Launching a Product - What is conscious design?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm. And on today's episode, talking about how to launch a product, I want to answer the question, what is conscious design? So this is something that I have been working to become an expert at and have created a process around. And it's something that is really a culmination of a lot of different ideas and approaches. And I think it's really important for launching a product smartly, especially in today's world where things like environment and social impact and things like that are really, really being paid attention to, not just by small individuals, but big companies and large groups of people. This is now the world that we live in. And so in order to make sure that your product is going to launch and be successful and make the impact that people are really looking for in products, we want to have this conscious design approach. And so I want to talk a little bit about what conscious design actually is and a few little steps to put your mind into a place where you're thinking through a little bit of lens of a conscious design approach. I want to talk about observation, both in lifecycle, customer experience, and sustainability or regeneration. Know your impact, connection and feedback, and why inclusion is part of it. And it just is part of it. It's not an extra add-on. It just is part of conscious design. So first, observation. So human-centered design and other modalities and approaches to design all use this, and it's something that is really, really important. And I just expand a little bit on what to be observing. So I have worked on many, many products. I've worked at big companies and small companies, and one thing that almost all of them don't do, at least not in my experience, is observation in terms of the life cycle of the product. Product life cycle is very important. If you want a sustainable product, you need to be aware of and observe the entire life cycle, not just, oh well, I make it and I produce and I get it to the customer. That is not where the life cycle of the product ends. Lifecycle, either as cradle-to-cradle, where you have a product that it gets produced from raw material, it then gets given to the customer, it goes through one use, potentially multiple uses. There's products that can, you know, after their primary use is done, their packaging gets turned into another product or things like that to extend the life of that material and that effort in producing a product. But eventually it gets to a point where it's not going to be usable. And so one of those approaches is to bring it basically back to the cradle. So reusing that material, recycling, things like that. And cradle to grave is unusable. So that's bio— biodegradable material, biodegradable products, they sometimes fall into that. And technically, if you are, you know, it composts into dirt and then you grow a new plant out of that dirt, Then you technically are, but that's not usually seen that way. But you should be thinking about that entire lifecycle. What does it actually look like when your product is discarded? When nobody wants it anymore, nobody uses it anymore, it's broken beyond repair. Even if you have repair programs, obviously not everything can be repaired all the time. So what does that look like? And observing it, what does it look like for current products? What is the ideal lifecycle? So observation. It's both looking at what is and what you want to have happen. Second area of observation is customer experience. So you can't be very conscious in your design approach if you're not aware of the customer experience and what that process looks like. And thinking through, when I talk about customer experience, I don't just mean, oh, when we make a sale and when they have a problem. I think about customer experience as the first moment that they ever figure out that your brand even exists, even if it's just a simple glance. They see, you know, a billboard or they see an ad briefly, under a second. That is where their customer experience begins. And it doesn't end until they are no longer your customer and will never buy a product again. Sometimes, you know, for certain products, say baby products, you're probably not going to buy a bunch of baby products once your kids are older. So if your brand is really focused on, let's say, newborn products, you, you have a known life cycle, a known experience that as soon as they are done having their child in that age range where it's appropriate and, and your products are really useful for them, Then you are not going to have, you know, a continued customer experience unless they have another child. But eventually people stop having kids, so you know that there's a finite experience that's going to be generated. And so you want to be aware of the whole process, not just little pieces. And that's how there's a lot of disjointed customer experiences where people think about them in siloed— oh, our customer service department, we think about that customer experience, and then we think about our sales, and then we think our marketing, and then we think about our product itself, you know, whatever that user experience is, and then we think about, you know, our purchasing experience. And not bringing those all together and observing and being like, okay, well, here's, here's all the things we need to do. How does somebody actually go through that process? What does that actually look like? As a customer from the very beginning to the very end, and you want to be observing that and paying attention to it because you can't observe it— if you don't observe it, then you can't see it, you can't understand it, and you can't improve it. Nobody improved anything they didn't know about. So it's really important to understand and observe that. The last is observation in Being aware of sustainability and regeneration. So there's a few levels, and I'm just gonna touch really briefly on this, but there's sustainability in the moving forward. This will be sustainable. It is sustainable. It does not burn people out. It doesn't burn up resources that can never be returned. It's not a negative impact. But it also doesn't undo or improve necessarily the whole ecosystem or society or whatever you're looking at in terms of this, but you have it sustainable so you can keep doing it, but it may not be a huge improvement. So things that fall into regeneration are things like biodynamic farming where they're able to take farmland that was not growable. You could not grow crops on it no matter what you did. And there's a different process, a different approach to it that people have been able to revitalize and make that ground, that land, be able to produce, you know, crops again. And so that is regeneration. That's being able to take something— it's not just sustaining, it's not just, oh, we won't make it worse, we'll make it actually better. So when we're done with it, this is actually better than when we left it. And there's a lot of ways to do that. There's a lot of ways to think about it, but observing what your product is, what the products are in the market, and whether any of them are in that regeneration place. Because if you can be there, if it's possible to be in that space, that gives you a better product and a better edge. And you'll really— you want to be doing that. You want to be as much in that space as possible, at least sustainable. but ideally regenerating and improving things. The second major area is knowing your impact. So, you know, if you're really paying attention to things, you're observing, then you should know what other products are doing, what their impact is. You should know your impact. And your impact, I can guarantee you, is much larger than you think it is. If you're, you know, you could just be starting a company or launching your first product, know that you are making a big impact. You are going to be making an impact in how, you know, the raw material, the raw material is sourced for you. You're making an impact how that is collected and how that is gathered, how that is processed. Everything that you use is going to be your impact. How much shipping you do? That's an impact. How is the working conditions of the people working at the manufacturers you hire to do your work? What does that impact? How are you impacting those people, those individuals, those communities, as well as the environment, your own market? How are you impacting your users? What does your product say about the people that purchase it? What does your product say to the people that purchase it? There's a lot of Impact. And it's— there's ripple effects, right? You make an impact on a primary direct impact. You also make a secondary impact to everybody around them. You know, if you really improve the lives of someone, you actually could be improving the lives of everyone around them as well. And the same is if you're not improving their life. You're doing— if some— something is negatively impacting, it doesn't have to be huge, right? It doesn't have to be destroying somebody's home, but if it's a small negative impact, it could still ripple out. And so just understanding what are all the touchpoints, how does your product impact and interact with individuals, with communities, and with the businesses that all work together to produce the product, deliver the product, support the product, and the people that actually use it. Third is Connection and feedback. So with conscious design, it's definitely something that's used in other, you know, human-centered design and in other thought processes. You must have connection and feedback to the people who are actually using and buying. And remember, your customer and your user may not be the same person, so you want to be building a connection with both. If they're 2 separate people, Make sure that you have connection with both of them. Make sure that you have a good connection with the buyer and the user. Make sure that you get feedback from both, because those are 2 separate points of view in your customer experience. And really, without, without this, you can't keep doing the cycle of observing, making adjustments, making improvements, and moving forward. So you want to be Getting a strong connection, because if you if you don't connect well with your users and customers, then they're not going to give you the feedback you're really needing. They'll just give you some feedback. They'll give you an idea or two. It's not going to be what you want. You want really good feedback. You want really good input from the people that are buying and using it. Lastly, why inclusion is part of it? So. Inclusion is just part of a conscious approach to design because you can't exclude anything. You can't only observe part of what you want. You have to observe the whole thing. You have to connect with all of your users. And kind of by default, if you are excluding anything, then you are not following a conscious design approach. You are following a more limited process, and therefore inclusion is just something that's built into it, and it's very important because if you approach it with the idea of inclusion and including everyone and including everyone that's potentially related, if you're thinking about, yeah, you impact your core group, but that ripples out to their friends and their family and their community, you really figure out that your product is going to make an impact So much greater than you possibly think of, and it's a great thing. And you need to be thinking about everyone that it is going to impact and not skip anyone, because one, if you need to know what that impact is to make sure there's a positive one, and two, it's always good to know that you're impacting more people. It's always good to be able to do that and know it. It's something, if you don't observe it and you're not aware of it, you're not going to be able to make sure that it's a positive thing and you want to be able to do that. So hopefully this gives you just a quick overview of conscious design as an approach to developing your own product, launching your own product, and you can learn more on our website. We're putting out more and more content about conscious design. It's such an important thing to what I do with my firm. And, you know, it's the title of our podcast and YouTube channel. So it's, it's something that we're really focused on. I'm really focused on bringing out and want to see more people, you know, putting, putting everything together. And I didn't really invent the wheel with, with this. It's just kind of putting things together that people already do, but In a system that I think will work very well. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed, and like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in The description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.