The value of design in business

In a long paper, Reon Brand of Philips Design presents a holistic approach to systemically transform cities into places that positively contribute to human personal development, social harmony and diversity.

“Urban living is the future of the majority. But although urbanization has brought great progress to human civilization, it is also a key factor in compromising the natural balance of the planet; it has become one of the key threats to loss of biodiversity. There are a number of associated macro level issues such as pollution, decline in natural resource, and numerous current and escalating social issues that will increasingly detract from the benefits brought by urban living if we continue to develop cities in their current format. Many approaches to improve urban development are still driven on an issue-based level rather a systemic approach.

This paper examines the systemic issues and drivers of change associated with urban development. It explores possibilities for a holistic approach to systemically transform cities into places that positively contribute to human personal development, social harmony and diversity, and the environment and health of the planet at large. The paper concludes that we have to think differently about the role and the function of cities, which will inspire us to develop future cities and urban living in a different way.”

> Download paper (pdf)

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Most will agree that good design is timeless; but how about good design advice, or does that get dated? You can be the judge now that Stanford University in partnership with Academic Earth have published a series of 12 lectures called “Principles of Product Design,” put together by IDEO–way back in 2001.

Topics included are:

1. Career Development
2. Building a Personal Gratification Company
3. Follow Your Passion
4. Design is Risk-Taking
5. Hire Great People
6. The Process of Design
7. Product Development Process: Observation
8. Designing Products vs Designing Experiences
9. Design as an Iterative Process
10. Prototyping the Mouse
11. Career Advice
12. How do you pick clients?

Here’s David Kelley with #6, “The Process of Design:”

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Manoj Kothari, who founded [Indian design firm] Onio Design, and others of his ilk are no longer content designing refrigerators, mobile phones and soap wrappers. They now hope to take on a bigger, more serious role in their clients’ businesses–from brand experience and trends research to business process design to re-crafting corporate strategy. In short, they want a seat at the decision-making table.

How? Design thinking is a new philosophy that has helped these firms move into areas traditionally occupied by research houses, advertising agencies and consulting firms.

>> Read article

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Design Observer’s got a great summary up of the past week’s discussions around humanitarian design, touched off by Bruce Nussbaum, responded to by Emily Pilloton, and with Cameron Sinclair, Alex Steffen, Robert Fabricant, Jon Kolko and others chiming in. (Don’t forget about Xanthe Matychak’s post at Core77 back on the 7th.)

Check out the roundup here.

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In the sexily named Ergonomics Today, Ian Chong has posted an article entitled “Design from an Ergonomist’s Perspective; Ergonomics from a Designer’s Perspective – Perhaps It Should be Both.” Chong is a professional hybrid that you’d think would be common, but is actually quite rare: He’s both a professional ergonomicist and an industrial designer. “But currently [in the design industry],” he writes, “the two as far apart as the Twilight characters and daylight…I have a box full of things labeled as ergonomic [and] some of these things are pathetic, most are laughable.”

Chong sounds off on the obvious need for these disciplines to work more closely together, and provides an example of where to start:

When I was teaching grad school I brought two classes together, one from the NYU ergonomics school combined with another from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute design school. I paired up the students into project teams; each team had at least one from Pratt and one from NYU. The goal was to introduce the disciplines to each other and to expose each of them to each others way of thinking. And guess what? The final projects evolved from the input of each team member and resulted in changing the way of thinking for each of the students. Needless to say that I was pleased with their interaction and found that each student readily accepted another viewpoint and resulting in a final project reflective of appropriate solutions and creative thinking. As I saw some of these students in following years, I was constantly reminded by them what a great class this was, mostly from the varying opinions, input and collaborations. Truly this was successful in combining the two disciplines in a harmonious and creative way.

Give the whole article a read here.

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Core-fave Jan Chiphase, principal researcher at Nokia and roving global thinker on mobile culture, will become frog design’s Executive Creative Director of Global Insights, based in frog’s Shanghai studio. Here’s from the press release:

Chipchase joins frog from Nokia, where as a principal researcher he studied behavioral patterns that informed the development of new products based on emerging consumer trends. With deep experience in running complex, international design research projects, he is widely considered to be the authority on applying human-centered insights to the development process. His extensive research projects have taken him around the world to collect insights into the broader emotional, social, and cultural contexts of the impact of technology. Recent projects include research studies into the design of mobile money services for emerging markets; travel to Uganda to look at shared phone use; trips to India to examine how design can make mobile devices more accessible to people with low or non-existent levels of literacy; and a study in South Korea exploring how early adopters were reacting to the then recently launched mobile TV.

Read more (later today) at janchipchase.com and at frog design.

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To get you in the mood for Milan this month, check out this great profile piece on Marcel Wanders from the TV series Designer People. The short documentary follows his career from the early days with Droog to setting up Moooi, and offers an intimate look into his work and the growth of his studio with insights from people like Renny Ramakers, Ross Lovegrove, and Paola Antonelli. Sorry, no embed available – click here to watch.

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Just before the New Year, Helen Walters, Editor of Innovation and Design at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, wrote a blog post criticizing a (UK) Times piece which was in turn criticizing certain government-funded design projects as being a waste of bread. Walters’ central take was that the blame for this misconception was the fault of the designers themselves: “Designers need to step up and fight back and prove their craft is not a 20th century anachronism,” she wrote. This then sparked a bit of a debate:

The response was swift, spirited, and fell mainly into two camps. Some thought I was being deliberately incendiary and borderline irresponsible; others agreed that perhaps the design industry has an issue. Many quite rightly pointed out that “design” is a much larger proposition than the graphic design of this particular rebranding exercise, while there were numerous lively and articulate defenses of design as a process, not a style or an artifact. Companies such as Apple, Procter & Gamble and BMW were cited as corporate leaders that clearly understand the worth of good design.

Prompted by this, and in an effort to promote a better understanding of the design industry, Walters then rounded up IDEO partner Diego Rodriguez, RKS Design’s Ravi Sawhney and Deepa Prahalad, Angel investor Dave McClure, and pediatrician/preventive medicine specialist Dr. Jay Parkinson to collaborate on a list of “The 27 most influential designers and design thinkers making an impact on business today.” With some names you’ll recognize and others you’re seeing for the first time, the report is well worth a read and accessible here.

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The UK’s Associate Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group (APDIG), in partnership with the Design Business Association, has published the findings of its Parliamentary inquiry into public sector procurement of design and creative services, in a report entitled “Design and the Public Good: Creativity vs. the Procurement Process?“

APDIG and the Design BusinessAssociation undertook this inquiry, building on the findings of the Cox Review of Creativity in Business, to assess the relationship between government and its design providers, and to explore design’s potential to unlock innovation for the public sector. We take the term design in its broadest sense, as a verb rather than a noun, as a set of tools that enables a better way of doing things – whether that means designing effective policy, designing out waste, or designing services that work for users.

According to Gisele Murphy of Design Wales, “the report highlights how the UK Government could benefit from working effectively when commissioning design. The recommendations aim to achieve value for money in commissioning creative work, improve collaboration between designers and public sector buyers, and most importantly, ensure that decisions are end-user focused. The text includes several informative and concise case studies.”

Read press release (DBA version)
Download report

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While he was a grad student pursuing his PhD at MIT’s Media Lab, Richard DeVaul developed “memory glasses,” a spectacle-mounted display wired to a small wearable computer running Linux. As the project’s name suggests, it was intended to remind the user of things they needed to do or context-relevant facts they needed to remember, sort of like virtual post-it notes. “I can improve your performance on a memory recall task by a factor of about 63% without distracting you, in fact without you being aware that I’m doing anything at all,” DeVaul explained.

DeVaul (bottom left) and colleagues model the memory glasses

“The things that I want help with are, in a sense, very simple,” DeVaul told USA Today while describing the project. “Basic things. If I’ve been sitting in front of my computer for six hours, and haven’t gotten up to eat, a little thing would remind me, ‘Rich, go take a break.’” DeVaul’s glasses were subsequently featured on an episode of Scientific American Frontiers called “Never Forget a Face.”

DeVaul invented these glasses way back in 2003. So why are we telling you about it now? Well, because Apple’s just hired the guy. Of course the glasses aren’t the only thing DeVaul’s done and is valued for; the wearable computing expert was a co-founder of AWare Technologies, “a company focused on technology-driven solutions to the problems of physical inactivity in the corporate health and fitness market” that did work for everyone from DARPA to the Olympics. But here’s to hoping that in a few years we’ll all be queueing up for iGlasses.

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