Helping Leaders Design better products for Market, Planet and People
Great products are a balance between user delight with commercial success an art and a science honed by skilled designers. But the rise of generative AI is changing the game. With a few prompts, anyone can generate slick visuals or bold ideas. Tempting, yes. But are they workable? Will they sell? Almost certainly not.
Too often, we see businesses treating AI outputs as ready-to-build concept skipping the hard questions of market fit, feasibility, and sustainability. The risk? Products that look impressive but fail in the market, and often harm people and the planet.
That’s why we created the Design Compass: a safeguard for design in the AI era, helping businesses and educators cut through the noise and guide ideas toward real-world success ensuring they are designing the right thing for people and planet.
Our approach has now gained recognition, with funding awarded from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, to support the development of the Design Compass. This backing strengthens our mission: to protect the integrity of design in an AI-driven world and equip organisations with a tool that leads to products that work, last, and matter.
Our Solution: The Design Compass®
The Design Compass® is a practical tool that ensures product ideas are not only creative, but marketable, sustainable, and socially responsible.
- The inner ring asks tough commercial questions to stress-test whether a solution is truly marketable.
- The middle ring focuses on environmental impact, evaluating how a product uses energy and raw materials.
- The outer ring considers people, ensuring a design does no harm across its lifetime, from manufacture to end-of-life.
It doesn’t hand designers a finished solution. Instead, it challenges them, highlights conflicts, and points the way to better outcomes.
The Design Compass is currently available now as a free online tool, giving students, educators, and businesses access to structured design guidance. It directly integrates the Design Council’s Skills for a Sustainable Future (Skills for Planet) Blueprint, which the Design Council has endorsed as part of its commitment to shaping sustainable and responsible design practice.
How we developed it
- For over 15 years, founder Stefan Knox has used the marketing layer of the Design Compass in workshops at the British Library’s Business & IP Centre, as well as with clients seeking stronger market success.
- In 2012, Bang Creations developed the environmental planet ring, applying it in live client projects.
- From 2021, collaboration with lecturers at Falmouth University and the University of Chester as helped evolve the model further leading to the introduction of the people ring to consider social responsibility.
This layered development, informed by business, academic, and real-world design practice, has shaped the Design Compass into a holistic framework for innovation.
How the tool is used
The Design Compass can be applied in three distinct ways:
- Design and evaluation tool – 18 core segments, made up of three layers. The first layer helps us identify design challenges and produce marketable solutions, the middle ring pushes us to be environmentally sustainable, and the outer ring adds in social responsibility concerns. This is a cyclical, and iterative activity, and we keep going until we arrive at a promising solution. It guides designers to explore conflicts and trade-offs in real projects, creating more robust solutions.
- Idea generation tool – Structured challenges help “unstick” creative blocks, sparking new lines of thinking and more impactful ideas.
- Benchmarking tool – Visual results highlight comparative strengths and weaknesses, helping designers see exactly where their designs outperform (or fall short of) competitors.
What’s next?
We know students reference the Design Compass in their studies, and companies use it to integrate sustainable thinking into product development. With the endorsement of the Design Council, and its availability as a free online tool, it is already becoming an essential resource in shaping responsible design practice.
The next evolution, with the funding awarded from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, is the development of a subscription-based AI-powered Design Assistant. This will build on the Compass framework with a dedicated large language model trained specifically in structured design content. Unlike general-purpose chatbots, it will guide designers through a repeatable process asking the right questions, surfacing conflicts, and suggesting solutions that balance creativity with commercial, environmental, and social responsibility.
Why not simply use ChatGPT or other AI tools? Because they don’t follow a structured process, nor do they deliver the depth and specificity of insights the Compass provides. Our aim is to make the Design Compass an indispensable and intelligent partner for designers, businesses, and innovators worldwide.
About Innovate UK
Innovate UK drives productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas.
We connect businesses to the partners, customers and investors that can help them turn ideas into commercially successful products and services and business growth.
We fund business and research collaborations to accelerate innovation and drive business investment into R&D. Our support is available to businesses across all economic sectors, value chains and UK regions.
Innovate UK is part of UK Research and Innovation. For more information visit www.innovateuk.ukri.org
Learn more
To find out how the Design Compass® is shaping the future of responsible design, please contact us on: ku.oc.ssapmoc-ngised@olleh
