Design Strategy?

When someone says “digital strategy”, or just “strategy,” what comes to mind? You might think of strategic roadmaps, strategic pillars, ROI, KPI’s or a whole range of other deliverables and concepts that create a strategy.

Yet, today many of these tools are based on a foundation that is no longer true. Assuming consumer and business behaviors and activities are not going to change for 12 months is a vision of the past. In reality, the only constant is change and the rate of adoption of new forms of technology and consumer experiences is way in advance of any roadmap that tries to predict the future. So what can you do? This collection of articles looks at ways to become more agile, critiques what have come to be seen as best practices, and tries to help you avoid doing things that are actually destructive to your own success.

The SIMPLE Answer to Digital Strategy
“Most of the challenges you’ll face will be with folks trying to make this bigger (because that’s easier), slower (because that’s easier too) or stalling (because that’s easiest).”
Thought Works

Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It.
“The idea of purposefully introducing into my life a service designed to fragment my attention is as scary to me as the idea of smoking would be to an endurance athlete, and it should be to you if you’re serious about creating things that matter”
New York Times

Digital Strategy is Dead
“By learning to act and iterate quickly in small ways, companies build their most sustainable competitive advantage: agility.”
Thought Works

IBM is gearing up to become the world’s largest and most sophisticated design company
“Designers bring this intuitive sense for what it [the assignment] means. They understand the power of delivering a great experience and how to treat a user as if they were guests in their own home,” says Gilbert, who’s also the company’s designated chief design evangelist.”
Quartz

Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible
“The worst thing about estimates is that they push a company in the direction of doing work that’s estimable”

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kaushik-panchal.com
@kaushik5000 or @Buscada on twitter

Fix your own blind spot

On the weekend I drove a car which had a feature I had never seen before. It had a small LED indicator in the wing mirror which appeared when a car drove by me in the blind spot of the wing mirror. This saved me from having to crane my neck back over my shoulder to check that blind spot. Great! I thought, That’s handy, that makes my life easier.

Later on in the drive I had become used to this new tech and basked in its glory. No need to look any more, the little LED will just show up and I will be safe. Safe in this knowledge, I checked my mirrors and started to pull into the curb at which point I swerved quickly to avoid hitting two cyclists who were in my blind spot! Woah! It doesn’t work in that situation?

What had been a convenience a moment earlier now became a liability, making me think about all the trade-offs people make everyday for convenience. Google maps on your phone, no need to know where you’re going, right? Apart from all the people that ask me for directions while holding a smartphone in their hand, in New York, a city built on a grid for easy wayfinding.

"What had been a convenience a moment earlier now became a liability"
 

This post is not about features, but about systemic problems of learning and how we apply our learning to the world. There seem to be many tools to make your life easier, but very few to help you get smarter and learn more.

Why? Perhaps it is that getting smarter and better at things requires hard work and patience, things that are not convenient. I am not advocating going back to the dark ages (or even the 90’s) and using maps and compasses again, but what I am advocating for is that we use technology to start building our own personal cultures, our own ways to think about the world, creating tools for ourselves to be more successful, happy and fulfilled.

What does that mean practically? Simple example. If you love sushi, instead of using yelp, spend the time looking up the best sushi restaurants in your area, make a list, map the locations, list out the specials and what you might eat there. Now make something, a blog post, a vine, anchor, snapchat about it and let other people know.

"Creating tools for ourselves to be more successful, happy and fulfilled"
 

Do this every time, soon you are the expert instead of yelp, you have taken something you love and learned more and helped others learn more. This doesn’t have to be a job or make you money, but it is a way to share your personal culture — what you think and how you think — with others. That is how great ideas start.

Visual Thinking

Making a sketch is often the first step towards thinking about a design problem. But I’ve found that oftentimes making that mark feels daunting – it is the first sign of my imagination committing to a solution. A mark feels risky – the idea is now out in the world for more than just me to see.

I often think of sketching an idea as making a visual list. Making lists helps move ideas forward, another kind of decisive first mark. I also think about list-making as a process :

1. Make the list (Thinking out loud, possibly in collaboration)
2. Looking through the list again and re-ordering it. (Fitting it to the needs of the idea)
3. Reviewing your new list (Critique and time for contemplation)
4. Fixing the list and deciding to follow its order (Deciding on a course of action)

With sketching, or visual thinking, these steps happen simultaneously, still holding a lot in common with a simple list.

Here’s an example from one of our recent projects with MIT’s Wolk Gallery for a exhibition promotion piece.

One of several sketches which emerged from this visual thinking process. —

The final design

Although this process seems based in a visual product, I apply this kind of visual thinking (or visual list-making) many kinds of problems. Because of the quick nature of the process, we’re able to address many questions and answers early on, helping to shape a project’s outcome in the process.

Function + Purpose = DeliGHT

An important principle in designing anything is trying to understand what the function and purpose are for something, and how these are different.

What is it that someone is trying to do? This is the function.
What is someone trying to achieve? This is the purpose.

A simple example,
Function = I want to make some tea
Purpose= I need hot water, I need a tea bag and I need a container for two things to come together.

“A kettle” may seem the obvious answer to this riddle. Yet, there are myriad ways in which the purpose can be met without using a kettle.

[Example] A cup which on contact with water starts a chemical reaction which heats the water.
[Example] Boiling water and a tea bag in a cooking pot.

The question is: Are there new ways of satisfying the purpose, which work better than a kettle and a cup?

Stating the problem in this way allows designers to think about a problem conceptually and allows them to think critically about current conventions and while allowing them to see the atomic elements of the problem.

The purpose can also be broken down into sub-purposes, giving us a more granular way to look at a problem.

Thinking about how purpose can be broken down also allows you to think about the best possible outcomes for each given purpose.

The best outcomes for a given purpose or sub-purpose can also be validation tools that allow you to:
– measure the success of a design concept
– have a uniform way of comparing your design idea against other existing design solutions.

If your design solution allows for a much better outcome to a purpose, this is the starting point of creating a design which really innovates and does not just incrementally iterate on a problem space.

An excellent book which uses similar principles is “What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services” by Anthony Ulwick. This book concentrates on product design, but I think this process and way of thinking can be applied to products which are much more conceptual, as well as in identifying whole new markets of opportunity for innovation.

- See more at: http://buscada.com/function-and-purpose/#sthash.6h1SYOXA.dpuf

The importance of the design cycle

A design process must not be a straight-jacket on creativity. On the other hand, creativity in design needs to have some form of validation; otherwise it reduces its own ability to create new opportunities.

This simple cycle is inclusive of multiple design tactics but is rigorous in how it judges the results of any design. The designer/s can enter into the cycle at any point.

If you have a great idea, start by making it.
If you need to define a problem, start by thinking and analysis.
If you already have a product or service, try critiquing it.

The most important next step is to go to the next point in the cycle.

In the design industry, many designers / product owners only go through this cycle once and then bounce between “making” and “critiquing.” This can easily turn in to a vicious cycle of iterating on tactical designs that do not really address the problem. Often, in this “bounce” the process lacks acritical piece of thinking or analysis which might unlock the true nature of the problem.

At every point of the design process it is critical to reconsider, or query, the problem, checking in to see that you are designing for the right problem.

Following the cycle is not easy. It requires you to question opinions you have formed in the course of a project which can be hard to let go of. These opinions or decisions may have been hard fought victories with other project team members / clients and seem irreversible; but nothing is irreversible if the problem itself has changed through your considered process of thinking and analysis.

This process happens at every stage of a project from concept to production and brings fresh insight to every step.

Playing by your own rules

It is hard to win when you are playing by someone else’s rules or, worse still, do not entirely understand the rules. By redefining the “meaning” of your project you become an expert in the rules of the game, and one of the people defining those very rules.

The Meaning to Tasks model uses the idea of a “project meaning”.

It supports a practice for teams and individuals to create fundamentally new meanings for projects, products and services. By working in this way the meaning of everyday projects are changed, and projects created are differentiated from the rest of the market through innovatively integrated strategies, rather than solely through feature-level improvements.