"Coca-cola: Building a Better Design Machine" [BusinessWeek]
This is an old article but I definitely think is an example of where the design practice is expanding to: creating meta-design tools and processes that will enable people who do not have a traditional design background to actually design something. And this something will be constrained and within guidelines, but will be good enough for people to actually make a narrow yet useful use of a design tool.
Design tools have become this uber-monsters that can do virtually everything: think about photoshop CS4 or the latest video editing tool you fancy the most. Is there anything they can't do? These are definitely tools for expert designers, who spend literally 100% of their time designing stuff. But what about the people who have a business function within a company other than design and wants to harness the power of design to do their job better? Do they really have to learn the whole complexity of of an advanced tool just to help them think, visualize, prototype or look for solutions that had nothing to do with the expert practice of design as an end?
The Coca-cola 'design machine' is just an example of how a company is empowering their stakeholders to make better design decissions that are aligned with the overall business strategy in a very friendly and non-obtrusive way. Coca-cola business goal is not to have people spend time thinking about the composition of an ad. They want people to think about how the ads can connect better with their customers giving a set of design guidelines. These design machine users leapfrog the operational aspects of visual design and move to a higher level of thinking in order to focus on what really matters to them which is to apply the best business strategy possible in alignment with Coca-cola brand strategy.
Posts
While in general your thoughts here are in the right direction, don't forget about the power of pencil and paper for designing things. Those are pretty accessible, and cheap too.
ReplyDeleteI am not arguing that machines could design anything independently without our involvement.
ReplyDeleteHere I am making the case for machines/tools that assist humans to make better 'design' decisions.
A store manager might not know how to use pencil and paper to design a point of display that will help him sell more cokes bottles. But what he surely does know is what kind of customers he has, what are their preferences, what are their buying patterns, etc. and and this is the valuable knowledge that matters to design something that fits his store.
He will provide his business judgment and the tool will put it into practice within a specific set of design guidelines based on patterns the Coca-Cola company has already identified. Everybody wins.