Adaptive Path Blog

Last week I attended Connecting 07, the ICSID/IDSA Congress. I’d never before engaged with IDSA, and I quite enjoyed it. What struck me was how the issues that industrial and product designers are facing are pretty much identical to what we’re seeing in the world of experience strategy and design.

My favorite talks/speakers:

Hans Rosling, Gapminder. Hans is a dynamic speaker who is able to make statistics and data visualization fun and provocative. If you haven’t seen his TED talk, you should.

Sabine Junginger, Lancaster University. Sabine spoke on “Design Change: A Paradox” about the role that design can play in change management. This may have been my favorite talk of the event, because it both supported and challenged conventional wisdom about the emerging role of design in business. As I wrote to my colleagues:

Sabine studied under Dick Buchanan at CMU, and has a Ph.D in…. DESIGN! But, she has her head screwed on tight. She pointed out that while design is often brought in to make change, it often serves to accommodate the status quo with band-aids.
Three things I liked:

she kind of dissed design thinking, saying you can’t separate thinking from making.

she pointed out how the current design+business craziness means that the different organizational silos (marketing, product dev, IT, etc.) each bring in design to make change, but end up using design only to bolster their silos

that successful change management with design *begins* with the product… i.e., it’s essential that you use the act of designing a product to produce change… you don’t change an organization in the abstract so that it can then produce better products
- visions and strategies (and organizations for that matter) must continue to evolve. (Okay, that was a fourth thing)

Sam Lucente, HP. Sam (written about in the latest Fast Company) is in charge of design across all of HP, and has an amazing story to tell about how design is evolving and succeeding at HP. He gave good slides, some of which I photographed. I think the most important lesson from Sam was that in order for the design practice to be seen as a valuable contributor at HP, work had to begin at the most basic level — consistency and simplicity throughout the entire product line — before design could be successfully used to differentiate and innovate.

James J. Pirkl, The Generation Connection. This guy advocated a “transgenerational” approach to design. He objects to how older generations are conventionally perceived, and made the case that many suppositions about the elderly are just plain wrong. He doesn’t advocate design for elderly though… He advocates design that works for all. He showed his Transgenerational House, an embodiment of his design principles, which, honestly, looks pretty cool.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 7:38 am and is filed under Conference commentary, Experience strategy, Management, Product Design, Product Management, ROI/Business Value. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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