What does design do to your company?
A question all designers struggle with- “What is it that you do?”. I always try to explain experience strategies, cognitive psychology, mental modals, human factors, and end up settling for coloring, painting, stitching and making stuff.
When an artist paints on a canvas, he focuses on expressing the emotions. What the viewer understands is not a concern. Similarly, an engineer focuses on solving a problem through products. How the user uses the various mechanisms are not a concern. Both art and engineering are essential for human being. Somewhere in between, comes design. where innovative products, can complete their functions and can be related to our emotions or cognition. (though form follows function, both can arguably be equally important)
In the 21st century, a designer fits in almost everywhere. Anything under the sun you can dream of, there is a space for a designer. Simply because a good design works in three parts.
1. The ideation
2. The execution
3. The interaction
and there is no service, product, space or experience that has not gone through one or more of the three parts above.
The ideation: The most critical part a designer involves himself/herself in is when the concept is generated to solve a problem. Understanding the problem and setting up the stage for execution and interaction.
The execution: The actual building cycle of the product. A good design influences how the product is build, developed and perfected using the least time and better resource allocation.
The interaction: The final interaction a user has with the product or service. This decides if your user stays with you or not. Better the experience a user gets out of a product, better is the design you have.
Throughout these stages, a designer adds value by bringing in fresh perspective and voice of the consumer onto the table. That’s why you require a designer.
You hire a designer to change stuff. How your company works, how your product builds, how your product actually impacts the consumer. It means many of your developers will complain that they are made to rewrite pages of code that works perfectly fine. That’s why you pay shitload of money to a designer right? Well, if a designer is in your company, and makes designs based only on decisions made by the business administration, marketing and sales departments, then the designer is just an implementer of someone else’s designs. And you are paying a designer to make no designs.
The expertise a designer uniquely has to solve the problem, is their expertise in understanding a problem, analyzing it and finding the most viable solution possible within the restrains of resources and business requirements of a company. In short, a designer puts both users and a company’s requirements into perspective. The process involved in ‘understanding’, ‘analyzing’ & ‘solving’ your companies problems is generically termed as Design thinking
Read how design thinking saved lots of dimes.
So whats required to make design work. A mistake most designers make in a new company is that they gel in and adjust to their surrounding. Mostly because companies want their designers to work with their process. Opinion is very important when most of the companies do not understand what is it to expect out of a designer. Setting an expectation requires to happen initially. Hence the designer requires the freedom and permission to do what a designer do best. Influence. A designer might go about making changes. Understand the rationale behind their thoughts and decisions and let design influence your company.
