3 Key Takeaways From our Podcast with Terry Behan
We had the pleasure this week of getting to talk all things design with legendary professor Terry Behan.
Terry Behan had two passions growing up: design and boxing.
Luckily for us he chose the former as a career path.
Listening to this conversation will be 25 minutes of your life well spent.
However, if you need some quick takeaways, the list below covers some of the fascinating ideas Terry discussed:
1. Think about Experience Architecture
Terry’s obsession with providing the best possible experience explains why he is where he is today.
When making the jump from the theoretical to the practical, how people interact with your product or service should be front of mind.
When creating anything, ask yourself how do you engineer something intuitive and practical?
As Seth Godin said “There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.”
Terry’s questioning of why things are the way they are is crucial to creating a better world.
In fact, putting human needs at the center of design can help solve some of the greatest social challenges of our time.
2. What is Design?
Definitions of design can be very different depending on who you ask.
When something becomes a buzzword there’s a danger of the meaning being lost.
This is why Terry sat down with his colleagues at Parsons School of Design and formally defined design.
To Terry, Design is an act of creation, it’s an act of improvement and it's about improving or building product services or experiences that are there to move the world forward and to redress the imbalances of the past.
3. Focus on Product Market Fit
What characterises some of the biggest companies of our time, be it Amazon or Apple, is their laser like focus on product market fit.
At the core of both companies’ identities are ingenious design solutions whether they’re phones unlike anything else on the market or the seamless experience of 1-click shopping.
Those who see design as a “nice to have” are missing a crucial advantage in the marketplace.
If you’re interested in learning more about design, why not register for our course, ‘Human Centered Design’, made in collaboration with Parsons School of Design.
For more than a century, Parsons has been a leading provider of design education to students from all over the world. Located in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village, this famous institution is ranked the no.1 design school in the U.S. and a top-ranked school globally.
