Anything elegant is often simple; not everything simple is elegant. Things that are simple are often user friendly, not everything simple is user friendly. Sometimes complexity is needed. Simplicity has different meanings. Good businesses need to be simple and easy to understand, and that’s the investment criteria for Warren Buffet. Businesses are getting too complex these days and most executives, let alone CEOs, know all the moving pieces or have any idea of their risk exposure. And some rely on SAP to manage their enterprise and that’s unrealistic.

There are many different kinds of simplicity, sometimes in form and sometimes in function and sometimes both. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Elegance is “far side” simplicity that is emotionally engaging, profoundly intelligent, and artfully crafted to be two things at once: simple and powerful. Why elegance? Is it an elusive target? Is it only applicable to design?

A business model includes the raw function of what we (economist) refer to as its “industry” (it’s a bank or a retail chain or a newspaper, for example), but can also include particular ways of operating the raw function (a branchless bank or low-cost airline, a discount retailer or a free online social network, for example). Thus the business model “function” can shade into “performance” when particular approaches to types of customer, levels of service and brand ethos are considered. The architectural side of the business model is how the core components are stacked together and that impacts the function as well as the performance. It can be simple and elegant AND it can be complex and elegant.

What makes product desirable? What makes them desirable to an extent that people are attached to it (like the Blackberry, iPod or Birkin)? What is the basis of that emotional bonding? Is it based on the brand or the product or a combination of both? If they would go to the extreme to repair it, or even keep it after buying an updated version, it affects multiple ownerships.

To extend the psychological life span of products could be instrumental in reducing the demand for scarce resources and solve many sustainable challenges. Up until now, the role of the product and its design in stimulating the degree of attachment experienced toward this object remains quite obscure. As the product is under the designer’s direct control, understanding these issues is valuable for designers. Industrial designs have strong technical rational and that sometimes limits them to be reflective.

Donald Schön’s book The Reflective Practitioner (1983) discusses the crisis of professional practice. This crisis relates to the fact that professions such as architecture, design, medicine and psychology are strongly dominated by technical rationality and its positivist epistemology (PE) of practice. The problem is that PE cannot solve the dilemma of “rigor versus relevance” that professionals are confronted with. This is because PE is based on analytical, empirical and logical propositions of truth within an objective world. However, professional knowledge involves experiences, feelings and subjective evaluations, which are non-existent in PE.

The “fuzzy front end” is usually what matters and makes the most difference.  This early stage of product development often gets off to the wrong start. Too much emphasis is placed on the cost and volume trade-off and there is not enough thinking around how to turn products into a personal tool. Perhaps a tool to get work done or too to tell other who you are. In the case of a forklift, a cell phone or a toaster, you should not start with how to produce the most number of units for the lowest price while getting them into the hands of the most people.  This should come from the sales people, not the product design team. What people value most is the way that they interact with a product and what meanings it carries. This goes beyond price. The visual form, the way that they handle it, and how it makes them feel and think are all part of the design strategy. In the end, product design is simple:

- Understand the core feature that a user wants and then relentlessly reduce complexity and unnecessary elements until you get a simple user experience.
- Map out the product’s sociability – its affiliation with social groups and any product or, its category and how it is connected to different social groups or product groups.
- Look hard to find memories that are related to the product. Find pleasure that is directly and indirectly associated by using the product. Hire an anthropologist to help.

Image Source: http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2006/07/ideck_touch_screen_music_player.html; http://www.flickr.com/photos/23703702@N00/378586732/sizes/o/

Service design is an innovative and emerging discipline. I am not referring to the older definition of it in the manufacturing and hospitality industries.  Today, almost every business is a service business. How service companies bring innovation to life largely depends on how they define themselves. Pure services cover a wide range and heterogeneous fields. These range from low volume retailing to highly interactive digital interfaces. Don’t dismiss the high volume retail environment and technologically enabled activities like telecommunications, utilities, banking and insurance.

An example would be ING. Trying to define what a virtual bank would look like was not a simple task for ING DIRECT.  How do you get wary consumers who expect vaults and teller cages to trust a virtual bank?  The key is to design for the mind and the senses. Today’s businesses need to consider their emotional relationship with their customers as a key component of their value proposition. Designing a compelling customer experience enables this relationship. ING DIRECT sells a unique (and super simple) range of products and engages the customer in a unique way, creating the opportunity for a trust engagement as well as, ultimately, customer acquisition. There were so many customer barriers to overcome and address.

Another example is LG. They make and sell appliances. Now you can drag your dirty laundry over to the hip Canal St Martin neighborhood to wash it at the LG WashBar. The concept is unique: buy a drink at the bar and get free access to the upstairs “apartment” where you can do your laundry—washing powder comes free too!—browse books from the library, watch movies, and check your e-mails at the two free wireless hotspots. It’s a great place to hang out. The feel is cozy minimalist design meeting a high-tech appliance aesthetic. There’s even a dance floor downstairs for DJ nights. Fresh clothes and Saturday night dancing?…sounds good to me. The plan is to open up 15 across France.

So how does service innovation happen? It begins with gathering insights including goals and paths, prototyping the working experience and evidencing. Next, is service blueprinting. It all comes down to three things: Creating compelling user benefits, optimize based on the separability of the service nature and making sensible automation/human trade-offs. Develop Compelling User Benefits. Understand what type of benefit/value a service innovation can provide. Is this innovation an important core benefit or a new way of delivering an existing benefit? Examples are Cirque du Soleil (new core benefit), Netflix mail order DVD rental (new benefit), Blockbuster’s self-destruct DVD in 48 hours (new benefit) and Ford’s latest use of radar-based active safety technology linked to satellites (new benefit). Optimize based on the separability of the service. Is this innovation for a service that is produced and consumed simultaneously? Examples are Telemedicine (create separable services), Blackberry (mostly inseparable services), Enterprise Car Rental (create inseparable services) or iTunes (create inseparable services).

Model the service economics and making trade-offs. Customers are expensive. Dealing with them costs money. Putting them through a speech recognition application to offload calls saves money but lowers the quality of the experience. Each year, call centers implement new technologies that can take over the functions previously handled by people. Why then are customers so unhappy, if we expect call centers to implement technology that will make customers happy and provide them faster service? Simple, because technology does not equal quality customer service.

Take Nintendo Wii’s Glucoboy as an example. A game compatible with the Game Boy Advance or DS Lite, was launched in Australia on World Diabetes Day. The Glucoboy makes monitoring and achieving blood sugar goals fun. Whenever a user performs a glucose test, points are awarded which allows the user to unlock games. More points are awarded if the user’s blood sugar falls within the specified goals. The points may be spent in the game or on the GRIP online community. Users post their scores to the GRIP community to see who has the best scores in a town, country, and in the world. Nintendo has plenty of opportunities to create new benefits (and revenue) through service designs.

The Nintendo idea was created by Paul Wessel who noticed that his 9-year-old son would constantly lose his glucose monitor but not his Game Boy. Mr. Wessel states,  “That moment, five years ago, design was about the creation of beautiful and usable objects. Human has a similar project, using service design, when they pioneer the use of games for health industry. The idea is to create ways for people of all ages to improve their health and well-being through the use of video game technology. Expect to see more service design innovation when healthcare and gaming crossover.”

Today, it is additionally and increasingly thought to be a valid approach to problems related to, well, anything – be it global warming, poor transportation or social issues. What differentiates the designers’ way to solve societal problems from that of other professionals’? The essence of design still lies in the quest for aesthetic, functional as well as sensorial experiences, that appeal to and help societies. To design is to make the problem-solving a matter of the heart as much as rationality. While engineers can make banks efficient, designers can make customers happy. Efficiency and happiness are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, many businesses today act as if they are. They will be surprised who service designers can change that.

Image Source: http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/02/27/how-to-not-put-on-your-earrings/; http://www.linkdesign.nl/assets/Image/P_ING/ING_WEB_01.gif; http://trendwatching.com/trends/brand-spaces.htm; http://www.spbwhatsup.com/images/cirque.jpg; http://reviews.cnet.com/i/bto/20080227/Wii.jpg