Tag Archives: huffington post

How to write a high quality design brief

PDMA_Design thinking

 

… Although the design brief plays an important role in concept development, there are few resources about how to write one. In general, the design brief is viewed as a competitive advantage and traditionally guarded as a business secret. Research on writing a design brief is scant and prescriptions for how to organize documents are heavily based on individual consultants’ experiences. As such, most design briefs are the writer’s interpretation of a Request For Proposals (RFP) or merely a reformulation of an existing business plan (Petersen 2011)…

… The responsibility for writing a design brief is usually relegated to one department and there is little or no cross-departmental collaboration. At the Industrial Design Society of America event in 2012, for example, design students and professional designers alike voiced their concerns about the design briefs they had seen. The design briefs written by engineering departments contained too much information and were overly restrictive, whereas the design briefs written by marketing departments contained too little information and did not inspire designers. Therefore, many designers read a design brief when a project is started and rarely revisit it afterward…

 

 

Table of Contents

1 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO DESIGN THINKING 1
Michael G. Luchs

 

PART I: DESIGN THINKING TOOLS 13

2 INSPIRATIONAL DESIGN BRIEFING 15
Søren Petersen, Jaewoo Joo

3 PERSONAS: POWERFUL TOOL FOR DESIGNERS 27
Robert Chen, Jeanny Liu

4 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAPPING: THE SPRINGBOARD TO INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS 41
Jonathan Bohlmann, John McCreery

5 DESIGN THINKING TO BRIDGE RESEARCH AND CONCEPT DESIGN 59
Lauren Weigel

6 BOOSTING CREATIVITY IN IDEA GENERATION USING DESIGN HEURISTICS 71
Colleen M. Seifert, Richard Gonzalez, Seda Yilmaz, Shanna Daly

7 THE KEY ROLES OF STORIES AND PROTOTYPES IN DESIGN THINKING 87
Mark Zeh

 

PART II: DESIGN THINKING WITHIN THE FIRM 105

8 INTEGRATING DESIGN INTO THE FUZZY FRONT END OF THE INNOVATION PROCESS 107
Giulia Calabretta, Gerda Gemser

9 THE ROLE OF DESIGN IN EARLY-STAGE VENTURES: HOW TO HELP START-UPS UNDERSTAND AND APPLY DESIGN PROCESSES TO NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT 125
J. D. Albert

10 DESIGN THINKING FOR NON-DESIGNERS: A GUIDE FOR TEAM TRAINING AND IMPLEMENTATION 143
Victor P. Seidel, Sebastian K. Fixson

11 DEVELOPING DESIGN THINKING: GE HEALTHCARE’S MENLO INNOVATION MODEL 157
Sarah J. S.Wilner

12 LEADING FOR A CORPORATE CULTURE OF DESIGN THINKING 173
Nathan Owen Rosenberg Sr., Marie-Caroline Chauvet, Jon S. Kleinman

13 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AS INTELLIGENCE AMPLIFICATION FOR BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATIONS 187
Vadake K. Narayanan, Gina Colarelli O’Connor

14 STRATEGICALLY EMBEDDING DESIGN THINKING IN THE FIRM 205
Pietro Micheli, Helen Perks

 

PART III: DESIGN THINKING FOR SPECIFIC CONTEXTS 221

15 DESIGNING SERVICES THAT SING AND DANCE 223
Marina Candi, Ahmad Beltagui

16 CAPTURING CONTEXT THROUGH SERVICE DESIGN STORIES 237
KatarinaWetter-Edman, Peter R. Magnusson

17 OPTIMAL DESIGN FOR RADICALLY NEW PRODUCTS 253
Steve Hoeffler, Michal Herzenstein, Tamar Ginzburg

18 BUSINESS MODEL DESIGN 265
John Aceti, Tony Singarayar

19 LEAN START-UP IN LARGE ENTERPRISES USING HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN THINKING: A NEW APPROACH FOR DEVELOPING TRANSFORMATIONAL AND DISRUPTIVE INNOVATIONS 281
Peter Koen

 

PART IV: CONSUMER RESPONSES AND VALUES 301

20 CONSUMER RESPONSE TO PRODUCT FORM 303
Mariëlle E. H. Creusen

21 DRIVERS OF DIVERSITY IN CONSUMERS’ AESTHETIC RESPONSE TO PRODUCT DESIGN 319
Adèle Gruen

22 FUTURE-FRIENDLY DESIGN: DESIGNING FOR AND WITH FUTURE CONSUMERS 333
Andy Hines

23 FACE AND INTERFACE: RICHER PRODUCT EXPERIENCES THROUGH INTEGRATED USER INTERFACE AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN 351
Keith S. Karn

24 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION FOR DESIGNS 367
Daniel Harris Brean

25 DESIGN THINKING FOR SUSTAINABILITY 381
Rosanna Garcia, PhD, Scott Dacko, PhD

 

 

Value of Writing Design Briefs

DML_Design brief

Our intuition is that we should create design briefs collaboratively. Our study showed that the very act of writing a brief, improves concept performance by twenty percent on average, while, already top performing designers achieve a twenty five percent performance enhancement from brief writing. Studies at Stanford Center for Design Research show that investing time in writing a superior brief can increase performance up to an additional thirty percent over average performing briefs…

 

Dessert design workshop @ Cognitive Science 2013 (2)

* Continued from Dessert design workshop @ Cognitive Science 2013

20130719_Dessert design @ Huffington Post

…Breakthrough innovation occurs when knowledge and experiences from vastly disparate areas are synthesized into new solutions. In this particular instance, someone from a Korean cultural background had combined “The Little Prince” by the French aristocrat, writer, poet and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, with a dessert entree, a course that is still relatively new to Korean culture. Not even the French could have come up with that combination!…

How to collect creative ideas massively?

20130327_Soren @ KMU (1)

Soren Petersen gave a presentation on how to collect creative ideas in a massive scale. He introduced how he applied crowdsourcing methods to address a wide variety of design issues including design marketing conflicts, animal rescue, peace innovation, to name a few. According to him, social platforms such as LinkedIn and HuffingtonPost are useful for us to prioritize problems, solicit solutions and share key insights with professional designers.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/E0eQNGc_TAw]

Interface between design and marketing

20111031_Huffington Post

Designers don’t just put cosmetics on the skin of a product!” During my interview with a graduate student at Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009, he argued that designers play a key role in developing a new product….

… The primary reason that marketing researchers often limit the role of designers is that they pay far too much attention to the “outcome” of designers’ activities. Many designers who research users, develop and evaluate concepts, and work with business strategists find it difficult to communicate with marketers, since marketers shed little light on the “process” of designers’ activities. …

 

.

20111108_Huffington Post

In actual practice, designers often set the marketing input aside and start a project by looking at advertisements and websites for their client’s and their competitors’ products. They collect images and stories concerning the uniqueness of each product and make fleeting trips to the products’ point of purchase, taking pictures and playing with the products. If the budget allows, they purchase a sample of products for later disassembly and destruction in the studio. Ideas for new features often stem from the designer’s personal experience — including his cultural and social background — and their project research into nature, art, fashion, architecture, entertainment, and other products. …

… At the end of the day, marketing is often presented with three to five realistic finished rendered concepts from which they have to select one for detailing. Often flash will out compete content, since no objective metrics have been presented, so it is little wonder that design is still seen as art rather than as being business driven.