Lecture

In The lecture, Stephanie Krieger talks about branding, architecture, interior design, and service design. She uses various companies as examples, focusing on Lucy, and the Chicago Public Transportation buses. She went through the steps that her company would go through with the client and the initial process, where the store or service would be observed secretively. In relation to this, Krieger brings up the “5E’s”- Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, Extension. Of these 5 points, there was plenty of emphasis on “Extension”- this is what makes customers back. When Krieger said this, I thought of coupons may retails stores put in shopping bags at the end of a purchase; this makes the customer want to come back to redeem the coupon and get the benefits of it. The 5 E’s are important and effective because they can really be applied to any business. Next, Krieger discussed improvements that can be made to a certain business. There is a process, which follows these steps; Understand, Design, Test, and the people involved in the process are the corporate stakeholders, the staff, and the clientele. There is  somewhat of a domino effect- the corporate stakeholders display the products and identify the benefits of them; the staff overlooks these products in the retail environment and builds interaction around them, as well as protects them; the customer looks for these products and identifies which ones are new, as well as which ones they like. One must first understand the problems of a brand- what works, and what does not work, to be able to make any improvements. Next, solutions and options are designed. Testing is then done by prototyping, which can be done in various forms and methods. From the prototypes, successful points can be noted and then be used in a larger scale.

The methods discussed in the lecture were referring to a specific company, but really can be used to talk about almost any company. The process that  Krieger discusses ties in various aspects of design which I think makes it successful and effective.