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Marketers focus on their brands and customers as the family jewels--and they are. But there is another kind of marketing asset that I call "runways" and if you don't have them, you will miss huge opportunities. In this ADD world of rapid-fire Twitter streams, long-tail options, and media multi-tasking, you must be in the right place at the right time or the moment is lost. Runways are relationships your company can create with trading partners and consumers that make your brands accessible, and give YOU access to markets and marketing options you otherwise would not have.
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What the Cluetrain Manifesto did for marketing strategy, IDEO and specifically the Method Cards did for design strategy. In the same way Cluetrain saw and named what was happening in a "small pieces, loosely joined" world, in the Method Cards, IDEO saw and named a design strategy that was for and about interconnected everyday people. If all markets are conversations (Cluetrain), then all useful design is indeed conversation as well.
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Human-Centered Design is a process used for decades to create new solutions for companies and organizations. Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of people. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear people's needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.
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Back in the day--and by "the day," I mean the legendary days of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and legendary computer scientist Alan Kay--we would say, "We spend millions in research and development figuring everything out, and then the first consumer who walks up to the machine can tell you everything that's wrong." Today, market research is a $19 billion industry and focus groups are one of the most expensive types of market research. The question is, what role should design play in the process?
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As designers working to improve the quality of life in other countries, the firm IDEO has spent more than 10 years creating a methodology focused on designing for the user. And now, IDEO wants to give all of that methodology away. A series of PDFs that are free to download, the Human-Centered Design Toolkit hopes to empower organizations and design firms by giving them their field-tested tools for social impact in a way that focuses more on sharing information than authorship.
