Co-Creation: When Users Become Co-Designers

co-creation

Co-creation in design is like bringing in a co-pilot for your project. You and your team have spent a lot of time in the design process; walking a mile in the user’s shoes, talking and learning about their journey’s, using your newfound knowledge to come up with some great ideas through brainstorming, developing them into […]

Refining A Concept Through Rapid Prototyping

Prototyping can be physical and digital

What do you think of when you read the phrase Rapid Prototyping? Making something out of nothing really fast? Playing with models to see how they work? While the phrase might conjure up ideas of a Star Trek replicator or some wild 3D printing factory, rapid prototyping is a design thinking tool that all companies can […]

Concept Development That Builds Strong Ideas

Concept development might seem pretty straight forward; you’ve completed the user journey, interviewed them to learn their perspectives and conducted detailed brainstorming sessions. Now you’re ready to select the best ideas and build them into winning solutions that will fit within the creative brief (or project goals, business criteria, etc… ) before being unleashed upon […]

Brainstorming Like A Creative Director

Do you ever wonder how creatives at ad agencies come up with new ideas on a daily basis? What type of brainstorming processes do they use to stay relevant to attract the viewers’ attention? At its heart, this overused buzz term is essentially that really focused, results-driven sister to daydreaming. Brainstorming generates ideas, challenges conventions, […]

Understanding Your Users Through Interviews

Talking is one of our most primal and basic functions, yet when presented with interviews or data on a computer screen, more and more people are choosing the impersonal interaction. User research has always held a high place within design but it now has come to the forefront with more people competing for customer attention. […]

How To Start Journey Mapping

Imagine being the proverbial fly on the wall watching your customer’s journey from recognition of your brand, through research to contact and ultimately purchase? What would that journey look like? What types of ‘a-ha’ moments would you hope to uncover? Journey Mapping is taking the hypothetical customer journey and plotting it out in a flow-chart, […]

5 Habits Of Great Design Leaders

Being a designer is a dream for many. Full days creating beautiful pieces and stunning interactions. This is great for members of a design team, but it’s only the beginning for a design leader. We’ve all seen agencies and studios promoting their skills and why they ‘know brands’. But once you look a little deeper, […]

5 Ways To Adopt Design Thinking

Design is in the C-Suite. So what happens now? The cheers can be heard from art school classrooms, from behind drawing tablets in design studios and in long forgotten cubicles occupied by internal creative teams living in corporate purgatory. Design has won, it is now at the boardroom table. What will smart executives do with […]

The Value of Design Leadership in Business

As all designers know, great design doesn’t start with specs, but with the user. How will they interact with their creation? What type of look, feel, emotion, response should the design evoke? While the final products that designers create ultimately become the consumer face of a company, design has always lived its life in middle […]