Priyal Mehta is our speaker on the theme of DESIGN this month.

Nada Badran writes our themed essay on the theme DESIGN this month.

Design

by Nada Badran

“The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” – Helmut Schmidt.

Over the years, there’s been a painfully slow, but gradually shifting focus in large organizations, one that puts design closer to the core business. That’s because all businesses face a common issue: simplicity. Simplicity in offering their value propositions in a world of increasingly complex technology. People need their interactions with anything they buy, to be simple, intuitive, and satisfying. They don’t want to have to sit poring over a thick manual deciphering complex codes, just so that they can use their purchases. They need help. So the shifting focus is on humanizing the users’ experience, especially the emotional aspects, rather than just the utility and product requirements.

Design helps create such emotional connections. It identifies needs by having the designer live the customers’ experience. Stepping outside of themselves, and into others’ shoes. Design thinkers use prototypes to explore potential solutions, a method of learning through making. But they are far from the finished product. They’re a work in progress, designed to be tested and subject to radical changes if they’re not deemed simple and inspiring to use. Design thinking processes are flexible but also follow a structure, so that innovation is driven by seizing opportunities, rather than focusing more on preventing errors.

But design thinking is also not without failure. It recognizes that it’s difficult, if not rare, to get things right the first time. Even the world’s most successful companies are victim to its iterative nature. Think of Coke’s unsuccessful ‘New Coke’, Apple’s ‘Newton’, or Amazon’s ‘Fire Phone’. If you don’t remember them, that’s because they all flopped and were discontinued. But that didn’t stop any of these companies from picking up where they failed. Design is a constantly evolving and inherently social process that asks for empathy and humility, driving a more human approach to business.