For the last few years, I was teaching startups to think like designers. But I eventually realized that you need someone to model and inspire design thinking within the company. If you don't have a designer in your founding group, it's harder to have a culture of design. You see the reasons why all the time: A consultant comes in to improve a design and when they leave, the transformation eventually dies.
This was my aha moment; it challenged whether I was making an impact. My solution? Do the opposite of what I’ve been doing. Rather than spending as much energy training nondesigners, I figured I’d help designers succeed as part of the founding DNA of startups, thus making great design a natural expression of their operations.
Although designer-founder genes are rare, more designers have the capacity to step up to the challenge. Inspired by the mathematician Richard Hamming, I believe that being a designer founder of a tech startup is one of the biggest opportunities in the design field today. So I laid out some assertions to begin experimenting, started aligning resources and kickstarted research about designer founders.
What's Driving the Movement
Here's why design is important to the tech world today:
1. As the consumer tech market becomes more crowded, brands and experience design--not just technical capabilities--are becoming critical to success.
2. Innovation is about radical collaboration. The critical mass of combined design, technical, and business skills enables product iteration to happen faster and at a higher resolution.
3. Designer founders have unique skills (not just visual) to understand human needs and discover unarticulated opportunities.
With these points in hand, I presented them to as many designers and investors as I could find. Turns out, more than 50 of them believed these assertions, too. So we came together as a community to create the Designer Fund and invest in the next generation of designer founders.
The Skills to Ship
Clearly, every designer isn’t meant to be a founder and probably shouldn’t be. To be clear, we don’t mean designer as the prima donna pixel-pusher that you might be picturing. We also don’t mean designer as the “I took one class called UX Fundamentals in business school.” We mean an honest-to-goodness, experienced practitioner who has learned to design by designing. And most importantly, they're able to ship usable products.
Above all, designer founders should be experts at finding the right problems to solve. That means sometimes building usable products that are ugly, or prototyping with a spreadsheet, and not getting trapped into making something beautifully useless that will not scale. Designer founders need to be able to do a lot, and it’s not easy.
This Is About Impact, Not Hype
The point is not to get caught up in buzzword titles, or challenge the role of design consultants or founders with engineering backgrounds, but to highlight the emerging opportunity for founders with design expertise from trained to self-taught backgrounds. It makes sense that a prerequisite for a tech company is to have a founder with technical skills. The same heuristic should hold true if you want to ship consistently well-designed products like Pinterest, AirBnB, and Path. Why not have a cofounder with design skills who champions the user experience?
Now, more than ever, we face complex problems that designer founders are well-equipped to solve. Everyone in a company should have empathy and practice design regardless of their title. Design can no longer be just be an outsourced add-on, limited to putting “lipstick on a pig.” Tech moves too fast for such short-sighted design thinking; it won't be a lasting advantage.
Of course, designer founders aren’t some magical unicorn or silver bullet that’s going to solve everything. They’re but one potential key ingredient to teams of innovators, not a guarantee. Many companies will succeed without designer founders and many will fail with them. But I believe they improve the odds of survival.
Studying the Paths of Designer Founders
Designer founders we’ve observed are consistently multidisciplinary and have cross-functional skills necessary to make decisions about products. They are fluent in the full design stack, ranging from user research and interaction design to information architecture and communication design. They may not be experts in all sub-disciplines of design but can get by on their own in the early days of their startup and attract specialists when needed. In addition, they have a thorough enough working understanding of technology and business stacks, including agile programming and data-based marketing methods. Designer founders can move up and down the design stack and across the technology and business stacks to do what it takes to ship and use data to justify their decisions when needed. Thus, they are capable of leading both their product and organization through the design cycles needed to innovate. There’s a difference between a designer who can design a car dashboard and a designer who can design an entire car and how to drive it. Designer founders need to be able to do both.
To support these claims, we’re practicing what we preach and interviewing every designer founder we can find who’s created a venture-backed tech startup. The collection of interviews will be published as a nonprofit book that will be free for students, with the goal of synthesizing patterns and lessons to inspire entrepreneurial designers. The first by-product of this research, our Designer Founders info cards, represent a snapshot of data we’ve collected and some patterns we’re starting to explore. What you find is that designers live behind some of the web's best startups, including Vimeo, YouTube, Hunch, Path, Etsy, and Instagram. That's no coincidence.
The Future of Designer Founders
More designer founders than previous decades are daring to walk the unbeaten path and sacrifice the security of a paycheck to pursue the freedom of creating meaningful impact through tech startups. Whether they succeed or not, these designers represent a new breed of entrepreneur that will hopefully inspire the next generation of designers to be even better at making positive social change. There are also schools who are responding to the call to train entrepreneurial designers, such as the Stanford d.school, School of Visual Arts, among others. As we enter a user-interface revolution, there are even more possibilities for designers to create experiences with touch, sound, and movement interaction.
In the wake of Steve Jobs's example, it's obvious that designer founders should be champions of the user experience. They're the ones who stand with one foot in the world of technology and the other in the world of people, bringing the two together.
ref: http://m.fastcompany.com/design/59797/full/
This was my aha moment; it challenged whether I was making an impact. My solution? Do the opposite of what I’ve been doing. Rather than spending as much energy training nondesigners, I figured I’d help designers succeed as part of the founding DNA of startups, thus making great design a natural expression of their operations.
Although designer-founder genes are rare, more designers have the capacity to step up to the challenge. Inspired by the mathematician Richard Hamming, I believe that being a designer founder of a tech startup is one of the biggest opportunities in the design field today. So I laid out some assertions to begin experimenting, started aligning resources and kickstarted research about designer founders.
What's Driving the Movement
Here's why design is important to the tech world today:
1. As the consumer tech market becomes more crowded, brands and experience design--not just technical capabilities--are becoming critical to success.
2. Innovation is about radical collaboration. The critical mass of combined design, technical, and business skills enables product iteration to happen faster and at a higher resolution.
3. Designer founders have unique skills (not just visual) to understand human needs and discover unarticulated opportunities.
With these points in hand, I presented them to as many designers and investors as I could find. Turns out, more than 50 of them believed these assertions, too. So we came together as a community to create the Designer Fund and invest in the next generation of designer founders.
The Skills to Ship
Clearly, every designer isn’t meant to be a founder and probably shouldn’t be. To be clear, we don’t mean designer as the prima donna pixel-pusher that you might be picturing. We also don’t mean designer as the “I took one class called UX Fundamentals in business school.” We mean an honest-to-goodness, experienced practitioner who has learned to design by designing. And most importantly, they're able to ship usable products.
Above all, designer founders should be experts at finding the right problems to solve. That means sometimes building usable products that are ugly, or prototyping with a spreadsheet, and not getting trapped into making something beautifully useless that will not scale. Designer founders need to be able to do a lot, and it’s not easy.
This Is About Impact, Not Hype
The point is not to get caught up in buzzword titles, or challenge the role of design consultants or founders with engineering backgrounds, but to highlight the emerging opportunity for founders with design expertise from trained to self-taught backgrounds. It makes sense that a prerequisite for a tech company is to have a founder with technical skills. The same heuristic should hold true if you want to ship consistently well-designed products like Pinterest, AirBnB, and Path. Why not have a cofounder with design skills who champions the user experience?
Now, more than ever, we face complex problems that designer founders are well-equipped to solve. Everyone in a company should have empathy and practice design regardless of their title. Design can no longer be just be an outsourced add-on, limited to putting “lipstick on a pig.” Tech moves too fast for such short-sighted design thinking; it won't be a lasting advantage.
Of course, designer founders aren’t some magical unicorn or silver bullet that’s going to solve everything. They’re but one potential key ingredient to teams of innovators, not a guarantee. Many companies will succeed without designer founders and many will fail with them. But I believe they improve the odds of survival.
Studying the Paths of Designer Founders
Designer founders we’ve observed are consistently multidisciplinary and have cross-functional skills necessary to make decisions about products. They are fluent in the full design stack, ranging from user research and interaction design to information architecture and communication design. They may not be experts in all sub-disciplines of design but can get by on their own in the early days of their startup and attract specialists when needed. In addition, they have a thorough enough working understanding of technology and business stacks, including agile programming and data-based marketing methods. Designer founders can move up and down the design stack and across the technology and business stacks to do what it takes to ship and use data to justify their decisions when needed. Thus, they are capable of leading both their product and organization through the design cycles needed to innovate. There’s a difference between a designer who can design a car dashboard and a designer who can design an entire car and how to drive it. Designer founders need to be able to do both.
To support these claims, we’re practicing what we preach and interviewing every designer founder we can find who’s created a venture-backed tech startup. The collection of interviews will be published as a nonprofit book that will be free for students, with the goal of synthesizing patterns and lessons to inspire entrepreneurial designers. The first by-product of this research, our Designer Founders info cards, represent a snapshot of data we’ve collected and some patterns we’re starting to explore. What you find is that designers live behind some of the web's best startups, including Vimeo, YouTube, Hunch, Path, Etsy, and Instagram. That's no coincidence.
The Future of Designer Founders
More designer founders than previous decades are daring to walk the unbeaten path and sacrifice the security of a paycheck to pursue the freedom of creating meaningful impact through tech startups. Whether they succeed or not, these designers represent a new breed of entrepreneur that will hopefully inspire the next generation of designers to be even better at making positive social change. There are also schools who are responding to the call to train entrepreneurial designers, such as the Stanford d.school, School of Visual Arts, among others. As we enter a user-interface revolution, there are even more possibilities for designers to create experiences with touch, sound, and movement interaction.
In the wake of Steve Jobs's example, it's obvious that designer founders should be champions of the user experience. They're the ones who stand with one foot in the world of technology and the other in the world of people, bringing the two together.
ref: http://m.fastcompany.com/design/59797/full/
“We must constantly look at things in a
different way. Just when you think you know something, you must look at it in a
different way. Even though it may seem silly or wrong, you must try. Dare to
strike out and find new ground.”
“Despite what anyone might tell you, words and
ideas can change the world.”
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s
cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And
the human race is filled with passion. Poetry, beauty, love, romance. These are
what we stay alive for. The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a
verse. What will your verse be?”
-Dead Poet Society
“To the crazy ones. Here’s to
the misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The people who see the world differently.”
“The people who are crazy
enough to believe they can change the world are the ones who actually do.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “To be great is
to be misunderstood,” and I always believed that was the general concept behind the “Think Different”
campaign.
To
the crazy ones.
Here’s
to the misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
Here’s
to the ones who see the world differently.
They’re
the ones who invent and imagine and create.
They’re
the ones who push the human race forward.
While
some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because
the people who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world are the
ones who actually do.
“Think
different.”
Reference: The
Real Story Behind Apple's 'Think Different' Campaign - Forbes ,well
written by Rob Siltanen, worth reading.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real-story-behind-apples-think-different-campaign/
"A big part of being highly creative person is having an open mind & being able to recognize great ideas even when you're not looking for them, perhaps even when they are the last thing you are looking for."
The DIY Lobotomy 2002- Tom Monahan observation
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
The DIY Lobotomy 2002- Tom Monahan observation
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
"The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men -- the man he is and the man he wants to be."-- William Feather
"If you are kind," reads the gift, "people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway." -Mother Teresa
I'm convinced that the greatness that matters more is the greatness people achieve through helping each other, through collaborating, more than the greatness that's achieved by grabbing all you can or getting all you can or building all you can. The 'you' needs to go away for there to be the real greatness to things. So for me, the genuine part, it's a weird thing -- to get to the real you, you have to be less you."
He raced BMX and motocross bikes from a young age, under the tutelage of his father, who taught him that "part of the joy of winning is the infliction of loss." Now, he says, tapping his forearm like a junkie, "I've been messing around with this less-competitive version of myself, because the other doesn't make you happy. You can't win enough."
"I'm trying to think ... midlife crises occur generally because we fear death, right? And I'm pretty sure I don't fear death. So maybe, what do I fear?" He pauses again. "What I fear -- actually, I'll tell you what it is -- what I fear is, I fear" -- his eyes start to pink around the rims, his voice cracks -- "I fear a moment when my children are older, and they look at me and say, 'What did you do? The world is like a spiraling cesspool. You were an adult, you needed to do something, I was just a kid. What did you do?' I want to be able to say, I did this, this, and this. And did my best. Yeah, that's it. It is a midlife crisis, and it's not my death. It's the fear of not being able to say that you tried, in all sincerity. I think it's a new kind of midlife crisis."
"Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning. -- M. Gandhi."
"If you are kind," reads the gift, "people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway." -Mother Teresa
I'm convinced that the greatness that matters more is the greatness people achieve through helping each other, through collaborating, more than the greatness that's achieved by grabbing all you can or getting all you can or building all you can. The 'you' needs to go away for there to be the real greatness to things. So for me, the genuine part, it's a weird thing -- to get to the real you, you have to be less you."
He raced BMX and motocross bikes from a young age, under the tutelage of his father, who taught him that "part of the joy of winning is the infliction of loss." Now, he says, tapping his forearm like a junkie, "I've been messing around with this less-competitive version of myself, because the other doesn't make you happy. You can't win enough."
"I'm trying to think ... midlife crises occur generally because we fear death, right? And I'm pretty sure I don't fear death. So maybe, what do I fear?" He pauses again. "What I fear -- actually, I'll tell you what it is -- what I fear is, I fear" -- his eyes start to pink around the rims, his voice cracks -- "I fear a moment when my children are older, and they look at me and say, 'What did you do? The world is like a spiraling cesspool. You were an adult, you needed to do something, I was just a kid. What did you do?' I want to be able to say, I did this, this, and this. And did my best. Yeah, that's it. It is a midlife crisis, and it's not my death. It's the fear of not being able to say that you tried, in all sincerity. I think it's a new kind of midlife crisis."
"Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning. -- M. Gandhi."
"My sense is he thinks it's a big game," a friend of Bogusky tells me. "He just likes playing the game. The game of life. If he finds something intriguing, he's like, 'I'm going to be the best in the world at it. I'm going to convince people to eat more fatty burgers, and I'm going to convince people to drive electric cars -- because I can convince them of anything.' "
I was reminded of one creative director who described Bogusky this way: "He's a combination of believing something and being so good at selling it that you can't tell the difference between the two."
reference:
http://www.fastcompany.com/alex-bogusky-tells-all
http://www.fastcompany.com/alex-bogusky-tells-all
Collaboration of artist, writer and entrepreneur
The mission: to entertain, to challenge, to captivate, to enlighten
If you put the best artist in the world and the best writer artist in the world, they will make the best masterpiece in the world and you know what its called. They called it a comic book.
Comic should be a reflection of a time.
I think people need an ideal to look at and to try to become and maybe for me Superman is that kind of ideal. - The death of Superman
One of the wonderful things about working in comics is you get built on people and people built on you.
You have all that under you and you add to it. I'm going to make my remarkable here, I am going to tell a story that hasn't been told about this character.
Sometimes they just need the right take or they need the love that somebody really understand it & someone see something new in it. Its not just about entertaining people, its giving them something to think about & some values & maybe something about to live towards.
I don't even want to think the world without DC. I love superheroes because its just like everything you want to do in your life. You like helping people, they help people, and you gotta live through them.
Comics are a story telling form that you can tell any kind of stories
We provide this great space for creative talent to really have a place to tell their stories
You gonna make this character into real people that you care about.
The character is so flexible, they work in every era because the creator has always found way to talk about what's interesting to them now and what's happening in the culture now.
Superheroes are the archetype, live within us & somebody find a way to present them to us, in a way that is compatible with realities that we live in. There's still around all this decade because they've been loved to evolved.
Character continue to be built, as it always have, by drawing on history and culture and personal experience to convey the deepest hope for the new generation in whatever forms the comics may take.
I have no idea how much longer books have for this world, but I do know people like Seigel & Shuster, Bob Kane & Bill Finger, Julius Schwarts & Allan Moore. These people came up with character and stories that are going to be run forever. Whether you're reading it on a small thing that look like a diamond that you tap with your finger and get straight the content into your retina or whether you're reading it on something that you can fold up and putting it on your pocket afterwards & you wanna pile up and put it in a tree house I don't know but I can tell you that hundred years from now there will be kids who want to find out what's happening with Superman.
ref: Secret origins the story of DC Comics
The mission: to entertain, to challenge, to captivate, to enlighten
If you put the best artist in the world and the best writer artist in the world, they will make the best masterpiece in the world and you know what its called. They called it a comic book.
Comic should be a reflection of a time.
I think people need an ideal to look at and to try to become and maybe for me Superman is that kind of ideal. - The death of Superman
One of the wonderful things about working in comics is you get built on people and people built on you.
You have all that under you and you add to it. I'm going to make my remarkable here, I am going to tell a story that hasn't been told about this character.
Sometimes they just need the right take or they need the love that somebody really understand it & someone see something new in it. Its not just about entertaining people, its giving them something to think about & some values & maybe something about to live towards.
I don't even want to think the world without DC. I love superheroes because its just like everything you want to do in your life. You like helping people, they help people, and you gotta live through them.
Comics are a story telling form that you can tell any kind of stories
We provide this great space for creative talent to really have a place to tell their stories
You gonna make this character into real people that you care about.
The character is so flexible, they work in every era because the creator has always found way to talk about what's interesting to them now and what's happening in the culture now.
Superheroes are the archetype, live within us & somebody find a way to present them to us, in a way that is compatible with realities that we live in. There's still around all this decade because they've been loved to evolved.
Character continue to be built, as it always have, by drawing on history and culture and personal experience to convey the deepest hope for the new generation in whatever forms the comics may take.
I have no idea how much longer books have for this world, but I do know people like Seigel & Shuster, Bob Kane & Bill Finger, Julius Schwarts & Allan Moore. These people came up with character and stories that are going to be run forever. Whether you're reading it on a small thing that look like a diamond that you tap with your finger and get straight the content into your retina or whether you're reading it on something that you can fold up and putting it on your pocket afterwards & you wanna pile up and put it in a tree house I don't know but I can tell you that hundred years from now there will be kids who want to find out what's happening with Superman.
ref: Secret origins the story of DC Comics
