In his BlogWell Seattle case study presentation, “Obi-Wan and Boeing,” Communications Director, Todd Blecher, spoke about the evolution of Boeing’s online communication approach [the reasoning behind the new Boeing.com].
Todd explained that by focusing on storytelling, sharing, and video, they have been able to change the tone of their online content from technical and boring to personal and interesting.
One can not begin to understand the role of Design Management — or its purpose — until one begins to understand the difference between the mundane and an experience.
If you are trying to achieve the mundane (starting at broken and going all the way up to undesirable and even forgettable), you do not need design, nor do you need Design Management.
The moment you decide that you want to go beyond the mundane, you must see beyond the singular act (of the transaction) and take note of the big, holistic picture that revolves around the experience of the act and all touchpoints concerned.
Each and every single facet of an experience needs to be contemplated — designed — for optimal performance. This is where design (at its best) comes in, and this is where enlightened management — hence Design Management — is critical.
Forget Design Management unless you strive for excellence. If you strive for excellence, be prepared to go far beyond the mundane — from the boardroom to the showroom.
Further Reading:
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers — and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.
People don’t buy what you do — they buy why you do it.
(via @rashford)
Tom Wujec from Autodesk presents some surprisingly deep research into the “marshmallow problem” — a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?
Copyright law’s grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry … and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. At TEDxUSC 2010, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion’s free culture.
This is an excellent talk that makes the case against limitations (both creative as well as financial) brought about as a result of copyright and intellectual property law.
An interview with David Kester, Chief Executive, Design Council. To foster a culture of innovation, managers must look outward to identify consumers’ problems and spark ideas for solving those problems. They must also ease employees’ fear of change.
Properly identifying the correct problem to solve is one of the most important (yet often overlooked) challenges of the design process.
Lets face it: most work is not designed, but simply takes place in settings and flows that have evolved haphazardly. The result of incremental boundaries is often overly-burdensome process or jobs where you sink or swim with too little structure. Imagine if jobs were as carefully thought out as the environment and reward systems in great games.
We’ve identified ten fundamental game ingredients in our research:
Leighton Read, Partner at Alloy Ventures and co-author of Total Engagement describes the role of online games as a strategy for making work fun. Leighton is a Maverick for The Management Innovation Exchange (The MIX), where management innovators come together to share their ideas and ideals. It’s time to reinvent management; you can help. Join the conversation here.
- Self representation with avatars
- Three dimensional environments
- Narrative context (great stories)
- Feedback
- Reputation, ranks and levels
- Marketplaces and economies
- Competition under rules that are explicit and enforced
- Teams
- Parallel communication systems that can be easily reconfigured
- Time pressure
All design influences our behaviour, but as designers we don’t always consciously consider the power this gives us to help people, (and, sometimes, to manipulate them). There’s a huge opportunity for design for behaviour change to address social and environmental issues where people’s behaviour is important, but as yet little in the way of a guide for designers and other stakeholders, bringing together knowledge and examples from different disciplines, and drawing parallels which can allow concepts to be usefully transposed. The Design with Intent toolkit (the cards and wiki) aims to make a start, however small, on this task.
I use the term Design with Intent to mean design that’s intended to influence or result in certain user behaviour — it’s an attempt to describe lots of types of systems (products, services, interfaces, environments) that have been strategically designed with the intent to influence how people use them. This reflective approach can be valuable for designers: being aware that we’re designing not just products, not just experiences, but actually designing behaviour at one level or another. Whether we mean to do it or not, it’s going to happen, so we might as well get good at it — and understand when it’s being done to us.
Thanks to @macartisan for the link via Twitter.
