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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:
Why the Blue Sky Must Die:
Getting real with how design can help business and people
August 6, 1pm EDT
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, 1pm EDT
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
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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.
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.
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.
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