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Designing Demand – in Software?
The Design Council is a body associated with ‘traditional’ design and innovation, but often some of their ideas and programmes are worth looking at here.
Designing Demand, for example, is a free workshop businesses can apply for. A team of independent experts in branding, product development, and design management is led by a Design Council associate. They are dispatched to a company to identify where design can be used to develop new products, services or branding. The experts spend time mentoring management to understand possibilities, and if the company wants to go about implementing the recommendations, the Design Council will point them in the direction of local qualified designers.
I’m wondering: what would a software design workshop look like? Would it be possible to sit down with a company and point out how their use of systems is inefficient or out-of-date? If they were developing bespoke software, is there value in talking about design first? Are we still so abstract from the real World that traditional design practices don’t offer any insight or innovation in this space, or can we take lessons from the design community? Is it possible to apply design principles in software to identify opportunities for innovation?
My gut instinct is there’s something here, but I’m not quite sure what.
