Innate Pattern Design Fluency

If we have a set of patterns that bear some relationship to one another - usually because they are in some common domain, with pattern thinking, we can compose those patterns to generate a larger design or amplify design effect.

In the new age of personalization and consumerization, people are the center of everything we do; customers and employees expect applications to be as intuitive and task-oriented. It represents a merging of corporate and consumer capabilities within the organization.

 Pattern thinking enables us to capture deep insight into complex new normal and makes design more science than art.

Pattern Thinking is important for designing: The digital world is so data-driven and information-intensive, the designer’s job in the business is to listen intently, help the organization make the intuitive and the best possible solution to delight customers. When patterns work together to solve problems in a particular area, these patterns are called a pattern language. From a design perspective, pattern language can help people navigate through patterns to learn about a problem space, find commonality in a variety of differences; abstract rules behind all shapes and sizes; science & art; and apply creativity to generate something delightful and solve problems innovatively.

Each pattern is useful to address some specific problem. What could be in a stronger relationship to us than something that solves a problem for us? A pattern language is "about" the relationships between patterns. Developed methodology and practices that engage the right people early in any design activity in ways that capture pattern language, understand underlying sensations to manage decisions and handle conflicts with empathy throughout the design cycle. The healthy design cycle is that you design the process, then model, execute, monitor, optimize then again back to design. It's a continuous improvement cycle in which pattern discovery makes all activities more systematic and inherent.

The focus is on what patterns do, a higher order focus than on what patterns are, the goal is to harness creative problem-solving. All complex beings have complexity in them. From a problem-solving perspective, the person who reads and understands the pattern language needs to decide how to apply that language to describe a set of problems and solutions both scientifically and artistically. Every pattern perhaps helps you to discover or fix something; sometimes tie the patterns together so you can navigate among them for figuring out better solutions to complex problems. For a given solution is the combination of the inner forces acting on the system with the pattern language applied to solve that particular combination of forces.

Always be careful about examining the hidden patterns, the potential points of engagement, rather than jumping to the “fixing” mentality. It requires you to keep your eyes open and keep your mind off the box, break down the conventional box and actively seek out new patterns wherever you can discover them. For design driven customer-centricity and problem-solving, it’s important to clarify design related communications and goals, make sure they are unambiguous with a clear sense of purpose and where they want to be within a given timeframe. Genuine design leadership capability is essential and most of the design activities have benefited from high-calibrated design teams with pattern thinking fluency.

Patterns play a role in design which involves science, math, art, and virtually every action or activity we engage in: All types of intelligence such as design have a certain level of complexity in it. Pattern language as long as knowledge management decomposes the complexity of design work via effective partitioning, leading to effective decomposition of complexity smoothly. Pattern Thinking is a hybrid thinking to combine design thinking, system thinking, architect thinking and visual thinking for capturing deep insight. If we have a set of patterns that bear some relationship to one another - usually because they are in some common domain, with pattern thinking, we can compose those patterns to generate a larger design or amplify design effect.

The “organizational design problem” would be to build the “best” mix of organizational elements that enable the organizational interdependence and coherence. Art, science or engineering, etc, are all interconnected disciplines at the core of improving design maturity. Organizational leaders need to understand pattern languages, identify design capability gaps and make an objective assessment of the business design capability, develop the target state design capability, and figure out what needs to be done to improve it, to ensure organizations are on the right track of embracing design as a culture and build a strong brand.

Patterns evoke and gestate higher-order patterns while clarifying fundamentals of decomposition and debunking the serendipity of complexity. With effective leadership and masterful designers, organizations can be transformed into a customer-centric organization, operated as high-performance and high mature businesses catalyzed by diversification, personalization, and intelligence.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation,UX/CX