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Organizational Design Maturity
Design maturity is about creating space for inspired ideas to flourish while orienting business processes, objectives, and incentives around the customer. It is rooted in connecting the responsibility for design outcomes to every corner of the business. It is about creating ambassadors for design in the organization, and managing design execution from the top, rather than pushing design meaning uphill.
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Design Specialization
As organizations grow, they need not just more designers, but different ones. To mature in design, they should diversify their design disciplines. This shift, from generalists to specialists, requires changes in personnel and leadership. By incorporating various design disciplines such as trend strategy, user experience, and design innovation alongside industrial design, a company's design effectiveness progresses from mere doing to thinking. As design becomes more integral to operational strategies, it moves closer to a state of being where terms like "sustainability" and "circular economy" are actionable rather than just buzzwords.
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Creative Design Process
The advancement of design-doing requires a thorough revamp based on industry best practices. This involves inspiring creativity, solving design problems, and empathizing with users. It also means creating space for exploration, collaborating with technical teams, optimizing workspaces, and aligning metrics with business goals.
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Visual Brand Language
Fundamentally, a visual brand language is a framework for how your brand manifests on a product. At it’s core it serves as the Rosetta Stone for translating the verbal descriptions of the brand into visual and experiential elements. In essence, it is where the soul of a brand is put into a bottle and diligently characterized. The visual brand language should be thought as “how the brand thinks.” This is where all the high-level convictions, metaphors, and brand essence is defined– because of this it should evolve only as the brand does. The VBL is the rock and foundation that your design language systems are built upon.
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Design Language Systems
Design language systems consist of detailed guidelines that offer crucial direction on how to implement control elements across product activations. This entails translating overarching design intent, as encapsulated in north star concepts, into clear and measurable design elements for effective interpretation and application. This multifaceted process ensures that design principles are seamlessly integrated into product development, promoting consistency and clarity in user experience.
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The Creative Sandbox
Rushing to market while developing new tools, materials, and technologies severely limits the effectiveness of an NPD engine constantly having to reinvent the wheel.
The Sandbox Strategy is a framework for creating products with known technologies to develop that we can parlay into near- term roadmap opportunities, building on the shoulders of progress, and not reinventing the wheel with each program.
This requires having separate resources dedicated to support the constantly growing sandbox of capabilities.
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Innovation Frameworks
Innovation, a concept subject to diverse interpretations across organizations, fundamentally relies on shared foundational principles rooted in observation, identification, strategic leveraging of strengths, and proactive engagement within an organizational framework. This foundational framework serves as the bedrock upon which organizations cultivate their unique approaches to innovation, fostering an environment conducive to creativity, adaptability, and sustainable growth.
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Measuring Design Impact
Relying solely on design awards and sales performance to gauge design effectiveness isn't precise. Market success is shaped by various factors, not limited to a single department. While tracking awards and sales is valuable, it doesn't offer a complete perspective. Instead, I prioritize assessing teams' adherence to a proven process that enhances creative output quality. This approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of design outcomes. Depending on the team size, implementing a design operations group may be necessary to manage processes effectively and ensure consistent, predictable results.
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Trend Integration Frameworks
A market trend analysis framework is a systematic approach to evaluating market trends and their potential impact on a business. It typically involves gathering and analyzing data on market size, growth rate, consumer behavior, and market trends, as well as evaluating the competition and regulatory environment. The objective of a market trend analysis framework is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the market and to help businesses identify opportunities and make informed decisions about product development, pricing, promotion, and distribution.