Articles, Experience Design, Industrial Design, Retail Design, Strategic Innovation

Every one loves the sexy side of design and that is probably the most visible part of the profession. Many neglect the less sexy side of design: the solving of very complex problems in the world. Designers are strategists too, although sometimes they don’t know it. In the course of finding solutions, their ideas are shaping business and markets. Or another way to look at it, strategists are designers. They design new business models based on creative re-engineering of value chains. Design has always been an important element and very much neglected by B-Schools. Design as “strategic thinking”, not as “visual thinking”. This is the premise behind the Wharton School’s new executive program — Design, Innovation & Strategy. The course was conceived by a group of senior executives. What’s their rationale? Design is often the path to innovation. Strategy is Design.

Design changes are a reaction to pressure. This is true of both evolutionary design and human design.  In a completely stable system (of which there’s no such thing), there is no pressure to make design changes. In today’s chaotic environment, there’s a bigger demand for designer for change.  Expect to see more B-school program on design and innovation.
Design is essentially a rational, logical, sequential process intended to solve problems or initiate change in man-made things and in nature. The process begins with the identification and analysis of a problem or need and proceeds through a structured sequence in which information is researched, ideas explored and evaluated until the optimum solution to the problem or need is devised. The problem is in the traditional process (many still practice it today), the work of the expert in the process was often compartmentalized, each having little, if any input in matters which fell outside the boundaries of their specific domains. Thus, participants explored their ideas unilaterally, with one or another participant, through virtue of their “expertise”, imposing constraints upon all others. As they pass the bucket, the product designer has veto on matters to do functionality; the engineer has veto on technology and the human factor in usability.

Look back at the years of the Bauhaus movement when they attempted to knit the design process into a coherent whole. Students were encouraged to study design in a way that was both total and detailed. That is, designers were expected to balance all the considerations that came to bear upon the design of particular artifacts, systems and overall environments. As a result, design quickly evolved into a closed activity – an activity in which all but the designers themselves had little, if any valid input on questions of base materials etc. That was the birth of the multi-disciplinary designer.

Design is important for any organization but not many organizations get it. This includes Google. Bowman, former visual design lead of Goggle accuses the company’s culture of relying too much on numbers, to the point where creativity suffers. According to Bowman, “Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better,” he writes. “I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.”

Created by Richard Shed,  “The Good Design Manifesto” in London is a collection of 100 brief responses from industry experts to the question “What is good design?”  Here are a few of them:
Good design…
…makes ordinary people’s life more meaningful. (Lavrans Lovrie, Livework)
…brings the intelligence of nature together with man’s production capabilities. (Jonathan Prestwich)
…is finding new places where what we can dream meets what we can make happen. (John Miller and Anna Hart, Mark)
…is no longer about 20th century debates around form or function. Good design will ensure we got a future on this planet.
…is sooo boring. We need GREAT design: Vision. Humanity. Sex. Death. Art. Love. (Richard Eisermann)

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