The great thing about the future is that you can design it.

“The great thing about the future is that you can design it.” That quote I came up with a decade ago was not enough for my friend James at dinner last night, who asked me, “But what do you mean by design?”

I could have taken one of the 100,000 definitions of design that’s online, but for James, who is pragmatic, I needed to come up with something down to earth.

Indeed, design is down to earth. It belongs to the pragmatists, the experimenters, the makers, the doers, those in love with the craft. But it also uses your brain and your eyes, when it comes to listening to the users, generating creative solutions, and strategizing directions that can transform your business or your life.

This is what “D.E.S.I.G.N” means to me:

Drive Change: one of the primary roles of design is to drive change for a brighter future. It requires energy and resilience. It is driven by an innate conviction that there is a better solution out there. By joining creative forces with relentless exploration, one can discover unique propositions that truly produce innovation and change. Cultural change is the most important piece of Innovation. It requires convincing every single stakeholder that not just your intent but also your approach is valid. Neglect it and all your efforts will collapse in a second.

Explore new territories: design is about uncovering hidden paths, collaborating on new ventures, leveraging data and new technologies, creating new solutions that embrace the future and its opportunities. It is about going beyond the obvious, observing people, and identifying new ways of doing things. It requires insatiable curiosity and openness to the world, with positive intent as a driver of change. It is about understanding all the components of the current ecosystem and creating something original and relevant in order to generate new or incremental sources of revenue.

Sharpen your tools: whether this is about research, strategy or prototyping, designers have elaborated the most pragmatic tools over several decades. Even though there is a design tool for everything, it is only as good as the people using it. People are at the heart of any design initiative. Whether this is about targeting new users or about the team running an innovation approach, it comes down to the quality of the conversations between you and your user, you and your solution, and the solution and its user. This is where branding and its relevance to user context can truly add meaning to the experience. This is how you differentiate, elevate, and sharpen the value of your new solution or service.

Inspire the future and its possibilities: no matter what your initiative is about, people need to relate to it; they need to understand what it means and how it is going to impact their future. Few people can envision a new context, a new technology, a new possibility. The role of design is to bring ideas to life, even if current means do not allow us to deliver that solution immediately. Designers have that extraordinary ability to produce multitudes of creative assets that inspire experimentation and prove a hypothesis. This is where the craft of design, and its multiple disciplines, is relevant. Branding, Industrial Design, User Experience Design, Interaction Design, Interior Design, Food Design: everything designers spent years refining in their design schools becomes the only way to articulate a common vision and launch an entire team or organization on a strategic initiative or venture.

Gather evidence: Design is not just about the act of envisioning and creating a new solution. It is about ensuring that this solution makes sense, and that there is relevance for its user. Testing and learning in the real world is at the heart of the design process. Gathering evidence along the three-lens of Desirability, Feasibility and Viability is key. This requires discipline and cross-functional collaboration. First, the team needs to align with the key criteria and determine how to assess solutions against them with consistency. People who fall in love with their ideas might not like this approach, but “going out of the building” and facing real users is the only way to gather evidence of the validity of any hypothesis. Second, teams need to define the proper methodology to assess certain criteria, and this is another creative exercise with which people might be uncomfortable. Third, teams need to go out to test and learn, and this is where budget or resources might be lacking. Teams need to have the courage (and time) to pivot solutions based on their findings, rather than on their gut feelings. Design provides the tools and creative assets for a proper three-lens assessment to narrow relevant solutions across the innovation funnel.

“Never delegate understanding:” This quote is from Charles Eames, one of the most famous designers in the world of architecture and furniture design. It speaks to the need for designers to truly empathize with their users, to gain a profound understanding of where, when, and how they might consider using this new product or service. Designers know how important it is to observe and listen to users and stakeholders in the first place. It is not about reading a report or hearing it through the grapevine; it is about being where your users are, where the action is, and where you and only you can identify new ways of delivering an original solution or service.

Yes, James, whether your objective is to invent an entire ecosystem or simply to improve a solution, design is the act of best using your mind by leveraging the wonderful gift of our five senses to produce a creative answer to a problem. It’s human nature. Like this dinner with you, in which the food, space, light, sound, and service have been designed to provide a pleasurable experience, no doubt the future can be designed. Our future.

Happy New Year, my friend!