Michael Roller

Must Read: Becky Bermont on Design

Some of my favorite people to work and interact with are business people who (somehow) find themselves surrounded by designers. In the consulting world, we often call these people “strategists,” but I’m sure there are lots of other names for them. The reason I find them so valuable is that they help me understand how design fits into the rest of the business world, preventing me from being myopic about design. Becky Bermont is one of those people. An MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Becky now works alongside John Maeda as RISD’s VP of Media + Partners. Check out these two articles published by Harvard Business.

Learning from How Designers Think and Work

It’s interesting how Bermont developed her definition of design in essentially the opposite direction that most designers develop theirs. I remember going to a design strategy conference at IIT and being struck at how similar it felt to market research conferences. I see now that designers are people who can make information emotional and visceral, who can make a bigger impact by thoughtfully marrying form and content. They are “experience perfectionists”…

I like how Bermont peels away at the layers of design here. In my opinion, she’s getting close to the core. Design’s biggest value is using aesthetics (you can call it storytelling if you want) to generate both excitement and investment in a certain product or project. This value comes from a combination of design thinking and design making.

How Artist/Leaders Do Things Differently

I won’t lie — for non-artists like me, working in this leadership paradigm has taken some adjustment. But it’s an essential part of our collective commitment to leading our organization authentically. She doesn’t explicitly call it out, but the principles in this post are the heart of my personal definition of design thinking:

1. Passion fuels the work
2. Form and content can’t be decoupled
3. Iteration is expected
4. All failures are opportunities for course correction

Designers, in isolation, don’t always see the value of their process or their skills. At worst, they identify the wrong things as their strengths. Of course, the same goes for any business function; we’re at our best when observing and working together. Thanks to Becky and her peers for helping designers understand their true value!

Tags: definitions, design making, design thinking

1 Comment to Must Read: Becky Bermont on Design

1. [...] I’ve discussed before, I very much appreciate insight on design from non-designers. Ralf Beuker is one of those people, a [...]
Design Droplets Interviews Ralf Beuker | Michael Roller on July 6th, 2009

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