Experience Leader

An Interview with Jane Austin, Chief Experience Officer, Digitas UK

Interviewed by Sam Aquillano, Founder, Executive Director, CoDesign Collaborative 

Design leaders in the C-suite are driving creativity and innovation across their organizations to generate new levels of transformation and growth. Our Founder and Executive Director, Sam Aquillano sat down with Jane Austin, Digitas UK’s Chief Experience Officer, to learn about the unique opportunities for design leadership in the C-suite, and how she strategically manages and motivates a large creative enterprise.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sam Aquillano: You recently joined Digitas UK as their Chief Experience Officer — I love seeing creative-minded leaders enter the C-suite. Can you describe the role of Chief Experience Officer? What’s the mission of a CXO?

Jane Austin: I believe that if a business is going to be truly successful it has to do two things — find a problem worth solving, and then solve it better than anyone else. A truly successful product or service meets people’s needs so well that they are willing to pay for it. If you are not clear why you are making something, who it’s for, and why it exists, you end up with a muddled mess. If you frame it like this, you can see that design has the ability to enable success and to help a company be exceptional.

Having a designer in the C-Suite who has the tools to help the organization find these problems — big and small — and who also has the business ability to help frame the solutions in terms of financial return, can give a significant competitive advantage to a company. 

Organizations that want to have success by creating products and experiences that are 10x better than the competition can use design as their secret weapon by elevating design to where it can impact not just the product but the organization itself. Designers are often facilitators rather than doers, and using this skill internally to create structured conversation and bring alignment is very powerful. 

Design isn’t something that happens alone, but when added in the right way, at the right level, it can be an extra ingredient that helps businesses thrive and great work happen. We can elevate the everyday to something special. 

SA: What does a typical work week look like for you? If typical exists?

JA: My role is much more flexible and harder to predict than previous jobs, which I really enjoy. A lot of time is spent talking to the team, looking at the work, understanding what’s happening, and planning out what we’re going to do next. I have regular 1:1s where we talk about what the team is working on, how they are doing, career development, and reflections on how we can improve how we work. We have fortnightly team meetings too where we do visual stand-ups, which is a fast-paced, fun way for everyone to share their work. 

I also take part in our running workshops, looking at hypotheses and how to validate them, helping analyze some research, running a brainstorm, or writing and taking part in pitches. I really enjoy pitching. It’s an opportunity to find out about different businesses and sectors, understand how they work, their business models and challenges, their audiences, their plans for the future, and come up with creative ways to help them. It’s really satisfying being able to help these businesses understand new, lean, customer-focused ways of working. 

We also spend time together as an executive team looking at how the business is running and thinking about ways to fine-tune it. This could be culture, strategy, processes, how we develop and talk about our propositions, how we design the office or a whole load of other things. We are not a “design-led business.” We are a balanced business that gets design and understands the impact it can have, so the designers on the executive team have input into all the aspects of the business, and of course, design is our business. This means we have a wide range of viewpoints and skill sets taking a balanced look at what we are doing and how we work, and I think this makes us really strong as a team and as an agency. 

I love the different aspects of design this role entails. I’m helping design experiences and products for our clients’ end customers, designing new and better ways to work with our clients and deliver these products, and finally working with the executive team to design the business and how it operates. I’m really enjoying the breadth and scope of work and the impact I can have.

SA: You have an amazing career, leading design and user experience for leading brands like MOO, growing technology companies like Babylon Health, even a digital news site. Tell us a bit about your journey into this role?

JA: My main strategy has been to focus on working with people I like. After all, in a full-time job you can end up seeing your colleagues more than your family, and you can go through some stressful times together. I’ve focused on trying to work with people I like, that I feel I can learn from, and that I’m happy to see in the morning. Most of all, where I feel I can be authentic and be myself, and that I feel comfortable to speak and to be wrong. If you are somewhere where you feel judged or scared of making mistakes you won’t speak up or take risks. 

SA: In the six months or so that you’ve been in this role at Digitas UK, what differences are you experiencing from leading design and customer experience in-house, within brands, to now being focused on client success?

JA: For our clients, their success is to have successful products and experiences for their customers. By the time they come to us, a lot of the internal wrangling that goes on and that I’ve been part of has already happened and budgets have been assigned and projects have internal support. It’s really refreshing as we are often going straight into strategy and execution.

SA: Why is it important to have design and customer experience in the C-suite? What do you bring to that level of leadership that’s unique to others on the executive team?

JA: So far a lot of my role as an executive has been as facilitator, leading conversations about culture. We all know the Peter Drucker quote “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” We all know the kind of business we want to be – a balance of kind, supportive, and fast and focused on results. That’s a delicate balance, so I’m helping design different ways to support this culture. At my time at Government Digital Service (GDS), I loved how they actively designed the culture. It had that delicate balancing act of being human and working quickly and getting results, and you just “knew” what doing things in a GDS way meant. 

At Digitas we are actively designing the culture to make the change we want to see, and are being very intentional about how to make this a great place to work, where great work happens. Being in the C-suite allows me to combine design and culture, and working with clients at a senior level allows me to help them design their culture too, by helping them be customer-focused, remove silos, and experiment with fast, collaborative working. 

SA: In your role you are driving strategy — how do you use design and creativity to craft strategies that grow Digitas UK and transform your clients’ businesses? And how do you design processes to enact those strategies?

JA: I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever really designed a new process – but what I do is remix techniques that help frame the problem. What do we know? What is an assumption? What is the risk? Why should we do x instead of y? What should we work on that makes people happy and makes the business money? Why should we invest time and money to build this thing? There are a lot of techniques and methods to help you find the answers to these questions. I try to find the best way to find the answers — and when I say best I mean what is the least you can do to have the most certainty or to take the next smallest step. 

A lot of businesses, and a lot of designers too, have failed by spending too much time and money creating overblown business cases, designing things that didn’t have the right reward for all the effort put in, or rushing to market without validating all the assumptions that were made. For design to be impactful, it should design not the end product, but each small step on the journey, to find out if you are doing the right thing. This way of working is called “lean,” but I just think it’s common sense. Break your work down to the smallest unit of work you can do to remove risk and know the next step is right. Find your answer, do the next step, stop what you are doing, or pivot to a new idea. 

Design like you might be wrong, and be open to being wrong, because it’s still valuable, you have learned something, closed down an unprofitable avenue, saved time and money and heartache. And you can try the next thing and get closer to being right and building something that solves the right problem better than anyone else. 

Working like this is one of the things that makes startups disruptive, and every business — from charities through to healthcare and government — can learn from the philosophy of minimizing waste and maximizing learning. First you learn, then you use this to make a better product or experience, and then you try the next thing.

SA: What’s your advice for companies looking to elevate design and customer experience to the C-suite for the first time? If you were the CEO, how would you do it?

JA: Throughout my career, I’ve been surprised at some of the naivety about what design does and the impact it can have on the C-suite. I have observed that many senior C-Suite people perceive design as being almost coloring in, adding polish on something the other teams have come up with. However, if you only allow design to come at the end then you aren’t getting the full value from the team. 

Don’t do what every other business is doing – think about how to compete by offering an amazing experience, and how you need to be set up and organized to make this happen. 

Allow design to be as upstream as possible, helping design ways of working, design the culture, validate business models, experiment and impact strategy as well as executing to get the full value from what we can do. And I mean help, not lead. Digital businesses need different skills collaborating together to be successful and the design team should be one of these collaborators. 

SA: You oversee a creative enterprise — what’s your secret to building, organizing, and motivating large teams of creative people? And how do you get everyone moving in the same direction?

JA: Having two kinds of visions — one is what the product is for. Some call this the value proposition. I would call it the mission; why something exists and does what it does. Everyone should know this, and understand who they are designing for. This is a little more challenging in an agency but we focus people on one product or company for a period of time so they are able to get this depth of knowledge, but also tap into what we are doing for other clients so we can share our body of knowledge. 

The second thing is to have a unifying philosophy of how we work. At Digitas our particular team is focused on balancing customer and business impact and delivering inspiring creative work. This means you don’t need a set, prescriptive process; instead you need a clear framework for how to approach things that everyone understands. Once you know why you work and how you work, you can overlay rituals that build team spirit, such as team meetings, sharing work, outings and offsites. 

The final thing is to be very clear about what kind of culture you want and to make this visible. Possibly one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of this was Government Digital Service. They were masterful in sharing values and a view of the world that was human, supportive, and enabled good work to happen. The culture drives behaviors and decision-making. 

Great work happens when people feel safe, supported, and inspired, so I try to be intentional and thoughtful in creating culture. Just try your best to give people the opportunity to be their best. 

10 Factors for Creating the Next Generation of Chief Design Officers (Preview)

In our time talking design to non-designers, it’s always so rewarding to see people fall in love with design. Society, corporations, and design will impact each other in dramatic ways going forward, so we need even more people to fall in love with design.

By José Dos Santos, Head of Design Americas, Signify and Sebastian Fixson, Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Innovation, Babson College

In our time talking design to non-designers, it’s always so rewarding to see people fall in love with design. Society, corporations, and design will impact each other in dramatic ways going forward, so we need even more people to fall in love with design.

A design coach with 30 years of experience boldly stated that, “the job ‘designer’ of today will disappear. Computers, AI, and other similar technologies will take away the role of the designer as a problem solver, this has happened in other professions. There is an opportunity, if designers understand this and make a shift from problem solving to problem definition, and then to problem owning, but this means more responsibility and accountability. For this, designers need to be closer to top leadership.” 

Our research has taught us how important it is for designers to lead design, and for that leadership to sit at the highest level of business, where priorities are discussed and budgets and decisions are made. However, while there are many who believe the Chief Design Officer (CDO) role is a growing phenomenon, and respected companies like McKinsey have even provided data and insights attesting to the importance of design, evidence seems to suggest that design leadership at the highest level in large corporations is still very rare…

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Creating a Balance Between Generalist and Specialist 

Creative professionals often have trouble explaining their winding career paths to the business world. In turn, business professionals are frequently unaware how a creative professional can possess such a diverse range of skills and still be equipped to solve their specific challenges.

By Angela Yeh, Founder and Chief Talent Strategist, Yeh IDeology and the Thrive by Design Program

Creative professionals often have trouble explaining their winding career paths to the business world. In turn, business professionals are frequently unaware how a creative professional can possess such a diverse range of skills and still be equipped to solve their specific challenges.

These misunderstandings limit the success of both the business and the creative professional. Design is one of the most complicated and competitive industries in which to develop a successful career. Sadly, some design professionals find that over time, they are not advancing as they hoped within the industry, and notice they do not love their work or are not earning what they deserve. 

Business needs design more than ever to help solve the challenges they face, and creatives deliver their best work when they are aligned with the mission of the work. There are needs to be met for both parties, and it’s the designer’s prerogative to solve the challenge of how their collective work can be mutually beneficial. When design and business both grow from their collaborations, the result is incredibly powerful.

I’ve spent my career teaching creative professionals how to speak to the business world and how to build a successful career. As I’ve seen career paths evolve, many creative professionals explore building a career within the corporate world or as a business owner, as well as freelance, contract, and consulting practices. I call this taking the intrapreneur or the entrepreneur track. While the opportunities in these tracks are different, many of the problems creative professionals face are similar.

Generalist or Specialist

One of the most common pieces of career branding advice is to specialize as much as possible, even to the point of developing a sub-specialty. This doesn’t always work for designers, who dislike being boxed-in to a specialty. Therein lies the challenge: how does one specialize to meet the needs of the market, if designers don’t want to be labeled or categorized? Should designers follow their impulses at the risk of becoming a generalist, or do they forsake their multitude of passions to become specialized in one area of expertise, so that business can understand what they do? In truth there is a balance that needs to be developed between one’s own goals and business requirements. 

Creative professionals are highly attuned to the sensation of “flow” they experience when following their passions, so they tend to evolve their area of expertise faster than any other profession, and often thrive in this constantly changing state. They represent a particular archetype of talent, forward thinkers, and movers who thrive when embracing new pursuits. For employers and clients who equate value with individuals that have a long history of expertise, this type of work history is a disconnect. Yet employers and clients tend to value experts who have a long-standing history in the expertise they seek. Creating a balance between a generalist and specialist mentality is the key to creating a successful career in design.

The Designer’s Challenge

Designers and creatives are driven by curiosity. For instance, a designer could start with a foundation of industrial design skills in consumer products and evolve into developing user experience skills in mobile internet-of-things devices. They could then migrate to strategy skills in brand development and continue to move into service design in customer experience. If you were to look at that evolution from the eyes of a non-creative hiring manager or human resources, it could be confusing to understand that career path. They’d ask, “Who is this person and what is their expertise?” But from a designer’s standpoint, this person is an expert in design. 

“I’m a Designer and I solve problems.” Design professionals are often capable of solving a wide array of challenges — from physical products to digital services, to organizational or commercial systems, to culture settings. This ability to draw on seemingly disparate experiences in authoring solutions for new challenges before them is a designer superpower. 

Many designers we meet — at all levels of professional achievement — begin their story with the statement: “I am a designer and I solve problems.” Designers love this phrase because it leaves the door open to many possibilities. As multidisciplinary problem-solvers, designers are often able to juggle a wide range of responsibilities. What they fear is being stuck in a position or industry that draws on just one area of their expertise. 

Unfortunately, when designers seek advice from traditional career coaches, they are often told to just pick one specialty and market and stick to it. This is too restricted for creatives, and they can lose their state of flow and thus their creativity. Curiosity for that topic or category evaporates and it becomes rote. Designers will always want to evolve their area of expertise, their range of skills, or the type of problems they want to solve. That is the nature of being a designer. 

To address this problem, designers cannot only quantify their current range of expertise, but must identify how they are evolving, validating, and qualifying future paths. I help design professionals understand their market, attract it, and win the best opportunities by working with them on how they understand themselves as specialists and how they can frame their value. We’ve seen this introspection result in design careers elevating by an exponential level.

Case Study: Jacob

When you don’t know what you’re capable of, you won’t know what to strive for. 

One of our recent clients was a 44-year-old designer named Jacob. Jacob built a solid 20-year career in industrial design and became a talented senior product designer for a well known electronics manufacturer. He led the design of their top product lines, until he was laid off. Since then, he and his family moved to Indiana. Jacob pursued design roles there, working through the local chamber of commerce and business networks, but found nothing. He scoured the local chamber of commerce and business networks and found nothing. In Jacob’s words: 

“I was shooting for design manager or senior designer roles but somehow I could not land the interviews. I tried to switch to teaching – didn’t make enough money. I tried running my own studio – didn’t make enough money. Even though I knew I wasn’t going to love it nor that it would last long, I finally started working for a new company where I was brought in to develop and produce a new product line. This was the first product this company had successfully produced in the last 20 years and what I developed for them will end up carrying them for the next 20 years. While management would never let me go, the work was no longer compelling enough for me.” 

Continuous job-hopping and countless Interviews led Jacob to believe he wasn’t finding the jobs he wanted. He knew he wanted to love his work, but he didn’t know what he wanted next. And in the end he wanted to be able to support his family. 

“Financially, I’ve hit as high as $150k at the job I loved a few years back. Then I dropped so low, when I was trying to teach and run my own business, I won’t even go into it. I’ve since come back up to 120K but I know I’m worth much more than that. Most of all I don’t want to lose the love for what I do or fall out of the industry, like I’ve seen happen to some friends.” 

Like many design professionals, money was not his main driver. However, compensation can be an interesting indication of how well you know your unique value proposition (UVP), and how well you own it and represent it. 

Jacob came to us stuck at the “Senior Designer Ceiling,” one of the most common career ceilings a design professional faces. Many senior designers at this point are highly capable of a wide variety of abilities and are stuck in a generalist perspective, not knowing which combination of those abilities advance in their career — that’s what Jacob needed to figure out. 

While enrolled in Thrive By Design, Jacob developed an understanding of his talent algorithm and how to cultivate it to take his career to the next level. He realized that his true passion flowed from his expertise in leading research and development for new product creation and developing new business models and infrastructure to support those initiatives. We showed him how to identify the top areas of opportunity where he could best succeed. Jacob started to attract the right opportunities that would merit his high caliber and broad range of abilities. He realized he already was the leader he wanted to be. 

While it’s important to know what you’re capable of, knowing how to represent yourself is a totally different set of skills to master. One of the most impactful aspects of the program is the Thrivers Weekly Group Sessions. Alongside other fellow thrivers rapidly evolving their careers, Jacob honed his abilities to represent himself in mock interviews, and reframed his resume and portfolio. He learned to qualify job opportunities, craft the role that he wanted, and even mastered negotiating for what he knew his expertise was worth.

The Employer’s Challenge

We talked about the almost compulsive need for designers to evolve and diversify. Let’s now explore this challenge from our customer’s perspective. 

The designer’s customer is business. Oftentimes business doesn’t know what design expertise is, especially while it’s constantly evolving. 20 years ago, design was an unknown industry. In the last 10 years, the business world has realized design can solve a multitude of problems and challenges, and the pandemic has drastically sped up this realization. 

However, when it comes to identifying design talent and expertise – regardless of agency or individual that could best solve that problem – looking at design talent is incredibly confusing for business leaders and hiring managers. 

When I speak to business leaders, they ask, “What kind of agency or person do we need? Shouldn’t the designer come from our industry? What kind of design expertise do we need? Do we need a customer experience or service design expert? Do we need someone specializing in UX or strategy to solve this problem?” 

As a recruiter, I play in the nexus between employer and talent and between business and design. Beyond appreciation for the end product, business does not always understand how design works. It’s a challenge for businesses to comprehend design thinking, let alone understand which design expert is the best one for them. 

I believe that it’s the mission of all design professionals to understand how to help cross this chasm by becoming skilled at representing the role of design in business, including the amount of time, agency, and funding it takes to support design at a level that leads to excellent results. Today, there are thousands of designers out there — far more design professionals than businesses care to choose from. It presents already unprepared hiring teams with a paradox of choice. Vetted applicants from a diverse range of backgrounds and expertise all claim to be able to solve their problems. Over dozens of candidates, the “I solve problems” promise wears thin. 

This creates a problem for businesses that don’t know what type of design expertise they need. While each design professional is indeed capable of solving a wide range of problems in their unique way, it’s hard for hirers to distinguish between talent and decide who is the best fit. 

Keep in mind that employers and clients gravitate to experts who have a long history refining the expertise they seek. Years spent as a specialist in this industry is a brittle but entrenched metric. Hiring managers and HR professionals often ask, “Why did that design director leave her job after just two years?” As creative professionals, we know that tenure may not indicate one’s ability to solve a problem. In fact, a more divergent career path may indicate that a candidate is a more compelling match for their needs. 

Why this path, and the expertise it represents, are compelling is up to the candidate to explain. This means understanding how their diversified portfolio of experiences aligns with the client or employer’s needs. How best to represent themselves as the expert for a company’s needs — when their career path has been so varied — is a complicated science. These stories of alignment are different for each design professional seeking a step up and vary depending on the client they are speaking to.

Design Strategist Can Mean Different Things

Design terminology is being adopted by other disciplines. Terms like “product design,” “actionable insights,” and “strategy” can be found in diverse job descriptions. Employers and design professionals who are unnecessarily creative in the design roles they create can further cloud things. Catalysts, Provocateurs, and Disruption Officers may look great on a business card, but they confound HR teams. 

A first step in the Yeh IDeology process is a gap analysis, conducted with our recruitment clients, to understand their team landscape. In this assessment, we move past the titles and job descriptions to help the hiring team clarify their design team structure and calibrate their needs for the open role. We assess the product categories, representative initiatives, and varying design challenges in the role. Do the open positions require more research, strategy setting, or design implementation skills? Do they require a high level of corporate diplomacy? 

Angela Yeh leading a Thrive by Design master class. 

Through this process, the hiring team may realize that their archetype for an ideal designer may change drastically depending on the priorities driving their corporate initiatives. Descriptions for the scope of responsibilities and range of expertise for ideal candidates may need to be fine-tuned. 

In one recent engagement, the company already had a top-notch design team, but the product management teams were in vastly different stages of design awareness. They were also on different pages concerning the investment needed for a new hire who could marshal the adoption of a new universal design system. The hiring team identified this challenge as the leading criterion for the position. In the end, they needed a design strategist, who could bridge the gap between the design group and the different product management teams, while serving as a liaison between separate design units. 

Our talent assessment process similarly looks beyond the title and industry. In our experience, an ideal candidate may come from a variety of backgrounds. They may currently hold roles with titles like designer, researcher, or strategist. They may currently work within customer experience or service design teams. In this instance, our client was surprised to find that their three top candidates, equally qualified for this role, had widely differing backgrounds and unique value propositions (UVPs).

Balancing Needs

Getting the balance between generalist and specialist right starts by establishing the ideal balance between your own needs and those of your customer. That balance each of us seeks is unique for what we offer for each of our customers — our UVP. Ask yourself, “What is my Unique Value Proposition for this customer?” 

When a designer is talented, multidisciplinary, and capable, it’s harder to define their UVP. We call their suite of abilities a talent algorithm. When a business is unfamiliar with evaluating design backgrounds, this equation can be confusing. It is incumbent on the designer in these instances to understand what they can offer each customer and know how to represent that value. What the business needs from you is your UVP. Empowering professionals to identify and own their talent algorithms and to credibly and successfully articulate their UVPs in the pursuit of step-change roles is the UVP I’ve defined for Yeh IDeology. 

Learning how to distinguish where you sit in the design industry and how to represent your perspective is The Work. Those who ascend develop a clear understanding of how their unique combination of industry experience, design expertise, facility with tools and methods, and passion for the goals they seek come together in the context of the roles they are pursuing. 

After moving through the Thrive By Design curriculum, Jacob interviewed and won a role as a design engineering manager at a top company near where he lived that came with a $50,000 salary increase over his previous position. He was brought in to expand this company’s offerings, identify new clientele, and develop new products. The role was a substantial jump in scope and responsibility. Having mastered how to envision his best future and make it a reality, Jacob has broken through the senior designer ceiling, moved up into management, and is evolving his professional skills, all while making a bigger impact at a company that respects and values his expertise. 

The Design/Business Dependency 

Can education bridge the gap?

By Adrian Gill, Founder, Ad Hoc Industries

Business and design don’t fully understand each other. The state of the relationship between designers and the businesses they work with is a symptom of two fundamental problems: business leaders not understanding just how much value designers can bring to the table, and designers not having the type of business education they need to hone their natural entrepreneurial mindset further.

Designers have much in common with entrepreneurs. They frequently start from a blank sheet of paper, and are constantly developing and pitching new ideas. They are visual storytellers, drawing on their future forward view of the world to generate new ideas to creatively solve problems in innovative ways. Conversations with designers are about creating something that does not yet exist. 

Some of the world’s most successful companies — from Tesla and Apple, to architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group — have seamlessly integrated business and design, offering examples of how the two fields can coexist in viable, impactful ways. Designers have seats at the leadership tables of these organizations, and they all seem to have avoided the suspicions with which business and design often view each other.

The design outcome is the most telling part of a great relationship between business and design. Instances where we see forward thinking, well-differentiated products that resonate with consumers is the proof of the business-design relationship working well. For example, Bjarke Ingels Group’s early award-winning Copenhagen housing project was one of the projects that jump-started their business success. The Mountain Dwellings marked a reimagination of multi-level underground parking — 80 single-level apartments, in a 10 story building, all have private parking with roof gardens facing the sun, glass facades, and wooden terraces. The design creates a suburban neighborhood with sunlight, fresh air, and gorgeous views in an urban environment. This successful end result is telling of how well Bjarke Ingels Group’s business and design teams work together. 

Tesla’s Cybertruck design received 200,000 pre-orders within a month of launch, and is now influencing electric truck design from other brands. The Tesla model 3 is the best selling vehicle in Europe right now — not just the best selling electric vehicle, but the best selling vehicle. This product is a success because of the trust cultivated between business leaders and design leadership at Tesla. 

The Apple story is well-traveled but continues to be a compelling example of the innovation possible when design and business work together. Apple challenged why our computers should merely be beige or gray. Then the iPhone put our lives in our pockets. The Apple Watch design changed the nature of our relationship with wristwatches. Everyone knows about Apple’s unrelenting attention to design. 

These examples all require and represent one thing: design leadership, and the freedom to innovate that comes when there’s trust in the relationship between business and design leaders. The leaders of Apple, Tesla, and Bjarke Ingels Group recognize the power of design as an integral part of their strategy to unlock opportunities within their industries — and they succeed many times over. 

Yet, despite these successes, many business leaders see design and designers as afterthoughts. Too many of the startup CEOs I’ve advised think that design is simply a task that can be outsourced. Even when companies get larger and have bigger budgets, organizational charts list the design department as simply a part of marketing. For too many business leaders, design is a discretionary spend or a department of people who follow production instructions from the C-suite. Designers rarely have a seat at the leadership table. 

The state of the relationship between designers and the businesses they work with is a symptom of two fundamental problems: business leaders not understanding just how much value designers can bring to the table, and designers not having the type of business education they need to further hone their natural entrepreneurial mindset. So what if we could teach business to designers in more creative ways? What new forms of collaboration and products could come out of this? How much more could designers offer to the business world?

Mountain Dwellings apartment building by architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group

Tesla Cybertruck 

Apple iPhone & Watch

What Designers Bring to the Business Table

Designers have even more to offer to business than their aesthetic sense and creativity. In fact, perhaps their greatest trait is their curiosity. Designers constantly take on feedback, pivot, and adapt, allowing them to synthesize many different opinions and resolve conflicting directions. Throughout the design process, many iterations do not work, and some fail altogether. Designers are comfortable with failure and compromise. They collaborate profusely, and often get to BATNA — the best alternative to a negotiated agreement quicker than others. Designers also inherently understand consumer behavior and aversion to the predictable and clichéd, as designers’ sense of curiosity drives design direction. What makes a designer successful in the business world? Among other things, a willingness to continue to be curious about many different paths, evaluate and try new options. They persist until they reach a design direction that meets the brief and shared goals. 

Business leaders, while often understanding that great design is important, believe that designers are just “too expensive” for their company. Instead, they explain they would rather start with something basic and improve the design later on. For many business leaders, investment in branding comes only after the company brings in tens of millions of dollars of revenue. This line of thinking is not only misguided, it’s more expensive. In a business environment where every move is immediately visible, filled with large, well-funded agile competitors, great design is one of the few ways to truly differentiate your brand. 

Think of it this way: it’s better to invest in fantastic creative for your ad campaign, and spend less money on ad distribution, than having poor advertisements and distributing them widely. For the young CEOs I advise, I encourage them to look at how much of their marketing budget is allocated towards social media and digital advertising and consider whether these ads would perform better if the ads themselves were higher-quality. If the answer is yes, it might be worth spending more on designers. Better yet, designing great products and services in the first place would make marketing them easier from the outset. 

A Business Mindset for Designers 

Most designers would rather spend their time doing what they love — pursuing new ideas to design beautiful things. We should protect and encourage this mindset. Maybe it’s more about adopting “business mindfulness” as designers versus turning designers into business people. I believe designers can actively create a world where more companies put design at the forefront of their organizations. Designers can create more visual and accessible language, systems, and processes to make business more understandable and intuitive. 

In a recent conversation with Jutta Friedrichs, Co-founder and Design Chief at Soofa, she mentioned that she particularly enjoyed her accounting and finance courses. This surprised me, but she explained that for once, there was a concrete answer. One plus one always equals two. Her point? Everything else in her world was subjective, and so it came as a relief to have more definitive answers. These kinds of courses are worth teaching to designers, but they could be even more impactful with intentional and visual demonstration to the design community. 

Designers also need to hear stories from advisors and peers in their industry about how a business education has impacted their careers. For instance, I’m a former accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and graduate of Harvard Business School. Through my experience at Puma, where I led the Footwear Division, I had a close up view of both worlds that typically have two different mindsets. Now, as founder of a creative agency and Brand Experience and Creative Director at the Harvard Innovation Labs, 90% of my time is spent on creative work. As much as I willed my career away from a traditional business path, I’ve come to see my education in the field as a tremendous asset. 

At Puma, I would conduct design reviews for new footwear collections, and at the same time, be responsible for financial projections of that collection for price negotiation with factories, which would influence decisions on whether to open new tooling for styles or use existing tooling. This role required the ability to lead design talent, understand design direction and intent, and to explain how a design was differentiated from the competition and its desirability to consumers. This balance of design and business was more comfortable because of my business background. In business related discussions, I had a certain credibility and confidence from my understanding of the business implications of design choices. In turn, in conversations with designers, it was easier for me to discuss tough decisions and work with them to find creative solutions to potential roadblocks. Typically the creative and the business mind are manifested in two different people in any organization. It’s a distinct advantage to have both skills in one person.

Rethinking Business Education for Designers 

If we want to create a world where more companies put design at the forefront of their organizations, designers will have to will this vision into reality. We must collectively design new, more effective systems to help fellow designers pursue and actively embrace business education. 

Should teaching business and entrepreneurship to designers be done primarily through the lens of other creative industries? Perhaps we can learn from the film industry. Filmmaking in many respects is directly related to venture creation. General steps in filmmaking roughly follow the same path as building a venture: Start with a question, research, and development of a idea/storyline, write the script, develop a storyboard, create a plan and budget, curate a team of collaborators (cast and crew), pitch potential investors (executive producer(s)), film the project, pitch to film festivals, promote the project, and negotiate distribution deals. The creation of independent films is the closest to the venture creation experience. Perhaps design schools should convene filmmakers and designers and use the filmmaking process as a vehicle to teach business and entrepreneurship. 

Encouraging more designers to pursue business education requires changing how we teach business to designers. What would an income statement in an accounting class look like if a designer were teaching it: visually, would it look the same? Should we reimagine business concepts to cater to more visual-minded individuals? What if a balance sheet was visually balanced? What does the equation Assets = Liabilities + Owners Equity become with a more imaginative execution? If we found intuitive ways to unlock the mystique of financial statements, and business concepts became more accessible to designers, might this then translate to a better connection with consumers? In turn, might this amplify and scale design leadership in business? This is an area that is ripe for disruptive thinking. 

As I mentor creatives in the SCADPRO program at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which aims to develop creative business leaders, I hear confidence in brand building but sense hesitation around numbers. Here, I can advise that they have 80% of what it takes to build a business; well-defined brand positioning and differentiation, which requires strong design and creative thinking. The 20% gap, or the business part, is easier to close. It is easier to teach designers business than it is to teach business people design. There is much more certainty and predictability in business that enables decision-making. This makes it easier to teach business to anyone, including designers. Teaching design to business professionals is more difficult as it requires cultivating the creative instinct and aesthetic choice, which are harder skills to teach because they are so subjective. The point is not that one designation is better, but more importantly that they need each other. 

What’s going to be prized in the future is creative multi-dimensional thinking over one dimensional thinking. It’s a real loss not to bring business thinking to the creative arts and design to business schools. What if design itself, and not just design thinking, was mandatory for business students? Design should become a meta-discipline akin to writing and persuasion. With a new appreciation for the value of creative credentials, can business schools foster more creative thinkers? Business students may find starting or growing a venture is more straightforward when you have the tools to communicate your ideas, frameworks for creative problem solving, and strategies for effective branding. 

Future business success will increasingly be due to people who realize this design/ business dependency and actively look to create environments and curricula that feed good ideas into a new educational ecosystem. Cultures where design and business leadership are not just working closely together, but seamlessly intertwined, and equally rewarded, will succeed. That’s a design future I dream to be a part of. 

From Equity-for-Service to Collective Partnership

Box Clever’s new approach to accelerating startups through design and mentorship.

By Bret Recor, Founder + Creative Director, Box Clever

The business model of design firms is broken and outdated. It doesn’t serve clients in the long-term and leaves startups and early-stage companies unsupported at their most vulnerable moments. But we have a vision for how this must change.

Design is more than ‘a step’ in the process. Too often, design is seen as a service to outsource, a deliverable or a box to check. When thought of as so siloed, collaborative momentum hits a brick wall, and the product, and ultimately the business, suffers. On the contrary, great products and user experiences require uninterrupted attention during their design, development, and refinement – attention that should continue long after going to market. Sometimes the greatest design challenges come after the relationships between businesses and design teams have wrapped up: troubleshooting the production process, or a rollout and promotion that cuts through the noise by celebrating the key elements of the offering. Today’s model sidelines experienced design teams, often in the name of cutting costs in the short-term – and, in the case of fragile young businesses, leaves them to sink or swim.

The designer-as-vendor model is set up for failure, or at least for limited success. It’s engineered for a hand-off, an “I’ll take it from here” – and even the closest, most aligned collaborators can still drift apart after the initial phases of design are complete. Founders have paid for the design and that has been delivered, the logic often goes, and so what is the value of keeping a third-party design agency involved? CFOs would likely advise to move on or, if changes are needed later, to find a cheaper alternative. 

It’s a model that denies the ongoing contribution that design could make throughout the life of a business, and the strength of designers to not only create tangible products through design services but also drive more value through creative problem-solving more generally. 

What would happen if instead of viewing design as a discreet service, we saw its greater contribution to business growth and development? What might a partnership devised to suit that kind of contribution look like? And what could the end products of such a partnership look like? 

Attempt to Improve: Service for Equity 

Though we all seem to acknowledge the value of good design in business, we maintain a fairly distinct separation between the two: business is an imperative, design is a service. We use design for business, never the other way around. This is seen in how we create and support good business versus good design. Good business happens through building networks of support, through constant re-evaluation, and in understanding it as unending; good design happens (it is believed) in a studio, isolated and timebound. 

Business incubators, for example, provide funding, mentorship, resources, and access to a broader network of people to help startups get from idea to product and to shepherd them through the rocky early years of existence. They typically take equity in exchange for investment and for this community of support. While ninety percent of startups fail, the incubator model is devised to make a lot of bets – while the one in ten successful businesses will make the incubator millions (or billions). You might call this model a great success, if evidenced by the sheer number of incubators out there, or by how many design agencies (and others) are opting to discount fees and do as they do in Silicon Valley: take equity. 

Firstly, design agencies understand their role in creating some of these successes and want a slice of the rewards when those products make massive returns. But equally, it can also be a means of maintaining a seat at the table: with investment, they can extend their presence at least in some limited form. 

It is a model that we at Box Clever have been exploring since our founding nine years ago, and for the last five, it has become the most common way for us to engage clients. 

More and more branding and design agencies like ours are taking a page from business incubators’ book and moving away from cash-only projects to only work with companies they believe will deliver a return on investment through equity. 

The draw is obvious: the combined valuation of leading incubator Y Combinator companies exceeds $400 billion (it includes the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit). And that is nice for the incubators and investors. But for the individual entrepreneurs—despite all the advice, mentorship, and capital an incubator provides—by and large, it is not enough. It bears repeating: the vast majority of startups will fail. Even those with the help of incubators who’ve launched dozens of unicorns. 

Bright ideas are often painfully dimmed by a choppy road to launch. We have worked with clients who, when it has come down to production, have opted to cut corners to disastrous results for their business. Months and millions are often lost, needing to revisit design work that was quickly compromised by inexperienced in-house teams, who couldn’t see the mistakes being made on the factory floor. An attempt to save X amount sometimes resulted in the need to spend ten times that amount to fix the error. Often, we knew we could have helped, and often we offered to. And yet, we weren’t given permission. In some cases—even as equity holders—our help and advice were not accepted. 

When great partnership is embraced, design can contribute to better outcomes—for the product, planet, and so much else. A critical facet of industrial and product design is creating uncompromised physical products and experiences that revolutionize the everyday. With luggage makers Away, and cookware brand Caraway, two companies with whom we have worked, quality of finish and production was key. For both, Box Clever spent time at their factories in China, working closely with the manufacturers throughout the production process to ensure the fidelity of the design work everyone had poured their hearts into – and on which those businesses rely as a point of difference. 

In addition, over the years Box Clever has collaborated with a vast array of companies to bring their imaginative designs from the page to real life in an environmentally conscious way. Design models for positive change can include strategies such as subscription and upgrading plans where companies take back and responsibly handle old products (for Vave Health, we incorporated this into the design of a portable, wireless ultrasound machine), more traditional strategies to reuse or limit plastics (as we helped create for Eddi soap dispenser), and more. It is imperative designers explore moving beyond greenwashing and catch up to the evolving discernment of consumers around making a positive environmental impact. 

What would happen if more of these deep-rooted partnerships were made standard practice and codified in a business model; not just offering connections as an incubator does but being in the room; not just taking equity so we have an upside, but being able to contribute our experience in a real and ongoing way. How can we level up from just vendor-with-equity?

Industrial design client work, top to bottom: Eddi Soap Dispenser, Fade Task Light, and Away Luggage. 

The Future is True Partnership

While innovative, the vendor-with-equity model is still not enough. Despite all our effort, all our investments, and all our equity in the companies we support, we are still rarely able to contribute in all the ways we can. Our expertise and our network are underutilized. There’s a baked-in financial incentive for an entrepreneur to minimize our involvement.

What experienced design agencies bring to the table is far more than just design, of course. We know processes, and we know people: how to get things done, how to overcome hurdles along the way, and we know whom to ask for help when something is beyond our expertise. It’s because we’ve done it again and again with the dozens of clients with whom we’ve worked over the last 20 years. We have long been investors – creatively and financially – in our clients. The new partnership model we are developing is a step function improvement on the previous models and promises to deliver equally more value and a greater chance of success.

Our aspiration is that this new model will allow the full startup ecosystem – the entrepreneurs, the investors, the agencies, the consumers – to extract more value. It does this by establishing a more efficient and effective product development process—from investment through to end-of-life. And by avoiding the common missteps of a fragmented process, it conserves resources and reduces risk all along the way. What we seek is to become true partners — consistent, long-term, deeply interwoven partners.

‘Partners’ though, is a word that is often misused. It is a word that has come to mean an entire spectrum of professional relationships, a stand-in for so much that it’s become hard to define. The future, we believe, requires deep strategic and creative teamwork that goes far beyond an approach that limits us to service providers and investors, or vendors with equity. It goes so far it should obliterate the idea of ‘client’ altogether. Partnership for us means we can not only support a company through design and launch but for long after.

We believe that deep-seated incorporation of design and design-thinking into the creation of a new business, and not just its tactical use at inflection points, significantly improves a startup’s forecast for success. And we’re not the only ones: McKinsey’s 2018 report on design determined the best design performers, according to their index, increased their revenues and shareholder returns at a rate nearly double that of their counterparts.

In those cases, design goes beyond simply a focus on ‘the product’ in its most narrow sense, and touches on strategy, user experience, packaging, go-to-market narrative, and even reflects how they have built out their teams internally.

Partnership+

Critical to our new model is that we’re not doing it alone. A core pillar of our strategy is BCx, a collective pioneering a streamlined and stable approach to creative consulting services for startups. A good partner knows its strengths and its limitations. To overcome those limitations, we bring in trusted advisors, not unlike a traditional business incubator. Our collective is made up of a select range of members, each expert in their field. Among others, they include engineering and technical teams that help us problem-solve and steer clear of inefficiencies, and communications teams that can help us position and reveal design work to optimize product launches, and even other design partners when specific expertise is needed.

The collective is a creative brain trust that is as much a multi-dimensional effort to de-risk the very risky world of startups as it is an acknowledgment that Box Clever itself has its specialties and couldn’t possibly have all the answers. BCx consolidates the expertise of its network, bringing them into the process at the right moment to maximize their value – often earlier than a startup would choose or be able to seek their counsel without BCx as a partner. Box Clever is there throughout, using to our advantage existing chemistry with our network and an intimate understanding of their working style that allows us to be as tactical as possible about which of them we tap to contribute.

If it takes a village, then BCx builds that village – and where a traditional incubator lets founders visit, we invite them to move in. The model is agile, adaptive, and effective.

For founders, it helps smooth the process. It eases the overwhelming task of finding, fielding, and hiring partners, while also ensuring a good working dynamic because that dynamic has already been tested and can be managed by Box Clever.

This model also helps give a boost to a startup’s investor appeal, anchoring it to a partner with a proven track record of supporting success. Always in the name of de-risking, BCx is calibrated to the startup experience: mapped against fundraising cycles, go-to-market strategies, and the common hurdles of the critical first years of existence. Importantly, it does so with realistic forecasting of costs and flexible contracts that allow for programs to be customized to each company and their needs and circumstances.

Better Together, Better for Everyone

This approach was conceived out of frustration – in seeing many great ideas fizzle, investments of time and money evaporate into nothing, and a market of products that are not what they could be. But it has evolved to be much more than a way to fix those issues. It is designed to positively impact every stakeholder involved: better for investors and businesses, better for people and the planet, and better for designers and studios. We need to ensure, as this model is developed, that it achieves these imperatives.

Many principals of design agencies have found great wealth from both fees and equity in their clients’ company. This doesn’t usually filter down in any significant way to the teams whose work and commitment helped bring those projects to life. We need to restructure compensation so that designers within an agency feel they share a stake in business outcomes and are rewarded for it.

Most importantly, we need to continue to overhaul product development for a planet in crisis. Guiding companies to a circular system is a key part of our process. We want to make environmentally friendly products irresistible—and all products environmentally friendly. Establishing a presence as proper partners in the business allows us the opportunity to truly push not only for sustainability (what should be table stakes today) but also for methods of reuse and consideration for the afterlife of products.

This means not just theorizing about circularity, but committing to it now, even if the process is not yet currently perfect. Approaching circularity like a startup – starting the process in motion rather than waiting for the execution to be flawless – is important. For this to happen, we believe design and business need to be in sync.

A New Future for the Design Industry

We see this new model not only for Box Clever, but possibly as the future of the design industry. Instead of contributing, participating. Instead of providing a singular service, integrating across the business.

Design and business make less and less sense to consider as two separate disciplines. This new model aims to fuse them; they can and should operate as an alloy: melded inextricably and made stronger and more resilient in the process.

We see this business model as a way to truly balance design and business. By making them inseparable and integrated, we let each build on the strengths of the other and there are only winners: profit, people, and planet.

If we get this right, and if our process drives up value as we hope, then perhaps we’ll see others adopt it – and its impact can be multiplied. And we all know: we have a duty not to create more trash – but incredible, worthy and responsible products.

Box Clever’s studio during their work on the Eddi Soap Dispenser.

Bringing New Products to Life

Focus on Minimum Acceptable Designed Experience for Startup Success.

By Danielle Shaheen

Startups face unique challenges navigating the uncharted route from an idea to a tangible consumer product. It’s widely stated that as many as 90% of startups fail. And when it comes to the startups developing hardware products, that number is likely even higher. But what sets the successful 10% of companies apart from the rest? And how can you avoid critical mistakes during the industrial design process?

The path to a new physical product requires much more agility for a startup compared to the typical industrial design journey of an established company. By identifying and understanding the challenges and risks — and learning how to plan for them — startups can work through the design process nimbly while achieving design excellence.

MVP

Minimum Viable Product

MADE

Minimum Acceptable Designed Experience 

Focus on MADE, instead of MVP

When bringing a product to market, you need to move beyond what some call a minimum viable product (MVP), a product with just enough features to be acceptable and usable by early adopters. The word ‘viable’ is subjective.

Many startups choose what to make based on what’s viable for them at the time, ignoring what’s acceptable in the consumer’s mind and wallet. If your startup is bringing new technology to the world, or a new process or idea, it must be developed into a product that truly serves the consumer. So it’s imperative to replace minimum viable product for the startup with minimum acceptable designed experience for the end-user. The minimum acceptable designed experience, or MADE, is what will attract and retain your first customers, setting your new venture up for success. 

A great example of the evolution from MVP to MADE is the design development for Neurable’s first product, the Enten headphones. Neurable, a Boston-based startup, brings breakthrough Brain Computer Interface (BCI) sensing technology to the consumer market. Through a set of headphones integrated with their technology, Neurable’s Enten can read your brain activity and translate it into insights to benefit your everyday life; for example, helping you understand your own focus and distraction patterns throughout the day, simply by monitoring your brain activity while wearing the headphones. 

Designing their sensing technology into a set of headphones was exciting and challenging work for our team at Fresco. Their MVP was designed to work and be worn, but it used large, off-the-shelf sensors, which in turn created very large headphones. The MVP was useful to demonstrate the technology to a small group of internal users and early adopters, but it wasn’t the end product. The MVP did not succeed in areas that a consumer typically requires from headphones, they must be compact, look great, and be comfortable to wear. 

Neurable recognized and embraced the notion that the form factor of their MVP, driven by their existing and available technology, needed significant design refinement and advancement in the sensor technology to bring a successful product to end users. 

Developing technology into a consumer-facing product raises the bar of the entire product architecture and changes the product requirements and experience. Fresco helped Neurable pinpoint their MADE by carefully identifying the target customers’ use cases and expectations. These insights guided the design, function, and appearance of the Enten final product. The MADE features sensors that are woven into the ear cup fabric, incorporating BCI technology in an attractive, delightful, and unobtrusive way. The MADE is not only about ensuring that a technology works as intended, but also that the designed user experience resonates with the target market, serves consumer’s needs, and meets their expectations.

Neurable’s Enten headphones MVP with off-the-shelf sensors (left) MADE with woven sensors (right) 

Choose a Design Partner Wisely 

If your startup has a science and engineering-dominant business culture that values technical differentiation, don’t leave sophisticated design and product development to inexperienced, junior-level, solo contributors, or even worse to non-designer founders. If you don’t have resident experts in design-driven product development, then that experience should come from outside consultants or partners. The right team will guide you to your MADE. 

The type of design partner you choose matters. There are companies that focus on design for manufacturing, but they typically lack the front-end magic and don’t place enough importance on the end user. There are also whimsical boutique design firms that produce inspiring conceptual work, but these products often cannot be made into a manufacturable, mass-market product. 

Industrial design for product development is a professional team sport. It requires senior-level talent and a team that can leverage multiple strengths to take you from conceptual greatness, through the problem-solving process as you explore new technologies and usability, and then all the way through manufacturing. A good design team should also be comfortable with the “undefined,” and provide a level of imagination that builds upon a founder’s vision (even if it’s still blurry or a work-in-progress), to create a desirable and exciting end product and experience. 

Skills you want to look for when cultivating your team:

Industrial design innovation: user research, design market analysis, strategic differentiation, intellectual property development, concept development, user-centered design

Industrial Design execution: geometry development, Class-A surfacing, UX/UI, human factors and ergonomics design, prototyping, design for manufacturing, assembly and repair, packaging design

Manufacturing support: design documentation, supplier validation, vendor liaison and negotiation, part inspection

Marketing assets: web and social media 3D assets, virtual photography, product animation, illustration, AR/VR

As you approach manufacturing, your design partner should be your buying agent and advocate. You wouldn’t walk into a contract negotiation without a lawyer, so don’t be the startup that goes straight to the manufacturer without expert design partners in the room. A knowledgeable design team will guide you through the manufacturing phase, manage contract manufacturers, and ultimately ensure that the end product represents the product you spent years developing – in build quality, performance, and cost.

Enten Prototype 

Create a Realistic Roadmap

Creating hardware products is hard. We do not like being the first people to tell a startup that the timeline to develop their product will be about 12-18 months, with costs in the seven-figures, but we often are. Design, by the way, is a very small percentage of that cost. Knowing what to expect in the industrial design process and having a realistic schedule, milestones, and budget instills trust across the board – internally and externally. 

We always suggest a startup look at two maps of the industrial design process – a macro and a micro. There is the big picture with a comprehensive plan of the realities described above, and there is the short-term strategy plan that is focused on getting to the next best step.

Areas of Focus for Product Development

Companies with established brands and products typically have a stable product development process and a healthy cadence of new product launches. Their needs for external industrial design support are often about generating extra staff bandwidth, or enlisting an external innovation partner providing fresh-eyes to their industry. In those established settings, the industrial design for product development cycle is usually defined, linear, and timed. 

Conversely, a startup’s product development process will most likely not look like this. And it shouldn’t. There are a myriad of unique realities facing startups and entrepreneurs as they approach the product development process for the first time, and they are usually constrained by limited resources and budget. Approaching these challenges strategically will make a successful product development process to bring your MADE to market. 

So, what should the product development process look like? It should be different for every company, guided by the realities and unique challenge areas you are facing. Here are some of the elements to consider:

Design for Risk Areas, First

Developing an entirely new product carries inherent risks. Novel ideas and technologies have the risk of not being market-ready. Will the product perform? Will it last? Are you going to find the right factories to make it? Is this the start of a viable business? Your design process should be defined by the product risks. Strategically invest in the areas most likely to be your biggest challenges. Identifying the risks and solving them will give your team peace of mind, confidence, and space to be creative in the areas that are your true differentiators. When you communicate with stakeholders and investors, you will also convey confidence in successfully bringing your product all the way to market. 

In the example we gave above, Neurable’s MVP revealed a big risk – the sensors. They were part of an off-the-shelf solution that was impacting the product’s size, aesthetics, and comfort. The Neurable team rerouted their path to focus on that risk, advancing that particular area of the product’s technology. The fabric woven with conductive threads designed into the ear cushion was the innovative result of that effort, and completely changed the end-user experience for the better.

Design for Funding

Startups need funding to cover the design, development, manufacturing, and marketing costs of a product launch. The necessary investment is large, so describing a product experience must be done in a compelling way. Presenting your product vision tangibly demonstrates to investors and backers your ability to capitalize on a market opportunity. Also, having tangible and visual product assets, grounded in the design development plan, shows that you’ve de-risked your product and have a clear vision. 

Even established companies make “concept products” to gauge the market, their potential customers, and their internal stakeholders. Startups must be ready to flex this visioneering capability to preview what a next round of funding will allow them to achieve. 

For example, throughout the evolution of the Enten, Neurable was focused on having the tangible assets that defined their product vision. We created appearance models, product renderings, animation, and used CAD of early product architecture for Neurable to tell their story and share the potential of bringing Brain Computer Interface technology to the consumer. 

Leverage the Prototype

Creating looks-like and works-like prototypes is a must for a company to understand what they are building, receive feedback, see what is working, and identify what needs to be re-thought. This is the ultimate de-risking activity, and it should be done before engaging with manufacturing partners, so you have a tangible target of what you want a factory to quote and build. You will also gain an intimate understanding of the product complexity, and how this will affect cost and timelines of production. 

In Neurable’s case, strategically-timed prototype rounds helped us understand, design, and refine how the BCI technology would integrate into the Enten headphones. Fresco built working prototypes to help Neurable refine and package their BCI technology in the intended form factor. As part of design execution, we also built appearance models, which helped us select materials and identify our requirements for suppliers and manufacturing partners. 

Consider Production Volumes

Not all products need to be designed for large scale mass-production. A first MADE product for a small company, or a young product line, is a learning product. And most likely it will be a low-volume product from a mass-production standpoint, perhaps under 100,000 units. The decisions about what to perfect, what to make unique, what to make “good-enough” will be intrinsically tied to the quantities of a first product build. 

A deep understanding of design for manufacturing is essential to get this right. It’s imperative to design your product in such a way that it can be produced for low volumes, and then adapted for high volumes without missing a beat. Otherwise, you could over-invest in unnecessary details, choose a manufacturing process that’s too capital-intensive, or one that is unit-cost prohibitive.

Maximize Your Visual Assets

During the last decade we have seen a dramatic increase in 3D visual assets, created by industrial designers. These should be leveraged throughout the product development process, and beyond as web, social, and marketing assets. 

High-quality 3D renderings can be used for virtual photography, technical animations, VR for demos and tradeshows, AR for ecommerce, and more. These assets should be leveraged at every step of your development journey, including the final visuals for a product launch. 

Neurable went live with their MADE, the Enten headphone, with an Indiegogo campaign. The launch utilized many assets that Fresco created, such as physical appearance models for photo and video shoots, virtual photography, product animations, and all the visual assets for online marketing campaigns. 

An efficient and expert design team will build your product CAD from the beginning with the intention of repurposing the CAD for your market assets. 

The Value of Design is Holding You Back

Writing about the value of design has historically meant defending the business value of design as a justification for audiences who aren’t primed to accept the argument anyway.

By Jen Briselli, Chief Design Strategy Officer at Mad*Pow

The business value of design has been well established. But, the word itself, value, means so much more than the monetized definition imbued by capitalism. Value is actually quite an empathic, purpose–driven, and human–centered concept. It defines worth and usefulness beyond financial gains. Perhaps the focus on demonstrating design’s value is exactly what holds design innovation back. 

Instead of retreading this worn ground, let’s shift the conversation from one centered on monetary benefits to one that moves people, drives change, and empowers excellence at multiple levels of an organization and the world itself. We don’t need another thought piece about the value of design – we need to focus on the design of value – and everything that entails, beyond the bottom line. Organizations that are still caught up defining or proving the “value of design” will be left behind – if they haven’t already. So what should they be thinking about instead?

Design is a Rhetorical Art 

You’d be hard–pressed to find a successful executive or business owner who does not understand the importance of design in 2021 – if only for its role in identifying, prioritizing, and creating the products and services that solve their customers’ needs. But what many know about design may solely be based solely on a few meetings with design teams or perhaps a design boot camp or certificate course. So how can we fully appreciate the value of design in a meaningful way without knowing what it is? 

The practical definition of design is a hotly debated topic – what is design? What makes a designer? Is it about aesthetics? Experiences? Services? Systems? There are many answers to that question, but at its core, design is an intervention – a deliberate process by which we navigate the chasm between current and future state. Design uproots and diverts the status quo to pave a better path forward – or so we hope. 

Design is a meta–practice, a rhetorical art devoid of its own subject matter. To be a designer is to apply a way of thinking more than being an expert in any one domain. Design functions as connective tissue and enablement. It’s focused on audiences and outcomes, and we can learn a lot from another ancient art with a similar focus: classical rhetoric. More specifically, the concept of rhetorical stasis can shed some light on where the notion of “value” becomes a quagmire for design instead of powering it forward. 

Stasis theory is not a new concept – it was developed by an ancient Greek rhetorician named Hermagoras, who lived in the 3rd century BC. Again in the 4th century, the theory was refined by Aristotle and later by Cicero in his book, Orator. The main idea is that when we engage in discourse, we do so at a certain altitude, or “stasis.”

To design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones — Herbert Simon 

Contemporary categories of rhetorical stasis include:

Existence: Does a problem exist? 

Definition: How do we characterize the problem? 

Cause: What caused the problem? 

Value: Is it good or bad? Effective/ineffective? 

Action: What should we do about the problem? 

Jurisdiction: Who should decide what we do about the problem?

In practice, these categories are usually explored and resolved in order. First, we must determine and agree whether something exists before we can move on to deciding whether it’s good or bad, should be addressed, and what should be done, if so. 

In order for discourse to be productive, the participants need to be engaging at the same stasis. If one is arguing about the cause of a phenomenon while the other is arguing about its existence, not much progress will be made until they arrive at the same place, or stasis, to litigate the topic further. For example – if you are arguing about climate change and one person is arguing about whether climate change is caused by man, while the other is arguing about whether cap and trade is a viable solution, forward progress isn’t likely. 

Whenever I witness an instinct or request to justify, explain, or sell the value of design, I am reminded of this rhetorical framework. It strikes me that value is an unproductive stasis for any discussion of design as a practice in 2021. Rehashing the question of the value of design is working at the wrong altitude altogether – just as arguing about the definition of design (or even its existence) holds us back from the more meaningful discourse. Organizations need to navigate design more intentionally in order to solve our most salient world challenges. 

Let’s acknowledge that thoughtful design exists, is effective, and is needed for growth and sustainability. What’s more, design has been well demonstrated as providing value, no matter how you define it. Today’s most innovative and impactful organizations have left the arguments about definition and value to Twitter talking heads and are operating on another level altogether. They are navigating the what (action) and who (jurisdiction) of design, in order to build more equitable systems and empower people to solve their own problems. 

Who designs? And how?

When we define design as meta-practice, a process without its own subject matter, we cannot use conventionally finite terms to identify a designer because design has no domain unto itself. User experience designers differ from industrial designers, who differ from graphic designers, who are nothing like service designers. But designers in each of these traditions have something in common – they apply their craft to serve as guides through an idea jungle. 

Within communities of trained designers and initiated peers, debates have long persisted about who gets to call themselves a designer, what constitutes design, and whether we are makers or facilitators. Now more than ever, the design community is challenging itself to reframe its own tools and techniques to empower the latent design expertise each human holds within their lived experience. 

This is the place where meaningful change is unfolding, not in the question of what design achieves, but in how and who drives it. It is no longer enough to simply study design methods and empathize with an audience; we must also acknowledge the blind spots inherent to the power structures in our work, to question our interpretations of “designer” vs. “user,” and to engage more of our audience as experts in their own experience. 

This very real shift in the locus of expertise nudges designers away from: 

“Let me understand how this looks and feels to you… now let me solve this problem for you by pretending to be you and layering my design skills on top to solve it.”

…toward something more like…

“Let me understand how this looks and feels to you… and now let me use that understanding to build tools with you so you can solve that problem for yourself.”

…and eventually to a lack of differentiation between me/designer and you/user:

“Let me understand how this looks and feels to you… and you can understand how it looks and feels to me, and we’ll design something together toward a shared vision.” 

Social media debates and conference talks aside, empathy will continue to be the critical component in a design evolution that leads to a world where everyone designs – and our roles as facilitation design practitioners become more of facilitation than problem-solving. Certainly, we’re not there yet – our ‘users’ and ‘clients’ still need us to help design better experiences for others because there’s not always a path for those customers to create it themselves. 

But as we shift toward a future with more egalitarian access and participation, it will mean we create products, experiences, and ultimately systems that are more flexible and socially sustainable in the long run. The organizations that stop spinning their wheels on definition and value, and instead work to solve precisely how to integrate this shift to action and jurisdiction, will be the ones to lead the next century of innovation. 

The Future(s) of Design Value 

So if you’re still stuck in an organization questioning the value of design, I’ll pose this question: what purpose are you designing for? What future are you building toward? 

Whether you’re a bigger fan of Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” 

Or Audre Lorde, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” 

Hemming and hawing over the value of design, or even the opportunity cost of not doing design, is an exercise in futility. You owe it to the future audiences you’re designing for to design with bravery beyond the bottom line. 

To quote futurist Dr. Sohail Inayatullah, “we use the future to change the present.” Future thinking can help us do so not in an effort to predict the future but as a means to illuminate unexpected implications of present-day issues that empower individuals and organizations to actively design their own desirable futures. The emphasis isn’t on what will happen, but on what could happen, given various observed drivers. 

Organizations who anticipate a measurable financial metric as a response to the value of design – which implies a need for growth on a linear scale – are trying to solve future problems with status quo logic. They are wholly ignoring a new set of issues and opportunities that may emerge from a future state. 

So what is the future value of design? Perhaps it will be realized in the growth of systems thinking, strategic foresight, and other modern lenses on the age-old challenge of changing existing states into preferred ones. But, these approaches are not meant solely to build deeper expertise or greater empathy among designers by imagining themselves in their users’ shoes. Instead, they intend to connect users (ahem, fellow humans) with designers, dissolving the distinction between them – engaging all to co-design more innovative and sustainable experiences, systems, and futures, together.