Monday 3rd October, 2016
Design Process - Business Lecture 2
This lecture began by talking about the many different pressures coming from various places in industry. These sources of pressure range from marketing, finance, production and research and development. And as there is a need to please all of these people and the end consumer and/or client this makes it a very difficult place for designers to be. So it was given as a tip that we should keep evidence of everything told to us by our peers in industry as to save our skins in future. Things to be taken of note for such occasions are things like phone-calls, e-mails, and any other conversations.
It is important as a designer to understand what is happening. This means you have a need to assess the situation you are in. The best method for this is to ask questions before starting any design work for a brief. It's vital that you do this because if you don't ask the right questions or any questions at all you may end up designing something totally incorrectly and thus end up re-working the brief's outcome. Asking questions is something that I'm already doing in a way, as our way of doing it during this current brief 'Cybernetic Self' is basically researching topics extensively and in the right way to create the proper response to the assessments.
A point of interest that came up during the lecture was the need to make the client feel like they are the boss. Ways of doing this are to leave parts of the design out so that they feel that they can build on their design - yet you'd be knowing what to include where. When something happens in the design that they do not like, it makes it much harder for them to go back on the choices that they have made.
Referring back to the point of assessing the situation you are in, you should never go on and take a brief and say it'll be ready the next day and such. At least not without having got the proper information from your clients. Questions must be asked such as; why do they want it in this style?what does this company do? who are their customers?
After this Norris discussed the graph for 'Product Positioning';
This graph is what should be used when looking at what you are designing, No area of this graph should be considered as a bad one because there is going to be custom in each of the price ranges. This was shown through an example of the above graph filled in with different vehicle makes such as; Rolls Royce, Audi, Skoda and Lada. It is also important to mention that asking a client where they expect their company to be 5 to 10 years in the future as this may give you something to work with.
There were many other methods of product positioning as it were, these were; Boston Consulting Group Matrix (BCG), PEST Analysis, SWOT Analysis, Product Life Cycle, and the Adoption Curve. Each of these methods has its own level of importance and relevance and it is mostly dependant on the type of brief or the type of company or entity that you are working with. The area's that they cover are things like how much money they will make, are they cash cows for the said company (an example of this could be the iPhone's sold by apple, and how they make iPhone plus models for example). The styles are all very important to the business processes of design, and using them can help you to get your brief response right the first time, avoiding any design audits.
