Design, Advanced Planning and Product Development

Economic change brings opportunity as well as failure. In today’s volatile world economy, traditional ways of doing business are becoming disastrously obsolete. Companies must offer better products now—and introduce them frequently to stay in business. Growing populations in developed and developing nations have greater expectations for themselves and their environment, and citizens everywhere are demanding more of private business, government and non-governmental organizations. Fundamental to success in this fast-changing, market-driven world are better ways to find, organize and use the information critical to advanced planning and design—of artifacts, systems, services and institutions. Structured Planning is a computer-supported set of tools for information-age design planning. For the development of new products, it helps planning teams to deal effectively with complexity and ambiguity and to explore projects in both breadth and depth at the time when insight has the greatest impact. Its tools and procedures help planning teams to uncover user-centered needs, recognize insightful relationships, capture ideas as they develop, organize large amounts of information optimally for concept development, and develop solutions appropriate to the real (and natural) complexity of problems. INTRODUCTION Design is no longer an exotic pursuit. Tough times, new opportunities and world competition have opened the doors. Overseas competition has done what decades of reasoning could not; design is now recognized as a major strategy for competitive success. Businesses and business schools are making genuine efforts to learn more about design and to incorporate sophisticated design thinking in their operations. With less fanfare, but potentially greater impact, governmental organizations, institutions and NGO’s (nongovernmental/non-commercial organizations) are also discovering the value of design thinking. In universities around the world, design educators and design researchers now find themselves with new audiences and new opportunities for leadership. The challenge for all is to nurture development of the new means—the design and planning theories, processes and organizational models—so that they can permanently infuse design values and benefits throughout society. A DESIGN STRATEGY To see the multiple values of design most clearly, design should be viewed through the lens of quality, now the universally-recognized requisite for success in business. Quality for products (and artifacts generally), is almost always associated with craftsmanship—how well the product is made. But there are more dimensions to quality, and they can be best appreciated through a consideration of how things are designed and what benefits are accrued. The relationships between design and quality are expressed in the Quality Pyramid model (Figure 1). The pyramid has a multilayered design core, with craftsmanship as the first of three progressively sophisticated layers. From the design perspective, quality as craftsmanship is achieved through attention to issues of engineering design and design for manufacturing. Well-designed products at this level are easier to make well. Detail design is at the second layer of the design core. Here the role of design is to contribute to performance, human factors and appearance. Design specialists (engineering designers, product designers, industrial designers, communication designers and others) invent and refine features or details at this level to make the product work better functionally, work better for people physiologically and psychologically, and work better symbolically within social and cultural niches.