One of the hottest topics right now is bringing design concepts and thinking approach to business strategy. The basic idea of the design approach to business innovation is to
(i) understand the client and the "design problem" - to thoroughly understand the context and explore opportunity horizons
(ii) use a variety of creative design and user observation techniques (everything from ethnography through to visualization through to exploring scenarios) to develop ideas for newly uncovered customer unmet needs
(iii) develop, build and refine prototypes with a series of multiple iterations, to test the ideas against the customer in a real world context
(iv) leverage those ideas to change the competitive dynamics and the economics of the business
Emerging technology has changed the way we interact with everything from social interactions to productivity tools we use. Designers of interactions no longer regard their job as designing a usable interface—but as architecting and designing customer experiences. I can see a new breed of designers emerging blending a number of disciplines from interactive designs to spatial and product designs. At Blast Radius, I can see a group home grown experience designers broadening their scope of influence and thinking of “experience” from service design to customer community development.
In a new book Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of IDEO, share stories from an insider’s viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to final outcome. Bill and his interviewees talked about why personal computers have windows in desktops, what made Palm’s handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. In the book he tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that have been successful at IDEO—how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design. This is an interesting read and you can download a free chapter from here. http://www.designinginteractions.com/download
