At Motorola Enterprise Mobility (We are not the phone group and are managed completely separately and have a very different culture around engineering, business and design) we have what we call the "Innovation & Design Studio". It is under the CTO's office, which is parallel to the product business units. We are a service agency to the business units, however, b/c of about 10 years of cultural change here at what was previously known as Symbol Technologies, we are a partner, if not a leader in the product strategy and definition processes, as much as in the product design and technical specification processes.
First, There are 2 halves to the lab ... Design & Advanced Engineering. The latter half is made up of top tier engineers innovating at the technical level, but also serving as a service bureau to the design half when we need to create fully functional prototypes, or we need to suss out the technical realities behind our designs. This has made a HUGE difference to our abilities not just to create tangible products that people can instantly relate to, but also in legitimizing design as a leader in innovation. Second, we have a dedicated design research team. Doing ethnographic studies, interviews, and validation studies this group's data and analysis feeds directly into the design process. Designers back up their decisions with real data that is available for every stakeholder to consume and where that data isn't available, but later required the design research team goes out and validates that work (often with designers and product managers in toe). Our design process is very similar to Apple's. Hundreds of sketches will lead to 10 gray models (not "pixel perfect", but very well rendered before being "printed" as wax with primer). Then we will validate those, do another level of exploration and take 4 to the level of appearance models (pixel perfect, but not interactive). Then we will take that down to 1 or 2 that we make interactive appearance models (snapdomes work) and finally 1 will get electronics and even go through a round of tooling. That's the process ... but then there is a larger framework that exists internally where we have 2 distinct product lifecycles. First products go through design explorations outside the confines of the product groups. Since they don't have budgetary control over these early projects their role is secondary and our leadership is stronger. This work is then fed into the primary product lifecycle, by which point strategy for design and often marketing (the design group has its own market research person as well) are set. Now all of this "So far" has primarily been focused on Industrial Design. Our IxD group is really small (Want to join it?) and so we have not been able to do the same level of work consistently. Though the current project I'm working on is such a large eco-system project that the IxD component is integral to the total success of the industrial design and service design that we are in there pretty tightly. So to Lada's point, yes others are doing a lot of what Apple is doing, but I don't see in almost any technology organization the partnership between design, business and engineering that I see at Apple and now at Motorola Enterprise Mobility. I've been through MS enough times to know that this concept is definitely not pervasive throughout the organization and definitely not on the platform and the office product lines. So while your process may include working with developers and doing sketching, I haven't seen the level of partnership and design leadership at Microsoft (of course, looking just from the outside, but with some pretty good periscope experience inside). -- dave -- dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=26995 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
