Design is the first of the six Concept Age
senses
that we’re going to explore. Dan Pink
quotes John Heskett when describing design as “a combination of utility and
significance”.
Utility is something that is prevalent in
the market today. Unless you’re on the bleeding edge, most products do
what they say they’re supposed to do with reasonable consistency. Utility
is not how to differentiate a product. Significance is.
I went to a friend’s house last weekend
and she had the neatest
measuring cup (yes, I used “neatest” and “measuring cup” in the same
sentence – that’s significant right there!).
Unlike the hundreds of measuring cups you
may have seen before, this cup did the job of measuring (utility) but in an
unusual way (significance). The bottom of the cup angled up so that you
could read the numbers without holding it up or bending down for a better
view. I already have a couple of measuring cups, but this cup’s great
design makes it worth buying.
Design makes use of holistic thinking,
focused on solving a problem, in a way that is significant to the
customer. According to Dan, “Design is a high concept aptitude that is
difficult to outsource or automate – and that increasingly confers a
competitive advantage in business”.
Design sense is not limited to product
developers and marketers either. Everything we use or produce is
designed. This blog has a design, as does a business case, a request for
proposal, your office, and a presentation you need to make to a client.
The list is infinite.
Dan offers several suggestions for
strengthening your design sense. “Channel Your Annoyance” is an
exercise where you find a product that bothers you and, with nothing but a pad
and pencil, you redesign it. Another neat exercise is “Put it on a Table”
where you take something that you “connect with” on some emotional level and
answer a series of questions to determine why. He also includes a list of
design magazines and museums you can explore.
Good design is “giving the world something
it didn’t know it was missing” – did you think you were missing a great
measuring cup?
I didn’t!
Technorati tags: Business, Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind, Design
Nevermind, saw that you linked it. Just as I pictured it from your description. 🙂
What is the brand of that measuring cup? A novell idea, but from a novell company?
That’s a big question!
My first thought is that our school systems often focus on memorization and not on developing the ability to bring disparate ideas and experiences together to solve problems.
Professionally, I think the biggest enemy of problem solving is that no one has time (or makes time) for reflection and companies often have a low tolerance for experimentation. People don’t have the time to see what’s going on in their industry (let alone other industries) and then to consider how what they’ve learned might be used to solve their own company issues. This is something we could address by encouraging people to take some of their time to find out what’s going on around them and appling it back to their environment. Look at 3M and Ideo and some of the companies that are noted for innovation (which is problem identification and solving). They do this fairly well.
Thanks for visiting!
Ann, I am intrigued with the practical whole brain thinking examples you tie into “problem solving” here. Just today NPR ran a story about the lack of problem solving skills in US compared to other leading countries and we are dropping lower by PBL comparisons yearly.
In reading your thoughts I’d love to hear what is your opinion of why this is so, and your ideas for what could be a solution to help us become effective problem solvers…? Thoughts?