Steve Vassallo

"He 21st century will be the designer's century, because the most interesting innovation is happening at the top of the stack-at the interface with end users-where technology meets design, and where a swipe right or a hold might decide the next breakout business. Based on interviews with scores of design thinkers and designers-turned-entrepreneurs, The Way to Design sketches out the path to scale up from designer to designer founder. And drawing from his years as an IDEO product designer and his own experiences launching, running, and investing in startups, Foundation Capital general partner Steve Vassallo shares lived-in advice on how to create design-led organizations.This book is for entrepreneurial designers who want to know what it takes to start a company, and for non-designer entrepreneurs and executives who want to understand how to make design a core value of their business"--www.amazon.com.

The Way to Design

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It’s usually the case that moral character or human error are blamed for what are really system failures. The people who made the mistakes—the “bad apples”—need to be reprimanded, retrained, or fired. But systems thinkers understand that these are symptoms and not causes. Systems-savvy designers will know the real answer is to unearth what patterns or assumptions are generating those suboptimal behaviors—the bad containers, as Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo puts it, rather than bad apples. Not just what happened and when, but how and why these things happened.

Rather than attempt to design a wholly new, perfect solution, oftentimes it’s better to find areas where an incremental change will lead to significant renovation in the system. The smallest nudge for the biggest effect.

The Way to Design quotes

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