Copenhagen Wheel

Acabo de leer una noticia sobre este interesante proyecto, the Copenhagen Wheel. Visto como está el tráfico últimamente en Madrid a ver si se generaliza un poco el uso de otras alternativas...(de hecho esta mañana con la nevada hasta el tren de cercanías estaba colapsado)

Este es el video

Barcelona Design Week Day 1

I attended the first session of the Barcelona Design Week this morning. One funny fact is that in the marketing materials of the Barcelona Design Centre there´s a testimonial from my entrepreneurship professor at Haas, Jerry Engel from the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. 

The audience was roughly 70% designers, 30% business people and some students scattered here and there. After several presentations there was an interesting panel with Sue Siddall from IDEO, Matt Barthelemy from Smart Design, Michael Thomson from Design Connect and Gus Rodríguez from Philips Design.

Regarding the dialog between business and design it is a good thing that designers and business people are getting more fluent with each other´s language. Nevertheless my key takeaway was that it is the customer, and her needs, what forces design and business to speak the same language, as Sue Siddall very nicely put it. 

Other interesting thoughts from today´s session: there´s a growing post-ego, do-something-bigger attitude amongst firms or the importance of collaboration, co-creation and open and multidisciplinary approaches that dematerialize or blend design with other disciplines in order to solver higher questions (designing a more ambitious framing activity according to IDEO)...

Ciudad Bolardo, por UNTERCIO

Lo prometido es deuda y gracias a Marina, del estudio de arquitectura UNTERCIO aquí está el texto y varias imágenes del proyecto Ciudad Bolardo:

¿Es peor el remedio que la enfermedad? Este trabajo estudia la posibilidad de recuperar como solar el vacío urbano generado por los bolardos en el entramado de las calles de Madrid.

El bolardo empezó a usarse en el centro como parche para evitar la invasión de las aceras por parte de los vehículos de los conductores poco considerados. Esta barrera delimita con violencia el ámbito del coche y del peatón en la calle, dando al automóvil la sensación de prioridad y desplazando al viandante a estrechas aceras invadidas por toda clase de obstáculos.

La actual existencia del Servicio de Estacionamiento Regulado y del trabajo que realizan sus controladores, así como la existencia de otras zon

as de coexistencia coche-peatón, permiten replantear la necesidad y oportunidad del bolardo.

Sospechamos, y por eso este trabajo, que a día de hoy, la política de implantación de bolardos no solo no supone un beneficio al peatón sino que es un obstáculo y genera un gran desaprovechamiento del espacio público en nuestra ciudad.

El video de la presentación aquí (gracias a Marina del Mármol de untercio por enviármelo). También lo podéis ver a continuación:

pecha kucha pecha kucha pecha kucha Madrid

De vuelta del Pecha Kucha Madrid vol.6. Ha habido un buen mix de presentaciones. Personalmente me han gustado más las de la primera mitad (varías de arquitectura y la de poesía). Imagenes, palabras y pensamientos provocadores, bocanadas de aire fresco sobre todo para los que pertenecen (pertenecemos) a otras disciplinas.

Con qué distintos ojos somos capaces de enfrentar una misma realidad según seamos arquitectos, marketineros, publicitarios o lo que sea. Qué limitado por un lado y qué reduccionista pero qué enriquecedor cuando somos capaces de escuchar otros lenguajes.

Para mí la mejor ha sido la visión que sobre los bolardos tienen los chicos de untercio.com. No voy a revelar nada más de momento. Estoy pendiente de retomar mi conversación con ellos para mostraros su presentación pronto en este, mi blog y, por supuesto, suyo de ustedes también.

¿Qué es Design thinking?

Ayer realicé una presentación en un curso de la Escuela de Excelencia Comercial de Telefónica. Se trató de una introducción al Design thinking como herramienta de innovación estratégica. A continuación adjunto una adaptación del material que empleé en esta charla.

Que es Design Thinking?

View more presentations from Santiago Rodriguez de Miguel.

El Design thinking no es ni más ni menos que el empleo estratégico de metodologías del diseño para solventar problemas. Por diseño se entiende la intersección de una necesidad humana con la tecnología y la economía. En palabras sencillas, consiste en "ponernos las gafas del diseñador" para observar a los usuarios, detectar y comprender sus necesidades, idear soluciones e implementar prototipos hasta alcanzar la solución idónea (humanamente deseable, factible y rentable). Este enfoque es multidisciplinar, creativo, combina lo cualitativo con lo cuantitativo y defiende una elevada incertidumbre o divergencia inicial que se va reduciendo conforme nos acercamos a la solución por lo que requiere de flexibilidad o apertura de miras.

Además de describir sus usos y aplicaciones en toda la cadena de valor (aunque principalmente con respecto a desarrollo de productos, servicios y experiencias de usuario), ilustré el proceso del Design thinking y algunas de las técnicas empleadas en esta interesante metodología (visual thinking, investigaciones etnográficas, rapid prototyping, etc.). La sesión terminó con un ejercicio conjunto con la técnica del Business Model Canvas, en el que los asistentes analizaron el modelo de negocio de la división de impresoras de HP.

Como siempre, queridos lectores, se agradecen los comentarios.

Haas MBA and Design

Quick note. According to Business Week the Haas MBA ranks proudly amongst the world's best design schools.

Ya lo sabía (I already knew it)

:)

Left AND right brain

In one of my previous posts I addressed the lack of dialogue between Business and Design. I have just bumped into this article, EQ meeting IQ, by Carina Oskarsson. She also points at the difficulties of communication when one side is wired around text and the other around visuals, the traditional left brain versus right brain argument. Her solution is for one side to adopt the perspective of the other:

"A key to effectiveness is to seek to have the same mental ground as those I cooperate with. We cannot communicate through visuals, so we have to use words in order to gain a common understanding. Once we have a dialog, we develop trust. Trust is more than a brand; that is what design is about".

Definitely, traslation or "learning the other side´s language" does the trick. Nevertheless how enriching it is to be "bilingual". Tools like prezi (to create presentations), or the business model canvas (to describe and analyze business models) come to my mind. I think is about time for Business to learn the language of Design. That fresh air is much needed.

Simple details don't cost that much

Last Tuesday I took the high-speed train (AVE) from Madrid to Barcelona. In the super nice, less-than-3-hour ride I notice a tiny details I had already noticed in the Japanese bullet train (Shinkansen)


That little thing on the wall it's a mini hook to hang your jacket, something you do not find in airplanes, at least not in the economy seats...


A very simple detail, not that costly, that makes the passenger's life a little bit better. For me design is strategy but also small things like this.

Pavement marking. Why and What for

I have spotted this "design-flop" in Madrid. Actually it might not be that much of a flop. If we ask why this pedestrian crossing is like this we would find several explanations. A very plausible explanation could be that a car was parked when the paint crew arrived.

In many occasions rather than asking why it makes better sense to ask what for. In this case the unorthodox design of the pavement marking allows for one extra car to be parked in the street. And some paint savings too.

The Cultures of Design

In this month´s issue of Connect, the newsletter of the Design Management Institute (DMI), Steve Portigal outlines several archetypes or Cultures of Design. These archetypes respond to the classical choice between design processes based on a strong internal vision versus those centered around the customer.

The Squeaky Wheel and The Cult of Personality archetypes are those in which one individual strongly influences the design outcome. Portigal mentions Apple or Dyson as examples of these archetypes.

Although many organizations claim to have a Uncover New Needs and Solve Them approach most of the times they are just implementing literally what customers ask under a User-Pleasing archetype.

Portigal´s last archetype is The Department of Committee Meetings, in which there can be room for the customer´s voice although most of the times is the squeaky wheel approach the one taking over.

Great comic strip by Erlich in El Pais

It reads:

"Yes, the rent is more expensive"

"But take into account the design"

Measuring innovation and design

Interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly on innovation metrics. You can't improve what you are not measuring. In a nutshell McKinsey's research shows that companies that measure innovation are satisfied carrying this activity. It provides a useful understanding of their innovation performance although there is room for improvement, for instance, developing incentives that are aligned with metrics or communicating this information to investors. There is also this podcast + post in Killer Innovations with an introduction on how to prove the value of innovation.

Another interesting connected topic is the value of design. Does design have value? How can it be measured? Sara Beckman, my New Product Development professor at Haas, talks about it in an interview with Adaptive Path. In this presentation...

Applying design thinking principles in product management

View more documents from whatidiscover.

...she mentions three examples of organizations taking a stab at those questions:

• Corporate Design Foundation. "BusinessWeek IDEA Design Award winners outperform those who didn’t win in stock performance"

• The California College of the Arts has compiled a Design Strategy Market Index. "The index shows that for companies who invest in design and use it as part of their strategic management, on average, they’ve gained 274% of their value. This considerably beats all market averages and indexes for the same time period."

• The UK Design Council has developed the Value of Desing Factfinder
  

There is always subjectivity in defining what constitutes good design and what does not, but this is a good point to get the dialogue started.

Quick reminder to self: think creatively

Simple presentation on creative thinking by Joanna Maxwell. Bumped into it in slideshare. Too many stock pictures for my taste, although some of them do a great job conveying the idea. I also liked the "play" recommendation and the quote on the power of connecting the seemingly unconnected :)

Creative Thinking: Your Edge

View more presentations from Joanna Maxwell.

On Business and Design: the discipline of Business Design

Graduation has put me out of circulation for a while, but here I am again.

In one of my previous posts I mentioned my struggles with how Business and Design can talk better to each other. IDEO's Ryan Jacoby has posted about the curriculum of a discipline that would be the perfect marriage between both worlds: Business Design. Quoting his reply to one of the comments in his post:

[..] "I’m not envisioning a "business for designers" curriculum or a "design for business-types" curriculum. It isn’t Design+Business or Business+Design, but instead the program would be focused on the new discipline of business design: a practical mix of entrepreneurship, commerce and art all with the "making" focus you mention." [..]

This brings together a lot of interesting things I have been in touch with lately: my Customer Development, New Product Development, Design as Competitive Advantage and Open Innovation classes, the clinics at the Berkeley Institute of Design ... Now that I am done with my MBA I am all fired up about putting it to practice in a start-up I will be collaborating with during the summer. Additional info to come in the next days.

Let me conclude by pointing at the Cult of Done Manifesto, a link I also got from Jacoby's blog. This is all about the importance of doing, failing fast and often and learning [and enjoying it] along the way.

My business and design portfolio

I am updating my portfolio with the latest projects, but here it goes the April version. Following the advice of my fellow Haassie Maiken I have structured my experiences according to the following framework: Challenge, Process, Solution, Learnings.
In order to visualize it properly you have to go to full screen mode. The formatting is not 100% consistent after the upload but it does suffice.
Feedback is greatly appreciated

Santiago Rodriguez Portfolio April 09 Slideshare

View more presentations from santiago_rdm.

A meaningful dialogue between Business and Design

In the last months I have had many informational interviews with people in the Design Thinking* space, mostly designers. When I asked them about the value of a Business School graduate in their companies one single comment came up over and over, surprisingly with almost the same words every time: Business and Design do not "talk" to each other. I do not like that. At all. Today more than ever we need the integration of Business and Design in order to solve this mess of interconnected pressing challenges our world is facing.

That's the reason why I have launched The DesignBusiness SandBox.

For the Design and the Business community, the DesignBusiness SandBox is a meeting point that brings the Design perspective into Business and viceversa.


Using Design thinking as the underlying methodology, the goal of this tool is to create a meaningful dialogue between the Design and the Business world.

Although it has been originated as a student-driven Independent Study Project, and right now it lives within UC Berkeley, I eventually would like to open the site to the Design and the Business community. The site is in an very early and shameless prototyping stage. As the first topic for discussion I am focusing on storytelling.

If any of the previous paragraphs appeals to you, [contact me] and become a collaborator. You will make this man happy.

----

* Here it is IDEO's Tim Brown's definition of Design Thinking. Here, the wikipedia article, not as catchy as it should be for such an important concept. I should address What is Design Thinking in another post but this might work as a beginning for those of you unfamiliar with the term.

By popular demand: cocido madrileño

This was my Design as Competitive Advantage class first day presentation. We had to present an example of a well designed product, service or experience. I was debating whether to talk about my inexpensive Casio F-91W or go for a more holistic experience.

I eventually decided for Madrid's signature dish, something I enjoy shopping for, preparing and eating with friends. Cocido madrileño or Madrilenian stew. People keep asking me for the recipe. Yesterday a classmate of mine told me her family in the Philippines cooks a similar version every week.

Business Model Innovation and Design

Yesterday, as part of my Managing Innovation and Change course with Prof. Chesbrough, I attended a lecture on Business Model Innovation and Design by Alex Osterwalder.

Alex started by providing a definition of business model, "how an organization makes (or intends to make) money", which he maps around a simple yet powerful visual tool, the business model canvas:

The business model canvas by Alex Osterwalder

In the center we have the value proposition of whatever business model we are looking at. To the right we have the customer, segments and relationships, and how the revenue is generated. To the left we have the company resources, activities and partners and its cost structure.

This unified framework captures a lot of information in a snapshot. Alex successfully used it to describe existing business models and to compare them to those of competing companies. Such a simple tool helped the audience generate insights "on the fly". Visual representation, a design tool, does a great job helping describing and applying a business concept.

Alex went on explaining how design thinking can be applied to design new business models providing examples of design tools for observation, ideation, prototyping and visual thinking. You can find more in his blog, Business Model Design and Innovation.

Alex's work is an example of how meaningful the dialogue between business and design can be. There are many interesting things going on around this subject and I am currently working on a project along these lines so I will be blogging about it soon.

Some Blackberry Pearl design flops

A simple design mistake can trigger a call to 911. Such a simple thing is a total turnoff for me as a user.

The design process

The design process is my favorite tool for problem solving. Lines 1 to 5 in the following exhibit describe different approaches to map this process:

The design process - Click on the image to enlarge

Sources:

1. The Universal Traveler. Koberg, D. and Bagnall, J. Thomson Crisp Learning, 2003
2. Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory as explained in the New Product Development course - Haas MBA 290N-2
   
3. IDEO Product Development. Harvard Business School case study, April 2007
   
4. SY Partners approach to innovation
   
5. Design Thinking. Tim Brown. Harvard Business Review, June 2008
   

The first phase, in red in the previous exhibit, consists in looking around you, and inside you too, to understand the problem. The second phase, in orange, is about coming up with alternatives and selecting the one that would be applied in the third phase, implementation, in green.
What I like about the Universal Traveler's approach is that it explicitly adds the problem definition at the end of the observation stage and singles out evaluation at the end of the process.

Two considerations. The process is iterative in each phase and as a whole:

• In each phase because problems are complex and dynamic and there always room for us to do more research, come up with new ideas, etc.
• As a whole because after evaluation -feedback- the process should start all over again.

Other related approaches are John Boyd's OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) or the Agile software development methodology. I find interesting similarities in Steve Blank's Customer Development philosophy, or should I say religion after reading his book The Four Steps to the Ephipany? Yes, I am a believer.