Hugh Dubberly, founder of Dubberly Design Office, has collected over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes from architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, quality management, and software development and published them in an eBook called “How do you design?”.

His view of the scope of design reflects the motivation for this collection.

 

 

This collection is highly valuable because it helps to reflect how we are solving problems and how we might achieve different outcomes by adopting and following different processes.

You can find more information at the DDO website or download the book as a PDF directly.

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Economically difficult times create a lot of uncertainty in organizations and many businesses have to cut back their activities in various areas to limit expenses and protect the sustainability of their business. A lot has been written about the importance of customer-focus, innovation and design in a recession. The conclusion is always the same: these areas are just as important as ever and if you have to trim back in your organization you better do this in non-core business areas and keep on investing in the core-areas of your business.

This is obviously not rocket science but where are the real-world examples of companies that have reinvented themselves in a downturn?

Economic challenging times require a focus on customer value

There are some and my personal favorite is an analysis in BusinessWeek from May 2001 (Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work) where the author outlines why Apple’s new retail outlets are not going to be successful.

[The] Problem is, the numbers don’t add up. Given the decision to set up shop in high-rent districts in Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, and Jobs’s hometown of Palo Alto, Calif., the leases for Apple’s stores could cost $1.2 million a year each, says David A. Goldstein, president of researcher Channel Marketing Corp. Since PC retailing gross margins are normally 10% or less, Apple would have to sell $12 million a year per store to pay for the space. Gateway does about $8 million annually at each of its Country Stores. Then there’s the cost of construction, hiring experienced staff. “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” says Goldstein.     

The pundits have been wrong, here are some of current numbers that show the success of the Apple retail stores (found here and here):

• Twenty percent of Apple’s revenue comes from the Apple Store
• Apple made $1.25B at the Apple Store in the fourth quarter of this year, which is 42 percent more than last year
• Apple makes $4,000 per square foot of Apple Store surface area every year

Reflecting on this example we can see that even though analysts and journalists believed that this is not the right way to go, it was obviously (or maybe luckily) a successful move. In a recession it is easy for everyone to predict the failure of new products, services or distribution channels. The article additionally shows how much you should rely on others to estimate the success of new products or services.

Indeed it is more difficult to launch new products and services in a downturn compared with boom times. Instead of building new products and services based on any random hype topic in boom times where value is defined investors, media or other entrepreneurs, new products and services have to deliver real value to customers in a recessions.

The world doesn’t need another social network which is merely a clone of Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing. What is needed in challenging economic times are transformational products and services that provide value to customers.

Of course the case study with Apple is not the only one, the UK Design Council, the national strategic body for promoting the use of design in business, has published an article titled “Designs to overcome a downturn – Facts, Figures and case studies” with several case studies where designers worked together with companies from different sizes and sectors to improve their performance during challenging economic conditions. The case studies that are presented are from Castle Rock Brewery, Thistle Hotels, McCain Oven Chips, HMV and Ian Macleod Distillers.

You should also check out the collection of other case studies that highlight the role of design in action.

So what is the role of the design in challenging economic times?

As we can see from these different case studies, approaching these situations with design in mind (in a sense of focusing on delivering “designed” artifacts) as well as with a design mindset (solving the problems through the eyes of a designer) can lead to successful re-definitions of value propositions.

Cost-cutting and trimming excessive resources has been and will be an essential approach to focus on the essential core of a business and to provide the necessary resources so that new products and services can be designed, produced and marketed.

If you think that this downturn is different and you do not need a designer to make your products “look nice” you should think twice. Making things look nice is not the job of a designer. Solving problems and providing value is one of the essential goals of design and looking at current problems from a different perspective might just provide the insight or solution that could prepare you for the next upturn. 

Image courtesy of [mikbaird] and [ihtatho]

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IDEO has released a Human Centered Design Toolkit that is the result of  a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The BMGF brought together four organizations —IDEO, IDE, Heifer International, and ICRW—to partner in the creation of a method for guiding innovation and design for smallholder farmers.

It contains the elements to Human-Centered Design, a process used for decades to create new solutions for multi-national corporations. This toolkit has been designed to hear the needs of smallholder farmers in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

While many elements of the toolkit are specifically tailored towards the specific questions one faces when innovating with and for smallholder farmers, it is a valuable collection that makes the sometimes vague human centered design process more concrete and therefore transferable and reproducible.

What I really like about this toolkit is that it differentiates between the design team and the facilitators. I think this differentiation and the active nomination of facilitators is one of the unique aspects in design processes and the transfer of design knowledge.

I see a lot of potential to create Human Centered Design Toolkits a specific company and certain industries. It is really helpful to narrow the focus and create a human centered design toolkit for the automotive industry, telecommunications industry or financial service industry.

More information about the toolkit

[via Nick Marsh]

 

 

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Businesses are confronted with an increasing rate of innovation and the ability to continuously and systematically develop innovative products and services is becoming a critical factor to sustain a competitive advantage. Our role as one of the leading business schools in Europe is to prepare our graduates for these challenges.

Prof. Dr. Walter Brenner, Director of the Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and Prof. Larry Leifer, Director Center for Design Research, Stanford University initiated a collaboration in 2005 where student teams work on product and service innovation challenges presented by corporate partners. Teams take projects all the way from defining design requirements to constructing functional prototypes ready for consumer testing and technical evaluation. Projects typically combine aspects from sustainability, automotive, medical, communication, and user interaction.

Students working towards their master’s degree in information, media and technology management participate in this  two-semester course where they learn the necessary skills to gather deep consumer insights, develop ideas through various ideation techniques and synthesize these ideas into conceptual prototypes of innovative products and services.

In the fourth year of this cooperation 12 students are working in three teams to work on the next big idea with problem statements from three corporate partners. The corporate partners in 2008/2009 are BASF,  Lonza and Swisscom.

My role in this course is twofold, firstly I am teaching and coaching the students in the design process and the different methods and tools that are used in the different stages, secondly I am doing research on the course observing different aspects of the design process and design collaboration with business students.

More information about the course can be found on the official website at http://designthinking.iwi.unisg.ch

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What are the difference between business people and designers? What are the differences between a “business mindset” and a “design mindset”? These are a few questions that I have been researching and thinking about recently and which I will try to answer in more detail in my Ph.D. thesis.

In this process I have collected different statements that summarize some of the differences, challenges and approaches to overcome the gap between managers and designers.

A.G. Lafley, CEO Procter & Gamble, found in "P&G Changes Its Game, BusinessWeek"

Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence). Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.

 

Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, found in "Design Thinking and How It Will Change Management Education: And Interview and Discussion"

A traditional manager would take the options that have been presented and analyze them based on deductive reasoning. You typically get those options on the basis of what you have seen before—that is, inductive logic. You then select the one that has highest net present value. Whereas a designer uses abductive reasoning to say, “What is something completely new that would be lovely if it existed but doesn’t now?”

 

Tim Brown, CEO IDEO, found in "Lessons from innovation’s front lines: An interview with IDEO’s CEO"

The innovation process is a series of divergent and then convergent activities – a very simple concept but one that a lot of leaders used to managing efficient processes in their businesses struggle with. By „divergence,“ I mean a willingness to explore things that seem far away from where you think your business is today. The discomfort that a lot of business leader have with innovation is with divergence. They think that it’s divergent forever and that they’ll never be able to focus on something that makes business sense. I think that’s where some business leaders, historically, have had a bit of problem with their internal innovation units: the leaders have a sense that these units are endlessly divergent. If you understand that convergence follows divergence, and that it‘s really hard to converge without first diverging, maybe that‘s a bit comforting.

 

If you are doing research in this field or if you are confronted with questions and challenges at the intersection of business and design, please don’t hesitate to send me an email at bernhard@customer-experience-labs.com. I am interested in sharing experience and exchanging ideas.

Image credit

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