Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Increasing the Importance of Design

Throughout the 20th century, businesses largely ignored the lessons from Eastman's experience. Because of the relative simplicity of their offerings, companies felt that an experiential orientation was unnecessary. Products were developed from a technological and feature-based standpoint and, by-and-large, that was fine. An experiential approach to, say, shaving, wouldn't gain you much advantage, and the nature of the tools necessitated a functional approach.

This perspective changed with the rise of computerization, the embedding of microchips in everything—in short, the increasing digitization of our world. Microchips allowed for rapid evolution in product complexity, and product designers, stuck in their old habits, did nothing to allay this. Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, means that those chips packed more and more power, which product designers felt obliged to use.

With instantaneous worldwide digital communication and global shipping streamlined by containerization, the end of the 20th century was a time of even more rapid globalization. Manufacturing costs plummeted as production shifted to Asia. Adding features and functionality wasn't much more expensive, and customers assumed that products that did more things must be better. Today, however, this belief system is reaching a breaking point. Customers now often return items that aren't defective, and in fact work as planned, but turn out to be too complicated to figure out.

As global trends have developed, business management has come to rely on efficiency, optimization, and quality management to deliver value. The good news is that these approaches have worked, and worked well. Many organizations have become very lean, wasting less time, allowing fewer defects, and adopting more efficient processes. Ironically, the bad news is that this type of business optimization is increasingly commonplace. The processes for measuring and controlling efficiency are well-known and well-documented, and so in today's world they no longer provide a significant competitive advantage.

As we plunge deeper into the 21st century, it's becoming clear that companies need to heed George Eastman's lessons. To cut through the complexity of a world that is both shrinking (in terms of the global village) and expanding (with respect to technological capability), businesses must take advantage of the power of design to realize true competitive advantages.

What Do We Mean by Design?

Design is gaining visibility in the world of business. Business reporters proclaim "The Power of Design," as if they've just discovered a secret practice with untold powers. Obviously, design has been around for a while, but it's been saddled with a host of connotations that haven't necessarily served it well:

• Design as aesthetics. Perhaps the most commonly held view of design is that it primarily distinguishes a product's aesthetic appeal. Though aesthetics are valuable, this reduction of design to styling alone has limited design's impact in matters that are more than skin deep.

• Design as a distinct role. Design is like acting. There are a few gifted naturals, but most designers train long and hard to build the skills and sensitivities to balance form, flow, and function. Therefore, we see designers as professionals who specialize in activities like imagining, drawing, and modeling, which most of us were weaned away from in grade school. Sadly, this discourages non-designers from engaging in design activities to which they might provide a valuable contribution.

• Design as a thing. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a collection dedicated to design, and it features chairs, bowls, typewriters, and salt-and-pepper shakers. Some of the products were financial successes, like the Herman Miller Aeron Chair, and many were not, like Apple's G4 Cube computer (Figure 1-4). This limits the discussion of design as an activity that produces precious artifacts, items that can be placed under glass in a curated display.

• Design as savior or rock star. Flip through business magazines or attend a design-related conference and you might start to drink the Kool-Aid. "Design thinking" is "the new black." Design is equated with the equally murky term "innovation." Just design the way Apple does, and success will follow!

  

  Figure 1-4. Even Apple makes mistakes: the G4 Cube was worthy of MOMA, but not the market.

At Adaptive Path, and in this book, we take a different approach to the idea of design. At heart, we believe that design is an activity. As an activity, it incorporates these elements:

• Empathy. Design must serve a human purpose, and so design requires an understanding of how people will interact with whatever you're designing.

• Problem solving. Design really shines when it's used to address complex problems where the outcome is unclear, many stakeholders are involved, and the boundaries are fuzzy.

• Ideation and prototyping. Design produces things, whether they're abstract (schematics, blueprints, wireframes, conceptual models) or concrete (prototypes, physical models). Design is a creative activity, and thus requires actually creating something.

• Finding alternatives. Design is less about the analysis of existing options than the creation of new options. Sometimes that means looking at existing options in new ways, and at other times that means creating from scratch. An effective design process typically offers many solutions to a problem.

While there are people who are trained and have deeper experience engaging in these activities, it's far too limiting to consider design the purview of only those called "designers." As we'll discuss throughout this book, for businesses to succeed, design must become an organizational competency.