How to Ripen Avocados Quickly

While there, he engaged Bryden Wood and together they developed the Front End Factory, a collaborative endeavour to explore how to turn purpose and strategy into the right projects – which paved the way for Design to Value.

Take Company A that wants to deliver affordable quality housing as part of a long-term secure investment of funds.To do this they need to develop a product, get it built by a Developer, and attract people to live in the accommodation, Dwellers.

The designer of the product could develop a very simple value landscape using the Kano model (a product value model) where Threshold Attributes are minimum standards, Performance Attributes are the-more-the-better and Excitement Attributes are just that.Through doing this, the designer can start to see incongruities in the value chain..The conclusion may be drawn that although there is alignment between Company A and the Dweller, with affordability matching the lower returns; the great-place-to-live matching the social change agenda; and the habitability matching the reputation, there are some discrepancies with the Developer.

Their business model is different, working in and looking to protect a market with greater demand than supply they are looking for higher short-term returns and the market dictates that quality standards are not such an issue because Dwellers have so few options.The answer is not to try to design the impossible but to help to re-structure the whole value chain..

The idea of analysing the value landscape may not occur to most architects, designers or project managers; being more comfortable in focusing on the asset, the aesthetics, the technical details or the physical deliverables.

However, without this context there is an inevitability that the true opportunity for value delivery will never be achieved.. Our Design to Value book, gives many examples where a multitude of stakeholders are brought into the arena of problem definition, problem solving, and design.So is it all about computers?.

“Technology is really important to what I do for Bryden Wood.They call younger people like me "digital natives", because we've grown up with computers.

In the end though, everything comes back to people.In meetings with contractors, and other partners, I've had to present my solutions, and work with others to implement them within the overall design.