CHAPTER 2

DREAM HUNTING

In the strenuous effort to interpret the developing economic and social situation, large and small companies alike are gradually understanding that their innovation processes need to be rethought in order to, finally, put the human being at the center of everything. Some enterprises call this approach human-centered; others call it people-centered or consumer-centric. The goal is always the same: to design something for a real person. This is all fine and proper—but the exact choice of wording is important. The choice of words, actually, is often also an interesting indicator of the culture behind an organization, a person, or a professional community.

Don’t Call Them Consumers! They’re Human Beings

I don’t like the word “consumer” as it is used in the business world today. It’s a term that I find alienating, to the point of being disrespectful to our human nature. My particular distaste for the word stems from two main reasons.

First of all, calling human beings “consumers” runs the risk of depriving them of their humanity, by viewing them merely as business entities to whom you are selling a product, in order to make them consume it for profit. Would you ever call your daughter, your son, your wife, your husband, or your parents consumers? I wouldn’t. Isn’t it an ugly word? Isn’t it reductive? The image of my daughter as a little consuming being disturbs me. The word flattens us out onto a single dimension, the dimension of beings who do nothing with their lives but buy and consume. I don’t want to be seen as a consumer. I would very much like to be seen as a being who lives, enjoys, suffers, dreams, invents, communicates, travels, and creates. We are human beings, not consuming beings.

The second reason that I have developed such a piqued intolerance for the term is that we are living in a society in which available resources are increasingly scarce, the act of consuming these resources needs to be limited and responsible, and the intelligent use and reuse of these resources ought to be our daily mantra. Pigeonholing the human being as a consumer (of these resources) sends a message diametrically opposed to the aims of every innovator, entrepreneur, designer, researcher, and marketer in the world. “User” is a far more dignified term, because it focuses on a person in the act of utilizing a product or service and finding some benefit in it.

An innovator who sees people as consumers prioritizes every possible and imaginable tool to sell them something and make them consume it. In contrast, an innovator who sees people as users focuses on the creation of positive functional and emotional value. Finally, the innovator who sees people simply as human beings will make their happiness the priority, and everything will gravitate around that single goal.

Consumer-centricity is about understanding people in order to sell them something. Human-centricity is about understanding people to build real value in their lives. The first approach sees a good product as one of several levers to generate business growth. The latter sees a good product primarily as a driver to improve people’s lives.

I want to design for human beings. These human beings will acquire, consume, and utilize. But these will be dimensions, consequences, results—not the keywords by which to reduce or define these humans. Above all, I want to create solutions that aim at bringing human beings joy, that entertain them, provide security, simplify their lives, connect them, help them relax, make them happy.

There are other terms that have a similar function. I have always been fascinated, for example, by how the US retailer Target calls its clients “guests.” For many these people are simply consumers; for the Minneapolis-based chain, they are sacred guests, welcomed into one’s home and treated with care, attention, empathy, and respect. In this book, I have tried to avoid the term “consumer” as much as possible; on the rare occasions I use it, it’s always in a strictly business context. Over the course of my life, I have always tried to limit my use of the word, relegating it to those situations in which I needed a particular audience to intuitively comprehend my messages, without risking any potential misunderstanding. In these cases, unfortunately, I have had to use the term, and I will do so in the future. But on all other occasions, the person for whom we design and innovate is and will remain, solely and simply, a human being.

At the Crossroads of Desirability, Technical Feasibility, and Economic Viability

In this new business scenario, where everything is becoming progressively more centered on the creation of value for people, the past few years have been extremely fertile ground for the growth of a particular professional community, whose members have always put human beings at the center of all their activities. Not consumers—human beings! This is a community that has lived for a long time on the margins of the business cosmos, in a kind of protected and isolated Eden; a community that has only recently begun to step outside of its own territory, tentatively navigating and adventuring out into new celestial orbits of this unexplored universe; a community composed of humanistic, multifaceted innovators; a community that has been often misunderstood and confused. This is the design community, and it draws on a process called “design thinking.”

Some people will wonder what design has to do with the world of innovation. Anyone who asks this question has no idea what design really is. This is, nevertheless, a very frequent question.

As used in common parlance, “design” has come to be associated with two concepts: beauty and luxury. A designer object, a designer dress, and a designer car are all manufactured with high aesthetic content, and they often come at a high cost. The aesthetic dimension in particular is absolute; it’s the priority, without compromise, to the point that often one doesn’t even expect real functionality from a designer product. In other words, functionality becomes merely an optional value, something that’s just “nice to have.”

But designers in reality are much more than simple stylists—with all due respect and admiration for stylists, of course. Designers are professionals educated in the art and discipline of innovation.

Design processes always begin with an intuition by individuals who are observing reality, analyzing it, thinking it through, trying to grasp it, dreaming it. These individuals and their thoughts are a kind of ignition; everything expands out from the primary idea, which acts like an enzyme that brings down the necessary temperature to then trigger a reaction, becoming the catalyst for a project. But what do these individuals observe, analyze, and dream? What’s the object of their intuition? What’s the focus of their research? The reply is as simple as it is vast and difficult to contain—because the object of their investigation is reality in its totality; it can essentially be anything. In order to decipher this effort, without abandoning it to the laws of mere accident, we can summarize some of the main types of research within three distinct and fundamental dimensions:

1. The sphere of the person, with all their needs and wants

2. The sphere of science and technology

3. The sphere of business

Along with thousands of other students during my years at the university of Politecnico of Milan, I was educated precisely in these three fundamental dimensions:

Desirability: the dimension of the human being. We studied cultural anthropology, ethnography, semiotics, and a series of disciplines connected to the human sciences.

Technical feasibility: the dimension of science and technology. We studied physics, mathematics, material science, digital technologies. Every project had to be considered in terms of its feasibility and the technologies of its production.

Economic viability: the business dimension. We studied marketing, branding, and economics.

In the design curriculum, these three dimensions are then set alongside a series of technical courses to prepare us to actually design, from ideation to development and launch. We are taught hand-drawing, digital design, 3D modeling, prototyping, photography, color theory, and more. When we design, every solution has to be defined, balanced, and evaluated according to the three spheres: it has to be desirable (desirability), feasible (technical feasibility), and able to be commercialized (economic viability). You can see, fairly intuitively, that through structuring their thought and work in this manner, designers are essentially trained to become innovators: holistic, multidisciplinary innovators who are able to deal with any kind of problem, in every product category, in essentially any industry.

Striking a Balance Between Empathy, Strategy, and Prototyping

The intuition of an innovator can take off in any field within these three areas. The point of departure for an innovative project could be, for example, the casual observation of how a child plays with classmates in a schoolyard, or an epoch-defining scientific discovery by a researcher in a university lab, or a conversation with a client who opens up new business opportunities that were unexplored up until that moment.

One of the greatest challenges, at this point, is to connect all three dimensions in a flexible and efficient manner, maintaining an authentic focus on the end user. It’s not easy at all. In the world of big companies, what makes this balancing act still more difficult is the entrance of factors such as scale, corporate culture, and financial strategies. These kinds of structures thus require professionals who understand all three dimensions and have the correct tools to put them into conversation with one another within the innovation process.

It is here that the much-vaunted “design thinking” comes into play. It is a process that alternates between investigation, creation, and validation, organizing them in a series of divergent and convergent phases (the famous “double diamond”). This process is enabled by three fundamental vectors: empathy, strategy, and prototyping.

Empathy

Empathy is nothing more than the capacity to understand the person you are innovating for in an authentic and profound way. It represents the phase in which the designer gets into the mind and spirit of that person, reading the person’s emotional signals, taking on the person’s subjective perspective, analyzing motivations, observing behavior and reactions in an objective and rational way, without being influenced by the designer’s own personal bias.

When a designer manages to get into the head of the user and takes on the user’s perspective, the designer can then understand the user’s needs, desires, ambitions and fears, and thus design the ideal solution that takes all of these particular variables into account. In brief, in the process of design and innovation, empathy is the ability to understand what is relevant to the user.

Strategy

Once a user’s need has been grasped, it is then necessary to understand whether the potential solution for that need makes any sense from a business point of view. The second vector of design thinking—strategy—has precisely this goal: to understand whether the idea is relevant for the company (whether an existing company or a new one) and, if it is not relevant, what needs to be done to make it so. Four different, complementary dimensions need to be borne in mind during this phase:

1. Do we have a business model that is up to sustaining this idea?

2. Do we have the right technologies and manufacturing processes to support the idea?

3. Do we have an appropriate company culture for managing this idea?

4. Are there any external factors that might negatively impact on the idea, either now or in the future?

Trying to understand these four areas in a deep way, right from the start, is fundamental for avoiding the most classic mistakes made by organizations dealing for the first time with real innovation projects. Many inexperienced managers fall in love with a winning “consumer proposition” (that is, an idea that makes sense for the people whom the managers want to serve). And so they begin in a rush, flying along on the wings of their enthusiasm, without taking into consideration all the other variables from the beginning, only to realize later, midway through the process, that the company cannot actually invest in the necessary manufacturing plant or technology, for example, or that the creation of a new sales channel is too ambitious a project and unjustified by the potential ROI (return on investment) of the new product, or that the funds simply aren’t there to launch and manage a new brand in the portfolio.

Inexpert leaders, in most cases, fail to ask the right questions at the beginning of the project journey. They end up managing a product development process without knowing that in reality they were dealing with a project that should have been much broader in scope, impacting the company’s culture and organization, as well as its portfolio and manufacturing strategy.

You have to know from the start which variables need to be considered, so as to then find the right questions and appropriate answers, in this order, phase by phase throughout the process. On this journey, the quality of the question is fundamental: far too often, people generate a whole set of correct answers for a whole set of wrong questions. And too often, people forget to question the validity of their questions, finding comfort instead in the correctness of their answers. The ability to evaluate and understand which dimensions need to be explored, and what are the correct questions to ask, is an essential criterion for practicing innovation in the right way.

Prototyping

In the innovation journey, prototyping is the catalyst desperately needed to support empathy and strategy. Its role is to make every idea, every solution, every business model, every technology unlock, more understandable, more tangible, and more shareable, through the entire development process and in every project phase.

Many people erroneously believe that a prototype is simply the concrete realization of an idea, created in order to share the idea’s characteristics with an audience—whether colleagues, clients, or investors—and eventually to test the idea out. For example, you produce a prototype to present the project for a new lamp to a client, or to test a plane on a flight, or to showcase a new vehicle at a motor show. This is certainly a correct definition, but it’s only part of the story. It captures one aspect of the value generated by prototyping. Before being put to these uses, the prototype is a catalyst for thinking.

From doodling on Post-it notes to the first functioning model of a car, the prototype is an example of the aesthetic and functional characteristics of a product—or a brand, a space, an experience, or a service—created with the aim of generating reactions, interactions, thoughts, and reflections. These reflections may be born from a dialogue and may be shared with others on a team or may simply arise spontaneously in an innovator’s mind, evolving in that mind, animating that mind. The prototype can be an intimate and private experience as much as a public and collaborative activity.

The Superpowers of Prototyping

Prototyping has five distinct superpowers, which occur in every kind of process. I have consistently and strategically used the following superpowers over the past twenty-five years of my life to drive my ideas forward.

The Power of Alignment

Prototyping is about aligning all the interlocutors with one another, without constrictions on time and space, around a single interpretation of an idea—people in the same room with you, but also individuals in other parts of the world or in different layers of the organization, seeing the idea that same day or after weeks or months.

For example, if during a meeting I say the word “knife,” every person in the room will visualize in their mind a different kind of knife. If I sketch a knife, though, we will all be aligned around that specific interpretation of a knife. The same goes for any idea you may try to share and drive in an organization.

The Power of Internal Co-creation

Prototyping is about enabling people with different backgrounds—technology, business, design, finance, manufacturing, and so on—to work together in synchrony on the development of an idea. Each expert works on the same prototype. The modification of the initial concept by one expert has an impact on all the other experts. By having all the experts work together on the same prototype, each of them can react to, manage, and adapt the evolving concept and the overall strategy, in real time, with an extreme agility and flexibility.

In the analogy of the knife, a marketer in the room may think that the brand that I just sketched on the knife is not visible enough. An ergonomist may think that the handle is not comfortable enough. Many people may think that I have designed a bad knife. But this is the power of design thinking in action: through that sketch I am enabling a dialogue among people with different backgrounds. That prototype activates an agile form of co-creation. Each person participates; they all have a role in making that knife better, in perfect synergy and with great speed.

The Power of External Co-creation

Prototyping can then be used to activate a dialogue with potential clients and users, allowing you to co-create with them.

Share the knife with your clients and users!

The Power of the Shiny Object

Prototyping is about exciting our target audience, including sponsors and investors. People fall in love with ideas that are tangible, that look real—and that are therefore perceived as realizable.

Make that knife meaningful and appealing. And make people dream and support you.

The Power of Confidence

Through these multiple iterative validations, the concept is progressively fine-tuned and gets better and better. The prototype helps you see things that you can’t otherwise see. The result is the generation, within the organization, of a widespread faith in the value of the idea.

Share that knife, evolve that knife, and build confidence about that knife in the entire company.

Prototype as soon as possible, even if you still don’t have all the answers, precisely because you still don’t have all the answers! The prototype amalgamates empathy and strategy. With a prototype, you validate your project hypotheses with efficiency, agility, and accuracy, in all three dimensions of innovation: the human being, technology, and business—or, in other terms, desirability, technical feasibility, and economic viability. This works in your professional life and in your private life, too.

The Principles of Meaningful Design

Once the needs and desires of the individuals we want to innovate for have been understood and a relevant business strategy has been defined, we are ready to prototype, creating the ideal solutions to satisfy these needs and desires. The innovator’s talent, experience, sensitivity, and vision are fundamental variables for generating the best products, brands, spaces, services, and experiences. But some years ago, I realized that just having faith in innovators was not enough, especially in my complex world of multinational corporations. I needed a series of guidelines that I could refer to with my teams, a series of universal principles that could guide us and inspire us, mapping the road, constantly providing us with powerful filters to interpret and validate the meaning and value of each idea, and bringing us together around a single vision.

It was in this way, in the mid-2000s, that I drew up a list of principles derived from the experience of thousands of projects launched to market. I made this list for my teams, but I also made it for myself, to keep in my pocket, a treasured compass that could direct me on my innovation journey.

I call these the principles of meaningful design. They are a series of postulates to keep in mind every time we conceive and design something new, in order to consistently produce solutions to people’s needs and wants that are meaningful to them.

The first two principles on this list are the fundamental principles, the ones that serve as the foundation for every innovation project and connect together all other principles. The following seven are the enabling principles, the essential principles to follow if we want to generate solutions that are aligned with the goals of the fundamental principles. The final three principles are the clarifying principles, the principles that aim at clearing up some very important aspects of design and innovation that are often misunderstood or undervalued, and which—if applied correctly—exponentially increase the impact of our solutions.

The Fundamental Principles

Human: Useful, Emotional, and Semiotic

The first principle of meaningful design, the human—and humanist—principle, lives at the intersection of utility, emotion, and semiotics. It is a synthetic principle that embraces everything and everyone, claiming the substantial necessity and value of designing solutions (whether product, brand, space, service, or experience) that can strike a perfect balance between a person’s needs and desires.

Each and every one of our projects should resolve a specific functional need, generate an emotional connection with the user, and have a semiotic value—that is, it should manage to tell a story, with a communication flow that moves out from the user and into the surrounding world.

The stories that we can tell the world through brands and products come in all shapes and sizes. They can be narratives about economic and material status (“I’m rich”) or mental, intellectual, or spiritual status (“I’m creative”). Or these stories can identify us with a particular community, such as a professional, religious, ethnic, political, or social group (“I’m an artist,” “I’m an Orthodox Jew,” “I’m a Catholic priest,” “I’m Indian,” “I’m a Masai warrior,” “I’m an athlete,” “I’m a rapper,” “I’m an environmentalist”).

Users might be aware of the semiotic value of the solutions they are using, or they can be unaware of that value. For instance, I may wear a jacket that I particularly like and am very proud of, but through that jacket, inadvertently, I may be screaming to the world that I have really bad taste in fashion. I may drive a car with custom colors and a unique aftermarket design, aiming to project my economic status and style, while ending up sharing only my lack of elegance and sophistication. Whatever the level of awareness, the solution communicates a story—like it or not. Through the products and brands that we experience, use, wear, eat, or drive, we communicate a story, 24/7, to the world around us. Always.

I call this first principle “human” because in its three aspects—utility, emotion, semiotics—it covers, directly and in a holistic way, all human needs.

Innovative: New, Unique, Distinct, and Extraordinary

The second principle of meaningful design specifies the innovative nature of the solution.

Meaningful design is new: It breaks the continuum of the known and expected, introducing at least one element of novelty, a variable that has never been adopted before in that specific context.

Meaningful design is unique: It is the only existing example of this new approach. There are no similar approaches. This unique nature might be an aspect already integral to the novelty of the solution, but I am highlighting it to further stress how much the solution must also be perceived as such. The solution must be, in other words, obviously unique. Sometimes I have come across products that were effectively new but were not obviously unique; in other words, in some way they recalled other, preexisting—albeit different—solutions. And for this reason, the products were not appreciated by people as new.

Meaningful design is distinct: If the first and second variables are present, then—by definition—the well-designed solution will also be different from all other existing solutions and thus distinct from all the competitors. In this case, again, the characteristic deserves to be considered explicitly—instead of being thought of as implicit in the concepts of the novel and the unique—because “distinction” from the competition is a key goal of any business strategy and thus an important dimension in any design process. Furthermore, verifying this distinctiveness can be a useful and simple test to evaluate the unique nature of your idea.

Meaningful design is extraordinary: According to the etymological meaning of the word, the “extraordinary” is distinct from the ordinary; it is an exception from the usual practices, special in relation to the normal way of things. Yet again, this characteristic is an integral aspect of the first variables, but it is worth treating separately because the extraordinary nature of a solution introduces the perspective of the human being into the definition of a solution’s newness, uniqueness, and distinction. The solution is not just novel, the only kind in the world and distinct from the competition; the solution is also not ordinary—it is exceptional and special to the eyes and in the experience of the person who makes use of it. While the variable of distinction is a business variable, the extraordinary nature of a solution is a humanist one.

The Enabling Principles

Aesthetically Sustainable

The third principle of meaningful design is that it is beautiful, harmonious, pleasing to the senses, without any redundancy.

Functionally Sustainable

The fourth principle specifies that meaningful design is practical, efficient, convenient, and ergonomic.

Emotionally Sustainable

The fifth principle is that meaningful design is attractive and engaging.

Intellectually Sustainable

The sixth principle is that meaningful design is accessible, intuitive, and user-friendly.

Socially Sustainable

The seventh principle of meaningful design is that it is respectful, ethical, honest, and trustworthy.

Environmentally Sustainable

The eighth principle is that meaningful design is eco-friendly.

Financially Sustainable

The ninth principle specifies that meaningful design is valuable to the business and economically accessible to the user.

The Clarifying Principles

Relative

The tenth principle of meaningful design is that the solution depends entirely on the needs and desires of the person. There is no such thing as “good design” in absolute terms; “good design” is absolutely relative.

Poetic and Expressive

The eleventh principle of meaningful design specifies that the solution is permeated by a designer’s perspective and sensitivity. The solution is not the mere output of a process, however valid that process might be. Using the same process, different designers will generate different outputs. Respect and embrace this truth, and get the best designer you can find for your project.

Storytellable

The twelfth and final principle of meaningful design is that the solution must have a story to share. Or, in other words, this solution must be storytellable. And this story must be an integral part of the product’s DNA.

Over the past fifteen years of innovation and design, since the creation of this list, I have always had these twelve principles in my mind, my heart, and my pocket, as a kind of project compass. They are principles to hold by, to aspire to, in order to design with the human being at the center of everything. They are principles to never forget. Having this list printed out on a piece of paper or imprinted on your brain can help you constantly remember how to generate meaningful value for people—because it takes only a moment to forget some of these key qualities of meaningful design when we are overcome by the flurry of daily activities or the chaos of project trade-offs in the everyday struggle between desirability, technical feasibility, and economic viability.

A List for Everyone, Not Just the Designers

This is a list of principles relevant for anyone working in the world of innovation, no matter your background: design, marketing, research and development, consumer insights, sales, manufacturing, supply chain, commercialization, finance, legal, human resources, and every other function, from the CEO down to the junior employee, from the multinational to the start-up. Everyone plays an important role in this multidisciplinary journey to generate progress for the company and for society as a whole.

This list of principles has been forged with the human being at the center of everything: the human being who dreams, creates, produces, and the human being for whom those dreams, creations, and products are destined. These are humanist principles, not business principles—because innovation is first and foremost a humanist act, despite how frequently it is misunderstood as simply a lever for business.

The magical aspect of all of this is that if these principles are followed—putting human beings in their rightful place, in an authentic way, consistently over time—in the end, everyone reaps the fruits. Companies reach their economic goals, serving their clients and users in the best possible way. And our society as a whole enters into a new phase of progressive excellence, creating concrete value for each and every individual.

Those who do not reap any benefit from this new scenario will be those organizations and people who continue to think that you can find success with inauthentic brands or mediocre products based solely on scale—of manufacturing, distribution, and marketing. In the globalized and technological world in which we are living, that era has long gone, thankfully. Excellence will win out, and those who do not adapt to this destiny will disappear. And they won’t be missed.