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(theyfituserpractice,areeasytodotechnically,orfitthebusinessmission),thentheissues
andproblems.Astheylistproblems,theyareencouragedtosuggestdesignideastoaddress
them. In this way, the team implicitly prioritizes what they want to take forward and what
they want to let go from their initial design thinking without having to have a heavyweight
prioritization process.
Identifying product concepts:
The vision stories imply new product concepts. Any sig-
nificant product is composed of feature sets, app suites, and related services that work to-
gether. The visions contain these concepts within a story of to-be use. But they will be de-
veloped and delivered as coherent product elements that have to hang together coherently.
Each product concept holds together and could (in theory) be delivered as its own product.
If the team's only view of their design is as a set of scenarios, they will only see the fea-
tures—they will not see how the concepts have their own structure, relationships, and co-
herence.
The final step of the Visioning Session is to identify the product concepts explicitly.
Each vision suggests product concepts that may have been built up across other visions.
The vision evaluation makes it easier to identify the coherent product concepts because
the evaluation focuses on the vision elements, not the entire scenario. For example, in our
travel project the team identified a research tool, with a collection area for ideas and an
app for in-the-moment research; a planning tool for laying out the trip and making sure all
logistics have been considered; and an app for taking on the trip to record and share mem-
orable events. These product concepts work together as a whole solution, but each can be
thought about and refined on its own.
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The team draws each product concept separately, pulling the best ideas for that concept
from all the visions, using the design ideas and vision elements from one vision to solve
problemsidentifiedinanother.Thisprocessencouragestheteamtothinkofeachvisionnot
as a monolithic whole, but as a grab-bag of parts that can be recombined and repurposed
to both solve the users' problem and bring value to the business organization. These high-
level product concepts feed the next phase of ideation. This is also a good time to share the
vision with management stakeholders to check direction.
4.3.2 THE COOL DRILLDOWN
Thefinalpartofhighlevelideationisthe
Cool Drilldown
workshop.Designforlifemeans
designing to fit the whole life, including structure of activities throughout the time and
places of the day, motivations, attitude, and self-image. Designers are not used to address-
ing these aspects of design, so it is easy to overlook them in the visioning session. Getting
these aspects of design right also requires more detailed design than the quick construction
of visions allows for. The visioning session is intentionally fast-paced. There's no time to
