A Unifying Concept Between Design and Innovation
Jobs-to-be-Done practitioners aren't the only ones to think like this
The Finnish architect and designer Eliel Saarinen said…
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
While this is a solution-space concept, it addresses the next larger goal. When I saw this it struck me that this is exactly what we preach in the Jobs-to-be-Done world of innovation. By addressing the larger problem, we find opportunities for growth which can often result in disruption.
For example, how did the turntable play a vinyl record in the broader context of a music enthusiast who was trying to listen to music? It was a single thing in a larger context that required multiple things to get the job done completely. Could the one thing help the music enthusiast in other ways? The answer is probably no.
However, thinking about the objectives of people in a larger context allows us to identify resources as they emerge that can be applied in new ways to help us reach the objectives differently, more efficiently, in more contexts and situations. We can know in advance that these resources will need to exist and even describe the ideal attributes they must have.
It can also lead to fewer visible features through automation and infrastructure evolution. We didn’t know about the Internet in the 80’s, but we could certainly imagine music just playing in our ears on demand, even if we didn’t know how to do it.
I challenge everyone, when faced with a product, to ask themselves why the product exists, and what is the outcome it produces. Then ask yourself, what role it plays in a larger objective. Are there one, or are their many of these larger objectives that it plays a role in?
If you focus on features of the thing you will simply add cost and complexity to the thing.