A Whole New Mind: Design

Design is the first of the six Concept Age senses that we’re going to explore. Dan Pink quotes John Heskett when describing design as “a combination of utility and significance”.

Utility is something that is prevalent in the market today. Unless you’re on the bleeding edge, most products do what they say they’re supposed to do with reasonable consistency. Utility is not how to differentiate a product. Significance is.

I went to a friend’s house last weekend and she had the neatest measuring cup (yes, I used “neatest” and “measuring cup” in the same sentence – that’s significant right there!).

Unlike the hundreds of measuring cups you may have seen before, this cup did the job of measuring (utility) but in an unusual way (significance). The bottom of the cup angled up so that you could read the numbers without holding it up or bending down for a better view. I already have a couple of measuring cups, but this cup’s great design makes it worth buying.

Design makes use of holistic thinking, focused on solving a problem, in a way that is significant to the customer. According to Dan, “Design is a high concept aptitude that is difficult to outsource or automate – and that increasingly confers a competitive advantage in business”.

Design sense is not limited to product developers and marketers either. Everything we use or produce is designed. This blog has a design, as does a business case, a request for proposal, your office, and a presentation you need to make to a client. The list is infinite.

Dan offers several suggestions for strengthening your design sense. “Channel Your Annoyance” is an exercise where you find a product that bothers you and, with nothing but a pad and pencil, you redesign it. Another neat exercise is “Put it on a Table” where you take something that you “connect with” on some emotional level and answer a series of questions to determine why. He also includes a list of design magazines and museums you can explore.

Good design is “giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing” – did you think you were missing a great measuring cup?

I didn’t!