A Business Design Language

Businesses are systems and unlike the design of things like, say, a table, they have inputs and outputs and change and grow over time, with feedback loops. The process of designing a business is therefore a systems design one which marries a combination of business model and product design.

To develop a language for this, I used simple diagrams that represented flows of value and transactions. I then developed a visual language for the design process itself, based on an iterative version of the popular ‘double diamond’ one, and made the whole thing mappable to the elements of the business model canvas which is widely used by startups.