Bridging the valley of death

Abstract

A knowledge gap exists between design agencies and their clients leading to what is known as the Valley of Death. This is the result of a resource and knowledge gap around a concept, leading to challenges in adoption into an organisation resulting projects losing momentum, and ultimately being abandoned. The aim of this project was to develop a solution, in collaboration with Studio Kraftwerk, which tackled this knowledge and skill gap between the two parties, in order to ensure concept proposals have a better chance of being adopted and eventually reach the market. Research was conducted both through field interviews and in literature, to understand how this phenomena happens in practice and how it can be overcome. The findings of this identified a misalignment of expectations between design agencies and client organisations, resulting in neither party explicitly focusing on how to relate a concept into an organisation. Further to this, the literature research identified the organisational empathy framework, which highlights the key aspects required tackle this knowledge gap. This research fed into the development of the Bridging workshop, which is an approach to facilitate a knowledge exchange required to relate a concept to a client organisation. Through this approach, based on the organisational empathy framework, designers and their clients assess the alignment between a concept and the current state of the organisation. Following this, suggestions on how to create better alignment are made, whether that is through changes to the concept or proposed organisational transformation. While the Bridging workshop was developed within Kraftwerk's practices, this is not a unique challenge to their agency, and as such this approach can be applied by either design agencies or stakeholders within an organisation.