“Designing Companies,” an article in today's Forbes.com, by Tom Van Riper, reminds us that there's more to “industrial” design than creating cool products. Van Riper searches customer-experience design for that all-important ROI needed to get executives' attention -- and their business. Unfortunately, as he discovers, there are few metrics because services are such fluid “objects” in the first place.
American companies have shown they can build better mousetraps, but can they create shorter waiting lines and fairer insurance premiums?
For all the kudos and profits garnered by consumer product companies like Apple Computer and Procter & Gamble for innovative gadgets like the iPod and the Swiffer, it's the service industry that now drives nearly 80% of the U.S. economy. And most players in that space--from banks to retailers to insurers--are just beginning to recognize their need to offer their customers the type of innovation that industrial designers have long brought to consumer products.
That specialized breed calling themselves business design consultants think service companies represent the next wave of their work, adapting to service industries the principles that product makers have used to differentiate themselves in the fight for retail shelf space.
I don't think Van Riper makes a great case for customer-experience design, which is too bad given the relative paucity of articles on the topic in leading journals like FORBES. Read it for the brief case studies that constitute the second half of the article.
Despite its alluring title, “Designing Companies” identifies none of the companies actually designing companies, only their giant corporate clients. My guess is that you, the readers of this blog, are them. Care to identify yourselves?
BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
