Interactions - March/April 2009

Although Neumeier’s brand orientation makes vision for design while outsourcing a great deal of
for a somewhat orthogonal approach compared hands-on design execution.
with the more experience-oriented books dis- Neumeier’s prescriptions sometimes verge on
cussed above, Neumeier winds up tackling sloganeering (“Ban Powerpoint,” “Establish free-
many of the same topics, albeit with a different speech zones”), but he does go into satisfying
vocabulary. Grounding his book in the question specifics about the importance of establishing
of so-called “wicked problems”—social planner metrics like time to market and setting measur-
Horst Rittel’s term for seemingly insurmount- able frameworks for evaluating pilot projects. He
able challenges like balancing long-term goals also argues for establishing brand-training pro-
with short-term demands, predicting the returns grams to give employees certain core values that
on innovative concepts, and innovating at the can then take shape throughout the entire chain
increasing speed of change—he argues that of customer interactions. Finally, he articulates
such deeply thorny problems demand a new way his vision of the “designful company” by pitting
of thinking that’s altogether lacking in tradi- it against the “traditional” company, the design-
tional management approaches like Six Sigma. ful company being a place where customers come
Unsurprisingly, he suggests that salvation lies in before costs, vision and creativity take precedence
the practice of design. over command and control hierarchies, and jobs
Bemoaning the lack of design thinking among are more product-oriented than role-oriented. If
most MBA graduates, Neumeier tries to articulate this sounds like Oz, well, surely it’s a brand con-
how managers without a formal design education sultant’s job to conjure a better world?
can nonetheless adopt a designer’s point of view Ultimately, all three of these books share a
by cultivating empathy and intuition, an imagina- purpose: trying to influence business readers to
tive and idealistic outlook, and learning to live shift their focus from one-off-product develop-
with the “creative tension” between vision and ment to a more integrated approach to designing
reality—the distance between what is and what the customer experience. The books also share a
could be. The designer’s mind-set, he argues, flaw: succumbing to the idealistic pitch mentality
embraces paradox and encourages so-called that is, alas, the consultant’s stock in trade. A few
“third brain thinking”: the ability to zoom in and too many feel-good nostrums tend to undermine
out of problems at multiple levels. the credibility of worthwhile arguments, by mak-
Like Brunner and Emery and Adaptive Path, ing it all seem a little too easy. One comes away
Neumeier advocates that managers bring design wishing for a more grounded perspective, per-
thinking “up the ladder” through research and haps incorporating the viewpoint of beleaguered
development, industrial design, call centers, designers and managers laboring in the field
online experiences, face-to-face contacts, and so (of course, most of these people are too busy to
on—to create what he calls the “brand ecosys- write books). On the other hand, a more reality-
tem,” echoing Brunner and Stewart’s notion of an centered business book about design might make
“experience supply chain” (catchphrases being the for less inspiring reading. In the end, we look to
currency of the business-book realm). designers to transcend the mundane realities
After a frustratingly brief discussion of of money making, by transforming the world of
the problems facing in-house designers (that commerce into a useful art.

Neumeier admits could be a subject for another book), he goes on to discuss what steps managers

can take to imbue their organization with design

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alex Wright is the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. He

has led user experience design initiatives for the

thinking. He argues for establishing a design

New York Times, Yahoo!, Microsoft, IBM, Harvard vision clearly situated in an organizational entity University, and the Long Now Foundation, among that can pull together a “metateam” drawn from