Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Starting Conversations
How does anyone start? Here ... an ongoing inquiry into life, work, business, design, research, art, science, craftwork, social meaning, innovation, organization, creating value, holding space for humanity. From hundreds of different locations and perspectives I might start, let's start with identity.
Design / Redesign - Who, What, Why?
Usually people just get the idea of Redesign Research, the work I do, which is simply explained as performing research into how people think and work when they use your product. Then adapting the discoveries of that research for product redesign, continuing the circle of (product) life. The company got its start after the dot-bomb period of 2001, and my consulting firm, like many others at the time, started to find value disappearing as well as contracts. I noticed how more than a few clients in my network were finding themselves with cutting-edge websites thair customers found unusable. Built by the Big Design Firms of that time, such sites and services were big on Experience but low on workability.
I out-shingled my consulting work as a "fixer," rapidly finding a set of well-defined "real users" and learning about their needs and experience with the client website or product. Then working those customer insights into the redesign, collaborating with organic resources (the available client team) to launch something usable, workable, and often, cool enough. And delivered using the remains of budget, if any, left over from their Big Design Project that was on its way to a late-90's expensive memory.
My design philosophy is based on the pragmatics of workability: Every design is a redesign. Every new useful product grows from some other prior use, an accepted tool or service that was also once innovative. Market winners are not the coolest, the best tech, or the best priced. To me, the winning products grow from the strongest redesign of that prior, accepted way of doing things. And good redesign takes into account - everything that can be redesigned!
Design / Redesign - Who, What, Why?
Usually people just get the idea of Redesign Research, the work I do, which is simply explained as performing research into how people think and work when they use your product. Then adapting the discoveries of that research for product redesign, continuing the circle of (product) life. The company got its start after the dot-bomb period of 2001, and my consulting firm, like many others at the time, started to find value disappearing as well as contracts. I noticed how more than a few clients in my network were finding themselves with cutting-edge websites thair customers found unusable. Built by the Big Design Firms of that time, such sites and services were big on Experience but low on workability.
I out-shingled my consulting work as a "fixer," rapidly finding a set of well-defined "real users" and learning about their needs and experience with the client website or product. Then working those customer insights into the redesign, collaborating with organic resources (the available client team) to launch something usable, workable, and often, cool enough. And delivered using the remains of budget, if any, left over from their Big Design Project that was on its way to a late-90's expensive memory.
My design philosophy is based on the pragmatics of workability: Every design is a redesign. Every new useful product grows from some other prior use, an accepted tool or service that was also once innovative. Market winners are not the coolest, the best tech, or the best priced. To me, the winning products grow from the strongest redesign of that prior, accepted way of doing things. And good redesign takes into account - everything that can be redesigned!
