You Know When You Hire a Fixer…

You hire a fixer to bridge a gap between your knowledge and the norms and systems of another culture. They take what you want to achieve and escort you through the foreign intricacies of a misunderstood land in order to achieve a goal.

Q is a future-vision fixer, translating moonshot ideas into tangible steps and outcomes. He finds the soft underbelly of concepts, listens at the door of cultures, and reports back from the dark forest of fruitless research with objects, experiences, and technologies you hear, wear, and feel. 

Focusing On Flexibility

When trying to solve large or small problems, we tend to get stuck in the small details of the design processes. This is not helpful when we are focused on the future, so let the process disappear and be a small part of our work, focusing on exploratory work. There are countless unknowns, failed ideas, dead ends, misalignments, and open questions, all needing flexible, open-minded approaches to design and engineering.

Leading Emerging Practices

Q has been a focus and part of the critical design communities for over a decade. Q is well known for asking boring questions about how we can engage with the future boring, where he encourages the warm embrace of the practicalities and pragmatic questions of any future product, service, or system. It's important to him to push the relationships between design, emerging technology and how we explore the future. For Q to be trained as an Architect, it's important for him to understand things from first principles, get comfortable reading scientists' white papers, and even embrace their PhD; there is fertile ground where future design can help.

Embracing Post Disciplinarity

As my career and the design discipline have evolved, the constant shifting and changing of roles has become meaningless. I believe in approaching design in its broadest terms, using whatever tools are appropriate, and encouraging exploration and discovery. With these changes, I have successfully translated design approaches for non-design partners. This depends on communicating clearly and finding relevant writing techniques for scientists, engineers, business strategists, and developers. This helps embed design literacy in large, complex organisations.

Learning Through Sharing

It's funny to write that creating long-form written content or presenting to large groups helps make my ideas more concrete. I develop my thinking through writing. Here Are a Few Examples.

Toolkit

  • The Five W is a technique used in Journalism, research and police investigation for information gathering and problem solving. The questions are part of the answer. With different input that will help you to answer some of the 5Ws.

  • Prototypes are widely recognised to be a core means of exploring and expressing designs for interactive computer artefacts. It is common practice to build prototypes in order to represent different states of an evolving design, and to explore options.

  • Any project where a maker has worked together with one person to make something impactful for them and/or their community. Impact here is not only about the practical. Joy, discovery, and play can also make a difference in people’s lives.

  • The power of knowing you don’t know everything is what drives us to seek more. More detail, more exploration and more discoveries. More questions lead to more answers, which beg only more questions.

  • Will you return home? It's a very simple question: If I'm five miles from home, would I return the new device or product that has been built? Is it that useful for the end user? Would you go back for your device if you were five miles away?

    The ToothBrush Test When considering new products a fun and simple test I learnt from my time at Google our VP would ask the question. They wanted to know if the product is, like a toothbrush, “something you will use once or twice a day. Do we use it every day? Is this an “Add-in” or just another “Add-on”? If the answer was yes to both, we kept it; if not, we cancelled. We removed 5 subscriptions, which added no value to our core activities.

  • This is simply the input to your decision. It's not the solution, it's the criteria by which you will evaluate possible solutions or consider revisiting previous solutions. Think of it as the intro section to any design or proposal. Point by point.

    1. A radical sci-fi sounding solution that may seem impossible today

    2. A technology breakthrough that gives us a glmmer of hope that the solution could be possible in the next 5-10 years.

    3. A huge problem in the world that affects millions or billions of people.