From Tradition to the Future with Conceptual Design Practices

When design is mentioned, many of us think of disciplines such as interior/stage design, fashion design, industrial design, and graphic design, which find resonance in our minds through visual reflections. Those working in these disciplines will emphasize that the visual reflection of their designs is no more of a priority than factors such as usability and durability. However, whatever you design must be 'visible' in order to be implementable, usable, and improvable.

When taken in the context of these disciplines, it is possible to be drawn to the idea that design is naturally a process resulting in physically visible, tangible reflections. But when we move from the visible plane to the invisible plane, from objects to processes and systems, we fail to realize that these are also products of design. We evaluate design as an activity limited to the production of visual forms and patterns, ignoring design work that does not result in an objective output. After all, it is not difficult to roughly imagine the journey from drawings on paper to physical models of a building or a dress before it takes its final form. But when we try to imagine a system formed by the coming together of multiple people and/or objects, the physical forms of the system elements become unimportant: For example, can you explain to someone who does not know how the public transportation system works with a picture of a ticket or a train?

Of course not. When our context is the system layer, our focus shifts from the forms of system elements to their relationships and connections with each other, and accordingly, our need shifts from the act of depiction to the act of modeling. Everyone may have a different reflection of a model in mind for a public transportation system, but I am sure all of them include physical system elements such as vehicles, stops, ticket booths, and turnstiles, along with abstract concepts such as schedules, fares, and routes. The reflection of the user (the human) on the model we construct will not be in the context of physical appearance like a mannequin or a stick figure, but in the context of the passenger role they take within the system. What matters is not physical form and size, but the nature of the interaction with the system.

At this point, you may rightly think that we do not need to think about these things, that there are professions such as urban planning and transportation engineering that exist precisely to construct these. Because systems such as public transportation, production lines, and supply chains consist of high-cost employees that cannot be entrusted to people without special expertise and experience, and they are built according to traditional templates that have been applied many times and proven to work. However, although these templates, mostly based on developments after the Second Industrial Revolution, are useful and practical, they are not sufficient for today's world that has left the Fourth Industrial Revolution behind. The discovery of potential problems and solutions brought by new technology requires not implementer approaches but creative approaches. How the signal receiver communicates with the transmitter is an engineering matter, but determining what they will say is a design activity. You can hire to increase the effectiveness of your organization, but to increase efficiency, what you need to do is again design. The key to being able to design something is to visualize it. Of course, schematizing every system is not as simple as an organizational hierarchy, but it does not require much more than the boxes and arrows that make up an organizational chart. At this point, I would like to talk about a few conceptual design methods that can be applied to make the abstract visible.

Context Diagram
These are models with relatively little detail used in the early stages of a system design project that facilitate seeing and understanding the big picture. They are used to map out system actors and the data or material flow between them, and to define the scope and operation of the system. It is another name for the Level 0 data flow diagram.

Data Flow Diagram
Data flow diagrams are formed by elaborating on the context diagram. They are used to model the system, represented by a single element in the context diagram, at the detail of the processes operating beneath it.

In the diagram above, we see the restaurant element's food ordering, reporting, and product supply processes, and how the ordering action relates to storage and reporting systems. When more detail is needed, engineering capabilities need to come into play; however, bringing the conceptual design to this level will generally be sufficient to evaluate the system, talk about it, and convey it to third parties.

Flowchart
It is used to show the predecessor-successor and conditional relationships of processes within a system. It is created with UML (Unified Markup Language), developed to represent different elements such as actions, inputs, and conditions. It is a diagram focused not so much on the architectural structure of the system but on the underlying operating logic.

Above we see a section from the flow diagram of a short-term car rental application. When we examine the diagram, we can easily understand the conditions (the white-colored sections) that the user must meet to move from vehicle selection to the payment step, such as being logged into the system and having a profile eligible to rent the selected vehicle, and how the system will inform the user (the red parallelograms) if these conditions are not met.

The tools used for conceptual design are of course not limited to these examples. There is a very wide selection ranging from simple charts like mind maps to technical documents like ERDs (entity-relationship diagrams). In today's world, where information and data flow design is far more important than form and pattern, to create value, whatever our work, we need to use conceptual design methods and tools more frequently and effectively. In today's world, where everyone and everything is connected to each other thanks to the internet, the most effective way to create value is to produce new systems. To be able to do this, it is necessary to be able to produce new templates as well as master existing ones. Conceptual design and modeling are no longer a special skill but a requirement for everyone. Even if your topic is a discipline with deep-rooted traditions such as medicine or education, the first thing to do to create value using digital opportunities will be to model the templates in the mind of a doctor or teacher. Because the way to build the future together is by making the invisible visible and carrying design consciousness beyond forms and patterns.

HBR Turkey - Alper Gokalp