The Force Behind Star Wars: Turning Design Ideas into Reality

You’ve got an idea. Maybe it’s a new idea for a web application. Maybe it’s a new product idea you need to push through your organization. The question is: How do you turn an idea into reality?

To answer this question, we’ll look at the making of Star Wars. We’ll look behind the scenes at what it took to get George Lucas’s space fantasy from script to screen. From assembling the right team to navigating the Hollywood corporate studio environment to tapping into powerful universal patterns — we’ll look at a dozen lessons UX designers (and developers!) can learn from this adventure.

This struck me as interesting, as being a SW geek myself, I already knew a fair amount about how Star Wars evolved. George Lucas had a very clear vision of what Star Wars was going to be, and he developed the film in quite an evolutionary way. (Quite different from how he makes films now.)

Here is a link to the presentation (no audio, but the slides are insightful, as well as well designed):

My summary:

• Perspective - the way you look at things, the way your customers look at things
• Language - need to be able to connect - business fluency
• Build experience - start small and go from there
• Protect the future - are there things that you can protect the rights to?
• Right people - you need the right people - broad and deep generalists who passionately want to be there
• Embrace constraints - from constraint comes greatness