I have been, along with a small number of people from my workplace, “teaching” a product innovation class in a local design school. They are third year students that have gone through a schooling process and will be out in 6 months, looking for a job. A few days ago we met one of their teachers, responsible for “methodology” in the first year, someone who sat down with the students and gave them directions on how to conceptualize in design. He is now going to pick up the same students he had in the first year and maybe try and understand how much of his so called methodology is still in use, maybe build on that. I hope he is able to correct his own methods based on what he finds out from this experience; or perhaps not! He showed me work he did with these students in the first year, A3 boards filled with black & white scribbles and drawings, organized in some organic fashion, symbolizing conceptual exercises the students did. These same students the other day, after me and my colleagues gave them 5 solid classes without letting them drawn a single line asked timidly “what can a designer do in the midst of this complex mess”. They were referring to the applied innovation process we are sharing with them, where you have to understand context, actors, needs before diving into solutions – something natural for a designer. A long story to state something obvious; we have a problem.
Now think about this, there is more than one way to look at it.
I believe some people, including in my own workplace, would say this is the typical problem of a design school being completely detached from the reality of design nowadays, preparing designers to be designauthors instead of preparing designers to identify, understand, think and act upon the system where products are inserted; ah, yes, CONCEPTUALIZE. They would say that schools are still focusing on producing nice looking designs, instead of teaching them about process. They would say that these schools, the curricula and the teachers are responsible for “producing” designers that are put out in the market without the ability to work as design specialists in teams, without scope and vision, without solid methods to produce really valuable designs.
Now I go back to that young designer’s timid question “what can a designer do in the midst of this complex mess”. We all start with the utopian “save / improve the world” typical designer attitude and the basic skills and methods a designer starts with – sketching and drawing skills, extended into a visual and oral communication ability. Then we learn how to think, become more aware of the material world around, of people and of ourselves, we build on our own skills and define our professional ambition. Yes, a lot of us want to be Starck’s and Ito’s, we are not the only profession producing icons that reflect a certain lifestyle and coolness, I am sure student architects want to be Foster’s and Calatrava’s and student painters Bacon’s and Rego’s. It doesn’t really matter if these icons are, above all, entrepreneurs in their business, managers of small to large teams where a lot of other professionals work without recognition. They are actors in the material world, the same material world where designers act.
The whole issue starts with a disregard for these basic designer skills. The whole thing started when schools stopped filtering designers that didn’t have these basic skills, when the profession of industrial design opened to anyone, no matter if you could communicate visually (above all) or not. It mattered if you could think. Ah, yes, think! But Hey, Mischa Black stated that sketching was thinking with your hands, and if you really SEE a designer sketching, you will understand exactly that. Through sketching, he is exploring possibilities, taking into account everything that engages with the product, maintaining focus on the solution as a sum of all worries, of all opportunities. The moment you state that a designer does not need to know how to sketch, think while you sketch, you open the door to designer friends and foes – today, you can have a design degree and hardly know how to think with your hands. You open the door to design planners, to design managers, to design lovers and critics, to designer wannabies. A lot of these, recognising that they can’t sketch, will engage into devaluating this essential part of designing and become, in fact, designer’s worst enemy, an enemy from inside that uses the ability of others to raise his profile.
I never though I’d make this analogy, but here I am... It’s a little bit like football (European, I mean). Everyone loves to take a shot at the players calling them dumb. Of course, we measure their thinking ability by the spoken word, usually through television. It never occurs to us that these people are specialists and they function in a different hemisphere. Cultured journalists know this, but they don’t care. We appreciate a player that is able to score, but above all, a player that “thinks”. The reality is that they all have to think with their feet, some think better than others, but this thinking HAS to result in goals. The football business is also filled with football planners, managers, lovers, critics and wannabies. Just like in other sectors, the football business is filled with people that make a lot of money from the system without ever touching a football. But contrary to the field of design, we make no confusion about who is the football player and who isn’t. It is far from a good system, but I believe it serves the purpose.
Maybe the kid has a good point. I believe we need to go back to being designers and understand that the complex system where products are set needs to be tinkered by professionals and each should know their job. The job of the product designer is to change, alter, break, elude, circumvent, push the system tough design, through the clever convergence of all possibilities and opportunities in a product. That’s also when innovation occurs, real innovation only exists when you change, alter, break, elude, circumvent, push some part of a system. Though design is still the best tool to do more of the same when you can’t / won’t touch the system... Products are good system changers and designers are good change drivers. They are not the only ones, you can change logistics, finance, production standards and innovate the system. In fact, strong and lasting innovation is when you do this in various parts of the system, various NODEs. The iPod (I know, I know, but it is a bloody strong business innovation) is a product driver in a sector that has been changed dramatically from inside, from how you download music to how you pay for it. The system had to be changed in order for innovation to take place. The product is a driver, it is the sum of all opportunities that the system provides.
Designers, let’s get back to designing, let the other guys tinker with the other parts of the system.
Showing posts with label Manifesto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manifesto. Show all posts
Monday, May 14, 2007
Did you say INNOVATOR?
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.
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.
To be or not to be... a designer.
So here are my last words and after all these "obvious career moves". If you are a designer, someone capable of thinking and doing well with good intentions, stick to that. Just that. If you do that for a long time, you will have to learn enough, just enough, of everything else to make you a good designer. If you are a designer and love to be a designer, focus, cherish that, protect it.
I am 42 years old, been into this messy area of design for quite a while. In fact, I was a late bloomer, I remember deciding to go and take a degree on design because I worked for a design who understood design as being the art of designating what others had to do. I remember saying to myself, if this guy can be a designer, I can also be one! Ok, not your average reason to start with design...
I am one of those that went into design because of a talent for drawing and because I liked things. So, took a degree on industrial design (old right?) and then went on to work in the fastest growing company in Portugal, of course, a branding company - my first "obvious career move". I was hired as their first product designer and left 8 years later after doing the typical pathway "from designer to manager because it's the only way up". I interrupted this period for a couple of years and went on to London to do a masters of art... in design; awkward, right. Meanwhile, the company helped me live the good life while in London (they really liked me, yeahh), when I left in 1997 I was executive director managing a group of 12, part of the board of directors of a company of over 200 people, I was making VERY good money.
Why did I leave? to complete my second "obvious career move", form my own company. Though about a new concept; felt the plastics industry was booming and went to the fast growing area of Marinha Grande - a world renown mold making geospot, where I teamed up with some industrial partners that offered engineering / prototyping / mold making / plastic injection under one roof and decided to complete the circle upwards with product design. I had to build the thing from scratch, identify clients, hire people, design, present and collect - management, so to say. Good idea, right? It would have been if I hadn't chosen the wrong partners; as soon as I was the best small company in town and after they had learned the ropes and I trained the team, they started pushing me out. Would I stay and fight and loose precious time while busting my health?
No, went on to complete the third "obvious career move", went abroad and went to work for a fast growing design consultancy in Barcelona, as their design area manager. Yeahh, I know, what does that mean... it was supposed to mean: form a good design team and make sure the design results are top notch. What in fact meant was: compromise with management and other departments, deal with a shitload of bureaucracy, pay more attention to that and to profitability and design will somehow survive. 3 years later, I was invited to start a new fantastic career, become an international account manager. When you are old enough, speak 4 languages and understand enough about a large number of issues that will make you look smart in front of the majority of people, you get to become a salesman. Manage clients and accounts is, after all, the grand profession of sales.
Why am I ranting about my personal path as if I am not successful or appreciated. I am in fact successful, I work in a good company, get paid VERY good money, get involved with fantastic projects and work with very smart people. As to being appreciated, I believe there is a number of people that believe I am a good professional, though less and less people think I am a good designer. And this leads me to why the ranting.
One could argue I could have made better decisions. I could have started by telling my first boss not to promote me to design manager, let me stay on as a designer and hire other people to that job. I should have fought my partners when they wanted to push me out of the company, and buy their part in order to maintain a small product design company that I started. I could also have told the guys at the place I work now "if you don't give me conditions to be a design manager, then let me go. By the way, I don't want to be a salesman, I am a designer". But, do you really think this is what I should have done? Isn't obvious that I did all the "obvious career moves" first, because I had a chance to and second because they were so bloody obvious?
I have been to more than 50 events on design / design management / innovation / management / ... and whenever the word design pops up everyone seems to have an opinion about it. And, at the end or at the beginning, they will all ask the obvious question: what is design. That's when I usually leave the room. I am tired of people discussing what is design, using the same cliches and obvious misconceptions that lead to the same result - poor design, nobody understands you.
Design is about thinking. And doing. And wanting to improve. If you do this well enough, you might be a designer after all. The sad thing about it and about designers is that, when you can think and do things pretty well, when you are curious and restless, people tend to take you out of design and put you into other categories. This is bad because in the real wild world, you don't get to be a designer when you cross over to other areas, and part-time designers deserve no respect from full-time designers. They take you out of design and give you leadership and management tasks, as if this will complement you being a designer.
So here are my last words and after all these "obvious career moves". If you are a designer, someone capable of thinking and doing well with good intentions, stick to that. Just that. If you do that for a long time, you will have to learn enough, just enough, of everything else to make you a good designer. If you are a designer and love to be a designer, focus, cherish that, protect it. We have become - not now, it started with Peter Gorb understanding the value of the designer - commodities and other areas are learning more from us that the opposite. So let them cross over, make them look as silly as we look when we try to engage in business planning. They will come around, and we will survive, if we stay put and design.
By the way, as you might have guessed, I am tired of this fancy job they have given me and am thinking about going back, back to where I started and...design.
I am 42 years old, been into this messy area of design for quite a while. In fact, I was a late bloomer, I remember deciding to go and take a degree on design because I worked for a design who understood design as being the art of designating what others had to do. I remember saying to myself, if this guy can be a designer, I can also be one! Ok, not your average reason to start with design...
I am one of those that went into design because of a talent for drawing and because I liked things. So, took a degree on industrial design (old right?) and then went on to work in the fastest growing company in Portugal, of course, a branding company - my first "obvious career move". I was hired as their first product designer and left 8 years later after doing the typical pathway "from designer to manager because it's the only way up". I interrupted this period for a couple of years and went on to London to do a masters of art... in design; awkward, right. Meanwhile, the company helped me live the good life while in London (they really liked me, yeahh), when I left in 1997 I was executive director managing a group of 12, part of the board of directors of a company of over 200 people, I was making VERY good money.
Why did I leave? to complete my second "obvious career move", form my own company. Though about a new concept; felt the plastics industry was booming and went to the fast growing area of Marinha Grande - a world renown mold making geospot, where I teamed up with some industrial partners that offered engineering / prototyping / mold making / plastic injection under one roof and decided to complete the circle upwards with product design. I had to build the thing from scratch, identify clients, hire people, design, present and collect - management, so to say. Good idea, right? It would have been if I hadn't chosen the wrong partners; as soon as I was the best small company in town and after they had learned the ropes and I trained the team, they started pushing me out. Would I stay and fight and loose precious time while busting my health?
No, went on to complete the third "obvious career move", went abroad and went to work for a fast growing design consultancy in Barcelona, as their design area manager. Yeahh, I know, what does that mean... it was supposed to mean: form a good design team and make sure the design results are top notch. What in fact meant was: compromise with management and other departments, deal with a shitload of bureaucracy, pay more attention to that and to profitability and design will somehow survive. 3 years later, I was invited to start a new fantastic career, become an international account manager. When you are old enough, speak 4 languages and understand enough about a large number of issues that will make you look smart in front of the majority of people, you get to become a salesman. Manage clients and accounts is, after all, the grand profession of sales.
Why am I ranting about my personal path as if I am not successful or appreciated. I am in fact successful, I work in a good company, get paid VERY good money, get involved with fantastic projects and work with very smart people. As to being appreciated, I believe there is a number of people that believe I am a good professional, though less and less people think I am a good designer. And this leads me to why the ranting.
One could argue I could have made better decisions. I could have started by telling my first boss not to promote me to design manager, let me stay on as a designer and hire other people to that job. I should have fought my partners when they wanted to push me out of the company, and buy their part in order to maintain a small product design company that I started. I could also have told the guys at the place I work now "if you don't give me conditions to be a design manager, then let me go. By the way, I don't want to be a salesman, I am a designer". But, do you really think this is what I should have done? Isn't obvious that I did all the "obvious career moves" first, because I had a chance to and second because they were so bloody obvious?
I have been to more than 50 events on design / design management / innovation / management / ... and whenever the word design pops up everyone seems to have an opinion about it. And, at the end or at the beginning, they will all ask the obvious question: what is design. That's when I usually leave the room. I am tired of people discussing what is design, using the same cliches and obvious misconceptions that lead to the same result - poor design, nobody understands you.
Design is about thinking. And doing. And wanting to improve. If you do this well enough, you might be a designer after all. The sad thing about it and about designers is that, when you can think and do things pretty well, when you are curious and restless, people tend to take you out of design and put you into other categories. This is bad because in the real wild world, you don't get to be a designer when you cross over to other areas, and part-time designers deserve no respect from full-time designers. They take you out of design and give you leadership and management tasks, as if this will complement you being a designer.
So here are my last words and after all these "obvious career moves". If you are a designer, someone capable of thinking and doing well with good intentions, stick to that. Just that. If you do that for a long time, you will have to learn enough, just enough, of everything else to make you a good designer. If you are a designer and love to be a designer, focus, cherish that, protect it. We have become - not now, it started with Peter Gorb understanding the value of the designer - commodities and other areas are learning more from us that the opposite. So let them cross over, make them look as silly as we look when we try to engage in business planning. They will come around, and we will survive, if we stay put and design.
By the way, as you might have guessed, I am tired of this fancy job they have given me and am thinking about going back, back to where I started and...design.
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