Designing for Designers: How Harmonic Supports Personal Design Practices

By Taft Weber-Kilpack, service designer

As a design-oriented environment, you can imagine Harmonic Design is a thriving world of creatives, always interested in something new. The world of service design is constantly evolving, and we are always learning and growing our methods to meet clients' needs and pursue our own design passions. 

To better understand how we are growing, we undertook a four-month internal project to learn about what our designers do to develop their practice, connect with outside fields, and foster learning environments on their projects. With a broader view, we could see the way Harmonic Design’s practice interacts with the practice of each individual on the team (Harmonicas) and broader communities of practice, discovering: 

• What Harmonicas value and gain from existing practice activities
• How to support Harmonicas to continue developing their practice in the directions they are interested
• Where we could become more engaged in the design field (or other fields!)

With these insights, we began experimenting with internal activities to investigate how we could support practice-building more. 

Using Design to Understand Design

The project was led by the same service design approaches we usually use for client work. I conducted 16 interviews using visual research frameworks, similar to client project discovery. I attended meetings for internal initiatives, chatted with people who had led practice-related projects, and picked the brains of some of our best systems thinkers. There is no shortage of resources and brain power on the team - especially when you plant the seed of carving out more time for learning. 

Harmonicas have various interests that intersect with, are tangential to, or even wildly unrelated to service design - and the interviews showed how people see each others’ niche interests as valuable and generative to their practices. Practitioners are also applying their values (e.g., design as a driver for equity) and using them as a direction for learning and growing opportunities. Interests and values cut across the client teams we usually work on and become opportunities for building connections and learning from each other. 

And how exactly are our teammates learning? They’re up to everything! To name a few: reading, watching videos, building new templates, interviewing other designers, attending events, going on service safaris, reaching out to coworkers for advice, writing, teaching design, and working on passion projects. But, each individual engages in different activities for different reasons. Any of our experiments need to keep this variety in mind, respecting that no one-size activity would work for everyone. Designers would benefit from autonomy in shaping and choosing their practitioner activities. 

I defined practitioner activities as “an action someone takes that they feel actively contributes to or stretches their practice.” In synthesis, three different ways to understand practitioner activities appeared:

• Brain time vs. Tool time: Where "tool time" focuses on sharpening specific methods, while "mind time" looks at the overall practitioner toolkit (Why do I design? How can I stretch?). Both are valuable. Sometimes, working on a tool can lead to larger insights as well.
  
• Structure and Sacredness: Is the practitioner activity carefully programmed and structured? By whom? And is there a recurring routine to the practitioner time that makes it somewhat "sacred" in a weekly or yearly context?
  
• Inputting to Outputting (and reciprocal, too): Is the purpose of the activity to bring in new information? Or instead to synthesize absorbed information and generate something new? In the middle, there are "reciprocal" activities, often in the form of 1:1 chats where practitioners are both giving and receiving from each other.

These categories could be interesting reflective tools for other practitioners.

• What kinds of activities do you engage in to grow your practice?
• Which typologies work well for you, or could you lean into more?
• How can you use typologies to experiment with engaging in your field?

Involving Users in the Process

With all those designer minds, we conducted an ideation session during our weekly team meeting. Prompted by possible scenarios of a future studio environment, we asked people to share their “I would love this” ideas and “I would hate this” ideas, acknowledging that what worked for one person on the team might not be a great fit for someone else. 

The playground and laboratory scenarios are opposites of each other in the framework and paint a picture of very different learning environments. The point was not to pick a future scenario but to instead use them as inspiration during brainstorming - and they became very helpful in guiding the conversation during the ideation session. 

There is an underlying structure with open spaces in which people explore their own interests, both individually and in organically-formed groups.

Keywords: joy, adventure, teamwork, sharing, recovering

An environment for experiments and the production of new knowledge and methods that systematically seeks and references outside knowledge.

Keywords: connected, structured, generative, focused

Lessons from Our Practice-Building Experiments

Since the ideation session, we spent a couple of weeks running smaller experiments across the studio, seeing what interventions people find useful for carving out dedicated practice time. Here are some activities that we’ve tried that you might enjoy trying in your studio or practice too: 

• Sharing about our “practice-building” activities from the last week during our Monday morning studio meeting
• Blocking one hour for a “Practitioners’ Studio”: a time to get together and work on something for your practice, with accountability from other people
• A one-hour group brainstorming session to work through a specific issue on a project with people from outside your client team 
• A lunch-and-learn, led by someone on the team who had a new method and canvas to share 

With each experiment, we are learning more about what works for different members of our teams and adjusting for the next iteration. There are more layers to go, like looking at policy or culture interventions we can take over a more extended period and finding ways to support people who are especially feeling a time crunch in their calendars.

Some questions that remain for us that might be interesting reflection questions for you too: 

• How can teaching-type activities remain ground-up and signal that anyone on the team can be a leader and teacher?
• What policies and practices best support people experiencing the most time crunch or workload (and not just in the workplace, can apply to pressure from personal life, too) and still want to engage in practice-development time? 
• How can practice-building be approached with a design and prototyping mindset, where failure or sunsetting an initiative are valued as learning opportunities? 
• How can regular initiatives we set up (ex., Practitioners’ Studio) remain flexible in commitment or timing to accommodate many schedules and priorities?