Introduction

A design brief is a short document, usually 2 to 20 pages in length, that relays issues of “who, what, when, how, and why” to the design team (Petersen & Phillips, 2011). As a written explanation of the aims and objectives of a project, the design brief represents the desired outcome by relaying requests from management to design teams. A well-written design brief enables designers to understand their clients and to communicate with other designers in a team fluently, eventually helping them to develop concepts. As concept development reflects only 5 percent of development costs, yet influences 70 percent of the final product's cost (Andreasen & Hein, 2000), using a design brief to translate management criteria into measurable and actionable design concepts is critical.

Although the design brief plays an important role in concept development, there are few resources about how to write one. In general, the design brief is viewed as a competitive advantage and traditionally is guarded as a business secret. Research on writing a design brief is scant, and prescriptions for how to organize documents are heavily based on individual consultants' experiences. As such, most design briefs are the writer's interpretation of a request for proposals (RFP) or merely a reformulation of an existing business plan (Petersen, 2011).

The responsibility for writing a design brief is usually relegated to one department, and there is little or no cross-departmental collaboration. At the Industrial Design Society of America event in 2012, for example, design students and professional designers alike voiced their concerns about the design briefs they had seen. The design briefs written by engineering departments contained too much information and were overly restrictive, whereas the design briefs written by marketing departments contained too little information and did not inspire designers. Therefore, many designers read a design brief when a project is started and rarely revisit it afterward.

2.1 Nine Criteria of an Inspirational Design Brief

To begin, we consider how industrial designers work. Designers are inspired by a wide variety of sources, including nature, fashion, movies, automobiles, aviation, weapons, architecture, and cutting-edge technology. Although some sources may not apply to a specific project, they may help designers formulate a new concept at a later point. Along these lines, we define an inspirational design brief as not only a guide to follow but also a mind-set to help designers leverage constraints in ideation. More specifically, we examined a wide variety of applications submitted to worldwide design awards and identified nine common criteria. We categorized them into three groups—strategy, context, and performance—and introduced them as nine design quality criteria (DQC).

1. Strategy
   1. 1. Philosophy: History, values, belief, vision, mission, and strategy of a company
   2. 2. Structure: Domain, business model, and competitive advantage of a company
   3. 3. Innovation: Area and type of innovation of a company
2. Context
   1. 4. Social/human: Needs and activities about individual and/or group of consumers
   2. 5. Environment: Requirements of and expectations for environmental concerns
   3. 6. Viability: Expectations about economic performance
3. Performance
   1. 7. Process: Budget and schedule of a project
   2. 8. Function: Nature of deliverables including unique selling point
   3. 9. Expression: Sensory styling and aesthetics of products

More detailed explanations, questions to answers, and the conventional metrics of each criterion are provided in Figure 2.1 and Table 2.1.

2.2 Writing the Inspirational Design Brief

The optimal approach to writing an inspirational design brief is through co-creation. Studies show that the act of writing a design brief improves the quality of concepts by 20 percent on average and 25 percent for top-performing designers. Writing a design brief also changes research behavior; when novice designers invest time in writing a high-quality design brief, they conduct research for a longer period of time as well as identify more impactful opportunities for ideation. Moreover, writing a design brief collaboratively reduces team members' perception of ambiguity while increasing their willingness to take risks in the subsequent concept exploration phase (Petersen & Ryu, 2015). Therefore, joint development of a design brief and treating brief writing as an important phase has the potential to add value to a project, curb risk, and increase creativity. Co-creating an inspirational design brief consists of the following three steps, as illustrated in Figure 2.2.

2.3 Research Findings about Inspirational Design Briefs

Going over budget is a serious issue for product developers. They can avoid this issue by carefully examining the amount of the content allocated for the two design quality criteria, process (how to make a product) and expression (how a product looks and feels), in a design brief. Petersen, Steinert, and Beckman (2011) reviewed 81 briefs including 51 briefs from the projects performed at Stanford University and 30 briefs from the projects performed at several companies. Their collected briefs covered a wide variety of fields, including automotive, consumer products, health care, construction, and aviation. Projects ranged in complexity from shavers to earthmoving equipment, and in size from cell phones to aircraft interiors.

Interestingly, the authors discovered that the amount of the content for process is negatively correlated with the amount of the content for expression (see Figure 2.3). This suggests that the less information a brief contains regarding the outcome of the project (expression), the more information it requires to describe how the project runs (process). Indeed, one group of automotive product developers who distributed the amount of the content for the two criteria in a more balanced way ran into fewer problems. However, the other groups of product developers who wrote too little about expression in their briefs lost control of their projects, leading to budget overruns and project failure.

2.4 Three Pitfalls to Avoid

We suggest that brief writers avoid the following three pitfalls when writing briefs:

1. Content distribution: First, brief writers often undervalue the importance of communicating strategy (philosophy, structure, and innovation) with their team members. It is an outdated belief that design is an afterthought and should not be integrated with the rest of the business. We suggest that the content regarding strategy should occupy at least 10 percent of the design brief. Second, some brief writers intentionally hide the complete information about the expected specifications (function) or the expected shape (expression) of the final product in order to encourage the blue-sky thinking of their team members. However, team members can only benefit from possessing the full information available. We suggest that the content about function occupies at least 5 percent and that the content about expression occupies at least 25 percent in the design brief.
2. Balancing between process and expression: As illustrated earlier, balancing the amount of the content between the two criteria determines the success of project. When brief writers include too much content about process (>55 percent), they may neglect the other criteria, potentially hurting the quality of the project outcome. When they include too little content about expression (<25 percent), they may ask team members to explore extensively, which results in a high risk of going over budget.
3. Length: Brief writers should benchmark the number of words used for their design briefs. The length indicates an aircraft interior, when in fact the product intended for development was a shower stall. Most effective briefs are usually 500 to 1,500 words in length.

2.5 Conclusion: Keys to Success

The main purpose of writing a design brief is to communicate organizational capabilities, the business strategy, and the business model to the members of the design team so that they are well equipped to synthesize novel, useful, and marketable concepts. Creative ideas come from well-informed individuals and teams. Leaving the design team in the dark is self-defeating; it only results in a negative effect on the budget, schedule, and outcome. Each design brief should be unique and requires a concerted effort to create. Recycling old briefs, with minor updates and modifications, does not lead to an innovative concept. Team members recognize “the same old briefs” on their desks and pay no attention to them.

In this chapter, we introduce the inspirational design brief as an answer for designers seeking to improve the current situation of misaligned business opportunities and design execution. We introduced its nine criteria called design quality criteria (DQC) and illustrated two examples, one for a product design project and the other for research project. Then, we illustrated the three steps of how to write design briefs in a co-creative fashion. We also provided research findings and clarified three pitfalls. We believe our proposed brief-writing method provides a unique opportunity for product developers in various industries to facilitate communication between their business managers and designers so that they can successfully leverage design in their new product development projects.

References

1. Andreasen, M. M., & Lars Hein. (2000). Integrated product development. Technical University of Denmark.
2. Lacy, P., Cooper, T., Hayward, R., & Neuberger, L. (2010). A new era of sustainability: UN global compact–Accenture CEO study 2010. (pp. 1–56). Accenture Institute for High Performance: Chicago, IL.
3. Petersen, S. (2011). Profit from design. South Pasadena, CA: Ingomar & Ingomar.
4. Petersen, S., & Ryu, B. H. (2015, April). Strategic comprehension driving risk-taking & design performance. 11th European Academy of Design Conference, Paris, France.
5. Petersen, S., & Phillips, P. (2011). Inspiring design—informed by metrics. Design Management Review 22(2), 62–71.
6. Petersen, S., Steinert, M., & Beckman, S. (2011, August). Design driven portfolio management. International Conference of Engineering Design, Copenhagen, Denmark.

About the Author

Dr. Søren Petersen is an international business consultant and design science researcher, author, and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post (The Creative Economy: www.huffingtonpost.com/soren-petersen). Throughout his 20-year career, he has worked with many top-tier international organizations, including Rambøll Group, BMW Group, Stanford University, Copenhagen Business School, and Hanyang University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in ME Design Research, MS ME from the Technical University of Denmark, and his BS in Transportation Design from Art Center College of Design. Over the past six years, he has published 24 scientific papers and over 150 articles on the Creative Economy, as well as authoring Profit from Design, a definitive book on design quantification. His areas of research include developing methods and metrics for bridging business and design. These include: Design Driven Start-ups, Design & Business Model Experimentation, Design-Driven Portfolio Management, Gamification in Concept Design, and Crowdsourcing Design Research.

Jaewoo Joo is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Kookmin University. He holds a PhD in Marketing from Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Jaewoo teaches and writes about design marketing and new product development through the lens of behavioral decision theory. He has served as a panelist for the Business Week's World's Best Design Schools.