Apple are famous for their design. From the stylish iPod and iPhone through to the stylish iMac and MacBooks, elegant design runs through everything Apple does. So, it seems almost churlish to ask: are Apple good at design? But it’s worth asking anyway. I used to use Apple computers from the early days – one…
Design thinking in business is becoming increasingly mainstream. The October 2007 issue of Fast Company magazine has a terrific special feature section on design thinking, profiling the designers who have brought design thinking to the forefront of modern corporate thought. Particularly interesting is the article on Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject. Fuseproject, founded 8 years…
A recent post from BusinessWeek Online reminds us that when starting a business, the Field of Dreams approach – “Build it and They Will Come” – is entirely the wrong approach: instead we should first go out and find one or more customers, at the earliest possible opportunity. This may be, perhaps, before we even…
Quality is often described in project management methodologies such as PRINCE2 as conformance of a project deliverable with predefined customer acceptance criteria. This is not how I naturally think of Quality. I think of a Quality product as a product that is well designed, with the needs of its target users and markets carefully considered,…
One of the hottest approaches to creativity and innovation in business right now is the design approach. In the United States, D-schools (design schools) such as the Stanford Design School are springing up in competion with (or complementing) traditional B-schools (business schools). The basic idea of the design approach is to (i) understand the client…