My interest in design developed from a very young age. In junior high school I already knew I wanted to be a graphic designer. Different from children of my age, I have always immersed myself in the world of arts, I enjoyed watching the opera or theatre performances and it developed in the way I saw and felt about things. I found my interest wasn’t limited to only design — I also had an interest in both music and literature

My family was also a great influence. My parents were in the printing industry and my eldest sibling was a graphic designer from ITB, so it was only natural that I adopted an interest in that world.

Hermawan Tanzil.

The web is the greatest entrepreneurial platform ever invented. Lowest barriers of entry, greatest human reach ever. I love the web. Permission-less, grand reach, diversity of implementation. Don’t believe this imaginary wall of access of money. It isn’t there.

Examine and interrogate your motivations, reject the money if you dare, and startup something useful. A dent in the universe is plenty.

Curb your ambition.

Live happily ever after.

David Heinemeier Hansson.

I think young designers who open design studios tend to think too little about money. If you don’t take the financial health of a new studio seriously (and put systems in place to monitor the finances) chances you’re going to wind up with money problems are high.  Stefan Sagmeister.

As corporate leaders become aware of the power of design, many view design thinking as a solution to all their woes. Designers, enjoying their new level of strategic influence, often reinforce that impression. … But design doesn’t solve all problems. It helps people and organizations cut through complexity. It’s great for innovation. It works extremely well for imagining the future. But it’s not the right set of tools for optimizing, streamlining, or otherwise operating a stable business. Additionally, even if expectations are set appropriately, they must be aligned around a realistic timeline—culture changes slowly in large organizations.

An organizational focus on design offers unique opportunities for humanizing technology and for developing emotionally resonant products and services. Adopting this perspective isn’t easy. But doing so helps create a workplace where people want to be, one that responds quickly to changing business dynamics and empowers individual contributors. And because design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.

Jon Kolko.

Many products built on an emotional value proposition are simpler than competitors’ offerings. This restraint grows out of deliberate decisions about what the product should do and, just as important, what it should not do. By removing features, a company offers customers a clear, simple experience.Jon Kolko.

A design culture is nurturing. It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time. Apple is celebrated for its successes, but a little digging uncovers the Newton tablet, the Pippin gaming system, and the Copland operating system—products that didn’t fare so well. (Pippin and Copland were discontinued after only two years.) The company leverages failure as learning, viewing it as part of the cost of innovation. Jon Kolko.

In design-centric organizations, you’ll typically see prototypes of new ideas, new products, and new services scattered throughout offices and meeting rooms. Whereas diagrams such as customer journey maps explore the problem space, prototypes explore the solution space. They may be digital, physical, or diagrammatic, but in all cases they are a way to communicate ideas. The habit of publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an open-minded culture, one that values exploration and experimentation over rule following. … Design-centric companies aren’t shy about tinkering with ideas in a public forum and tend to iterate quickly on prototypes Jon Kolko.

Design thinking, first used to make physical objects, is increasingly being applied to complex, intangible issues, such as how a customer experiences a service. Regardless of the context, design thinkers tend to use physical models, also known as design artifacts, to explore, define, and communicate. Those models—primarily diagrams and sketches—supplement and in some cases replace the spreadsheets, specifications, and other documents that have come to define the traditional organizational environment. They add a fluid dimension to the exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear thought when tackling nonlinear problems.Jon Kolko.

The focus on great experiences isn’t limited to product designers, marketers, and strategists—it infuses every customer-facing function. Take finance. Typically, its only contact with users is through invoices and payment systems, which are designed for internal business optimization or predetermined «customer requirements.» But those systems are touch points that shape a customer’s impression of the company. In a culture focused on customer experience, financial touch points are designed around users’ needs rather than internal operational efficiencies Jon Kolko.

People need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be intuitive and pleasurable. Empathy, experimentation, design smarts, and other qualities help create those kinds of interactions. Those qualities need to spread from the product design function to the whole organization.

There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.

A set of principles collectively known as design thinking—empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure chief among them—is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture.

Jon Kolko.