QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SUMMER 2018

Design for ________

 DE SI G N DE F I NED
From Design Thinking to Integral Design
A BRIDGE NOT TOO FAR
T
his piece is not about today’s abundance of design
thinking prescriptions to help businesses be more
successful by using design. Nor does it dwell on the
practice of design as we have known it.
The full potential of design—to delight and enrich cus-
tomers while helping businesses be more successful—is
layered like an onion. Therefore, greater breadth and depth
are needed to understand and explain it more comprehen-
sively. In this brief article, we offer a framework that might
just be up to the task of integrating the whole of design.
Subjective Objectivity
To date, attempts to fully explain design can be compared
to the story of the six blind men and the elephant. This
ancient Indian parable broadly goes:
A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called
an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none were
familiar with its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said,
“We must inspect and know it by touch.” So they sought it
out, found it and groped about it. One person whose hand
landed on the trunk said, “This being is
like a snake.” For another whose hand
reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of
fan. As for another person whose hand
was upon its leg, the elephant was like
a tree trunk. The blind man who placed
his hand upon its side said, “It is a wall.”
Another who felt its tail described it as
a rope. The last felt its tusk stating the
elephant was like a spear.
In some versions, the blind men stop
talking and start listening and collaborate
in order to “see” the full elephant. In
another, a sighted man enters the par-
8 IDSA.ORG
able and describes the entire elephant from various perspec-
tives. The blind men then learn that they were all partially
correct and partially wrong. The moral is that while one’s
subjective experience is true, it may not be the totality of
truth, regardless of how objective it may appear.
This is what seems to be happening with design think-
ing as well. We see at least three possible reasons. First, the
strategic use of design in business is in vogue, arguably due
to the huge successes of organizations using design, such
as innovators like Apple and Airbnb and design adopters
like Amazon and Pepsico. Second, social media has made
everyone a critic in a globally competitive context. Therefore,
products and services have to be better and better to suc-
ceed. And third, nobody wants to miss out on achieving the
greater success that using design seems to promise. Hence,
a general thesis drives modern teaching and consulting
approaches to design. This is especially so in design thinking
programs, which promise clients methodologies that will help
their companies be more successful.
So design thinking can be thought of as the new
elephant in the room, a concept many
describe according to their own percep-
tions, but that few call out as an incomplete
description of the essential methodology of
design. But design is a two-way conversa-
tion and demands orginal, innovative and
even provocative interactions with custom-
The four quadrants (I, IT, WE and ITS)
I is the interior of the individual;
IT is the exterior of the individual;
WE is the interior of the collective; and
ITS corresponds to the exterior of the collective.

© 2018. Jeff Smith & Sunil Malhotra
ers, in addition to a good understanding of and response
to their needs and wants. And originality, innovation and
provocation are not known to proliferate from using typical
customer research methodologies, however design oriented
they may claim to be.
Integral Design Framework
We believe that describing design from philosopher Ken
Wilber’s integral reality perspective provides us with a holis-
tic vantage point to further explain design.
Ken Wilber is an American writer on transpersonal
psychology who has proposed a four-quadrant grid to
synthesize all human knowledge and experience. All
Quadrants All Levels (AQAL) is his basic framework (see
diagram on page 8). It models human knowledge and
experience along the interior-exterior and individual-collec-
tive axes as a comprehensive approach to reality.
As the theory goes, everything in the human experi-
ence happens within these four dimensions of reality. Our
aspiration in using this framework is that it leads to a more
definitive and holistic approach for all who seek to leverage
design more fully.
Much of the design journey of LUNAR’s first 30 years
was influenced by Wilber’s integral theory, helping the
design firm balance the individual and collective dimensions
of product design both internally and externally. The experi-
ences from using this approach in combination with the
body of Design-in Tech work at Ideafarms are what led us to
the idea of interpreting design through the AQAL framework.
And as such, we think the potential of reducing the blur
between design being, design doing, design thinking and
design results makes sense going forward.
We have begun prototyping integral design using
Wilber’s quadrants (left). And we are optimistic about the
possibilities to further describe, correlate, and develop fun-
damental design disciplines and detailed levels of skills.
This way of laying out design makes it easy to under-
stand the current popularity of its left-brain-oriented quad-
rants on the right side of the framework (pun unintended).
This is because quantifiable and objective dimensions of
reality are almost always more easily accepted by business
leaders. Here we find that design thinking maps well as the
process or system that seems to most drive measurable
results-oriented behavior.
The other dimensions are equally, if not more, sig-
nificant in ensuring that design does not get relegated to
being a mostly quantitative activity and that character and
personality do not get diminished. These dimensions, in
contrast, come from informed points of view combined with
interdisciplinary collaboration, both of which reside in the
opposing left quadrants.
Once the definition of the disciplines in each quadrant is
clear, the next step is to also include design sub-disciplines
and skills. And as we do, we imagine the integral design
framework can bridge the left and the right, the top and
the bottom, and the corners to corners. In short, we aim to
connect all aspects of design successfully to one to another.
—Jeff Smith, Co-founder, Smith+Furbershaw,
designsmith@gmail.com and Sunil Malhotra, Co-founder
and CEO, Ideafarms, sunil.malhotra@ideafarms.com
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