via gracemcdunnough:
Better User Experience With Storytelling In this article we’ll explore how user experience professionals and designers are using storytelling to create compelling experiences that build human connections.
From Engineering Orientation to Design Orientation
Obi-Wan and Boeing
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.
Design Management
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:
On Design Management
Without a solid design management team in place
charting a coherent design strategy,
all the design thinking in the world can’t save you.
And Lord help you if all you have is design styling.
For > (where > = greater than);
- Design Management >
- Design Strategy >
- Design Thinking >
- Design Styling
Further Reading:
Design Thinking is Dead. Long Live Design Orientation
Design Orientation is Not a Buzzword
The New PUMA Fuseproject Packaging
PUMA and Yves Béhar developed over 21 months a more sustainable packaging and distribution system in keeping with PUMA’s ongoing commitment to sustainability.
For more information, head to vision.puma.com
Toward a Design Orientation
Nine months ago I wrote about Design Orientation as an alternative to Finance Orientation — the model which has governed business thinking for the past 50+ years.
Today, I read an amazing article in the Financial Times by John Kay, a member of the advisory board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and simply had to share it because it represents the first truly honest step in coming to terms with the failed economic thinking, theories and policies that have driven the world to the edge of utter financial and socioeconomic collapse. I am happy to quote the article below and also link to the author’s original source page:
The macroeconomics taught in advanced economics today is largely based on analysis labelled dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. The unappealing title gives the game away: the theorists are mostly talking to themselves. Their theories proved virtually useless in anticipating the crisis, analysing its development and recommending measures to deal with it.
A remarkably distinguished group of economists gathered last weekend for the inaugural conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, an initiative of George Soros. They were soul searching over the failures of economics in the recent crisis. Such failures are most evident in two areas: the inadequacies of the efficient market hypothesis, the bedrock of modern financial economics, and the irrelevance of recent macroeconomic theory.
The central idea of the efficient market hypothesis is that prices represent the best estimate of the underlying value of assets. This thesis has recently taken a battering. The boom and bust in the money markets was precipitated by a US housing bubble. That bubble followed the New Economy fiasco and was preceded by the near-failure of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund designed to showcase sophisticated financial economics.
The macroeconomics taught in advanced economics today is largely based on analysis labelled dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. The unappealing title gives the game away: the theorists are mostly talking to themselves. Their theories proved virtually useless in anticipating the crisis, analysing its development and recommending measures to deal with it.
Recent economic policy debates have not only largely ignored DSGE, but have also been remarkably similar to the economic policy debates of the 1930s, although they have been resolved differently. The economists quoted most often are John Maynard Keynes and Hyman Minsky, both of whom are dead.
Both the efficient market hypothesis and DSGE are associated with the idea of rational expectations – which might be described as the idea that households and companies make economic decisions as if they had available to them all the information about the world that might be available. If you wonder why such an implausible notion has won wide acceptance, part of the explanation lies in its conservative implications. Under rational expectations, not only do firms and households know already as much as policymakers, but they also anticipate what the government itself will do, so the best thing government can do is to remain predictable. Most economic policy is futile.
So is most interference in free markets. There is no room for the notion that people bought subprime mortgages or securitised products based on them because they knew less than the people who sold them. When the men and women of Goldman Sachs perform “God’s work”, the profits they make come not from information advantages, but from the value of their services. The economic role of government is to keep markets working.
These theories have appeal beyond the ranks of the rich and conservative for a deeper reason. If there were a simple, single, universal theory of economic behaviour, then the suite of arguments comprising rational expectations, efficient markets and DSEG would be that theory. Any other way of describing the world would have to recognise that what people do depends on their fallible beliefs and perceptions, would have to acknowledge uncertainty, and would accommodate the dependence of actions on changing social and cultural norms. Models could not then be universal: they would have to be specific to contexts.
The standard approach has the appearance of science in its ability to generate clear predictions from a small number of axioms. But only the appearance, since these predictions are mostly false. The environment actually faced by investors and economic policymakers is one in which actions do depend on beliefs and perceptions, must deal with uncertainty and are the product of a social context. There is no universal economic theory, and new economic thinking must necessarily be eclectic. That insight is Keynes’s greatest legacy.
Video: Inside the IDEA Design Awards
Slideshow: Best designs of 2009
In May, 20 of the world’s top designers ditched their day jobs and headed to Washington. There, over the course of three scorchingly hot days, they agonized and argued over who should win prizes in this year’s International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) program, organized by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and sponsored by Target (TGT) and Autodesk (ADSK). Today, BusinessWeek announces their decisions, with gold, silver, and bronze gongs awarded to 150 products or programs.
Reflecting the scope and reach of the design discipline itself, awards were given to everything from sleek TVs and sharp-looking computer monitors to more creative concepts with barely a toehold in reality. But this year, particular credit was given to designers who showed they had truly considered a project in the wider context of the world at large.
“Design is not just about making things pretty,” says Claudia Kotchka, former head of design at Procter & Gamble (PG), who was one of this year’s judges. “Designers are about making the world a better place.”
Sam Pitroda on the Nature of Innovation
Dr Sam Pitroda, chairman of India’s National Knowledge Commission, interviewed in Palo Alto, California on the nature of innovation, hinting at the role of design in solving the everyday needs of everyday people.
I love this interview because at no point does Sam Pitroda associate innovation with short-term productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, more profit, more corporate products — the domain of Finance Orientation. Rather, Sam Pitroda hints at innovation on the road to ending poverty, war, hunger, deforestation, loss of species and needless human suffering. If we are not trying to make the world a better place, we are not innovating.
Design is a fundamental creative problem solving process through which the highest potential of innovation for the benefit of humankind — and ultimately, a better world — may be realized.
(Thanks to zyOzyfounder for the tip)
The Fundamental Role of Design in Firms
This excellent interview (with Stacy Wolff, HP’s Director of Notebook Product Design) showcases the depth of the role that design plays in translating high level firm strategy into products, services, environments and experiences that directly impact the customer experience and brand perception.
Firms that understand the importance of the role that design contributes to their bottom line who consciously make an effort to shift their internal behavior and processes toward a product and user centered Design Orientation will benefit as Apple, HP, Ikea and a number of other brands have.
Any and every decision that is made (from the executive level down the line) leading up to the final execution and dissemination of any product, service, communicated message, environment or experience is a design decision.
Design Oriented firms will win.
(Thanks to @reBang for the tip)
When Accountants Talk Design
via sreikanth:
Claudia Kotchka on innovation at P&G, Institute of Design Strategy Conference, May 2008 on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
“The business value proposition is shifting from efficiency to innovation; from technology to design; from engineers to consumers; from left-brain to right-brain thinking; from things to experiences.” —Claude Kotchka , VP design, Proctor and Gamble
she btw, was trained as an acountant, and has never designed anything. and as VP of design , reports directly to the CEO. Thats a sign of how seriously a business takes in-house designers/design teams.
