Radical innovations are designs that alter the meaning of our life experiences. In order to realize such innovation, a designer needs a vision, a strong personal view on the world. The identity and values of designers however, are often denied in modern design processes. Consequently, (junior) designers have difficulties in connecting with their values and standing for their ideals, especially when designing within a corporate setting. We report a case study that demonstrates how nurturing a designer's personal understanding of 'good design' and integration of this understanding in his work, influences a design-driven innovation project and outcome. Our findings suggest that a designer's principles for good design, enable him to design more in tune with his identity and related ideals. Personal principles for good design empowered the designer's creativity, decision making, process planning, and drive to design and promote the acceptance of a radical idea within a corporate setting. We hope to inspire designers to use personal values and identity for design-driven innovation, and would like to start a discussion with design research and education communities to ponder on how designers can be supported in this journey. Design-Driven Innovation; Good Design; Principles for Good Design; Designer's Identity Gray Dawdy is a product designer originally from California, now living in Munich, Germany. His work focuses on innovation strategy, interaction design, and development of consumer and health-tech products. Nick Sturkenboom is a design research-practitioner and is concerned with designled digital innovations. His interests include Web 3.0, design thinking, and design philosophy (in particular dialogic activity theory). Rebecca Price is a researcher, forming part of the Horizon 2020 research project, PASSME. Her research explores the application of design on problems that concern organisations, systems and industries. In particular, she is interested in forthcoming digital innovation challenges that accompany the ever-changing society we live in. Dirk Snelders has a background in the social sciences yet mostly worked at design schools. Dirk has published on aesthetics, novelty and branding in design, and service and strategic design. His current research interest is on the professionalization of design.
In Design-Driven Innovation (D-DI) the meaning of a product or service is radically innovated to introduce a new paradigm that ideally can benefit people, companies, and society as a whole. However, due to the associated risks, most companies are hesitant to engage with and adopt D-DI. Human Centered Design (HCD) is preferred while innovation is limited to incremental change. This dichotomy is also reflected in design literature where D-DI is pitted against HCD. We propose the symbiosis of the two approaches as a strategy to create space for and the adoption of D-DI within companies. An instrumental design case study explores a design-driven service innovation and its adoption in a renowned airline. Results show an adopted D-DI where HCD evidence mitigates for the market and organization uncertainty while D-DI enabled a paradigm shift in the company’s current service operation. Advantages and limitations of this mitigation strategy are discussed. With this design precedent, we aim to encourage designers and companies to further explore the benefits of a symbiotic use of D-DI and HCD.
The automotive design process prevalent in industry that dictates transportation design education, is optimized to facilitate the frequent aesthetic renewal of personally owned vehicles for car-oriented cities. With its origins in the late 1920s, this hyper-specialized design process has barely changed from its original form. In this paper, we provide a brief account of the automotive design process from its origins (analogue) to the present day (digital technologies), followed by a new paradigm instigated by immersive technologies. A passenger drone project is used as an example to describe the possibilities of immersive technologies in this radically innovated process. Enhancements from 2D and 3D to immersive and interactive 4D, enable a lean, yet contextualized process to design radically innovative vehicles.
Within the third wave of digital service innovation, framing is becoming increasingly complex. Accordingly, design practice finds itself in a transition from designing single service solutions that are shared, to designing systemic solutions that are shareable. We report a case study in which we use Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to analyze the framing process that a designer went through when designing a digital service for a Connected Care startup. Results show the importance of the designer's activity awareness and the challenge of dealing with relational complexity when framing the digital service innovation. With this work, we hope to inspire researchers and practitioners with the potential that CHAT has to offer for the reflective practice in digital service innovations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.