This weekend I am buried in a seminar on how to be a more engaging public speaker. Most of us fear public speaking. We fear being embarrassed in front of crowds or not being seen as credible in what we are talking about. I too have those fears, which is why I am in the seminar.

Our homework tonight was to write our defining moment, a story about why we are talking about what we’re talking about, so here’s mine:

Having started my career as a visual designer, I was quite happy just dealing with colors, objects, and fonts. As long as clients were happy, I was happy. Though throughout that time I found I really struggled with clients who didn’t appreciate my viewpoint on design. Like most designers I felt I was the expert in all things related to the “beautification” of a product.

Then the dot com crash hit and my life changed forever. After a year of underemployment and struggling to make ends meet I landed in the mortgage industry. I was working in a call center taking calls from people who needed their mortgage loan yesterday. I came to the quick realization that people didn’t understand finance nor did I to be frank. Calls such as “now I can afford a home with this interest only loan” & “I need to pay my contractor who started a month ago; why hasn’t this loan closed?” left me more then a little concerned. This would be an ongoing theme in my life as I began the journey towards financial literacy.

Then I landed in the insurance industry working on a change program to shift resources around the company, save money, and streamline the overall business. Here I suddenly had a new voice. I was hired to work on the internal web site redesign and any other admin related tasks. Having come out of the dot com bust with experience in web design I was a perfect fit for this small group. I knocked out the redesign, creating what I would (years later) come to understand were called wireframes and user flows not specs and process flows. They began to move me around to other similar projects and before I knew it I was a business analyst bringing design thinking to business objectives and suddenly it hit me. There was something to the designers way of thinking that was a different more encompassing approach to problem solving then the traditional MBA thinking. I began to explore what this meant and eventually found my way to Interaction Design but it was that project starting as an Administrative Assistant that led me where I am today.

We don’t think about it as it’s second to what we do. I design something then I create this document then it’s huge and I have to condense it and then the client has to extract it then there might be problems and he has to go through all these troubles then gets

Two most effective ways of communicating is talking and drawing. Drawing it out on the white board

But how would I communicate differently if I were right next to the client. I would probably just reach over the wall and talk to him. Create insights on a list and post it up on your wall to live in their space all the time and know them. It immerses you in what your are designing and their needs. Pretend your client is part of your team.

Analog crowd source: a wall of different concepts and then the developer and you can sit down and talk about what you do. Then the developer can feel like they are part of the design process and add the issues with the technical side. The more you talk about your ideas the more you can flush them out. A lot easier on a white board to get ideas across quickly about issues or the emotional appeal on the project.

IDEAS – We’ll make more! If you have to redraw it then it may create a new and better idea after the next iteration.

Clients don’t understand your process if they are new to working with you so you’ll need to educate them that this is a process. Instead of presenting ideas, sketch with the client. Start broad and iterate down to the solution. Like spiraling down from the top of a tornado to the bottom of it.

Don’t turn your website into an app. You just failed if you are going create an app. How are people going to use it and for how long? Sketched in the wrong direction will usually lead to the right direction. Depending on the client… drill down into their logo and how their audience views them. Might open a conversation in direction. Such as BET’s star which is seen as “hope” for up and coming pop stars and rap stars. Utilizing the story of BET we personalized the app with relevance for the audience. Don’t build an app. Build a brand experience. We implemented ways for the audience of the shows to interact with the stars.

I first learned about Glitch through my friend, Shelly Bowman, after sign up I immediately fell in love with this cute little browser based massive multi-player game. You can get a feel for the game from the trailer above  but some of the stuff the trailer doesn’t show is the intricate details such as the count down to the end of a skill training:

I enjoy it is it’s “sense of humor” and quirkiness. You can pet trees (which I swear must be a take from the fact this company is based near Berkeley, California), talk to yoga frogs, nibble on pigs, massage butterflies, and they may even want to discuss things of this world with you (see below). In order to increase skill training time you can get “Rock” to speed read. They say the devil is in the details. In this case, the joy of the game is in the details and all those details help tell the story. Tiny Speck has gone so far to make their site a joy to use on mobile. I believe Glitch has a lot of potential to be a run away success when it goes public.

Update:
Tiny Speck Closes $10.7 Million Second Round on Social MMO Glitch, Entering Closed Beta Also of note, in the article, it’s mentioned that Tiny Speck will release an API for the Glitch animation to be utilized in other projects.

Tiny Speck Expects Glitch but No Glitches in Launch: User will be able to grow the game in their own way by using the API to add streets and other sections of the game. A truly customizable experience.

Tiny Speck Founder, Stewart Butterfield, Talks Glitch

As a designer, I am responsible for the experiences I create for my users. Whether creating a financial web site or a game, I need to consider how people will interact with that information. What excites me about this video is it takes an everyday object and creates a new and unique experience which changes the behaviour of the user. Interesting.

Another example is Mint.com.

Most people would say that they 1) do not understand finance and/or 2) find it rather boring. I am included in that population. Until the day I found myself working in finance, I can honestly say I didn’t understand it. No one spent time explaining it to me. School never had a class in it. How was I ever to understand it? I was frustrated with money.

Enter Mint.com and all of a sudden you have users who say, “Mint.com has changed the way I view my finances.” Really? Why is that?

Mint adds color and graphics. It talks to you about your money. Shows you where you are spending, where you can cut, helps you budget, watch your investments grow, etc. It provides a simple interface for ease of use and understanding. It has changed behaviour and the user’s understanding of their money.

How much more as designers can we help our users understand things they do not and affect behaviour within applications, web sites, games, and other digital means? What can we look to, to help us explore new forms of interactive understanding? Every project differs. In the case of JunoBaby it simply needed to be a simple module to help users understand the company. In the case of AEG (redesign live soon), it was an interactive flash piece that explained the historical timeline of the company through imagery and video while matching with the historical periods in time to help users better understand the time periods the company was making such decisions.

Whitney Hess has posted the following:

Jess Bezos’s, the founder of Amazon.com, says, “Obsess over customers“. More importantly:

Obsess over customers: “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers.”

Invent: “Any time we have a problem, we never accept either/or thinking. We try to figure out a solution that gets both things.”
Think long term: “It requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood.”

It’s always Day 1: “There’s always more invention in the future. Always more customer innovation. New ways to obsess over customers.”

What I like about this video she has posted is it gets back to a point I have made about never losing touch with the customer. In all my experience with Six Sigma, Change Management, and User Experience, I think the only thing that really touches the customer is a culture of asking and consistently testing and iterating on your product line with your customers (or users). Hence why I have fallen into User Experience as a career.

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On top of this Business Week recently posted an article about the IDEA 09 Design Awards calling the article, “Designing a Better World” where they said, “Business leaders should care about design because it hits the bottom line… more than anything else, design builds a business.”

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For today’s post I am posting some interesting links.

Milissa Tarquini’s Blasting the Myth of the Fold
When I first started my career as a web designer, I remember the old adage “design for the fold” & “don’t make the users scroll too much”. Milissa’s article argues that people are now use to scrolling and that the fold no longer has the relevance it use to. However, you still want to lay out the information and design on the page in order to encourage the user(s) to scroll to the remaining content below the fold.

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Other links of potential interest:
Future of Web Design
Mostly Flex & code based articles – It’s following some interesting things happening in code and flex development through Adobe.

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And a presentation: Design Thinking in Business

| View | Upload your own

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And a video: Who is the T, in IT?

Courtesy of , who stole it from

Design remains the most underutilized and misunderstood tool at the disposal of business.

Building competitive advantage in our increasingly fast-moving, information-rich world of global access is not easy. For a while, technology was the answer. Engineers developed new technologies, whether a chip or chemistry, that did something wonderful, at least in the eyes of those who came up with it, and their companies rushed it to market and, often, to initial success. But technology alone is not enough. Take, for example, an electronic product laden with features, most of which are never used by the customer. By comparison, today’s biggest winners, such as the Palm V or the iPod, went beyond the raw technology; they used design to simplify technology, delivering it to consumers in a way that’s meaningful, engaging, and easy to use. The exceptional sales results speak for themselves, in these cases as well:

- OXO is the leader in the commodity marketplace of kitchen utensils because its commitment to the design process led to products that literally redefined this category.
- Whirlpool went from no market share in the front-end loading washer/dryer category to a 40% market share in one year through an extensive user-research and design effort that redefined the category and the money that could be made in it.
- Lenovo, which acquired IBM’s PC division, already had the largest market share of computers in China, in part because of its use of design to truly address the needs of the Chinese market.
- Proctor & Gamble continues to build new billion-dollar brands by using design to redefine existing technology. This effort is led by a vice president who reports to the chairman and CEO and whose mission is to “build design into the DNA of P&G.”

As these examples suggest, successful products and services result from joint efforts among marketing, engineering, research, design, and other disciplines. Design is intrinsically linked to a company’s ability to meet its business goals and achieve its mission. Done well, design can become a strategic resource to produce the kind of innovative customer experience that strengthens global brands. Yet design remains the most underutilized and misunderstood of all of the essential resources to achieve innovation and brand leadership.

What is design?

Let’s start with the basics. Just what is design? Design is a user-focused, prototype-based development process that simplifies complexity and achieves success through collaboration.

Design is user-focused, not just because it incorporates research on what customers say they want, but because it is grounded in observing potential users in their own environments and from that observation developing ideas that will improve their lives and provide an enjoyable experience.

Design is prototype-based because it involves continuously making models. Making even crude representations of some future product or idea provides a means to think about the idea. Both two- and three-dimensional models provide a common language to everyone on the development team. Prototypes make ideas real, identify problems and suggest improvements. Prototyping is an iterative process that continues throughout the development process.

One way to think of a designer is as somebody who has learned to speak a language that everyone understands but that the designer has been trained to speak. This modeling language is essential to an effective innovation process precisely because it gives everyone, from every discipline, a common ground and keeps them on the same page. With even a crude model sitting on the table, there are no words to misinterpret. Prototypes are a very important part of the discovery and development process, providing a tool to explore and expand an idea.

This is the good news. The bad news, as it were, is that the process is often chaotic and unpredictable. Business-school textbooks like to talk about a’phase gate process’ for product development, and yet, as we are told repeatedly, the most successful products do not result from the standard process; they are always “different.” So, although design is a process, it is one that thrives on complexity and is not necessarily linear. However, it can translate this complexity into something understandable.

This is very right brain, while we live in a predominantly left-brain, often engineering-led business world. This may explain to some extent why design is underutilized. The same complexity and chaos that disables many managers, stimulates designers and their way of thinking. The designer is inclusive, never having enough information or enough options, always looking for more possibilities and for opportunities to combine them in unexpected ways. One of design’s important contributions is to simplify complexity.

Finally, design succeeds because of collaboration. The input from different disciplines is critical to creating a well-informed product or service; design takes this input and translates into a common modeling language, the glue that brings common understanding to the many disciplines, enabling the development process to move forward more quickly and more successfully.

What design is not

It is also important to understand what design is not. Design is not art, it is not aesthetics, and it is not engineering. It’s not the work of one person and it is not the solution to all of your problems.

Although design is not art, it is still written about in the Arts & Leisure section of most major newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, and, to many executives, design is more about art than it is about business. But the truth is that design is “applied art” in the sense that it is applied to solve a particular problem or address a new opportunity.

Design is not aesthetics. Aesthetics is one of the many results of a successful design process, but design is the way you get there. Design is not engineering. In many meetings with executives and with business school students they’re nodding their heads, “Yes, I understand design, we do design in our company,” but they’re thinking about their engineering group. One way to appreciate the difference between engineering and design is to look at the required courses from a major engineering school for mechanical engineering and then look at the required courses for industrial design. There is no overlap at all. They are very different courses of study, taken by different people and both make a major contribution to the success of many businesses.

Design is not the work of one individual. Unfortunately there is a tendency by some to think that they will bring design into their organization by having an internationally known designer work for them. It’s not that easy. As discussed above, design is a process, not just good looking apparel to be draped over an existing product. The understanding and use of design must be part of the way the company does business. The company must practice design leadership by incorporating design into the company in many different ways.

And finally, design is not the solution to all of your problems. Design in a silo cannot achieve great results. Successful design exists as part of a multidisciplinary, collaborative process that can produce true innovation.

Why design is so Important today

The examples at the beginning demonstrate the important role design can play. It works for companies of any size, and it offers tremendous opportunity precisely because it is so underutilized and misunderstood. Those who harness this resource may well see their business thrive and grow without the need for the acquisition of new technology or other companies.

Balancing Design and Information: Why did you choose this topic?
I chose it because striking a balance between information and graphic design is a daily tug-of-war for me.

:This is so true!

Somewhere along the Internet timeline, designers have been asked to wear two hats. I don’t fully understand how this happened because it seems counter productive to the creative psyche. Information design is such an undefined job description. Some people define it differently than I do, but for the sake of clarification, I’ll attempt to define it in light of the role I’ve assumed in my current position:

Information design is the breakdown of information, in a database or raw format, rebuilt for Internet use with an infrastructure that lends itself to a navigation system that others find intuitive.

: think about this further. How is it Intuitive? What is expected on a site? How do people think about a site? How do they find their way around a site? What specifically is intuitive about it? (ask people in the industry about it)

The description makes my head spin. I’m visually-oriented. I create with the right side of my brain. Yet my job asks me to use the left side of my brain; the side that requires the formulation of words to describe a picture that I already have in my head.

: As a designer how do you work with this? around this? What would help in getting your visual images into words or onto the computer screen?

(Post a new comment)
I was doing some reading online about design and came across this article about balancing information and design. I believe it was written by Danielle Hull.

Written by RitaSue Siegel for Communication Arts

Lately, I’ve been thinking about three things. 1. How does a designer learn to become a manager or design leader? 2. Design has become a critical and strategic function in today’s evolving organizations, but will design educators adapt curricula to enable graduates to meet rising expectations for design performance? 3. Will design education embrace experiential learning, through internships, to remove barriers between education and practice?

Must design managers be MBAs?
Many designers aspire to become design managers and some think they will get there faster with an MBA. Not true. First, most business schools do not recognize design management as a critical business function. Second, business schools do not stress the importance of developing skills of persuasion and developing meaningful relationships in organizations in order to get things done. Without relationship-building skills, how will a design manager succeed at guiding an organization through the process of integrating design into their corporate structure?

Has design become too important to entrust to designers? (No!)
Design curricula can adapt to the evolution in business, technology and the social environment by providing students the experience, i.e., internships, to test classroom learning about design fundamentals, research and the process of design in organizations. If curricula do not adapt, design education will be preempted by other specialists who have discovered that the process of innovation, “creativity applied to a purpose,”1 or “design thinking” (called a “business behavior” by Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek), is fundamental to the creation of marketplace value.

Design thinking is critical to organizations in transforming their functions and form to respond to evolutionary marketplace forces. Business has raised its expectations of design process deliverable—more than nice typography, lovely form or space. But will design education adapt so that grads can deliver “more” and move up the value chain to the front-end of product development? Or will traditional design program grads be relegated to executing other people’s strategies and concepts?

What an MBA is or isn’t
My goal is to demystify the MBA, not denigrate it; to remove it once and for all from consideration by designers who seek to become design managers.

As Harvard Business School professors explain in “Is Business Management a Profession”2 (and I paraphrase), “The basis of most business school curriculum today is a functional approach, the grouping of courses to mirror the differentiation of finance, administration, operations and marketing as the major activities of the firm.” (Please note, design is not considered a major activity.) “This structure evolved in response to turning out grads to perform tasks that would be required of them by employers.”

Business students are provided with no more information about getting things done in an organization than are students who study design. An MBA program does not teach leadership skills. And, for the record, leadership and management are not synonymous. MBA programs do not provide study in relationship building, flexibility, collaboration, influencing, presentation and other skills vital for working in organizations. Actually, it is more important to provide experiences where students can practice these skills.

Business schools have lost their way according to recent articles in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review and books about the Wharton School and Stanford Business School. Professors “know too little about how real businesses work and spend too much time cranking out highly technical papers of the kind that the academic system mistakenly rewards,” said the Wall Street Journal.3 “They are locked into dysfunctional competition for media rankings (‘Top 10 Business Schools,’ for example), that divert resources from long-term knowledge creation.”

Can design schools adapt to today’s environment?
Many design educators are also locked into systems that evolved in response to teaching grads to perform tasks required by employers from another era. Most cannot adapt to the need to offer the integrated array of tools designers need, and accreditation bodies have no incentive to encourage change.

Design work is now done in integrated, multidisciplinary teams. Guiding students in building relationships across “the deep gulfs of understanding between design and other disciplines”4 requires experience doing it.

I recommend a requirement that design educators have at least five years of experience working in major consultancies, corporations or organizations. Many become teachers right after graduating from the very schools where they teach. Many do not keep up with design and design process evolution. Many practicing designer/design managers participate in shaping the education process by making presentations at conferences, which educators rarely see, and providing internships. Smart students with career ambitions beyond sitting at a computer screen quickly realize the limitations of their education and so consider an MBA.

To stay current with the latest design thinking, designers and professors should read BusinessWeek, follow the online links, and study the Web sites of leaders like IDEO, Design Continuum, The Idea Factory, Doblin Group, University of Cincinnati and Institute for Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. I suggest learning how design became a critical business function at Whirlpool, JCI, Nissan, Samsung and Ben Q, and scouring the Web sites of the Design Management Institute for conference presentations and other organizations.

It has never been easy to describe design, but ‘they’ get it now
In the defunct British magazine Design,5 I described a panel about American design in New York moderated by Ralph Caplan, one-time editor of ID magazine. The presenters were Jay Doblin, pioneer and guru of design planning and methodology, Lella Vignelli, a designer of furniture, exhibitions and interiors, and Chuck Mauro whose industrial design work focused on human factors. When they had finished, Caplan asked if they were all in the same business. They said, “Yes.” In his new book Caplan writes (a bit romantically), “design is deliciously applicable to almost everything, almost everywhere, the design process is inclusive to the point of non-definition.”6

It has been a long, hard struggle, but organizations now understand that design has more value than simply producing artifacts. Some use the design process, “design thinking,” as an integrator and facilitator for innovation, a means of strategizing about the future, identifying new markets and developing products. And some recognize that a “great product” like an iPod creates emotional bonds with consumers, generates excitement and provides a shorthand for a company to talk about itself and for everyone to talk about the company.

Toward a solution—The professional model for design education
Only the University of Cincinnati is structured to provide students with internships or ‘co-ops,’ real-world educational experiences, during which they learn to collaborate, communicate, strategize, interpret, adapt and lead. Through five non-consecutive internships, alternating with quarters in the classroom, design students test their design, technical, writing, presentation and relationship-building skills. They often work side-by-side with incredible people and are exposed to an array of business and cultural contexts that will become available to them when they graduate. Many companies later hire their interns because of the relationships built and the talent and intelligence they exhibited.

And, equally important, the curriculum is informed by student feedback.

Medical education has always incorporated work experience. The New Yorker magazine, in its Annals of Medicine series, describes Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston as the only hospital in the country “to require surgical residents to demonstrate proficiency in simulated [surgical] procedures in order to advance to the next year.”7

“Though surgical skills can improve with practice,” Dr. Daniel Jones, the chief of minimally invasive surgery there, said, “medical schools shouldn’t encourage students with poor hand-eye coordination or other severe limits in psychomotor ability.” Instead of letting them become surgeons, as at other schools, they are encouraged to move on to specialties that may suit them better.

This kindness should be extended to design students, who through internships, will learn whether or not they have the combination of form, intellectual and personal skills to succeed in a career in design.

Changes in the marketplace
Organizations building brands in the U.S. no longer rely solely upon mass-market advertising to reach consumers. They seek new ways to connect with consumers, or more precisely, to be invited into their lives.

And as a result, the design of products, communications, services and environments, has become more important than ever before. Organizations are eager to incorporate the process by which designers learn about consumer/user needs into their cultures to enable designers to create delightful experiences that enhance consumer’s lives through all of the above.

The future is now
Enrollment in design schools is strong. Design is a hot topic. Now that the value of design and design process are being discovered by non-designers, will the study of design be confined to design schools?

Even designers who become individual contributors need to learn how to get things done through other people.

Today, every designer is involved in design management or leadership (whether or not they are a Design Manager). Many are being asked to take responsibility for how a brand or category of brands is experienced by the customer across all touch points. Many are responsible for developing innovative products, communications, environments and services in ways compelling to consumers who may not have known they want or need them.

Being a successful designer or design manager today also requires an understanding of business, marketing and sales. Why must so many design students wait until graduation to get hit on the head by the real world when they could have gained experience with it through internships?

Just a few days into an executive management course at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Margaret J. Miller, a senior economist at the World Bank, found herself sitting at a table wearing heavy leather gloves and vision-obscuring glasses, trying to figure out how a person with a physical impairment might experience the process of wrapping a gift. The goal of the five-day Managing Teams for Innovation & Success (MTIS) course: to see the experience through new eyes. “With a few basic tools — just craft materials, really — people could actually start to think about things from different points of view and be creative,” says Miller.

Where to send managers to learn how to be creative is becoming an important issue for top executives. After all, the MBA is a degree in “administration,” and in a business world where creativity and innovation are at a premium, skills in administering organizations have less value.

With MBA enrollments down, B-schools are striving to become more relevant to prospective students. To remain leading suppliers of management talent to corporations, consulting firms, investment banks, and other business, B-schools are being forced to adapt to a changing world. “More and more, companies find themselves involved in exploration,” says Margaret A. Neale, a professor of organizational behavior and leader of the MTIS program at Stanford. “To be competitive, you have to be more creative.”

Mixed Success
Stanford is doing just that by establishing a new Institute of Design that will teach design thinking and strategy to business, engineering, and design students. This “D-school,” founded by Stanford engineering professor David Kelley, also founder of design powerhouse IDEO, may well give Stanford an edge over its B-school rivals as innovation becomes more valued for corporations striving to increase their revenues.

The Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the other top D-school in the U.S., is already sending many of its grads to big businesses. “More than half our graduates are going into strategy, marketing, and research in companies, not just design,” says Patrick Whitney, director of the ID. Large consultancies such as McKinsey & Co. are hiring recent grads.

Business schools have been trying to inject design thinking into their curriculae for well over a decade, with mixed success. Many have worked with the Corporate Design Foundation in Boston to develop design courses. These B-schools tend to offer a single elective or executive MBA class in conventional product design.

Harvard Business School’s course in Managing the Innovation Process, Northwestern’s Product Development & Design, and Georgetown’s Developing New Products & Services are all extremely popular among MBA students. And an elective at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, for example, has had students developing improvements to cars for years.

Problem-finding
B-schools are are now trying to go beyond the single elective in product design by linking up with design schools. One of best programs in the country is the Integrated Product Development track for MBAs at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Designers, engineers, and marketers mix it up in the classroom to develop prototypes of useful products that are commercially viable. MBAs more accustomed to financial analysis and bottom-line issues are pushed to think more creatively. “Innovation is critical in management. You have to innovate to compete and survive,” says Carnegie Mellon Dean Kenneth B. Dunn.

At the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, Sara L. Beckman, a senior lecturer in operations, teaches a course called Design as a Strategic Business Issue. Beckman has teamed up with IDEO, Berkeley’s School of Engineering, and California College of the Arts to teach a course called Managing the New Product Development Process. For many MBAs, it’s the first time they have ever worked with non-business people on projects. “The analytical MBA focuses on solving a problem, but the design process focuses on problem-finding,” says Beckman.

That’s the premise behind the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School executive program — Design, Innovation & Strategy — scheduled for this fall in Milan and Copenhagen. The course, part of the Wharton Fellows program that brings together mostly middle managers from around the world, was conceived by a group of senior executives. Their rationale? Design is often the path to innovation.

INSEAD’s joint program with the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., one of the leading car design schools in the world, brings design students to Europe to team up with business students in various courses. Then they go to Pasadena, where students present their designs.

Many companies are going directly to top design firms to set up customized executive-education sessions. Most of these involve getting the CEO and his top managers out shopping for the things their company sells. It’s a game of “be your customer” that, despite its simplicity, can have enormous impact. Samsung has learned a great deal about design by attending various sessions at IDEO and other consulting firms.

Learning how to be creative is one of the great managerial challenges ahead. It was once obvious where managers should go for training. That’s no longer the case.

READER COMMENTS

Having never taken a typography class this is fun for me!

It’s remarkable how often business strategy, the purpose of which is to direct action toward a desired outcome, leads to just the opposite: stasis and confusion. Strategy should bring clarity to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people where you, as their leader, are taking them — and what they need to do to get there. But the tools executives traditionally use to communicate strategy — spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks — are woefully inadequate for the task. You have to be a supremely engaging storyteller if you rely only on words, and there aren’t enough of those people out there. What’s more, words are highly open to interpretation — words mean different things to different people, especially when they’re sitting in different parts of the organization. The result: In an effort to be relevant to a large, complicated company, strategy often gets mired in abstractions.

People need to have a visceral understanding — an image in their minds — of why you’ve chosen a certain strategy and what you’re attempting to create with it. Design is ideally suited to this endeavor. It can’t help but create tangible, real outcomes.

Because it’s pictorial, design describes the world in a way that’s not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film, scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience the thing that the strategy seeks to describe. If, say, Motorola unveils a plan to create products that have never existed before, everyone in the organization will have a different idea of what that means. But if Motorola creates a video so people can see those products, or makes prototypes so people can touch them, everyone has the same view.

Unfortunately, many people continue to think of design in very narrow terms. Industrial products and graphics are outcomes of the design process, but they do not begin to describe the boundaries of design’s playing field. Software is engineered, but it is also designed — someone must come up with the concept of what it is going to do. Logistics systems, the Internet, organizations, and yes, even strategy — all of these are tangible outcomes of design thinking. In fact, many people in many organizations are engaged in design thinking without being aware of it. The result is that we don’t focus very much on making it better.

If you dig into business history, you see that the same thing occurred with the quality movement. As business strategist Gary Hamel has pointed out, there was a time when people didn’t know what quality manufacturing was and therefore didn’t think about it. Nevertheless, they were engaged with quality — they created products of good or bad durability and reliability. Then thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming deconstructed quality — they figured out what it was and how to improve it. As soon as people became conscious of it, manufactured goods improved dramatically.

The same thing needs to happen with design. Organizations need to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time making people conscious of design thinking — not because design is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it, we’ll make it better. And that’s an imperative for any business, because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation productivity. That is, it can increase the rate at which you generate good ideas and bring them to market. Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems. When you bring design thinking into that strategic discussion, you join a powerful tool with the purpose of the entire endeavor, which is to grow. Here is Ideo’s five-point model for strategizing by design.

Hit the Streets

Any real-world strategy starts with having fresh, original insights about your market and your customers. Those insights come only when you observe directly what’s happening in your market. As Jane Fulton Suri, who directs our human-factors group, notes in her book Thoughtless Acts? (Chronicle Books, 2005), “Directly witnessing and experiencing aspects of behavior in the real world is a proven way of inspiring and informing [new] ideas. The insights that emerge from careful observation of people’s behavior . . . uncover all kinds of opportunities that were not previously evident.”

Very often, you can build an entire strategy based on the experiences your customers go through in their interactions with your organization. Service brands have a horrible habit of focusing on the one interaction where they think they make money. If you’re running an airline, there’s an awful temptation to focus all of your attention on what it’s like to fly a particular route on a particular aircraft. In fact, you can track backward and forward a whole series of interactions that consumers have with you that are very relevant. If you start to map out that entire journey, you begin to understand how you might innovate to create a much more robust customer experience.

Recruit T-Shaped People

Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can’t just stand in your own shoes; you’ve got to be able to stand in the shoes of others. Empathy allows you to have original insights about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.
“We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do.”

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That’s what you’re after at this point — patterns that yield ideas.

These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don’t put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return with many artifacts — notes, photos, maybe even recordings of what they’ve seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making: They explore observations very quickly and build on one another’s insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their observations come directly from the real world.

Build to Think
“Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. In a sense, we build to think.”

Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a promising idea, you build it. The prototype is typically a drawing, model, or film that describes a product, system, or service. We build these models very quickly; they’re rough, ready, and not at all elegant, but they work. The goal isn’t to create a close approximation of the finished product or process; the goal is to elicit feedback that helps us work through the problem we’re trying to solve. In a sense, we build to think.

When you rapidly prototype, you’re actually beginning to build the strategy itself. And you’re doing so very early in the innovation cycle. This enables you to unlock one of your organization’s most valuable assets: people’s intuitions. When you sit down with your senior team and show them prototypes of the products and services you want to put out in two years’ time, you get their intuitive feel for whether you’re headed in the right direction. It’s a process of enlightened trial and error: Observe the world, identify patterns of behavior, generate ideas, get feedback, repeat the process, and keep refining until you’re ready to bring the thing to market.

Not long ago, we worked with a large food-processing company on the possibility of incorporating RFID technology into its supply chain. After many rounds of prototyping and getting feedback, we made a three-minute video that described a very complex interaction of suppliers, customers, logistics, weather, geography, and a host of other real-world conditions that showed how RFID might work. The video rapidly accelerated the development of a potential RFID-based strategy, because the company could instantly give us even sharper feedback and help us refine it. Rapid prototyping helps you test your progress in a very tangible way and ultimately makes your strategic thinking more powerful.

The Prototype Tells a Story

Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process — it generates feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections — and a storytelling process. It’s a way of visually and viscerally describing your strategy.

Some years ago, a startup called Vocera came to us with a new technology based on the Star Trek communicator — that “Beam me up, Scotty” device. They had worked out the technology — an elegant device the size of a cigarette lighter that you could wear around your neck and use to connect instantly with anyone on the network. But the team had no way to describe why people would need the thing. We made a five-minute film that played out a scenario where everyone in the company had these gadgets. The storyline followed how one person used the communicator to rapidly assemble a crisis team dispersed across an office campus. The film showed that while fixed communications and mobile phones are very good for expected interactions, this device was ideal for reacting to the unexpected.

The team used the film to tell their story; it helped them raise VC funding and it acted as the guiding framework for the development and marketing of the product, which is called the Vocera Communications Badge. But there’s an interesting twist to this tale. We thought the badge would work best on big office campuses. The market thought otherwise. Vocera’s two largest markets are hospitals and big-box retail stores.

In the end, it didn’t really matter that the market opportunity morphed into something different. Because you’re testing and refining your strategy early and often in the design process, the strategy continually evolves. When the market changes, as it did with Vocera, the strategy can change along with it. This gives you a big jump start over abstract, word-based forms of strategy, in which the first time you get to test the strategy’s outcome is when you actually roll it out. You can’t gauge the strategy’s effectiveness until you achieve the end result and do your postmortem. I don’t see why that’s useful. By building your strategy early on, in a sense you’re doing a premortem: You’re giving yourself a chance to uncover problems and fix them in real time, as the strategy unfolds.

Design Is Never Done

Even after you’ve rolled out your new product, service, or process, you’re just getting started. In almost every case, you move on to the next version, which is going to be better because you’ve had more time to think about it. The basic idea for the notebook computer came out of Ideo some 20 years ago: Ideo cofounder Bill Moggridge is listed on the patent for the design that lets you fold a screen over a keyboard. Since then, the laptop has been redesigned — and greatly improved — hundreds of times, because design is never done. The same goes for strategy. The market is always changing; your strategy needs to change with it. Since design thinking is inherently rooted in the world, it is ideally suited to helping your strategy evolve.

It all comes back to the fact that in order to really raise innovation productivity within organizations, at the strategic level and everywhere else, you have to increase the amount of design thinking inside organizations. Doing so helps you get to clarity faster, helps your organization understand where you’re taking it, helps you figure out whether you’re on the right track, and enables you to adapt quickly to change. Those are pretty valuable survival skills.

Some companies already understand this and are working design thinking into their organizations. It’s not such a hard thing to do. The toughest part is taking that first step — breaking away from your habitual way of working and getting out into the world.

Tim Brown is the CEO and president of Ideo, one of the world’s leading product-design firms.

In October 2003, several hundred graphic designers gathered in Vancouver for the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ biennial conference. For three days, they argued, debated, and fulminated over what seemed a daunting question: How could they make the world — especially the business world — understand the power of design? Today, that challenge seems quaint, even antiquated. If anything, companies now face the question’s inverse: How can you not see the power of design?

Look around you: The evidence of design’s power is everywhere. It’s apparent in the mere fact that the bar has been raised. Customers expect, even demand, more from the design of everything they buy. As Walter Herbst, CEO of the product-design firm Herbst LaZar Bell, has said, “Good design is not good enough anymore.” Companies as varied as Adobe, Nokia, Toyota, and Virgin understand that great design is a prerequisite for turning consumers into customers. Whether it’s software or sippy cups, when something works right, looks right, and feels right, it sparks an emotional connection. People come to love it and loyalty soon follows, along with the three Rs: repurchase, reuse, and recommendations — benefits that fall directly to the bottom line. Such is the power of design.

Design’s power became even more evident as we assembled our second annual report on the Masters of Design — the innovators, instigators, and risk takers who are the force behind design’s growing influence. Through them, we see how design is shaping the way we communicate and educate; we see how it’s a catalyst for reinventing cities and reimagining nonprofits. We see also how companies such as Whirlpool are leveraging design as a competitive weapon — and stealing market share from formidable foes. And in this year’s most far-reaching development, we see how companies like Procter & Gamble and Samsung are using design thinking to recast their strategic thinking. As Ideo CEO Tim Brown puts it, “Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems. When you bring design thinking into that strategic discussion, you introduce a powerful tool to the purpose of the entire endeavor, which is to grow.”

We used some of the key principles of design to create this report. We took a multidisciplinary approach, collaborating with an all-star jury drawn from business, academia, and the design world itself. This custom-made panel put us on the path toward our goal: not only to spotlight great designs but to look beyond demigods like Gehry and Graves to discover new heroes and heroines who define what breakthrough design means today.

Even a quick look at the design world shows that many of today’s designers defy easy categorization. They might have expertise in architecture, the graphic arts, or industrial design, but increasingly their work takes in many other fields: animation, anthropology, biology — just follow the alphabet. That’s why we devised five categories that encompass all of the design world and reflect this need to break through old boundaries.

Peak Performers have innovated over the long haul; they are design’s leaders and influential thinkers. Impact Players are those who, over the past year or so, have demonstrated design’s capacity to shape strategy. Game Changers are the agitators who are transforming the way we think about design. Collaborators are allies from outside the design world who work with designers to reinvent their organizations and even their cities. Next Generation billboards the rising stars who are creating design’s future.

Taken together, these 20 masters are rewriting the rules for design and for business. Their accomplishments, failures, and lessons learned have meaning for us all, designers and nondesigners alike. If you are leading a team or company, mapping out a marketing strategy, innovating part of a supply chain, or streamlining a manufacturing operation — that is, if you are a decision maker facing a problem — think about this question as you meet our crack problem solvers: What are you and your organization doing to fully seize on design’s power and promise?

a/b = b/a+b

“A regulating line is an assurance against capriciousness. It’s a means of verification, which can ratify all work created in fervor. It confers on the work the quality of rhythm. The regulating line brings in this tangible form of mathematics which gives the reassuring perception of order. The choice of a regulating line fixes the fundamental geometry of more…It’s a means to an end; It’s not a recipe.”

What? Designers speak their own language. No wonder the business world looks at them funny. Granted I was one and am returning to the design world but I think I need a “design language 101″ course. Here’s another:

“But if there is not order, there is no way of telling what the work is trying to say.”

That’s far and makes sense. The teacher today said to get a sketchbook and start learning to illustrate your ideas visually. Right…