Panelists

Sebastian Conran, Sir George Cox, Wayne Hemingway and Nico Macdonald shared their experiences and views on business and design. The event was chaired by Centre for Creative Business Chief Executive Greg Orme. [Sir Terence Conran was replaced by Sebastian Conran.]

Documentation

The CCB has documented the event in its newsletter Grow! Edition 3, April 2006 (3.3MB file linked from the ‘Previous events’ section of the CCB Events site).

Notes based on my comments

[These notes are taken from a piece I drafted for the panel, which will be developed into an article. They are not to be cited directly.]

Examples of design success

It is clear that design can make a real difference to business:

• Personal video recorder (PVR) maker TiVo has created an industry using interface design and ease of setup and use to lead[vi]
• In the UK StreetCar uses service design to create a better, more seamless customer experience

Why is business focusing on design?

To some extent, it is a natural development. Products tend to develop through four phases: implementation of a new technology that is amazing just because it works; ‘feature wars’ in which companies (often incoherently) add features from their competitors and requested by users; ‘usability focus’ on optimising the feature sets and making them usable for typical users; and disappearance as the product becomes familiar, transparently usable, and commoditised. Design tends to become important in the third and fourth phases, and these are increasingly the phases through which British products are passing.

There are product categories in which design will always be less important, such as capital equipment used in industry, in which features are always important, not least for productivity. Workers tend to be trained to use this equipment, and are obliged to use it, and the role of design in creating easy to learn and use products is less critical.

However, design is also being embraced as a vogue new business mantra. Just as we had total quality management, six sigma, focus on core competence, and agile organisation design is now in the sights of business. And it ties into a number of related contemporary business trends: customer focus, emotional intelligence, risk aversion, corporate social responsibility, sustainability and environmentalism.

Customer focus is reflected in enthusiasm for design research methods such as ethnography. Emotional intelligence in the focus of design on the emotional side of both consumer and employee. Risk aversion in the incremental approach of much design, and the emphasis (particularly in product and interaction design) on usability testing. Corporate social responsibility in the power of design in communication. And sustainability and environmentalism in design’s own pre-occupation with these themes.

These trends don’t bode well when British industry is up against national competitors which are rapidly create new product lines, implement things at scale, challenge supposed limitations of users, can afford to fail often, and have a more confident orientation to the future.

Is the design industry up to it?

Whether or not UK plc can transform itself through design, there is a question as to whether the design thinking and the design industry is up to it – and one that preoccupies the Centre For Creative Business.

Clearly design talent is increasingly international, but as this debate is focused on the UK we should start with this country. And we should note that designers operate within companies as much as they operate externally, as freelancers or studios.

First, it is not clear this is a role British design wants to take on – at least not at the higher level I have outlined.

More generally, I don’t believe the design industry is currently up the task of helping the transformation of British business. The design industry in this country hasn’t been even been able to transform itself around lesser challenges, such as those around interaction design, interactive products, and the Internet.

And it doesn’t currently have the scale, particularly noting the broad failure of management consulting – a much larger industry – to facilitate the transformation of British business. In an interview with Design Week last year Sir Martin Sorrell described the design business as “a cottage industry”[xi]. And it is one that appears to be hollowing out.

It is also unclear whether many British designers are sufficiently serious, organised and informed to effectively influence UK companies at a high level.

At another level design, at least in the area of product and interaction design, is increasingly estranged from the means of production and reproduction of the things they design. As manufacturing has moved to South East Asia, Central Europe, and Latin America, so have the engineering and manufacturing skills, facilitated by the digitisation of product specification its electronic transmission. In this situation, for designers to properly discuss with engineers or understand the manufacturing process they need to travel abroad. Without this, the appropriateness of their design solutions can only be compromised.

And there is a more profound problem. Sections of the British design industry have become hostile to business and are unwilling in their role in supporting it. They are also increasingly skeptical about the needs and desires of the people for who they design.

Where the stakes that fix design solutions – people, clients and constraints – are being loosened, and key collaborators being separated, it doesn’t bode well for great design solutions.

Is the main problem with business?

And British business has, to an extent, already been saved by British design. Since it became clear that in core areas of production Britain couldn’t make it, design – in the form of advertising and marketing, packaging and branding – has helped to keep alive the British manufacturing, service, retail and entertainment sectors. A cottage industry maybe, but a pretty successful one.

But there seems to be no clear route from here to a more profound role for design in British business. To realise the greatest potential of design business would need to:

• Be more ambitious in the nature and the scope of challenges it addresses
• Be prepared to take greater risks
• Be prepared to invest in new product and service lines, with the requisite ‘re-tooling’ needed, and the concomitant increase in productivity [“Creative effort should help to improve manufactured goods, not just tart them” Larry Elliott [xii]]
• Focus on real people and their needs and desires, but not under-estimate them
• Break down the barrier between business and the creative sector, to weave design into the fabric of industry (as it was in the classic age of British industry)
• Stand up for itself, rather than be defensive around profits, corporate social responsibility and environmental issues

In many respects there are also broader societal issues. A major societal issue is the lack of a problem-solving culture. Instead we have a culture which conjures up problems that have little foundation, and wallows in problems that are apparently so great they preclude a problem-solving approach.

The typical response to contemporary problems is to superficially identify the cause of the problem, and advocate we do less of it. This can only have a negative impact on businesses approach to using design in particular, and imaginative thinking in general.

We need a vision of the future from our political leaders – and we need leadership. We get neither from Gordon Brown (who commissioned the Cox Report) or Tony Blair. In this climate it is hardly surprising that British business aren’t focused on thorough-going or grand innovation.

Design is a necessary but not sufficient input into the future of British industry. But in reality, there needs to be a business solution to the design industry. And there also needs to be a societal and political solution to the state of British industry.

Notes

[vi] On the interface, see 'TiVo: Now you see it, now you don’t' Nico Macdonald, Interfaces (British HCI Group periodical), Spring 2002

[xi] Cited in Private View 'Winning the turf war' Jim Davies, Design Week, 19/05/05

[xii] 'Better design requires better products' Larry Elliott, The Guardian, November 21 2005