From Looking Digital to Being Digital: The Impact of Technology on the Future of Work Experiment-driven design can iteration, especially early on, is less about nailing down the “right” design and more eliminate the need for the most about exploring the design space, testing new ideas (usually by exposing customers expensive kind of rework. to them), and systematically gathering data that will inform later iterations. As such, the most successful early design iterations are those that uncover the most useful the original design vision would have The work of design information to inform the ultimate design. produced. It represents a shift away from When implemented properly, experiment- having a design fully fleshed out up front, In industries where the product itself is driven design can eliminate the need for before building commences, and toward digital—like software or web-site design— the most expensive kind of rework, namely an approach in which a series of rapid we have witnessed a shift over the past the unplanned redesign that happens late “design-build-test” cycles is used to evolve decade from linear to non-linear, iterative in the overall process after major design the design. design processes, with dramatic increases flaws are uncovered. in the speed of product development and The potential of this emerging work equally impressive reductions in design Experiment-driven design is not relevant practice is perhaps best captured in the risk. Perhaps the most familiar evidence of only in software. In fact, its influence in words of Luana Iorio, who oversees General this shift has been seen in companies like automobile design has also grown rapidly Electric’s research on three-dimensional Google and Facebook, where engineers are in recent years. A case in point: Audi’s printing: “The feedback loop is so short encouraged to eschew lengthy waterfall Virtual Lab and crowdsourcing initiatives now that in a couple of days you can have approaches to design and iterate rapidly, are quickly changing the tempo and the 25 a concept, the design of the part, a test get feedback and improve. flow of design engineers’ work. Audi’s as to whether it’s valid, and within a week 24 you have it produced.” In other words, Slogans like “fail fast” and “move fast experiment-driven design is important for and break things” might seem like both the work of design and the design endorsements of chaos and inefficiency, but of work. in practice the opposite is true. Iterations are used effectively to acquire information about the suitability of the current version of the design. The objective of each 29 | Accenture | Copyright 2014 Accenture. All rights reserved. ©