Editor’s Note: This snippet is from “The Creative Professional’s Guide to Money: How to think about it. How to talk about it. How to manage it.” By Illise Benun, founder of Marketing-Mentor.com. Published by HOW Books, 2011. It’s a book we highly recommend because it is filled with practical, knowledgeable advice, and encourages designers to respect what they have to offer and to find clients who feel the same. From time to time, Ilise has said we can reprint sections.

Editor’s Note: In his new book, Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO, steps back from focusing on creating elegant objects and beautifying the world around us, to examining design thinking itself. The best designers, he says, match necessity to utility, constraint to possibility and need to demand. Most people are “ingenious at adapting to inconvenient situations that they are often not even aware that they are doing so,” Brown claims. “Traditional research techniques such as focus groups and surveys, which in most case simply ask people what they want, rarely yield important insights…Henry Ford understood this when he remarked, ‘If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.’” This is an excerpt from the chapter where Brown talks about three mutually reinforcing elements of any successful design program – insight, observation and empathy. We asked to present the section on empathy.

It’s possible to spend days, weeks, or months conducting [ethnographic and behavorial] research, but at the end of it all we will have little more than stacks of field notes, videotapes, and photographs unless we can connect with the people we are observing at a fundamental level. We call this “empathy,” and it is perhaps the most important distinction between academic thinking and design thinking. We are not trying to generate new knowledge, test a theory, or validate a scientific hypothesis—that’s the work of our university colleagues and an indispensable part of our shared intellectual landscape. The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives.

Empathy is the mental habit that moves us beyond thinking of people as laboratory rats or standard deviations. If we are to “borrow” the lives of other people to inspire new ideas, we need to begin by recognizing that their seemingly inexplicable behaviors represent different strategies for coping with the confusing, complex, and contradictory world in which they live. The computer mouse developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s was an intricate technical apparatus invented by engineers and intended for engineers. To them it made perfect sense that it should be taken apart and cleaned at the end of the day. But when the fledgling Apple Computer asked us to help it create a computer “for the rest of us,” we gained our first lesson in the value of empathy.

A designer, no less than an engineer or marketing executive, who simply generalizes from his own standards and expectations will limit the field of opportunity. A thirty-year-old man does not have the same life experiences as a sixty-year-old woman. An affluent Californian has little in common with a tenant farmer living on the outskirts of Nairobi. A talented, conscientious industrial designer, settling down at her desk after an invigorating ride on her mountain bike, may be ill prepared to design a simple kitchen gadget for her grandmother who is suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.

We build these bridges of insight through empathy, the effort to see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions. In 2000, Robert Porter, the president and CEO of the SSM DePaul Health Center in Saint Louis, approached IDEO with a vision. Porter had seen the episode of ABC’s Nightline in which Ted Koppel had challenged us to redesign the American shopping cart in one week and wanted to discuss the implications of our process for a new wing of the hospital. But we had a vision too, and we saw an opportunity for a new and radical “codesign” process that would join designers and health care professionals in a common effort. We challenged ourselves by starting with what is perhaps the most demanding of all hospital environments: the emergency room.

Drawing upon his highly specialized expertise in the ethnographic study of technology and complex systems, Kristian Simsarian, one of the core team members, set out to capture the patient experience. What better way to do so than to check into the hospital and go through the emergency room experience, from admission to examination, as if he were a patient? Feigning a foot injury, Kristian placed himself into the shoes—and in fact, onto the gurney—of the average emergency room patient. He saw firsthand how disorienting the check-in process could be. He experienced the frustration of being asked to wait, without ever being told what he was waiting for or why. He endured the anxiety of being wheeled by an unidentified staffer down an anonymous corridor through a pair of intimidating double doors and into the glare and the din of the emergency room.

We have all had those kinds of first-person, first-time experiences—buying our first car, stepping out of the airport in a city we have never visited, evaluating assisted living facilities for an aging parent. In these situations we look at everything with a much higher level of acuity because nothing is familiar and we have not fallen into the routines that make daily life manageable. With a video camera tucked discreetly beneath his hospital gown, Kristian captured a patient’s experience in a way that no surgeon, nurse, or ambulance driver could possibly have done.

When Kristian returned from his undercover mission, the team reviewed the unedited video and spotted numerous opportunities for improving the patient experience. But there was a larger discovery. As they sat through minute after tedious minute of acoustic ceiling tiles, look-alike hallways, and featureless waiting areas, it became increasingly evident that these details, not the efficiency of the staff or the quality of the facilities, were key to the new story they wanted to tell. The crushing tedium of the video thrust the design team into Kristian’s—and, by extension, the patient’s—experience of the opacity of the hospital process. It triggered in each of them the mix of boredom and anxiety that comes with being in a situation in which one feels lost, uninformed, and not in control.

The team realized that two competing narratives were in play: The hospital saw the “patient journey” in terms of insurance verification, medical prioritization, and bed allocation. The patient experienced it as a stressful situation made worse. From this set of observations the team concluded that the hospital needed to balance its legitimate concerns with medical and administrative tasks with an empathic concern for the human side of the equation. This insight became the basis of a far-reaching program of “codesign” in which IDEO’s designers worked with DePaul’s hospital staff to explore hundreds of opportunities to improve the patient experience.
Kristian’s visit to the emergency room exposed a layered picture of a patient’s experience. At the most obvious level, we learned about his physical environment: we can see what he sees and touch what he touches; we observe the emergency room as an intense, crowded place that provides patients with few cues as to what is going on; we feel the cramped spaces and the narrow hallways and note both the structured and improvised interactions that take place within them. We may infer that the emergency room facilities—not unreasonably, perhaps—are designed around the requirements of the professional staff rather than the comfort of the patient. Insights lead to new insights as seemingly insignificant physical details accumulate.

A second layer of understanding is less physical than cognitive. By experiencing the patient journey firsthand, the team gained important clues that might help it to translate insight into opportunity. How does a patient make sense out of the situation? How do new arrivals navigate the physical and social space? What are they likely to find confusing? These questions are essential to identifying what we call latent needs, needs that may be acute but that people may not be able to articulate. By achieving a state of empathy with anxious patients checking into an emergency room (or weary travelers checking into a Marriott hotel or frustrated passengers checking in at an Amtrak ticket counter), we can better imagine how the experience might be improved. Sometimes we use these insights to emphasize the new. At other times it makes sense to do just the opposite, to reference the ordinary and the familiar.

Cognitive understanding of the ordinary and the familiar was at work when Tim Mott and Larry Tesler, working on the original graphical user interface at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, proposed the metaphor of the desktop. This concept helped move the computer from a forbidding new technology of value only to scientists to a tool that could be applied to office and even household tasks. It was still in evidence three decades later, when the start-up Juniper Financial asked IDEO to help it think about whether banks still needed buildings, vaults, and tellers.

In approaching the uncharted territory of online banking, we began by trying to get a better understanding of how people thought about their money. This exercise proved to be challenging in the extreme since we can’t watch the cognitive process of someone thinking about money in the way we can watch the behavioral process of someone paying a bill or withdrawing cash from an ATM. The team settled on the technique of asking selected participants to “draw their money”—not the credit cards in their wallets or the checkbooks in their purses but the way in which money played a part in their lives. One participant—we called her “The Pathfinder”—drew little Monopoly-style houses representing her family, her 401(k) retirement plan, and some rental properties, since her focus was on long-term security. Another participant—designated “The Onlooker”—drew a picture with a pile of money on one side and a pile of goods on the other. With disarming candor, she explained to the team, “I get money and I buy stuff.” The Onlooker was completely focused on her day-to-day financial situation and did almost no planning for the future. Beginning from cognitive experiments like these, the team of researchers, strategists, and designers developed a subtle market analysis that helped Juniper refine its target market and build an effective service in the emerging world of online banking.

A third layer—beyond the functional and the cognitive—comes into play when we begin working with ideas that matter to people at an emotional level. Emotional understanding becomes essential here. What do the people in your target population feel? What touches them? What motivates them? Political parties and advertising agencies have been exploiting people’s emotional vulnerabilities for ages, but “emotional understanding” can help companies turn their customers not into adversaries but into advocates.

The Palm Pilot was an indisputably clever invention, and it has, deservedly, won widespread acclaim. Jeff Hawkins, its creator, began with the insight that the competition for a small, mobile device was not the omnifunctional laptop computer but the simple paper diary that many of us still slip into and out of our shirt pockets or purses a hundred times a day. When he began to work on the Palm in the mid-1990s, Jeff decided to buck the conventional wisdom and create a product that did less than was technically possible. That his software engineers could have stuffed spreadsheet capabilities, colorful graphics, and a garage-door opener into the Palm didn’t matter. Better to do a few things well, so long as they were the right things: a contact list, a calendar, and a to-do list. Period.

The first version of the Palm PDA was a hit among tech-savvy early adopters, but there was nothing about its chunky gray plastic form that fired the imaginations of the larger public. In search of this elusive quality, Jeff teamed up with Dennis Boyle at IDEO, and together they began to work on a redesign that would appeal not just at a functional but also at an emotional level. The interface was left largely unchanged, but the physical quality of the device—designers call it the “form factor”—was reimagined. First, it was to be thin enough that it would slide smoothly into a pocket or purse—if it didn’t disappear, Dennis sent his team back to the drawing boards. Second, it was to have a feel that was sleek, elegant, and sophisticated. The team sought out an aluminum-stamping technique used by Japanese camera manufacturers and found a rechargeable power supply that even the battery suppliers doubted would work. The added development was worth the effort. The Palm V went on sale in 1999, and sales rocketed to more than 6 million. It opened up the market for the handheld PDA not because of a lower price point, added functionality, or technical innovation. The elegant Palm V did everything it promised to do, but its sophisticated look and professional feel appealed, at an emotional level, to a whole new set of consumers.

From the book CHANGE BY DESIGN. Copyright C 2009 by Tim Brown. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.

Whether the delivery is graphic or spoken, Milton Glaser can be relied on to pare away the superfluous and focus on what’s relevant in the most direct, thoughtful and inspiring way. Today he celebrates his 80th birthday and a 60+ year career that is still going strong. A new documentary “Milton Glaser: To Inform & Delight” directed by Wendy Keys, now playing in select U.S. locations, provides convincing evidence that he is worthy of being called the most influential graphic artist of our time. It’s a must-see. And here’s something that we consider a must-read – a talk that Glaser gave in 200l to the London AIGA titled “Ten Things I Have Learned.” Great food for thought.

10 Things I Have Learned

by Milton Glaser

1. You can only work for people you like.

This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

2. If you have a choice never have a job.

One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached 75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone asking me about old age these days?’ I recognised the voice as John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times. ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age’ he said.

3. Some people are toxic avoid them.

This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

4. Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.

Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything – not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.
Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.

5. Less is not necessarily more.

Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

6. Style is not to be trusted.

I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvellous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty. I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem because the field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else. Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic shift and things are made to look different. Typefaces go in and out of style and the visual system shifts a little bit. If you are around for a long time as a designer, you have an essential problem of what to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you maintain your own belief system and preferences becomes a real balancing act. The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of his life and committed suicide. But the point is that anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity and purpose.

7. How you live changes your brain.

The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how – that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.

8. Doubt is better than certainty.

Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right. There is a significant sense of self-righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty. Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you. Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self-righteousness is often the enemy. Self-righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.

9. On aging.

Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’ I got it on my birthday. I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t matter that what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’ Wisdom at last. Then I heard a marvellous joke that seemed related to rule number 10. A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent I told you yesterday we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said ‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘Ok. Got any cabbage?’

10. Tell the truth.

The rabbit joke is relevant because it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either. It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behaviour towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public. We expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and that he doesn’t misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labelled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labelled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public not designers or clients. ‘Do no harm’ is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

by Gary Kelly / @issue Interview / vol. 6 no. 2

Editor’s Note: Alan Webber, who co-founded Fast Company magazine in 1995, has long recognized the role of design as the great differentiator in business. In his most recent business book, “Rules of Thumb,” Webber shares insights gleaned from his own life and work experiences over the past 30 years and distills them down to 52 rules of thumb. Webber’s rules aren’t the end of the discussion; they are the beginning, with readers invited to add their own rules. Here we reprint Rule #28. Webber’s other 51 rules are just as pertinent and interesting.

Rule #28
Good design is table stakes.
Great design wins.

In the last few years since I left Fast Company and started traveling a lot, I’ve noticed a global leitmotif, as if the same piece of music were being played in different countries all over the world.

In Tokyo at a conference on innovation I sat down with an old friend, a business sociologist and strategist for leading Japanese companies.

“Japan used to be a low-cost exporter of manufactured goods,” I said. “But those days are clearly over. What’s Japan’s new national strategy?”

“We don’t think there’s a problem,” she told me. “Japan intends to compete globally on the quality of our design.”

It made sense to me. Japan has an exquisite sense of style and presentation.

Not long after that trip I went to Denmark for a conference that brought together architects, industrial designers, and graphic artists. I walked around Copenhagen, admiring the shops and stores, the comfortable restaurants, the overall ambience of the place. Then I had a cup of coffee with a friend who had organized the gathering.

“Denmark has high wages, high taxes, and an expensive social safety net,” I said. “But your manufacturing is moving to cheaper countries. What’s the strategy for the future?”

“We’re not worried,” she said. “We intend to compete on the quality of our design. Denmark is famous for our design.”

I think you can see where this is heading.

I got the same answer in Florence, in São Paulo, and in Stockholm. In Toronto they were proud of the quality of their urban design. In the Dongtan planned city in Shanghai, China, they’re designing an eco-friendly city from scratch. Singapore is redesigning the entire country, from its education system to its cybereconomy.

Today design is differentiation. Companies use design to create distinctive products and services that capture their customers’ imaginations; to restructure their corporate operations; to unveil new logos and uniforms that express a fresh corporate identity; to develop new communications tools that connect with customers and shareholders; to build corporate offices that encourage and enable collaboration; to collect and share information across a global platform. Design is a way to solve deep-seated social problems. And design is a money saver, a way to simplify products and make them easier and less expensive to manufacture.

It wasn’t always like this. In the old days, designers were the people at the end of the production process. Engineers handed them something they’d developed and told designers to “pretty it up.” Those days are officially over.

Today “starchitects” such as Frank Gehry are sought after by governments from China to Dubai to do for them what he did for Bilbao. The designs of J Mays at Ford and Chris Bangle at BM W have created camps of followers and spawned hordes of imitators, as has Jonathan Ive for his designs at Apple. Tinker Hatfield at Nike originally trained as an architect before turning to shoes. David Kelley, founder and chairman of IDEO , gets credit for spearheading the “D” school at Stanford, a cross-disciplinary program to combine smart business practices with cutting-edge design skills. Across the board designers have defined a way of seeing that adds to the delight of customers and the profitability of companies.

When it comes to the role of design in business, the old days are gone. The war is over.

Design won.

So What?
My guess is that most of you already get it. You already know that the design of your Web site says more about your brand than any thirty-second TV spot. You know that little—and not so little—things such as the design of your logo and letterhead, the design of your business card, and your office space all communicate instantly what your operation is all about, whether you’re a company of one or one hundred thousand.

But perhaps design is still a mystery to you. You know it’s important but can’t quite find a way into its language, specs, and tricks. Here are three ways for you to start to crack the design code.

Reading. If you’re a word person trying to learn about seeing, there are any number of terrific books that will get you started. Begin with Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. It’s entertaining and instructive; you’ll discover that you’re probably a left-brained business thinker in an increasingly rightbrained economy. Once you accept that new fact of life you can use Dan’s exercises and extensive reading list to delve deeper into the world of design. Anything by Tom Kelley of IDEO will expand your appreciation of design and innovation; Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things will help you see the world with fresh eyes. If you want to see the world through green eyes, read Will McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle.

Viewing. According to Dan Pink, medical schools in the United States have started taking their students to art museums. The point isn’t to turn them into art collectors. It’s to have them practice seeing—a critical skill for aspiring diagnosticians. For aspiring entrepreneurs or business leaders the same skill is vital and the same practice can help. The more you look at art the more you develop your appreciation for how design works. If museums and galleries don’t do it for you, try furniture and interior design. It’s worth spending an afternoon looking at rugs, fabrics, and furniture to see what you like and don’t like, what you consider graceful, and what appears awkward. Or if you can’t imagine an afternoon of carpets but you love cars, make a design field trip to your favorite dealerships. Don’t worry about price; you’re not buying. But look carefully at the lines, interior detailing, and small amenities that give each car its own performance.As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

Shopping. No, not for the car. But go out and buy an assortment of smaller objects you can put in your home and office. Go to your nearest kitchen store and pick out a variety of OXO products, from a peeler to a teakettle. If you hold any of these items in your hand, you’ll immediately understand what “consumer-centered design” means. If you don’t already have one, order an Aeron chair. There’s a reason it’s in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Go to the nearest Bang & Olufsen showroom and pick out a phone or a TV, depending on your budget. Need a new laptop? Stop by an Apple store and purchase a new MacBook Air. Critics say it’s underpowered and overpriced. But it’s also flat, light, and gorgeous. Feel free to add your own favorites to the shopping list. Go to the part of your city where the antique stores are and see what great design looked like in the past. Or if you prefer virtual shopping, check out the Web for design-centered sites.

When you’re done with your shopping spree, assemble all the items you’ve bought in your office or home and take a look. When it comes to line, color, shape, size, material, functionality, what do these products have in common? Are they as good to look at as they are fun to use? Is there an emotional content to their design? Is there a distinctive “cool factor” that comes from the design?

Then, after you’ve taken a careful account of the ways they look, feel, and perform, check one other thing: price. That’s something else they all have in common. Great design lets you charge more.

All that shopping too expensive for you? No problem: treat it as a field trip. You don’t have to buy a thing to get the idea. But you do need to buy into the idea: design is everywhere, and increasingly design is everything.

Excerpted from “The Designful Company”
by Marty Neumeier
The discipline of design has been waiting patiently in the wings for nearly a century, relegated to supporting roles and stand-in parts. Until now, companies have used design as a beauty station for identities and communications, or as the last stop before a product launch. Never has it been used for its potential to create rule-bending innovation across the board. Meanwhile, the public is developing a healthy appetite for all things design.

One survey by Kelton Research found that when 7 in 10 Americans recalled the last time they saw a product they just had to have, it was because of design. They found that with younger people 18-29, the influence of design was even more pronounced. More than one out of four young adults were disappointed in the level of design in America, saying, for example, that cars were better designed 25 years ago.

In Great Britain, a recent survey commissioned by The Design Council found that 16% of British businesses say that design tops their list of key success factors. Among “rapidly growing” businesses, a whopping 47% rank it first. The mushrooming demand for design is being shaped by a profound shift in how the first world makes its living: creativity in its various forms has become the number-one engine of economic growth. The “creative class,” in the words of Toronto University professor Richard Florida, now comprises 38 million members, or more than 30% of the American workforce. McKinsey authors Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce put the figure only slightly below at 25%. They cite creative professionals in financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment who act as agents of change, producers of intangible assets, and creators of new value for their companies.

When you hear the phrase innovative design, what picture comes to mind? An iPhone? A Prius? A Nintendo Wii? Most people will visualize some kind of technology product. Yet products—technological or otherwise—are not the only possibilities for design. Design is rapidly spreading from “posters and toasters” to processes, systems, and organizations.

Dr. Deming, the mid-century business guru who inspired Six Sigma, had some far-reaching ideas beyond quality control. You’d expect his thinking to be stuck in the rusty past, but it remains remarkably progressive by modern standards. His trademark 1982 “System of Profound Knowledge” was an attempt to get managers to think outside the system they’re working in. It featured a list of “deadly diseases,” including a lack of purpose, the mobility of executives, and an emphasis on short-term profits (sound familiar?). Among the diseases was an over-reliance on technology to solve problems.

The sure cure for Deming’s diseases is design. It’s the accelerator for the company car, the power train for sustainable profits: design drives innovation; innovation powers brand; brand builds loyalty; and loyalty sustains profits. If you want long-term profits, don’t start with technology, start with design.