LimeJam Blog

Article repost from http://www.designcouncil.org.uk

Jonathan Salem-Baskin

Global Brand Strategist

Design, structure and purpose

Design is the order and sense that we impart on otherwise chaotic existence. Design is the structure that we as humans impose over what is… it’s the meaning we give to experience that in and of itself that might not have any meaning. Design is structure and purpose where maybe none exists naturally.

Roberto Verganti

Design, innovation and meaning

So, what is the function of design? Design has a very important connection to the innovation of product services and business models, and the way design can innovate things is by changing the meaning or making things more meaningful. Actually the definition of design comes from the Latin word which is designare, and designare means designate, so giving meaning to things. It’s not about the style, it’s not about the technology, it’s not about the functionalities. What is the meaning that people give to this product? And design is about the innovation of this meaning.

Paul Bennett

IDEO

Putting design at the heart of business strategy

Design is business and business is design. The two are absolutely intrinsically linked, in my opinion. I think that businesses that don’t understand fundamentally that department is not just about the decoration of something but it’s about the solution and it’s about the way to design forward and it is strategic, I don’t think that those are the businesses that are going to survive. I think businesses that fundamentally put design in the middle of their strategy and use design as a way to move forward are the businesses that, certainly the businesses that we work with and the businesses that I would encourage other people to work with.  

Robin Bew

Design and radical business innovation

Well design is absolutely central to this, because of course while you can do things incrementally; actually really eliminating waste from your production process often means completely re-engineering the way that you do things.  And that requires more than just a few tweaks here and there; often that means completely re-thinking the entire production process, in a way which is more efficient and more effective, and more suitable for a world in which resources are costly.  So I think it does speak to the design imperative.  You can be incremental, but if you’re really serious about making a big change to the business, well you have to think more big deal than that.

Jonathan Salem-Baskin

Design and customer expectation

In my broad definition of design it would be everything from how governments are structured and run to how products are built and offered, how religions are founded and experienced. The easy ones of course, the ones that come to mind are Apple and Harley Davidson, places where you have a tangible product that’s been designed, not just to meet customer expectations but in fact to anticipate them. There are a lot of examples in the hospitality industry, Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton did it somewhat similar, Virgin, Jet Blue in America are examples of it, but ultimately design is about giving people what they need whether or not they know they need it, and doing so in a way that makes them feel like they asked for it.

Nick Jankel

Design and open innovation

I work a lot in open innovation, which basically means opening up the boundaries of your business to ideas from all sorts of different directions. Designers can obviously be some of those people, but what I think actually designers could do if they want to make use of the opportunities over the next ten years is to think of themselves less as service providers, or producers actually, of stuff, you know, artwork, ultimately, and think much more about how they can use design as an ethos. Design thinking as it’s known is part of that, but the whole idea of a merger, co-creativity, it’s inherently design led, but it will need designers to move from the I’m the genius, I know best, I can tell a consumer what he wants before he wants it type mentality, and move to a I’ve got some skills, some talent, some vision, some exciting ideas, and working with real people in all different parts of the organisation, we can co-create something of true lasting value and beauty.

Roberto Verganti

Incremental or radical innovation?

It really depends on the type of innovation you’re aiming at. If you’re doing incremental innovation then the typical process of getting close to users, understanding how users give meaning to things is very useful. But if you’re targeting a more radical type of innovation, if you radically want to change the meaning of things like the Nintendo Wii, it’s a radical change of meaning, and then you actually have to step back from users. Because otherwise users pull you into the current meaning of things and you want to envision the meaning by working with interpreters, other people outside your company typically, that can help you to see the experience of how people give meaning to things from a different perspective.

Bonnie Dean

Design, culture change and risk

I think most companies, if you interviewed them after they had been through a design intervention would say that it brought a lot of intangible things that are harder to measure. And for many, it’s helped change their culture and it’s made it a more open culture, it’s made it more adventurous, and it’s made them understand how to assess risk differently in ways that the risks they choose to take, they have more chance of being commercially successful with those risks.

Jeff Denby

PACT

Making innovation happen

Design is absolutely core to what we do. It is not a value add piece. In fact, Yves Behar and his project are equity partners within the business, and so design is actually built into the corporate structure of PACT. It’s into our DNA. We cannot exist without considering design throughout all of our problem solving.

Paul Bennett

Design thinking and its role in innovation

A gentleman asked me recently what is the best innovative, the most innovative business you have seen in years and I always talk about the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai in India. Why it is, is because on paper it sounds insane. So, you know, if somebody said to you in a brainstorm I want to build the MacDonald’s of eye care, we would all laugh at them, and he did it. He built a franchise model around low cost cataract surgery for people in a country where cataracts are an absolutely huge issue. The theory is that everybody who can pay pays for two that cannot. He has done that by breaking every single piece of the chain down into its constituent parts and designing optimally the right idea. So whether it’s the product, whether it’s the service, whether it’s the nursing, whether it’s the facility, whether it’s the testing, every single piece has been designed to be the most efficient and the most empathic that it can be. And by the way, he’s making a load of money. And by the way, he’s helping a bunch of people.

I personally think we are at a really interesting moment in time. I think we are at a time, there’s a great phrase that I use a lot, it’s an Inuit proverb, which is the storm is the time to fish. I think the economic storm is still swirling over all of our heads, and I actually find that quite exhilarating. I think it’s a really good time to look at what you are doing, to look at how you are doing it, to sort of do stuff. I mean if you take the metaphor to its logical conclusion, the fish are under the surface and there’s a lot of really great ideas there to fish for. So to me, what I think we need in a time like this is action. So, you know, there’s a lot of discussion about design thinking. I think design thinking is fantastic, but I think we need to overlap design thinking with design doing, and this is about making stuff happen.