6 Ways Design is Going MASSIVE in 2017
Design, and in particular, Design Thinking, has come a very very long way over the last few years. Management Consulting firms are snapping up agencies left, right and centre. Designers now sit on the board, in the C-suite, and hold some of the highest positions at the biggest companies in the world. The momentum Design gained in 2016 is incredible, but don’t think it’ll stop there. As organisations mature up the Danish Design Ladder (see our extended version here) they’re realising the power of using design in other more powerful ways.
From our point of view, at the frontline of Design in Business, we see many areas where Design will add immense value in 2017. Here is but a slice of where we’re heading.
1. Design Sprints as an investment triage process
The investment process at corporates is a black hole for innovation. De-risking projects and initiatives with century old financial metrics that kill anything that doesn’t have a positive, and directly attributable, revenue model. Attribution of revenue works if you’re selling lemonade on the side of the road. Newer ways to value our investments are needed. But before we reach utopia we’ll use Design Sprints to come up with persuasive prototypes founded in customer research, and iterated to the point of MVP-lite. Can I use any more jargon in this paragraph, I think not. Read about Design Sprints here Design Sprints, So Hot Right Now
2. Design Education to unleash your intrapreneurs
Entrepreneurs are obsessed with solving problems, they’re passionate about talking to potential customers, they get the big picture yet focus on the nuances of experiences, they take controlled risks, they go about their mission relentlessly, and they don’t take no for an answer. Intrapreneurs have a few more restrictions. Finding the subversives amongst your employee base is hard, they certainly won’t own up to it for fear of HR repercussions. Design education will help bring them to life and spur them into action. If you invest in Design Education, you’re sending a clear signal to your employees that you value innovation and the people that challenge the status-quo and fight to improve your customer experiences.
3. Design Research unleashing new customer insights
You don’t know your customers, and they don’t know what their needs are, everything is changing, and rapidly. A gold rush is about to start, and the gold is customer insights. Typical focus groups and market research won’t help you because they only tell you what is, it won’t tell you what could be, what the market will be like in the future. In order to get a glimpse of the future you need ethnography, lite-ethnography, or just Design Research to help you find what you’re competitors won’t see, invaluable customer insights, gold. We see Design Strategists and Designers, in general, playing a huge part in hunting for these insights, simply because Designers don’t skip the good bits. They ask why, they dive into the nuances, they don’t try and save time by skipping the synthesis step, they truly care about what makes people tick, and they delve into it.
4. Design Thinking as a tool to push companies beyond the status-quo
You think you’re edgy because you’ve got an innovation lab? But do you really know how to use it? And do you have the processes in place to let people explore within that lab? Design Thinking as a general practice helps in all regards. Your innovation lab is incomplete without employees performing customer research, synthesis, concept generation, ideation, prototyping, customer testing, business model generation, and finally narrative strategy. These are all practices that come naturally to those that live Design Thinking. If you really want to go beyond the status-quo, and you really want to use your innovation lab to do what it says it will, get some Design Thinkers in your ranks.
5. Design Mindsets helping push collaboration and co-design
Every organisation has experts, not every organisation helps these experts flourish in their chosen fields. Bringing them out of the shadows and into the limelight is difficult in itself, let alone getting these experts into a room with other experts to make 1+1=5. Having a design mindset makes people inherently collaborative, it binds people together on shared visions, it breaks down silos, it enforces curiosity and crushes the kind of individualism that stifles innovation and high performers. If you want your organisation to be more collaborative; your employees to co-design new products, services, and experiences; and you’d like to break down silos and bring elements of modularity to your organisational structure, let a design mindset flourish within your people.
6. Design Culture encouraging diversity and inclusion
Designers love people, they love beautiful things, they love (in equal parts) perfection and chaos, they seek inspiration everywhere, they’re insanely curious, they ask why constantly. They won’t do something that doesn’t make sense to them, and they try to surround themselves with as many different people as possible. Designers favour diversity and drive the inclusion of all people with everything they do. Diversity and Inclusion is a huge topic for corporates at the moment. If your organisation isn’t diverse, and you want to speed up the process, hire some more designers and let them loose. Let them hack the office furniture, let them play music, let them do whatever they feel will change the vibe of your culture, you’ll thank them for it.
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