The power of design translation: visual communication
The complexity of a collaborative effort inside and outside organizations defines the challenging landscape of our present time. At the same time, the design practice is constantly evolving and design professionals keep finding new ways to address the ‘complexity-and drama-of times’ in which we live in through new ways of transportation, new products/services, new digital experiences. In a particular note, one thing that has always kept me being truthful to the practice is the ability to utilize our abstract ways of thinking to illustrate (in multiple shapes, forms, dimensions) what others consider to be real or understandable. Our contributions to the business world have been evolving and expanding from existing patterns (in which design is practiced primarily within the B2C market) to radically new paradigms that challenge the status quo and are based upon equity and quality of life (Irwin, 2015).
For that reason, design is at a point in the market maturity where we have been given the opportunity to practice it as an educational approach where organizations come to us for guidance on how to shift from operational business models to human-centric models. The role of design, now more than ever, is shaping human needs and, in consequence, designing and delivering new forms of services to improve human lives.
As we challenge the status quo and empower organizations to become human-centric, we must not forget what has kept us truthful to our design identity, the visual translation skills that we use to teach, illustrate, connect and share with people across silos by creatively coming up with new ways to establish new forms of communication flow between people, process and platforms.
As a designer, I believe that the power of visual communication is intrinsic for collaboration and alignment. Many times, I’ve used this skill during meetings and working sessions, to rapidly translate ideas into a tangible artifact. I cannot stress enough that when I say visualization, I don’t mean high fidelity renders or colorful drawings, I mean any visual form you can think of, such as, basic geometric forms, low fidelity prototypes, body-storming, hand made posters, mindmaps, paper prototypes, legos… These artifacts are meant to be used with the intent to translate a thought, an idea, a strategy. Designers are key facilitators of this translation exercise and inspire and encourage others to produce and co-create these artifacts together in a collaborative way.
Producing artifacts is how you start to translate and convey solutions that inform business strategy decisions.
I would argue that this visual translation exercise if not set up properly with no purpose or focus, becomes useless. Every design-lead project should always have a well defined problem or hypothesis to start from. Every project will be different, have its own language, bias and requirements. The good thing about all of this is that, as a designer, we constantly find new ways to help connect people to ideas to processes to solutions. Our job is never done and that is the beauty of it.
