In February I’ll be holding a workshop at the IxDA 2011 conference on the topic of Advanced Design. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss ways to build a design team within your organization that is focused on future products or strategies. The idea for the workshop came from some conversations I had while attending a course this summer at the Yale School of Management, called Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders. Organized by the AIGA for designers in leadership positions, the one week course covered topics ranging from Strategy, Marketing, Patent Law, Finance, Operations, and Leadership. After and between classes, a lot of the discussions between students were on how designers could more actively participate in and shape the long term strategies for their respective companies. A number of the designers there either had teams that are dedicated to creating new product concepts that would push their company forward, or were in the process of creating such a team. This activity is often referred to as Advanced Design. The purpose of Advanced Design is to break away from the everyday, tactical, schedule-driven, conservative product solutions that come from designing for the very near future. 

Advanced Design work has the potential to help a company get ahead of its competition by using design skills and thinking to visualize an ideal product portfolio for the long term future. Having worked on a design team at Nokia for several years with exactly this kind of agenda, and now working at Microsoft on both products for market and products in early incubation stages, I have a lot of interest and experience in this topic. I’ve seen concept projects make it to market, and I’ve seen great ideas boxed up and left in a drawer to gather dust. It is a lot of fun designing the products and strategies that a company could execute in the future. However, it is rarely a clear and smooth path from concept to market. Probably the biggest challenge any Advanced Design team will face is how to make their ideas become real. Advanced projects often feel like this:

In the workshop I will share examples of projects that have succeeded and failed, to highlight the approaches that I believe increase the chances for an Advanced Design team and their projects to be successful. I will illustrate different organization models for Advanced Design, and their pros and cons. There will be activities to help participants think about how Advanced Design would fit within their organization. Finally there will be time for participants to share their experiences within their companies. The workshop will not be about coming up with new ideas. Ideas are the easy part; the hard part is moving them forward. My goal is to give participants new tools to impact their organization.

To complement my own background and experience working on advanced design projects, I’ve been interviewing colleagues in other companies about their experience with this topic, and asking designers to complete this short questionnaire on the topic. If you’re interested in this topic as well, take a few minutes to answer the questions. If you’re going to be at IxDA 2011 in February, sign up for the workshop! It’s going to be a lot of fun.