Business Design

Sharon Reier’s piece on design management consulting tunes into what I’m working on these days… These firms operate quite differently from traditional strategy consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain, which work mainly with top management and use the concepts and techniques inculcated at top business schools. At the design firms, there is a “richer engagement…

Just finished ready Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, a wonderful, powerful critique of modern architecture. At one point he describes how the International Style was killing demand for craftmanship, replacing Beaux-Arts architecture with glass boxes. …to those who complained that International Style buildings were cramped, had flimsy walls inside as well as out,…

Organizations that have hired talented designers don’t always produce good designs. For those of us who are designers, there are many, sometimes frustrating reasons. For organizations, there is a complex interworking of goals, communications, organizations, processes, tools, and relationships that may or may not positively influence the quality of design. In the past ten years…

Kevin Potts has a short and sweet article about Better Invoices in the new ALA. Highlights of the doc format: The word Invoice Tax ID # All names and addresses Date the invoice was sent List of services with dates Terms (he has a good example showing carrots and sticks for timing, to which I…

Recently I read a project brief that nicely summarized the problems with a web-based ordering system. They were able to see the connection — which is often indirect — between good design and innovation. The brief admitted the product both looked esthetically poor and was hard to use. As a result potential customers were lost…

‘Markets don’t buy products, customers do.‘ —Tom Peters A great argument for complementing marketing with design.

Karl Long posted his new DMI article, Customer Loyalty and Experience Design in eBusiness: ‘I’ve tried to take the approach of connecting experience design to a business imperative, in this case customer loyalty…. This means some issues need to be addressed by the design early on before you start trying to collect more information or…

The Evolution of the Design-Inspired Enterprise (abstract free, article not free) in MIT Sloan’s Management Review is another article in the avalanche of recent business publications discovering design… …companies such as Master Lock, Procter & Gamble, BMW and Cambridge SoundWorks have employed design research — including the use of multidisciplinary teams and a variety of…

In the next decade, many design jobs will move offshore. If you think I’m wrong, if you think this is preposterous, then talk to out-of-work programmers who thought the same thing only five years ago. But Victor, you protest, someone can’t do user research from 4000 miles away. To this I’d say, most companies aren’t…

I’ve mentioned the Rotman Management (University of Toronto) design issue (.pdf) recently, but having finished it I’d like to point out what’s worth reading in this worthy mag: First, if you’re printing just do pgs. 5-30. The rest is fluff and alumni only. The dean’s column on page 7 contrasts the business focus on optimization…

Not too long ago I wished for Designers Without Borders, a SWAT team-like organization that would drop designers into third world countries and give them help with technology no one else could offer. Brainheart magazine reports (albeit not online) on something close to this, Geekcorps: A US-based, non-profit organization, we place international technical volunteers in…

In David Stutz’s resignation letter to Microsoft, he despairs of the toll the downturn will take on management: ‘Being the lowest cost commodity producer during such a recovery will be arduous, and will have the side-effect of changing Microsoft into a place where creative managers and accountants, rather than visionaries, will call the shots.’ I…

Alternate career idea #51: Form a small team of crack Internet peeps to provide quick and simple services in the developing world. For example, imagine a SWAT team dropping into Afghanistan to set up a simple website to disseminate information within the new government, complete with no-nonsense hardware and training. Then we’re off to somewhere…