Everyone is familiar with the Double Diamond in Design, but what's up with the Clubs, Hearts and Spades on this platform?
The mission and vision of the Design in Focus Platform is to discover and demonstrate the value and impact of Creativity, Innovation and Design (CID) in business and society.
While a diamond may seem relevant due to the link to the process, the reasoning behind the card deck symbols may have you wondering. Wonder no more as we're about to share the big idea.
First let's look at the keywords of our mission and vision. Value & Impact and Business & Society. How could we measure the success of demonstrating value and impact, and how do we distinguish business and society? Most of society depends on business and most of business depends on society. The value of what we find impactful and the impact of what we value is equally nuanced because there are different economical and societal associations derived from societies dependence on business and business's dependence on society.
We could have simplified it and just to just focus on tangible business numbers, but not all designers speak business and not all business speaks to CID professionals. How could we expect CID professionals to support the mission and vision? From starving artists such as Van Gogh, conned inventors such as Nicolas Tesla, and all the losses of clever designers such as Hedy Lamarr.
Due to the demand on design and innovation to be effective problem solving agents, often there is a huge call for creativity, and creativity many argue, is the soul or spirit of all of what we as mankind experience and come to call reality. It is the link to this creativity which distinguishes great design and innovation from poor design and innovation. Often business is purely interested in figures and numbers, which does not always speak the same language as CID.
So how to combine them all into a singular cohesive voice. We first, we need to find the relevant entry points and from there arrange them into cohesion through information processing. The link between value & impact and business & society from which nothing else can be subtracted is experience, and a persona we could form experience relevant for this platform is professional. Thus we arrived at professional experience at the base. Now we needed direction.
To go in any direction we had to chart a map. A compass comprises of four cardinal points, North, East, South, West. Although the mission and vision relies on real world experiences, our compass needed more to be effective relating to the world of the professional and so the directions had to gain personalities of their own, that way they could realistically embody the viewpoint behind the direction.
With the world as full of individuals as it is, how many viewpoints exist? A lot, so, we kept the goal of funneling the input into four directions. Now we needed to find recognisable personalities behind each one of the four directions. We came up with the notion that value only impacts humans which makes up society through the business of coexistence.
Since we are a platform for CID professionals, the directions needed to be relevant for CID professionals too. It's not only business value and impact we are after, it is also professional humans' value and impact. From this we build the four pillars.
Industry talks, the CID club, professional voice (business)+(figures value) represented by clubs
The human experience, meet the hearts, personalities voices (society)+(human value) represented by hearts
The dream team roundtable, diamonds made under pressure, professional performance (business)+(impact) represented by diamonds
The dark side of the force, call a spade a spade, honest CID to CID talk. (society)+(impact) represented by spades
By now you can see why we chose these four symbols. The Design in Focus platform has many areas and offers an array of options. To simplify navigation and aid users to better understand or remember the platform, the use of icons is very handy too.
This platform is still in the making and we are expanding rapidly. Can you help demonstrate the value and impact of CID in business and society? We'd like to hear from you. Visit the onboarding portal for more details.
Comments