Infrastructuring the Foundations for Design
A blog post by guest author Lourenço Viana.
Preface by Marzia Aricò
This is the first guest column on Design Mavericks. I have decided to open this platform to welcome other perspectives relevant to design-driven organisational change. The first guest author I have invited is Lourenço Viana, Head of Research at Mango and a PhD candidate at the University of Lisbon. In this blog post, Lourenço dives into the mechanics of setting up the right infrastructure for design to flourish in an organisational context. By mixing the theory from his PhD with his practical experiments at Mango, he helps us understand how to be effective as design practitioners and leaders in driving change, starting from the foundations. Enjoy it!
Change is Intrinsic to Designing
Design has the incredible power to transform relations and relationships. If you work in the fields of strategic or service design, relations are the object of your work. However, you cannot really design interactions. You can design spaces, protocols, guidelines, and artefacts to create the conditions for interactions to occur in the desired manner. You can, in other words, develop an infrastructure for exchange.
Service design focuses on generating value through interactions. As a discipline, it brings people together to align them on how to provide a service and work towards that goal collaboratively. Nevertheless, some organisations struggle to adopt service design fully. To prepare an organisation for service design, it’s crucial to create an infrastructure for service design. Whether you’re the “Design Team of One” or part of a small design team struggling to remain relevant, understanding how infrastructures work can help you by improving your organisation's ability to use service design. And yes, I’m arguing this work can also be done by design.
Infrastructure
We all have an idea of what infrastructure is; the word suggests roads, railways, and power supplies, but also education and healthcare. Basic things that allow us to go about with our lives.
In organisations, infrastructure comprises the technology and tools—but also rules, norms, and beliefs—supporting group practices. Infrastructure is deeply related to Organisational Logics, which are the frames we use to interpret the world around us and define how we act and speak. The type of infrastructure organisations build is influenced by their logic and reinforces it by supporting certain practices.
The tools you use to design, like Figma or Miro, your company’s intranet, but also the organisational hierarchical structure and the norms on how to work (collaboratively or competitively, for example) are all part of your organisation’s infrastructure. What organisations value and the processes implemented to achieve it are also included in this concept.
Infrastructures have some common characteristics:
They are transparent to use: we don’t see or think about them when we use them.
They don’t need to be assembled every time and exist beyond a single event.
They are built on an installed base: they don’t exist in a vacuum; they inherit the existing structures’ strengths, limitations, conventions, etc.
They are learnt as part of membership: while they’re taken for granted and invisible to the members of a group, new members must become familiarised with it.
They become visible upon breakdown: when they stop working, we acknowledge their existence.
Infrastructures are important for design because they influence what we do, how we do it, and how it impacts people. The tricky part is that they are invisible, especially for those who rely on them daily. It’s our job as designers to make them visible.
Infrastructuring
Setting the stage for design work is vital. People in organisations don’t speak the same language—they behave according to different logics or have different mindsets— and may not be willing and ready to give design the space it needs, let alone be part of it. Trying to convince them won’t do the trick. We’ll have to work a bit harder to make a point and create the conditions for design. While it’s sexy to say that we need to change the paradigm or adopt a new mindset, I believe it’s more realistic to say that we can contribute to introducing a new logic that will co-exist with the established ones. And that’s okay.
How do we do this? We need to work on the infrastructure. Infrastructuring is the term used for this. It refers to the integration of new tools and practices on existing infrastructures; the long-term, ongoing, and situated design work done to develop infrastructures.
The infrastructuring process may vary, but it is compatible with a traditional design process of action-reflection. I like to divide it into four stages:
Strategic intent: when you assess the situation, uncover the hidden infrastructures, and define your scope and approach.
Intervention: the activities you perform to develop a new infrastructure (within a team, for example).
Reflection and adaption: the analysis and iteration of the activities.
Scaling-up: when successful, the implementation of the same process to other teams.
Kick-starting infrastructuring is no simple task because invisible forces are influencing it. On the one hand, we have social structures, including norms, cultural factors, rules, and human factors, such as how people behave and relate to each other. On the other hand, transformation impact also acts as a force since the results of our work will determine its continuity. These forces may work as drivers, enablers, or barriers to change. We identify them in stage 1 and keep doing so along the infrastructuring process.
To achieve a successful transformation, we must continuously engage in action-reflection design work. Through our actions, we bring about change, and by reflecting on those actions, we can understand their implications and make improvements. Over time, the existing infrastructure will become more visible and gradually evolve into a new one with additional and renewed practices and tools.
Infrastructuring in a Fashion Retailer
To make infrastructuring more tangible, I’ll provide an example in a real setting. I work as Head of Research at Mango, and one of my team’s goals is to help create a customer-centred organisation. This task can be understood as the introduction of a new organisational logic at Mango: a customer logic. Our first initiative was called “Customer Centric”, and it was extremely valuable and informative.
We developed this project in collaboration with Mango’s Denim Team, and we based our work on a three-step framework:
Team and Customer understanding: Assessment of the team’s existing customer touchpoints and work process. Definition of a customer journey based on existing information.
Customer interaction: Training on how to perform research with customers. Observation of existing user research activities. Research sessions with customers.
Knowledge application: Analysis of the gathered information. Definition of actions to be taken. Selection of indicators to evaluate the actions’ impact.
This framework fits right into the two initial stages of the infrastructuring process.
1. Strategic intent: team and customer understanding
Together with the team, we analysed their work process and identified key moments where customer knowledge could be valuable: before, during, and after the fashion design process. We also devised potential interesting research methods that could fit into the team’s mindset.
2. Intervention: customer interaction and knowledge application
For the intervention stage, we collaboratively selected a set of experiments that included several customer interaction activities. We accompanied the denim team along the process, making sure the research activities ran smoothly and yielded relevant knowledge. This was a challenging task, considering how busy this team was. Their main goal was to work on their own projects—designing and buying jeans—and ensure sales were up. Learning about customers was not part of their priorities; after all, they had never done that. This type of research was not part of their infrastructure.
While some activities were unsuccessful, others drove valuable knowledge and spoke right to the team’s concerns. This knowledge directly impacted the design of new jeans, the amount of garments to be produced, and how to market them on the website, facilitating user navigation.
3. Reflection and adaption
After the experiments, we reflected on their impact and viability. Based on this analysis, we were able to prioritise the most valuable activities for the team and scale them up to other groups in the same department.
We took some key learnings from this initiative:
The existing commercial, short-term mindset makes it difficult to introduce new practices that seem to take a long time (conflicting logics).
Activities must prove (business) value in the short term (responding to the existing logic).
Research needs to be accessible and understandable (for example, fitting sessions make sense because they tap into the fashion designer’s language).
Participation is critical: involving and accompanying the team along the process is vital, both in formal and informal processes.
4. Scaling-up
Slowly, we have been able to integrate some new practices across various teams at Mango. However, the work is never done since inertia is so powerful. Small successes come in the shape of an email asking for help to “understand our customer”. Some of this success allowed us to build trust, expand our scope of action, and start doing other types of projects based on participation and customer knowledge across the company: we’re finally doing some service design.
What’s next?
As a designer, there are a few things you can do to start working with infrastructuring. My recommendation is to involve your stakeholders as much as possible. I’d also advise you to find a partner: someone alongside you to help you reflect, share your struggles, and celebrate successes. Before you start:
Identify your transformation goals.
Acknowledge the politics of your organisation:
What are the existing logics?
What is perceived as value?
How do people do their work, and what tools do they use?
To start the transformation, build on existing strengths rather than entirely disrupting existing infrastructures.
Select a small project and a team that’s easy to collaborate with.
Invite colleagues to a user research session.
Include them in your design process by making a workshop.
Make sure they extract valuable knowledge they can act upon.
If people find these contributions valuable for their work, they’ll repeat and ask for more. By recurringly including people in these processes, you will instil trust and familiarise teams with new practices and tools, which will eventually become part of their daily work. You’ll develop infrastructure.
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Good to see service design being pushed a little past simply 'customer interactions' and towards change.