Design driven innovation is often the result
of team effort. It brings together a range of disciplines,
humanities, technology, manufacturing, to management. Teams have to be built on the basis of the
type of problems being addressed. You are speaking of collaboration in design
which was the topic we discussed in this course last time. Yes, collaboration is the name of the game
today, every designer who wants to take their design to the people must know about the perilous
pitfalls of design innovation.
The pitfalls of design innovation. This landscape shows us the path of product
from idea to large scale deployment. You can see 3 canyons or pitfalls which spell
danger when an idea could fall in and fail before it gets anywhere. In the first stage, the designer is taking
his idea from a mock up to a prototype which can be tested with users. . The collaborators could be social scientists,
material experts technologists and so on. If things are satisfactory at this stage our
idea is able to make the leap across the pitfall to becoming a working prototype. . At this stage the designer’s role is say
70 percent of the total work.
So, we have moved now from the mock up to
prototype and crossed the first pitfall. Yes, now the prototype needs to be tested
with users and refined and worked further. The designers take input from different collaborators
to take the idea from prototyping to pilot production. . Here the collaborators could be from user
experience, market research, manufacturing and other related areas depending upon the
type of product or service.
.
By this time the designers’ role has shrunk to say 50 percent of the total effort. .
So, now we have safely crossed the second pitfall. Now, the challenge grows harder with large
number of user trials and more inputs from users. In this stage the collaborators are tool engineers,
product planners, manufacturing experts and most importantly, the financers. Now, the designer’s involvement has shrunk
to say 20 percent. But not the intensity of the involvement. Of course not the designer has to champion
the cause till the product reaches the marketplace. I noticed that each successive pitfall indicates
a deeper fall in case of failure. Obviously so because the further into the
process we are there is so much more at stake in terms of cause and resources. And if the designer’s idea slips into one
of the pitfalls the idea itself could be lost forever or the project timeline will go very
large.
So, like this adventurer, the designer needs
some out of the box thinking tools and a lot of technical help from other domains in order
to leapfrog these pitfalls to critical junctures in the innovation process. Every designer’s nightmare indeed. But the nightmare can be avoided with design
thinking and early planning. Design thinking for innovation, we need to
talk more about this. You know, the hurdles in the path of a designer
are many. Every product presents a unique set of challenges
to begin with and may throw up several unanticipated challenges all along the way.
The contributions of a wide variety of experts
may be needed before the product can see the light of the day. The designer has to play a significant role
at every stage negotiating between different teams. The process of collaboration can be said to
be a success when the innovation and design processes go through all the stages in the
landscape. From the germ of an idea to an actual functioning
product..
