[by lil’bear]
Tara’s talk about losing her mojo has me thinking about the tangible and intangible parts of my own work. Which leads to a bigger question. What is it that I do?
we end up spending a great deal of time creating tangibles to keep the peace. Someone once told me that the more intangible your business is, the more tangibles you will have to produce and the more tangible your business is, the more intangibles you will have to produce.
Historically I’ve looked to interaction design for the tools, processes, deliverables.
- IA Book Templates
- IA Deliverables and Artifacts
- Boxes and Arrows – Deliverables
- Dan Brown’s Portfolio
- Templates and Stencils for Visio and OmniGraffle
- How to use Information Architecture deliverables
- Michael Angeles deliverables
These are all very tangible. They are a means to communicate. They are not comprehensive. Because there are other deliverables that I routinely deliver, including:
- Pricing models
- Cash flows
- Competitive analysis
- Product roadmaps
- Working software prototypes
Many of these deliverables are part of business planning for startup organizations. Others are part of a product management process. (Blackbot has a list of some product management tools).
- What kinds of problems are you solving?
- Stop designing products
- An information architect will be CEO
Identify and Design
All of these are points along a path to help identify people’s needs, behaviours, desires, and goals while designing new products, services, offerings, and systems to support the culture or ability.Time to start planning the future.