It happens more and more that we don’t get a designbrief anymore. Due to the known factors it’s not longer possible to predict easily what will be the next step. Basically we have to start designing the designbrief which is of course what we love most. We call it imagineering!
After clarifying the goals we start investigating in order to understand, and finally come up with different scenario’s, idea’s, possibilities,.. It always seems that this point is so crucial and considered as the end of being creative. It almost feels like stop playing around, let’s go back to reality now.
I personally believe this is a big misunderstanding and I believe a radical mind-shift is necessary here. It’s not possible to keep thinking within fixed methods and project based processes. It used to be common to put all the ideas together make a first ‘realistic’ selection and spent some budget to do market research in order to decide which will be the next product. I strongly believe this doesn’t work anymore.
During our ‘imagineering phase’ we really go in depth and start to investigate all possible solutions from different angles using different user oriented techniques in order to come up with realistic and feasible ideas. I believe it’s impossible to measure the success rate of a certain scenario in this stage. It’s very difficult to communicate the complete experience behind a certain idea and therefore not possible to rationalize.
The shape of the innovation funnel has changed completely. We therefore strongly support the idea of ‘Think Big, Spend Small’. At this point it’s not expensive to continue with different scenario’s. Further design research will make them more mature and easier to understand. The different scenario’s will interact and support each other to create a strong vision and substantiated result. If we consider design & creativity as a continuous process there will be a continuous stream of ideas and innovation will be more logic than ever before.
Pachinko is the Japanese version of what we know as pinball. The halls which you find everywhere in Tokyo are crowdy and the noise is irritating loud. This game illustrates the difference between the European and Japanese way of thinking regarding strategy. We Europeans shoot one ball very carefully and try gently to push it in the direction we want it to go and hope it will go into the right hole of which we know the chance is rather small. Japanese shoot a lot of balls together because they know at least one of them will fall in the right hole.
Het bericht Think Big, spend Small verscheen eerst op Studio Peter Van Riet.