Hacking the SWOT Analysis
A designer’s approach to using a business analysis tool
As designers become more integrated into business units and find themselves in the boardroom they need to understand the tools, models, and language that the business community commonly utilizes. Designers may feel that business focused, highly analytical, reliability minded people have a lot to learn from us designers. This is probably true, but likewise designers have a lot to learn from business people. While design thinking in business has only begun to develop in the last 20 years, businesses have still been thriving for a long time. With digital disruption happening across many sectors, the role of design has never been more apparent. James Brown, the strategy director at Zone, made a cheeky comment that “not everything that happened before the internet was stupid.” Businesses have been doing smart and interesting things before digital (and designers) were around and in the mix.
Not everything that happened before the internet was stupid
Understanding the tools of business analysis gives designers a new understanding and common language with their business colleagues, but it can also provide inspiration for new tools in the design process. In our project for Design in Business at Hyper Island we decided to “hack”…
