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DMI
is pleased to introduce a new series of online seminars. The Design
Leadership Series complements the popular DMI Seminar series with
shorter, interactive presentations that you can access right from
your desktop. The series will feature leading thinkers in design
and design management addressing topics of key importance, brought
to you through Microsoft Live Meeting. You may easily participate
with your team in a conference room, making this a very cost-effective
educational experience. The lectures will generally last one hour,
followed by a question and answer period with the presenter.
Past Sessions:
Research Is NOT The Enemy
January 18, 2012
Jonathan Asher, Executive Vice President, Perception Research Services
"Why bother testing? It only wastes time and money. And the results will either tell us what we already know—or they'll be wrong!"
You may have felt this way early in your career—and there may be some people on your team that still feel this way. In fairness to them, conducting research the wrong way can be as harmful as avoiding research altogether—and many of us have cringed in back rooms as shoppers were turned into "art directors."
However, smart designers also realize that research can be quite valuable in uncovering insights, providing direction, and demonstrating the value of their work. Just as important, research is not going away, as it is now a nearly universal component of any design effort. Thus, designers need to educate themselves about consumer research in order to proactively impact the research process—and to appropriately critique research without appearing overly self-interested.
To that end, this webinar will focus on sharing new research tools/techniques—and discussing "best practices" for conducting design research.
Key takeaways:
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Recommendations for using research at different stages of the design process (pre-design, screening and validation)
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Introduction of new shopper research tools (including in-store eye-tracking) and how they are being used to inform design briefs
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Discussion of emotional measurement, its added-value and optimal use
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Best practices for ensuring that standard techniques—such as focus groups—are used appropriately to yield actionable insights
Failure to Connect: Understanding Gen Y
December 7
Karen Reuther, President, DMI
This presentation will share insights into Gen Y and challenge businesses to rethink what they know about today's youth. More than just a new generation of consumers, they have unprecedented global unity and influence, which represents tremendous opportunities for companies to create, market and innovate for them.
Through constant participation in online media and social networks, Gen Ys share their every thought publicly and make their expectations and aspirations well known. Companies just need to listen and connect authentically. This presentation will offer relevant insights and implications that businesses can use to create offerings that connect to this generation of consumers.
Building Customer Relationships through Service Engagement
November 9
Ted Booth, Interaction Design Director, Smart Design
How you build your brand and deepen customer engagement is changing. More and more, this is happening 'bottom up' through the experience of the product or service itself, not 'top down' through media campaigns and messaging. This shift is changing how marketing happens and how customers are engaged. It means moving from broadcasting messages to providing access, from campaigns to service delivery, from a centrally managed function, to the coordination of disparate teams and functions toward a common vision.
Smart Design will share learnings from the retail consumer financial services industry and other industries such as consumer electronics and health care. In particular, this webinar will touch on three main themes:
1. Designing for access
For services, such as retail consumer financial services, the customer experience happens through key customer touch points such as online accounts and smartphone applications. The experience of these touch points comes to define the experience with the brand, and becomes a primary 'channel' for building customer relationships. The design of these interfaces, and the platforms behind them, must both deliver the service and engage customers in a deeper conversation.
2. Taking a systems approach
The advent of smartphone apps, tablets, 'Smart' TVs and even connected cars is changing what the 'web' is and shifting consumers’ expectations. The web site is now one of many digital touch points, all of which need to support the customer experience in a consistent and platform-appropriate way. The design of each needs to be considered as part of a larger system.
3. Leading diverse teams toward a common vision
The shift to service engagement through multiple touch points is changing how companies work. More and more, customer engagement is the result of different teams such as marketing, customer research, user experience, IT and senior leadership working together (or not). Success in this environment places greater demands on leadership, vision and coordination across different functions.
The Unified Theory of Desire
October 5, 2011
Nathan Hendricks, Chief Creative Officer, LPK
Every year, in every corner of the globe, marketers spend millions of dollars on consumer research. Their aim, of course, is to uncover the insights critical to driving preference in the marketplace. However, these investments often fail to deliver the desired results. Initiatives that score high in research are as often as not, dogs in the market or even worse, mediocre in that they hang on, doing very little to inspire the people they are intended for. At the same time, researchers in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and sociology have made breathtaking advances in our understanding of how the structure and development of our minds manifests themselves in our outward behavior.
As designers and marketers, our understanding of people needs to go beyond function and delight. In fact, if stimulating our desires compels us to buy and purchase decisions often boil down to a battle between pleasure and pain, design should speak the language of pleasure. The Unified Theory of Desire is a simple and sensible approach to understanding people and the choices needed to create brands that connect.
Key takeaways:
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Desire can unify a multidisciplinary staff and foster “organizational engagement”—a corporate structure that inspires confidence in the precision of design. Allowing desire and pleasure to be the basis of a structural framework will encourage more intimate engagement with the consumer.
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When designers and marketers tap into primal human desires, the result is a fundamental connection with their consumers as people, and the recognition of the implicit value the brand brings to their daily lives.
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Embracing desire as a driver of decision-making could result in new, fine-tuned methodologies in understanding the consumer through research. Shifting the focus of consumer research to gauge people’s desires could ultimately result in profound changes to brand foundational documents, leading to the design of brands with visceral sustainable consumer connections.
Designing for Tribes: The Value Creation Imperative
September 13, 2011
Mark Dziersk FIDSA, Managing Director, LUNAR | Chicago
The attitudes and behaviors of consumers are changing and some marketers still think it’s 1975. Those who still believe that segmentation and the traditional 4 Ps are the way to go to market for product design are destined to fail in the near future. Blockbuster didn’t get it, Groupon does. Product companies must look to new models of attitude and behavior to define the landscape in which to design products.
This talk will share insights from a class taught in the joint Kellogg/McCormick Engineering School at Northwestern University, in which the formulation of significant new groups deemed "tribes" are creating new purchase and marketing paradigms for traditional product design offerings. In order to satisfy "tribal needs," Designers must move from an executional mindset in design to an idea of “Value creation.” Value is defined by addressing assessed behavior with meaningful response, accomplished by a combination of ingenuity, beauty, and charisma.
This DMI webinar will explore the methods and techniques required to create value for “tribes” as embodied in goods and services that address behaviors, including:
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What is tribal behavior and why it trumps segmentation in product and service design
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How value creation redefines the product design process
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The three keys to envisioning new product offerings
Culture Shock
June 8, 2011
Josh Levine, Director of Internal Branding, Liquid Agency
If it’s time for your company to go beyond design thinking and start design doing, you’ll need to tackle one of your biggest business challenges—culture change.
The only truly sustainable competitive advantage in a blazing fast market is your people. How do you mobilize an entire organization to make powerful innovation-inspiring business decisions quarter after quarter? Make it your culture. Culture change isn’t easy, but the good news is the enormous return on this investment is no less than shocking.
In this session you’ll learn:
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Why culture is the best tool for creating value
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The definition of an effective culture
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The three things you must have for culture to change
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The goals of your culture: create a community that creates value
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Why culture change is so damned hard
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What makes for great culture: three brief case studies
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What to put in your culture change toolkit
The Value of Design – Deconstructed
May 10, 2011
Robert Bau, Senior Strategist, Mind Your Table Manners
When it comes to value creation, designers know how to walk the walk but not talk the talk. In other words, while many designers have a gut-level understanding of value, they are not always able to express it (or indeed calculate it) in client meetings. This webinar is about deconstructing the concept of value and exploring the linkages between value creation, design and design thinking.
Making Research Actionable
November 3, 2010
Stuart Karten, Principal, SKD
Corporations invest heavily in research to understand their customers. However, such research does not always produce insights that can lead to successful new products. Too often, product development teams get stuck as they struggle to transform piles of documentation into actionable insights. Stuart Karten believes that successful products result from actionable insights based on user empathy. In this presentation, he shares tools and strategies for developing the necessary engagement and empathy in every team member, from researchers to designers, engineers and corporate teams.
Through illustrated case studies, Stuart will demonstrate how “ModeMapping” and “Thread Matrix” processes can engage visually oriented designers in research analysis, translate complex behavior into manageable data, identify the information most relevant and valuable to product development, and ultimately drive innovation.
Why Design is Changing Management
October 6, 2010
Fred Collopy, Senior Associate Dean & Professor of Information Systems, Case Western Reserve University, Weatherhead School of Management
Two streams of thought are converging to produce an important direction in the design of organizations and their strategies. One stream comes from design, where leaders of theory and practice have extended the application of design into areas of strategy, branding, product development, and organizational change. The other stream comes from management, where thought leaders are viewing management as a process of designing.
Together, these streams emphasize the humanistic and integrative aspects of managing that make it an act of creation and synthesis, rather than just a form of analysis and decision-making. Illustrating with products such as Sherwin-Williams’ Twist & Pour package, and business models such as Apple’s iTunes and Malcom McLean’s container shipping, we will explore how companies and other organizations can bring the skills of designers to everything that matters to their success.
Driving design thinking into an organization
August 4, 2010
Kaaren Hanson, Director of Experience Design, Intuit
Several years ago, Intuit realized that it had strayed from its roots and was no longer creating the most intuitive experiences on the market. With a culture that highly regards the customer, Intuit was ripe to integrate Design Thinking. Learn how Kaaren Hanson’s team and key executives are making Design Thinking a core competence, driving customer and revenue wins, and helping to re-invent the company culture.
Key Learnings:
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Senior leadership buy-in is important — but not nearly enough.
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Don’t talk — do! (aka talking doesn’t get you very far)
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Process doesn’t work
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Patience, patience, patience
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Focus on your energizers (your detractors will take care of themselves)
The Designful Company
June 2, 2010
Marty Neumeier, Director of Transformation, Liquid Agency; author, The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation
In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovators, companies can no longer merely “unlock” wealth. Today they have to actively “create” wealth, or end up in the fossil layers of business history. As a result, brand-builders have an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play a key role in the next management revolution—the rise of the designful company.
Marty Neumeier, Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency, and author of two influential books on brand, explains why design thinking—in its broadest sense—will become the new best practice, and how you can leverage your unique position as a brand-builder to transform the way business does business in the 21st century.
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A new broader definition of design
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Why designing beats deciding in an era of rapid change
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How to harness the organic drivetrain of value creation
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Why brands are the new barriers to competition
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How to use the good/different chart to predict success
Discovering What’s Next
April 7, 2010
Harry West, CEO, Continuum
We are going through a time of great change: the integration of the physical and the virtual; rapid erosion of technical advantage; fast followers pulling out into the passing lane; the emergence of real markets in emerging markets; and above all intense global competition. Companies are looking for new approaches to innovation as a way to stay ahead.
There are four elements to how designers think that can help organizations discover what’s next:
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Acknowledge that we do not now know the answer and to be open to completely new ideas that are not even in the framework of our current thinking.
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Search for solutions—not inwardly as experts, but through the lens of consumers and customers and constituents; we conduct our research as if we are anthropologists visiting an unknown tribe.
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Explore options by tapping a broad range of people with different skills, disciplines, and mindsets. Include people who understand well the constraints we have to work within, and also people who do not see any constraints at all, and listen carefully to what they say even when it is obviously wrong.
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Prototype and evaluate a range of ideas to learn, iterate and refine until it is right. Great ideas with small flaws fail; details matter.
In this session we will review some simple techniques that can help an organization get to what’s next.
Corporate Design Functions: 2010 and Beyond
March 3, 2010
Jeneanne Rae, President and Co-Founder, Peer Insight LLC
Gordon Hui, Senior Vice-President, Consulting Services, Peer Insight LLC
The past decade saw the emergence of robust design functions in Fortune 1000 corporations. Once relegated to production management and artwork-type activities, corporate design functions have become multifaceted, strategic organizations, providing breakthrough thinking on innovation, brand, and customer experience. While certain industries, notably entertainment and hospitality, have long recognized the impact of great corporate design, it was only in the 2000s that a similar level of investment was seen in other industries, ranging from consumer packaged goods to B2B services.
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What lessons did those new corporate design functions learn in the past decade?
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What challenges will corporate design functions face in the coming decade?
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What best practices should corporate design functions consider going forward as a result?
In this session, we will provide answers to these questions based on working with a variety of organizations.
Embedding Design DNA in your Business
November 4, 2009
Willem Boijens, Principal UE Manager, Vodafone
For strategic design thinking to have a truly lasting impact on an organization, it must be embedded in that company’s DNA. But that’s easier said than done, especially when the company in question is one of the largest telecommunications providers in the world.
During a career that has spanned 20-plus years, Willem has been shaping the way companies think about design—from the inside out. For the past ten years, he has played an integral role in helping Vodafone evolve from its singular focus as a network service provider into a multi-faceted company that now defines the mobile experience for millions of people around the world.
The recent launch of Vodafone 360 underscores the complexity of this transformation. In pulling together the key elements of design DNA (the people, the processes and the practice), Vodafone 360 marks a turning point in the company’s approach to business in general and design in particular.
Of course, such a major transformation didn’t happen overnight, and it’s by no means complete—there is still a long way to go to embed design fully in Vodafone’s DNA. In this webinar, Willem will share some key insights into the ongoing process of embedding design DNA at Vodafone, plus he’ll suggest ways you can implement a similarly bold and potentially disruptive approach in your company. Martin Griese, Principal UE Project Manager of Vodafone,will moderate the webinar and take questions during the session.
This webinar will cover the key elements of design DNA:
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People: Understand how to grow and manage a team to make design DNA a reality.
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Process: Get an overview of the methodology behind a design DNA transformation and learn to recognize the “milestone moments.”
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Practice: Explore ways of generating design equity that will reinforce the value of design DNA, plus learn how to nurture and propagate this DNA within a more traditional corporate culture.
Design Mind/Engineering Mind
October 7, 2009
Surya Vanka, Principal Manager, User Experience, Microsoft Corporation
Great products are born of the synergy of the design mind and the engineering mind. The design mind’s ability to break through established patterns and paradigms, and the engineering mind’s ability to optimize and actualize, have been the foundation of great individual and team processes. Through cycles of sketching and prototyping, great designer-engineer collaborations have created successful products for more than a century.
Today, the nature of products is changing fast. Most products from phones to appliances to automobiles are becoming software and services encased in hardware. The experience with these products is novel, dynamic, and content-laden. The interaction often spans multiple platforms (hardware, application, web), multiple form factors (desktop, mobile) and multiple interfaces (keyboard, pointer, voice, touch, gesture). It is challenging to not let the multitude of complex technologies drive the experience. It is also challenging to maintain a healthy and balanced designer-developer collaboration.
In this talk, Surya Vanka will describe the new synergistic designer-developer collaborations that are emerging. These include: First, a new hybrid role, the ‘Devigner,’ that bridges designer and developer. Next, a new breed of experience-focused tools that allows designers and developers to concurrently sketch and prototype interactions. Third, the development of lightweight software languages that allow designers to maintain control of the creative decisions late into the cycle. And finally, the emergence of work styles and organizational cultures that depend on designer and developers not just working together, but the designer learning tricks from the developer toolbox, and vice versa.
Best Practices in Ethnography
August 5, 2009
Rob Tannen, PhD, Director of Research, Bresslergroup
While many organizations are now conducting field research as an integral part of their product definition process, teams continue to struggle with efficiently planning, gathering & analyzing qualitative research data, and turning it into actionable result. User research is an integral activity for successful product teams, but it has the potential to become invasive—causing interruptions and administrative overhead and generating too much non-actionable data—if not managed appropriately.
Fortunately, there are tools and techniques that can improve the speed and benefits of user research while reducing invasiveness to all involved. The presentation will cover common questions, and recommend best practices on topics including:
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Creating a field research team and defining roles
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How to document qualitative observations
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Appropriate types of questions for field interviews
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Methods for observing ergonomic issues and problems
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State of the art tools for gathering and analyzing data
Leadership and Change Management for Volatile Times
June 3, 2009
Carole Bilson, VP, Global Design & Usability and Technology Support Operations, Pitney Bowes
Designers, design departments and consultants are naturally positioned to drive leadership and change in just about any work situation or environment. That’s a good thing, given the uncertainty in today’s market, where everyone needs to step up their game. What is the best course of action when you need to both evaluate and cultivate team members—and yourself?
Learn about the power of these skills, and how to develop them further in yourself and others.
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Gain best practices acquired from running a large corporate design department and leading internal and external teams
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Learn about resources to further develop one's design management skills
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Challenges that leaders face and how to overcome them
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Staying ahead of the curve—in a volatile market
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Leading internal and external teams in collaboration
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Tips on overcoming resistance to new ideas
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The keys to change management as related to design management
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How leadership and change management capabilities can open many doors/opportunities
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The Zig Zag path: the non traditional road to advancement
Managing Design Risk:
Exploring and Exploiting the Economics of Interaction
May 6, 2009
Michael Schrage, Fellow, MIT Sloan School of Management
Conceptually and technically, good designers tend to be founts of good ideas. During difficult and challenging times, however, the challenge is less ‘good design’ and more around convincing colleagues, clients and customers that good design is more than worth the investment. Persuading people or—better yet—putting people in a position to persuade themselves becomes an essential part of a holistic design process.
This webinar describes and discusses tested techniques that design innovators and innovative designers can use to cost-effectively manage ‘design risk’ with their key constituencies. Participants should come away with simple but powerful tools to improve their powers of participatory persuasion.
Digital Service Design
April 15, 2009
Brian Gillespie, Director of Strategic Design, Molecular
Survival in the global economy has driven many companies to evolve from being simple creators of products to being creators of added value by providing sophisticated services that support their customers’ use of their products. Digital service design provides many new opportunities to bridge the analog and digital divide, and supports new ways to integrate real products with virtual experiences, and create entirely fresh, new services and experiences.
Digital service design used to be about content and architecture, but now it is about experience; it’s no longer simply about information architecture but rather experience architecture. To imagine the many connections that can be made, design managers need to have a solid understanding of their target audiences’ digital daily life, and the motivations that convert them to experiencing their product and service providers digitally. This understanding provides insights into the aspects of daily life that reveal unmet needs and desires and indicate opportunities to satisfy them.
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Experience Architecture (EA) vs. Information Architecture (IA)
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Personas, consumer journeys, and customer lifecycles
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Design information systems
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Industry examples
Seeing Around Corners: How Trend Forecasting Can Illuminate the Curves in the Road Ahead
March 4, 2009
Valerie Jacobs, Group Director, LPK Trends
Given the volatility of the world economy over the past 18 months, our desire deepens for tools that can make sense of the future and its uncertainties. As designers we constantly “problem solve” using the knowledge we have today and up until recently we could safely assume that consumers just wanted more of the same, but better, more “innovative.” What the Institute for the Future’s Bob Johannsen describes as the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world seems here to stay.
But what if… we did have tools to help us see around the corners of 2009 or even 2025? Employing new methodologies for creating consumers’ future state (not their present state) offers a chance for trend forecasting to play an even bigger role in design strategies. This DMI webinar will provide insights, including:
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Fusing the philosophies and principles of fashion trend forecasters, business strategists and thought-leading futurists to arrange a suite of tools and techniques for both short term and long-term socio-cultural trend forecasts
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Helping designers transform and translate their craving for the coolest of cool into inspiration AND trend insights for the near future
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Using “Landscape Scenario Planning” to create divergent and challenging future states as far out as 2025
The Culture Key
February 4, 2009
Edgar Papke, Founder, Living Change, Inc.
The key to the successful implementation of any strategy is the understanding of, and the alignment of process to, an organization’s culture. This is particularly true when it comes to leveraging the possibilities of innovation and change. Join Edgar as he shares his insights into what defines the unique characteristics of organizational culture and demonstrates ways to leverage that knowledge and understanding to higher levels of creativity, synergy, and performance.
Designing for Technology Adoption:
Applying Adoption Theory to Increase the Success of New Product Offers
November 5, 2008
Alonzo Canada, Directing Associate, Jump Associates
It’s no secret that in most product categories, the majority of new innovations fail. Yet, there are products like the Toyota Prius, the Apple iPod and even Thomas Edison’s electric light that defy these odds and become entrenched into the fabric of society. What makes these revolutionary products succeed while so many others fail – including technologically superior competitors?
Their success can be attributed to much more than design. These products marry design with technology in very specific ways so that their features, functions, design language and messaging align to the technology’s progress through the adoption curve. What their success means is that managers, designers, and marketers can use insights from adoption theory to create new offers that best resonate with the different needs of people that arise as a technology becomes more mainstream.
This insight leads a deeper understanding of how the design of the original Toyota Prius connected with early adopters’ need to feel “cutting-edge” but also responsible with their investments, or how Thomas Edison’s deliberate choice to limit the wattage of his first electric lights actually made a radically new technology feel more familiar.
What you will learn
This presentation will decode strategies to be applied to the design of products according to where they fall along the adoption curve. By understanding how to best design for technology adoption, business leaders, marketers, and product designers for startup technology firms and even established Fortune 100 companies can learn how to create new product offers that thrive in the marketplace.
Delightful Product Experiences: The Design Imperative at Microsoft
October 22, 2008
Steve Kaneko, FIDSA, Design Director, Entertainment Experience Group, Microsoft
Learn from Steve’s 17-year journey at the world’s most prolific software company, and why he believes Microsoft will continue to change the world through both technology and experience innovation. Steve will use recent product initiatives like Zune, Xbox, and the Windows Vista PC to illustrate how the culture of product development and design has evolved to respond to new business challenges.
Topics covered in this webinar:
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Embracing cultural design tendencies
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Microsoft’s evolution from technology, to product, to experience
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Alignment frameworks for creative strategy and focus
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Partnering examples to complete the end-to-end experience
From Dysfunction to Function:
The Evolution of a Creative Team
October 1, 2008
Maureen Carter, Creative Director, Comcast Interactive Media
The unification of a team of creative thinkers is imperative to meeting the demands of today’s business market. Developing captivating and progressive creative that focuses on the user experience and key business objectives—this is the mission of today’s design leaders. The success of which is still determined by profitability, but the methods to achieve it are evolving. Being successful at this begins with a viewpoint that a productive creative team methodology relies on the strength of the whole sum of talent rather than the strength of one. One of these methods involves the fusion of a creative team that becomes a connected team who is then more equipped to thrive and to churn out ideas that stand out from the crowd.
Aligning the proper talent with the right project or opportunity can prove valuable to your end solutions. Creative teams need mentorship and encouragement from their managers. This is the primary way these teams utilize the expertise of others to develop design solutions that are marketable and appropriate for its diverse audiences. The effort of pulling a team closer together as a method of design approach can breed results that come with a mix of influences that therefore result in a hybrid of generated ideas that are original and competitive.
Key Points
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The use of design methodologies as a tactic to achieve team collaboration and as a constructive model for a team to unify.
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Pairing the right talent with the right project for ultimate creativity: dynamics of the individual in a creative team and aligning them to projects and other team members based on their backgrounds, their experiences, interests and skills.
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Not being afraid of the reality of one’s team: recognizing dysfunction within a creative team and facing it honestly while fostering solutions to bring cohesion to the group.
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Commitment to design means diversity in design: diverse audiences need diverse creative approaches; especially cultural for a blend of viewpoints.
This presentation will provide examples and discussion topics for design leaders and practitioners who are faced with building and fostering creative teams that are called to provide appropriate and engaging design solutions for their company or client needs in an ever changing market. It will help design managers gain a deeper insight on how to foster a creative environment for a team that is productive and to know when to “turn it upside down” in order to meet creative goals and create design solutions that break boundaries and make an impact
Why the Blue Sky Must Die:
Getting real with how design can help business and people
August 6, 2008
Tim Wallack, Director, Insights & Strategy, Smart Design
One day at Smart Design, not so long ago, a new client hired us to run a seminar on innovation. Did they want creative, generative tools? Were they interested in new brainstorming techniques?
No.
They were flooded with ideas. They needed help finding the right ones.
This wasn’t Nike, Apple or HP – it was a large financial institution! To us, it was the final signal the momentum had shifted from discovering what’s new and possible to discovering what’s right (for people, business and brands).
“Why the Blue Sky Must Die” takes a look at why this change is happening and what thinking, sensibilities and tools we can use to meet these new challenges.
The webinar will share some of the tools and techniques we use at Smart Design to:
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Assess a company’s tolerance for innovation
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Understand the realities of your consumer and how to succeed at retail
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Integrate disciplines
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Build product and service roadmaps
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Guide decision-making
Who should attend? Any design manager, designer, marketer or design strategist who would like to pick up some new tools, techniques, and anecdotes about finding the right design solution. No brainstorming techniques will be offered.
Staying True to your Brand Core while Responding to Change
June 4, 2008
Stephen Zhang, Vice President, Image Director, Fossil
Jill Elliott, Vice President, Creative Director, Fossil
To change or not to change? Products and images are two critical components of a brand. They are what customers, see, touch, and engage with, and therefore must project the core values of a brand.
Consistency is the key to successful brand management. Projecting a consistent product and image message builds brand loyalty and consumer confidence. It is how your customer comes to trust your brand, your products, and your image. However, in conflict with this is the constant influx of new product technology, information, and ever-changing trends that influence consumer behavior. A successful brand must learn to integrate and innovate to stay relevant to the market, while continuing to stay true to core values.
Key Points:
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Importance of consistent and differentiating brand strategy
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Evaluating trends and new information against your brand core
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Strategy to implement new information into products, image, and brand values
The presentation will provide a case study for those brand strategists who are trying to sort out their own approaches to manage overwhelming changes without losing their minds. It will help design managers to define clear frameworks for design teams to balance between fresh ideas and stay within the brand.
Strategic Positioning for Corporate Design Groups
Case Study: Motorola's Enterprise Mobility Business
May 7, 2008
Graham Marshall, Director Design Research, Motorola
Curt Croley, Sr. Director of Innovation & Design, Motorola
Motorola's Enterprise Mobility Business (EMb) focuses on mobile computing solutions for business customers who need to capture, move and manage data during their day to day business operations. EMb is the global market leader in these types of business to business solutions and their internal design group is named Innovation & Design. This group holds a unique and strategic position which is rare for corporate design groups. As with most high technology corporations, product development programs are owned by separate divisions within the business and design is often in a service role.
In this case, the Innovation & Design group reports to the Chief Technology Office (CTO) and is in a position to directly influence market opportunity choices and the product development directions across all divisions. This strategic positioning has developed over time and is based on the group’s focus on customer research, its excellence in design and advanced engineering execution, and its track record of pitching and prototyping disruptive concepts that have become successful products.
This team of 38 members includes four general disciplines; industrial design, design research, interaction design and engineering. Design research visited and profiled 133 customers in 2007 and is now well established as the center of customer knowledge for the business; industrial design partners with divisions on all development programs and directly influences product direction decisions. Engineering has the resources and expertise to prototype disruptive products ready for production. In addition, the group initiated and now facilitates the business’s formal innovation process that identifies new product and business opportunities.
Using specific development examples, this Webinar discussion will outline the unique positioning of the group, how it developed, and how this strategic role is continually strengthened.
Key learning points:
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Leveraging the value of customer research to position the design team for leadership
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Facilitating a company wide innovation process as part of the team’s core competency
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Strengthening technical development skills to solidify relations with the engineering disciplines
Bottom Line Experiences:
Measuring the Value of Design in Services
April 2, 2008
Lavrans Løvlie, Founding Partner, Live|Work
The power of design to accelerate the economic performance of industry is well documented, perhaps best of all through the UK Design Council’s 2005 report “The Business of Design.” However, economic performance is too narrow a way to describe the value of work that appeals to the senses as much as to sensibility.
Lavrans Løvlie, director of London-based service innovation and design company live|work will discuss three different methods the company has explored in order to measure the value of design in the service sector: Triple Bottom Line accounting, GVA and the Service Usability Index.
Key Points:
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“Triple Bottom Line” accounting. Analyzing the economic, social and environmental consequences of service, both for provider and user.
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GVA – “Gross Value Added.” A measure used to explain value creation in the design of public services, including contribution to local and national economy.
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The Service Usability index. A live|work method that measures the quality of services from a user point of view. The method combines ratings for the service proposition, experience, usability and accessibility to produce comparisons of service experience.
Questions for participant consideration:
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How does measurement of service quality differ from products?
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What types of indicators are useful in order to legitimize a concept in the early stages of the design process?
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What are useful parameters to measure for the design buyer – and for the customer?
Using Design to Catalyze Strategy Implementation
March 5, 2008
Chris Conley, Professor, Institute of Design and Founding Partner, Gravity Tank
Crafting strategy remains a top priority for senior leaders as globalization accelerates, competition grows, and customers' needs evolve. Successful strategies answer key questions such as, “What business should we be in?” “How do we compete?” “Where are we headed?” and “How do we get there?” The potential is significant—strategies can change the fortunes of a company because they originate from a point of high leverage—the executive suite.
However, many senior leaders find that once the strategy has been formulated, the more difficult part is getting the organization to understand and adopt it. And despite broad distribution of strategy decks, activities like town halls, plant visits, and creating new performance measures, strategy implementation is fraught with inaction. Fortunately, the design discipline, with its orientation to problem solving and making the future tangible, has something very powerful to offer. In this webinar, Professor Chris Conley will discuss how design expertise can be used to help companies implement the strategy they’ve worked so hard to create.
Key Points:
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A strategy is more like a design brief than a designed solution
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Design should be used to help visualize the strategy
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Acting on strategy requires conviction, not just understanding
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People need to work on how to interpret strategy for their area
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Strategic prototypes embody futures that result from strategy
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Collaborative exercises are required to facilitate understanding of the strategy
Questions for participant consideration:
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What strategies or directions have you been asked to pursue?
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What makes strategies difficult to act upon?
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How would you describe the similarities and differences between strategies and design problems?
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What is the difference between strategy and tactics? Which do you value more?
Beyond Good Product Design and Good Management:
Applying a Design Approach to Position Design to be More Strategic
February 6, 2008
Steve Sato, Corporate Design, Design Practice Lead, Hewlett Packard
An experience-design approach excels at differentiating products and services from competition; so why not apply experience-design “heuristics” (or design thinking) to reposition design in your organization? Then, as you move forward, what priorities do you need to set in order to build design capability and reliably fulfill your organization’s new, more strategic role?
This seminar is intended for VPs, directors, and managers who are committed to making design more strategic in their organizations, to going beyond designing products, and who already understand how to manage design.
Steve Sato has blended theories and practices from design, change management and organization design, and applied them in planning and architecting a design practice at a major corporation. As a participant, you will:
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Be introduced to an experience-design approach and principles that will be used as an organizing structure.
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Be provided frameworks and tools to create your own set of principles and tactics, appropriate for your situation, to promote the strategic use of design and set priorities for building or acquiring design capability.
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Learn how and why some tactics have succeeded and failed in “real world” situations.
New Interdisciplinary Methods for Collaboration
November 6, 2007
Richard Watson, Partner, Essential
Mike Mooney, Partner, Catapult Thinking
This webinar looks at the challenges, opportunities, and insights of this inter-organizational collaboration, now common in both consulting and in-house firms. Essential and Catapult Thinking share insights about working together and with clients, using interdisciplinary work methods. Sharing competencies is not without its challenges, yet done effectively it can harness specializations in product and service development, business innovation and brand strategy to measurably impact business transformation and market success.
The last decade has witnessed significant growth and expansion of design organizations. Some strove to integrate into a single-offer complementary service such as research, strategy, industrial design, UI design, communications, engineering and branding. Other smaller organizations provided the same degree of integration and design thinking by collaborating with key partners while staying focused on their own areas of specialization, delivering solutions that aligned truly interdisciplinary perspectives.
The Power of Branded Work Environments: Helping Employees To Live (and Love) Your Brand
September 12, 2007
William Hull Faust, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer, Ologie
Companies spend billions of dollars annually to promote their brands through external media, yet they often fail to grasp the value of reinforcing the brand with their most important ambassadors: employees and associates. But more and more companies have begun to rethink the role of branding workspace to help employees truly live the brand. They’re realizing that design can have a significant impact on how well employees translate the brand promise to customers. And they’re starting to consider work environments as areas for long-term investment versus simply a capital expense. So how does your employees and associates’ workspace impact business performance? If you begin to think of it as an employee and customer touch-point, a wide range of opportunities emerge, including:
Personal productivity—The design of workspaces, from individual offices to entire buildings, can either support or hinder productivity. And it’s about more than efficiency — good workspace design can significantly enhance communication, collaboration, and creativity, leading to more innovation.
Employee engagement—Employees at all levels are affected by the place where they work, and many studies show that associates think more highly of an employer who invests in their work environment.
Customer service—The branding and design of workspace can either help or hinder how you ultimately serve customers.
Brand image—All companies have a brand image, but it’s more than how we communicate. Environments are an outward expression of who we really are and they need to accurately reflect a company’s personality, point of view, and philosophy in order for associates to live the brand promise day in and day out.
These issues — and others — will be discussed through the sharing of principles and case studies in an open and inviting webinar environment.
The Elements of User Experience: Driving Customer Loyalty Through
Design
July 10, 2007
Jesse James Garrett, President, Adaptive Path
What makes people passionate about a technology product? What's the
difference between a forgettable product and one that gets people
talking? Success requires grounding your development approach
in a deep understanding of user psychology.
Companies often see the time and money invested in product
development go to waste simply because the final result doesn't accurately
reflect the needs and expectations of the customers who have to use the
product. In this presentation, Jesse James Garrett looks at ways to
build customer insight into your designs so that they resonate with your
audience, and they build customer loyalty.
Bridging the Gap From Product Design to Marketing Strategy
June 21, 2007
Steve McGrew, Creative Director, Philips Design
Integrating design and marketing strategy is a challenge indeed. How often have we seen products with great potential fail due to a loss of direction or ineffective marketing? This is a growing concern, particularly within larger organizations in which product development and marketing strategy are often not driven from an integrated platform. This webinar will focus on how to develop strategic tools to enable clear design direction and changes to business processes. You will learn how to get these tools adopted within an organization in order to guide product design and maintain integrity and relevance through to the creation of effective marketing communication.
Key topics:
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The role and value of user insight and customer research to inform product and marketing strategy
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Discover new ways of working to optimize the effectiveness of product development and marketing activities
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Share strategic planning tools and best-practices for maintaining design integrity
Moving Up the Design Curve for Greater Competitive Advantage
May 8, 2007
Heather Fraser, Director, designworks Strategy Innovation Lab and Design Initiatives, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
No one can debate the value of design as traditionally seen as a functional output: Great design of brands, spaces, products and service experiences creates connections, desire, satisfaction and value to the ultimate user, taking a commodity to a premium position. Great design thinking can also fuel creativity and organizational momentum as an innovation tool to get to bigger ideas, faster and more efficiently. But where design has its highest value is in extending the application of design thinking through to strategy and business model design. Embracing design methods and mindsets as an integral part of the strategic planning and business development process can drive the design of new strategies and business models in support of dramatic new growth.
Practicing designers today are uniquely positioned to assume an important role throughout the business planning process. Discussion will focus on how design thinking can contribute to corporate success and how designers can harness their knowledge and experience into driving business model innovation in an enterprise. Discussion will include the following:
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The Design Curve—broadening the application and value of ‘design’
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Extending Design Thinking into the strategic planning process—from consumer insight to strategic business model design
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Moving organizations up the Design Curve through inspiration, education and experimentation
Internal Brand Building: Brand Building Inside Out—the Next Wave in Corporate Brand Management
April 3, 2007
Karl D. Speak, President, Beyond Marketing Thought
Internal brand building has quickly become one of the strongest emerging trends in corporate brand management. Karl D. Speak, a noted expert in brand management, will share his insights from more than a decade of designing and implementing internal brand building programs. Every marketing and design professional who is interested in brand management needs to learn about internal brand building and how this innovative process can engage all employees to build stronger customer relationships.
Following are some of the key points of this engaging webinar:
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Learn why and how companies of all sizes and different industries are using internal brand building as an organizational development framework to connect employees with customers.
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The three different types of internal brand building programs and which type might be best for your organization.
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Discover how this proven innovative process enables marketing, communications, and human resource professionals to team up to produce measurable improvements in employee engagement and financial results from customers.
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Case studies will be presented to demonstrate how internal brand building programs have been linked to key strategic business issues, and the role designers, marketers, and human resource professionals played in the successful implementation of an internal brand building program.
Failing Object Lessons: Design’s Green Limits and our Collective Potential to Make a Difference
March 6, 2007
Valerie Casey, Executive Creative Director, frog design
Because “green” has entered the cultural vernacular, and because its economic benefit has been justified, we are at a critical inflection point. Designers need to evolve approach and expand designs purview: we need to rely more heavily on critical design thinking skills for changing our client’s organizational behavior, rather than illustrating solely with marketable products.
Discussion will focus on how designers can gauge and motivate client’s propensity to embrace principles of sustainability.
In addition, participants will explore a “Kyoto Treaty” for design. What could the core principles and goals of such a treaty be? How would asking for a commitment to sustainability for every product design firm in our community change the landscape of design? We are prepared to ask consumers to buy green and our clients to commit to sustainability – what deliberate actions will we commit to in our own practices?
While green products have influenced market and consumer behavior, the impact has been less than we might have hoped. Particular moments in cultural history illustrate how design produces the very system it attempts to critique. We can understand these limitations by analyzing key moments:
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The displacement of object “aura” due to mechanical reproduction (history)
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The shifting models of value perception through cultural staging (performance theory)
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The rise of amateur crowds influence on design (current technology analysis)
New Insights on Quantifying Design’s ROI
February 20, 2007
Rob Wallace, Managing Partner, Wallace Church, Inc.
Rob Wallace has been called “one of the founding thought leaders of design’s ROI.” For the past decade or more, Rob has applied data from more than a dozen major CPG brand identity and package design projects to one of the most effective ROI methodologies. He has outlined this methodology and the results in a Design Management Review article.
Since this pivotal article’s publication, Rob has new data, new results and new insights about how to empirically prove design’s paramount effectiveness in generating profit. However, this quest is not without its controversy, its pitfalls, and its cautions. Now, in a fast-paced, informational and inspirational webcast, Rob will use real world case studies and share new insights on quantifying design’s value.
You’ll learn:
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How to apply the methodology and track its results
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How to find “the magic moment” when the data is irrefutable
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How to position and present the results to justify the right resources are dedicated to the design process
You’ll actively participate in a team dialog in which webinar participants will discuss how this information can best be used, and how it can be used against us. Lastly, as a participant in this process you will have the option to automatically be enrolled in an ongoing online consortium monitored by the DMI where additional data and information will be archived and additional insights can be posted.
Collaborative Innovation: Internal Change – External Client Value
June 13, 2006
Lee Green, Worldwide VP, Brand and Values Experience, IBM
Collaborative Innovation has emerged as the best opportunity for design and brand managers to effect change inside their organizations and for their clients. The results create differentiation in the way we engage with our customers and their experience with our brand. And, when extended as a service to our clients, it allows them to be more competitive and to leverage differentiation in the offerings they extend to their customers. Innovation is not about new technology alone. It is about relevance. It is about developing customer insights, and understanding new market opportunity. In many cases, the opportunity has not been previously defined, either by the market, or the user. This web seminar will focus on how IBM is changing the experience clients have with IBM and how IBM is extending design as a service and component of their collaborative innovation offerings for clients.
Creating Business Value Through Interaction Design
October 10, 2006
Bill Hill, Founder and President, MetaDesign
How do you create business value through design? When designers invent solutions to new problems, what are the tactics in achieving success through the creation and implementation of useful, usable, and desirable interaction experiences?
Join Bill Hill, President of MetaDesign San Francisco, to explore and discuss examples of user interface elements that demonstrate a ROI either by reducing cost or increasing revenue. Supported groundwork from organizations such as Cisco, Xerox, and others will provide a unique outside perspective.
Using a developed framework, Bill examines how to produce and measure value for the “Holy Trinity” of Shareholders, Customers and Employees. This framework maps to the transformation of designers from focusing on things (brochures, icons, products, etc.), to understanding user needs, to producing measurable value for shareholders.
The Post-Industrial Economy: Design for Sustainability & Profit
October 12, 2006
Gianfranco Zaccai, President & CEO, Continuum
We are well into a post-industrial age and it is becoming ever clearer that sustainability is not only a moral imperative, but good business. In fact, companies such as General Electric and British Petroleum have identified sustainability as a core mission. The field of Industrial design is also in a moment of transition into a post-industrial design era where the expression "less is more" is taking on more than a Bauhaus mantra. In the future, truly inspiring design will be that which provides users and consumers with greater experiences, while taking away unnecessary material and complex information.
Brand Attraction and Emotional Design—Uncovering the Brand Attributes that Consumers Crave
November 14, 2006
Henry Chin, Executive Director, Ziba Design
In a world of choice, few product lines—let alone brands—stand apart. Why? And how can we apply the fundamental rationale behind core human desires to better understand what it takes to move beyond merely fulfilling functional needs, to create emotional attachments to products and brand? Creating value-based connections through the identification and design of meaningful experiences is the foundation of Emotional Design. Every company has an essential core, and every company has a strategic customer that it seeks to attract.
Empowering Design for Leadership: Clarifying the Fuzzy Front End of Innovation
May 9, 2006
Darrel Rhea, CEO, Cheskin
The most honorable and riskiest goal for a company’s innovation
program is to achieve disruptive transformation in the marketplace.
Managing this successfully requires bold leadership and a well-defined
approach to advanced development—the “fuzzy front end”
of the innovation process. In this presentation, Darrel Rhea will
explain how methods of design research are invaluable in uncovering
big innovation opportunities and how design can inspire internal
alignment of senior management to make those opportunities a reality.
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