Factors and Frames: Analysing the Designs of Things and Framing Arguments

What's more exciting than the power to analyse and deconstruct the designs of things in a way that creates new insights for those must drive change. Such power comes with the ability to identify structural problems that are not so obvious, thus opening up lines of inquiry and defining new pathways for progress. This course helps you acquire such power by teaching you a new method based on tools and techniques from several fields. A method that grew out of recent work in industry and government.

The four-week course is organised around three challenges teams generally face:

Analysing the designs of things and deconstructing them into factors and frames.
Finding the smallest possible changes that lead to the greatest overall improvements.
Writing arguments that align interests in support of proposed changes.

What sort of 'things' will we take apart? All sorts of things, such as airport screening, satellite imaging, waste collection, medical testing, bus stops, charging stations, cash withdrawals, car rentals, parking tickets, police arrests ... everyday things that could any day fail. We will go through almost a hundred examples in this course.

Course outline
1) Plus and Minus: Affinity and attraction between things.
2) Potentials and Actuals: Thresholds, possibilities, and projections.
3) Performance and Affordance: Two ways of making things 'happen'.
4) Windows of Opportunity: The big question of 'when and where'.
5) Hierarchy of Concerns: Applying weights and allocating costs.
6) Stereotyping: Characterisation with 20 patterns of acceptable risk.
7) Sequencing: Structural analysis and decomposition.
8) Double materiality: The sustainability challenge

Plotto and the learning curve
The course is taught in an informal style, using a training database called Plotto. At the start, Plotto is nothing but a beautiful catalogue of photographs with captions. But with new each lesson, we add a layer of information to the records, in the form of labels, tags, and statements. Around halfway, the records become building blocks for constructing narratives around cases such as airline tickets, medical testing, and waste collection. By the end of the course, the records look like they are used to train AI.

Schedule and setup
Eight sessions, from July 5th to July 31st, 2024
Wednesdays and Fridays, 16:00 to 17:30 CET Amsterdam
90-minute live lessons over Zoom; twice a week
Notion workspace for practice exercises
Slack for discussions.

Who is this course for?
This course is for a general audience i.e. anyone concerned with significantly improving the designs of things; a job that is harder than ever because of the growing pressure to improve profitability and sustainability, not just one or the other. Anyone keen on improving things by examining the fundamentals and proposing changes that evoke enthusiasm, not resistance, from customers, suppliers, societies, and governments. That includes product managers, service designers, engineers, procurement officers, sales managers, policymakers, lawyers, management consultants, and cost accountants.

Instructor:
Majid Iqbal

Disclaimer
This course may temporarily void your prior knowledge of certain things and that may cause a little discomfort. But, as the great physicist Richard Feynman so nicely explained, 'going through confusion and doubt, sometimes even feeling stupid, is part of the learning process'. On the other side greater clarity and depth await. Also, as the esteemed Kenya Hara humbly suggests in 'Designing Design':

"To understand something is not to be able to define it or describe it. Instead, taking something that we think we already know and making it unknown thrills us afresh with its reality and deepens our understanding of it."