People have always gravitated to things that are well designed. Design creates desire, but what good design means today is becoming far more than just face value. People expect more of the things they buy and use to serve a purpose; to actually solve a problem or to improve their situation, not just look nice. Good design is human-centric. It satisfies both the audience’s needs and desires, and good designers know how to put the audience experience first to get to ideas that are both solution and style. It’s called Design Thinking and it’s a way of thinking all brands could benefit from. Understanding audiences, from their problems to their passions, needs to be part of how all brands create today—not just as interesting context, or as a stat to justify our ideas, but as the starting point for the solutions themselves.
Historically, design is a late-stage tactical add-on, making an already developed idea more attractive to the consumer with a beautiful wrapper. But Design Thinking is about blending what people want, what technology makes possible and what’s viable for the business to create solutions that go beyond aesthetics. It’s about capturing insights to inspire human-centered solutions, combining products, services, spaces and information into ideas that work and people love.
Space: HiQ
Car-service chain HiQ’s rebranding efforts were led by the understanding that, for many of us, taking our cars to the garage can be a daunting experience. We feel anxious over the price and alienated by the use of technical jargon and general lack of empathy for customers. Its new concept center is designed to communicate simplicity, reliability and openness by using simple language, illustrations and glass walls to allow customers to see onto the garage floor themselves. The welcoming atmosphere helped reposition the franchise as the transparent, no-stress, friendly garage.
Product: Y-Water
Y Water is an organic, nutrient-rich, low-calorie development drink that’s also committed to green practices. The distinctive Y-shaped bottles are symmetrical in every dimension and riff off a question kids most commonly ask: “Why?” Biodegradable rubber “Y Knots” turn the bottles into a toy by connecting them in Lego-like constructions, creating spaceships, animals, robots, or whatever else a creative child can imagine. Shaping a unique new behavior and a product afterlife for the product, Y Water encourages kids to repurpose the 100% recyclable bottles versus simply discarding them as trash.
Service: Bank of America
BofA turned the common consumer behavior of saving change in a jar at home into an innovative savings account service called “Keep the Change.” Consumers who use their debit cards to make purchases can now choose to have the total rounded up to the nearest dollar and the difference deposited in their savings accounts. The success of the program lay in the instinctive desire for people to put money aside in a painless way and the program’s natural integration with existing consumer behavior.
- This newsletter was first published in July 2008. Media Arts Mondays is produced by Media Arts Lab. You can subscribe to Media Arts Mondays here or download this newsletter here.
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