Board Director Phil Langley describes the XR + Interaction group’s focus, as being on game engine technology for virtual reality, augmented reality and web/mobile app development.

Working with a Design to Value approach enables this type of questioning and flexibility..Developing a solution through iteration.

We repeat this sequence of steps until everyone involved is satisfied that all relevant expertise has been brought to bear on the solution and that the solution fully addresses all aspects of the problem.This iterative process might appear familiar, but what makes the Design to Value method different is that the focus is not simply on developing a detailed description of a solution to allow someone to build it.It is to represent the evolving design in a way that is relevant to the stakeholders so they can understand the choices made and judge whether the design meets their needs.

This is a unique advantage of our Chip Thinking®️ process.. Rather than showing increasingly detailed plans and elevations, we represent the solution in terms of what it does to solve the client’s problem.For a prison that needs to be more rehabilitative, this means: showing what is visible from where; how activities are distributed across the buildings and the site; how the buildings are zoned and controlled to allow free movement while controlling who goes where.

For a pharmaceutical plant that needs to satisfy uncertain demand in an emerging market, this could entail seeing the capacity of the production equipment, its utilisation, the labour required to operate it, and the flexibility of the equipment to produce either different or more products..

In each case the representation is driven by what client and stakeholders need to see to satisfy themselves that the proposed solution meets their needs, but also to inform the wider team to decide what the next design iteration needs to look like to create an even better and more detailed solution.. At the end of this process, we have not simply a good design but also a transparent account of how expert knowledge and stakeholder requirements steered the decision-making process.In my inaugural lecture in the autumn, I suggested that one of our biggest challenges to solve going forward is trying to get free of the tendrils that bind us.

Another metaphor is to reduce the viscosity of business.I don’t know whether you have ever made a non-Newtonian fluid by mixing cornflour with water?

As soon as you try to move the fluid its viscosity rises exponentially; in fact, people have walked across swimming pools of the stuff.. For me, both the Devil’s Snare and the cornflour explain one of the key reasons why we fail in doing the great things we are all capable of.We become wedded to one way of doing them and when we don’t get the results we want, we think we just need to try harder, to struggle more or to do more work.