What Aspiring Designers

Need to Know About

Strategy
By David Sherwin - April 4, 2013

This is an exclusive excerpt from my new book, Success by

Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers, which
was recently released by HOW.

As I read through his resume, the designer stared at me

expectantly. He had a wealth of great design projects under his
belt. He had been seeking out personal projects to build out his
portfolio. He had internships with sterling businesses and design
studios. But there was one thing that leapt out at me from the list
of core skills hed listed at the top of his resume: strategy.
Not brand strategy, content strategy, interactive strategy, media
strategy, or the MBA-land of business strategy. Just plain ol
strategy.
This has been happening more and more frequently, for a few
reasons. In the process of providing strong service to our clients,
we increase the likelihood of becoming a strategic partner. We
finally have a seat at the table when the client is talking
strategyand we can offer a range of strategic services that
verge outside what may be considered a designers core area of
expertise. This is a good thing. With the ongoing expansion of
designs role in business, todays designers are helping to solve
problems that transcend mere decoration and instead impact the
core functions of a clients business.
But in our haste to be strategic partners, Ive discovered that
many designers dont fully grasp how strategic services fit into
their client offerings. And when I ask designers out of sheer
curiosity how theyre functioning as strategistswhat
experiences they directly bring to bear on being strategists rather
than having a strategic orientationthey cant easily answer the
question.
If youre going to run a design-led business, its inevitable that
you will need to talk strategy with your clients. So lets explore
the types of strategies you might create as a design
businessperson, as well as how they may support the efforts of

your clients. Its my hope that this information will open up

some new paths for you to explore in your career as a designer.
What exactly is strategy?
The dictionary says: a strategy is a plan of action or policy
designed to achieve a major or overall aim. Intention leads to
action, which hopefully yields a desired result.
But dont get too excited about the word design appearing in
this definition of strategy. Even though plans or policies may
have been designed, that doesnt mean strategies are about
designing or are created by designers.
Instead design businesspeople who want to create strategies must
be able to both intend and realize strategy, says Henry
Mintzberg, Joseph Lampel and Bruce Ahlstrand in their classic
Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic
Management. The realization piece can be hard for some
designers, as our clients are often responsible for the deployment
and upkeep of what we create. To quote Timothy Morey, an
associate vice president of strategy at frog: Business strategists
cant agree on how exactly firms make their strategy. The
emergent schools of strategy favored by Mintzberg (and backed
by my experience!) suggest that there is a lot of room for clever
designers to surreptitiously impact their clients strategy through
design and design research.
Unintended consequences also influence how designers create
strategies. Strategies have to form as well as be formulated,
says Mintzberg, in reference to the ways companies react to
continual fluctuations in the behavior of their competitors,
customers and culture as a whole. For example, a soft drink
manufacturer plans to release a new pink-colored soda that tastes
like watermelon, but it will take at least a year for its product to

reach the market. An article in The Wall Street Journal says that
their competitor is rolling out a line of fruit-flavored sodas,
starting with a watermelon flavor in just one month. Both
companies may have similar strategies for how they will roll out
their products, but the late entrant to the market will have to
reformulate its strategy in order to establish a successful
position. A strategy has no value if it cant be acted upon.
In your work as a designer, you will be asked to take many
positions with regard to what strategy means to your clients. You
may perceive new patterns through your research and
recommendations. For another client, you can suggest a specific
position or change their perspective. You may also find yourself
recommending particular tactics for your clients to assume a
better position in the market.
Just by fulfilling design activities you are often realizing
strategies, whether you intend to or not. But this does not mean
that you are practicing strategy. Compare the above definition of
strategy as a plan with how Charles Eames defines design:
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to
accomplish a particular purpose. If a designers actions are
aligned with a particular purpose, then they may be strategic.
This does not mean, however, that they are intending that
strategy or able to fully describe the course to get there. This is
the domain of a design strategist.

How does a designer practice strategy?

I asked Abby Godee, an executive director of strategy at frog, for
her definition of design strategy. This is what she said:

Design strategists will help any design team create the why and
the how that will lead to a more meaningful what.
Design firms are generally good at addressing what should be
made, but their abilities may vary based on the how and the why.
Many designers, in their design training, are not initially
prepared to address what a client needs to understand around the
why, and design firms can often leave a client hanging regarding
the how.
What does Abby mean by the what, the why, and the how?
Why: We need to understand our client business problems and
identify where they should explore solutions to those problems
which segments, which user needs, which markets and which
opportunities?
A designer practicing strategy must be able to explore and
describe why certain conditions have led to the need to create
new things in the world, or to change or remove existing things
from the world. These conditions could be related to customer
behavior, market competition, cultural trends or other factors.
The design strategist must be able to discern patterns and
identify competitive positions in order to establish a more
holistic perspective for their clients.
What: We have identified opportunities regarding what to
design, supported by insight. These opportunities clearly
indicate possible design solutions that will influence a clients
business for the better.
As Abby noted, most design businesses spend the majority of
their time intuiting what should be made, but they may not
always know why what they are making will have a meaningful
business impact. A strategist should be able to work with a

design team to plan a future state for a businesss customers with

the inclusion of new or improved products and services, as well
as any new branding approaches, marketing or advertising
positions. These plans should help clients focus attention on a
specific position in relation to their competition.
How: Based on agreed solutions, we determine how possible
design solutions will be designed, implemented and brought to
market. A design strategist would also assess how prepared the
client organization is to realize those solutions and the potential
impacts of doing so.
A design strategist should help a company understand how to
realize the solutions theyve envisioned and designed at a high
level. This could require anything from creating implementation
road maps to designing, building and shipping products,
services, new brand guidelines and advertising campaigns. The
design strategist may not be an expert in all of these domains.
Instead she may serve as a sort of general contractor to connect
design teams with the appropriate partners throughout the
implementation process. At this point, a design strategists
careful planning gives way to a deep understanding of what
tactics will fulfill intended strategies.
How does design strategy align with your clients business
aims?
Now that you have a sense of what design strategists provide for
their clients, you can begin to explore the roles that designers can
play in helping to formulate and realize strategies on behalf of
their clients. Designers may influence strategies within the
following areas of a clients business operations.

Corporate strategy: Corporate strategy governs how a company

intends to sustain its operations over time. Corporate strategy
seeks to answer one question: What business are we in? The
corporate strategy is manifested through the mission, values,

goals and aspirations that a company has set for itself. Youll
also find it in the clients plans for partnering with favorable
firms, merging with competitive firms or acquiring companies or
IP to support its interests.
This area has traditionally been the domain of management
consultants, but designers bring a clarity of thought and the
power to reduce complicated strategies to digestible images,
frameworks and stories, which makes them good candidates to
play here, says Timothy Morey.
Business strategy: Business strategy is a broad umbrella that
encompasses the most important ongoing considerations for any
corporation, from process optimization to product/service
portfolio management to operations, finance and marketing.
However, it can almost always be summed up as an attempt to
answer this question: How are we going to make money within
our market?
Business strategies support corporate needs: Meeting revenue
targets, achieving desired market positions, rewarding
shareholders, fulfilling stated corporate strategies and more.
Many services that design businesses provide, such as
product/service strategy, brand strategy and marketing strategy
are flavors of business strategy and may be generated by a
design strategist who has the appropriate expertise.
Brand strategy: Brand strategy is the practice of formulating
how a companys brandthe sum of how the company is
perceived through all of its interactions with its customersis
manifested through corporate marketing, communications,
product and service design, interactive design and business
operations. Designers who work on a companys brand translate
corporate strategies and business strategies into a brand position,

which may then touch a companys product/service strategy and

marketing strategy.
Product/service strategy: Product and service strategies help to
define and shape the evolution of a companys portfolio of
salable products and services. I use the word portfolio very
deliberately, as a corporations business strategies are realized
through proper investment in their best-performing products and
services. While product strategy is often depicted as an outcome
of corporate and business strategy, in reality it is often the driver
of those higher order strategies. A designer with a great
product strategy can end up surreptitiously changing the business
or corporate strategy of an organization. Think of Apples initial
foray into the music business with the iPod, or Amazons impact
on the publishing industry with their Kindle products.
Marketing strategy: Marketers explore a clients business
strategy and product/service strategy, then determine what
actions should be taken in the market to better sell a companys
products and services to reach stated business goals. Designers
who play in this space may influence product/service strategy
and business strategy.
Strategy as a service that designers provide: A designer may
provide even more flavors of strategy that impact a clients
business: interactive strategy, content strategy or media strategy,
just to name a few. Many of these strategies are closely tied to
what should be realized, and how, but they may not be offered
by a business strategist.
While its tempting to elaborate these strategy types in depth, I
think its more important to note that these are services that
support the delivery of design strategy. Design strategists must
be able to string tactics together into a plan that every person at
the table can agree upon and execute with confidence. Much of

what we design can create new patterns in behavior and can

cause business strategies to form in an emergent fashion. But we
cant create a media strategy and claim to be a corporate
strategist. Nor can we completely revise a companys business
strategy when formulating a content strategy. What a design
strategist can do is help clients visualize how they can reach a set
of agreed-upon objectives, with the appropriate tools and
resources at their disposal.
How do I help set strategic direction for a client project?
BFAs advising MBAs regarding their business strategy may
seem a bit strange to both parties involved, but as youve read so
far, designers can have great influence on how a companys
business strategy is realized in the market. To act as a strategic
partner for any organization means reaching a place where both
of you agree on the problem you are trying to solvewhile
remaining flexible enough to accept that this agreement will
likely change as the project progresses, due to market forces.
But the most critical part of solving business problems through
design requires investing in learning about a clients business
and its competitive space. We often forget to approach our
clients problems with the same level of rigor that we would
approach the formal design process. Over time, this is how a
designer becomes a strategic partner for her client. This process
often begins with asking the right questions during the proposal
stage or while writing a brief.
The secret sauce in these long-term sustained conversations is to
think about problems as a space that both people and companies
maneuver through over time. Designers can help companies
define where they stand within that spaceas opposed to
grasping at problems to solveand help business stakeholders
find a consistent language to describe the challenges they face

and how they interrelate, from organizational units and market

segments to long-term goals and brand style guides. Do not
underestimate the power of design and storytelling to rally
organizations behind a well-articulated strategy.
Designers are well equipped to work with strategists to achieve
this aim. To quote Gabriel Post, a strategist I have worked
closely with:
Given that designers are typically highly visual people, or at
least model makers, I highly encourage strategists to co-develop
visual models with the designers of the products that will live
in it. Some common models used are ecosystem models, valuechain models and marketecture models each has a slightly
different take on what is described in its landscape.
The better the understanding of the world which a product is
being designed for, the more meaningful the resulting product.
And since Id argue the value of design is in the degree to which
the result is meaningful for the end user, being part strategist is
becoming an essential part of being a designer.
And lastly: As a strategist, its not your job to just say yes. It is
often said that strategy is as much about deciding what not to do,
as it is about selecting what to do. Having a high-level, strategic
impact on any company requires a deep level of commitment,
trust and a sustained relationship over time. None of these
emerge instantly on day one of your very first project. And none
of them come from being a yes-man. You need to choose to ask
the hard questions early on, in a way that can be heard and
responded to, and every compromise you make should be cleareyed and shared.

And if you dont? You may obtain a well-paid client

engagement, but you wont be invited back to the table as a
strategist.

Strategy by Design
In order to do a better job of developing, communicating, and
pursuing a strategy, the head of Ideo says, you need to learn to
think like a designer. Here's his five-point plan for how to make
the leap.
By Tim Brown

It's remarkable how often business strategy, the purpose of

which is to direct action toward a desired outcome, leads to just
the opposite: stasis and confusion. Strategy should bring clarity
to an organization; it should be a signpost for showing people
where you, as their leader, are taking them--and what they need
to do to get there. But the tools executives traditionally use to
communicate strategy--spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks--are
woefully inadequate for the task. You have to be a supremely
engaging storyteller if you rely only on words, and there aren't
enough of those people out there. What's more, words are highly
open to interpretation--words mean different things to different
people, especially when they're sitting in different parts of the
organization. The result: In an effort to be relevant to a large,
complicated company, strategy often gets mired in abstractions.
People need to have a visceral understanding--an image in their
minds--of why you've chosen a certain strategy and what you're
attempting to create with it. Design is ideally suited to this
endeavor. It can't help but create tangible, real outcomes.

Because it's pictorial, design describes the world in a way that's

not open to many interpretations. Designers, by making a film,
scenario, or prototype, can help people emotionally experience
the thing that the strategy seeks to describe. If, say, Motorola
unveils a plan to create products that have never existed before,
everyone in the organization will have a different idea of what
that means. But if Motorola creates a video so people can see
those products, or makes prototypes so people can touch them,
everyone has the same view.
Unfortunately, many people continue to think of design in very
narrow terms. Industrial products and graphics are outcomes of
the design process, but they do not begin to describe the
boundaries of design's playing field. Software is engineered, but
it is also designed--someone must come up with the concept of
what it is going to do. Logistics systems, the Internet,
organizations, and yes, even strategy--all of these are tangible
outcomes of design thinking. In fact, many people in many
organizations are engaged in design thinking without being
aware of it. The result is that we don't focus very much on
making it better.
If you dig into business history, you see that the same thing
occurred with the quality movement. As business strategist Gary
Hamel has pointed out, there was a time when people didn't
know what quality manufacturing was and therefore didn't think
about it. Nevertheless, they were engaged with quality--they
created products of good or bad durability and reliability. Then
thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming deconstructed quality-they figured out what it was and how to improve it. As soon as
people became conscious of it, manufactured goods improved
dramatically.

The same thing needs to happen with design. Organizations need

to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time
making people conscious of design thinking--not because design
is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it,
we'll make it better. And that's an imperative for any business,
because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation
productivity. That is, it can increase the rate at which you
generate good ideas and bring them to market. Where you
innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design
problems. When you bring design thinking into that strategic
discussion, you join a powerful tool with the purpose of the
entire endeavor, which is to grow. Here is Ideo's five-point
model for strategizing by design.
Hit the Streets

Any real-world strategy starts with having fresh, original insights

about your market and your customers. Those insights come only
when you observe directly what's happening in your market. As
Jane Fulton Suri, who directs our human-factors group, notes in
her book Thoughtless Acts? (Chronicle Books, 2005), "Directly
witnessing and experiencing aspects of behavior in the real
world is a proven way of inspiring and informing [new] ideas.
The insights that emerge from careful observation of people's
behavior . . . uncover all kinds of opportunities that were not
previously evident."
Very often, you can build an entire strategy based on the
experiences your customers go through in their interactions with
your organization. Service brands have a horrible habit of
focusing on the one interaction where they think they make
money. If you're running an airline, there's an awful temptation
to focus all of your attention on what it's like to fly a particular
route on a particular aircraft. In fact, you can track backward and

forward a whole series of interactions that consumers have with

you that are very relevant. If you start to map out that entire
journey, you begin to understand how you might innovate to
create a much more robust customer experience.
Recruit T-Shaped People

Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product,

service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having
an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can't just
stand in your own shoes; you've got to be able to stand in the
shoes of others. Empathy allows you to have original insights
about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.
"We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they're
willing to try to do what you do."

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that
they're willing to try to do what you do. We call them "T-shaped
people." They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg
of the T--they're mechanical engineers or industrial designers.
But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other
skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able
to explore insights from many different perspectives and
recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human
need. That's what you're after at this point--patterns that yield
ideas.
These teams operate in a highly experiential manner. You don't
put them in bland conference rooms and ask them to generate
great ideas. You send them out into the world, and they return
with many artifacts--notes, photos, maybe even recordings of
what they've seen and heard. The walls of their project rooms are
soon plastered with imagery, diagrams, flow charts, and other
ephemera. The entire team is engaged in collective idea-making:

They explore observations very quickly and build on one

another's insights. In this way, they generate richer, stronger
ideas that are hardwired to the marketplace, because all of their
observations come directly from the real world.
Build to Think
"Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you spot a
promising idea, you build it. In a sense, we build to think."

Design thinking is inherently a prototyping process. Once you

spot a promising idea, you build it. The prototype is typically a
drawing, model, or film that describes a product, system, or
service. We build these models very quickly; they're rough,
ready, and not at all elegant, but they work. The goal isn't to
create a close approximation of the finished product or process;
the goal is to elicit feedback that helps us work through the
problem we're trying to solve. In a sense, we build to think.
When you rapidly prototype, you're actually beginning to build
the strategy itself. And you're doing so very early in the
innovation cycle. This enables you to unlock one of your
organization's most valuable assets: people's intuitions. When
you sit down with your senior team and show them prototypes of
the products and services you want to put out in two years' time,
you get their intuitive feel for whether you're headed in the right
direction. It's a process of enlightened trial and error: Observe
the world, identify patterns of behavior, generate ideas, get
feedback, repeat the process, and keep refining until you're ready
to bring the thing to market.
Not long ago, we worked with a large food-processing company
on the possibility of incorporating RFID technology into its
supply chain. After many rounds of prototyping and getting
feedback, we made a three-minute video that described a very

complex interaction of suppliers, customers, logistics, weather,

geography, and a host of other real-world conditions that showed
how RFID might work. The video rapidly accelerated the
development of a potential RFID-based strategy, because the
company could instantly give us even sharper feedback and help
us refine it. Rapid prototyping helps you test your progress in a
very tangible way and ultimately makes your strategic thinking
more powerful.
The Prototype Tells a Story

Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process--it generates

feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections--and a
storytelling process. It's a way of visually and viscerally
describing your strategy.
Some years ago, a startup called Vocera came to us with a new
technology based on the Star Trek communicator--that "Beam
me up, Scotty" device. They had worked out the technology--an
elegant device the size of a cigarette lighter that you could wear
around your neck and use to connect instantly with anyone on
the network. But the team had no way to describe why people
would need the thing. We made a five-minute film that played
out a scenario where everyone in the company had these gadgets.
The storyline followed how one person used the communicator
to rapidly assemble a crisis team dispersed across an office
campus. The film showed that while fixed communications and
mobile phones are very good for expected interactions, this
device was ideal for reacting to the unexpected.
The team used the film to tell their story; it helped them raise VC
funding and it acted as the guiding framework for the
development and marketing of the product, which is called the
Vocera Communications Badge. But there's an interesting twist

to this tale. We thought the badge would work best on big office
campuses. The market thought otherwise. Vocera's two largest
markets are hospitals and big-box retail stores.
In the end, it didn't really matter that the market opportunity
morphed into something different. Because you're testing and
refining your strategy early and often in the design process, the
strategy continually evolves. When the market changes, as it did
with Vocera, the strategy can change along with it. This gives
you a big jump start over abstract, word-based forms of strategy,
in which the first time you get to test the strategy's outcome is
when you actually roll it out. You can't gauge the strategy's
effectiveness until you achieve the end result and do your
postmortem. I don't see why that's useful. By building your
strategy early on, in a sense you're doing a premortem: You're
giving yourself a chance to uncover problems and fix them in
real time, as the strategy unfolds.
Design Is Never Done

Even after you've rolled out your new product, service, or

process, you're just getting started. In almost every case, you
move on to the next version, which is going to be better because
you've had more time to think about it. The basic idea for the
notebook computer came out of Ideo some 20 years ago: Ideo
cofounder Bill Moggridge is listed on the patent for the design
that lets you fold a screen over a keyboard. Since then, the laptop
has been redesigned--and greatly improved--hundreds of times,
because design is never done. The same goes for strategy. The
market is always changing; your strategy needs to change with it.
Since design thinking is inherently rooted in the world, it is
ideally suited to helping your strategy evolve.

It all comes back to the fact that in order to really raise

innovation productivity within organizations, at the strategic
level and everywhere else, you have to increase the amount of
design thinking inside organizations. Doing so helps you get to
clarity faster, helps your organization understand where you're
taking it, helps you figure out whether you're on the right track,
and enables you to adapt quickly to change. Those are pretty
valuable survival skills.
Some companies already understand this and are working design
thinking into their organizations. It's not such a hard thing to do.
The toughest part is taking that first step--breaking away from
your habitual way of working and getting out into the world.
Tim Brown is the CEO and president of Ideo, one of the world's
leading product-design firms.
A version of this article appeared in the June 2005 issue of Fast
Company magazine.

What You Can Learn

from Virgin America's
Strategy Canvas
By Adam Richardson - July 8, 2010
The common wisdom for starts-up looking to take on entrenched
competitors is to look at what the competitors are doing and
offer a different - but relevant - value proposition to customers.
The best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy which came out a
few years ago gives a clear way of thinking about and

visualizing your unique value, the "strategy canvas".

Unfortunately it's not always as simple as just "thinking
differently". The struggling upstart airline Virgin America is a
case in point.
Virgin America offers a superior product at a lower price, has an
enthusiastic fan base, and cutting-edge marketing - all usual
ingredients for market disruption. So why can't it take a sizable
bit out of entrenched competitors? Fast Company reports on how
Virgin has faced barrier after barrier to expanding its service into
new markets, a critical step for an airline to gain enough
geographic footprint to attract a sustainable quantity of
passengers.
The article quotes Hubert Horan, an aviation consultant:
King Solomon couldnt start a U.S. domestic airline these days.
No matter how well theyre run, its tough for any airline thats
small to survive.
Here are these well-run efficient airlines [Virgin, JetBlue,
Southwest] people like them, they have low costs but they
cant get the badly run inefficient airlines to go away. In a
competitive market, the people with the better-run companies
ought to drive the high-cost companies out of business, and that
just doesnt work in the airline industry.
Here is a strategy canvas of the airline industry, comparing
Virgin, Southwest, and an averaged "Legacy" airline. The
strategy canvas evaluates several dimensions of competition (e.g.
prices, convenience) on simple low-to-high scales. You draw a
"value curve" crossing the points where entrenched competitors
sit for each of the competitive dimensions, and then look for
white-space opportunities to differentiate. (My tongue-in-cheek

but not entirely incorrect one-line summary of BOS is: look at

what the competition is doing, and do the opposite.)

Admittedly this diagram is a quick and dirty analysis but you can
immediately see how Virgin and Southwest have very different
value curves than legacy outlines. (And yes I recognize that there
is variation within the legacy airlines, they aren't all exactly the
same, but like I say I've averaged them for the purpose here. This
is is often what is advocated in BOS, which uses Southwest as a
case study of creating a new value curve - see the graphic on
p38.)
Strategy canvases are a nice way to quickly take the pulse of a
category. But they are also easy to do poorly by leaving off
important dimensions that may not be about the more obvious
factors of product innovation. This strategy canvas, for example,
leaves out the political and geographic lockout that the legacy
airlines have created, which - as Virgin is showing - are vital to

market traction. Don't make the mistake that some companies

(and industry analysts do) of cherry-picking your competitive
dimensions to make yourself look good, and leave out ones that
may have a critical impact on your ultimate success.

AVP of Marketing Strategy Adam Richardson is the author of

Innovation X: Why a Companys Toughest Problems are its
Greatest Advantage. His book is the manual for leaders looking
for clarity about the emerging challenges facing their businesses.
You can follow Adam on Twitter @richardsona.

How Strategy Improved

My Life
By Stacey Gillar - October 17, 2008
In 2006, three things happened to me that changed my life. The
first was the birth of my second son. The second was my job
change, and we'll get to the third in a bit.
Amazingly, the job change did eclipse my son Moses' birth. I
went from a long history of providing information for free, to
providing information at a cost. From a librarian's point of view,

this is a significant change. What precipitated this change was

my movement from an internal group to an external one, from IT
to Strategy.
Moving to this group blew my mind. My introduction to this
relatively new group at frog was the first Strategy summit and
what was said went so far over my head I was dizzy. What I
managed to grab on to was that these people were very, very into
making products and strategies that would be successful in the
market and make our clients successful. Everyone had great
strategies they were sharing and formulas and matrixes, and they
were all much more interesting and intriguing than I expected
them to be.
I have been at frog for nine years and we were always into
helping our clients be successful, but by providing a system to
the process, it was now taken to a very obvious new level. It
made all the sense in the world to me, and I got it.
What I quickly realized was that I liked money, and that was
ok. Being part of Strategy made me see how I could possibly
start a business, too. Working only on businesses and strategy
and trends made me feel I had a nice basic business toolset and
could possibly be successful if an opportunity ever came my
way. This was a big step for a Librarian with a degree in Art.
Now we come to the third thing that changed my life. My
husband came up with the idea, as he normally does, but this
time he wanted to actually do it, and to take it to the end, no
matter what that end was. I agreed as this was the opportunity I
was looking for, as well. I could see that out of all the
businesses in just this one town, we could do the same and be
part of what helps make the world go around. With the little I
had been able to glean from the Strategy group in the time I had
joined them in how to make a product successful and with the

trends I had been reading, especially from TrendWatching, we

formed a business that finally opened last week.
I am now a living breathing member of what I am involved in at
my day job. I can now see both from the client side and the frog
side. I know the pressures of paying the bills and wondering if
this new crazy design will work because my livlihood and my
employees livlihoods are on the line. Being a part of frog, I
could not leave out some lovely interior design as well as
branding design for the store, as small as it is. As Doreen puts it,
at some point in the design process, the customer is going to
have to really sweat it out and at that point they will not be sure
of the direction, but that is when you know you're on the right
path and that's why you go outside to get a design that really
pushes the boundaries of safe. I now know this feeling, too!
As small as my experience has been, and is, I am happy to be a
part of the engine that makes up our country and am excited to
see what will happen next and this whole money making idea is
truly interesting and that makes it exciting to see not only how it
will grow our business but how we can work in our environment
appropriately to make something positive as much as possible. I
think that a cookie store goes a long way down that path.
I am very appreciative of my experience at frog and in Strategy
to bring me to this next level.

Lessons in Adaptive
Strategy
By Adam Richardson - January 19, 2011

Here's a company I can be pretty sure you've never heard of:

Grace Manufacturing. I'd never heard of it either until this New
York Times profile, though I've seen and used its products
"microplanes" for shaving cloud-like piles of parmesan, truffles,
and other high-end ingredients. Microplanes for kitchens now
make up 65% of the company's revenue, yet it was a product
category completely different from what Grace started out doing,
and only got into reluctantly. It's a fascinating example of
questioning assumptions about your business domain when
under pressure, staying alert to customer needs, and being open
to opportunities as they appear.
Grace started out in the 1970s as a contract manufacturer of
etched steel parts, such as for printers. Grace had a proprietary
process for making precise steel shapes, which resulted in the
edges of the steel being razor-sharp. In this context, sharpness
was a liability and workers had to be careful handling the parts.
With the emergence of dot-matrix printers in the 1980's, Grace
realized its cash-cow business was under threat, and so it looked
for other areas.
Faced with a similar situation, other companies may have looked
at adjacent areas wooing the makers of dot-matrix printers, or
looking at other high-volume, complex machine pieces. Grace
took a step further back and thought more broadly about its

capabilities and the attributes of what it does. As CEO (and

founder's son) Chris Grace put it, "We realized we were good at
making sharp things. And so we thought, what can we make
that's sharp?"
Woodworking tools became the first answer: specifically small
planes for doing fine sculpting of wood surfaces. Grace had
some success with these tools, but then the unexpected
happened: chefs started using them in novel ways. Grace
inadvertently created a need and a new product category: the
culinary microplane, which extracts more flavors from foods
than traditional grating and shaving. Chefs loved this new
expansion to their toolbox.
At first Grace was incredulous that its serious woodworking
tools would be used in this application, but that didn't stop it
from taking orders. Today microplanes dominate Grace's
business, and the company has continued to explore other
applications, such as medical and cosmetics, driven in part by the
pressure of patent expiration.
Following how customers are continuing to find new ways of
using their products is important for Grace, for example by
watching The Food Network. I love how Chris Grace puts it: "If
you child was an actor, you'd watch for him," he explained.
"Same deal with us."
(This article originally appeared on the Harvard Business
Review blog)
Image from flickr user Deidre Woolard (cc)

AVP of Marketing Strategy Adam Richardson is the author of

Innovation X: Why a Companys Toughest Problems are its
Greatest Advantage. His book is the manual for leaders looking
for clarity about the emerging challenges facing their businesses.
You can follow Adam on Twitter @richardsona.

Understanding Design
Strategy
Posted on February 22, 2013 by Terry Lee Stone
Categories: HOW March 2013 Tags: design business, design strategy.
Pin It
This post is an excerpt from the feature article Understanding Design
Strategy by Terry Lee Stone in the March 2013 issue of HOW Magazine.
Click here to download the full article, or get the entire issue here!

In the broadest sense, strategy is a plan for how to achieve a

goal. In business, strategy bridges the gap between policy
(guidelines governing action) and tactics (a set of techniques).
Strategy is what a company develops to differentiate itself from
competitors actual or predicted moves. Its complex and it
drives every decision a business makes.
Our clients business strategies also form the framework for our
design strategies. While these are interrelated, they are not the
same thing. Design strategy, as a field of theory and practice,
refers to the integrated, holistic planning process examining the
interplay between design and business strategy. However, for
most graphic designers, design strategy simply refers to the
conceptual underpinning for their creative work.

WHAT IS DESIGN STRATEGY?

There really is no one definition of design strategy, but the goal

is to merge business and creative objectives in a meaningful way
that moves design beyond just an aesthetic exercise. When we
integrate design processes and design thinking into the larger
business goals of our companies or clients, we elevate the
concept of design to a strategic tool that businesses can
leverage, says Rob Bynder, creative director and owner of RBD
| Robert Bynder Design Inc. in Newberry Park, CA. While
inextricably linked, business and design strategies meet different

needs. Business strategy includes financial, product and market

objectives, which are best expressed through brand touchpoints,
says Greg Mann, partner and creative director at The Fibonacci
Design Group LLC in Los Angeles. Design strategy is the
roadmap for the visual and media components that help to build
and drive these objectives.
Design strategy could be described as inventing the language to
express your clients business strategy most clearly. Jamie
Koval, president of VSA Partners in Chicago, puts it this way:
Design strategy articulates the parameters and potential of a
specific challenge that drive a series of solutions or result. Its
simple, compelling and actionable. And as with any language,
evolution and variation are inevitable and should be
accommodated. Design strategy is a dimensional, multifaceted
plan that allows traveling down different paths, says Volker
Drre, creative director of Drre Design Inc. in Los Angeles.
We want to include flexibility and the option of organic growth
into the agenda right from the start.

DESIGN TOUCHPOINTS

WHAT GOES INTO A DESIGN STRATEGY?

Any design strategy should address the following:

Existing problems and ongoing challenges

Current benefi ts and successes to be leveraged
Unmet client/customer needs
Changing client/customer behaviors and attitudes
Emerging ideas and trends

Opportunities to differentiate

The way these issues are addressed is the essence of the strategy.
When this process is translated from business language and
actions into design language and actions it becomes the basis for
a design strategy. (See Influences and Touchpoint charts)
What is the one thing I find myself saying over and over again
to my internal clients about design strategy? Our design strategy
is not about what you like or what I like. Its about whats right
for us as a company and, ultimately, for our companys
customers. Our company is invested in this approach, and
staying on strategy is the best way to create value for our
clients. LAURA TU, PWC
Some designers confuse design strategy with a creative brief, but
understanding the distinction is critical. Design strategy is how
we recommend approaching the project; a creative brief helps
frame what is being requested by the client and is an integral part
of communication between client and designer, says Justin
Ahrens, principal/creative director of Rule29 in Geneva, IL.
The design strategy can often expand or contract that brief,
based on the research or findings while the strategy is being
developed.

Like what youve read? Click Here to download the entire

article at MyDesignShop, or Click Here to get the March 2013
issue of HOW Magazine and get this article along with so
much moreincluding the 2013 International Design
Awards!

Openness or How Do You

Design for the Loss of
Control?
By Tim Leberecht - August 13, 2010

Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century,

and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds.
Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since
Henry Chesbroughs seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003.
However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from
different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations
have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the
paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good
time to reframe Open from a design point of view.
What sparked my interest in particular was the Dachis Groups
list of Six Social Business Trends to Watch which referenced the
phrase JP Rangaswami coined at this years Enterprise 2.0
conference: Design for the loss of control. His point was more
IT-specific, arguing that the combination of pervasive digital
infrastructure, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, social
software, and smart phones have enabled employee- and
customer-driven solutions to a degree that renders top-down IT
systems obsolete. As Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group
writes: Enterprises currently expend considerable resources
trying to impose control on a situation that increasingly appears
like it not only cant be controlled, but almost certainly doesnt
need to be.

No longer in control
The new paradigm Hinchcliffe describes has implications far
beyond just IT. For one thing, employees, who are facing an
increasingly hybridized work/life proposition, are eager to do
what they are passionate about, and they will increasingly find
the digital spaces and tools that allow them to do this most
effectively without having to ask anyone for permission.
Companies have to come to terms with the fact that the
traditional model of managerial resource allocation and
coordination (mainly coerced through extrinsic motivation in the
form of rewards and punishments, such as payments,
promotions, demotions, etc.) has become outdated and no longer
reflects the social fabric of todays workforce.
Moreover, customers, too, seek out relationships with brands that
go beyond the merely transactional. Empowered through
ubiquitous access to information and therefore radical
transparency, through an abundance of choices on the web, as
well as the ability to contribute and tap into social networks (and
thus social capital) in real-time and on-the-go, they expect
brands to offer engagement and collaboration models that match
the more distributed and multi-layered mechanisms of value
creation through social media.
Commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In
short: Companies have lost control over their workforce, their
customers, and as a result, their brands. Or, more precisely, as
Charlene Li points out in her book Open Leadership, they have
never really been in control what they are actually forced to
give up now is their need for control.
The power of pull

So what can they do besides just bemoaning this loss and

passively observing how the new centrifugal forces of the Social,
Real-Time Web are disrupting their traditional business and
engagement models? Li lays out how business leaders can and
(must!) embrace the new rules of openness. John Hagel, John
Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, in the The Power of Pull,
provide an actionable framework for how these new forces can
be leveraged through shaping strategies on the individual,
institutional, and societal level.
These shaping strategies, as the term suggests, present an
exciting challenge for design. If designers embrace the insight
that influence is replacing authority as the new currency in the
pull economy and that the best way to gain influence is to give
up control, they will have significant impact on how this new
economy is shaping up. In fact, they are uniquely positioned to
develop what Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison call levers of
access, attraction, and achievement that provide the creation
spaces and tools for employees and customers alike to design
their own destiny, create their own meaning, and thus convert
their very own skills and passions into productivity and loyalty.
In essence, businesses can use shaping strategies to amplify
and accelerate the inevitable loss of control in order to avoid
employees and customers abandon them. This may sound
counter-intuitive but the upside is considerable. A deliberately
designed loss of control grants companies the only remaining
and arguably most critical competitive advantage access. As
long as they enable and facilitate knowledge flows, ideas,
passions, skills, and experiences, they have access to them. In
fact, if they fully leverage the powers of pull, these assets will
gravitate towards them.
X-problems and social networks

Openness is no longer just a nice stunt but a fundamental

requirement for any business that wants to thrive in the new
pull economy. Because were increasingly dealing with "XProblems," as my colleague Adam Richardson reckons in his
book Innovation X, we need approaches that allow us to come up
with creative solutions to problems we may not even know yet.
In other words: Solutions that help define the problem. Or as
Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison put it: If you want to find out
what it is you dont know that you dont know, you need to hang
out with other people who might already know it.
The loss of control enables the creation of more weak ties in a
companys network (inside and outside of the organization), and,
as social network research has shown, weak ties are more
conducive to transporting foreign ideas, knowledge, and skills
because they move faster from one node to the other as the
network becomes more accessible and nimble on its fringes. The
further you get away from the core of your network, the less
control you (may want to) have.
You could argue that designers have been designing creation
spaces, feedback mechanisms, and other participatory
experiences for some time now. They certainly have, but perhaps
without fully recognizing or deliberately orchestrating the
amount of loss of control that their designs represented. It seems
like the time is ripe to understand these efforts as part of a
broader shift and consolidate them into a series of formats that,
going forward, shall serve as blueprints for design for the loss
of control, across different corporate functions and disciplines.
Frequently, these solutions will involve de-institutionalizing
decision-making by removing the intermediary. In many cases,
this may imply an act of democratization, but it is also important
not to see this as a zero-sum game. Control is not just shifting

from one hand to many; rather, it is dissolving and

defragmenting and along the way diminishing or turning into
something else, far more valuable: social capital that resides in
the public domain and is no longer controlled by anyone. The
formats that propel this new mode of collaboration and value
creation are emergent and informal, and they typically carry a
significant amount of tacit knowledge.
Here are some recent examples:
Open ideation/crowdsourcing: Open ideation (or
crowdsourcing) is based on the assumption that the best ideas for
new products, services, and business models may come from
outside of your organization or from those people inside your
organization who are typically (by function or hierarchy)
excluded from the ideation process. Like all open innovation
efforts, crowdsourcing redistributes control from an elite group
of thinkers and doers to a broader group of self-selected
participants. By broadening the funnel, companies can harness
the accumulated or aggregated knowledge of these voices.
Crowdsourcing is usually focused on ideas and insights but can
also cover a wider array of collaborations with external parties
throughout all stages of the innovation cycle. Dell, Starbucks,
P&G, and many other organizations use crowdsourcing. Nike
partners with Creative Commons and Best Buy for
GreenXchange, a platform that promotes the creation and
adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve
important global or industry-wide sustainability challenges.
TED is expanding its reach through TEDx, independently
organized TED events," without compromising the exclusivity of
its brand. Furthermore, Victors & Spoils brought crowdsourcing
to the world of advertising; and IDEO recently launched its
crowdsourcing platform, OpenIDEO, inviting the public to join
creative challenges that tackle social issues through design.

And there are firms such as InnoCentive that specialize in

crowdsourcing services for other companies. All these
companies not only make ideas accessible to more or less open
publics (to some extent, giving up control over IP) but also
commit to making the follow-up on these ideas (at least partially)
transparent (giving up some control over agenda-setting and
strategic planning).
Open design research: frogMob, developed by frog design, is a
tool for crowdsourced design research, based on the idea that
everyone can be a researcher for a day, just by paying a little
more attention to the world around them. frogMob uses guerilla
photography and stories to take a quick pulse on global trends,
behaviors, and artifacts. Launched internally first tapping into
frogs eight global studios we are now expanding frogMob to a
broader public. Through frogMob, we are able to mobilize not
only our internal network around a specific assignment but also
external contributors on an ad hoc basis, in a short amount of
time (like a Flash Mob). frogMob allows us to provide
lightweight, rapid design research for clients who ask for a
trend scrape that identifies patterns and offers unexpected
inspiration. The key here is to tap into existing knowledge flows
- in a nimble way that does not require too much commitment
from the participants and eliminates bureaucratic hurdles.
Open strategy: Crowdsourcing can also take place as a
combination of online and offline collaboration, as demonstrated
by NPR and its Think-In on the future of digital media.
Supported and facilitated by frog, NPR hosted an open strategy
session, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection
of media and technology to explore new approaches to content
creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member
stations. The Think-In harnessed the collective expertise and
creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives,

and innovators, and it developed concepts that NPR incorporated

into its organizational roadmap. The event was augmented
through live-commentary and streaming via various social media
channels. This social augmentation made the workshop
accessible for a broader audience, which like the on-site
participants felt so genuinely passionate about NPR that they
committed some serious time to this collective brainstorming.
Such passion for brands could also be put to work through a
more radical version of a Think-In: a brand hijack that
convenes customers and other interested parties to explore new
directions for a brand yet with the twist that the brand itself
would not participate (but may have the option to co-opt the
results of the session afterwards).
Open-source humanitarian software: In the software space,
open-source projects have long been an established form of open
innovation, see IBMs Eclipse platform. Random Hacks of
Kindness (RHoK), founded by teams from Google, Microsoft,
Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, uses open-source methods
to hack for humanity. It describes itself as a community of
developers, geeks and tech-savvy do-gooders around the world,
working to develop software solutions that respond to the
challenges facing humanity today. The group runs
Hackathons, inviting the best and the brightest hackers from
around the world, who volunteer their time to tackle disaster
relief issues with through software applications. The Hackathons
are designed as so-called codejams, fast-paced competitions
that give the participants a set amount of time to solve the
challenges they are given. At the end of a two-day marathon of
hacking, a panel will review each hack, and the winners will
walk away with prizes, as well as the right to call themselves
RHoKstars ever after. Another example of open-source

humanitarian software is Ushahidis CrowdMap which displays

crowdsourced crisis data on maps as a free cloud-based service.
Open-(source) social networks: Lockheed Martin, the giant
defense contractor, built its own networking site called Eureka
Streams and released it open-source for the public to use. As Fast
Company writes in a recent blog post, The company's
management had recognized that an internal social networking
tool could have all sorts of procedural benefits for a large, and
geographically disjointed organization. Essentially it lets
knowledge workers inside the company find and talk with
other experts who may have valid input to particular projects, but
who would otherwise have zero oversight or input. Dow
Chemical is another example of a company setting up its own
social network, in this case to help managers identify the talent
they need to execute projects across different business units and
functions. Dow has even extended the network to include former
employees a smart move. Closed networks are of diminishing
value. A recent McKinsey Quarterly report argues, In the longer
term, networked organizations will focus on the orchestration of
tasks rather than the ownership of workers and advises
executives to make the network the organization.
Open branding: In the spirit of transparency, design firm
Continuum is partly revealing to the public its creative process.
The specific challenge is to create a brand identity for the Design
Museum Boston, a nomadic institution that exhibits mainly in
the virtual space. For six weeks, Continuum is partnering with
Core77 on a blog series that will reveal the firms process and
progress as it takes on the challenge. Readers are invited to
comment but it is not quite clear to what degree they can
influence the creative work. Its a non-commercial client and a
low-risk project but in any case, making a creative project
transparent even somewhat haphazardly is an interesting

experiment that is worth following. The more radical experiment

would of course be to put the creative control over a project fully
in the hands of the smart crowd and have the creative team
steered by a disperse group of remote creative directorsbeyond just input comprising of insights and ideas. Other, more
radical formats are imaginable: For example, sharing a
companys entire communications (some, more or less tightly
managed corporate Twitter accounts are in a way a precursor to
this) with the public. This would be radical transparency indeed,
and an experiment with unpredictable outcome will the benefit
of enabling reciprocal, collaborative relationships outweigh the
risk of reputational landmines and IP violations? Is it IP, in the
end, as proprietary knowledge stocks (The Power of Pull), that
serves as a companys greatest asset or isnt it rather the ability
to attract talent and grant access to knowledge and skills?
Theres another, softer benefit to it: Brand personality comes
from being personal. The more transparent and the more
vulnerable brands are, the more personal, they more authentic
they will appear. Transparency is a prerequisite for authenticity
an unmasked and immediate act of communication.
Open social-capital enablers: Small, ad-hoc, start-ups are
popping up that leverage the principles of self-organization,
which Clay Shirky so aptly described in Here Comes Everybody,
to rethink capital and reinvent human resources allocation in
order to tackle global issues. Originated from the Sandbox
network, an exclusive network of young innovators and
entrepreneurs under 30, this movement calls itself Emergent
Transformation, and Max Marmer, one of its masterminds,
writes on its group blog: Lately we have been observing an
accelerated movement of ventures that are revolutionizing how
we take initiative on a global scale. They can be mostly found in
the areas of education, innovation, collaboration, networks,

entrepreneurship, and human development: spaces that most

likely will dominate the future of value creation in our society.
These ventures are leveling the global resource play, unleashing
unused & undeveloped human capital and leading to a
socioeconomic transformation. For example, there is Supercool
School, an online school platform that strives to give people
worldwide access to education by building a new global
infrastructure of live online schools. Or Assetmap, an online
platform that helps individuals discover and leverage resources
directly from the community around them, using the
methodology of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD).
Max Marmer believes One huge differentiator that sets these
projects apart from almost all other organizations is their
emphasis on human potential or social capital, rather than
economic capital. The hope is that by creating a clearly defined
space for these organizations to work in, there will be more
opportunity to share this social capital, allowing them to achieve
complimentary aspects of mutually shared visions. Their
aspirations are tied to value creation, based on co-operative
contribution, and will allow them to fulfill personal passions.
Giving new meaning to their work, its helping people lead
happier lives.
Open conferences: Un-conferences are facilitated, face-to-face,
participant-driven conferences centered on a specific theme or
purpose. They are the antidote to the conventional conference
format, radically disrupting the delineation between curator and
attendees, speaker and audience. The attendees are the experts.
Many organizations and groups have begun to use unconferences to capture and externalize the full breadth of
expertise assembled at conferences. Some conferences prefer to
incorporate only some un-conference formats into their program

 participant-driven sessions that are developed on site in real

time.
Open conversations: Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And ad
shop Crispin Porter + Bogusky did it. All of them use their
corporate web sites as social hubs that curate what is being said
about their brand rather than staging what their brand has to say.
These efforts are attempts to at least co-opt the conversation on
the Social Web before brand-specific aggregators could benefit
from being parasites of the brand's social universe. In other
words, what if a brand faced unexpected competition from a
third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and
easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than the brand
itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a
site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but
not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the
company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and
Glassdoor.com, which aggregate individual member data into a
fairly transparent view of companies, including employee
information, salary information, and recent news. Indeed, thirdparty brand curators might realize that brands live in the social
commons, and that whoever builds the right aggregation
mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a
mass audience will own the branded conversation on the web.
Take a look at how Get Satisfactions community-empowered
customer support plays this it is not an uncontroversial model,
but it is designed for the loss of control (of brands), enabling
customer-to-customer service. You could also spin the idea of a
social homepage a bit further and not only curate the social
web conversation about your brand but actually give away your
whole homepage to third parties and to public service
announcements, stories, or art. Give up control gain social
currency.

Open HR: Of all critical business functions, HR might be the

one with the greatest potential for innovation. With dynamic,
quickly accessible expertise replacing static piles of proprietary
knowledge, and companies moving from organization-centric to
network-centric modi operandi, HR becomes a key enabler of
assets through the nurturing of relationships, developing talent,
and fostering a culture of openness and participation. This is not
just pep talk but includes new tools and methodologies that
radically alter the relationship between employee and firm. A
recent study by Birkman International that surveyed nearly
20,000 HR professionals found that 83 percent of respondents
see great potential in social media-based HR solutions,
particularly when it comes to improving communication,
learning, and knowledge sharing. Here at frog design, we have
launched frogForward, an open-ended, conversational, and social
performance management app that allows our employees to
provide 360-degree feedback any time throughout the year (not
just during review cycles). Goal-setting is entered as a stream,
and the feedback peer, managerial, and employee feedback
can be shared openly or privately. This new approach reflects the
changing realities of work performance, from a task-driven
control and coordination approach with quantifiable goals to a
holistic view that is more situation-and context-aware, gives the
employee significantly more control of the process, and
considers intangibles such as tacit knowledge, social
intelligence, and relationship-building. frogForward shares this
approach with Rypple, an ad-hoc social network that provides
simple, direct, anonymous, and ongoing customer and employee
feedback.
All of these initiatives, whether they apply to brand, CRM,
product development, R&D, customer service, or HR, exhibit
some similar characteristics:

- easy access;
- open platforms that harness the creativity and expertise from
people outside of the organization or untapped sources inside;
- open-ended formats that can evolve as the problem statement
changes;
- ample room for participation and emergent self-organization;
- easy mechanisms for tinkering and hacking (e.g. through opensource formats);
- small formats that can be easily shared
- strong incentives (ideally intrinsic motivation or social
currency);
- real-time visibility (through sharable content);
- tie-ins to dormant or active social networks;
- and distributed decision-making.
Openness as permanent crisis
There is another aspect to this: The most imminent and urgent
manifestation of loss of control is of course a crisis. And in
times where terrorism, financial downturns, natural disasters, as
well as catastrophic events on the individual level are a steady
companion to our societies and personal lives, designing for
crisis has become a default skill, forcing designers to make
contingency planning an integral part of the experiences they
create. Often, this means developing exit scenarios that are
flexible enough to provide a structure for emergent solutions in
response to emergencies. (The notion that architects design
spaces so they can be escaped from has been thoroughly

examined by Stephan Trueby in his book Exit-Architecture Design Between War and Peace). In other words: an easy way
out. And in. Because exits are entry points as well. If you design
ways out of the system, they might as well serve as ways into the
system.
If you think about it, this insight may provoke a different notion
of openness understanding it as a system where exit and entry
are identical. In this line of thinking, an ecosystem on the Social
Web could be seen as a system in permanent crisis it is always
in flux, and its composition and value are constantly threatened
by a multitude of forces, from the inside and the outside. What if
we understood designing for the loss of control as designing
for structures that are in a permanent crisis? Crises are
essentially disruptions that shock the system. They are deviations
from routines, and the very variance that the advocates of
planning and programs (the Push model) so despise. At their
own peril, because they fail to realize that variance is the mother
of all meaning; it is variance that challenges the status quo, pulls
people and their passions towards you, and propels innovation.
Designing for the loss of control means designing for variance.
One system in permanent crisis that contains a high level of
variance is WikiLeaks. The most remarkable thing about the site
appears to be the dichotomy between the uncompromised
transparency it aims at and the radical secrecy it requires to do
so. The same organization that depends on the loss of control for
its content very much depends on a highly controlled
environment to protect itself and keep operating effectively. But
not just that: Ironically, secrecy is also a fundamental
prerequisite for the appeal of WikiLeaks there are no secrets
claim. Simply put: there is no light without darkness. And there
is no WikiLeaks without secrets.

Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total

openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open,
nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first
decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what
needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative
choices for positive effects. You need to build enough variance
into a system to make it flow and yet retain some control over
the underlying parameters (access, boundaries, authorship,
participants, agenda, process, conversation, collaboration,
documentation, etc.). Only if you maintain the fundamental
ability to at least manage (and modify) the conditions for
openness, will you be able to create it. To design for the loss of
control, control the parameters that enable it.
These are just some initial thoughts. What other formats and
business models can you think of that design for the loss of
control to everyones benefit and increased social value? What
other variances can be created and effectively shaped? What
design principles must be applied?
Over to you.

Tim Leberecht is the CMO of frog and the publisher of design

mind

The Peculiar Logic of

Remote Control Design
By Robert Fabricant - November 2, 2009

There is no better whipping boy for design than the grotesque

multi-button remote controls that clutter our coffee tables, media
cabinets and minds. I have a selection of six in my living room,
none worse than this one from Time Warner Cable. I can't tell
you how many design presentations I have begun with the
remote control unit (RCU) as exhibit #1 for the increased
complexity of our lives and the huge need for design to improve
the state of affairs for the average consumer. So why have we
made so little headway? Having worked for both Consumer
Electronics and Cable companies on precisely this problem, I can
attest to the many reasons why the RCU has been remarkably
impervious to good design. But maybe I am just missing the
peculiar logic of why the current RCU design is so good?

This idea struck me as I read a recent article in the New York

Times about how the networks are embracing the DVR, once
viewed as the biggest threat to their ad-supported business
model. The article sites passivity, i.e. the couch potato effect, as
the main reason for this embrace. Apparently TV-watching

remains an essentially passive activity despite the recent

proliferation of DVR's (~30% of households). Recent Nielsen
studies have shown that even if you give the average American a
fast forward button in the palm of their hand, they are too lazy to
skip ahead. How comforting.
As I read the article I started to think that there might be another
culprit. Perhaps the conventional RCU design is finally paying
off? Maybe all of those legacy buttons that no one ever uses (the
various 'Picture in Picture' controls and the colorful A,B,C
interactive TV buttons) are part of a deliberate design strategy?
Maybe they are there precisely to add to the cognitive load the
accumulated effect being that valuable functions, like fast
forwarding, are much harder to learn. Maybe Time Warner's
Remote Control design strategy is finally paying off?

As frog's Vice President of Creative, Robert Fabricant leads

efforts to expand the impact of design into new markets and
industries. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert is
lead partner in Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the
power of mobile technology to combat HIV and AIDS in South
Africa. He is an adjunct professor at NYU's Tisch School of the
Arts and is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New
York.

Design: its not all about

you.
By Nick de la Mare - March 1, 2009

Too often, design companies throw around terms like userexperience design, user-interaction design and human-centered
design, proclaiming that the sole motivation, and center of their
design target, is the end-user experience. Its a noble
proclamation, and most would be hard-pressed to disagree. But
heres a dirty little secret: in reality, and much to the chagrin of
user-centered design proponents, its not all about the user.
Increasingly, a designer needs to understand and design not only
the user experience, but also the brand and business model
surrounding the product or service. While a recognizable brand
offers the promise of comfort and familiarity to a user, those
benefits will only be accepted if they feel right. When a brand
ignores this dialog between users and brands, and morphs into
something that feels discordant with users expectations or
previous experiences, the fallout (which comes fast and furious
in the networked economy) can be crippling. Tropicana found

this out recently when they hired Arnell Group to redesign their
orange juice packaging. As the New York Times reported:
The about-face comes after consumers complained about the
makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and
clamored for a return of the original look. Some of those
commenting described the new packaging as ugly or stupid,
and resembling a generic bargain brand or a store brand. Do
any of these package-design people actually shop for orange
juice? the writer of one email message asked rhetorically.
Because I do, and the new cartons stink.
Empathy for the user is obviously very important. But as
feedback becomes more instant and more intense, and products
increasingly become conversations between brand and user, we
need to better understand the needs of the companies we
represent as well. Just as users have needs, companies have
needs too. As we work to understand the goals, aspirations and
needs of the users we represent, we must do the same for
organizations. After all, if the company doesnt have the
resources or desire to bring an idea to market, all of the
pleasurable interactions we design cant change the fact that the
end-user will never see it.
A product will only become successful if it makes it to market.
Over time its success will be judged on its ability to generate
more income than it costs to maintain. In other words, a wildly
successful product does no good if its long-term costs bankrupt
the company launching it. So theres obviously a need for
upfront strategic thinking at the conceptual level. Understanding
business metrics and goals frees us to pursue financially relevant
solutions, ones that are sustainable, innovative and responsive to
user, brand and business needs.

Historically, designers havent been overly concerned with

understanding the balance between the pillars of user, brand and
business. A sole focus on users does little to create synergies
between organizations and individuals, or to create products with
meaning within the larger context of market. It just reinforces the
sense that design organizations often dont get business metrics.
Increasingly however, designers are getting involved in strategy
in ways that would have been unthinkable to an earlier
generation.
Nathan Shedroff, who runs the MBA in Design Strategy program
at California College of the Arts, describes Design Strategy
thusly:
This is what is meant by the term Design Strategy: the use of
design processes, perspectives, and tools to create truly
meaningful, sustainable, and successful innovation across a
variety of design disciplines, including industrial, interaction,
visual, experience, and fashion design Whether design
strategy is the new thing needing to be injected into business
culture or whether business values, understanding, and language
is the thing needing to be injected into design culture almost isnt
an issue. Ideally, both need to happen in order for organizations
of all types (including non-profits and government agencies) to
truly innovate and build more appropriate, successful, and
sustainable solutions. This also requires those with a design
background and those without to work together to bridge these
understandings and create better cultures for innovation.
When I think about the operating principle driving an ideal
design consultancy, this is what I see: Cross-disciplinary teams
working collaboratively with clients to understand business, user
and brand needs. Then designing empathetic systems, services
and products that leverage all aspects of the relationship between
these key pillars. The best designers will be strategists, those that

understand each element in the ecosystem and build beautiful,

sustainable bridges between them.

As frog's Executive Creative Director, Nick de la Mare leads

frogs cross-disciplinary teams in the pursuit of strategic design
solutions across product, service and experience. His work
focuses on the convergence of digital and physical media to
create branded experiences for Nike, Chase, Disney, Johnson &
Johnson, among others. His projects have been recognized by the
IDSA, AIGA and others, and published widely.

Smart Brands in the

Connected Age
The Internet of things is giving rise to social and
smart. Is your brand ready to adapt?
By Tim Leberecht

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks are

yielding unprecedented actual and virtual valuations. Social
media empowers and propels social revolutions, such as the ones
we are witnessing in Arab countries. Enabled by broadband
technologies and mobile devices, entire industries are connecting
with customers and one another in entirely new ways. Clearly,
the connected age has arrived. A world population connected
through ubiquitous, real-time, and social computing, and through
more than 50, 75, or even 100 billion devices. A world where
every thing is connected with everything.
Connectedness has become a cultural and business meme. Clay
Shirkys Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a
Connected Age sparked it, and several authors have since
elaborated on the concept. User experience expert Peter Merholz
has repeatedly written about it, citing Dave Grays musings on
the Connected Company and Social Business Design (see page

15) and Tiffany Shlains new film, Connected, a documentary

that explores the visible and invisible connections linking major
issues of our time and relates them to personal
interconnectedness.
The Internet of things, with its unprecedented level of
connectivity, is giving rise to both social and smart. And
smart means complex. Increasingly, products and services are
multifunctional, multilayered, and connected to a broader
ecosystem of services, providing a platform for added-value
applications. Companies of all kinds are beginning to develop
smart solutionssmart phones, smart energy, smart healthcare,
smart housing, smart mobility, and more. Smart ecosystems have
emerged as the linchpin of innovative experiencesthose that
brands can truly own.
But what about the brands themselves? What do the new
paradigms of connectedness and smart mean in terms of
how employees, customers, and other constituents interact with
companies and their products and services? What if
connectedness is the new modus operandi for brands and all
brands must now be smart?
By definition, smart systems are self-organized systems with
built-in feedback mechanisms and the ability to reorganize
themselves constantly to adapt to their ever-changing
environments. They are capable of describing and analyzing
situations and making decisions in a predictive or adaptive
manner based on the available data, thereby performing smart
actions. How can brands do that?
Networks
In the networked economy, marketings value lies in identifying
and activating valuable connections, in networks inside and

outside of the organization. These networks include other brands,

which constitutes a whole new type of B2B marketing: brand-tobrand. Marketers need to ask themselves the questions, Which
brands company do we want to keep? Which halos do we want?
Which brands should we market to (both for partnerships and
talent)? In the business-to-business space, and in particular in
professional services, this kind of lateral marketing is
increasingly replacing the typical buyer-targeted marketing.
And the concept of brand-to-brand goes even further: Brands
must not only treat other brands like partners, but they must also
market to consumers as if they were brands. Consumers have
their personal brands to project and cultivate, and the image ruboff, the brand value transfer they earn by interacting with a
brand, is as important a motivator as any material or utilitarian
gain. Smart brands map out the network of brands of which they
want to be part, and it doesnt necessarily include only
competitors. Smart, connected brands reach out constantly
beyond their own industries to forge unlikely alliances at the
fringes of their own networks, because todays edges are
tomorrows core. Or as Allison Fine, author of Momentum:
Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, puts it aptly: It is
counterintuitive but true; the more decision-making we push
away from the center, the more powerful our social networks
become. Thats the power-to-the-edges concept.
Social Intelligence
Connected brands are social brands, and if they are smart,
social for them means to be socially intelligent. The term
intelligent comes from the Latin intelligere, which literally
translates to to connect or to interlink. According to
scholars, people have social intelligence when they are able to
get along with people in general, and have ease in society,

knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other

members of a group, as well as insight into the temporary moods
or underlying personality traits of strangers. Applied to brands,
social intelligence can be interpreted as the art of detecting the
most subtle cue in understanding an individuals behavior and
the ability to receive constant feedback and then convert it into
behavioral change. The socially intelligent brand can link the
social desires and motivators it identifies in the other and
respond to them with its own palette of social interaction modes
and stimuli. Isnt marketing all about the other, about
understanding otherness in order to be different(iated)? The
socially intelligent brand is empathetic, trained in detecting
behavioral cues, and has what you may call the network affect,
in that it can identify and easily join conversations, and therefore
recognize, activate, and move networks through its behavior.
Platform
It has become a clich, the notion of being a platform, but
most clichs are truths that recur. And it is definitely true that
smart brands need to be not only trusted but also built upon, in
other words, be a platform. If you are a platform, you have the
power of pull, and the evolutionary forces work in your favor.
This means opening up for outside influence, and it means
sudden directional shifts if necessary. And it implies that your
service is a utility others can leverage to create their own assets.
The line here is fine, as you can imagine. Being a mere utility is
the opposite of being a brand. Smart brands provide just enough
value to the ecosystem to defend their position in it, but they also
make sure to retain the very source code of their value.

Super-Flexibility
Smart brands operate like software organizations in the way they
structure themselves and operate, shifting from a linear, static,
and robust model of planning and executing on strategy, to a
more fluid, non-linear, agile, and distributed approach that
allows knowledge, the capital of the 21st century, to quickly
flow through their networks. Stuart Evans and Homa Bahrami
coined the term super-flexibility to pinpoint this new set of
capabilities and define it as the capacity to transform by
adapting to new realities, underpinned by the ability to withstand
turbulence by creating stable anchors. They propose that instead
of thinking about strategy as a single best approach, developing
super-flexible strategies involves switching between a portfolio
of initiatives. Smart brands maneuver their strategic
trajectory, like changing gears in a car. Whats more, they say:
A super-flexible brand is multi-polar, with several centers of
gravity. Today it is white, tomorrow it is black. It is much like a
living organism with multiple brains, but these move in the same
direction, like a flock of birds or a school of fish.
Presence
In her 1995 book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the
Internet, Sherry Turkle used the phrase distributed presence to
describe a multichannel, always-on marketing strategy to reach
target audiences. Subsequently, marketing shifted from
broadcasting to narrowcasting, from mass communications to
social distribution, from prime time to real-time, from paid
media to earned (or increasingly) owned media, and from
awareness to engagement. With the burgeoning age of
hyperconnectivity, it may evolve further: Presence is now the
non plus ultra of all marketing efforts. Brands that are highly
connected are able to be at the right time at the right place; they

are omnipresent because they deploy multiple channels and are

able to cover all relevant networks. They are like a rubber band
stretching in multiple directions while not breaking. This concept
of presence allows brands to master what my colleague Adam
Richardson, writing for the Harvard Business Review, has called
preemptive knowledge managementthe awareness of
knowledge inside or outside of the organization before it
becomes externalized. This gives smart brands a crucial
competitive advantage: They are in the know about the lives of
their customers, but in a different way than before. It used to be
that knowledge was power. In the connected age, the real power
comes from fast knowledge, faster than in real-time. Presence, in
this case, is the absence of visibility, it is all intuition.
Unpredictability
Smart brands are also good at dealing with events that are
unpredictable. As Peter Merholz writes, Businesses must
grapple with the messiness of humanity, because when people
are freer to interact, unpredictability occurs. And the
decentralized networks that form the substrate of the Connected
Age lead to emergent properties that, by their very nature, are
also unpredictable. Unpredictability is the new brand
consistency. Good brands stay unpredictable and help their
organizations embrace the unknown. Management performance
shall not be measured by how much uncertainty it can eliminate,
but how much uncertainty it can tolerate.
Given all that, ask yourself: Is my brand adaptable, connectable,
and sociable? Can it be easily upgraded? Does it, like a smart
system, bring together interdisciplinary approaches and solutions
in an integrated design? And does it have the courage to ignore
the formulas offered by analytics? It seems counter-intuitive but
the connected age is not the age of data. Smart brands remain

ephemeral for they know that brands, despite the deluge of data
at their disposal, are more substance than shape, more chaos than
structure, and more intuition than knowledge. They are viral
because they are driven by passionate people, and their passion
spreads through the connections they activate. They make a
lasting impression because they have the ability to connect
people with people, people with brands, brands with brands,
stories with people, stories with brands, and stories with stories,
all the while constantly evolving their repertoire of interactions
based on their intuition and the faster-than-real-time feedback
they receive from the members of networks they own, activate,
or join. Hyperconnected, hypersocial and omnipresent, they can
anticipate desires, sense mood shifts, pre-empt knowledge, and
quickly direct attention to significant events and conversations
because whenever something happens or is being talked about,
they are already there.
Tim Leberecht is chief marketing officer of frog and its parent
company, the Aricent Group.

The Emergence of
Design Technologists
The growing centrality of the technology team in today's
design firm.
By Sean Madden, Design Technologist, frog design San Francisco

For years, design was considered the last step in the corporate
business plan. Programming, even more so. But with the
increasing convergence of disciplines in today's top creative
firms, the business world has taken notice, introducing design
more deeply into its operations than ever before. To offer
strategic recommendations that are grounded in a real-world
understanding of the technologies, companies, and markets at
play, consultancies and their clients have turned to the
iterative validation of design. For this process to be possible, the
technology team's function has adapted, as well, moving away
from the pure implementation of ideas into a more collaborative
role. No longer can or should there be a hand-off from designer
to technologist, but rather a communion that pushes the limits of
what is possible, technically, visually, and strategically.
The traditional digital design workflow in which designers
give a completed specification to the development team for
execution is being quickly replaced by a methodology favoring
rapid prototyping, reflection, and refinement. This practice is a
far more efficient way of validating concepts, because it allows
solutions to be put in front of both the client and the target
audience much sooner. Feedback can be incorporated and
designs adjusted in response to these initial prototypes. This
period of trial-and-error requires that the technology team be
involved from step one, helping not only to create the prototypes,

but to translate the user feedback into feasible technical

solutions.
A new role has emerged to meet these dual needs of
programming and design: the technologist. A technologist must
possess the skills necessary not only to program an application,
but to contribute to the design itself. He must understand the
principles of interaction design, human-computer interaction,
motion, and many other elements that traditionally fall to the
designer.