The Relevance of Total Design

The Relevance of Total Design

By Jessica Day

In 1970, a forty-year-old engineer left his role as the Chief Designer at the English Electric Company never to return to the private sector again. He adopted an academic career and began teaching design to MBA students who were still trying to figure out what the future of the design profession might be. Here, at the Loughborough University of Technology, he taught students for fifteen years from the Nottingham-forested East Midlands of England, until he later relocated to Scotland and completed a visionary work that is still being utilized by numerous designers today. The professor was Stuart Pugh and the method was Total Design – the framework for a structured and methodical design process that is being adopted by an ever-increasing number of companies today.

Total Design has gone through numerous permutations and re-imaginings, but essentially it is a model that aids in the identification of both market and user needs that encompasses the needs of product, process, people, and the organization.  The six stages of development that roughly apply in most ever industry are market, specification, concept design, detail design, manufacture and sell.

And although a great deal of analysis has been dedicated to all stages of total design, there is a unique opportunity presented in the analysis phase that focuses on the innovation potential within a decision matrix. Essentially, a Pugh decision matrix requires that an organization brainstorm qualities that are important to the customer and to a company for each idea and then rate those ideas on a fixed scale whose weights can be edited and prioritized in their own right.

Pugh writes:

“A major advantage of controlled convergence over other matrix selection methods is that it allows alternative convergent (analytic) and divergent (synthetic) thinking to occur, since as the reasoning proceeds and a reduction in the number of concepts comes about for rational reasons, new concepts are generated.”

In other words, a flexible decision matrix that values ideas and is able to weigh different user or organizational values in a mutable setting allows for more creativity. Not only does it help conceptualize about products and markets as they exist right now, but helps present gaps or opportunities that haven’t been conceived of yet.

This is why IdeaScale has created a Pugh-inspired decision matrix in their innovation management system that allows both users and administrators to evaluate potential innovations across multiple, flexible criteria in order that innovation experts identify not only the best ideas to bring to the sell phase, but to help develop the next phase of evolution for any innovation department.

To learn more about Pugh efficacy and IdeaScale’s decision matrix ReviewScale product, sign up here:  http://buff.ly/1lTt1dw. 

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