There’s a restaurant in Toronto (I think it’s Nicey’s Eatery, but I may be wrong), with this sign on the wall:

It’s at the same time a quirky word trick and a passive aggressive warning:

“Don’t blame us if you’re disappointed - it’s because your expectations are too high.”

The sign has its roots in a manufacturing principle known as the Iron Triangle, which dates back to the 1950s.

The basic principle of the Iron triangle is that in any managed project, results have 3 constraints - time, quality, and cost. Two of these constraints will overpower the third.

*The Iron Triangle of Project Management*

As an example - McDonalds focus on providing fast food at low prices. These factors determine the ‘quality’ of it’s food.

Apple design products with high manufacturing tolerances, so getting them to market in line with competitors means a lot of waste and/or strict process control. As a result, product costs are higher than average.

I discovered the Iron Triangle during my time at the Royal Mint, and it’s actually useful when applied to creative work as well as project management. It’s a neat way of rationalising how to approach a brief, and keeping on track - especially if you’re a perfectionist who finds it hard to let things go.

I’ve always struggled with the word ‘quality’ however, because it’s subjective, and based on personal reference. Both examples above could be divisive purely because of their definitions of ‘quality’.

When I apply the Iron triangle to my coin design work, I tend to replace ‘Quality’ with ‘Focus’. It’s not perfect, but it encompasses the difference between a quick illustrative design (“Can we have a some hands and a flag?”), and something more intellectual (“We want to evoke the spirit of D-Day with an emphasis on hope for the future”). “Focus” will determine how much research and thought I put into a composition and its symbolism.

By changing the parameters of the Iron Triangle, it can help represent different constraints in varied contexts, which makes it a super useful tool.

In February, former justice minister Sir Robert Buckland called on the government to relax the functional skills requirements for neurodiverse people in apprenticeships. Currently, many autistic people looking to complete level 3 apprenticships are held back by the requirement to complete level 2 qualifications in English and Maths (there are alternative ways around this, but they’re convoluted).

The call comes as part of Bucklands review of Autism and Employment. Around 7 in 10 autistic young people are out of work, and the report suggests ways in which the pathways to employment can be adapted for candidates with autism. It’s a recognition that many autistic young people, who would otherwise be fully capable of operating in a mainstream workforce, are being held back by a requirement to demonstrate supplemental knowledge in a format that often derails them.

This strikes at the heart of something that I’ve learned through parenting an autistic child, and which in turn has reflected back on the way that I work as a designer. In a positive way, I should add.

Our son falls into a weird gap in the perception and treatment of autism - his challenges aren’t substantial enough to require a special educational environment, but they do put him behind the curve in terms of the pace and complexity of mainstream schooling. For the last 2 years of Primary, he had a personal 1-2-1 to help him stay on track and navigate the work.

Due to ESN funding changes in Wales, he moved to high school with neither a statement of need, nor funding to cover one. There’s a great TA in his class, but that’s it. Without any structured help, we’ve had to improvise, and this has highlighted the neurotypically linear and homogenous nature of the way we educate our kids - something that’s certainly an anathema to our creative household. It’s also where the Iron Triangle comes into play.

When we sit down to tackle homework, we’re often confronted with counterintuitive admin and specific requirements for recording, into which we have to fit ‘getting the point’.

If I draw this as an Iron Triangle, I come up with something like this:

For many capable autistic kids, the combination of analysing, recording and understanding can be overwhelming, with the result that no one thing gets done well.

By making a triangle, we can remind ourselves to consider constraints, and focus our son’s finite energy in the best way. We often separate the recording aspect of homework from the learning, and split it across a couple of nights, allowing him to recharge. This sometimes comes at the cost of requiring a time extension, but we feel it’s the right trade off. Quality trumps Time.

Schoolwork can often feel like it’s designed to prove that education has been delivered, rather than ensure that a child has learned anything.

As designers, it’s important to remind ourselves to identify, and keep referring back to, the original point of any creative process, so we can deploy disparate ideas and skills to get the right end result.

In fact, for designers, it’s not even about an end goal, really. It’s about being alive to a sort of creative Zeitgeist, and letting that shape your ideas and actions. I often find that once I’ve done due diligence on the symbolism and narrative of a design, the actual decorative composition kind of creates itself, because the narrative suggests certain shapes, colours, tools, and techniques. I view the narrative as more important than the minutae of the actual design.

I tend to have this conversation with my students when one of them inevitably presents a full page of font variations as ‘design research’, and I tell them a story about my wife and I deciding to paint our house grey…

We painted several swatches on the exterior wall, all slightly different shades. A yellowy-grey, a bluey-grey, a greeny-grey, a grey-grey etc.

The colour variations between each swatch were made apparent only because of the colour of each neighbouring swatch. In reality, the only grey we needed to consider was one that complimented our slate roof tiles, which were blue-grey. All the other variations could be discarded.

When my students create pages of font variations, or colour palettes, they’re not designing; they’re decorating. It’s usually a sign that they’re struggling with the brief, and padding out their work. I remind them that as long as their choice of font has some resonance to their overall design narrative - is informed by the story they are telling - then any minor variation is moot, and a waste of time (and money).

Buckland reminds us that procedure, accountability and benchmarking should not determine outcome, but instead should resonate with it, be deployed only where they enable it.

For autistic learners, the weight of procedure, designed by and for neurotypical people, is often a higher barrier than their autism.

For designers, a growing reliance on digital process to determine decorative output is threatening. AI can only work forwards - it reads instructions and pastes together an outcome driven purely by its limitations. Humans can work backwards - adapting their tools and techniques so they resonate with the brief, and in doing so, create underlying narrative.

In either case, lateral, innovative thinking gets hamstrung by procedure.

To paraphrase Den Xiaoping - “it doesn’t matter if the white cat or the black cat catches the mouse. What matters is that the mouse gets caught.” Now that’s a sign I’d like to see in a cafe…

#education #robertbuckland #autism #apprenticeships #design #irontriangle

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