In this BDI thought leadership piece, Geoff McCormick of , shares his musings on design: that it’s a very interesting time at the moment - in particular, the application of design to create business improvement with new products, new software and new services.
The Alloy has always promoted that could do more than ‘just’ make things pretty, and that it should be placed at the heart of and not on the periphery.
Our work has always been about bridging the gaps between different departments and . At the start it was between engineering and marketing; between users and R&D teams. As technology moved on, and we started designing experiences, our skills evolved to bridge the gaps between coding and marketing teams; developers and .
While the outputs might be different, the same organisational challenges exist - helping to blend the skills of innovation teams to deliver something great. The result of these shifts means that the wider challenge is how best to integrate the physical (products) and digital (platforms, apps) into compelling services ‒ which is being answered by the relatively new field of .
Changing how we work, think and act
This exciting ‘evolution’ has led us to remodel our conference rooms into a more usable workspace, more focused on working than discussing and debating.
As in any emergent field, there have been a lot of ‘territorial’ claims. What is service design? How do you define design thinking? And so on. While they do need clarification, to us, this shift has been organic, a simple evolution of the focus on the shape of a telephone button to a focus on how an elderly person might want to interact with a digital platform or a care provider (ie a person). What differs is how we specify the to be delivered - in CAD, code or guidelines.
What we know is that the physical products are still VERY important: that as more of our time is spent digitally, there is a need to relate to these experiences physically. This connectivity is becoming a commodity, but, despite all that has happened, it still isn’t easy managing digital things and physical things.
The internet of things belongs in the same overused group as but, more importantly, it highlights how much work there is to be done. It is still not easy for people to be able to share content intuitively, a fundamentally simple thing. (Yes, there are apps, but how can the average consumer find, understand and use them?)
The advent of up to 50 billion connected devices, humming with latent potency means that there are huge opportunities for designers to help technologists, policy makers, public servants, users and citizens understand what this might mean and how it has the potential to enhance our lives. The initial challenge is to ensure that our complex , our irrationality and our needs are understood.
The next challenge is to make sure that we translate these insights into clear innovation goals and not just pretty pictures.
Contact: Geoff McCormick, Director, TheAlloy
+44 (0)1252 712 000, ,
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