Design in an innovation-free zone
I recently read an article on the Business Week web site entitled Designing in Hostile Territory that talked about tackling innovative business projects from a designer’s standpoint in a corporate environment that lacks a creative core. Even though the crux of the article deals with designing methods of enhancing corporate workflow, retaining customers, etc., these methods are very applicable to any designer or developer trying to sell an innovative idea to a reluctant client.
The most important point I found was that of empathizing with your “adversary”… to find and truly understand the reasons why your client, boss, or colleague is apprehensive to an innovative approach to the given project. Roger Smith writes:
It’s almost impossibly hard to design something compelling for a person whom you don’t respect or attempt to understand. The filing cabinets full of unbuilt houses designed for clients the architects saw as “philistines” are testament to the limitation of disrespecting your user. The architect consoles himself with the brilliance of his design without having any better explanation of its still-born fate than “the client had no appreciation of architecture.”
I personally find this hard to do most of the time, but at the same time I see where my resistance to understanding a “philistine” point of view doesn’t help in selling innovation or even creating an effective product for a client.
Additionally, Smith goes on to talk about the language of reliability. To paraphrase and bring into the context of our discussion, a more conservative client is only concerned with results, not the subtleties of the design. Having run across this many times, I was often frustrated in my earlier years that the client really just didn’t care if what they got looked nice as long as it worked. Now, I see it as a bit of a relief, knowing that that usually gives me free reign to be a little more bold in mixing innovation with a message that’s proven. In fact, as Smith mentions, a designer should integrate the concepts of “proof” and “certainty” into their vocabularies in order to help persuade conservative clients into agreement on a design. The more you can prove an idea similar to what you have works, the better.
I think, for me, the summary to the idea is not to go to a client as a “designer”, go as a listener, and base your strategy from there. And by “designer”, I mean all the pretentions that sometimes creeps into a designer’s ego. The more you portray the “oooh… look at me, I’m an artsy designer” vibe, the quicker a conservative client is going to shoot you down — mark my words.