Reflection 2: The Design Experience

Innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through direct observation, of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the way particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported.

Tim Brown

Four years ago, Amelia Ufford and Wes Baker were lying on a beach in Sri Lanka when they were dismayed to find pop cans and old wrappers floating in the otherwise pristine ocean. Tim Brown would say that this was the beginning of the inspiration phase of designing De-Brand. Brown’s model of the design process focuses on three stages: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation. Amelia and Wes were inspired. They saw a need in society. They saw a need for the sustainable disposal of waste created by a growing consumer culture.

Amelia and Wes ideated and implemented their plans and strategies to create De-Brand, a company devoted to the sustainable disposal of marketing and product waste. Through its existence, De-Brand has gone in several different directions and Amelia and Wes continue to re-shape and update the company’s design to this day.

My partner and I were charged with creating a business canvas in an effort to capture De-Brand’s essence. We also needed to go through a design process. Present the canvas. Give some insights. It seemed easy enough. My biggest question the whole time, “what the hell is going on?”

I didn’t know what we were trying to accomplish. I didn’t see the inspiration. Were we just going to regurgitate the facts we were told by Amelia back to her and Wes in the classroom? What could we really tell them about their business that they didn’t already know? What are we being asked to do? Could we really analyze their business with the limited information we had?

Once we got the ball rolling on the physical design of our business canvas, the process moved rather smoothly. We spent a good chunk of time creating sketches and prototypes of what our canvas might look like.  Many crumpled pieces of foolscap later we had decided on a prototype which would become our canvas. Through the implementation process we were constantly adjusting on the fly to get things just right.

At the end of the day, we had created something I was proud of. We had re-imagined our information in a way that we thought was simple, effective, and aesthetically pleasing. But I felt that our insights lacked some inspiration. I was a bit nervous to deliver them to Wes. I was worried he would think we were just stating the obvious. Wes was very positive in his feedback to us, but still voiced the opinion that he would have enjoyed something a bit more outside the box.

I thought about this project like a student, not a designer. Satisfy the demands of the question. Don’t take unnecessary risks. It was Lindsay Watt of Placeling who put it best, “ask forgiveness, not permission.” Take the risk. Put yourself on the line. See what happens.

Working with CEOs like Amelia and Wes, I learned that when you are designing, a well thought out wrong answer is more valuable than a superficially correct answer. You can’t design something great without taking the risk that what you design might be utterly horrible; and a design rooted in meaningful inspiration will always have value, even if it is way off the mark.