You’ve been hiding your digital camera in your briefcase for months, taking artsy snapshots of coffee-cup carcasses and still lifes of pens between meetings. On weekends, you’ve morphed into a flea-market junkie, building a diverse collection of 200 spoons you now study for curve degree and metallic shine. Now all you have to do to prepare for your big design meeting on Monday is put pencil to paper and begin sketching like Raymond Loewy. Stop — put away the pencil! “The worst for me, as a designer, is if someone came to me with a picture of something and asked me, ‘Can you please do something like this?’ ” says Lena Simonsson-Berge, a 30-year Ikea design veteran. But doesn’t being a good design collaborator mean swapping your marketing hat for a designer’s beret? PowerPoints for paintbrushes? Simonsson-Berge and other design professionals would argue no, and in fact recommend quite the opposite.
As design increasingly plays a central role in how companies define and differentiate themselves, folks in marketing, research, finance, and the like who have never touched CAD (much less know that it stands for computer-aided design) are finding themselves working more closely than ever with design teams. They depend on designers to concoct magical innovations while also expecting them to speak their common language of bottom lines and ROI. The best designers pull it off. But don’t you owe it to them to meet halfway? How can you become as much of an asset to designers as they are to you?
1. Show them the canyon
“There’s a guy at Ford, an Italian guy, Giuseppe Delena, and he always used to turn to the marketing people and say, ‘Don’t tell me you need a bridge, show me the canyon!’ ” says Dev Patnaik, a principal at Jump Associates, a design-strategy firm that works with companies such as Nike and Sony. People view designers as artists, but their fundamental role is problem solver, so the more strongly you can articulate what the need is and who the problem is being solved for, the better the solution they can dream up. That’s why Ellen O’Neill, VP of design for Starwood’s St. Regis, Sheraton, Luxury Collection, and Four Points properties who’s designing rooms for St. Regis’s new residential condo line, finds value in spending time with developers who can share every last detail about their potential customer. “Our job is to design the experience they’re going to have when they’re staying in the room,” says O’Neill. “Their job is to tell me who’s going to be in there.”
2. Metastasize Your Metaphor
Rather than trying to do designers’ jobs for them or overwhelming them with too much data, which often stifles creativity, try finding innovative ways to express the essence of a product. Patnaik encourages nondesigners to use the metaphor technique favored by Apple’s Steve Jobs. “When Steve Jobs was working on the previous version of the iMac, he told [Apple design guru] Johnny Ive, ‘Make it like a sunflower.’ ” Jobs wasn’t encouraging yellow petals; he provided Ive with a metaphor that captured an idea about its functionality and essence. “It’s as if that picture is something I can double-click on, and it’ll open up in my mind,” adds Patnaik. For those who aren’t natural metaphor generators, he suggests sketching an idea on paper and asking yourself the functional and emotional reasons it moves you. Then trash the sketch and communicate those reasons to your design team.
