Creating and communicating value(s)

Design Management Review, Summer 2004 by Sametz, Roger, Maydoney, Andrew

By affecting how people think and act and by connecting an organization to its constituents' values, design can enhance performance. Roger Sametz and Andrew Maydoney present a model of design that articulates these outcomes and how best to leverage them. Their discussion is about communications design, but their insights are applicable across a range of design arenas.

Thinking about value

It's difficult to talk about the value that communication design (or, more narrowly, graphic design) can create and deliver if neither practitioners nor clients think about communication design in terms of value.

It's similarly hard to talk about the contributions of different kinds of value communication design, and their informing processes, when the prevailing mental models don't include "value." Unfortunately, communication design is often

* Thought of primarily as a formal, visual discipline: "We need someone to lay this out."

* Defined in term of artifacts-"making things"-"I need a brochure.. .logo... Web site."

* Conceived and executed separately from an organization's strategic plans and thinking.

* Purchased as a commodity. Decisions are based on price, not value (and without taking into account "opportunity costs").

* Framed as "deliverables" to be checked off a to-do list, but without sufficient attention to the processes that deliver a useful (or not) deliverable.

* Planned and implemented, often without any sufficient connection to goals and outcomes or to agreed-upon metrics. (Almost anything else an organization embarks upon has some set of parameters to evaluate return on investment and success.)

* Not thought of as assets (beyond a logo or logotype) that have lasting value and need to be managed to deliver the highest possible return.

The fact that value, in any real sense, is not part of the dialogue is underscored through the "beauty pageants" that the communication design profession itself stages to "value" what its practitioners do. Thousands of entries are dealt onto tables, and judges bless those pieces that jump off the table (in the allotted nanosecond) with a colored chip. Enough colored chips translate into an award. But these awards are necessarily all about artifacts only-artifacts and their quotient of visual "cool." These contests may point to and, self-referentially, fulfill trends in visual iteration, but they are rarely explicitly about value delivered to a client organization or to its constituents. They couldn't be: The goals, opportunities, constraints,and results that connect to the artifacts are not on the table. And while visual coolness may well be important to a communication project's value, by itself, out of context, one can't know if any particular flavor of visual cool is appropriate or in sync with an organization, whether it will resonate with constituents, or if it will help to elicit desired responses and achieve stated goals.

Stepping back, defining "big-D" design

Although realigning mental models is never quick and easy, the outdated ones that define the scope and value of communication design need to be revisited-in practitioners' offices, classrooms, boardrooms, and in the conference rooms of the media that "serve" the profession.

If "small-d" design is about making things with ink, pixels, or paint-however visually arresting and intelligent-"big-D" involves thinking about these artifacts in a wider context: communication. And communication, even in its simplest form-leaving a note for the mythical milkman, drawing a map on a napkin to give directions, placing a classified ad to sell your old Jeep, or asking a friend about a new movie-is about learning, informing, educating, persuading, with some goal in sight. The most casual of communications are initiated with purpose, with a range of outcomes imagined-either in one's favor, or not. Certainly, communications that are more formal in their planning and execution should have at least as much rigor.

Thinking about communication design as communication that is designed involves stepping back and understanding that Web sites, corporate identity programs, and sign systems aren't the only things that can be designed. The analytical and translational skills that are critical to small-d design can-should-be applied on a wider scale.

At the front end, investigative processes can be designed to look both inside and outside an organization to develop goals, strategies, programs, and metrics-underpinnings that both inform any specific communications and give a picture of what success might look like. Frameworks for collaboration can be designed-frameworks that move hallway conversations from the subjective "I like/don't like green," to the more objective and useful "We need to effect χ or y kind of change to be successful." Customer experiences can be designed-across media and time. Channel strategies must be designed. And ways of generating enthusiastic and voluntary internal "buy-in" can and must be designed-without which the resulting artifacts may gather dust in some closet. None of this designing necessarily involves picking a typeface or art-directing a photo session. But it is all about designing a dialogue on many levels. Communication, according to our friends at The American Heritage Dictionary, is a "system for sending and receiving messages" (italics added to enhance communication).