Value-Centered Design
The Force Driving Every Great Business
“Our need will be the real creator.”
— Plato
Graphic designers arrange visual elements — markings and colors — on a field or canvas to convey a message or evoke a feeling. Whether it’s pencil and paper or manipulating pixels on a screen, their output manifests as visual stories on multiple media. Industrial designers arrange atoms — physical matter — into beautiful, functional objects that serve a purpose. The purpose could be simply to hold flowers and be attractive (a vase) or to move heavy things from point A to point B (a forklift). They might shape clay or wood, but these days industrial designers usually design products in computer-aided drawing (CAD) software that simulates the three-dimensional world — and every product is a three-dimensional story.
Business designers are also all about telling stories — but what is the equivalent of visual elements or physical matter for business designers? It’s value. Business designers create, capture, and deliver value. Like all designers, we center people and their needs in our work — we also uniquely center value. We’re tasked with generating value for companies and customers. But what is value? Where does it come from? And how do we know if we’ve created it?
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What is value?
Philosophers, psychologists, economists, and just about anyone interested in human behavior have been trying to understand and characterize value for as long as humans have pondered such questions. A philosopher would likely point to the intrinsic or extrinsic qualities that make something desirable, worthwhile, or significant: “I value my freedom because it allows me to pursue my unique purpose and joy.” A psychologist might consider value to be a subjective assessment of how well something meets an individual’s needs or fulfills their desires based on personal motivations and experiences: “I value my freedom because it fulfills my need for autonomy and aligns with my desire to live authentically.” An economist, on the other hand, might define value as the benefit derived from a good or service relative to its cost, measured by factors like willingness to pay or the utility it provides: “I value my freedom because it lets me focus my time and energy on the things that matter most to me.”
As a business designer, I see value as the perceived worth, usefulness, or importance of something to a person or group, shaped by their needs, preferences, and circumstances. With this in mind, I can craft a valuable offering that has worth, usefulness, or importance and express that offering as a value proposition. As I wrote in Issue 009, a value proposition is a statement that clearly identifies the benefits an offering will provide to a specific target audience, explaining why it is superior to other alternatives in the market. It’s essentially the promise of value to be delivered and a primary reason a consumer should buy from you. As a bonus, it’s very useful in aligning the various elements of your business around a common strategy — including product/service development, marketing, pricing, operations, distribution, and more.
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Value Flows
But where does value come from? If you’re thinking about value propositions, the answer is easy: goods, services, experiences, relationships, etc. Inspired by the ideas and writings of economist Saifedean Ammous, I’m thinking more elemental than that. Every unit of value is part of a flow, and if you trace that flow far enough back, you find one source of value and one force shaping it throughout the flow.
The source at the beginning of any value flow is the universe around us; in our case as humans, that’s the Sun, which powers life and energy systems, and the Earth and its resources, which provide the building blocks for everything we create. As technology advances, fundamental sources of value may extend beyond our planet to include asteroids and other celestial bodies, mined for their rich mineral reserves — but for now, it’s our pale blue dot and that big ball of fire in the sky. The force present throughout the flow is human ingenuity — the drive to innovate, problem-solve, and create, shaping raw resources into things of meaning, use, and… value.
Take, for instance, the simple act of eating a piece of bread when you’re hungry. The value flow begins with the Sun, which enables plants like wheat to grow. The Earth provides the soil, air, and water, each rich with nutrients, that nurture the seeds into our amber waves of grain. Human ingenuity is engaged throughout. Farmers prepare the fields, sow the seeds, and monitor the crops, using tools and machinery made from metals mined from the Earth that run on petroleum products drilled from the Earth (petroleum being a long-term solar energy storage material). Combines powered by fossil fuels harvest the wheat, which is transported to mills where it’s processed into flour.
Salt is also mined, water is purified, and yeast is cultivated, each requiring its own intricate flow of resources, energy, and human labor. These ingredients converge with flour at a bakery, where they are mixed, kneaded, and baked into bread. Alongside this process, petroleum by-products are refined to create the plastic for the packaging, while trees are harvested and processed into the cardboard used for shipping. The bread moves through a logistics network of trucks, trains, and warehouses (built from materials extracted from and out of the earth by humans and machines constructed from metal and running on petroleum) before it finally arrives at your grocery store or doorstep.
Bread is a product — how about the value flow of a service — say, a visit to the doctor? Again, as all value flows do, it begins with the Sun and the Earth. The food that nourishes the doctor, the patients, and the entire system’s workforce is grown through sunlight, soil, and water (thank you, Universe!). The Earth also provides the raw materials for equipment: iron for stethoscopes, plastic for syringes, and the resources for countless tools and devices used in modern medicine. Human ingenuity transforms these raw materials into an intricate web of care.
The value flow continues with the education and training of doctors and support staff. Years of schooling and practical experience, supported by educators, institutions, and researchers, shape their ability to diagnose and treat illnesses. These institutions rely on concrete, steel, and wood buildings and the technology to provide resources like textbooks, simulation labs, and online learning platforms.
Behind the scenes, a digital infrastructure supports the visit — human ingenuity has even bent the lowly electron to serve our needs: medical records are stored and managed through software systems that rely on servers powered by electricity, networks of cables, and internet protocols. Appointment scheduling, insurance processing, and payment systems add layers of human labor and activity to ensure the system runs smoothly.
During the visit, the doctor uses their expertise, honed over years of practice, to assess your symptoms and provide a diagnosis or treatment plan. If medication is prescribed, the flow extends further. Pharmaceutical companies research, develop, and manufacture drugs using complex scientific processes supported by biologists, chemists, and engineers. Pharmacists then package, ship, and stock these medications, completing another loop in the value flow.
Value moves through our human-made systems much like protein moves through the food chain: created at a fundamental level, transformed at each step, and ultimately consumed to sustain and drive the entire system forward. Value is created, captured, and delivered by and from the Sun, Earth, and human creativity. At each step, whether it’s a product, service, or experience, human effort and ingenuity are the forces that keep the flow moving. And, each step poses an opportunity for business design.
The incredible power of human ingenuity could be considered the push of value, but there’s an even more powerful force, the pull. That pull is the scarcity of time — the most finite and irreplaceable resource we have. At its core, value is often assessed through the lens of time: Is this worth my time? Does this save me time? Will this enrich the time I have? This can apply to the limited time we each have on this earth, but also could be as short as, say, the time between a previous meal and when I get hungry again. This scarcity creates a natural pull, prioritizing what is perceived as valuable enough to warrant our attention and effort. Time pull even extends beyond our human lives as we seek to create things that outlast us, make impact, and leave a legacy.
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What is something worth?
How do we assess just how much value something has? As you can probably guess, there are a lot of theories here — and it’s essential to understand how your customer community assigns value in order to best design for it. I recommend reading Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything — but for our purposes here, I’ll keep it simple: objective versus subjective value.
Objectivism asserts that value is inherent in an object or action, determined by its intrinsic qualities or functionality, independent of individual perception. According to this view, something is valuable because it possesses measurable, objective characteristics — its utility, durability, or ability to fulfill a defined purpose. For example, a well-crafted tool holds value because of its ability to perform its intended function effectively, regardless of who uses it. A practical application of objectivism can be seen in the Labor Theory of Value — it emphasizes that the worth of a product or service is rooted in the time, effort, and skill required to create it. A handmade piece of furniture, for instance, derives its value not just from its function and the craftsmanship and labor invested in its production. Think of the value flows from above; if each step or element of the flow has inherent value, including human labor and ingenuity, you can simply add these up to understand the full value of the offering. Easy right? Well… that might be too rigid, and it certainly doesn’t account for the subjective experience of individuals. Interestingly, the economist Karl Marx expanded this idea to argue that the only way to profit was to exploit labor (the value of workers’ contributions) — said differently, with Marx’s objectivism in mind, the only way to generate profit is to pay workers less than the value they’ve generated.
Subjectivism posits that value is inherently personal and determined by an individual’s unique needs, desires, and perceptions. It asserts that there is no universal measure of value — what one person finds priceless, another might consider insignificant. For example, a simple slice of bread might hold immense value for someone who is hungry, while the same bread may mean little to someone who is well-fed. Multiply this by billions of individuals, and you get the Cultural Theory of Value — it suggests that value is not only shaped by personal preferences but also by shared beliefs, traditions, and social narratives. A diamond ring, for instance, is valuable not just for its material properties but also because of the cultural meaning attached to it — love, commitment, and status. Subjectivism and cultural theory state that value is not fixed or objective but fluid, evolving from both personal context and collective understanding.
Where I sit today in a Western tradition of capitalism and individualism, value is indeed seen as subjective, not absolute; it depends on the individual or group perceiving it. Value is also contextual and dynamic — it depends on the situation, timing, audience, priorities, needs, and countless other internal and external factors.
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Finding Something Valuable
As Plato said, our needs are the real creators — they catalyze creation. Need and value go hand in hand. Every living thing has needs. Even an amoeba needs water and nutrients to generate energy for survival. An amoeba is a single-celled organism; humans, on the other hand, are made of roughly 37 trillion cells. Like our cell structure, our needs are exponentially more complex.
In 1943, the renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow created a way to organize that complexity into a handy framework that has stood the test of time: his hierarchy of needs. The model organizes human needs into a pyramid, beginning with physiological needs (food, water, and shelter) at the base, followed by safety, belonging and love, esteem, and finally self-actualization at the peak — where individuals pursue personal growth and fulfill their potential. While some argue that human needs aren’t always experienced in a strict hierarchical or linear fashion, Maslow’s framework is still a powerful tool for understanding human motivation toward fulfilling needs. We all experience these needs, so we all experience value — and if we can experience it, we can design it.
My wife and I recently felt the need to give gifts to our kids — a need to express love, care, and connection through giving (it was also Christmas time, so there are expectations, but let’s save expectations for another newsletter). We gifted our kids a few exciting Lego sets. We bought Legos because we knew our kids would value them — we also value Legos as parents. There are all sorts of different types of value. Legos have fun/entertainment value for our kids, and let’s face it, for us as well. In addition to being fun, they’re also high quality, there’s a wide variety to engage with (both sets and pieces), they all integrate and connect with each other, and they’re motivating. As a parent, they have very high nostalgia value — even self-actualization value, as I genuinely believe building with Legos helped me develop my creativity, improvisation, perseverance, and problem-solving skills — and I hope they do the same for my children.
Remember, value is to business designers as visual elements are to graphic designers. It’s possible to design offerings using different types of value. Through their work at Bain & Company and published in their seminal article, The Elements of Value, in Harvard Business Review, Eric Almquist, John Senior, and Nicolas Bloch built on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to create a practical framework for understanding what customers value. Drawing on extensive research, including surveys of thousands of consumers and analyses of hundreds of companies, they identified 30 fundamental “elements of value” that drive consumer behavior. Like Maslow’s hierarchy, these elements are organized into a pyramid with four levels: functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact.
At the pyramid’s base are functional elements, such as quality, saving time, reducing costs, or simplifying a task — basic utilities customers expect from a product or service. Moving up, the emotional level includes elements like reducing anxiety, providing entertainment, or delivering aesthetic appeal. The next tier, life-changing elements, encompasses personal growth, motivation, and even hope. At the top of the pyramid sits social impact, representing elements that help consumers connect to broader societal goals, such as contributing to sustainability or fostering a sense of belonging.
The team found that businesses that deliver more elements of value across these levels outperform their competitors in customer loyalty and revenue growth. For example, they analyzed the success of Apple, which delivers value not only through functional benefits (high-quality products) but also through emotional (design and aesthetics), life-changing (creativity and inspiration), and social impact (connection and community).
From a business design perspective, the elements of value framework serves as a powerful tool for innovation and differentiation. Using these elements as a guide, business designers can identify unmet customer needs, prioritize features or services that resonate most deeply, and create more compelling value propositions. For example, a company might start by delivering significant functional benefits but then layer on emotional or life-changing elements to build deeper relationships with customers. The framework also encourages businesses to look beyond the product or service and consider how the entire customer experience with the brand contributes to perceived value.
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Designing Value
Much like an industrial designer might adjust an angle or surface texture to allow for better usability, business designers can use different amounts of various types of value when crafting value proposition concepts. Let’s try it using the 30 elements of value. Let’s say we’re building a company focused on hydration — which can mean many different things — and multiple ways exist to create, capture, and deliver value in this space. For example:
A hydration company that seeks to deliver quality, variety, fun, and motivation might look something like this:
SplashFuel transforms hydration into an energizing and enjoyable experience by offering high-quality, vitamin-infused waters in a variety of exciting flavors. With playful packaging and motivational messages, SplashFuel inspires customers to stay hydrated and reach their wellness goals. In addition to our Daily Boost line of waters, our app allows you to scan each bottle with your smartphone camera to track your hydration goals and reach key wellness milestones.
A hydration company that seeks to deliver quality, connection, nostalgia, and affiliation/belonging might look something like this:
The Wellspring is a serene destination designed to reconnect people with the ritual of hydration and the shared experience of wellness. By combining mindfulness, sustainability, and thoughtful comforts, the retreat fosters a deep sense of belonging and rejuvenation. Enjoy our tasting bar throughout your stay, complete with natural spring water from local sources, infused herbal teas, and more, all served in artisan glassware. Plan your stay with daily sessions on hydration rituals from cultures around the world, water-themed spa treatments, guided meditations centered around the calming effects of water, and gatherings to mingle with like-minded guests.
A hydration company that seeks to deliver quality, sensory appeal, design/aesthetics, heirloom, and providing hope might look something like this:
Eterna transforms hydration into an art form by crafting exquisitely designed, long-lasting hydration tools that elevate the sensory experience of drinking water. With products meant to last a lifetime and inspire sustainable practices, Eterna combines quality, beauty, and hope for a better future. Our signature products, like the Eterna Carafe and Legacy Bottle, transform your home into a stylish shrine to intentional hydration. Every Eterna purchase funds our partnership with global clean water charities, providing sustainable access to drinking water in underserved communities and educational campaigns on reducing single-use plastics and adopting sustainable hydration habits.
By using the elements of value like an artist uses a palette of paint, business designers can craft entirely different business concepts tailored to meet specific customer needs and aspirations. A single focus — hydration — can branch into vastly different value propositions depending on the combination of elements applied.
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Measuring Value
Designing value is only half the equation; the other half lies in knowing whether the value you’ve created resonates with your audience. Measuring value is a multi-dimensional process that requires understanding what you deliver and how your customers perceive and experience it. While value can be intangible and subjective, it can still be measured through a combination of quantitative metrics and qualitative insights. This topic deserves its own newsletter as well, but briefly, some approaches:
- Revenue and Profitability: Perhaps the strongest indicator is whether customers are willing to pay for the value you provide and how much.
- Customer Satisfaction and Brand Sentiment: Surveys that ask customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale provide direct feedback on whether their needs and expectations are being met. Surveys could even index directly to the elements of value, i.e., “Rate your feeling of belonging during your stay at The WellSpring.”
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric measures customer loyalty and the likelihood of recommending your product or service to others. A high NPS suggests your offering delivers substantial value.
- Conversion Rates: Whether it’s sales, sign-ups, or other actions, conversion rates show how well your value proposition motivates action.
- Retention and Churn Rates: Retaining customers over time signals that the value you’re delivering is consistent and meaningful.
- Time Spent or Frequency of Use: If customers interact frequently or for extended periods with your offering, it’s a sign that they find it valuable.
- Emotional Resonance: Tools like interviews, focus groups, and sentiment analysis help uncover the emotional impact of your offering, capturing intangible value like joy, trust, or pride — or, again, connect these interviews directly to the set of value elements you’re trying to offer.
- Behavioral Data: Observing how customers use your product or service can uncover patterns that reveal its practical and emotional value.
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Designing value is about solving problems and meeting needs — it’s about crafting experiences and connections that make customers feel understood, inspired, and empowered. Value is as dynamic as the humans who experience it, shaped by individual contexts, collective narratives, and the interplay of objective and subjective forces. As business designers, we must balance being human-centered and value-centered, creating businesses that connect deeply with people and achieve extraordinary long-term results.
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I’d really love to hear how you think about centering value in your business and/or in your design work. Please reply to this email with your thoughts.
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Thanks for reading! Talk soon!
— Sam
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