Gain, the relaunched AIGA journal of business and design

AIGA, the professional association for design, has just relaunched its Gain journal, dedicated to stimulating thinking at the intersection of design and business.

The launch issue contains a huge amount of material (no less than 30 articles) organised in such categories as customer-centered design, the DUX 2005 conference, design as strategy, design process, and communicating design thinking.

Those that caught my eye include:

(Form + Content + Context) / Time = Experience Design
Experience
design” is a discipline created by the reality of communication today,
when no point of contact has a simple beginning and end and all points
of contact must have meaning embedded in them.

Diamond search: improving the user experience of buying loose diamonds online
This
case study, presented at DUX 2005, examines the development and
deployment of a dynamic, visual, usable, confidence-building, diamond
search tool, and a user-centric, end-to-end online shopping experience
for loose diamonds.

Go to the customers of your customer
When trying to break into an industry, do you start at the heart or at the fringes? Caleb Luwick rolls out how Tricycle used design savvy to transform an industry’s established sales cycle.

Metamorphosis: metmuseum.org
Culture and commerce meet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s digital museum without walls, writes Stephen Nowlin.

On brandology and futures research: an interview with Andrew Zolli
Branding strategist Andrew Zolli discusses the future of brands and futures research in an interview with Gong Szeto.

Project Platypus: reinventing product development at Mattel, An interview with Ivy Ross
Ivy Ross, Senior Vice President at Mattel, discusses her innovative approach to building new brands with David Womack.

The artless website: schwab.com
Glen Helfand claims that the design of schwab.com proves that smart, in the age of new media, is more substance than style.

Why is it so hard to make products that people love?
Why do so many good designs get trampled during the product development process? Adlin and Pruitt hash out why the development process so rife with disagreements and compromises even though everyone is interested the same good thing.

Readers are invited to join the discussion through a new mailing list.