At the outset of a project, it’s vital to have fusion on the strategy. Business, marketing, and technology stakeholders can live off the same page relative to the start and endpoints of a new product or major project. This is common ground, or Fusion Strategy. LightCode begins a project on the basis of its Fusion Form – an online instrument in our toolbox that helps us navigate the various goals across an organization (whether 2 or 20,000 employees) to arrive at common ground.

Trying to determine the pathway to the hearts and minds of customers is a constant journey of adjustment. Every major project, new product, or new service offering requires a starting point. In our experience, if the project begins with competing goals at its starting point – whether they’re explicit or implicit – the project will wander or vacillate. It never flies like an arrow to its target (endpoint).

The Fusion Form is a way to clarify the competing goals and bring alignment to the starting point. And, as we all know, if the start is flawed, the end is anything but flawless.

Designers are painstakingly aware of how things look, but increasingly we are also morphing into strategists, particularly in the field of interactive design. It boils down to design as a form of influence – both with the customer and the executive boardroom. At LightCode, our interactive designers strive to connect the two ends in a perfect circle… at least that’s our goal.

In the world of cognitive psychology there is this notion called “framing,” which is a highly interpretive approach we bring to any given situation. Framing is fundamental to the way in which we respond to experiences, aesthetics, people, writing, and just about everything.

A frame is a personal perspective, and it’s built one brick at a time (the “brick” being our experiences). A frame allows us to recognize cultural norms and nuances, and modify our behavior accordingly. For example, when confronted with a men’s room and a women’s room, we frame the icon on the bathroom door and pick the appropriate one. The wrong choice can leave a scar – literally.

Everyone “reads” their world through frames. Design takes this into account. It uses color palettes, imagery, fonts, white space, sound, video, icons, etc. to enable the target customer to resonate with the design, and in this resonance, be influenced by it.

Great design though, is not confined to customer influence; it also influences the business model, the brand, and yes, even the organizational culture. Hence, we are moving into the era where designers are strategists, which is why we only hire designers with deep and broad frames that include the boardroom, not just the customer’s living room.

There’s an overwhelming tendency among today’s businesses to invent The Next Big Thing. Business leaders want to be the next Steve Jobs, but how practical is that? Companies put pressure on themselves to innovate faster-better than their rivals, and doing anything less is tantamount to failure. How many times have we heard someone say: “In tough financial times, innovation is the key.”

At LightCode we’ve discovered that many of the most powerful innovations are simple ideas that solve the most basic needs and have a meaningful impact in people’s lives. While these inventions aren’t as technically complex as an i-phone, they can have significant, enduring influence. If executives think that complex innovation is the Holy Grail of their bottom lines, we would argue that a simple innovation can extend the company’s existing products and services to include the social web.

A product that operates with a social ecosystem rapidly becomes opensourced – in other words – users embrace the product as one of their own. This makes The Next Big Thing an outgrowth of the alchemy of your product + users + social web + ideas + add-ons. User-based innovation is where we started in the 90s, and with the social web, it’s simply getting easier and faster to find out what user’s want and need in order to retain their loyalty and viral momentum.

The simple idea is to integrate the social web with your products or services. It might be, that out of that endeavor, will come The Next Big Thing from your company.

In the social world there has been a potent uptick in activity. Social networking sites have sprung up in every conceivable niche, amplifying our social power by increasing the speed in which we can access new friends, rekindle old acquaintances and network for business opportunities. The question we ask at LightCode is whether amplified social activity creates amplified social stress. The social web platform indirectly pressures us to join, profile, respond, recommend, unfriend and track, and in some instances, by the minute. But all of this creates a predicament: How can we obtain the benefits of social networking without yielding to superfluous demands?

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied social groups and their interdependence. He proposed the number 150 as the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.” The question is whether Dunbar’s theory applies to the online world. If a person has more than 150 friends in their social web, is increased stress the result? We believe it is, though we lack any scientific data to prove our assumption.

An important thing to remember relative to social networking is to strike the balance between output of time and input of value. If you’re spending time managing 200 friends across multiple social sites, and the time is draining you of your capacity to develop real-world friendships, strengthen family ties, exercise regularly, focus on innovations at work, or pursue that neglected hobby or avocation, then consider that you might be over your limit.

Remember, Dunbar’s law the next time you add friends – if you don’t, you might also be adding stress to you life. Something to contemplate from your friends at LightCode.

As management consultant John Hagel writes, “The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It’s to make meaning.”

Business schools, board of directors, and analysts have inbuilt into the psyche of most C-level executives that making money is the ultimate goal of business. However, the arrival of the social web has disrupted traditional business strategies, democratizing branding and the meaning of a company’s products and image. The brand is no longer exclusively the monopoly of marketing and its brand strategy. In today’s hyper-transparent web economy, customers own and manipulate the brand.

Embedding meaning in design is a way to look at how the social web can be folded into the brand experience, and how everything can be designed to convey this meaning as it shifts under the influence of customers, media, and the public at large. No company is truly in control of its brand anymore. But it can design meaning into its customer interactions, its social web strategy, its website, its content, and its service and support strategy so that all of the elements are “wired to authentic care”.

Meaning in design is a form of invisible marketing that, ironically, can be the most compelling voice. Clustering customers on demographic or behavioral data is in its sunset stage. We live in an emerging “age of conversations” in which the boundaries between consumer and producer, amateur and professional, domestic and global, are not only blurring, they’re transforming. It is the era when producers (companies) who deeply care about their customers prevail.

This is all part of design. Design, in this context, is not pretty images or aesthetic web pages that achieve awards. It’s not brilliant code that functions seamlessly and flawlessly. It is something more profound and practiced, and at its core, is the notion that authentic care between the producer and its customer is integral to everything that the company does. Design is the evolving, forward-rushing conversation between customer and company.

The “open brand” is based on empathy and care. Meaning in design evolves out of this principle. Anything less, in our opinion, is pretense.

Recent crop circles we’ve adopted at LightCode.com.