(DD#3) Pebbles Playbook HQ

Our own little universe of content

Another day, another drop

Keeping in line with our approach for the year, we bring to you our third design-drop in the series. This one is short but packs quite a punch.

Right into it

The intention behind the article at hand is to launch our playbook HQ. This space will house our various playbooks and become the scaffolding upon which we build and publish the rest of our playbooks to come.

If you want to cut some corners and get right into it, you can check it all out – here.

If you want to learn more about it, the story behind it and the context in which it falls, read on.

Context

To better understand the playbook, let’s begin with some context.

Who we are

Pebble Design is a strategic design & product studio. Our aim is to help teams make great products, services and ventures. We do this by helping teams explore and build new concepts or improve and innovate on existing ones, guided by the lens of design-led innovation in general and strategic design in particular.

Pebble’s design-drops

As discussed in a previous article, our team at Pebble has long believed that we have a thing or two to contribute to the space of design-led innovation in general and strategic design in particular. We are currently in the process of releasing our approach bit by bit, in the form of what we call design-drops. This playbook is our third drop in the series.

A Playbook HQ

With the context out of the way, lets explore the topic at hand — what is the playbook HQ and why we made it.

What

Our playbook HQ is the space in which we will begin to house our various playbooks on design, research and innovation. Every time we create something new, this HQ is where the content would be published. The vision is to eventually contain everything we know, think and do in the space.

Why

There are two main reasons that have led us to create this HQ and those are —housing and scaffolding.

The first reason is housing
As mentioned before, we are on a mission to map out and publish our design approach. We are currently doing so in the form of playbooks which we hope to drop regularly throughout this year. Now that we started to build up some serious content behind this initiative (and have much more on our short-term to-do list), we need to have a place that would house and present this content in an accessible way.

The second reason is scaffolding
We have a lot of ideas about what we could be mapping and publishing next and it could get a bit overwhelming at times. The HQ provides us with important scaffolding that we could build on. The structure organises our existing content but also guides us as to what we could publish next.

For us and others
Finally, to state what may seem obvious, we are publishing this HQ for both our own sake and others. This whole initiative of publishing our design approach was done first and foremost for our own sake. Sitting down to think about and articulate our own approach is a challenge that we hope would result in more clarity amongst our own team and better work overall.

Beyond that, we hope that the work we have done here could also support others. Whether you are an individual or a team, we believe that having access to a well-articulated, simple and effective end-to-end design approach could help you make great things.

How it is structured

The HQ breaks our playbooks into two sections—main playbooks and deep dives. The main playbooks section tries to capture the crux of our approach, while the deep dives intend to build on it and add depth. Whether you are new to the space or well-versed in it, we recommend starting with the main playbooks. If you find that they work for you and you want to go deeper you could go to our deep dives next.

How to use it

We have approached the HQ in the same way that we create everything and that is for you to use them as you wish. That said, we have a few thoughts about ways to make good use of this HQ. Below are a few of those:

• A way to refresh your own understanding of the space.
• A way to deep dive into areas that you are less familiar with.
• A treasure trove of useful templates to access when needed.
• A way to up-skill people in your team.
• A way to establish a common design & innovation approach within your team.

Whichever way you end up using this collection of playbooks, we would be eager to hear about it.

And so you have it

And so you have it— our playbook HQ, a central place where we plan to house all our playbooks on design-led innovation.

Ready to start?

To get right into it, you can access the HQ — here.

Have a look, give it a go and let us know what you think. Whether it is a critique or a compliment, a way to improve it or a related thought, we’d love to hear about it and we promise to reply. Just drop us a line at: hello@pebbledesign.co.

And that’s a wrap, we hope you find this playbook and those contain within it, to be of help.