Two / Is design just “the flashy looks” or is there more behind the scenes? What else is important?

Yeah, Nice Chair, It’s Design

A lot of ideas exist these days about design and some of them are profound, some of them are just superficial. People use the word their new chair: ‘yeah, nice chair, it’s design’, just talking about the flashy looks of the chair. And, in a way they’re right. But they might perhaps highlight only one aspect of the new chair: just the ‘looks’, which is only a part of design. So the looks of course are an important ingredient of design but there are many more design aspects to the chair which might not jump to the eye immediately. So…. if you would like to know more about designing you should begin to understand more about the different demands on a design and on a designer in making a design. 

Return on Investment

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You should also understand  that a design, for instance for a chair or a coffee-machine is a product that a company is investing in. A the company needs return on it’s investment, and it has to have a good pricing to sell well and deliver enough profit. So…. the company needs to know a lot about what a customer precisely needs and experiences in using the coffeemaker. So these are also aspects of a good design: company’s return on investment, pricing and customer-satisfaction. So… now we have three aspects that also need to be put in a design: the looks,(appeal), the return on investment, and the needs of the customer.

Performance and Durability

Ready? No! Of course the thing has to function well and has to be durable, so here we have two aspects put into the design that are on the inside of the machine and do not jump to the eye so quickly. It has to perform again and again so… this means it has to be solid.

Identity

Then, back to the looks. Well, when a company only does what the customer wants, it is very likely to become a boring company without an identity of itself. So, the own corporate identity is balanced by the customer needs and vice-versa. Here we see that the looks of a product is not a superficial thing like ‘flashy’ or something. In our example the looks of the coffee-machine has many deep layers that tell deep things about the companies identity and about the identity and needs of the consumer. So you’ll have to know your customers and you’ll have to define your identity as a company and put that into the design as well.

Set of Demands

Perhaps you can now understand that the task of a designer is more than making a nice drawing of a chair or a coffee-machine, he has to incorporate many aspects into one product with many features and demands.Stronger still: if one of these demands fails, it’s probably so that the coffee-machine won’t have any success. 

These aspects are know as the design-mix: 

  • The design of the inside technology
  • The functioning and performance
  • Company identity
  • Aesthetics, the appeal
  • Quality, durability
  • Customer needs and the experience of the customer.

More to Come

But there there is still more, for just having made good product doesn’t mean it sells automatic. So next time I will be talking about other demands on the design-process that are important for the marketing of the product.

this article is part 2 of a series about design Management. To read the previous article go to:

http://bizcovering.com/business/design-management-a-company-means-well-worth-the-investment/