Lots of professions use design process in their fields. For example:
• Engineers might do many virtual models to determine how to optimize a result.
• Interior decorators and artists are looking to create emotional relevancy.
• Marketing professionals are trying to anticipate user needs and desires
But, a unique concept of professional design thinking holds that:
• Visual cues and attributes have a direct connection to the way people experience and perceive themselves and their world and that
• These connections are internalized through the use of a product, service or space
To clarify the differences between design and other disciplines, let’s take a look at the goals, focus and tasks of other related and important disciplines to businesses, that might use some elements of the design process, but are nonetheless primarily concerned about other goals.
• Artists, typically focus on changing our perceptions of the world, through a medium for purposes of expressing their particular vision.
• Decorators, typically focus on creating aesthetically pleasing environments by applying surface treatments based on particular styles to beautify and place or object.
• Marketers, who work closely with designers, are justifiably concerned with what will sell and are interested in transactions.
• Engineers optimize variables to create products and environments that work well and accomplish their stated objectives in a reliable and efficient way.
It’s not that designers aren’t concerned with these objectives. Reliability, salability, expression and change or aesthetic connection are certainly part of the constraints that designers will deal with. But, designers are primarily concerned with what is going to improve the user experience to make it more valuable to users, by adding meaning and relevancy to that experience. It is the actual use of the product, service or space that matters.
The basic principles of design value are:
• Emotional Correlation. There is a direct relationship between what you see and experience and the value you perceive. When you see or experience something, people make a judgment as to what is meaningful and valuable.
• Successive Approximation. The correlation between what you see/experience and what you think/feel can be represented and tested before it is offered or made. We might not know, in advance, what form something needs to take to communicate certain information or create a certain perception. But, by creating representations of possible options before we make a final selection, we can gauge for ourselves and for others what the possible effect will be.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Friday, August 29th, 2008
Branding, Design, Marketing, Pittsburgh No Comments
The word “Design” has been applied to just about everything. Hair Design. Nail Design. Floral Design. Etc. Although there may be elements of design process in many of these fields, design as a profession can be differentiated from other related fields such as art, engineering, marketing, decoration and the like.
Design is a business strategy that focuses on increasing the perceived value of products and services by:
• Anticipating a users needs and desires
• Associating attributes and visual cues that add meaning and emotional relevance
• Approximating a final integration of attributes through prototyping and testing
Failing Your Way To Success
This last of these, approximating through prototyping, is the core activity of design. In this respect, design is a process of destruction creating value by successively approximating and eliminating options inappropriate to user satisfaction or constraints. As in science, there is an hypothesis, the basis of the ‘concept.’
But, rather than trying to create a solution that can be replicated by anyone, design is about experimenting with different approaches with the understanding that only one will survive. It is only through prototyping and review of the relative strengths and weaknesses of options, that a solution is defined. Designers, in this sense, are experimenting with what ‘could be’ to arrive at what ‘will be’ produced. Only through hundreds of failed prototypes or experiments does a successful solution emerge.
Just after I graduated college, I had the opportunity to visit Milton Glaser, one of the most prolific designers of his time. He had co-founded PushPin Studios (with Seymour Chwast) and New York Magazine (with Clay Felker) and created many iconic designs of 60’s, including the I “heart” NY logo and the psychedelic Bob Dylan poster. I was curious about how he did it. When I was ushered into his office, he was at his drawing board, a humble affair, not dissimilar from the one I used, perched on a stool like the one I used. Next to it was a trash can, just like the one I used. But there was a difference. It was 9:00 AM and his trash can was full.
Inspired Destruction
His back was to the door, so I was able to watch the master for several minutes. What I had imagined was a process of inspired creation. What I saw was inspired destruction. He would sketch something, then throw it out. Then another. Throw it out. Clients probably would have been pleased with any of the options in the trash can, but the inspiration came after many phases of destruction.
Good design is built on a rather counter-intuitive principle. Rather than a process of ‘creating,’ most of what happens is destroyed. By making small or “successive” approximations to define the attributes and visual cues that add meaning and emotional relevancy, one moves from a point of uncertainty to greater certainty as to what is going to create more value for users within a set of constraints.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Advertising, Design, Marketing, Pittsburgh No Comments
Until about 200 years ago, the design process was quite immediate in that there was a very direct connection between people who made things and the people who used them. If you wanted a canoe, you’d use the time-tested method of getting bark off a tree, and shaping it like your forefathers did. They learned what worked over time, by the process of boats sinking, or floating. There was an evolution to the forms that products, buildings and packaging took. The person who designed and built your boat probably lived down the street. There wasn’t really a mass market.
Designer as Intermediary
But as technology and mass production became part of the business environment and markets expanded, people who bought and used things got farther and farther from the people who made them, so that eventually, they never even met. People who made things had to imagine what people might need in the future, and gradually, the field of professional design emerged as an intermediary, anticipating and planning for products, services and communications would impact and connect to people they’d never met.
Where the engineer, marketer and sales force typically represents the provider of a product or service, the designer represents the user, defining what would be desirable, useable and useful to people. Even in the developmental years of the design professions, designers understood that the products, services and spaces needed to address a range of desires and physical and emotional issues that went well beyond functional need. Products and services were opportunities to create experiences for the users, not just a solution to a problem.
Representing the User
When Henry Dreyfus, one of the founders of the Industrial Designers Society of America and it’s first president, designed the now classic phone handset in 1937, he said that “the phone is merely a way for people to have the experience of communicating directly with someone they love over great distances.”
In 1939, he designed the Big Ben Alarm clock for Westclock. After a year of development, it was ready to market. The first customer was the John Wanamaker department store in New York City. Henry Dreyfus, in what is considered to be the first live ‘user testing,’ observed potential customers pick up the clock, examine it and put it down without buying it or asking any questions. Eventually, he questioned customers. Why were they putting it down after examining it? What was wrong?
Their response: it felt too light. Something so light couldn’t be substantive. Whether they were right or wrong, Dreyfus realized that people were associating weight with value even though he knew there was no connection. In a radical departure from the notion that ‘less is more,’ he added a 3 oz. weight, serving no function whatsoever, but to create the perception of greater substance. In this case, more weight equated to more value. He said, “people want the experience of knowing that their alarm clock had something inside.” Weight was an attribute that had meaning and relevance… it created a cue that led to a perception of value and substance.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Advertising, Branding, Design, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Pittsburgh, Public Relations, Sales, Uncategorized, Web Design No Comments
A few years ago, I asked my mother, who’d seen a lot of changes over her lifetime, what technology or product she thought changed her life the most. I expected she would say the telephone, automatic transmission or Pampers. She thought for a minute, went to our kitchen cupboard and pulled out a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a box of Duncan Hines Chocolate Cake Mix.
Campbell’s Soup
“This,” she said, “made me a better mother,” pointing to the can of tomato soup. “This is what I gave you every day at lunch and you liked it. It wasn’t just good. It was MMMmm good. It gave me confidence that I could be a good mom.”
Good soup. Good mom. I remember walking home from elementary school for lunch everyday. My mom was right. That bowl of soup was a symbol of connection and consistency. My mother associated that product with something that was important to her…giving my brother and me food we liked. Of course, the product itself had nothing to do with being a good mother. But that’s what it meant to her.
And it must have done the same for millions of other moms. 89% percent of American households purchase Campbell’s soups with an average of eleven cans of Campbell’s soup in their pantries at all times. It has a 69 percent share of the U.S. wet soup market, selling almost three billion cans of soup every year. At a 15%-28% price premium.
Duncan Hines Chocolate Cake Mix
As for the cake mix box, what did it contain? Flour, sugar and chocolate flavoring, all ingredients she had in the cupboard as well. So why was this one of her top contenders for innovation of a lifetime? “It was so easy, we could do it together,” she said. “You couldn’t blow it.”
The Promise of a Brand
Campbell’s soup and Duncan Hines cake mixes aren’t just products. They’re brands that have associations with values to which parents and kids can connect: good mothering, sharing and, if I daresay, love. When you think about the ‘benefits’ these products fulfill, it’s easy to jump platitudes like convenience or simplicity. But the real value isn’t in the convenience. It’s in the associations that are important to the people that buy and use these products. We all have both simple and more complex needs. To the extent that products can address some of the deeper more complex issues that customers deal with, the greater the chance you’ll have stronger associations and possibly a strong brand.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Friday, August 1st, 2008
Branding, Marketing, Pittsburgh, Sales No Comments