Why Africans need convenience

Grant Gibbs designed the Hippo Water Roller to give poor, rural South Africans an easier way to collect water. The Hippo is a plastic tank which doubles as a wheel, with a handle. It's easy to fill and easy to pull over rough rural terrain, even by children. It's an ingenious solution and as it turned out, people love the product, but will not pay for it. Despite its success as a development aid project, it was always acknowledged that it would not be a commercial success.

On the other hand, an interesting fact that emerged from the 1999 ICSID Interdesign, hosted by the Design Institute of South Africa was that the same disadvantaged people would pay someone to deliver water to their homes, rather than fetching it themselves from a communal tap. It seems that time is as valuable at the bottom of the pyramid as at the top.

At the opposite end of the technology spectrum, mobile phone company MTN has become one of the fastest growing telecoms companies in the world by expanding into risky markets in Africa. Some stories tell of people traveling for days to spend several month's wages on a phone. It's easy to assume that the explosive growth of mobile phone sales in Africa is simply a matter of usefulness; people are able to communicate where previously they were not. However it's possible that this is only part of the reason.
side from the inevitable calls to far away family and the crucial contact number for an itinerant handyman, mobile phones are used to arrange a lift, a party or for other social events that would have otherwise meant a possibly fruitless walk. In other words, the phone provides convenience, just like the service of water delivery.

C.K. Prahalad has pointed out that developing world customers are savvy and value-conscious. That's true, but there could be more to their discernment than that. Maybe the difference between the Hippo Roller and MTN is that these markets need not only great usefulness but also great convenience before they'll open their wallets. Add the possibility of earning extra money and you may have a winner.


Tasos Calantzis

Product Leads and Strategic Designers

In Design Group Organization I outlined the structural relationship between Product Leads (designers responsible for a specific business unit's product designs) and Strategic Designers (designers who lead the integration of corporate strategy and product concepts) within a large design team. In this organizational model, Product Leads and Strategic Designers often work on the same product but in different roles and at varying capacities.
During the ideation phase of a new product, the Strategic Designer is heavily involved. They work with key business stakeholders and corporate or product strategy teams to illustrate a vision of success through product concepts. They use the power of narrative and visualization to collaboratively develop a product vision that corporate stakeholders ultimately sign-off on.

During this process, the Product Lead is involved but does not need to absorb the overhead of the strategy development process. As a result, they remain able to direct the efforts of their design team on existing products for which they remain responsible. The Strategic Designer is handling most of the hands-on work and meetings for the new product.

As the ideation phase moves closer to implementation the Product Lead becomes more involved. They begin to work closely with the Strategic Designer on more detailed information architecture and interaction design concepts. Gradually this process generates a complete design spec for the new product. During this period, the Strategic Designer's involvement lessens as the Product Lead takes on ownership of the product.

Luke Wroblewski, a prolific writer and design strategist, has written a series on the organizational structure of a corporate design department. He has kindly permitted DD to reblog three of his posts on the topic here.

Design Group Growth Paths

Within a large design group you are likely to encounter two distinguishing career goals: designers who want to manage others and designers who don't. As a result, it makes sense for the organizational structure of the group to support the career goals of both individual contributors and managers.
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In both cases, the opportunities may exist beyond the design organization. Product Leads may opt to pursue more direct product ownership by absorbing business responsibilities and becoming business/product owners in the Product Management organization. Strategic Designers may instead expand their skills to include new business growth and move into Product or Corporate Strategy groups. The diagram below illustrates these potential growth paths as well as those found within the design group (red lines).

Read the full post accompanying this growth chart here.

Luke Wroblewski, a prolific writer and design strategist, has written a series on the organizational structure of a corporate design department. He has kindly permitted DD to reblog three of his posts on the topic here.

Is design the new management consultancy?

http://www.designdirectory.com/blog/archives/business/default.asp

Victor Lombardi of the Noisebetweenstations blog has kindly consented to a reblog of his seminal post "Is design the new management consultancy?" here. He uses logic and evidence to break down the facts and reach the possible answer. Which is no, design is not the new management consultancy.
Some folks are asking this question. I've spent the past two years making the transition from designer to business consultant, jumping a lot of hurdles along the way. Here's a little of what I learned:
* Highlight opportunities instead of bitching. As designers, we walk around in the world and feel overly sensitive to everything that isn't designed well. We watch customers struggle when using poorly designed products. There's an inclination to highlight these faults to executives whom we think should know about these faults. And maybe they should, but mostly they need help seeing the big opportunities. It might sound like product faults and market opportunities are simply the flip side of the same coin, but it's the difference between being perceived as a whiny designer and a valued business advisor.

* Know your limits. When I hear a designer say, "We were doing the same kind of work McKinsey would do" I think "You really have no fucking idea what McKinsey does." I used to work at BCG (in the IT dept) and I have yet to meet a designer with thinking, methods, and tools nearly as sophisticated as those consultants. Just consider the career path at these firms: they take the top students from the top business schools who in turn have taken the top undergrads, and so on. Then the consultants work in a demanding up-or-out environment where excellence is necessary. This culture breeds great execution much more effectively than the best design studio cultures.

And I've beat the design thinking drum as much as anyone, but it's naive to believe only designers think this way.

* Invest in new hammers. Not every business problem is best solved by a product/service design or redesign. Sometimes an acquisition is the answer, or a divestiture, or hedging the financial markets. Business leaders have a lot of tools in their toolbox: marketing, sales, operations, finance, IT, HR, strategy, customer service etc., and each of these in turn has a deep toolbox, with practitioners who all want more strategic influence. Understanding them - and knowing when product or service design is not the best approach - makes for a more well-rounded management consultant.

* See the big picture. Sometimes design does have direct influence on business strategy. But describing that influence in terms of customer experience alone can lack the information that executives want to hear. Learning how to describe design's benefits in financial and strategic language is key.

* Be realistic about the influence of design. The current barrage of Fast Company and BusinessWeek stories on design can lull us into the impression that design is now king. In my experience, this isn't anywhere near the case. Sure, there are great changes happening: I see more companies doing field research and more realization of the power of customer experience. But it'll take years for the generations of business people to change their thinking and practices.

* Know what you mean when you use the word strategy. Unfortunately, strategy has become a muddled word, the meaning even traditional management consultants don't agree on (see Strategy Bites Back for an amusing look at the situation). But this is no excuse for us to practice muddled thinking. Here's a simple way I've been clarifying it in conversation:

o Product/service design: decide how to create something

o Design strategy: decide what to create, with a perspective beyond the current cycle (e.g. 3-5 years)

o Business strategy: decide what a business should do, with a perspective beyond the current cycle (e.g. 3-5 years)

Join the conversation in Victor's blog here.