A Simple Blood Test...

...is usually anything but simple.

At least trying to understand it is usually not simple. The lab report of simple blood tests are often beyond our comprehension. But they don't have to be. Better design and more context can clarify the results - and help us understand our options.

Wired magazine has a great article on how something as simple as blood test results can become confusing and not helpful at all. The solution? A redesign.

After a recent visit to the doctor, executive editor Thomas Goetz was inspired to overhaul the lab reports of medical test. To insure the outcomes were indeed clear, function, and elegant, Wired art director Tim Leong tapped three illustrators and writer Steven Leckart consulted with a team of medical experts.

Here's one of the redesigned blood test reports; follow this link to get a better look.

Now for your challenge: what kind of report do you currently use in your organization that can be redesigned to provide clear, functional, and elegant information to end users?

Good Design Gets You in the Game...

...great design is the game winner.

Welcome to the world where design is king.

In the old days, designers were an afterthought, the people at the end of the production process. Engineers would hand over something that was functionally effective and have the designers make it look good. Those days are over.

Today, design is about experiences as well as products. It's about services as much as it is hard goods.

Design is now differentiation.

Alan Webber, founder of Fast Company magazine and author of "Rules of Thumb," puts it this way: Today companies use design to:

• create distinctive products and services that capture their customers' imaginations
• restructure their corporate operations
• unveil new logos and uniforms that express a fresh corporate identity
• develop new communications tools that connect with customers and shareholders
• build corporate offices that encourage and enable collaboration
• collect and share information across a global platform

Design is a way to solve deep-seated social problems. And design is a money saver, a way to simplify products and make them easier and less expensive to manufacture and sell. Across the board designers have defines a way of seeing that adds to the delight of customers and the profitability of companies.

Application to ChurchWorld

You probably already understand this on some level. You understand that the design of your website says more about you and provides a quick glimpse of your "brand". You know that the little - and not so little - things like the design of your logo and your letterhead, the print pieces you use, the "flow" of your worship experience all communicate instantly what your church is all about.

But if you are still a design novice, and want to learn more, here are Webber's three ways to begin to crack the design code:

• Reading - you may be a word person and you want to try to learn about seeing. Dan Pink's "A Whole New Mind," Tim Brown's "Design Thinking," Tom Kelley's "The Art of Innovation" and "The Ten Faces of Innovation," and Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" are required reading. Get one of them today; read it tonight, and put it into action tomorrow.
• Viewing - You need to practice seeing. Go to an art museum; browse a furniture showroom gallery; check out the latest model cars. The more you look at objects like these, the more you appreciate great design. You're not buying, so don't worry about price. Look carefully at the lines, interior detailing and design, and the small things that make a big difference. "Seeing" is a critical skill for aspiring diagnosticians - like you.
• Shopping - Go out and find an assortment of small objects that go in your home or office. Look at OXO products; visit an IKEA store. When you pick up one of these objects, you will immediately understand what "consumer-centered design" means. Go to an office supply store and sit in an Aeron chair. Look at the latest products from Apple: iPhone, iPad, the latest MacBook Air. Go to an antique store and see what great design looked like in the past. Take a virtual shopping trip to your heart's content. When you have collected these objects (or examined them enough), what do these products have in common? Are they as good to look at as they are fun to use? Is there an emotional content to their design?

You don't have to buy anything to get the idea. But you do have to buy into the idea:

Design is everywhere, and increasingly, design is everything.

McDonalds - The New Community Center?

Iconic McDonalds is at it again: they are reinventing themselves once again - this time from a design perspective.

The October issue of "Fast Company" magazine has several fascinating articles on how the company that practically invented fast food is now immersed in revolutionary changes in design.

• "McDonald's Design Heritage" shows how the fast food giant has built its success on ideas that bubble up from anywhere
• "Super Style Me" - inside the $2.4 billion dollar plan to change the way you think about the most iconic restaurant on the planet
• "Where's Ronald McDonald" - inside the disappearance of one of the 20th century's most recognizable brands

"If you have a restaurant that is appealing, contemporary, and relevant," says McDonald's president Don Thompson, "the food tastes better."

Denis Weil, McDonald's VP of concept and design, says that the new styles of design fit perfectly into McDonald's everyman aesthetic. Calling it a community center, he means that McDonald's is one of the few places cheap and casual enough to be accessible to nearly everyone.

"There are very few public places left where private things happen," according to Weil. At the Innovation Center, a test lab for concepts of all kinds, there is a mock restaurant divided into four "seating zones," each designed for a different activity - chilling out, working, casual dining, and group events.

"Dialing up the design in a restaurant makes it a little stronger," Weil says, "but it will lose freshness faster, so we have to update more frequently."

Read all the articles above - then grab a Caramel Frappe' at your local McCafe, and imagine the relevancy for your organization.

And you can still get fries with that...

Looking Back to Look Ahead

Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, has a brilliant, innate talent to help people see the miraculous in the mundane. Author of twelve books including "The Pencil" and "The Toothpick", he has made it his calling to help the rest of us see the world through the eyes of the engineer.

I'm reading his latest book, "The Essential Engineer", and this sentence stopped me cold:

Design is effectively proactive failure analysis

He was writing about the continual change in automobile design; how we can predict the changes coming in auto design by looking at what annoys us today or what features we wish it had or think it should have.

What a brilliant, simple statement!

Now apply it to ChurchWorld. Are there things that aren't working in your church? By identifying what is still lacking in your church today, is it possible to predict what will be standard in your church tomorrow?

What are you designing for tomorrow that is a correction to today?

The Experience Blueprint

I'm wrapping up this week-long series of posts on "design" by returning to Tim Brown's book "Change by Design". Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, has challenged my thinking about design in a number of ways: it's not just for creative industries or people designing products. Design thinking is most powerful when applied to abstract, multifaceted problems that address a wide range of issues and concerns. Problems that the typical church encounters every day!


Here's a great example from one chapter on the design of experience:


Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, color, sound and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation.


Wow-that's a lot to think about! In the world of serving the church where I work and live, the concepts of designing for experience are so important, yet so often totally overlooked. Brown goes on to talk about 3 "themes" of the design of experiences:

1. The experience economy - people have shifted from passive consumption to active participation


2. Best experiences are not scripted at corporate headquarters but decided on the spot by service professionals who create an authentic, genuine, and compelling experience


3. Implementation is everything-an experience must be as finely crafted and precision-engineered as any other product

Just as a product begins with an engineering blueprint and a building with an architectural blueprint, an experience blueprint provides the framework for working out the details of a human interaction, including emotive elements, from beginning to end. It captures how people travel through an experience in time. Rather than trying to choreograph that journey, its function is to identify the most meaningful points and turn them into opportunities to positively impact the individual. What might be a source of discomfort or pain is now an opportunity for an experience that is distinctive, emotionally gratifying, and memorable.

The experience blueprint is at one and the same time a high-level strategy document and a fine-grained analysis of the details that matter.

I'm headed back to the drawing boards - what about you and your church?

Design Thinking

If this doesn't make you curious about the concept of Design Thinking, I'm not sure anything will! The image comes from the inside cover of the book "Change by Design" by Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO.

In the book, Brown introduces the concept of "design thinking". Design is not just about creating elegant objects or beautifying the world around us. The best designers match:

• Necessity to utility


• Constraint to possibility


• Need to demand

Design thinkers rely on rigorous observations of how we use spaces and the objects and services that occupy them. They discover patterns where others see complexity and confusion. They synthesize new ideas from seemingly disparate fragments. And my personal favorite: They convert problems into opportunities.

"Change by Design" is a blueprint for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking - an approach for creative problem solving - into all facets of their organizations, products, or services to discover new alternatives for business and society as a whole.

Design Thinking is for anyone confronting the challenges of today in order to create the opportunities of tomorrow.

What is Design?

It's not that there is a problem defining "design" - it's that there is an overabundance of definitions of design. Warren Berger, in his book "Glimmer" provides not only helpful definitions of design but helps the reader move beyond understanding design as only about style.

With contributions from designers around the world, most notably Bruce Mau, Berger developed ten principles, divided into four segments. These principles begin with a few basic design principles that can be used by anyone for any purpose - but also form the building blocks for the sections to follow. Listed below is an outline of the principles; for more details see the website.

The Glimmer Principles

Universal

• Ask stupid questions


• Jump fences


• Make hope visible

Business

• Go deep


• Work the metaphor


• Design what you do

Social

• Face consequences


• Embrace constraints

Personal

• Design for emergence


• Begin anywhere

Whether it's applied to business, social, or personal challenges, design thinking opens up new avenues of progress, suggesting fresh answers to old and difficult questions. It's about infinite possibilities - and more importantly, it's about optimism.

What if we looked at the world as a design project - how might we begin to make it better?