So…What is Design?
By Guest Authors Charley Bush and Kathy Hwang
Can design have the power to raise your stock prices?
In 2004, the British Design Council decided to try to answer this question. They created a “Design Index” out of 63 companies that were best-of-breed in design and compared shares of the Design Index with those of the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 between 1994 and 2004. The result? The Design Index outperformed the FTSE by more than 200%.
There is no doubt that “creativity,” “design” and “innovation” are buzzwords in business. A recent issue of Fast Company magazine proclaims “Build your Creative Capital.” The cover portrays Marcel Wanders as the stereotypical too-cool-for-school designer (dressed in black, of course), but this is also a man who has built multi-million dollar businesses in real estate, furniture, and hotels through design.
So design has made its way into the corporate spotlight. One question, though…what is design again?
People typically use “designer,” to refer to an artist who creates aesthetics for products, websites, etc. While this is an important component of design, it is only part of the story. For lack of a better term, that type of artist can be more appropriately called a “stylist,” as someone who focuses on visualizing concepts and has sensitivity to form, material, and color.
There is a controversial shift in the design world right now. Design is starting to move closer to a becoming a hybrid with business, making many people on both sides of the fence uneasy. Some are calling it “New Design,” or other ambiguous terms like “design thinking” and “strategic design.” IDEO says they’re doing it. So do Ziba and Design Continuum. But what is it? Are we the only ones more confused than ever?
Instead of giving it a new name, let’s just call it…DESIGN…but refine our traditional understanding of the word. We’ll call the aesthetics of a product the “styling,” and understand that it is part of the much broader context of “design.” We’ve had the privilege of being a part of these discussions at some of the leading schools in the world for design (Art Center College of Design), engineering (MIT) and business (INSEAD Business School). From these conversations, we have begun to lay down our own frameworks that we hope will shed some light and spur further discussion towards the best use of design for business:
CREATIVITY = Searching for and producing new ideas.
DESIGN = The process of materializing creative ideas on the market.
INNOVATION = An economically successful design that changes the market landscape.
Design is a process, rather than a field or profession. This process needs to encompass various fields including styling, business, engineering, and marketing to be able to bring a creative concept to market. This means that finding creative revenue channels for a product is as much a part of the design process as sculpting the product form.
The real question for a business is of course, “How do I innovate for increased growth and revenue?” Talking about design is imperative to that question, because without effective use of the design process, your market offering can become unsustainable for continued market growth. Or even worse, if a competitor disrupts your market with an innovation, your business may become irrelevant.
We believe that innovation occurs when teams use design to effectively connect the spaces between disparate professions. This is what we aim for. We will be delving further into this topic with a new series of articles on Design That Moves. We hope to continue exploring these spaces with readers to see what ideas come out.
Wow. Reading this has been extremely helpful for me. I’m only beginning to understand what design is about – after listening to a whole bunch of people talk about it for quite some time. And although I agree that the design process is extremely important for an offering, the really tough part is getting it into peoples hands and minds. Getting other people excited about it.
It would be a lot more interesting if they had created their design index in 1994.
This is a very good article. I especially liked the stress that the design concept is slowly merging into business and would hopefully transform the way we think about business.
But I don’t quite agree to the point that design is a process. I find it very difficult to define it as a process as with all things connected to the right brain activity. Fundamentally, a good design or a design that works is based on insights and I don’t think that there is a process of gaining insights.
Regards,
dibyendu de
I have to agree Kevin, that had they started the design index pre-study, based on certain criteria, it would have given a lot more insight into how to structure an organization to repeat the results. (other than having companies go out and win a lot of design awards).
Dibyendu, thank you for questioning the design-as-a-process theory. We love engaging in conversation that helps us all get out of our mental models. We agree that there is no fool-proof “A leads to B” type of formula for innovation.
We think design-as-a-process is less of a formula than it is a way of looking at problems and creating an environment that fosters creative solutions. Many firms and individuals at the moment are trying to lay out processes to approach this.
Below is an example of a popular one (a 15-step process to idea management), published by the design firm IDEO. Hope it helps spur more thoughts on the topic.
1. Appoint team and team leader and define clear objectives (outcomes) and constraints (time limitations) for the ideation exercise
2. Define, clear criteria (nesting ability, cost limit; buildable in one week; etc.) to be used to screen ideas
3. Gather general background data and search for a broad range of information on the industry
4. Derive working hypotheses about the key problem areas to be addressed throughout the value chain (theft, child safety; etc)
5. Go into the field to understand requirements from all actors in the value chain and validate/invalidate hypotheses re key problem areas
6. Share field results, live, within the group (with visual aids to convey the way customers/users experience the problem areas).
7. Brainstorm (the deep dive) to generate as many ideas as possible to address the key problems identified/validated in the fieldwork
8. Screen ideas collectively (through voting with Post-its) to eliminate those ideas that do not meet the criteria defined upfront.
9. Decide on the key themes to be selected for refocusing the idea enrichment exercise (theft, child safety; convenience; check-out)
10. Split the initial group into four theme sub-groups and ask them to come up with a prototype illustrating each of their themes
11. Have the four teams present their prototypes incorporating the best idea elements selected under each theme.
12. Bring the group together and ask them to select the best elements of each theme prototype to incorporated into the final concept
13. Build a concept prototype incorporating the elements selected from teach theme prototype
14. Present the concept prototype to management with a focus on explaining its benefits and get feedback.
15. Bring the concept prototype to real customers and users to check their initial reaction and derive selling arguments from their reactions.