Truth Designed: Transformation Through Design Integration and Transparency

Design Management Review: Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2009

Article by Ying Liu, Director, Interaction Design, MetaDesign; David Summers, Director, Brand Strategy, MetaDesign; Bill Hill, President, MetaDesign

The availability of increasingly robust technologies is unleashing a wave of new tools that are transforming our approach to business, politics, communication manufacturing, healthcare, and other dimensions of our society. MetaDesign’s Ying Liu, David Summers, and Bill Hill – with compelling examples from politics, healthcare, and product development – highlight how, at the core of today’s most powerful and disruptive applications, is a deeper transparency that delivers facts and information to facilitate the exchange of ideas and decision-making.

The decisions we make define us. At every turn we are asked to make choices. These choices are based on our interpretation and analysis of everything we know about the decision at hand – information that may come from a variety of sources. We make our decisions by processing information and understanding that which we believe to be true.

In recent years, the amount of information available to us has increased by leaps and bounds. Today, an average consumer can buy a one-terabyte hard drive (1 million megabytes) for as little as $100. In 1992, a terabyte drive, if such a thing had existed, would have cost $5 million. In mid 2008, the four-gigabyte (or 4,096 megabytes) flash memory chip in an iPod Nano cost $25. In 1992, the same four gigs of flash memory would have cost $500,000, making the price of a hypothetical Nano, oh, about $3 million. For most of us, the Internet didn’t exist in 1992. Monthly Internet traffic totaled about four terabytes; in fact, in 1992, the total of all the data traversing the global Net came to about 48 terabytes. Today, YouTube alone streams 48 terabytes of data every 21 seconds.

The upshot is that our ability to cost-effectively deliver and store large amounts of information has grown to the point at which the global population sees the world through a digital lens that today invites participation and collaboration. The interactivity that is now part of many people’s way of life has created new levels of transparency that affects how decisions are made regarding almost any topic.

The Internet is an obvious starting place for understanding the onset of transparency. When the Web opened up as a publishing platform in the mid 1990s, it allowed anyone with a bit of HTML know-how the ability to publish specialty content online. Forums, bulletin boards, and user groups became hubs through which people could communicate in a one-to-many context.

A turning point was when commercial sites such as Amazon began to create user-generated content to support product descriptions, giving potential buyers a new set of information on which to base purchasing decisions. It was not long before the transparency offered by such user-generated content became the backbone for entire businesses. Yelp offers user-generated reviews of local businesses. Flickr offers a user-generated lens into world events, art, and travel, yielding a perspective that sometimes goes deeper than traditional media outlets. Facebook offers the opportunity for people to become totally transparent as they broadcast up-to-the-moment details about themselves through an assortment of tie-in features and applications. All of these and other similar applications are designed structures for creating new levels of transparency and truth and challenging us to redefine our overall approach to evaluating information for better decision-making.

Certainly, the quality of some user-generated content as it relates to truth can be debated – with Wikipedia a common example. However, transparency and truth in design extends beyond what is believable; it also drives what is actionable. The transparency offered by today’s applications reveals a level of honesty and truthfulness that is driving transformation across industries. The integrated design of today’s digital tools offers a view into information that reveals new levels of truth that drive decision-making and wholly positive change.

Here we will look at how integrated design is bringing about new levels of transparency and truthfulness in politics, healthcare, and manufacturing. The tools available in these fields today drive new levels of actionable decision-making, better collaboration, and game-changing transformation. Ultimately, design managers are well served to understand the deeply integrated relationship among information, technology, and truth, and how design serves as a lever for creating.

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