January is often abuzz with 3 things: New Year resolutions, trends and forecasts for the year, and CES.

I’ll leave CES to the CES PR engines, because as designers, if you just focus on CES you will be a year too late.

So if you want to consider something more interesting and forward looking, check out this compilation of technology trends for 2012 from the global team at Frog Design. It looks like a number of interesting predictions from some familiar names.

Biomimicry is probably my favorite prediction of the lot. This design and innovation strategy is a long time coming as it is an untapped well of opportunities for earth friendly innovation. Love the land we live in.

Click for a larger image.

IA Collaborative, has tried to do the impossible, and that is to define the meaning of Design. Or rather, they have taken the effort to gather the different definitions of design from our favorite industry luminaries and arranged them in a rather symbolic (and cool) infographic.

I often think such exercises are often rhetorical and pointless, as a definition fails when it lacks context. However, as design is evolving into a more strategic activity, I have experienced many situations where I have to deal with the definition of design. Especially in a way that laymen, organizations, and businesses, can understand its value. We will have to open this can of worms yet again, and this vetted list is a good starting point.

Via: Glimmer.

I’ve found that one of the big reasons why Design Thinking fails in organizations, is that no one has the guts to stand up and say that an idea/concept/proposition sucks.

This point is an extension of our last article where we encouraged you to focus on the outcome rather than the process. In this article we encourage you to make sure that there is a good filtering system in place and a team of highly engaged people.

There are many reasons why people do not highlight something that sucks. Here are a few that I can think of:

1) There is no culture of creativity or space to make mistakes in an organization. When people who work in hierarchical organizations, they are often afraid of getting reprimanded for stepping out of line or coming across as not a “team player”.

2) Group dynamics can be a big factor. Especially tough when the group is tight and individuals don’t want to hurt the feelings of others. Put it this way, you have to accept that you are not going to be everyone’s best friend.

3) The organization has spent so much time, money and resources on the project that people feel afraid to recommend that the organization walk away from that investment.

4) I have seen on many occasions low quality work getting delivered, as the people working on the job are either not discerning enough, or lack insight on the quality of work they are producing, or fail to understand the requirements of the brief. The people working directly on the project should be the first filter, and hence why companies such as Apple have a culture of asking, “can this be better?”

5) There are many personal (or cognitive) biases that can come into play that design and innovation managers need to watch out for. Some of my favorites include:

Status quo bias — the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.

Bandwagon effect — the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.

Experimenter’s or Expectation bias — the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agrees with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appears to conflict with those expectations.

6) Finally, people in the team just lack motivation to raise their hand. Design and innovation often only comes when we push ourselves to the edge and beyond. Unengaged, unmotivated, and disenfranchised people will likely not care enough to take the effort to even try.

Of course when you do stand on your soap box and say this “sucks”, you should make sure what you are saying makes sense, and that you have developed a high level of what I like to call problem solving intuition that is underpinned by a list of evaluation criteria or key design principles.

Trust your gut, when it tells you to stop and think. After that, trust science to help you decide.

If you are interested in a little further reading, check out how Oren Jacob, the former chief technical officer of Pixar, had the guts to stop Toy Story 2 eight months from its launch date, because it was not good. If we consider that Pixar invested 3 years on this project, we can really appreciate how difficult a task it was for Oren.

Implementing Design Thinking is a regular series of posts, where I share my thoughts and experiences in helping companies implement Design as a tool for business success and achieving Design Leadership. Check out the rest of my articles here.

Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen claims, at Fast Co. Design, that 3 of the 4Ps of Marketing (Pricing, Promotion and Place or Distribution) are dead. It’s now a 1P Marketing world where everything should revolve around the Product.

That’s a great observation, if you are just selling one product, or only one product at a time.

For those that are uninitiated, the 4Ps of Marketing (also called the Marketing Mix) is a basic cornerstone of all Marketing activity and used to determine how a product or service can appeal to a customer.

Skibsted claims that the digital revolution made the following 3Ps obsolete, and wonders why Business schools still teaches this approach in their MBA courses. He says:

Promotion: is dead because the internet allows for businesses not to spend in advertising.

Place: is dead because businesses are all moving online.

Price: is dead because internet aggregators allow for market forces to decide on the price they want to pay.

Can you see what is wrong with this Fast Co. Design article?

While I do agree that the digital revolution has changes the way we do things, it has not killed the 3Ps as described above. In my humble opinion, the digital revolution has made marketing even more relevant and complex.

Promotion has not expanded to include, electronic direct mailers, viral marketing, blogs and social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter. Word of mouth has never been stronger. Even though online marketing has a smaller expenditure compared to traditional advertising, it does not and should not mean it is less of an importance.

Going online is a Place, though granted it is a virtual Place. For sure setting up an online presence is much cheaper than a bricks-and-mortar location, but it still requires a serious plan. Now, your competition is not the shop 3 doors down; it’s the rest of the world. Launching a site online and expecting people to come is a mistake many failed businesses make. So how else to you get people to come? By Marketing! This is particularly important if your business is 100% online.

Finally, Pricing is a humongous pain as now you have multiple channels to your customer. This means if you sell it for $2 more in one country and less in another, people will just buy it from that other country. Not only that, what about multiple online shops with different commission structure? Going online allows for shoppers to easily compare prices on aggregators like Amazon, which obviously leads to a Price race to the bottom.

It is not going to get easier. The digital revolution is going to make Marketing harder. Therefore I’m a little surprise that Skibsted, the founder of famed bicycle company Biomega, could come to this conclusion.

While I disagree with most of his article, I do agree that the digital revolution has made the last P of marketing, the Product, the most important of the 4Ps. It is such an important activity that it probably overshadowed the importance of the other 3Ps, causing Skibsted to ignore them.

It is true that at the end of the day everything will boil down to meaningful product quality, as good marketing will not sell a crap Product. But I would not say that the other 3Ps are dead.

I like to close this article by sharing with you a 5th P, which is something my Marketing professor never failed to remind us, and that is People. Puts everything in context no?

Lorna Ross, a design manager at Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation (That’s a place I would love to visit!), shares with Helen Walters insights on running a small design team within a very large organization. Lots of great tips and insights filled with wisdom that can also be applied in a consulting context as well. I’ve shamelessly reproduced it here for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

1) Move beyond needing to be understood. Focus on being valued.

2) Do not react to every situation. By allowing the dynamics to play out there is deeper learning. Designers self regulate through experience.

3) There is a thin line between being understood and being irrelevant. (If busy people have to validate you they will opt to ignore you instead and move on.)

4) Get your team comfortable with discomfort.

5) You may want to direct the work but your team may need you more as a decoy. Go where the need is greatest.

6) Make every team member feel empowered, trusted, respected…. and accountable.

7) Communicate zero tolerance for liabilities. One dysfunctional person can bring down your whole team, and you.

8) Never make excuses for your team. You will be seen as biased.

9) Make difficult and unpopular decisions with the same confidence and conviction that you make the easy ones.

10) Do not get too wrapped up in being liked by your team. They need you less as a friend and more as a leader.

11) Examine your own prejudices.

12) Scare everyone you hire. Carefully design the most effective interview process to really know who you are bringing onto your team.

13) Pay close attention to feedback and always be seen to value it.

14) Choose your battles. Know what you can affect and what you cannot.

15) The almost toxic levels of adrenaline needed to function in “hostile” or chaotic environments can tip a team into “battle mode” where there can be considerable collateral damage. It is your job to watch for this and interrupt it very carefully.

16) In a conservative culture, passion, determination and conviction can often be perceived as arrogance. Humility is a skill that you and your team need to master.

17) Value integrity and honest above everything else. Trust amongst the group is critical.

18) Learn to function without praise or validation. Not because you don’t deserve it but because it may never come. Determine and declare your own success metrics.

19) Never wait to be surprised by feedback. Seek it out.

20) Never gossip. It’s a luxury you cannot afford.

Via: Thought You Should See This.

One of the challenges of implementing Design Thinking is that Design Thinking can come across as a rather intellectual and academic exercise. Strange terminologies, divergent activities, new processes etc; who can blame them for thinking so?

In my humble opinion, Design Thinking needs to stop focusing on the process and be more about the outcome. In other words, Design Thinking needs to become more results-orientated. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not talking about ROI here. ROI kills Design Thinking or any creative process out right. What I’m on about is for us to define what we want to achieve with Design Thinking instead. This flips the activity from something that provides a “means to an end” to having an “end that justifies the (chaotic) means”.

I’ll also go as far as saying that it is not really that important which Design Thinking process you choose to use. In fact any of the 40,700,000 “Design Thinking Process” hits you can find on Google will be fine. Why? Well, what they don’t tell you is that most of the Design Thinking Processes out there are pretty much all the same.

As I mentioned before:

Design (Thinking) is an iterative activity that only has broad guidelines but no fixed process.

So why do people tend to focus more on the process than on the results? I can think of 2 reasons.

The first one is that implementation Design Thinking can be a rather long and arduous process. Naturally so as the Design Thinking approach can find lots of places and problems to add value to. Unfortunately this sometimes happens very far down (or up) the food chain, so much so that the immediate outcome is unclear. So as they say, “lets enjoy the process” shall we?

There is some truth in that saying; however, this is where Design Thinking starts to break down. If Design Thinking is left on its own to add value where it can and in all possible places in an organization, it will end up doing nothing substantial. Design Thinking needs to be better structured by defining the results you want to achieve, and then let the process naturally move towards it.

My second reason goes along the same lines, but it revolves around fear, the fear that Design Thinking can become a never-ending iterative activity. And it can. Designers naturally get this and are comfortable with it, but business people find it hard to accept. So what ends up happening is we go back to the process (often over relying on it) to justify what we are doing. While this approach works, we need to ensure that we keep an eye out on the end goal.

In conclusion whenever you talk Design Thinking, always talk about it in context of the objective. If there is isn’t one, make sure you come up with one. Doing so takes us one step closer to making Design Thinking a more credible activity to the unconverted.

Implementing Design Thinking is a regular series of posts, where I share my thoughts and experiences in helping companies implement Design as a tool for business success and achieving Design Leadership. Check out the rest of my articles here.

I was actually quite surprised to find myself deep undercover in Design Thinking activities in the last 12 months. The great thing was that these activities were varied, spanning from running Design Thinking workshops, developing a Design Thinking curriculum, lectures on leveraging on the power of design, and best of all implementing Design Thinking within organizations that are non-traditional buyers of design. What a ride!

What is even more interesting, was finding out that Design Thinking has not died (or become a failed experiment as some say), but more accurately, it has evolved into a vibrant ecosystem of activities that focuses on businesses, brands and organizations leveraging on design as a strategic competitive advantage.

Some of you might mistakenly think that I’m against the whole concept of Design Thinking. I don’t blame you as this probably stem from an article I wrote on how Design Thinking is Killing Creativity. If you read that article, it actually explains that the problems of Design Thinking stems from the activity not being facilitated or managed correctly, or worst still, subjected to the negative influences of traditional corporate culture. Those observations in that article have been validated time and time again during my yearlong involvement with Design Thinking.

Therefore I thought it would make a lot of sense to run a regular series here on Design Sojourn to share my thoughts and my experiences in how I helped companies implement Design Thinking as a tool for business success and ultimately Design Leadership. Furthermore, this seems to be a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) and discussion point with my clients and participants of my workshops.

This post will contain a table of contents that will be updated whenever new posts from this series are published. So I would like to encourage you to bookmark this post and visit our blog frequently? I hope you enjoy my thoughts and the ensuing conversation. Do stay tuned!

Table of Contents:

Implementing Design Thinking 1: Focus on the Outcome not the Process
Implementing Design Thinking 2: Have the Guts to Say it Sucks
Implementing Design Thinking 3: Next Week
Implementing Design Thinking 4: TBC…

John Gruber, from Daring Fireball, tells it like it is. For example, his thought on people wishing for larger 4-inch iPhone screens:

Apple decided on the optimal size for an iPhone display back in 2006. If they thought 4-inches was better, overall, as the one true size for the iPhone display, then the original iPhone would have had a 4-inch display.

I agree. Jony Ive probably had a bunch of iPhone foam models with different sizes and the model with the 3.5-inch screen probably felt the best in Steve Job’s hand.

John also shares some good insights on how and when we can expect a new iPhone form factor:

Apple isn’t going to make a new form factor just for the sake of newness itself — they make changes only if the changes make things decidedly better. Thinner, stronger, smaller, more efficient. If they don’t have a new design that brings about such adjectives, they’re going to stick with what they have.

[snip]

Apple is a company of patterns and cycles. These product cycles keep the machine functioning at a steady pace. They broke one pattern with the iPhone 4S: all previous iPhones were released in June. But they’ve added a new one: a two-year cycle that starts with a new form factor (3G/4) followed a year later by a new phone with the same form factor but significantly improved internals (3GS/4S). If next year’s phone is named “iPhone 5”, then I’ll expect a lookalike iPhone 5S in 2013.

John’s comments mirrors my own thoughts in my earlier article on mobile phone brands copying iPhones. I never really expected the new iPhone to have a change in its form factor. However when I called it the new phone the iPhone 5, what I missed was that Apple only changes the number when the form factor changes such as how the iPad evolved to iPad 2.

Finally, I like to say that Siri intrigues me. Is it strange that I keep on wondering how she looks like for real? Is she even a she? Function wise, I’m excited. Since it can do speech to text, it looks like it can help me with a faster blogging workflow. But I’ll hold off my judgment until I get a chance to play around with it. How about you? What are your thoughts on the new iPhone 4S?

This morning I work up to the sad news of the passing of Steve Jobs. Though I expected it, I had hoped it would never come. As the world mourns the passing of a legend, I’m at a lost for words to describe the breath and depth or the everlasting impact of his achievements. I therefore though it would be better instead to celebrate his life with a small tribute by sharing 8 things I would like to thank Steve Jobs for.

1) Showing the world what the power of design can do.

2) Showing that a design focused and design-integrated organization is vital for innovation and leadership in today’s market environment.

3) Showing that passion and going that extra mile turns good to great.

4) Not being afraid to fail, and instead launching paradigm shifting products with guts, and iterating as you go.

5) Showing the world that good design is about making choices.

6) Showing that it is not about products or services but about ecosystems.

7) Showing us how to stand above criticism while keeping sight of the bigger picture.

8) And finally, for demystifying technology by making it simple to use and turning it into our friend.

Though we have never met, you have indelibly left your mark on me (via my Apple IIe) and, not to mention, the world. Thank you for doing more for Design than anyone else could. RIP.

Harry Marks writes a very insightful piece on what Apple has done or will do for the computing industry in a Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud environment.

To some, it means Apple has locking you in to its “walled garden”. To others, the company is giving you everything you need in a pretty, all-inclusive package – like a Sandals with free WiFi. To me, it means Apple is getting ready to finish the first volume of its 10 year long opus on the true definition of “ecosystem”.

With your iTunes ID, you can make sure any music, apps and books you purchase on your Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad are automatically downloaded and synced on all your devices at once. If you start a document in Pages on Lion, it automaticaly saves each change and uploads it to iCloud, then syncs it back down to your iPad where you can work on it later at a coffee shop, or waiting for your train. No buttons are pressed to initiate the sync, no wire is required to transfer the files. Everything is done in the background without the user’s knowledge. Apple’s iCloud is one step closer to making “user error” a thing of the past and that’s the brush being used to paint the bigger picture.

One side of the industry thinks Apple is a hardware company, whose prime directive is to sell Macs and iPhones. The other side considers Apple a software company, where the devices are just shells to run the services and apps it provides. But Apple is more than just “hardware” and “software”. It’s an experience maker.

Devices and apps are nothing compared to the industry-shifting ways in which Apple is changing our perception of what “personal computing” should be. Steve Jobs’ legacy isn’t going to be a giant spaceship in Cupertino, nor will it be the iPad or iPod. Steve’s legacy and, more importantly, Apple’s, will be having built a biome for customers where online services and devices work together so mundane tasks and troubleshooting become unnecessary, while at the same time lowering the barrier of entry for users of all levels. Essentially, Apple has made “your nephew who’s a whiz with computers” obsolete.

(I bolded certain sentences to emphasize the key message.)

It is not only just about creating great products or services, it’s about creating an entire ecosystem. Not only that, it is about creating an ecosystem with parts that all work beautifully together. That’s the key. This is Apple at its best and not wavering from their fundamental, and now ancient, creed: “It just works”.

Check out Harry’s full article at Curious Rat.

Via: Revert to Save