Design as a Competitive Advantage

Imagine you’re building a new product – say a Death Star. And it’s solving a particularly pesky problem – getting rid of Rebel Scum. You don’t really care what it looks like or if it’s particularly efficiently designed – so it tends to be seen as an engineering problem. But in the rush to market – these products contain critical flaws. Like an exhaust port leading directly to the core.

There is an ongoing meme that technology is at the core of what we do, at the core of most successful products, and that design plays second fiddle. In this great talk from Mind the Product 2013, Andy Budd takes this meme head on and argues that design is the true competitive advantage. Of course it’s not about just the aesthetics – that will only get you so far. Good design is about how something behaves when it’s in use.