Actively Designing to Values, DtVs
I would like to thank the team at CMP’s Design & Innovation Global for the opportunity to present at Design Thinking Digital Summit. This was my first public talk in my new job as Chief Designer for Nokia Software, which made the occasion even more memorable for me.
I am also grateful for the continued one one one discussions that some of us are having over LinkedIn messaging, and the opportunity to exchange insights on the topic.
Value (singular) refers to the correlation between perceived and comparative worth and quality of a solution in the shape of a product and/or service.
Perceived value is a performance metric, a lagging indicator that confirms the degree to which design’s outcomes are met: market desirability and customer delight being two examples.
Brand Equity Value (BEV) is the ultimate measurement of composite business performance as a whole.
Values (plural) relate to our design belief system and, therefore, the culture that equips the job with moral imagination, drive, purpose and meaning.
Design’s human centricity is the soul of any system. Reality dictates that, in today’s world, all end-to-end technological solutions happen to be Human Machine Systems (HMS) without exception. Note the emphasis on the ‘end-to-end’ scope… there is no escaping that fact.
Values (plural) also refers to qualitative and quantitative leading indicators that inform the quality of design work in progress.
This means both new data and insights generated as we rapidly experiment, prototype options and conduct multivariate testing… these are intensive hyper-iterative cycles that orient and inform a design’s progression and improvement through all the steps from ideation to blueprinting. This is quintessential to Design Thinking. Simply put, without that effort there is no Design Thinking as such.
As an example, in Quality eXperiences by Design (QXbD) we assess: usefulness, utility, usability and affectivity values, which are ranked by effectiveness and efficiency parameters. That construct shapes the experiential qualities that define a system’s capability and behavioral model leading to production design blueprints.
QXbD‘s intertwines these with continuity and differentiability appraisals as we assess business model attractiveness and viability and, last but definitely not least, the technologies’ development, delivery, servicing feasibility over the product and/or service lifecycle. Note that the context is System Design as a holistic and interdisciplinary undertaking.
Designing to Optimal Values makes the job interesting, rigorous and tactical. Delivering optimal value relies on the honesty of Value Stream Mapping (VSM) cost-benefit analysis. How we define the scope and impact of the benefits, as well as difficult trade-offs, is a function of the design belief system and the solution’s soul.
One more thought… by now it becomes quite obvious that Value Propositions are best conceived by undertaking painstaking interdisciplinary design work.
I would also like to thank those of you who joined the live session and, as usual, I am happy to continue the discussion to trade insights as well as contrasting thoughts and viewpoints. We can have that conversation over LinkedIn messaging to keep things going.