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Driving design in a business-driven organisation

How might we increase design maturity in businesses which are not inherently design-driven? I think this is a practical challenge that product designers face.

Alden Tan
UX Collective
11 min readJun 2, 2021
A diagram demonstrating a gulf between 2 circles, which each circle representing design and business respectively
How might we bridge this ‘gulf’, if there is one?

In the book Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda, the author notes that if there was one definitive statement which could be made about what design is, it will be — in Steve Jobs’ words — “design is how it works”. I think the simplicity of this statement is deceiving, for it is just as thought-provoking. Design is how it works. It is the product, users come to it, form follows function. Every aspect of how the product works, is essentially, design. Design is not a means to an end, but it is the end all.

As a product designer who has spent about 4 years exploring the craft, this quote never really resonated so saliently with me until I started dipping my toes across different organisational contexts & cultures. And it was also when I paid more notice to conversations revolving about the concept of judging how ‘design-driven’ a company is, or how practitioners contemplate the shift to becoming more design-driven. But what are we trying to drive away from, or what we comparing being ‘design-driven’ to? In my context, I consider what I term as ‘business-driven’ organisations. Allow…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Alden Tan

I design products for a living in Singapore 🇸🇬 Also, I like to write and think about how to inspire a better world.

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