strategic design and concept development

Recently I have been working for my sister´s strategic design consultancy Kaltio for the first time, just to give some insight and create nice designs on her project. The phase I took part in was concept development, I sketched on platform concepts. I started thinking that how these platforms should be done and realized that if a concept is too well guided, the outcome might not begin to fly. One should always leave enough doors open for the concept development to take place. The best possible cannot really operate if the concept is too restricted. In strategic design one should take all possible time to explore the possibilities and look at the project from different perspectives.

Riikka had made really nice work on the concepts, so really my work just put the cherry on top. Hopefully the pieces will gain nice attention. they will come public in some time, so more images then.

Design process and the relation to marketing

Design processes are important as tools for making design systematic and easier to follow by clients and manage by participants in process. The process descriptions (processes?) are, however, on certain level the same and in this sense perhaps useless in marketing purposes.

I have heard that usually a process should be available to be seen by prospecting client, but I still assume other things, like consultancy reputation and previous clientelé (project outcomes) actually do the trick in consultancy selection. Therefore one could think that "the same - process" could work.. Processes as spines are also important for the actual designing and scheduling, but in some discussions I have learned that the actual process can actually dramaticly differ from the one presented in marketing material. What is the reason? Another tricky thing is actually the support from government that is in some cases given to creating the "tools", but later resulting in not using them.

I have created this kind of a design process draft that would present questions to be answered, instead of going into scheduling the design process. It then should be set with the client regarding to the need of different process particles. If the time spent on a certain section is the same, things that you do are the same and the tools used are the same, but only processes are different, is the process genuine then??

simple, non organized draft

Of course I relize that creating procedures is important for quality and maintaining the workflow is important for efficiency, but some differentiating and new leads perhaps needed? This is also a thing that could need some research done. And yes, my website needs one, too.