Hasta La Ideas

Move over UI/UX Design and make way for the latest parallel in the design world, Business Design! Rothman University defines Business Design is a human-centered approach to innovation. It applies the principles and practices of design to help organizations create new value and new forms of competitive advantage. At its core, Business Design is the integration of customer empathy, experience design, and business strategy. With industry-leaders like IDEO, Designit, and more including Business Design in their services, this trend is poised to integrate design in a whole new way. This series of write-up’s by Tsukasa Tanimoto ( a Business Designer himself!) explains Business Design, how to define it, the way it functions and most importantly, what role does it play in an organization.

Recruiting a business designer? Post a job with us to source the best talent for your requirement.

Looking for life-changing career opportunities? Check out YD Job Board to work with some of the best design companies in the world!

The discipline of business design seems to be increasingly appealing to actors within the service design and innovation consultancy industries. Spotless isn’t an exception — I am proud to announce that I have recently joined as their Service & Business Designer moving across from Fjord.

Another trend I have noticed while talking to friends in the industry and former colleagues, however, is how little business design is understood. Due to the fairly recent emergence of the practice, its definition is blurred. No need to worry though — even Business Designers themselves find it hard to define their roles and to describe their activities. As a Service & Business Designer at Spotless, I am excited to share a series of blog posts which will aspire to share my own vision of what Business Design stands for.

At the macro level, a business designer applies human-centered methodologies to innovate or optimize the business-related elements of a service or product. It is equally important for a business designer to understand human-centered design in order to apply it to business elements as it is for him or her to have the analytical skills to understand how a business or service functions.

I will go into the nitty-gritty of what business design actually is, practically speaking, in the following blog posts. Today, I will focus on how the world of service design and innovation consultancy evolved with time, as it will greatly help us understand the origins of business design as well as its relevance in recent years.

It all started by seeking ‘desirability.’

Service design, by nature, aspires to come up with solutions by putting people at the heart of its processes. Through design research, potential users demand the requirements of the future service enabling service design to create desirable services. While Livework studio and Engine, both founded in the early 2000s, are considered as the pioneers of service design, a great breadth of agencies — Fjord, frog design, Designit, and many more — have since started with a similar vision and proposition.

“It might be desirable, but can we actually make it?”

Thanks to the technological progress that exponentially improved in the 2000s and to the standardization of digital services, clients naturally started to want more than service blueprints. On top of having a plan for a desirable service, they started to ask how feasible and scalable the services actually were. As a consequence, two trends emerged — on one hand, service design agencies started to widen their offer to product development, and on the other hand, product development firms morphed into end-to-end agencies by topping up their portfolios with design research and service design capabilities. Prime examples include the likes of Futurice, Reaktor, ustwo, The App Business, and others.

With greater power comes greater responsibility: the need for viability.

In recent years, design has begun to prove itself as a smart return on investment, demonstrated by valuations like DMI’s Design Value Index, which showed that the financial performance of design-centric companies outperformed the S&P 500 by a significant margin. Understanding the market potential, large corporations have started to want a piece of the big pie. In the past five years, the Big Four accounting firms — PwC, EY, KPMG, and Deloitte — have all acquired smaller firms with design capabilities. IT consulting firms are also catching the wave — Accenture acquired Fjord in 2013, Wipro acquired Designit in 2015, Altran acquired frog in 2017, and most recently, Idean and Adaptive Lab joined the Capgemini network. (For a more extensive list, @John Maeda’s Design in Tech reports give a great overview of M&A activity within the design field every year). Prestigious management consultancies aren’t an exception, either — McKinsey acquired both Lunar and Veryday while Boston Consulting Group launched a venturing and design branch called BCG Digital Ventures. Advertising, likewise, has attempted to save its industry through similar acquisitions — IDEO, for example, joined a collective run by Hakuhodo, one of Japan’s largest advertising holding companies.

Two patterns seem to have emerged from this trend. Firstly, due to the infiltration of design into the corporate world, there is now much more pressure for design to deliver a measurable financial and business outcome. Clients are asking how financially viable service design work can be, and with their greater power, designers now have greater responsibility to deliver. The second pattern presents a new opportunity. As businesses begin to see the limitations of traditional business consulting, and as open-minded designers apply their methodologies to new fields such as the business paradigm, designers have the opportunity not only to prove viability but actually to design new ways to be viable.

The relevance of Business Design today.

Fjord is a design and innovation consultancy that illustrates these three points well. While their core offer is and will remain service design, they have expanded their capability to “deliver world-class digital products” and “to rewire organizations to unlock people’s potential.” Simply proving desirability and feasibility of a service doesn’t suffice anymore. Today, not only is there a necessity to rationalize our design work by proving how viable it can be, but there is also a growing opportunity to apply user-centered approaches and design methodologies to the business realm.

This is where business design comes in. The practice’s ability to understand the craft of people-centered methodologies, combined with its strength to create a common language with business stakeholders, makes business design the perfect ‘bridge’ between both worlds — and is the reason why its value is so relevant today.

Now that we’ve uncovered the origins of business design and slightly hinted at what it is all about, my next post will deep dive into what business design actually is within the context of a design and innovation consultancy.

Other References to understand Business Design better:

• What is Service Design today? by Matteo Remondini
• ‘Go Big or Go Home’? by Jesse Grimes on ServiceDesignNetwork
• How Design Thinking will fix Design Thinking by Bert Brautigam
• Global Consultancies Are Buying Up Agencies and Reshaping the Brand Marketing World by David Gianatasio on Adweek
• The Race is On! How IBM, Accenture, PwC, and Deloitte Are Shaking Up the Marketing Industry by AdAge

Du 8 au 14 avril se tient la Design Week de Milan, rendez-vous incontournable du monde du design international. A cette occasion, Dassault Systems organise son événement : Design in the Age of Experience. Des conférences et débats y sont organisés, réunissant designers et innovateurs de renoms. Entre autres ateliers, une série de “hackathons” permets aux visiteurs de penser la ville de demain.

Dassault présente une oeuvre immersive intitulée Interfaces. Cette installation interactive a été conçue en collaboration avec le cabinet d’architectes Morphosis, basé à Los Angeles. La création explore le rôle de la pensée conceptuelle. En utilisant la réalité augmentée et la projection numérique, Interfaces plonge le spectateur au coeur d’un échange de données et de décisions, intégré au processus de création du design contemporain.

Elle se présente sous la forme de panneaux animés et rotatifs, qui deviennent des interfaces, reliant l’expérience humaine aux environnements de design contemporains, tels que le climat intérieur, les relations entre les bâtiments et le contexte urbain.
A travers cette création et cette collaboration avec Dassault, les architectes Thom Mayne, Kerenza Harris et Eric Meyer mettent en lumière l’étroite relation entre l’évolution de notre monde moderne à celui d’un monde devenu numérique. L’univers des architectes est également mis en avant, comme une entité de plus en plus dépendante des solutions numériques.

Tout le programme de la Design in the Age of Experience est à découvrir ici.

Artist Matthew Day Jackson has developed a Formica surface that subtly replicates the surface of the moon and used it to make furniture.

Presented during Milan design week, the Kohlo dining table and chairs feature curvy cartoonish wood frames. But if you look closely, the surface material of the seat has a gentle texture that mimics, to scale, the ground surface of the moon.

Jackson created this surface by developing a new variety of Formica, the wipe-clean laminate material commonly used for cafe furniture in the 1960s and 70s.

The series is the result of a collaboration between Jackson, Finnish design manufacturer Made by Choice and the Formica Group.

Jackson, who has long used Formica laminate in his artwork, decided out of curiosity to visit the factory on a visit to Finland in 2018. By chance, he also met Niclas Ahlström, who founded Helsinki-based furniture company Made by Choice in 2015.

They decided to work together on a collection of furniture that would utilise a Formica laminate designed by Jackson and developed at the plant. It is called Kolho, because that is the town where the factory is located.

To make the series, the Formica Group developed bespoke steel press-plates to create a textured laminate at 80 microns (or 0.08 millimetres) in depth, which is a scale representation of the surface of the far side of the moon.

The texture is derived from images taken from NASA‘s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009, launched in honour of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Kolho’s debut coincides with the 50th anniversary of this landing.

The chair’s form – a swooping frame that wraps a smooth rectangular seat – is based on the Apollo spaceship and the moon’s Dionysus crater.

“Apollo was rectilinear and Dionysus was chaotic and curvy. Those two things, those two polarities begged for a material that curved, which is plywood,” explained Jackson.

“I think that the play was not necessarily about material, but thinking about geometry and how the curve of a line and the flatness of the table can meet.”

Jackson’s interest in the 1959 moon landing features widely in his artwork, often in reference to ideas about colonisation and human ambition, at whatever cost.

“As we explore the world and universe around us, we are peering deeper into our own reflection,” said Jackson. “We seek not the world outside, but rather, proof of our own existence. And as we search further, we delve deeper into the terrain of our collective selves.”

In Milan, Made by Choice will present four different tables and chairs in different geometries and colours.

“I don’t see this as falling outside of art at all,” concluded Jackson. “I think objects tell stories, I don’t see a difference between sculpture and furniture.”

Other recently-launched lunar-themed furniture includes the Moon Rock collection by London-based Studio Furthermore, which is made from aluminium but designed to look like it is formed from materials mined in outer space.

The post Matthew Day Jackson creates Kohlo furniture using moon-inspired Formica appeared first on Dezeen.

Tina Breidi brought together her passion for creativity and travel, to pursue a career as a project manager at global conference Design Indaba. She details how she got there for the Dezeen Jobs careers guide.

Born in Lebanon, Breidi initially studied product design and gained experience as an industrial designer at Beirut-based Spockdesign. A move to Milan saw her exploring further studies in food design, and she later completed an internship with Dutch food designer Marije Vogelzang, before joining South Africa’s Design Indaba.

At her current role, Breidi has been able to apply her combined cultural experiences. She explains living and working in different locations has allowed her to expand her design network “to all corners of the world”.

“[I am] being constantly exposed to various locations and people, nourishes my design perspective and strengthens my ability to recognise design opportunities,” she said.

She describes her involvement at Design Indaba as helping to curate and showcase “the world’s brightest talents working around design and creativity”, adding that the company’s positive environmental and social ethos first attracted her to the role.

According to Breidi the most beneficial skill she has learnt during her career is “finding the right balance between speed and quality and building the capacity to deal with all types of people”.

“Passion and drive” she reveals are amongst the essential qualities Design Indaba looks for in potential employees, as the organisation aims to inspire and empower people to create a better future through design and creativity.

Read the interview on Dezeen Jobs ›

The post Careers guide: Tina Breidi describes how she became project manager at Design Indaba appeared first on Dezeen.

Logitech releases a new keyboard case for the 3rd gen iPad Pro. The Slim Folio Pro case($119-$129) offers a bit more protection than Apple’s own case and it features a backlit keyboard that automatically turns on once the iPad is propped up. It also has a clever storage loop for the Apple Pencil and the magnetic latch keeps it secure and charged up when it’s not in use…(Read…)