Cyberman №10 — Business design — Stanford’s d.school, Adidas circular design, developing new business models by unbundling and bundling existing ones, and a new song by Leonard Cohen
Welcome fellow Cyber people.
Every now and then, this newsletter will bring you a few interesting articles about contemporary human beings, machines, and interactions between them.
It will be curated to bring different perspectives to these subjects, to ask important questions and maybe suggest a few possible answers.
You can find more articles on our Facebook Page or website. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Enjoy!
In this issue, we will explore the topic of business design.
A few decades ago, it was easier to identify with your job title. Designers were designing and business people were making strategies, crunching numbers, and selling.
And then during the late 80s and early 90s, consultancy superstars IDEO came up with design thinking. Applying design methodology to other processes, like creating business strategy, developing new products or rearranging your life. Now, everybody wants to design something and designers are expected to learn business staff.
The basic ingredient of design thinking is empathy, asking users what is important to them. After that, you think of a possible solution, make a rough prototype and test it with users. Based on user feedback, you adjust the idea and go all over again. After some time, your solution will probably be good enough, at least.
You don’t need to use design thinking to design a business, business strategies, or business processes, but its cool and you feel creative even while wearing the suit.
Let’s see how the big guys do it.
Once a scrappy disrupter in a trailer at the edge of campus, Stanford’s d.school — and its signature idea, design thinking — has grown into a Silicon Valley institution. Is it up for bigger challenges, like affordable housing, the courts, even democracy itself?
“Whether or not you have encountered the term, design thinking has influenced your life. Supermarket shelves and online app stores now feature countless products and services that were first dreamed up or refined using design-thinking tools: everything from early hand-held devices like Palm PDAs to Uber Eats and Bank of America’s Keep the Change savings program. While the movement has roots in physical design, it has, over the past two decades, blossomed into a method for generating solutions to a broad range of problems. Nonprofits have embraced the technique as a way to prototype new vaccine-delivery systems for low-income regions. PepsiCo now has a chief design officer whose job it is to bring innovative thinking to the company’s vast array of snack products. The bestselling book Designing Your Life applies design thinking to help its readers “create a life that is meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling.”
…
“Tackling immense social and political systems does pose challenges for a design approach. Several years ago, Reich began to talk with Stein Greenberg and Kelley about applying design thinking to improve democratic institutions, discussions that resulted in a course called Design for Bipartisanship. “We had all these long conversations about it,” Reich told me. “Sarah would always be pushing — appropriately — that we have to specify the problem, and I would say, ‘All right, are we thinking the problem is Congress? Or are we thinking the problem is citizenship and how people respond to elected politicians?’ Of course, my inclination was to say, ‘It’s a lot of these things.’ We can’t reduce the problem of democratic dysfunction to one problem specification. So far as I could make out, the design-thinking approach couldn’t move forward unless we could specify a singular problem to work on.”
Adopting circular design is “good for business”, says Adidas eco-innovation leader
Developing closed-loop products is seen as a key step towards turning the global economy into a circular one, in which waste and pollution are eliminated while natural systems are restored.
Embracing the circular economy and closed-loop design is the only way for brands to achieve business success while safeguarding the planet, according to a senior member of the innovation team at Adidas.
“The closed-loop approach could, in theory, mean that brands no longer sell products to customers, but instead lend them materials that are returned later for recycling.
“We look at closed-loop as the purest form of the circular economy,” said Kirupanantham. “So you make something, someone uses it and brings it back somehow. And that is turned into a new product: a new shoe or whatever.”
…
“We have to go where our consumers want to go,” he said. “Our consumers are more aware, much more streetwise. Regardless of what happens in legislation, it’s an economy that we believe they are striving towards. And that means we will strive towards it.”
In a famous 1995 pronouncement that has since become a Silicon Valley trope, Jim Barksdale, the CEO of Netscape at the time, declared that there are two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling. That is, many ventures seek to profit by repackaging existing goods and services as revenue streams they can control, with technology frequently serving as the mechanism.
“The tech industry’s mythology about itself as a “disruptor” of the status quo revolves around this concept: Inefficient bundles (newspapers, cable TV, shopping malls) are disaggregated by companies that serve consumers better by letting them choose the features they want as stand-alone products, unencumbered of their former baggage. Why pay for a package of thousands of unwatched cable television channels, when you can pay for only the ones you watch? Who wants to subsidize journalism when all you care about is sports scores?”
…
“Reducing the world’s accumulated complexity — businesses, institutions, or cities — to sets of discrete tasks or features requires viewing the world as a computer does: quantifying value, weighing costs against benefits, and disregarding ambiguity. As if the messy analog world was code itself, unbundling frames each desirable feature of the world as an independent module that can operate anywhere without a loss of performance quality. The process rests on a faith that technology can isolate the true value of anything useful, removing it from its context without any loss of utility or desirability.”
For the end of this issue listen to Moving On, a song Leonard Cohen wrote in May 2016 just after he heard that Marianne Ihlen, his former lover and muse had died. The song was released on a posthumous album that Cohen’s son produced. Read more about the album here.
Thank you for reading this issue of the Cyberman newsletter.
If you like what you read, please forward the newsletter to a friend and like our Facebook Page. If somebody forwarded you the newsletter and you like it, please subscribe here.
