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. :)
Posted by: Shrike | January 27, 2007 at 02:50 AM
What is the brand of that measuring cup? A novell idea, but from a novell company?
Posted by: Shrike | January 27, 2007 at 02:48 AM
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!
Posted by: Ann Michael | May 03, 2006 at 08:28 AM
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?
Posted by: Ellen Weber | May 02, 2006 at 09:21 PM