Pop stars complain of their continuing exposure to the media and the media continuously reminds These three traits have been the part of the designer’s playing field from start. That doesn’t mean other people may not do it, be my guest. But don’t get a hold of these traits without taking on board the responsibility they imply, you might be tampering with things that work well but in your hands end up producing poor results. And then you might think that innovation, diversity and prototyping are not that good. Instead, think about how you use these traits and, above all, please understand the value of the designer in your business.them that they live off this exposure and should learn to accept the responsibility of being pop stars. Every action we pursue generates a reaction, and therefore this present fad that everyone wants to be an innovator should be clearly understood as a responsibility. I want to talk about three major typical designer responsibilities and give a word of caution to all those that want to appropriate them lightly. I am talking about innovation, diversity and prototyping.
INNOVATION ≠ REALITY
I am a trained industrial designer, and I was educated to have my pet enemies, just like architects and MD’s. My pet enemy then was engineering. Basically we were taught to work with them but learn enough about their area so that we should question their options, their solutions. We were fed a number of stories that taught us the danger of accepting face value when an engineer told us “this is not possible”, we were trained to question this reality check, to push forward (with or against them...) the boundaries of reality. So, many of us chose to work with engineers that understood the importance of experimenting, conceptualizing, developing non existing solutions, and the market is full of success stories of good partnerships between designers and engineers that understood this balance.
Later, the pet enemy became marketing. We were educated to question the idea that the market was the dictator and the prescriber, that marketing was a science. We were fed numerous stories, from Akio Morita and his quest to launch the first Walkman just to prove that someone’s vision and “gut feeling” was just as important as a market study. There are endless cases proving that it is not true that you can ask people what they want and they will tell you, just as it is not true that if they tell you it will or will not sell it will become true. To this day, there are companies that engage in design and innovation exercises and then validate through more or less manipulated market studies the results, just to respect internal marketing mandates that “everything needs to be market tested”.
Recently, it was the business manager, the trained manager with his MBA. The designer had to be able to prove that his idea was financially sound from start, otherwise it wouldn’t move forward. This trend was fought from various starting points; Peter Gorb taught design management at the London Business School some 20 years ago in an effort to pass on to managers some of the specific and contextual background of design. A large number of designers went into business schools to learn the language of business. There have been endless efforts from numerous organizations into the development of methods that could justify the investment in design, in the assumption that if you prove this from start you might get away with not having to prove it every time you do a project.
All of these pet enemies exist for a main reason; design must question reality in order to become valuable. It is a question of paradigm, and the existing one (in the last 100 years) is one of mathematics, not emotions and gut feeling. So there is a constant pressure from the market to make design comply with reality, prove itself through numbers, structure and organize itself just as other paradigm aligned professions do. And then society, not only designers, generate design heroes that do exactly the opposite. When designers mention Philipe Starck, Ron Arad or Ross Lovegrove as their heroes, they do it out of respect for their assumed attitude towards engineering, marketing and management. The stories that are told are stories of products, ideas and solutions that went forward because they pushed the boundaries of their profession and many time the boundaries of other professionals and sometimes professionals themselves.... If you meet these people, if you listen to them, you will see what I mean. They do not take a no for an answer, they do not accept “this is not possible”, they do not feel the need to prove before start that their solution will be a success. If it is true their choices also encompass failure, they recognise they may get it wrong, but the possible/tested path is also filled with failures. And the reality is many companies pay and audacious amount of money to these people but not all companies know what to do with the result of their work, it takes a special company to work with talented designers. Now everyone talks about Apple, as if this was something new. Behind it a famous Jonathan Ive (for designers) and even more famous Steve Jobs, the closest thing we have to a design entrepreneur nowadays.
Innovators seem to be the pet enemy of design for the near future. Especially reality based / applied innovators, because it seems that the three cited enemies all got together to create a common foe. Innovation, for these people, is the clever mixture of engineering, marketing and management, with design to dress and communicate the so called innovation. It brings in vast doses of reality, from the “what is possible / feasible /client can do” of engineering, to the “what the market / users want” of marketing, to “what sells, what is more cost effective” of management. Since design is not grounded in this reality, it is grounded in a non existing reality based on improvement and unsatisfied needs and desires, design is not a equal part to this innovation, it is used as a selling device, a communication tool. The reality is that the majority of these so called innovations are not really that innovative, and that the results, from a designers’ point of view, are poor and unpleasing. Worst yet, a large majority of them FAIL as a business success, something that should once and for all make us question this so called reality based / applied innovators.
Just as with other pet enemies, design has let the fads move back and fourth and has continued doing its job, with engineers / marketing and managers that excel, that understand the value of design, without assuming too much prominence. And every time one of these fads rises too much in the agenda, design seems to be there, sharing the agenda, side-by-side, without doing too much about it and, typically, not in an organized manner. When the fad passes, or fails to fulfil its promise, they always go back to design.
DIVERSITY = RESPONSIBILITY
In France youths burned down vehicles, in a rage response to a so called failure in the REAL integration of the different cultures that migrate to this country. In companies, people are not yet burning down their boss’s cars, but they are manifesting their unhappiness in many other ways. The reality is that diversity brings a responsibility, and companies want this diversity but don’t always understand the effect and the responsibility of that diversity. On of my chiefs the other day talked how the organization he worked in before was filled with people that dressed the same, wanted the same from life, went to the same places, and that our company had a large diversity of people, different backgrounds from different cultures. I felt there was a certain “those where the good old days” sound to it, since a system made of very similar people might be more boring (his words), but it reduces considerably the noise and the disruption typical of a diverse ambient. This diversity, this aspirational merge of cultures does not form a distinct and integrated culture just like that. As with cities, these cultures end up creating their ghettos and areas where they exercise their habits and limit other cultures. It all seems to work till there is a spark that ignites the fire, and then everyone talks about the obvious, that there isn’t an integrated culture. Old companies sorted this out easily, they separated these people in groups and basically they didn’t meet except on office days, where they could all exercise their social skills.
There is an intrinsic issue to diversity, also part of what we have seen in Paris. The first step for a system that really values integration is the valuing of each of the components of that diversity. People that migrate and do jobs that no one else wants to do want to be just as respected as others that are doing similar jobs. This recognition of their value renders implicit another important issue; retribution. Everyone now talks about the fact that these people live in foul places, with very little investment and care from their public institutions, and this results in the typical poverty = violence syndrome.
Let’s not forget that, jut as the migration phenomena is irreversible, professional migration is also a fact. With the globalization of educational standards in the so called occidental world, no longer a company can afford not to have diversity, unless they accept that you should always hire local even if that means not hiring the best prepared, interesting and open minded. But also the person that is hungrier, more ambitious and most of the times, cheaper that local resources.
So the questions a business entrepreneur might ask himself are:
- If you feel that diversity is an important ingredient and a sales driver, do you understand the implications of that diversity, the responsibility of having people from different backgrounds and culture in your company?
- Do the methods and processes in your company recognise the value that each component of your diversity brings into your result?
- Does your Evaluation & Feedback and retribution / salary packages recognise what each of these components identifies as being valuable?
- If you accept that this diversity is only valuable as long as it stays diverse, how much of your company culture are you prepared to put at risk in order to allow more cultures and identities your company?
PROTOTYPING = GETTING YOUR HANDS DIRTY
Everyone talks about prototyping as an essential tool for innovation. Prototyping is an exercise in risk cutting, a tool geared towards giving us comfort about the possible performance of a system, but is no different from a business plan or a marketing plan – performance simulation tools. Though everyone accepts the benefits of prototyping, no too many people talk about the risks of prototyping. Especially, no one seems to talk about the implications of prototyping.
Here are a few of them:
- Prototyping means exercising possibilities, experimenting, accepting trial and error. Though we seem to want to separate invention from innovation, prototyping is where invention meets innovation. The best functional prototypes you may find are in Brussels every year. These inventors go to a lot of effort to simulate their invention, their idea. They use designers and model makers, but many times they do it themselves, since they like experimenting and are at ease with trial and error (also because they can’t afford to pay professionals and they have a problem in convincing people with money about the commercial success of their invention). The reason a lot of these inventions fail is lack of design, and of realism that comes from engineering / marketing / management. But let’s be clear, a lot of these inventions would fail if they had a serious reality check, and this still doesn’t mean they couldn’t be successful, it just means they didn’t pass the reality check.
- Prototyping is not reality and is no guarantee of reality. No matter how much effort you put into it, you cannot simulate reality. Even the most “real” prototypes contain large quantities of assumptions and solutions “as if”. In the plastics injection area, all prototyping technologies up to date simulate close to reality but do not reflect the reality of an injected plastic – not through STL or SLA, not through final material machining, not even through RIM (Rapid Injection Moulding). And this is one area where some investment has taken place to find almost real prototyping solutions. In business colleges where industrial marketing is taught with the use of expensive mainframes and software that simulates market reactions, everyone knows that scenarios change dramatically when you change a comma in one of the assumptions.
- Prototyping is prone to manipulation, just like all performance simulations tools. Prototypes lie, just like business plans lie. They are used to forecast, reduce risk and assess investment but the reality is that they become tools of manipulation depending on who is using them. Just like code when handled by hackers, they can easily become either virus or cure. Many organizations fail to attain their financial and business goals, nevertheless that doesn’t seem to kill them. Many prototypes fail to portray what will in fact take place, but they serve their immediate objective which is – to assess what are the main obstacles / focus areas and to convince some people that this will work. A friend of mine did a prototype of a self heating mug that blew up in the client’s office, throwing soup from floor to ceiling and all over the team. Does this mean that the idea is not good? Or even that the prototype is not good?
- Prototyping means getting your hands dirty, or being able to work with people that dirty their hands for a living. Getting your hands dirty is not fashionable anymore. The more designers dwell into the consultancy area, the more they want to distance themselves from the dirty hands environment of prototyping. They happily substitute the tinkering type of environment where prototyping thrives for paper filled offices and computers. But the reality is that prototyping and all that is involved implies dirty hands. Either that or something which is also not fashionable in consultancy environments – people that dirty their hands for a living. This type of person, a hands-on curious person that doesn’t read things from the Internet, rather collects and tinkers with things, projects things that don’t exist through gluing / soldering and patching things, uses cardboard to make scenarios, runs around the offices with semi assembled things and asks people to use /drop / eat / blow it up. This type of person nowadays is considered a “persona non grata” in the office and the majority of cases companies create a ghetto for him, somewhere in the basement, away from clients. In reality, this person is a great help for people that don’t want / know / have time to get their hands dirty and should be in the centre of the room, open to be visited invaded by curious and participative colleagues – making other people think and innovate.
These three traits have been the part of the designer’s playing field from start. That doesn’t mean other people may not do it, be my guest. But don’t get a hold of these traits without taking on board the responsibility they imply, you might be tampering with things that work well but in your hands end up producing poor results. And then you might think that innovation, diversity and prototyping are not that good. Instead, think about how you use these traits and, above all, please understand the value of the designer in your business.