Design vs. Planning
Planning is great when you have a working solution that you need to execute: a business plan, an annual event, a strategic plan, meeting agenda, wedding, travel, etc. Unfortunately, we often slide into planning when we really need to be designing. Design is both problem solving and world building. Design when you are solving a complex problem, when you are trying to imagine a new arrangement, and/or you notice that you’re cobbling together pre-existing solutions, etc.
Transcript
Culturally, PLANNING is way more part of our common sense. We have a set of things with an end in mind, and we have learned how to create timelines and make those things happen. We already have an image in mind and plan to execute it is much more part of our cultural common sense where designing to solve a complex social problem is counter cultural.
It's not in our common sense to want to question our own habits of thought, look for multiple different ways of understanding a problem. We’re less habituated to approach things from a DESIGN perspective, in the sense that we are trained in our lived lives to be good at PLANNING.
DESIGN when you are solving a complex problem, when you are trying to imagine a new arrangement, or when you notice that what you're doing is cobbling together a set of pre existing solutions,
PLAN when you're working with an existing arrangement, or you have a solution that you simply need to execute, such as a challenge, talent show, art exhibit, annual meeting, where you just basically take the form that you already have, and you're making it happen in a new place.
So when you're satisfied with your form, you tend to plan. And typically, we haven't been asked. We haven't been trained to actually question form. So we haven't been trained to even know if we're satisfied or not satisfied with it, because it's counter cultural to question form.
That's one of the reasons why we created the Studio. We were like a lot of our problems are formal problems, and we don't even know to question the form. And so this was why we say most of our work calls for design, even though we aren't culturally in the habit of doing it or wanting to do it.
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