https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872620300411
My notes: this is could potentially be a really important step for the framing of my thinking on policy impacting. Designers having to go through backwards leaps to reframe the brief and understand the intention behind the change. This model screams that considerate thought be put into the briefing from the beginning.
The funnel is a really useful way to demonstrate how decision making typically takes place in an organisation and the limitations it creates. Using this funnel to demonstrate policy impacting could be a great argument to why (good) problem framing needs to be done upfront, to make later decisions more effective.
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The Steinberg funnel is a model that demonstrates how insights move back and forth through a design and decision making process.
“strategic” is concerned with the making of well-informed decisions and “design” is a useful mindset and approach for doing so in an era of uncertainty.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872620300411
The Funnel’s vertical axis represents a quantity of decisions, and therefore also possibilities. The horizontal axis represents time. To the right is the number 1, representing a concrete and specific choice. To the left is infinity, representing the endless number of choices (and therefore eventual outputs) that could be made.26 The process of design (and innovation) is that of moving toward a singular output—and agreed course of action—be it a new stool, a constitution, a recipe, a welfare policy, or a submarine.
The left end of the diagram is where lots of decisions remain yet to be made. The work on this end tends to be more abstract and big-picture, and these initial questions often have a strong effect on shaping future outputs.
This is intuitive: there are more ways to answer the question, “What nourishes me?” than there are to answer the question “What should we have for lunch in Helsinki?” The right end of the Funnel represents a specific action that has been taken (“lohikeitto at Cafe Engel”). Between the two ends of the spectrum, decisions are made explicitly and directly by actors at various levels, as well as implicitly and indirectly by the context, conditions, and biases that influence the actors involved, forcing their hand with varying degrees of pressure. When explaining the Funnel diagram it’s natural to start on the right side of the page, where design is most familiar, and to walk towards the left side, describing each leap as you go.
The Funnel diagram was Steinberg’s diagnosis of the state of design (as a practice and discipline) in 2006 when he first drew it at Harvard. It described the status quo as one where designers were often working backwards to represent the needs of users and argue for better solutions they had discovered by virtue of their unique approach to needs-finding and problem solving.
There are certainly designers who have made a name for themselves for their heroic efforts to rewrite the brief or reframe the problem,29 and indeed designers often rightfully pride themselves on their ability to land these rhetorical backflips.
The power of designerly reframing has been explored thoroughly by Kees Dorst in papers and a book length treatment30 but we can also use the prevalence of reframing and rewriting the brief within design discourse31 as a weak signal that hints at the incompleteness of contemporary governance and business models.
Together, traditional western business and governance models simplify the world at the expense of the lived reality of this planet’s incredible diverse populations. To the extent that designers valorize the art of rewriting the brief, I believe it should be recognized as a highly developed coping mechanism rather than an end in itself. We should also seek to participate in the briefing from the beginning, which the Funnel puts front and center.