Learning to love lumpy doughnuts

By Shaun Abrahamson on November 5, 2009

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Whether you are creating a doughnut, a store to sell doughnuts or a custom doughnut service, you are following a design process.

The processes we have come to know and love, involves a group of designers moving through the process typically from a question, problem or idea. The design group has typically operated within an organization, often working with partners and a “representative” group of customers. The scale might be small with fewer than 10 people or perhaps as many as 1,000 people for a large automative design problem.

But many many more people are joining the design process, during different phases of the design process. Think about how many people are involved in open source projects like Mozilla or Wordpress? At times the process involves a small core group and other times conversations with larger groups of users on their respective support sites.

These ideas are finding their way beyond digital back to the physical world. Threadless is celebrating its 10th anniversary next year – they opened up concept generation and selection for t-shirt design. And quickly became a reference for what might be possible with a more open design process. Some complain that t-shirts are simple, but more complex design is happening – Local Motors are taking this thinking to the automotive industry, one of the more complex design processes – the latest product of their design process is the rally fighter.

Adding all these new participants is making our beloved doughnut lumpy. At different times in the process, more stakeholders are asking to participate and they are adding value in a variety of ways. Support forums are often the source of inspiration for new products, features or services, increasingly resulting from conversations between customers. Customers are often involved in proposing ideas to specific problems or to help select concepts. It might still be difficult to get involved in specialized production and development processes, but customers have proved to be very valuable during beta product evaluations, too.

Its not the prettiest thing at the moment. But we think it has lot of potential. People are going to add new filling, some sprinkles and eventually we think they may look strange, but they will taste better.

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