Concepting Periodical
Welcome to the world of Concept Composing.
Heyo! I’m Norm, a Concept Composer building a nascent Concepting function at Plaid. You’ve found our even more nascent Periodical series, where I’ll be discussing our explorations and learnings as the function evolves. What’s that composer role you mentioned? Great question!
A Concept Composer is someone who explores the form of an idea. They wade between exploring and documenting; composing into the unknown, and making sense of new ideas. The role was discovered by myself and Yatú as part of our research as Teal Process & Company. We like to think of the role as a combination of an artist, theorist, and designer.
The Concepting function at Plaid is a home to grow Concept Composers. Plaid’s provided a wonderful environment to explore ambiguity since I joined as a design intern in 2017. So while discovering this new role, I was always thinking about how it could be applied at Plaid.
I chatted with designers, design managers, and researchers on the team to understand how the role could best support the organization. Where we landed is the creation of a Concepting function that sits alongside our Research & Insights function. Here’s the initial primer I presented to the org!
In an organization like Plaid we’ve found two primary benefits of building a Concepting function.
- To enable product teams by helping accelerate the development and testing of new ideas.
- To conduct research on how we explore, and build infrastructure to support exploration improvements.
As we’re less than a year in, there’s much more to discover. A sentiment I try to repeat is that the act of concepting happens all across an organization every day. Creating a Concepting function just provides attention to think more deeply about how an organization generates ideas.
If you’ve started exploring a similar role or function, I’d love to chat!
Til yonder times,
Norm & Co.
