– Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
Imagine you're the CEO of a company. You're sitting in your 35th-story corner office, awaiting the impending launch of your first product. You know your clever marketing will help you put up massive sales numbers, and you anticipate many investors will be interested in capitalizing on your company. OK, so maybe you cut some corners and didn't use designers in your production process, but who needs those anyways, right?
Wrong. Your product does indeed fly off the shelves thanks to your marketing team, but once people get the product home and out of the box, they realize its poor design. Users become frustrated because the product doesn't actually solve for the problem it advertises itself to. Upset, they try to get in touch with your company, but the website lacks proper navigation and confuses them. Now, you've got hundreds of thousands of customers writing negative reviews about your company and its product.
Good thing you're not actually that misguided CEO. As Warren Buffet once said, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." In its truest sense, design is about making complex scenarios understandable. In this day and age, users expect products, services and experiences to solve their problems. The best companies know this and will incorporate human-centered design to give users the best possible products.
## [Take it from an expert: design is more important than ever](https://www.wired.com/2015/03/take-expert-design-important-ever/) by [Margaret Rhodes](https://www.kaleighflynn.com/) of [Fast Company](https://www.fastcompany.com/) (5 min read)
We've been saying it for a while and now John Maeda has delivered the data to prove it: Design is more integral to good business than ever before. Maeda himself is further proof of the trend; last year he left his post as president of Rhode Island School of Design to be a design partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. [Read more](https://www.wired.com/2015/03/take-expert-design-important-ever/)
by The Creative Cloud Team of Adobe (5 min read)
Consumers care about aesthetics. Steve Gustavson, executive creative director at Adobe, reported during the MAX session “Making Sure Design Has a Seat at the Strategy Table” that 50 percent of companies surveyed claim that design plays a huge role in how they achieve success. Companies that focus purely on data-driven strategies, without considering how design influences consumers’ impressions, run the risk of turning people away. Read more
by Mary Stribley (15 min read)
Recently, we started asking businesses how much they valued design in their workplace. And this is one of the most common answers we heard: For the challenge of perfecting a steady design flow – is it really worth it? Firstly, we’re strong believers in the notion that design in the workplace should be easy. And secondly – a thousand times yes. Read more
## [The world is poorly designed. But copying nature helps.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMtXqTmfta0) (5 min) Biomimicry design, explained with 99% Invisible. Hear about the Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit encouraging creators to discover how big challenges in design, engineering, and sustainability have often already been solved through 3.8 billion years of evolution on earth. We just have to go out and find them.
(8 min) Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers design partner John Maeda talks to McKinsey’s Hugo Sarrazin about why today’s senior executives must understand design.
(24 min) For most organizations “design” is a peripheral service or the subject of an occasional workshop. How can businesses integrate design thinking as a transformative day-to-day practice?
