Use metaphors and hack your design process

Design Methods 101: Designing with metaphors.

Would be a pretty rowdy bank, wouldn’t it?

What?

Design Metaphors can be used to merge new images with well-known territory in order to generate new and often very rewarding ideas.

Example

Designing future scenarios for a national food service, the team invited stakeholders to participate in a brainstorm session, presenting them to inspiration from the restaurant industry. Concepts such as a ‘la carte menus’, ‘uniforms’, ‘waiters & waitresses’, ‘chefs’, ‘guests’, ‘weekly specials’ were translated into the context of production line food for the elderly. The participants came up with a wide variety of ideas spanning from new internal procedures to and a menu, that would change throughout the season.

Design metaphors are also valuable when you want to show how something is broken. This video is showcasing just how broken banking services are by applying a bank metaphor to the context of an english pub.

Why?

Metaphors are a playful way of learning and gaining inspiration from other industries, cultures, products, people and even countries. Merging new images with well-known territory allow new concepts to surface. For instance:

‘How might we apply metaphors from the hotel business to provide a more user centric approach to patient care?’

What could ward rounds at a hospital learn from a hotel’s room service? What would it happen if we went from ‘patients’ to ‘guests’. And how could that idea be transferred to your business?

How?

Go through books, magazines, and online sources to check out who you think might inspire the project you are working on. Do it intuitively: the moment you begin to feel inspired, you are probably on to something. It might be a person, a company, an organization, a magazine, a country, or a religion that gets your mojo going.

Try to produce visual material like collages, mood boards and sketches. Pin it on boards and invite participants to brainstorm on future directions for the project. Start out by talking about what constitutes the metaphor, which you have picked, to get inspiration going. Write down your ideas while you talk, on large pieces of paper — or on a white paper tablecloth.

Some tools:

• http://www.gomoodboard.com/ — is a great way to start collecting your images and share them with your team. You don’t even need to register.
• https://pinterest.com/ — is a great place to start researching and it’s easy to pin and share the inspiration you find.

Take care, Nils Oskar