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Tuesday, March 5 2024
Searching for Quality
Searching for Quality is a weekly publication about design, building ideas and crafting high quality products that upgrade people’s lives.
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The relationship between design and planning
The distinction between design and planning is subtle, but important with respect to how teams approach problem spaces and opportunities.
This post from Farnam Street highlights an interesting perspective on this design/planning distinction from The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual:
“While both activities seek to formulate ways to bring about preferable futures, they are cognitively different. Planning applies established procedures to solve a largely understood problem within an accepted framework. Design inquires into the nature of a problem to conceive a framework for solving that problem. In general, planning is problem solving, while design is problem setting. Where planning focuses on generating a plan—a series of executable actions—design focuses on learning about the nature of an unfamiliar problem.”
I’ve also written about how good design is most often found and not planned, which highlights the reality that ambiguity is not only a natural part of the design process, but central to what design is all about. If you know what you’re going to build when you begin working on something, the requirement shifts from design to planning.
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