibits about the combinationof oxytocin that comes from a hug...
10:14 SYDNEY: I remember that.
10:17 KRISTOFER: Right? Yeah. And what thatcould mean for you with a partner. So I think about that as a beautiful exampleof the power of the reframe creating permission space for new things to emergeon.
10:30 SYDNEY: Practically speaking, like onthe ground, when someone has all this data, how can you ensure that thesynthesis is good is well done and leads to these kind of insights? What arethe things that can increase the likelihood of getting to that aha moment thatyou described.
10:51 KRISTOFER: Yeah, I love thatquestion. I think the craft of this has a few different parts to it. One ofthem is the way you work, and the other is who you do the work with. The"who you do the work with" side can embrace complexity. The morevariety and perspectives you have involved in looking at this imaginaryhairball of data (sometimes it's a physical hairball), the better, because theywill see things that you can't. There are actually pretty structured processesfor bringing new lenses into the work, but you can also just do it by trying tobring diversity into the team that is doing the work.
On the process side, I'd like to simplify the steps down to somethinglike this: First of all, you have to swim in the data. You need to surroundyourself with the information that you've collected and resist the temptationto do it in just one mode. It can't just be writing; it can't just be pictures;it can't just be audio stories. You need to find ways to make it visual andvivid, and surround yourself with it. If you can bring physical things fromyour learning into the space or be in a different place, all of that addsrichness. Then, the role of the people who are there with you is to start tolook for patterns. There will be a period where you're finding the kind ofobvious patterns, almost like the ChatGPT patterns. You drop it into thesynthesizer, and it will give you known patterns. Your challenge—and this iswhere having that diverse set of perspectives comes in—is to look forunexpected combinations.
And this is where we use a process we call abductive thinking. Usually,science and a lot of design involve inductive and deductive thinking. Inductiveand deductive thinking are about what should be true and what must be true;it's about certainty. You know you have variable A and know that variable B andC must exist, or you have variables B and C, so you know A must exist.Abductive thinking is the art of the possible. It's about weak logic. If Aexists, B exists, and C exists, well, F might be over here. As you're findingthese patterns, once you're swimming in the data, that's the kind of magic. Butthen there's one more step, which is naming them. There's a powerful creativeact in trying to tell a story about a pattern. That's where you can start tobring these opportunities to life. So, you swim in the data, start to find thepatterns, and then name them in inspiring, intriguing, and question-provokingways. The answer to those is that they reframe the answer to those; it is thatpiece wrapping around the seed.
The other thing, if I can keep going, is that a reframe is not justadding the words "How might we" to the front of a sentence, whichpeople often hear about when writing "How might we" sentences. But a"How might we" sentence actually has to bring together a number ofelements. It needs to bring together who is going to be impacted by something.It also needs to bring together some hunch about advantages or opportunitiesthat can be offered to that who and the gaps those are filling, and then pointtowards what might be possible. I often use a kind of Mad Lib sometimes withfolks who are new to design: How might we connect someone to some kind ofadvantage in order to bridge some kind of gap, which isa lot more than just saying like how might we make more money? Yeah, how mightwe connect users to services that really meet their emotional needs so that wecan charge a viable and profitable fee.
14:52 SYDNEY: And there's something in thattoo that's getting more specific so that you're better set up for coming upwith ideas or responses to that. How might we question. Because I think thatthere's this misconception in that kind of scoping down that you are losingsomething and you want to have all the possibilities still in front of you. Butactually it's necessary to get to a more specific point so that you canactually have a place to jump off from. Otherwise you won't know where you’regoing.
15:26 KRISTOFER: Yeah, the how might we islike the track switching moment, right? Like, if you imagine for our listenersif you picture like old tiny train tracks with those big like handle that youpull and it shifts something over just a little bit. This is that earlyinflection point that lets you take a different trajectory and move into awhole other world.
15:47 SYDNEY: So you mentioned community co-designbefore and I want to kind of come around to that again is how do you notice orwhat rather do you notice are the differences between working in community inthis kind of way versus working with trained designers in this kind of way. Arethere differences? Is it all the same thing? What are your thoughts on thatagain?
16:11 KRISTOFER: I love these questions,Sydney. I think one of the risks of any of these processes is that we assumepeople know how to operate or how to play the game when we invite them in, andwe have to support them. One of the pieces that really helps make a reframingprocess useful with the community is creating the conditions for things thataren't a part of this process to not be lost, because we're back to thatfeeling of narrowing down, which can feel like losing things. I think that whenwell-supported—and by support, I mean having enough time, learning thelanguage, and being able to use the words that matter—people can involve thecommunity in making sense of the problems, signals, and pieces they are facing.They do it every day. Anyone who's tried to get a toddler out the door toschool, navigated a healthcare system, or tried to plant a vegetable has had tonotice what's happening, follow those signals, and name patterns. Namepatterns, right? Swim in the data, right? Like, what do I do at tax season?Swim in my data, find the patterns. Or, you know, if I want to bake a cake, Ineed to find the right patterns.
17:31 SYDNEY: Yeah, amazing. And somethingalso that I wanted to touch on from when you were talking before is I feel likethis is also the point. Where it does differ from some of the more scientificor more traditional approach to synthesis or analyzing data you know you talkedabout the art of the possible and it really is about finding those pieces thatyou know based on the data, but they're not maybe 100% true yet or you stillneed to uncover more discovery to learn about them or to start to test thingsor move into those other cycles. Does that resonate with you as somethingyou've experienced when people say, Oh well, this is how I've approachedsynthesis versus how you might approach it in a design way?
18:21 KRISTOFER: Oh, 100%. I think it has to do with the kindof burden of proof the system wants. I find that those points where there'sconflict often stem from not agreeing on the kind of evidence you're going touse to inform a decision. If you're working with someone who wants certainty,validity, and perfection, then the first phase of a double diamond is not goingto generate that data. So, there's a different kind of stewardship required tofigure out what kind of data and evidence we need to make a decision and howopen we are to exploring other answers. The more certainty you want, the morerisky this can feel.
I think there is an opportunity to thinkabout a bundle or a portfolio of reframes, and to approach it like a scientificprocess, combining quantitative and qualitative research. The more designerswork with researchers, the more aligned we become. Absolutely. And lately, I’veeven become a fan of ethics approvals because they create a thoughtfulenvironment for how we engage and gather data. When you work with a greatpostdoc who can manage a University Health Research Ethics Board, it's not thathard, and you feel great because you've thought through things. There’s a lotto be learned on both sides.
19:53 SYDNEY: Yeah, absolutely.
20:00 KRISTOFER: I'm curious for you, Syd. Howdo you think about sense making or reframing? Like what are the steps in yourhead? What's different or similar to what I've talked about?
20:06 SYDNEY: Yeah, I think I think there'sa lot of similarities. Our practices are very aligned. No, no. Yeah. Yeah,exactly. So there's nothing like incredibly different. I think that...
20:14 KRISTOFER: We don't work together andenjoy it at all. [sarcastic laugh]
20:22 SYDNEY: Something that's really important for me inthe synthesis is that it's this beautiful stage between learning aboutcollecting all the data and learning about that data, and before you start tocome up with responses to that data. It can still be just as creative. I thinkit sometimes pales in comparison to something like ideation, which feels reallyfun and expansive as we come up with all these ideas. But if you don't get thesynthesis right and don't apply your designer's mindset or creativity just asmuch to synthesis, you will miss those opportunities. Something you said aswell is that there's more than one frame. There's the potential to have abundle of frames. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what that lookslike or what it means to be heading towards multiple different points on thatdouble diamond side.
21:26 KRISTOFER: Yeah, like, it's almostas if there are these shadows. The double diamond looks more like a flower withlots of petals. So this is a half-formed idea that I've been playing with, butthere's an intersection here between design processes and different kinds ofproblem spaces. There are ways of thinking about what kind of problem you'resolving. One framework for this is called Cynefin. It's from Dave Snowden andseveral others and it talks about different problem domains: clear,complicated, complex, and chaotic.
If you have a clear or simple problem, you need a recipe. I want to bakea cookie; you find a recipe and bake the cookie. If you have a complicatedproblem, you need an expert. Oh, my car is broken. I better find a mechanic.Let me go find a mechanic. They use their expertise and solve it. Complex andchaotic domains require probing and acting—kind of probing to understand what'sgoing on. Sometimes we call that prototyping, and in chaos, it's really aboutseeing what needs to be done and doing it.
Oftentimes, problems are nested. We go through this process where insidea complex problem are complicated problems, and inside complicated problems aresimple problems. Design sometimes encounters a simple problem—one that reallyjust needs a recipe or an expert—and we go through a five-why process. We endup moving from, you know, needing an oil change to figuring out how to getaround a city. You’ve moved from why you need an oil change (because my carisn't working) to why you need to get around (because I need to get around thecity). You end up in a place where you've moved into a complex problem domainwhere it's appropriate to prototype, be divergent, and explore.
There's this double-edged sword where sometimes we force problems thatcould be solved simply into a domain where design-led approaches are moreappropriate. But I think it's a both-and situation because, yes, we need to dothe oil change, and we need to understand the bigger context. It's our job asdesigners to use those tools wisely.
23:44 SYDNEY: Yeah. And so there's a nuancein understanding also when it's appropriate to have one reframe or multiplereframes or the specificity of the question that you're asking at that midpointin the process.
24:00 KRISTOFER: Yeah, it's a yes. I thinkand that's also this piece. Or sometimes, if the original problem you'rebrought is actually a problem it needs to be solved?
24:10 SYDNEY: Yeah, exactly.
24:12 KRISTOFER: And there's a choiceabout whether we want to solve it at the current level or address the rootcause. It becomes a different strategic choice: What harm is happening now?What is the intervention, and how do we show up? In product design orindustrial design, the timelines might be a bit simpler. In social innovation,where we're often dealing with present dangers or harms, the approach has to bemore nuanced. It’s a "yes, and" situation: yes, we need to addressthe immediate issues, and we also need to figure out the broader system, likethe transportation system.
24:46 SYDNEY: Yeah, exactly. And sometimesit's well, we can solve this one part of this bigger problem first, because wehave to start somewhere. So maybe that's the oil change. Even if we startedwith a bigger problem about navigating the city. Right. So it goes both ways aswell.
25:02 KRISTOFER: And I think there's one other piece to thisas well, which is that sometimes the reframe is about moving into an adjacentplaying field. There is a piece of working inside general capital marketscapitalism, which means you're in a competitive environment. Looking for anempty playing field or the blue ocean is only possible if you reframe;otherwise, you're swimming in a place with all sorts of other parallelsolutions because you're all solving the same problem. If you look for adifferent problem, you might be able to swim in a different place.
25:36 SYDNEY: Yeah, exactly. Kind of onthat note of when this process is effective, what other ways in which it couldbe better? I want to bring up a somewhat controversial topic. which ispersonas, often a part of sense making, is taking the data that you'veuncovered from your users and creating personas to inform the design processand shape the future design director. What are your thoughts on personas, theiruses and maybe their shortcomings?
26:14 KRISTOFER: Yeah. So a persona, youknow, is really a simplification of a user. It's an archetype, often astereotype. Both are attractive because our brains love simple answers that fittogether really well. Even though we haven't talked about reframing or the definephase as a dopamine moment, there is definitely a dopamine and oxytocin-chasingaspect to it. It feels so good to reframe something. I think personas have thatsame risk; they feel really right even though they can't cover everything. In ourpractice, we often add the word "proto," like "interimpersona" or "partial persona," to problematize them andrecognize that they are kind of a draft. I think they are helpful if we comeback to that Mad Lib I described, where you want to say who something is forand how this advantage and gap are connected.
What I'm really excited about and what we're trying to bring into moreof our practice is thinking about complex user ecosystems. Instead of mappingout just one kind of direct user persona, you can also talk about the analogoususers, adjacent users, excluded users, and systemic users—a whole range ofdifferent folks. You might be talking about, and here's a quick example: Sayyou're thinking about a service for someone who's going to pick up a food boxat a food bank. One of the adjacent users of that service might be the kids inthe car on the way there. By thinking about complex user ecosystems, we canstart to think about more responsive reframes.
28:12 SYDNEY: Yeah, I love that as ananswer because I think that there is still a space for personas or protopersonas. I think that they can help get different stakeholders aligned aroundwhat it might look and feel like to be a user, especially if they're not usedto thinking about people in that way, and they're also dangerous if they'reused incorrectly or if they're held on too tightly.
28:43 KRISTOFER: Yeah, I think, you know, GBA+ (Gender-BasedAnalysis Plus) has a great metaphor for this. They talk about lenses. If I putmy lens on and look at a street, I see certain aspects of it. I might see theflowers, the cracks in the pavement, or the shop I want to go into. Someoneelse might have a different lens; they might see the lack of a curb cut or thealley that feels dangerous, and so on. Lenses aren't swapped; they're added. Ithink we have to approach personas in the same way: personas aren’t swapped inand out, they're added together.
29:18 SYDNEY: Absolutely. Is there anything else about thispart of the design process that you think is cautionary, or that maybe we don'tdo in the best way, or that sometimes becomes an issue later on?
29:35 KRISTOFER: You know, I think one best practice is toleave good trails. I love documentation, especially when it's multimodal,interesting, and different. It's important to say, "Hey, we're on thistrail, we're making these choices, here's where we're going," and provideinformation that others might want to pick up. Developmental evaluationpractices do a great job of this, discussing which forks we didn't take. Thedefine phase is one of those forks, one of those moments. My caution would bethat we are always generating wisdom and telling stories about where we've beenand where we're going, so we need to leave them in a way that others can pickthem up.
30:24 SYDNEY: Yeah, absolutely. Kind ofbringing it back to a high note as we come to the end of our time. Can you tellus about a time that you had that dopamine moment in a defined phase and itkind of changed the course of the project in a in a positive way.
30:46 KRISTOFER: Yeah, for some reasontoday, I'm really recalling a project from 15 years ago. We were trying tobuild an outdoor park at the Science Center. A number of my colleagues, butmostly I, had gotten pretty obsessed with this being like "Sparks' BigBackyard." I was having all of these ideas. This story involves a high anda low and then another high. It involved all these outdoor elements. I waslucky as a kid to have a pretty free-range childhood, climbing a lot of trees,using power tools, and making a lot of messes. I was telling all these storiesabout how this big backyard was going to be full of wild grass andadventure—very wholesome in a kind of way.
We got to the point where we needed to give it a name and some branding.I thought I had synthesized everything into a very clear package. Then a newplayer entered the mix: a very fancy branding agency offering pro bonoservices. This is back to that idea that the define phase has all theseunexpected paths. Suddenly, some of the synthesis got taken out of my team’shands and into the mix of this other group, who had a completely differentperspective—back to that adding lenses idea. They went away and we walked backin a week or two later into their very fancy boardroom.
You know, it feels a little bit like Mad Men. We sit down, theypour us fancy glasses of water, and they turn on the projector. The first thingthat comes onto the screen is not waving tall grass, kids climbing trees, orpeople building things. It's a close-up of a juicy, dripping surface of a brain.Then they hit the button again, and it just says "Brains." We go onto talk about how this outdoor place does indeed have grass, climbing, magic,and adventure, but what it's really doing is growing people's brains. Thisoutside group, with a different perspective on our data, said this thing shouldbe called the "Brain Nauseum," a gymnasium for your brain.
33:08 SYDNEY: Yeah, that's really good. Right.Thank you for sharing your dopamine moment.
33:13 KRISTOFER: And it also involved. Itwasn't just it. Dopamine, also from the like, fear and being like this isdifferent. This isn't what we thought.
33:20 SYDNEY: Yeah. Will people respond tothis? Yeah.
33:22 KRISTOFER: Yeah, I hated it. I waslike, never. This is the worst. And then fell in love with it. Yeah, because itactually meant something. And we would have never gotten there if we hadn'tdone that thing I talked about before. Around complexity can embrace complexityand needing to have more voices, needing to have more perspectives. Who can seea pattern in your data that you can’t.
33:42 SYDNEY: You can't. Yeah, there's.Well, that's another great example of the same data set opening up differentpossibilities depending on who's looking at it. Brilliant. I always enjoy talkingwith you and learning from you.
34:00 KRISTOFER: Oh same here. Such a joy.
34:03 SYDNEY: Thank you so much for comingon today's episode. Again, this is our design, one-on-one series and todaywe've been talking mostly about the define phase of the design process, butalso about brains and other things too. Thanks again Kristofer for joining us.
34:18 KRISTOFER: Thanks Syd.
34:19 SYDNEY: Listeners stay tuned for notonly our next Responsible Disruption episode, but our next Design 101 episode,which will be a few more episodes on and we're going to talk all about thedevelop phase. Until then, keep exploring and innovating.
[Outro music}
That's all for today's episode of ResponsibleDisruption. Thank you for tuning in and we hope you found the conversationvaluable. If you did, don't forget to follow rate and share wherever you getyour podcasts. To stay up to date on future episodes and show notes, visit ourwebsite at thesocialimpactlab.com or follow us on social media and until nexttime, keep on designing a better world.
