Søren Petersen
Ingomar&ingomar-consulting
Jaewoo Joo
Kookmin University
A design brief is a short document, usually 2 to 20 pages in length, that relays issues of “who, what, when, how, and why” to the design team (Petersen & Phillips, 2011). As a written explanation of the aims and objectives of a project, the design brief represents the desired outcome by relaying requests from management to design teams. A well-written design brief enables designers to understand their clients and to communicate with other designers in a team fluently, eventually helping them to develop concepts. As concept development reflects only 5 percent of development costs, yet influences 70 percent of the final product's cost (Andreasen & Hein, 2000), using a design brief to translate management criteria into measurable and actionable design concepts is critical.
Although the design brief plays an important role in concept development, there are few resources about how to write one. In general, the design brief is viewed as a competitive advantage and traditionally is guarded as a business secret. Research on writing a design brief is scant, and prescriptions for how to organize documents are heavily based on individual consultants' experiences. As such, most design briefs are the writer's interpretation of a request for proposals (RFP) or merely a reformulation of an existing business plan (Petersen, 2011).
The responsibility for writing a design brief is usually relegated to one department, and there is little or no cross-departmental collaboration. At the Industrial Design Society of America event in 2012, for example, design students and professional designers alike voiced their concerns about the design briefs they had seen. The design briefs written by engineering departments contained too much information and were overly restrictive, whereas the design briefs written by marketing departments contained too little information and did not inspire designers. Therefore, many designers read a design brief when a project is started and rarely revisit it afterward.
To begin, we consider how industrial designers work. Designers are inspired by a wide variety of sources, including nature, fashion, movies, automobiles, aviation, weapons, architecture, and cutting-edge technology. Although some sources may not apply to a specific project, they may help designers formulate a new concept at a later point. Along these lines, we define an inspirational design brief as not only a guide to follow but also a mind-set to help designers leverage constraints in ideation. More specifically, we examined a wide variety of applications submitted to worldwide design awards and identified nine common criteria. We categorized them into three groups—strategy, context, and performance—and introduced them as nine design quality criteria (DQC).
More detailed explanations, questions to answers, and the conventional metrics of each criterion are provided in Figure 2.1 and Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 The Nine Criteria of an Inspirational Design Brief
Group | Criteria | Explanation | Questions to Answer | Conventional Metrics |
A. Strategy | 1. Philosophy | Design contributes by formulating, visualizing, and communicating the organization's philosophy |
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2. Structure | Design provides design-related knowledge to the Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat (SWOT) portion of the Five-Forces analysis |
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Not identified | |
3. Innovation | Design co-creates innovative concepts, visualizes, and communicates innovation opportunities |
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B. Context | 4. Social/human | Design participates in user studies, tests conceptual ideas, and communicates findings |
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5. Environment | Design contributes to environment by exploring eco-friendly opportunities |
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Not identified | |
6. Viability | Design provides design-related knowledge for the development of business models, including positioning, value creation, and cost reduction |
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C. Performance | 7. Process | Design co-creates the design brief, synthesizes concepts, refines them, and provides support in their subsequent development |
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8. Function | Design participates in integrating the provider and user aspects into functions and features | Not identified | ||
9. Expression | Design translates provider and user aspects into attributes, form, features, proportion, surface, and details; design creates a cohesive statement supported by a compelling story |
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Not identified |
Writing a design brief for an innovative product design project is an art as well as a science. Successful design brief writers elaborate their projects in detail using the DQC while keeping their final documents to a manageable length. Here, we introduce an example of an inspirational design brief for developing an innovative storage system project submitted to LEGO:
Our suggested nine DQC are versatile and can be applied to a very different type of project, such as when business decision makers approach a conventional challenge in a more innovative fashion. Traditionally, they made decisions by considering the analyses and suggestions made by internal researchers and external economists. However, these inputs often stem from a worldview based on outdated assumptions and fail to nudge decision makers to see an issue in a fresh perspective.
Take an example of sustainability. According to “A New Era of Sustainability” (Lacy, Cooper, Hayward, & Neuberger, 2010), a report released by the United Nations Global Compact and Accenture, “… while the belief in the strategic importance of sustainability issues is widespread among CEOs, executives continue to struggle to approach them as part and parcel of [their] core business strategy.” As a result, sustainability considerations often end up coming from random, ad hoc, or unrewarded contributions from passionate individuals, and seldom from strategically informed corporate policies. Although bottom-up processes are imperative for corporate culture to shift toward a more sustainable path, top-down initiatives are more influential in achieving significant change. Here, we introduced an example of inspirational design brief for proposing a research project submitted to corporate leaders. It aims to help them to reflect on the progress to date, the challenges ahead, and the impact of the journey toward a sustainable economy.
The optimal approach to writing an inspirational design brief is through co-creation. Studies show that the act of writing a design brief improves the quality of concepts by 20 percent on average and 25 percent for top-performing designers. Writing a design brief also changes research behavior; when novice designers invest time in writing a high-quality design brief, they conduct research for a longer period of time as well as identify more impactful opportunities for ideation. Moreover, writing a design brief collaboratively reduces team members' perception of ambiguity while increasing their willingness to take risks in the subsequent concept exploration phase (Petersen & Ryu, 2015). Therefore, joint development of a design brief and treating brief writing as an important phase has the potential to add value to a project, curb risk, and increase creativity. Co-creating an inspirational design brief consists of the following three steps, as illustrated in Figure 2.2.
Prior to creating an inspirational design brief, team members on the project (e.g., designers, marketers, and engineers) usually have little or no systematic documented information about the previous projects including their design briefs and their outcomes. To remedy this, they are provided with the DQC as a generic framework to organize previous information under the nine criteria as well as a general guideline for good balance of the DQC content. This assists brief writers to consider the whole aspects of the project, increase their emotional investment, and mentally prepare to address each issue in the later phase.
Each member writes a 500- to 1,000-word brief independently using the structure of the inspirational design brief template, aided by the content from previous projects. Doing so helps each member empathize with other members by formulating other functions' contributions clearly. Following the sequential process of the DQC, moving from philosophy to expression, supports the creation of the logical top-down architecture for the design brief. This facilitates building cohesive and comprehensive design requirements while assisting the individual members in seeing the project broadly as well as understanding the interdependencies between the criteria.
Team members collaboratively review multiple briefs by considering the final performance of each design brief. When the final performance data is unavailable, they may rely on the quality or quantity of insights obtained from each design brief. Then, they consolidate multiple design briefs into a well-balanced and more effective design brief. As the team gains experiences, performance evaluations can be updated accordingly.
Going over budget is a serious issue for product developers. They can avoid this issue by carefully examining the amount of the content allocated for the two design quality criteria, process (how to make a product) and expression (how a product looks and feels), in a design brief. Petersen, Steinert, and Beckman (2011) reviewed 81 briefs including 51 briefs from the projects performed at Stanford University and 30 briefs from the projects performed at several companies. Their collected briefs covered a wide variety of fields, including automotive, consumer products, health care, construction, and aviation. Projects ranged in complexity from shavers to earthmoving equipment, and in size from cell phones to aircraft interiors.
Interestingly, the authors discovered that the amount of the content for process is negatively correlated with the amount of the content for expression (see Figure 2.3). This suggests that the less information a brief contains regarding the outcome of the project (expression), the more information it requires to describe how the project runs (process). Indeed, one group of automotive product developers who distributed the amount of the content for the two criteria in a more balanced way ran into fewer problems. However, the other groups of product developers who wrote too little about expression in their briefs lost control of their projects, leading to budget overruns and project failure.
We suggest that brief writers avoid the following three pitfalls when writing briefs:
The main purpose of writing a design brief is to communicate organizational capabilities, the business strategy, and the business model to the members of the design team so that they are well equipped to synthesize novel, useful, and marketable concepts. Creative ideas come from well-informed individuals and teams. Leaving the design team in the dark is self-defeating; it only results in a negative effect on the budget, schedule, and outcome. Each design brief should be unique and requires a concerted effort to create. Recycling old briefs, with minor updates and modifications, does not lead to an innovative concept. Team members recognize “the same old briefs” on their desks and pay no attention to them.
In this chapter, we introduce the inspirational design brief as an answer for designers seeking to improve the current situation of misaligned business opportunities and design execution. We introduced its nine criteria called design quality criteria (DQC) and illustrated two examples, one for a product design project and the other for research project. Then, we illustrated the three steps of how to write design briefs in a co-creative fashion. We also provided research findings and clarified three pitfalls. We believe our proposed brief-writing method provides a unique opportunity for product developers in various industries to facilitate communication between their business managers and designers so that they can successfully leverage design in their new product development projects.
Dr. Søren Petersen is an international business consultant and design science researcher, author, and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post (The Creative Economy: www.huffingtonpost.com/soren-petersen). Throughout his 20-year career, he has worked with many top-tier international organizations, including Rambøll Group, BMW Group, Stanford University, Copenhagen Business School, and Hanyang University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in ME Design Research, MS ME from the Technical University of Denmark, and his BS in Transportation Design from Art Center College of Design. Over the past six years, he has published 24 scientific papers and over 150 articles on the Creative Economy, as well as authoring Profit from Design, a definitive book on design quantification. His areas of research include developing methods and metrics for bridging business and design. These include: Design Driven Start-ups, Design & Business Model Experimentation, Design-Driven Portfolio Management, Gamification in Concept Design, and Crowdsourcing Design Research.
Jaewoo Joo is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Kookmin University. He holds a PhD in Marketing from Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Jaewoo teaches and writes about design marketing and new product development through the lens of behavioral decision theory. He has served as a panelist for the Business Week's World's Best Design Schools.