Even more so than history, the economy and the concepts related to it can become so abstract that it’s difficult to navigate through a lot of what many experts are talking about. The vocabulary itself creates a gulf between what an ordinary person might understand and what is actually going on. Not to mention all the complexity tied up in the various institutions, forms, and graphs. Yet, at the same time it’s something that fundamentally touches each and every person to some degree.

Throughout different discussions about the economy, bailout plans, and national debt, it’s difficult to really understand what these large numbers mean. What does $700 billion dollars look like? What does it feel like? At a certain point it becomes so abstract that it just seems like people pulling numbers out of a hat and using a calculator to solve all the world’s problems.

That’s why I think financial concepts are always ripe for some good design work, and why I was especially interested in a recent poster by GOOD:

(via GOOD)

I think it’s wonderful that they combined a bunch of layers of information. What’s great about it is that you quickly get a sense of what happened by looking at the main components: the timeline and the increasing debt, but over time you can keep digging and reading the various nuggets of information that are at more of a micro level.

Over the summer I had some time to spend thinking and reading about topics that sparked my interest during grad school. Part of that happened to be a new interest in history. I never really liked general world history during high school or college, but the prospect of designing things for the future made me intensely interested in the past and how we’ve come to the present. After all, design research is digging into past experiences of people’s lives. If you scale it up to past trends and ideologies you get a better idea of the current momentum of the world.

One of the first thoughts I had about history was how difficult it was to truly understand the time spans that are referenced. Hundreds, thousands, and millions of years are not easy to get a gist of. There’s a certain subset of time that we can truly relate to–probably between several seconds and year or two.  Anything else is just a mental representation of what we are dealing with.

In any case, I think historical timelines area really inadequet, and instead of years they should use something that we can understand a little better on an intuitive level. We can understand human generations pretty well, and have a natural sense of the time involved in a person’s liftime in relation to their children’s, and it would be nice to show historical events in those terms.

Luckily, I found someone else who had the same idea:

Dan Roam is some sort of visualizer extraordinaire. He put out a book, and visited Carnegie Mellon while I was there–sadly I wasn’t able to make it to his talk. His work looks interesting, but I’m not sure about the whole napkin think. I think the idea is that it’s important to recognize that visualizing is useful even in extremely low fidelity. The value really comes in communicating an idea, making something understandable, and ultimately being a tool for stimulating discussion.

I’m not sure how I came across this article, but I found it in my “to read” folder, and Drucker was mentioned quite a bit during the second half of grad school. Dick Buchanan brought him up when discussing the new group of people contributing to management literature. He labeled him as a “management guru” somewhere on the cross of pain that I dare not dig up right now.

Theme
The article comes from an issue of the Harvard Business Review from 1999, and it deals with how people can achieve success within an organization—it’s practical advice. A person’s knowledge of themselves helps them to understand and manage their own life in the same way that a CEO might manage a company.

Problem
Drucker sees us living in a changing world that we need to adapt to. The changing roles and responsibilities of a “knowledge society” means that we need to be engaged in what we are doing and change when necessary. People in general are not prepared to manage themselves and often do it poorly.

Argument
To manage oneself, according to Drucker, means knowing how and when to change the work we do. We do this by answering the questions he poses:

• What are my strengths? Because we have choice in the work we do, we need to know what we’re good at and foster that strength.
• How do I perform? Knowing the way we work, communicate, and learn, as well as the way others do, helps us interact a lot more smoothly.
• What are my values? Understanding what you care about and what you think is the right way an organization should operate helps you to decide if you are working at a place that is right for you. Frustration comes from conflicting values.
• Where do I belong? After answering the above questions allows someone to choose what they think is the best environment and work.
• What should I contribute? This question is about finding a way to bring results. Balancing difficult results that are within reach and meaningful, visible, and measurable if possible. Doing so will help people figure out “what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set”

There is some more of the article that talks about managing relationships and developing a secondary career in order to “be somebody” where one might not be able to do so in their primary career.

Take Away
The clear connection is that designers, especially those involved in more of the front-end strategy and planning are what Drucker would call “knowledge workers.” The advice sometimes seems useful and other times obvious. As designers, we are a part of the societal shift in which we have more agency not only over the work we do, but of how we do it.

One part that I felt was particularly relevant was the part about contributing and bringing results. The example he uses is of a Hospital’s new administrator who focuses on a small part of the hospital in order to achieve results. As designers, one of our strengths is being able to bring about results by producing something, whether it’s a brainstorm, a conceptual model, or a full-fledged product. Indeed it would be interesting to ask Drucker’s questions to the discipline of design itself.

I found with his proposal to focus on strengths and nothing else a bit extreme. In fact, as designers, one of our strengths is in doing the opposite and becoming generalists rather than specialists.

Final Words
A quote on remedying bad habits, where you might replace “planner” with “designer”

… a planner may find that his beautiful plans fail because he does not follow through on them. Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work. This planner will have to learn that the work does not stop when the plan is completed. He must find people to carry out the plan and explain it to them. He must adapt and change it as he puts it into action. And finally, he must decide when to stop pushing the plan (66)