Design as a Quality of Life Issue

Have you walked through a home that just “felt different” from the previous homes you explored? Do prefer Target to Wal-Mart, or Lowes over Home Depot for your big box shopping, but are not clear why? Will you return to a favorite web site because you can find what you’re looking for, it feels easy to navigate and you can complete a transaction? Have you held an OXO vegetable peeler and wondered why on earth anyone ever used the one in your Grandma’s utensil drawer?

If you responded yes to any of these scenarios, you have experienced the positive nature of design thinking and the way it enhances our lives moment by moment. From our cars to our cubes to our phones and their interface, we are impacted by the choices and thinking of companies, industrial engineers, designers, and marketers who have decided what our experience will be with the products and services that we buy and access.

The rate of innovation Even through this recessionary economy, the pace of new product and service innovation has not slowed. Though it may be suffering from a lack of courage and commitment on the part of investors. As an agency that provides both product development research and consulting and communications strategy, we attend a number of events where we encounter investors, designers and entrepreneurs hoping to break into the mature consumer market. We are frequently dismayed that requests for mature consumer insights into their product or service come very late in the process – at the marketing stage – and not during the design and development of the product or service.

This disconnect seems to be driven by investors and the desire to get a product into market as quickly as possible and to “test in market” and “innovate on the fly.” In the many years we have seen this occur, we have observed…

Check out the rest of this blog post at MediaPost’s Engage Boomers Blog.