Adaptive Path Blog

I submitted a panel to South by Southwest this year, titled “Stop Designing Products.” It’s a meme that has been running through Adaptive Path, explained below. Well, you can now vote for the panel, tucked away under the “business/funding/entrepreneurial” and “web 2.0″ categories, neither of which is accurate. But, if you want to see a thoughtful panel that elevates the design-strategy-business discourse (instead of more blathering about, I don’t know, blogging), give us a nod.

The world of business and product design is changing. In fact, we have seen a number of trends taking shape that we believe are all pointing to the end of products. There is a growing realization that we are no longer designing single, stand-alone, centralized, static things, web sites, or systems. As the internet and digital networks in general become more ubiquitous, more distributed, and more integrated in our lives, we’re finding that it’s hard to find a “product” that is not also, or even mostly, a service. These service design projects generally involve multiple touchpoints or channels (i.e. the web, mobile devices, physical spaces, etc.), a focus on long-term relationships, and the need for consistent experience across throughout. In fact, consumers expect more variety, more control, more interoperability, more adaptability, and more consistency in experience than ever before. This has serious implications for business, design, and development.

(And thanks to the Adaptive Path team for that description, which I’ve been shamelessly exploiting.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Adaptive Path, Upcoming Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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