472: The intersection of art, design, and business – with Paul Stonick

How SCADpro is elevating product management through design

We are talking about some of the lessons from integrating art, design, and business needs that have been learned by SCADpro—the Savannah College of Art and Design’s in-house design, research, and innovation studio—which is generating innovative designs and products for the world’s most influential brands, including Google, Amazon, and Apple.

Joining us is Paul Stonick, the Vice President of SCADpro. Prior to SCAD, Paul spent 25 years in the corporate world leading world-class digital and user experience design teams, primarily in e-commerce, most notably with The Home Depot and Barclays.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[1:54] How do you view the intersection of art, design, and business?

“Good design is good business,” quoting Thomas Watson from IBM. I like to view design as value. For a design team to show value, they have to be able to speak the language of business to their stakeholders.

The work we do at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and SCADpro, our in-house design, research, and innovation studio, is the intersection of design and business. We don’t consider ourselves to be an art school but a creative university. Everything we do has some sort of business component woven into it.

[4:25] Can you share some examples from SCADpro of how organizations have found value by approaching innovation from an art and design perspective?

The Chick-fil-A drive thru was a SCADpro project. Several years ago they came to use wanting to rethink the outdoor dining experience. We designed the iPad experience, the flow, the orchestration, the uniforms, etc. We execute through a framework called Design Thinking. It’s a creative problem-solving tool, a human-centered approach to solving problems. Design doesn’t even have to be part of the output. For Chick-fil-A, the output was structure, process, and organization. That’s value because it’s a return-on-investment for Chick-fil-A.

Another partner is Deloitte, which we helped tackle some of the most complex issues facing public-sector organizations.

Recently we created a holiday campaign for the jeweler David Yurman.

We’re providing value in all different ways. For these three examples, we had students coming together from 100 different majors and minors, 120 countries, and all 50 states. We provide a global perspective and diverse thinking. Our secret sauce is unconstrained thinking, pushing the envelope, and going to places you usually don’t go to find the answer. That’s what innovation is—creating magic moments for the customer. Innovation is not about taking it to the press or to the board because then you’re serving the wrong customer.

[8:29] How do you apply Design Thinking?

While we encourage our SCAD students to be creative and think big, we strive to never forget the needs of the client. Our process starts with understanding the wants, needs, frustrations, and behaviors of the user to make sure we’re building the right product. It’s much more expensive to build the wrong thing than to build the right thing. The beauty of Design Thinking is it marries creativity and critical thinking skills. It requires us to generate a lot of ideas, so students become comfortable with failure. It forces you to try out many ideas early on and not get invested in one because generally your first idea is never the best. The process harnesses creativity through inquiry.

We have three offerings: a 48-hour design challenge, a 10-week partnership, and an executive experience in which we’re teaching other companies how to be creative again.

We did a partnership to redesign the Atlanta Police Department’s patrol cars. The students dug into the history of the police department and met with officers to understand what they were lo...