Design Strategy

Even the best sustainability initiatives stall when organizational support isn’t there. In this candid conversation, we brought together two perspectives—sustainable product design and organizational transformation—to unpack why most efforts fail and what it takes to build teams and systems that deliver. If you’re running into resistance, this is for you.

If your product strategy is being tested by supply chain volatility, this article will help you rethink reshoring as a design challenge, not just a sourcing fix. You’ll walk away with a practical lens for evaluating onshoring opportunities, making smarter tradeoffs, and building pipelines that flex under pressure. For a broader framework on designing resilience into your entire product pipeline, download the full white paper.

Lessons from my Wisconsin Digital Symposium keynote on building digital systems that actually work.

Early-stage product innovation is full of ambiguity. This article shows how to bring structure to that uncertainty—so your team can identify the right opportunity, align faster, and reduce downstream risk. Learn practical methods for clarifying vague challenges—and why that clarity is essential for successful product development.

AI can accelerate product development—but only if it’s applied strategically. In this article, you’ll learn 19 real ways AI can support insights, design, and engineering work—plus what to watch for when integrating it into your team’s workflow.

Launching a product is just the beginning. In this article, you’ll learn why lasting innovation depends on how you plan for what comes next—from evolving user needs to version 2 improvements and system-level decisions. If your team is thinking past the launch, this article offers strategic considerations for sustaining momentum—and making smarter product decisions over time.

The real opportunity is to allow people to make their own meaning for the brand through their own unique experiences with it.

If your brand helps consumers solve a problem or achieve a goal as only your brand can, you have a product experience that will create a brand evangelist.

Brainstorming can be very effective - if we don’t get lazy. At Delve, We subscribe to the notion of “more brain; less storm.”

Design strategists often lead design-thinking workshops for clients using the research they’ve gathered in the field as jumping-off points for innovation.

At Delve, we don’t focus on design thinking for its own sake, but rather, on design thinking and doing. What does action-oriented design thinking look like?

An innovation introduced today might be overhyped in the short term and underestimated in the long run. How will that inform your approach?

There are several methodologies available to speed up the development process. Which best fits your needs?

We started with a hypothesis for what the agency of the future looks like. Here are our top ten observations that keep proving to be true.

In order to meet the needs of future users, companies must anticipate disruptive technologies and develop a path to innovation.

Delve helps clients develop innovative organizations, teams, and leaders. How can you tell if your business needs Innovation Enablement?

Together, we can design a better world. Let’s start by leveraging our unique skillsets as change agents.

To achieve societal trust and move responsibly into an AI-enabled healthcare future, we need to put four elements in place.

What if you could plot your impact potential in real-time over the course of your project, allowing you to make necessary changes when it matters most?

Fresh from our webinar, AI & Medical Device Development, we'd like to share a few takeaways from the discussion.

The theme of the DMI Madrid 2023 conference was "The Power of Design in Turbulent Times." Here are some reflections on major themes that defined the talks and the conversations throughout.

With the transformative potential of new AI tools like ChatGPT on everyone’s mind, it’s easy to forget that artificial intelligence has been used in product design and engineering for many years.

To understand the critical importance of user research and strategy for businesses, it's helpful to look at real-world examples.

Business leaders need to make product decisions based on real data about their target market, instead of simply relying on best guesses or gut feel.

Microsoft just dissolved their AI Ethics and Society team. What’s a designer to do?

I am excited about where AI will take us in healthcare, but there are some challenges we will need to negotiate and serious dangers we must guard against.

Is your innovation incremental, strategic, or visionary? Use Delve's Future-Readiness Checklist to gauge your approach.

As healthcare moves toward everyday wellness, new health and wellness solutions will consist of offerings you wouldn’t expect from the current ecosystem. Designing solutions that provide a seamless integration of products and services will entice healthcare consumers.

Consumer-centric care will continue to be delivered faster, in unexpected places, and at previously untenable times of day and night. Companies that can redefine convenience will gain a competitive edge.

Advancements in AI and data analytics technologies, and the healthcare consumer’s increasing interest in tracking and sharing personal data, are paving the way for highly personalized care. To win this race, companies need to deliver deeper, more meaningful personalization.

Companies that provide more meaningful connection at an emotional and aspirational level will attract the next generation of healthcare consumers.

Future healthcare products need to be designed to embody a proactive and preventive mindset. This new paradigm is focused on enhancing our well-being and health in all areas of our life, all of the time.

Leadership diversity matters because having different perspectives and experiences drives innovation and helps companies to design better products. This is even more important when it comes to medical devices, where patients’ health and lives are at stake.

Within every organization, innovation wants to thrive. Here’s what it looks like when organizations dismantle the obstacles that stand in the way.

Home self-testing kits have played a crucial role in managing the spread of COVID-19 in the US, but a steep environmental price is hidden in the societal benefit.

Speculative design requires people to suspend their disbelief and allow their imaginations to wander. Here's one tool to ground it in reality.

What comes before and after you walk in your users' shoes? We distill empathic design into six principles for easy adoption.

In 2021 you devoured blogs about looking at old problems in new ways, unlocking your professional potential, and creating products that change the world for the better.

There’s a growing sense of urgency and renewed purpose in the design community.

Warning: I’m going to criticize and question something beloved by millions of people—stationary exercise bikes.

A thoughtfully designed care model can support better outcomes in ways that better fit into people’s lives. How exactly will care models have to change?

At CES in 2019, Verizon Chairman and CEO Hans Vestberg gave the opening keynote address about the upcoming advantages of 5G.

Being home more in 2020 meant a little more down time, including more time for books and audio books.

We can always count on the market to push change, whether the players in the market like it or not. Failure to adapt quickly to changing market forces will eventually come back to bite you.

STEEPLE analysis is a tool for scanning your external environment. It helps teams understand phenomena and imagine new opportunities.

For our Delve Talks podcast, Dave Franchino and I had the opportunity to interview a dozen people from various industries, all of whom share a common interest, desire and occupation that involves innovation, creativity and culture building. You can find the whole series here.

In 2020, the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) held its first Deep Dive on sustainable product design. The ensuing conversations revealed a burning need for collaboration between not just designers, but everyone involved in the creation and use of products.

Sometimes having a breakthrough idea is the easy part of innovation. Navigating the organization and turning that idea into reality is often the hardest part. That's why you need design strategy.

I have been spending a fair amount of time thinking about the spectrum of successes and failures related to the open-source maker movement and its contributions to addressing the COVID crisis.

Most products take anywhere from three to ten years to develop from idea to commercialization. But many companies rely on their understanding of consumers today to make decisions for these future products.

We are told the world has changed, I have heard people talk about the recent past as “the before” in recognition that we are in transition and not going back. I have also heard people talking as if this is a tough time, that we need to buckle down and wait for it to pass.

Translating research into actions is often more art than science. We have found “how might we” questions to be useful tools. Here's how to write one.

Before starting on an innovation strategy, decide which type you're chasing: Incremental, disruptive, or radical innovation. Each requires a unique approach.

There is no game-theory exercise or scenario planning model that will produce a definitive recommendation. I realize this isn’t particularly helpful or reassuring, so I offer you three specific supplemental tips for navigating your business in tumultuous times.

Apparently, unicorns just went extinct in Silicon Valley. That’s sad news for the small group of tech entrepreneurs who hope to cash in on the latest gold rush and build a company with a $1 billion-plus valuation.

Forecasting and backcasting provide a framework for disruptive innovation by establishing a solid structure to support big, strategic thinking.

How will you decide today what to design for 2030? Strategists look to megatrends to predict consumer behavior and futureproof strategy.

A list of emerging, innovative technology being developed to reduce carbon, geoengineer the environment, and improve battery efficiency and cooling tech.

Our free, on-demand webinar explains why innovation is so critical in healthcare, and introduces our Framework for Strategic Innovation: Health + Wellness.

Some of the most altruistic of projects create some of the most vexing and problematic dilemmas for the designer as their altruistic aims face reality.

You’re probably already looking up the word “strategy” to see if it’s a noun or a verb. Spoiler alert: it’s a noun.

Infrastructure has made all of the following innovations possible.

As a high school junior, I was shown the guts of an implantable defibrillator. That day, I quit my pursuit of a career in medicine to pursue one in medical device design.

Having a foundational understanding of your problem space is necessary for any design process. You wouldn’t hire someone who has never seen the ocean to design a ship, would you?

We've examined key sociocultural megatrends through a lens of medical and wellness consumer experience to single out four profound shifts in the field.

The common message spoken and implied by the many purpose-driven speakers we listened to: Find an organizing principle for your company, your project, product or community to move the needle.

We may need an innovacation after this! But no chance... the talks and exhibits are still going strong.

Jesse Darley and I arrived Friday evening and walked the streets of Austin. We were immediately immersed in all things SXSW. There were music, crowds, exhibits, lines, homeless, clubbers, diners, all of it.

If the numbers don’t add up, great design isn’t sustainable — no matter how thoughtful it is. Design must ultimately serve the needs of the business as well as the user.

Doing user research now won't help you design for 2028. Trend analysis will. Design strategists turn to it to predict consumers' future behavior.

The world is changing ... are your design teams changing with the physical/digital times?

What does it mean when an Industrial Designer designs a "product?" Nowadays, it can get a little convoluted.

How do you balance creativity with business efficiency as your team grows?

Let's face it, technology can enable us to do a lot of new things. That doesn't mean we'll actually do them.

During our decision-making workshop at SXSW, we ran a little experiment in decision making that yielded some interesting results.

A family trip around the world with two elementary school-aged children proved to be a meaningful lesson in leadership.

There are several methodologies available to speed up the development process. Which best fits your needs?

Your company probably has 3- and 5-year plans. But does it have a 30-year plan? If not, it may be unwittingly writing its own obsolescence.

User-centered design is great, but it if your competitors also invest in user research it may be time to do some contrarian exercises for stronger strategy.

Have you ever read an article about design trends and wondered, “Where on earth did THAT come from?”

What are the odds a new product will still be around in two years’ time? And, how do we decide what to design today?

We did a thought experiment and traveled 50 years into the future to glimpse the future of healthcare and of the patient's user experience.

Delve just published its first ebook on this interesting point in time when technology and society are entering new territory.

A few months ago, I was able to experience co-creation from the client side of things. I signed up for a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE workshop at Door County Forgeworks.

Manufacturers that lead the way towards sustainable medical device design will gain significant business advantages over those that sit on the sidelines.

Imagine a future where emerging technology — wearable sensors and 3D printers — are so accessible they’re embedded into most everyday objects

How about smaller companies who don’t have the budget for an innovation lab or the leeway to afford failed experiments? How can they get in on Design Thinking?