ChangeOrder

Making Clients Part of the Design Process

This weekend, I participated in HOW Design Live, a U.S.-based conference intended to help designers, in-house design managers, and creative freelancers gain the information and inspiration they need to succeed with their design work. One of my contributions to the conference was a talk about facilitated collaborations with design clients.

Why collaborate with your clients? Because when clients and designers work together as equals towards a shared goal, they can feel like they're part of the design process. Facilitated collaboration can inform and inspire your design team, so you are empowered to create great design work. It can also create alignment, which contributes to ongoing trust and ownership from all parties involved.

The above deck shares principles and perspectives that any designer can use to plan better client/designer collaborations. In the coming months, I'll talk more here about this topic!

Got a Startup Idea? Apply to The Designer Fund

I'm happy to announce that in the coming months, I'll be increasingly involved in a new nonprofit called The Designer Fund. This is a community of designers that will be investing in design founders through education, angel funding, and access to a network of people and resources to help them create their own businesses.

If you have ideas for your own business, or an existing prototype or early-stage app or service that you've been trying to get off the ground, this is an awesome opportunity to get serious about it. As you'll see from the other people associated with this venture, you can potentially be mentored or receive angel funding from some of today's top designers, both from early-stage designers at YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to designers at IDEO, Cooper, Jump Associates, and Method, as well as current designers at Path and Flipboard. (And me.)

Why? Because recently, I've seen a number of online discussions about ways that designers can have "a seat at the table" with their clients. How they can be part of helping to formulate product, service, or marketing strategy. How they can be seen as adding more value to businesses than just providing an aesthetic perspective. How they can collaborate more effectively with their cohorts in technology and business. These discussions are valuable for those of us who work in-house, or are hired by companies to provide the right kind of influence, at the right time, to create the meaningful impact. Designers may yield profit from providing services to these clients, but it's rare that they get to profit from creating and deploying the products themselves.

In conducting my research for my next book—talking with a wide range of designers both at design studios, within in-house studios, and working at their own startup ventures—I've come to the (perhaps apparent) perspective that both fledgling and seasoned designers can be extraordinarily effective at designing and running businesses. It's not just about having a seat at the table with senior-level executives, changing the course of how that company makes their customers' lives better. It's that they can own the table. Their passion, knowledge, skill, and artistry are all brought to bear with the right partners to create businesses that transcend the common billing-for-services model. While that model is an important path today for many of us (myself included), it is not the only way to make what you love.

A hypothesis needs to be borne out: that designer-led businesses and startups could perhaps be more valuable in the long term than traditional startups. In the best case, designers can launch the next wave of innovation. In the worst case, more designers understand how to create awesome products and services, and then enter into employment with today's leading agencies and companies.

Jump on in and apply!

The Building Blocks of Design Studio Culture: Types of Work

Type of work is one of the largest cultural building block of any studio, as the majority of the time in any studio is spent immersed in the work.

What follows are the questions you should be asking yourself before the phone rings and prospective clients ask you if you’d like to take on a project. Your answers to these questions, and how they may overlap (or not) with your staff’s answers, will help you better understand where you can take your studio portfolio.

 

Customer types

What industries do you want to work with? As an example: health care or consumer electronics?

What size of client do you prefer? Working with small companies or solely the Fortune 100?

Are you working with for-profit companies and ventures? Or are you focusing on opportunities from the nonprofit sector?

How deeply are you entrenched in helping to shape your client’s business? Are you a strategic partner, or seen more as an executional vendor?

What types of brands are you seeking to work with? Startups or established businesses?

What ethical stance do you take on certain types of clients? As an example: for some studios, working with a religious organization may not be considered appropriate, while others would jump at the chance.

 

Discipline and practices of design

What types of design does your studio want to practice? Print design or interactive? Industrial design or service?

What tangible things do you want to generate? One of the benefits of working on physical products, designed environments, and brand is that there is evidence of what you’ve created, which staff can point at. For interactive products and advertising, however, you may blink and miss it.

On what scale do you want to operate? As an example: If your firm focuses on branding, do you want to create simple identity systems or ones with hundreds of moving parts?

What other disciplines might you want to partner with? As an example: An interior designer may partner with an architecture firm to design a space.

 

Style of delivery

What length of projects do you seek? Do you prefer short-term projects, or would you enjoy working on an engagement that may last years?

Are there specific delivery processes you would prefer over others? As an example: some designers like to work in a controlled waterfall-style project process, while others like the close collaboration and constant change that emerges from an agile or scrum-based project process.

Where are the clients located? Are you fine with working with clients in a completely virtual manner, or do you prefer face-to-face interaction?

What level of security do you want as part of the client relationship? As an example: Do you desire a retainer with a client, where you have guaranteed revenue at the cost of freedom? Or do you generate revenues from flat fees, causing the staff to regularly propose and secure new work as part of their work life? This can influence the studio atmosphere.

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Anything you'd add to this list? See last week's post if you're interested in how type of work fits into the building blocks of design studio culture.