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Product Design with Lean Startup

Tue Andersen — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:13:06 -0500

On July 3, frog’s Milan studio will host a Lean Startup Circle to discuss the methodology, challenges, and best practices. Click here for more information.

The lean startup methodology, and its Minimal Viable Products strategy have grown hugely popular, but what are the challenges of applying lean startup and how can it be applied when working with external companies?

Lean Startup
Lean startup is a product design and realization methodology formulated by Eric Ries. The approach borrows from production practices, such as lean manufacturing and kanban, which focus on execution and adaption as strategies to achieve innovation (a more throughout review of lean startup can be found here.) Although the name includes the word ‘startup,’ the concepts can be applied to companies of any size—from a one-person startup to big, multi-national companies.

Inspired by both the scientific method and business optimization practices, the lean startup builds on three fundamental concepts:

Build: Drastically shorten each phase of the product development cycle, allowing the product to gain more feedback from customers and the market, and gain it more often.
Measure: Gain feedback from customers in each product development cycle using both qualitative and quantitative techniques.
Learn: Derive learning from each product development cycle through actionable metrics.

Challenges
The benefit of lean startup is that it offers a methodology for companies to drive sustainable innovation beyond a “throw it out and see if it sticks” approach.

When discussing lean startup with colleagues and clients, however, they often ask if it means that innovation and design is limited to a data-driven, scientific-like process. While gathering user and market data helps steer the innovation process, it is clear these processes do not stand on their own. Without intuition, skillful design, and the right interpretations, you won’t get far.

Despite the apparent benefits of the lean startup methodology, its widespread application remains challenging. In addition to my daily discussions with clients and colleagues, I've been applying principles from lean startup on a number of projects. Based on my experience, I’ve identified at least three major challenges:

Working culture
The first challenge concerns changing work practices and ways of thinking. While lean startup doesn’t necessarily mean giving up control, it offers new (and better) tools for staying in control. Changing the way of thinking within a company is not easy and requires a large investment of time. Often making a significant change requires employee backgrounds and skillsets that may be different than what are currently in your company. Those of us that have been working with Agile methodologies for the past decade knows that changing the cultural fabric of a company is a long, and often difficult, process. Thus, the first challenge is a cultural challenge.

A strategy for overcoming this cultural hurdle is to isolate the iterative design process to a smaller group of people within your company. This group should be empowered to take decisions and move forward in shaping the product, and gaining the needed experience.

Change the process
Lean startup also presumes a strongly integrated research, design, and development process. This is contrary to how many companies are structured. It also raises the question of how a company that relies on external consultants or offshore workers can effectively implement lean startup approaches. When the design and development of a project no longer happens in isolated phases, how can it be outsourced in an efficient way?
Furthermore, how can the learning from these activities be brought back into the larger organization?

This second challenge is a process challenge, requiring people with different skills to work in teams rather than departments. The challenge of outsourcing may be addressed by relying on external resources that not only deliver fixed deliverables, but also work together with the sourcing company to form a coherent team. This approach allows expertise be shared, increasing learning while accelerating the product development cycle. It is key to work with partners that understand iterative design and are ready to work within your team. This will help bridge the gap from traditional product design methodologies to methods based on rapid iterations and user feedback.

Planning and logistics
To measure, you need users. It may seem obvious but, in the end, you need to plan for it, and that may be harder than you think. Following approaches such as Design Thinking and Contextual Design involves users in all phases of product development, from participatory design to user testing. Design approaches are often focused on qualitative aspects, however, leaving quantitative research to the business people. The quantitative measurements of user behavior can reveal important aspects of your product, including its value, which can be hard to test using qualitative techniques.

One of the core principles of lean startup is to test often. The best way to know if you've improved your product is to run a comparative test where you test two different versions of your product on a group of users, and see which product performs best. To do so, you need the two versions to test as well as systems to capture user data and manage logistics. Even if you decide just to test an old version of your product against a new version, you still need to invest more time in the development to support parallel testing (also called A/B testing or split testing). This may not be an issue for bigger corporations with existing products and a user base. For a small startup, on the other hand, this can be a significant challenge. In the end, building a testable product has an impact on time to market. I refer to the third challenge as a challenge of resources and logistics.

The road ahead
Applying iterative design, and lean startup in particular, is fast becoming a mainstream design and innovation strategy. Despite these challenges, there is no doubt that lean startup—with its short development cycles along with measurements and improvements based on learning—is a fresh and much welcomed way to look at product design.

Tue Andersen is a senior software architect at frog's Milan studio.

Smart Accessories for Smart Phones

admin — Fri, 31 May 2013 11:52:19 -0500

A Model for Innovation in Emerging Markets

Ravi Chhatpar and Cara Silver — Thu, 30 May 2013 19:34:00 -0500

In the outskirts of Musanze, in northern Rwanda, mattresses have become a tool for female empowerment, family security, and social change. Hilarie, a softspoken farmer, mother, and wife, is the mastermind behind this association and has become a figurehead of change in her village and over 30 others in the region because of it. How Hilarie became a purveyor of mattresses for social change offers some fascinating insights about human behavior, community dynamics and… financial services.

Yes, financial services. Specifically, the challenge of financial inclusion—bringing financial services to the poor for the purpose of improving their lives. This is one challenge that resists easy scaling across markets. If a solution devised by a bank, mobile operator, or other financial services player achieves some level of success in one market, it's highly doubtful that the same idea will work in other markets. The always-cited example of this is Safaricom's highly successful M-Pesa mobile money platform in Kenya; no other mobile money service in the world has had even close to the same level of success.

One reason for this is that any new financial service targeting the poor will be co-existing (competing, complementing, or conflicting) with a number of other financial services already used by the poor. Most, if not all, of which are classified as informal services (e.g., hiding money under the mattress, using group savings clubs, borrowing from neighbors, etc.) For a new financial service to be successful, it has to fit well within this broader informal portfolio, meaning this broader informal portfolio has to be well understood. This is where most efforts at financial inclusion innovation fall short.

Recently, frog partnered with Visa to tackle the challenge of financial inclusion in Rwanda. As a first step, we knew that we needed to come up with ideas for new financial services that will better meet the most deeply felt and poorly met needs of Rwandan consumers. We also knew that any ideas we came up with would not operate in isolation, but in the context of existing informal service portfolios. Our challenge was to understand Rwandan consumers and their financial behaviors in a way that was rich enough to inspire winning ideas.

Which brings us back to Hilarie. We only found Hilarie because a team of us (frogs, Visa colleagues, and our local fixers) immersed ourselves in local communities in Rwanda, living in rented basic homes not hotels, hiking to remote villages not taking taxis, cooking with neighbors not eating at restaurants, and socializing the local way by sending our women into women-only video nights and men into men-only bars. This immersive approach to research allows us to form trusted relationships that have a better chance than traditional research of uncovering the deeper human stories that define people's identities.

Hilarie, tired of listening to her neighbors complain about their husbands, founded a local support group where women meet and give advice from topics ranging from domestic violence to the growing infidelity in their towns. Realizing that the impact of these meetings was limited without financial support, Hilarie invented a unique financial instrument. She devised an SLA (savings and loan association) – essentially a savings club in which a number of community members put in a fixed amount every month to save collectively toward a goal. SLAs are commonly used to save for things like school fees, grain for next season’s planning, and byccles to transport produce to the market.

Hilarie’s SLA was designed to save for mattresses. Why? Because the grass mattresses commonly used in homes in the villages were uncomfortable and unsanitary, and husbands often used the excuse of poor mattress quality as rationalization for lustful behaviors. Hilarie's SLA—called Sasaneza ("how to prepare a bed for your husband" in Kinyarwandan)—helps women save for mattresses to not only keep their husbands at home, but also act as a conversation-starter to address a wide range of issues in the bedroom, from infidelity to domestic violence. Sasaneza has since spread to over 30 neighboring villages, where she acts as a financial and community advisor.

What's important here is that Hilarie's solution is so much more than a financial instrument. It is an instrument for social change, community improvement, and broader contribution. SLAs have long been recognized by banks and other financial players as targets for their services, but this targeting tends to focus on the transactional and mechanical aspects of SLAs—how to save more securely, how to make savings grow, how to ensure on-time payments. What would it mean to create financial services that have such a social dimension, or that acknowledge the social nuances of the various informal services in an individual's portfolio?

With Visa and its banking clients, we came up with an idea for a community goals service that helps community leaders facilitate goal-setting and fund-raising using simple mobile technologies. We uncovered many other fascinating stories, like Hilarie's, and used these as inspiration for a number of new ideas that touch all parts of people's financial lives.

We are now going down the path of prototyping and evaluation and are happy to share our progress. Last month, we shared our story with Visa at an event held in Singapore's historic Art House. For more from our time in Rwanda, watch Visa's project video.

Ravi Chhatpar is frog's executive strategy director, based in the Johannesburg studio. Cara Silver is a senior design researcher at frog's Shanghai studio.

Visualizing Service Design

Elizabeth Wood — Thu, 30 May 2013 16:27:53 -0500

Roberta Tassi is a senior design researcher and interaction designer at frog Milan, with a deep background in information visualization and communication design.

While working on her graduation thesis—exploring the interconnections between Communication and Service Design—Tassi developed Service Design Tools, a website that gathers visualizations used to support design processes. The collection was created with the idea of sharing her research within the design community, and so far it has caught the attention of both academic and industry insiders. Yet, Tassi warns these tools are meant to inspire, not act as one-size-fits-all solution.

Tell us a little bit about Service Design Tools.
I put together this web platform called Service Design Tools in 2009, and I still manage it today. After published, it has immediately become a sort of reference point within the service design community, it's an organized catalogue of tools and examples that professionals can use to support their design activities day-by-day. It can be browsed in different ways, according to specific communication purposes, and it's conceived as an open platform: I still receive a lot of examples of new tools, keeping the collection growing in time.

Why are visualizations specifically crucial in service design?
When we speak about a service or a system, an ecosystem or concept, they are a lot of times abstract things. Visual representation is a way to make them more tangible, and so, sharable.

The same is when we deal with research outcomes, usually there is the need to translate them into meaningful insights and frameworks to inform the design process, establishing a foundation for all the following activities. And visualization again can be really helpful, to turn information and data into usable materials.

In which sense can visualization support design research?
On one side it's a matter of facilitating the interaction with people: visuals can help establishing the right platform to discuss, and help eliciting hidden behaviors, attitudes or feelings, especially when the subject is sensible. On the other side there's the whole issue of synthesizing and translating the research insights: making complex information manageable and sharable is one of the most important skills of a design researcher. You've to humbly read between the data collected, recognize patterns and shape data in a way that is meaningful for the client and that can really feed the project—otherwise the value of that information gets lost.

You’ve worked with people with diabetes on a few projects. How did you use visualizations in your research?
Well, we had to find a way to talk about their emotions to understand the history of their disease, challenges and needs—and it’s really difficult to achieve that point in a normal conversation.

We created a special tool with mood cards and proposed it to the participants as an exercise to describe their journey across the different stages of the disease. 'It's like a game' -one of them said at the beginning of the interview- looking at all those puppets representing possible feelings. But at the end it really became a powerful way to let people express their emotions and start a conversation about them.

We discovered that every time people with diabetes need to switch to a new therapy, they go through a critical moment that is called 'transition': it's a moment of uncertainty in which they are asked to change habits and learn a lot of new tasks, without knowing exactly if, when and how that phase will end. It's painful, and nobody really wants to talk about it.

--

I think that one of the most important things that represent my way of working is that I always try to do things differently. Even when a method or a tool has worked perfectly in a previous experience, I try to find a new way. The funny thing is that at the same time I've spent a lot of energies in putting together a library of tools, and that often people ask me to reuse my models and visual frameworks, but when it comes to me.. I simply hate templates. Aren't we creatives?

Elizabeth Wood is a copywriter at frog's New York studio.

Message to Mobile Operators: Monetize Personal Data

Theo Forbath — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:17:18 -0500

As the exchange of personal data becomes a lynchpin of the modern business model, mobile operators are confronted with new challenges and opportunities. At frog, we’re working with mobile operators on the challenges and opportunities in a world where a richer personal data stream is opening unprecedented possibilities for creating value. This article explores the why behind the market’s development and how operators can use Leverage, Risk, Scale, and Tangibility to evaluate opportunities to create value from personal data.

Personal data is the root of the next-gen business model

Twenty years ago, nobody imagined creating revenue from personal data. But a number of factors—the rise of the Internet, globalization of workforces, heightened access to capital, and a strong entrepreneurial spirit—changed all that by opening the way to rapid social and technological growth. Enter Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a whole new era in the sharing and consumption of information (read: data). All of these business models were predicated on the notion that if you can create a service cheaply and then offer it for free to establish a large user base, value would follow. And it has, mostly in the form of personal data monetization.

Now, by the time you read this, a huge trail of data will have been generated. Nearly everything we do in our daily routes—from checking email to buying coffee or driving to work—leaves distinct trails of data exhaust that describe who we are, what we do, and how we spend our resources. Today, your morning coffee not only gives you a buzz but also generates a rich personal data stream that can be logged, tracked, shared, and monetized.

As we continue to advance technologically and behaviorally, the opportunities to create value from personal data have become ever more real and exciting. These include embedded computing, the cloud, streaming service delivery models, location-based services, and multi-screen modes of online access in combination with mobile-centricity, hyper-sharing, and rising demands around the quality and cost of technology. With all these technological and behavioral forces taking shape, more and more businesses are taking strides to get in on the data monetization game.

Mobility and a growing dependence on connectivity put mobile operators in an advantageous position in this changing market. After all, operators provide the backbone of a consumer’s digital life and they have high levels of trust concerning sensitive personal data, such as home addresses, billing information, location, calling and texting histories.

Yet it won’t be easy for a mobile operator to create new forms of value from this personal data, mobile or otherwise. Operators must be willing to explore fundamental changes to the existing business framework, from new and different revenue models to new partnerships and customer segments (including B2B models). This will require more agility in responding to market dynamics.

Insights

Over the last few years, we have collaborated with mobile operators on adapting to these new market dynamics and the growing importance of personal data monetization. Our experience has led to a number of observations about the personal data value chain.
Personal data is not consistent enough in purpose and origin to ever constitute a unified dataset, nor should that be our goal. Andas the amount of data grows – from medical and social security records to transactional data - this fragmentation will only increase. Not all of this is equally accessible, because of necessary regulatory and privacy reasons and because companies will want to maintain control over their excusive customer base.
While the future will be driven by advances in the unseen systems that surround us, the objects that we touch and feel and interact with in our daily lives receive the bulk of our attention, love and loyalty. Operators must embrace these objects – our homes, cars and media centers – and the companies that manufacture them, to facilitate new services that will create value for consumes.

Strategy: How Operators Can Respond
These observations suggest that mobile operators should selectively pursue opportunities to cross industries or domains to create specific value for the consumer. One issue we see with clients in this regard: they sometimes assume you can do nearly anything if you just collect some data. But when pressed on what specifically can be done, there are often few concrete ideas.
To be actionable you must understand the needs of the end consumer and work from there. Place the consumer at the center of your ecosystem and imagine which specific combinations of services would provide the most value to them. Once these have been identified, focus on the following factors: a strong operator presence with considerable leverage; low risk; scalability and tangibility.

Leverage
Having leverage is key to any successful business model. Relative to other types of stakeholders, operators have a lot of leverage when:

·       Adding cellular connectivity to an existing service will create new value. One operator we’re working with is already taking steps to team with auto insurance providers in this way. Using cellular networks to tap into sensors in the car (acceleration and braking speeds, impacts, etc.), operators and carriers together can improve insurance underwriting, which can benefit drivers and providers alike.

·       The reliability of the network connection matters. Another operator we’ve encountered is working with healthcare providers on connecting heart monitoring devices via the cellular network. Operators have leverage in this model because their powerful networks can guarantee the level of performance needed for this critical function where other networks cannot.

·       Adding contextual information from the mobile will create new value. For example, operators have an aggregate view of consumer behavior on the mobile. Operators can determine where a customer was located when they did X, who they called after they did Y, and what apps they use in conjunction. This information could be used (with great caution) to create enhanced service experiences for the consumer.

·       An existing service can piggyback on the recurring billing relationship that operators have with the customer. For example, partner service providers could add their bus or taxi fare to the operator’s phone bill and reconcile transactions on the back end to avoid building out consumer billing infrastructure and lower consumer barriers to use.

Identify additional levers that you have as an operator (relative to potential competitors that are not operators). Then identify your levers as a business relative to other operators. These together will help you find points of leverage that will provide sustainable advantages.

Risk
In the example opportunities described above (i.e. connecting cars and heart monitors), the challenge for these operators will be to command value beyond just providing the pipe. Providing the pipe is an easy foot in the door, but going beyond this to create new forms of value introduces greater risk. For an operator to begin to monetize the usage (data) on the network rather than just access to the network, a certain amount of risk is unavoidable. This is because the fundamental levers of an operator’s business model today (focused on monetizing network access) are quite different from the levers that drive the monetization of data:

The challenge for operators is to find opportunities that allow you to pursue elements of the data monetizer’s business model without undermining the core purpose of the business.

Maintaining a sustainable position in the market requires that all the activities your business undertakes have a high degree of consistency. For example, if the mechanics of your company’s business model are based on keeping your costs low internally in order to provide a value-based alternative to competitors, would the pursuit of the new opportunity be consistent with this model? Would it reinforce it? Spend time articulating the core purpose of your business and identifying the principles of your strategy that should not be compromised, then evaluate the new opportunities for their fit within this to minimize your risk.

Scale
If you’re going to pursue opportunities to cross industries and monetize customer data, identify the levers that will create scale within an opportunity. One of the curses of belonging to a multi-billion dollar organization is that opportunities worth (just) a billion may not move the needle enough to get behind. Don’t lose months to detailed business cases, but do the back-of-the-napkin version to make sure the upshot is worth it to your business. Don’t constrain measures of scale to just total available market; attach rates and pull-through for other (and potentially much larger) sources of revenue could be key levers in the modern operator’s business model.

Tangibility
Operators will be much better positioned to create new levels of value for consumers if they play a substantial role in the tangible products people use. Easy to say, but this represents a significant obstacle for operators, who traditionally haven’t focused on making tangible consumer goods. So how can operators respond to this phenomenon in a way that adheres to its core purpose?

Becoming more tangible doesn’t necessarily require that other core businesses that are unseen go away, but if a brand is to elevate its status, gain deep consumer loyalty, and earn the opportunity to generate greater and greater value for a consumer, it needs to remain as close to tangible as possible to ensure that users attribute their experience to that brand. For operators, just one step removed from the consumer’s device, this leap may simply be a matter of revisiting positioning and branding strategies to shift consumer focus away from “five nines” and pipes, toward world class experiences that evoke strong emotion and loyalty, in order to gain the required mindshare.

Conclusion
At frog, we’ve learned that one of the most effective ways to prove a concept is to just do it. Market conditions change rapidly, and the timeline of the innovation lifecycle is shorter today than ever before. As the flow of personal data increases exponentially, mobile operators are in an advantageous position to seize the opportunity to monetize personal data and create value. They can use their widespread connectivity and a broad consumer base to create, leverage and scale up new services.

To do that, operators must look beyond existing business models and frameworks to seek new partnerships, revenue sources and consumer segments. They must be open to crossing industries and domains, and most of all, focusing on the needs of the end consumer and what services and experiences would be of value to them.

As frog’s vice president of innovation strategy, Theo Forbath helps clients transform their products and services, key business systems, and applications into competitive global solutions.

The 10 Building Blocks of Design Studio Culture

David Sherwin — Mon, 13 May 2013 08:21:15 -0500

This is an excerpt from from my new book, Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers, out now from HOW Books.

Culture is everything people in a design business do that supports the process of making work happen. Culture can create joy for designers, while improvements in process can facilitate profit. A common misperception is that culture emerges organically based on the decisions of a business owner or CEO. But a design studio’s culture is not created solely by those at the top. For a design-led business, culture is generated from ongoing contributions and discoveries from both studio owners and employees.

In researching my recent book on how design businesses can be more successful, I began to see important building blocks that were present in the most successful studios. These building blocks are divided into two groups: hard building blocks and soft building blocks. Hard building blocks are realized through a budget, meaning that you can allocate money and time for them as part of business overhead. The soft building blocks can be created through the decisions employees make over the course of their daily work, life and play (with less material investment by the owners).

A healthy studio culture draws equally from both types of building blocks. They provide emotional and material stability to employees in the face of ongoing work challenges, and often clients, family and the general public perceive them as ingredients of the company’s brand. These building blocks are equally present within design firms and in-house design teams—though for the latter, the composition of some building blocks may be heavily influenced by the company's overall behavior and needs.

Let’s take a deep dive into these building blocks, with important questions to ask yourself (and your team) in order to create a strong studio culture.

The “hard” building blocks of design studio culture

Type of Work

Type of work is the largest cultural building block for any studio, as the majority of the time in the studio is spent immersed in the work.

The kinds of customers selected by the business owner, the design disciplines practiced by the staff and the way projects are delivered by the team all contribute to the excitement that motivates employees and owners when they start work every morning.

What follows are the questions you should be asking yourself before the phone rings and prospective clients ask you if you’d like to take on a project. Your answers, and how they may overlap (or not) with your staff’s answers, will help you better understand where you can take your studio portfolio.

Customer types

What industries do you want to work with? As an example: Health care or consumer electronics?
What size of client do you prefer? Working with small companies or only the Fortune 100?
Are you working with for-profit companies? Are you focusing on opportunities from the nonprofit sector? Or are you interested in working with start-up firms?
How deeply are you entrenched in helping shape your client’s business? Are you a strategic partner, or does the client see you more as an executional vendor?
What types of brands are you seeking to work with? Small, hip local companies? Or older, established international firms?
What ethical stance do you take on certain types of clients? For example, working with a religious organization may not be considered appropriate for some studios, while others would jump at the chance.

Discipline and practices of design

What types of design does your studio want to practice? Print design? Interactive? Industrial? Environmental? Service?
What tangible things do you want to generate? One of the benefits of designing products, environments and brand systems is that every project generates physical evidence of your efforts. When creating interactive products or online advertising, that may not be the case. You may blink and miss it.
On what scale do you want to operate? For example: If your firm focuses on branding, do you want to create simple identity systems or the kind with hundreds of moving parts?
What other disciplines would you like to partner with? For instance, an interior designer may work with an architecture firm to design a retail space.

Style of delivery

What size projects do you seek? Do you prefer short-term projects, or would you enjoy working on an engagement that lasts years?
Are there specific delivery processes you prefer over others? Some designers like to work in a controlled waterfall-style project process, while others like the close collaboration and constant change that emerges from an agile or scrum-based project process.
Where are the clients located? Are you comfortable working with clients in a completely virtual manner, or do you prefer face-to-face interaction?
What level of security do you want as part of the client relationship? For example, do you desire a client retainer, which guarantees revenue at the cost of freedom? Or do you generate revenues from flat fees, causing the staff to regularly propose and secure new work as part of their work life? This can influence the studio atmosphere.

Space
Once you know what kind of work you’d like to create, you’ll need a space where you can make the magic happen. Studio owners must carefully consider the placement of their work space, the studio layout, the use of the studio environment and whether a formal space is even necessary to get the design work done.

Placement
You may be tempted to lease or purchase space in a far away, yet “up and coming” neighborhood that is great for your budget. However, getting to work shouldn’t be hard work for your employees or your clients. Otherwise you are implicitly charging your employees time that they could be using to take care of their wants and needs. Well-placed studios can help support those needs, by being near local coffee shops and restaurants, gyms and yoga studios, public transit or the freeway.

Layout
The layout of a studio helps facilitate the flow of conversation and the style of work taking place. Studio layouts can be open, closed or some combination of open and closed elements.

Closed environments are manifested through cube farms, closed-door offices and conference rooms—areas where people can seal themselves off from others and focus on their work. My first years as a designer took place in studio environments where each designer had his own cubicle, and any ongoing conversations required us to peek our heads over walls. At one point, we joked about sawing holes in the cubicle walls so we could see each other’s faces without having to stand up. (This was before video chat, mind you.) The layout of the space was a direct reflection of the kind of work that was taking place: production-heavy print deliverables.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have been working the past six years in entirely open studios, with little to no privacy possible unless I exit the studio floor. The complexity of the work product—much of it rooted in designing and developing interactive products and services—requires constant collaboration. An open studio plan encourages ad hoc conversation and a cross-pollination of ideas that otherwise would never see the light of day. However, an open plan also requires pockets of privacy, whether via conference rooms or closed-door “war rooms” where the staff can work without distraction. Noise-canceling headphones also are handy—I consider them the new “do not disturb” sign.

Use of environment
Decisions about the use of studio space can have a major impact on culture for both employees and visitors to your studio.

Design Commission leases an affordable studio space within the Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts. As a requirement in the lease, part of the design studio must be run as an art gallery. Every first Thursday of the month, the employees have to put on a show as part of a community art walk. Year after year, they have exhibited work from a range of international artists as well as created their own interactive art installations. This activity is also reflected online through a gallery website.

Other examples come from design studios that intentionally preserve a portion of their space for bringing in visiting artists and fellows, running a small retail store or subletting office space to like-minded businesses.

Co-location via virtual spaces
Some businesses choose to forgo a leased office space and work virtually, using by-the-meeting office spaces for face-to-face meetings with clients. In these situations, design teams work from home or from a local coffee shop, connecting regularly through email, IM, phone calls, video chat and online collaboration tools such as Basecamp, Campfire and WebEx. With the recent increase in drop-in and shared spaces, you can have the benefits of a studio environment on demand—providing the needed infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of leasing a full-time space. Plus, you also get the benefit of having some office mates to chat with.

Amenities

Amenities help create an atmosphere that supports staff as they go about their business. These amenities can help satisfy creature comforts—such as the daily caffeine fix—or encourage the staff to stick around the office, whether to socialize or to stay at work a little longer. (Sometimes both.)

Amenities are factored into the studio overhead as part of the benefits provided to all employees. They may be as simple as free soda and juice in the fridge, or a studio iTunes account stocked with thousands of tunes. Whether it’s locally sourced fruits and vegetables as a daily late afternoon snack or ice cream sundaes with chocolate chip cookie dough on the side after a hard week, what does your studio provide to keep your staff well-fed and happy?

Amenities may also include side benefits, such as subsidized gym memberships, a weekly on-site masseuse or free dining for those who choose to work past 7 p.m. Be aware that these perks can say a lot about your firm to potential employees. If you offer free cab rides home after 9 p.m., you might be broadcasting that working there requires staying late.

Training

Training is a line item struck from studio budgets when cash flow is meager. But both on-site and off-site training opportunities help foster a culture of continual learning. Designers are refreshed and revitalized by information and inspiration from outside their daily purview or work responsibilities. This can happen in person or virtually, whether by attending conferences and events, taking classes in new techniques or technologies, or fostering staff-led learning opportunities within your company.

Strapped for cash but want to satisfy your staff? Rotate the staffers who attend important events and require them to summarize and share what they learned with the studio.

The “soft” building blocks of design studio culture

Community

All work and no play can make a design team wear away. For this reason, design business owners should carve out dedicated time where studio staff can decompress and grow closer on a personal level.

Community-building activities and social outlets may be designed into the workday by studio management and staff, but ideally they should be realized and enlivened by the staff. Whether movie nights, Friday afternoon cheese tastings or ad-hoc happy hours, semiregular social outlets are often the highlight of a busy week. They become rituals ingrained in the company operations.

When I lived on the East Coast, Wednesday lunch meant Tex-Mex. It was our ritual for decompression. The studio principal would take the last few minutes of lunch to encourage staffers to talk about what was happening in their work and to tap into the creativity of the other designers to help them solve any problems they might be having. (It also made the lunch billable!)

The larger the business, the more these connection opportunities will help define the culture and inspire your staff. “The details, rituals and the camaraderie are an important part of frog culture,” says Doreen Lorenzo, president of frog, a global innovation firm. “For example, coffee time is at 4 p.m. every day at every office. It is a time to pause, maybe grab a bite to eat, talk to someone you haven’t spoken to, even play a friendly but competitive game of foosball. I often thought that if we took coffee time away we would have the highest attrition frog has ever seen. These small details make it an important reason why people choose to work at frog.”

Philanthropy

While earning money is obviously important for running a stable business, many studios also donate staff time or money toward passion projects related to nonprofit, educational and philanthropic causes. Studios can provide staffers with charity days that they can use individually or in groups. Some studios donate their space or evening hours toward supporting local educational or fundraising events. The costs of these efforts are included in studio overhead and can influence the type of work that a studio receives.

Recognition

Design business owners set the tone regarding how the performance of studio staff and their work should be recognized. The best recognition for your efforts should come from your client’s customers. Studio staffers, however, may desire additional praise from their peers, the press or the blogosphere. Some studios take pains to enter competitions, though such efforts can be costly and steal time and attention away from other endeavors.

Also, recognition doesn’t have to be solely about the work. The personal passions of studio staff can be shared with the world, as long as you continue to support your studio culture and properly represent your brand.

Leadership

How the studio owners lead a team, as well as how staff are properly trained and supported in taking leadership roles, can have major cultural implications for staff happiness. Not enough leadership, and your core staff may feel adrift. Too much active leadership, and your staff can feel like there’s no space in the work (or the studio) for their vision.

Challenge

A high level of challenge in client projects can supercharge a studio environment. Smaller-scale, more tactical projects may exercise the staff’s skills and craft sensibilities. Tackling larger-scale projects and design problems can provide the studio with new perspectives on persistent issues in the world and give your staff the chance to make a difference.

Additionally studio owners and staff can take on internal projects and initiatives to stay nimble and challenged when the project work isn’t as stimulating as they would like. Regular critique of ongoing projects should also challenge designers and studio owners to realize their best work.

Ownership

Ownership is the one of the best indicators of healthy leadership. Ownership is when the staff feels like they have control over their time and their work product. It emerges when business leaders provide their designers with the necessary space to ideate and create appropriate design solutions. It can also arise when a designer is able to imprint her unique perspectives and expertise on any of the cultural building blocks, such as the design of her office space, securing the right type of work, gaining a leadership role, receiving recognition or even coordinating a guest speaker series for the office.

Some design businesses provide incentives for demonstrating ownership around growing studio accounts, such as profit sharing. Staff can also gain an ownership stake in the studio if they stay with the studio for a substantial period of time. However, such monetary carrots might not appeal to everyone, and they should never preclude your staff receiving regular opportunities that align with their evolving passions.

What studio culture would you like to create?

Now that you know the building blocks of design studio culture, what are you going to do to focus on the culture at your studio or business?

I’ve created a Studio Culture Worksheet along with David Conrad, the Studio Director of Design Commission, to help you answer the following questions: What can your staff do to create their ideal studio culture? And how can that culture align with everyone’s desired working environment?

Here’s how to use the worksheet:

Take the worksheet and list what cultural building blocks you currently have in place as part of your studio.
Consider, based on what you want to do in the future, what new building blocks might increase joy. Add them to the worksheet.
Highlight which cultural building blocks you could give to others to increase their sense of ownership.
Have other team members do steps 1–3 with their own copy of the worksheet.
Merge all of your answers together and implement what the majority of the staff want first. Delegate ownership of specific initiatives to those on your team that have growth goals aligned with the culture-building activities.

Get a copy of Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers on Amazon.com.

Designing the Future / The Future of Design

hannah.piercey@frogdesign.com — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:31:19 -0500

Healthcare Needs Innovation Now

Fabio Sergio — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:34:32 -0500

New developments in connectivity and monitoring are shifting an industry traditionally defined by incremental change.

frogThink at The Tech

Timothy Morey, Bonnie Reese, and Maryanna Rogers — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:24:27 -0500

Approaching a problem with a design mindset is a craft—a way of working that may seem effortless, or even second nature, to a master craftsman, but can prove very hard indeed for a novice. And, like all crafts, it is something you learn by doing rather than by knowing. You can read all about “Design Thinking,” or other user-centric approaches, but it is only when you start to do them, to apply them, and to practice them that you start on the journey to becoming a master craftsman. As a result, these methodologies don’t really lend themselves to classic corporate education seminars. You can learn what they are in a seminar but not how to apply them. Such methodologies do not easily fit into a traditional school curriculum either. Though core curriculum standards are beginning to value twenty-first century skills, such as collaboration and creative problem solving, it is not obvious how a school might integrate the design-mindset into students’ schedules. It’s creative but it’s not “art”; it involves problem solving but it’s not math. So, if design-centric thinking is the future, and schools are not adopting it, how and where might we teach it?

Museums are a great place to start. They aren’t constrained by curriculum, they are environments that celebrate innovation and creativity, and they are often dealing with groups of students looking for an interactive experience.

The Tech Museum of Innovation is rising to the challenge, employing a hands-on, collaborative approach to its exhibit philosophy. As a museum without a collection to showcase, they put designing and making at the center of the museum experience. In fact, The Tech Museum has been providing opportunities for visitors to engage in “design challenge learning,” as they call it, for over 25 years—with The Tech Challenge (an annual team–based design challenge for 5th-12th graders), design-based lab programs, summer camps, and workshops. Now, as the museum is in the process of a complete re-design, they are also focusing on how to bring more design challenge learning to the museum floor.

The exhibit design team from The Tech came to frog and asked us how best to use some of our collaborative methodologies (which we call frogThink) in a museum environment with kids. We were thrilled to be asked to think through this with them and quickly pulled together a cross disciplinary team to engage for a day and define what this experience might look like. What better way to tackle the challenge than through some collaborative design exercises?

We started off the workshop by defining key Experience Principles. It was important to identify a set of principles that took into account the range of roles and people who would be engaged in the experience – the kids, the teachers who bring school groups, the parents, and the museum staff. Here were some of the key principles we identified through this exercise:

Make it collaborative: Give everyone a clear role in the process (including the adults on the sidelines)
Make it fun and entertaining for everyone
Provide a low barrier of entry, making it easy to get drawn in to the activity
Tie the activity to an achievable/tangible output
Create a lab environment where you feel inspired to invent and it’s safe to fail
Enable sharing and celebrate the outputs
Allow for reflection and realization of value

After establishing a shared vision for the key elements the experience should incorporate, we reviewed a range of different types of frogThink activities that we use in our business. Then we broke up into groups to tackle the design of the actual activity. We formed three groups made up of designers from both frog and The Tech and tasked each group with creating an activity flow of how museum visitors might engage in designing a social robot. We asked each group to use the Experience Principles as a touchstone for their activity design.

Our design also had to take into account the logistics of managing a field trip. These specific needs added a certain degree of complexity—keeping them safe, engaged and contained, taking into account the required chaperone-to-kid ratio, providing them with opportunities to MOVE and run around. We also had to ensure our activities would scale to different timeframes given the various constraints on school groups’ schedules. Finally, we had to recognize that not all chaperones speak English.

Each group designed a unique activity flow that responded to the challenge. One activity engaged the group with a provocative video to draw them into the challenge. Another group focused on simulating customer research to define the solution. The third group employed a lateral thinking exercise to generate unique robot solutions. Despite the differences in process, each solution aligned across the Experience Principles and included compelling components that could be prototyped.

The next step will be for the exhibits team at The Tech Museum to prototype these activities to test with the kids to see what works and what needs further shaping. We look forward to hearing what worked and what didn’t. Like all good design, we know it will need to go through numerous cycles of iteration informed by user feedback and testing. Luckily, The Tech team is committed and we know they’ll do a great job tuning the activities for their audience.

Timothy Morey is an assistant VP for the Innovation Strategy Group (ISG) at frog’s San Francisco studio. Bonnie Reese is a principal creative director at frog’s Austin studio. Maryanna Rogers is The Tech Museum’s director of innovation.

Mobile Ecosystems Evolving

Various frogs — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:15:37 -0500

Download Mobile Ecosystems Evolving

Mobile technology is more than the sum of the world’s portable electronic devices and the supporting telecommunications infrastructure.

Unlike earlier versions of the Internet, the mobile Web is a halo of information that follows us almost everywhere, an increasingly meaningful part of our most minute interactions with the physical world. It is an infinitely complex, dynamic system fed by billions of users and a growing variety of hardware and software programs that generate, transmit, and structure data.

These continuous streams of data are already transforming business on many fronts. How can improved user experience design make the vast trove of data more useful? What role does hardware play in the new digital ecosystems? And as the mobile Web continues to evolve, how will we prefer to interact with it?

frog explored these questions over the course of several weeks in our recent web series, Mobile Ecosystems Evolving. From healthcare, to retail, to enterprise—download the full collection of the insights and perspectives that were shared as we studied the future of mobile technology and its impact on diverse industries.