(DD#0) Pebble’s design-drops

Bringing our approach to the page

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 new concepts or improve and innovate on existing ones, guided by the lens of design-led innovation.

Design-led innovation

At Pebble, we believe that concepts are like pebbles.

All pebbles start off as rough rocks and when you throw a rough rock into the water, it sinks. But polish the rock into a smooth pebble and it could skip far.

Whatever it is you are working on, a new product, a service, a venture, a feature, they are all concepts that start off rough. Design-led innovation can help smooth them out.

How do you smooth out a concept? — you flesh it out, prototype it and bring it to life, while concurrently breaking it down into assumptions and then putting these to a test, discovering and learning in the process and iterating accordingly.

Successful products, services and ventures are pebbles, a good design process is the river that smooths them out.

Contributing to an evolving field

Design-led innovation in general and strategic design in particular, are still emerging and evolving as fields. A lot of people are excited about the promise these fields hold and yet most people out there are still figuring out their way through the space (us included).

While a lot has been created and released over the years, which has greatly helped those of us working in the space today, there is room for so much more to be developed, explored and shared.

Having worked in the space for quite some time and having experimented with various methods over the years, we believe that there is a whole lot that we too could contribute to the evolution of the space.

Our hope is that our methods, frameworks, techniques and approach in general, could help others who are already working in and around the space, as well as those trying to break into it.

Publishing our approach

Throughlines in our practice

For the past few years, we have tried to bring our design approach to the page. We started by looking for throughlines in our practice and then worked on illustrating, simplifying and templatising the content. We eventually found ourselves sitting on way too many pages worth of content and when we attempted to pull it all together we simply found the task to be too overwhelming. As a result, we decided to take a slightly different approach— a series of design-drops.

A series of design-drops

In the coming months and more, we will be publishing our approach bit by bit, one design-drop at a time. Each design-drop would be dedicated to a different aspect of our work. From an end-to-end mapping of the design and innovation process to a deep dive into each part along the way, to many other frameworks and templates that sit alongside our approach.

The Cornerstone

An end-to-end design process

First on our list, is a map of our end-to-end design & innovation process. We believe in the value of having a good mental map of the end-to-end design process. A high-level view to help you understand where you are at, where you are trying to get to and the steps you would have to go through along the way.

And yet, having worked in the space for some time, we are yet to have found a process that was good enough, in our eyes, at accomplishing this task. There certainly are a lot of attempts out there but, in our opinion, most of them are either too high-level, too focused on a particular part of the process, missing important elements or including elements that simply shouldn’t be there.

The Cornerstone

And so, we attempted to create something that we ourselves would be happy with and which others may find value in too. We took bits and pieces from the worlds of design-thinking, lean-startup, product management and UX, pulled them together in a way that made sense to us and then added some further thinking around it.

What we ended up with is what we now refer to as — ‘The Cornerstone’.
It is the centrepiece around which everything else we do fits together and builds upon.

Intrigued?

Our first design-drop is now out. You can find it here.

Future design-drops

We are going to be releasing more of these design-drops over the coming months. Interested? Sign-up here and be notified as soon as they drop.

Want to find out more about what we do?

Check us out at Pebbledesign.co. Our story, our work, it’s all there.

And that’s a wrap

Here is to an exciting time ahead!