Everyone in business for a while has what we call war stories. Stories from the trenches of business, design, product development, engineering, vendor relations, and so on. Whether and when we choose to tell these stories, and to whom, says something about us. There’s an old piece of advice about not disparaging one’s competitors. Keep it clean. Stay professional. I’m okay with that. But there can come a time to tell cautionary tales, and leave off the names.

What we say about others is more a reflection on the speaker than on the subject. When you say something about another person or organization, what does your choice of comment, its timing and audience, say about you? It probably depends on how well it’s expressed, and to whom. Examine your motive. Insights may be tainted by some hidden agenda, reflecting the extent to which you are being sincere. Offering a comment to the right ears, in the right way, feedback should be a helpful thing, even a gift. It’s all in the delivery, timing, audience, and basis in constructive motive and sincerity.

Sometimes, telling a war story illustrates a point, or a trend, that can explain things. For instance, the way we became the kind of design team we are today is a function of our own backgrounds, experiences, and strengths. More than once, we’ve heard true tales of competitors, or just other designers somewhere far away, making huge mistakes. You can find some real gems in the Design Management Institute’s design case studies. Maybe you’ve seen these: A million dollars’ worth of tooling ruined because the world-famous design team, lacking plastics experience, detailed a huge and complex assembly with zero tolerances. (Yet, it appears that heads did not roll!) Nobody is perfect.

Like most long-lived design firms, we have many happy customers in our wake. But over time, we also have a very few who were not happy for one reason or another. I could point out that their unhappiness largely resulted from not taking our advice, and losing money as a result, but that brings little or no satisfaction, I admit. That’s why fit is so important. We are not right for every project. No design team is.

What aspects of a client-consultant relationship indicate future success? We all struggle with that, but a creative mind will approach this differently than an analytical person. What’s the stock broker’s disclaimer? Past performance is no indicator of future returns. Or is it? If you seek easy certainty,  just realize that it’s a choice, and like most choices, has a trade-off. It’s our differences that give us diversity. And often, not having worked in your specific field is the way we’ll work together to innovate.

This post is a thought about overcoming inefficiency in translated ideas, and about using the power released from the proximity of opposites. Lateral and Critical thinkers have their places, but can sometimes seem to work at cross purposes. Certainly they will work in different ways.

Think of how complimentary colors vibrate when they are near each other. Hot and cold air combine with topography to make weather. Light and dark give us visual perception, and so on. The efficiency of a system is least at those places where one form of energy is translated to another. It takes energy to make a transition. For instance, in a sound system, after the initial source vibration is translated to electronic signal, the electrons are happily flowing in the circuits, a little less so at a connector, then suddenly, different things have to happen to get the signal to drive a loudspeaker or headphones, and exactly how the vibration pattern is perceived depends on the relationship between the vibrating cone and the ear, the room, and the listener’s location, ambient noise, and so on. By then, we’ve gone some distance from the original musician’s thought. All that, translated from brain to hand or voice to instrument or microphone, then mixed, recorded, packaged, reproduced, and heard. (I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that this process implants a memory from the composer to listener, though the composer may hear detail that has escaped somewhere during the process. But I digress.)

Are we there yet? A manager trying to specify an outcome in terms of deliverables on a budget and schedule who must manage design thinkers, or if you prefer, lateral thinkers, who perform the creative work, will find that there are communication challenges. What may be perceived as inefficiency will stress the time-and-budget-conscious manager. More than a few times we’ve seen the need to get down to business and name specifics conflict with the design process, a process that from the outside may appear to be loose, disorganized association. Critical thinkers value logic. Designers need it, too, but also value feelings about things. Trust your gut, we are taught.

Timing is everything, so what is first? The designer’s ability and willingness to challenge assumptions, to really understand what is truly important vs. what is merely assumed or expected is a big part of why companies bring design thinking to the workplace. Ordering criteria sets up the basis for making smart trade-offs. Move the list around and the result will change. Watch what you wish for.

The best designers have combinations of skills to apply to a project or, thinking longer term, a business relationship. Nobody is equally good at every aspect, so teams of designers seek to cooperatively and efficiently cover many bases required to get the job done excellently. Good teams consist of individuals who each take a slightly different view of the issues, and hopefully have a slightly different approach to exploring and understanding. Experience is the only teacher.

Metaphorically, compare this to the idea of examining an object from a distance in the dark. From where you stand, a light shining on the object will reveal certain information. Next, you move around (ask different questions) or assemble teammates’ viewpoints to really understand the object. Diversity is strength. You will form a different impression from your experience with the object, depending on which senses are engaged in the process, and in what order. Remember the blind men describing an elephant. Accurate, fast, detailed communication, and the ability to see obscure or subtle relationships between ideas and things are key skills that lets the mixed team work to succeed.

Like my associate, Jim, likes to say: We all love slick new ideas, but nobody drives a concept car.

First phase concept model: The Digital Furnace

We need and may even admire creative ideas, but, being necessary but not sufficient, they are only useful for products once they’ve been skillfully integrated.

In my school days long ago, the department head, Lee Payne, asked that we approach problems with an open mind. He called this playing Man from Mars, and to state it shortly, don’t assume. Ask. We can forget to question what we think we know.

The real issue is that this falls under the category of things designers understand that others often do not: a fresh viewpoint is a useful tool.

We had a young designer from Nike stop by the school the other day. He and the team he was on were instrumental in getting new running shoes made by their employer, Nike, on the feet of Japanese runners. It took several years of research and development. The young designer is not himself a runner. He was surprised to be given the assignment. Surprisingly, I learned that day that Japanese feet are shaped a bit differently. US shoes don’t travel well all over the world. The Man from Mars again. Don’t assume, ask. After telling a story of success, he concluded this way: it was his lack of prior knowledge about runners and Japanese customer expectations that led to his success. His method was to find a way to ask the right questions, talk to the right people, and look at problems with a fresh eye. Even the reasons customers gave in his initial research for buying running shoes turned out to be a dead end. They assumed why they liked the prior favorite: it had holes, and we all know holes let the feet breathe, so they must be comfortable. Not so, as it turns out.

So if your measure of a designer or a product development team is based primarily on their having specific product experience, be careful. We all need to save time, right? Assumptions lead to short cuts. Cut to the chase. Ship the product. Remember that it may be what we don’t assume that leads to real innovation.

Understand what we bring to the picture as designers: We are advocates for the user in negotiations with the producers and sellers. We seek value for the customer, and long-term profit for the seller and maker. A balance is needed to achieve success.

Why do companies hire design consultants? How many know what to do with them to efficiently proceed to a good conclusion? You may find it surprising, but I believe that there is no lack of talented designers available to businesses. What is lacking is good customers: companies organized to succeed in the use of the designers.

A former design school professor of mine loves to tell the story from his early career. He was working in a design office that was hired to design a new steel can punch opener for beverage consumers, back in the day when beverage cans were all steel. The project was successfully completed just as the aluminum can with a pull tab hit the market. The steel can makers, blinders in place, were working on the wrong problem. They asked the wrong question. The new punch opener was obsolete before it hit the street. The moral: The answers you get (aka the facts) depend entirely on the questions you ask. So ask good questions, and in the right order.

The nature of a design activity, the partnerships required, the questions to be asked, and the focus of an effort will vary. This is not news. Let’s stop and take a look at how it works. I propose that we begin by thinking in terms of three levels of complexity for a design effort.

The first question I like to ask any new customer is “Have you hired and used industrial designers before?” Clients with less experience at qualifying, hiring, and managing creative people are surprised to learn exactly what it is that designers do. If you think you already know, what makes you so certain? A design team should be able to articulate this clearly, and make sure that their efforts are understood, appreciated, and have a clear focus. We might be misunderstood, even by our partners like engineers and marketers, and even product development veterans, as mere stylists.

I still find it necessary to remind a new customer seeking design services that there are differing levels of skill and complexity required for different projects, depending on what is really understood about the market’s needs and the opportunities that need offers. It is a grave error to ignore this aspect and rush to complete some preconceived idea of a new product.

In design school, we were taught to understand a problem using the “man from Mars” approach: Assume nothing.

A design is a solution to a problem, here is a simplified hierarchy:

Level 1. The highest level of effort is problem (aka “unresolved opportunity”) identification: Taking a market need, or a way to rebalance consumer value and the product’s profitability, a clear problem statement seeks to discover, quantify and describe a design opportunity. A visionary problem statement forms the yardstick used to measure success later in the project. Competitive advantage, brand building, leveraging features to enter new markets or channels, cost reduction, new technologies, invention, all can lead to innovation and, eventually, improved value.

Level 2: The next level is Solution Identification: Many clients oversimplify this. Show us three concepts. Would you ask your legal department to draw up three alternative contracts so you could pick one? Of course not. If you know already what issues or problems are driving the design opportunity, and have a performance specification, you are ready to explore alternate solutions. These may derive from a tight performance and cost specification, or more often, are best understood as part of finalizing those critical aspects. How many alternative ideas are needed, how they are explored, their focus and the way they may selectively sort trade-offs, and their related aspects are questions answered by a tailored methodology. If a product is a promise of some benefit to the consumer, how is the promise presented? There is an art to this, and it drives both project cost and the schedule through a series of decisions leading to conclusions.

Level 3: Get it done. Solution Implementation: This is the process of getting a design plan realized and prepared for manufacture. Now that we know exactly what we need, and what it will cost to deliver the benefit to the user. Somebody needs to specify it clearly in CAD files, drawings, and specifications so that it can be made reliably and consistently. I don’t want to trivialize this step. A good idea can be brought to life or made mediocre by handing this third step without keeping an eye toward the vision of the product.

I offer these only to differentiate levels of design complexity, and to warn someone hiring and managing creative services to watch what you wish for. If you see a design team as implementers of your perfectly good idea, they may in fact accept your business, but if you are wrong, did you fail to appreciate the real opportunity?

See Design Thinking in Wikipedia for more insight into this area.  - SH

Have you ever been frustrated as I have when trying to open or reseal a food package? How about the one that reads “Tear here”, and perhaps offers a notch at the edge of a plastic envelope, maybe with a zip lock channel or slide? For me, at least half the time, these systems fail. There are numerous reasons, but more often than not, they are based on an idea that probably looked great on paper but in use, with these particular materials, is not functional. What you have in your hands is a promise not kept, and, it would appear, a company with no system in place to check the plan vs. actual parts.

I propose what I call The CEO Test. Most CEO’s I have met are not all that technically astute when it comes to materials and processes, which makes them good stand-ins for the average consumer. For this purpose, it’s okay if the CEO has an engineering background, but it leaves him or her even less of an excuse. If you are the CEO of a company that produces a package that is meant to do anything but be ripped open, the contents expelled, and then sent to be recycled, here is a little test for you: Go to the end of the production line, grab a sample or two, and try it yourself. Did the package tear cleanly? Does it reseal nicely? Happy?

Folks my age may remember all the not very funny jokes about programming the old VCR, and how unnecessarily hard it was. The controls were a smorgasbord of wonderful features, buttons, lights, and switches, designed to dazzle other engineers. My dear mother took her inability to manage this complex system as a comment on her abilities. Instead, it was just poor interface design. Today’s soft menus are seldom better. Here is how designers differ from the average consumer: we blame you for a lousy product interface.

Yesterday, I visited my doctor’s office. To check in, I was asked to use a nifty new kiosk. If only the manufacturer had tried this out on a few folks who had skipped breakfast so they could produce a clean blood sample. (They may not be at the top of their game when using your kiosk, my friends.) As I began to try to figure out where to begin, and what this machine was trying to get me to do, a nicely dressed, well spoken young woman approached me and asked if she could be of assistance. It was clearly her reason for being in the room. She was some kind of machine-patient interface assistance PR person. After I failed to ascertain the proper attitude for the two cards (driver’s license and the all important medical insurance card) the machine was intended to scan, the young woman showed me how to do it properly. Despite several mistakes on my part, the machine did its job. Then she handed me a short survey form, likewise not well designed. It had three questions, and some check boxes. For those of us who live in a world of subtle shades of good to poor to awful, this attempt to break the world into yes and no seemed useless. At the bottom was the comment box. At last, I can tell you what I really think: I think that a machine that requires a human assistant has a user interface that is not fully worked out. I am more savvy than the average guy when it comes to handling machines, and I needed Ms. Charming to get me through it. This, dear manufacturer (who shall remain anonymous. You know who you are.), is a system that is crying for attention. Want to talk?

Some of my last group of undergraduate design seniors are about to graduate. Some of them will go on to earn Masters degrees, a choice made all the more attractive by a slow economy. Others will look for jobs, using their portfolios, contacts, resumés, and job experience to turn their educational expenses into something more financially profitable.

So this seems like a good time to collect a few bits of advice. Some of these issues are related to the generation gap between young designers and hiring managers. There are plenty of professionals who know more than I about how to write a resumé, how to organize your portfolio, and how to dress to impress. So I’m going to keep it to advising graduating designers in areas where I see mistakes made repeatedly. I hope the advice is helpful. In no particular order:

1. If you want to link (with me, or any professional) on Linkedin, and you were not my student, or otherwise well acquainted, first send a note explaining who you are and why you want to link with that person. To the extent that linking constitutes some kind of relationship, however loose, it’s the best way to ensure a positive response. If you a student currently awaiting an answer, try it.

2. If you ask for a recommendation, be as specific as possible about what you hope will come out in the letter, and for whom it is written. You simply must follow up with a thank you. Then let the recommender know if land a job or not. Stay in touch.

3. If a recommendation gets you a job, hand write and snail mail a thank you note. They are rare these days and so provide an easier than ever opportunity to impress.

4. When hiring, there is no such thing as a favor in business. It is business. Your ability to work is a financial decision, not personal, except to the extent that your personality affects financial issues or calls your performance into question. The ideal that you should seek in any negotiation is the win-win.

5. A warning: If someone asks that your price be lowered as incentive for more work later, I’m telling you here and now to forget that ever happening. This would be the win-lose. Buying (or selling) any product or service strictly on price, unless it’s commodity, is short-sighted. Never in my 30 years of leaving satisfied customers has a lowered price led to more work. It leads to less money. You will be filed under “call this person when the money runs out”. When the money comes in, they owe you nothing. They will call the firm or the designer they wished they could have afforded the first time. I apologize for what may come off as cynicism. It’s just business, and thirty years of learning. If you are the hiring manager, save the hot air. When you try this ploy, though you may even be totally sincere, it makes you look bad, and will only lead to a difficult relationship.

6. Be honest about what you don’t know. Inexperienced professionals try to cover their shortcomings. People fake it everywhere. A true pro readily admits that they are in new territory, or don’t have a ready answer. I tell clients that I have very few answers. I do, however, have some great questions.

7. Treat everyone with respect, especially your competition and former employers. You will never ever gain ground by complaining about a former employer, coworker, or competitor. Let others make that assessment. If you are compelled to tell a war story to illustrate a point, leave out the names.

8. Do a brutally honest skills assessment on yourself. If you do not draw as well or better than anyone you know, get to work. A designer must draw very well. It is our visual skills that set us apart as communicators of the new. Do you want your ideas taken seriously? Of course you do. Besides, don’t miss the point here. Learning to draw is learning to see. You are being paid in large part for having a trained eye. Learn to apply a high degree of craftsmanship when its appropriate. Improved skill will help even your casual, fast models or sketches.

9. Any performing musician can tell you: Never apologize to your audience. (beyond maybe “Sorry I’m late”. But then, you were not late, were you?!) It just makes them uncomfortable. They don’t feel sorry for you. They feel sorry for themselves. If you must apologize, make it quick and get on with it. No matter what, do not carry on. Don’t point out flaws in your presentation. (“This next picture is really too dark to see well.”) Chances are some flaws will be missed. Another lesson from music: Musicians learn early on to distinguish between a note they think they played, and a note that was in fact actually sounded. Learn to proofread. See what is actually there, not what you think is there. No matter what, use a spell checker. To catch words spelled correctly but misused, look and look again. As an example, yesterday in a senior student critique, I spotted the word “damned” in place of “damaged”. When I asked B to read the page, he read “damaged” out loud. Then I asked that he reread, saying what was actually written. Oops. It’s okay if you are not a natural speller, just learn that fact and fix things. You are being paid to watch the details.

10. Work will put the “dead” back into “deadline”. The best excuse in the world is still an excuse. By the time they reach college, students have been perfecting the excuse for years, and have mastered the technique. If you have been living in a world where great excuses work, you are now leaving the station. You are paid to get a job done despite every reason that makes doing it impossible. Do not look for or offer some excuse. Just do the job. (Extreme medical emergency or death in the family, if true, may be the exceptions. That said, once you are experienced enough, you will learn to have a plan B in place that can sometimes even work around such difficult issues.)

11. Beware the parallel universe: Once  upon a time I brought some of my own work to class, specifically to illustrate model making techniques in paper. To my great surprise, my students told me that in the years they had been in school, this was the first time a teacher had brought in his or her own work. Here is the take-away lesson: School and work are two completely different universes, even if the objects that inhabit these universes bear a resemblance to each other. If you have been taught primarily by professional professors, theoreticians, among them those who do not do, but only teach, you may have some adjustments to make when leaving the world of the theoretical, subjective, and forgiving, and hitting the world of get it done, parts tolerances (see no. 11 below), materials limitations, costs, clients who don’t have time for your feelings, and no excuses. Be clear about which of these worlds you are in.

12. Business managers and engineers, by training and necessity, live in a world of measures. Designers mostly work and live in touchy-feely land, where intuition has value. Think of the friction (or disconnection) between these groups as akin to the ancient battle (gap) between heart and mind, or that between logic and emotion. Both characteristics are necessary to have a fully human being, or a fully human design. You learned a whole bunch of stuff to get here. Now learn to get along with those whose measurements may be different. (If you were a design student at a technical university, hopefully some of your best friends are engineers. Your ability to communicate easily with the technical folks is an important fact that can and should be listed under “strengths”. Don’t discount this.) Art school designers may find this one trickier, depending on your background and mindset.

Lastly, I offer my sincere wish for your good luck. Most of you are every bit as capable as we were when first starting out. Experienced design managers who have entry-level staff should not expect miracles. They do however have a right to expect you to earn your paycheck. Learn, stay optimistic, and above all, develop your resources. You’ll do fine.

In a BBC show about young British designers studying with French design icon Philippe Starck, a French advertising agency told their young client that brand is three things: Promise, Experience, and Memory.

Parents purchasing toys for their kids face a dilemma not unlike buying dog food: the buyer is not the consumer. Advertisements promise certain benefits to the prospective owner. In many ways the product itself, the way it presents itself, or communicates its features is, like a fashion model, part of that advertisement. To help sort out the noise, various reviews offer critique of cost / benefit relationships, but in the end, it comes down to pay your money and take your chances. Warranty offers relief in case of failure, but few companies can afford to absolutely promise satisfaction. (Outdoor gear retailer REI is one of them.)

Word of mouth is probably as trusted, or more trusted than lofty analysis. Childless adults purchasing toys may be disconnected from some of the basic issues that parents soon learn. What interests an adult does not always interest a kid. Many parents are familiar with the old story about giving a kid a cardboard box to play with, and let the child’s imagination supply the fun. Simple can be better than complex, depending on the adults’ willingness to assist in assembly and developing play routines, and (this is really key, shoppers) toys with many parts seldom stay together. Toys come and go and kids grow beyond taking what they’re given, to demanding, first what television tells them they should want, then what they believe will make them seem more grown up (a cell phone) or connected to their peers, e.g. video games, or movies. So what we’re left with is this: a toy, like any product or ad, is a promise. Kids learn through disappointment that often, the promise is a fabrication to get money, or perhaps, just a sign that an idea of a wonderful experience was not fulfilled by the product. Consumers might blame themselves for not getting what was obviously offered: satisfaction, or perhaps longevity. Mix with this a desire by some parents to further their child’s learning by getting them toys designed to make them smarter, speak another language, or to develop a particular skill, and now we have a real crap shoot. Musical instruments are a good example. Knowing how much to spend and which features to buy to arrive at some threshold of cost/benefit is a real trick, requiring consumer skill, or maybe reviews from owners. It’s especially tough when venturing outside the individual buyer’s experience. Does it matter if the features fulfill the promise of the product? Only if it’s your kid, or your money, affected by the choice. Market trends follow consumer behavior beyond reason. What is hot is hot, and it makes little or no difference that the value is not there. People may buy products by making emotional decisions to purchase of something that deserves to be studied first, for instance, an automobile. Understanding how materials and technology combine to drive expectations, and perception of value, is key to the product designer seeking to ensure that the third element of brand, memory, is favorable to future purchases.

The following is a discussion I began with my industrial design students as they began a project to develop a plate, cup and saucer. These principles apply to anyone in design school, or if you are buying design services, to help ensure you get the most bang for your design services buck. Enjoy – SH.

If you have treated your concept phase as a way to get acquainted with your project, a type of exploration of ideas, that is part of it, for sure. But wait, there’s more. If you don’t make the opening of a project strong, your chance of success goes down. Are you succeeding or just surviving? Neither?

A product concept:

1. Is a vision of future success, and thereby gives the project an early boost. It establishes a project’s personality. Ideally, it is not an icon, but more of a mirage. It changes as you go, but provides an ideal to pursue. It may lack sufficient detail so that it can be developed as the criteria and their order become clear.  Is easily understood, though some aspects may be subject to interpretation. This is the looseness quality that we talked about yesterday. Models can sometimes explain things that drawings cannot, and vice versa.

2. Is a conversation driver. It demonstrates what the designer thinks and needs to know to proceed. (e.g. a teacup design with several handle treatments, to explore how they relate). It tries to bring forth objections and useful criteria and feedback. It should not be boring. Does not confuse the viewer with a great deal of extra information. What exactly do you want to know? Make the concept an inquiry.

3. Is focused, and embodies some, but maybe not all, qualities sought by the problem and the user. For example, a designer might have concepts that trade off costs, or emphasize one criteria order over another. (e.g. is it cheap, or full featured, simple to make, or simple to operate, or both, maybe one concept requires low tooling and high piece price, then the next one shows the opposite, etc.)  Is selective. It may or may not yet deal with scale, manufacturing, or other hard realities, depending on its mission. You might choose to avoid certain aspects (e.g. color or control areas) to focus on and clarify others.

4. Demonstrates the designer’s ability to visualize. Besides drawings, it may have callouts to explain certain aspects. Is this view the most helpful? Do you need material samples to help the audience experience the tactile feel of the idea?

5. Establishes the designer’s level of visual acuity. Do you draw expertly, with certainty, or are you tentative? Do you show a strong sense of form? Establish your expertise from day one.

6. May be 2-d or 3-d, or a combination, like for instance, a photograph of a model being used.

7. Will change. Never fall in love with a concept and spend your project time trying to realize that ideal. Let the criteria and learning adapt the product and let it develop. Like a child, it needs to grow and learn.

8. Establishes a visual language to enable the designer to form a unique user-centered future in terms of something besides the past work of others. What if there has never been a thing like this? Then where does the visual language come from? Many of you have chosen natural forms, a powerful ally. There are others, of course, like history, art, mechanics, science, weapons, and so on. Metaphor is very powerful.

9. May concentrate on verbs rather than nouns. How does use affect form? (read The Art Of Innovation, by Tom Kelley) E.g. some of you may not want a handle on your pretty cup, but your avoidance causes other issues, or at least, causes you to solve the heat transfer issue in another way. In the end, you cannot escape the user’s needs. If your handle does not attach well, you have made a poor trade off. Real design does not hide from necessity, but meets it head on.

10. Provides the energy to drive the project forward through the difficulties ahead. Quality is a somewhat subjective term, but however you define it, it has power. Everyone likes great design, and you need all the energy you can muster in yourself, your team, and in the client’s employees. From people on the assembly line, customer service, sales, marketing, advertising, and others, more folks than the consumer can benefit from good design.

In the end, don’t settle for random, unfocused concepts. Good answers start with good questions. Despite strong visual appeal, if they don’t have what it takes, the advantages strong concepts bring are missing, and the project will suffer as a result.

See Design Thinking in Wikipedia for more insight into this area.  - SH

Check this npr story about the middle aged brain.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124118077

This link takes you to a very interesting comparison of brain function and characteristics as we age, with various examples of the advantages and disadvantages of developing and younger brains, and those of older or middle aged brains as well.  Once you get a chance to check it out, then give a thought to the myth that design is a young person’s game, and that it’s said that older designers are less able to come up with fresh ideas. I could go on at length about the researcher’s conclusions, but once you listen to the story, I think you’ll get my point: design is not exclusively a young person’s game.

In the end, maybe what we’d like is the advantages of both, and the disadvantages of neither. I’m not saying that there is no room for individual differences, which must be accounted for in the end. It just struck me, and  you might call it self-serving in a way, that the characteristics of the older brain are largely what you should look for in a design consultant: Primarily, the ability to synthesize complex relationships, and to favor the best interests of others, for instance, the user, the client or the project team, over those of the individual designer. I for one have always believed in the win-win, preferring to align my clients’ needs with my own, so that there is no conflict of interest.