Design strategy

A plan or guideline for the company’s design activities aiming to reach the company´s strategic goals and strengthen its desired identity.
In order to maximize the benefit you get from your design effort, it needs to be focused in accordance with your company strategy. KADABRA has good understanding of strategic use of design, and can help your company by: (1) setting goals for using design, (2) organizing the companies design activities in an appropriate way, and (3) making guidelines for the design of your company´s products.

We think that a design strategy is most valuable when you and your company have ownership to it. Therefore, all the activities in our design strategy section are organized as collaboration between your company and KADABRA – either taking place as workshops, or by making our deliverables in a way that can easily be adopted and further developed by yourself.

Insight

In everything we make, people are in focus. A user workshop is about exchanging ideas and thoughts on the product with the target group.
The user is the factor of most concern in the project. Through discussions and observation of users we get a deeper understanding of their motivation, context, and needs. In order to get good insight, it is necessary to look at specific user needs, how the user thinks in different situations, and what they wish to accomplish. These are the first and most important questions in an interaction design project.

A user workshop gives us as designers an essential first-hand experience of the user context – which gives us empathy and often directly inspires solutions. Therefore we see this phase as an intense creative phase rather than a documentation phase.

Result: Document with written and illustrated observations with conclusions for the project.

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Goal workshop

The goals of using design are debated and formulated together with your company.

What you wish to accomplish by using design varies from company to company. Design can have many positive effects – from adaptation of products to existing or new target markets, development of desired identity and brand, cost reduction in new product development, or product innovation. Through a workshop with KADABRA we become aware of what effects are most important to you, and formulate these as goals with design.

Result: Formulation of design goals

Design philosophy

General guidelines for product development, clearly formulated!
Many companies choose to fundament their product development in a “Design Philosophy”. The goal of the Design Philosophy is to give your company a set of principles or values as the basis of product development. These can be general of nature – such as “Good Design” – and/or go into details about function, form, use, materials, production, surfaces, colors, etc. Most often, the design philosophy consists of 3-6 main principles, which are described further in text format. The design philosophy is useful both internally, and for external collaborators.

Result: Design philosophy consisting of principles with written description.

Visual guidelines

A collage that creates a visual starting point for the development of the company´s products.

By creating visual guidelines, the design philosophy is given a more concrete form. In this deliverable, KADABRA searches for visual motifs and illustrations that exemplify and elaborate the design philosophy. Visual guidelines can apply to the company´s product portfolio as a whole, or they can be created specifically for collections or single products. Visual guidelines can consist of hand sketches, figures, pictures, colors, etc mounted in a collage.

Result: Collage with visual guidelines.

Product totem

A product totem creates a tangible and tactile starting point for development of the company´s products.

The design philosophy can be exemplified further by designing and making a real hand-held product or sculpture. This “product-totem” can either be a prototype of an actual product, or a more abstract figure which exemplifies the design philosophy. The goal of the product totem is to motivate increased focus on design, as well as giving a concrete example of materials, form, colors, and function which is central to the design philosophy.

Result: A physical product which reflect the companies design strategy.