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Apple seems to be a prime example of a successful design-driven business.

But hold on. What does a design-driven business look like? And do you even want business to be driven by design?

We’ve been working in the space between design and business for a while now and have formed quite a few opinions on this. We believe that “design-driven” means taking a holistic approach, where design methods help to guide business strategy as well as shape the product, service and process development.

This means that from day one, a company like Apple must understand how to meet the user’s needs and aspirations. Understanding them, however, is not enough: any company serious about a design-driven process must make them as much of a priority as the revenue models behind the product.

This also means that such companies need to apply the same brainstorming techniques used in design to create new models for distribution, revenue streams and maintenance. For Apple, this resulted in ideas like the Apple store, iTunes and the Genius Bar.

Sources:
Example 1 chart is from Bill Buxton’s book, Sketching User Experience: getting the design right and the right design. All rights reserved.

1. Signalement desk

Just Apple-tastic! This desk was created by Dutch design group, Signalement. This is what we’d imagine Apple would make if they did furniture. The design is obviously sleek and simple, but it’s the details that really make this desk pop. They took the extra attention to make the leg height adjustable. It’s also a nice surprise that opening the drawer reveals a saturated yellow color that contrasts with the glossy white backdrop.

2. Haus 658

These playful home decor products draw upon the image of Edgerton’s famous strobe light photograph Milk Drop Coronet, which shows the fluid movement of a milk drop as it falls on a flat surface. While we’re not entirely sure we could get away with that end table in our homes, the orchid vase has great movement. Even the placement of the long, thin orchid stems play into the visual of vertical movement into the vase.

3. “Three Ripples” Coffee Table from www.mufurniture.com

They say everything in the western world was symmetrical until Frank Lloyd Wright went to a World’s Fair and saw Japanese art. The Japanese have a term, “wabi-sabi”, that loosely translates to “the perfection of imperfection”. Products like the “Three Ripples” table show how subtle details placed in unexpected places can make a piece both simple and intriguing. Apparently you can even put soil into one of the “ripples” and plant your own tree.

4. Mrs. Hudson toilet

The introduction of new forms for utilitarian products can be a bit off-putting, but we love that Ukrainian architects 2-B-2 tried something different in an unusual place. They created a toilet with a unique style that would make anyone do a double-take and puzzle over it for a few minutes. For a location where all of us spend time, it’s about time we saw some new styles emerge for the bathroom. While the architects say that this form is based on a water drop, it looks a bit more like Sherlock Holmes’s pipe (on a side note, Holmes’s housekeeper was named Mrs. Hudson).

5. The Hang Chair

Marc Graells Ballve, a recent graduate from Havana, Cuba, created this chair to be able to hang a suit jacket on the back bar. This is one of the those items that is so obvious it makes us wonder why we didn’t think of it first. Definitely a simple and classic piece that would fit as well in your dining room as in the MOCA.