(The definition comes from the work. This photo comes from procsilas via Flickr and Creative Commons.)
I've recently found myself talking to audiences, fellow business designers (like Diego and Colin) and clients about what we mean by the phrase Business Design and what we've learned practicing it. Personally, I don't love defining stuff like this. The work should speak for itself.
I think it has.
Over the last four years, I've been really lucky to work alongside dozens of world-class folks at the firm as we've designed our way through hundreds of projects to not only a point of view on what Business Design means, but also a philosophy about what great business design is and how to get there. Looking back at our work and our community of practice, the definition sort of writes itself.
Business Design is an emerging discipline, practiced by people.
Those folks have diverse backgrounds, but they share a depth and passion for business. We're not business experts. We're designers with business expertise.
We’re human-centered, optimistic, entrepreneurial, pragmatic folks that make business possibilities concrete and real.
We’re deep. We geek out about business models, get inspired by business and we have experience and love getting things designed, trialed, done and made.
Business Design is a craft, not a field of knowledge.
At the highest level, we work alongside our collaborators and other design disciplines to do two things:
- Design business opportunities: creating new options, finding new ways and means for our clients to create value
- Help designs realize or find their business value: identifying constraints, so we may design around and through them
One big point of confusion that I've spoken and written about before is that I don't mean Design+Business or Business+Design. It's a practical mix of entrepreneurship, commerce and art all a "making" focus.
What are other people saying?
Well, Rotman's trademarked the phrase. I'm not sure if that means I have to start paying them my wages (I love those guys, but I'm not paying them my wages). People are adding on words, such as Social. Sometimes firms and practitioners mean organization design, or maybe analytics inside (tm?). Others seem to mean a systematic approach to identifying innovation opportunities, leveraging the tools of design and through a combination of inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning. That's certainly closer and we end up doing that quite a bit albeit in a way that's human-centered.
I'm excited to keep emerging the discipline, to help others learn the craft and to work with other Business Designers to push the bar on quality to make better, more valuable stuff.
What do you say?
