Changing the change

One of the most acknowledged (and so far unquestioned) theories of business is that competition is based on distinctive capabilities: something that one organization has and others haven’t. For years this theory has been the basis for contending the value of design for business: design makes a difference. And this approach of justifying the value of design because of differentiation has succeeded indeed. The number of companies investing on design is soaring.
Good news? Definitely. Surely for students and professionals, with an increasing demand for design skills and services. But unfortunately there is a downside: as an asset diffuses to every company, it inevitably loses its differential power. It becomes mandatory, not distinctive. It happened 20 years ago with Total Quality Management. In the late ‘80s firms considered quality as a top priority; the best quality performers were succeeding, and other companies started to invest in quality improvements with similar models and approaches: each adopted the principles of Total Quality Management, each had a manager responsible for Quality, each adopted six sigma or control charts. Two decades later quality is not among the top corporate priorities anymore. It is mandatory of course, and there are still quality managers in each firm, but quality is not considered a strategic differentiator. Is design bound to a similar destiny in business: to be mandatory, but not strategic?

I know this claim could sound awkward and outlandish to many. No one would nowadays dare to claim that design is marginal for business and competition. But as all companies around the globe are investing in design, and as all are investing in a similar way (all adopting user centered processes and techniques such as ethnographic analysis, brainstorming, rapid experimentation cycles) design in the next future is at risk to be perceived by managers as something necessary, but not differential. Design researchers, who have the attitude and the duty to look forward, have something to think and worry about. What’s next?
The rationale of the CtC conference comes from observation of the challenges that are faced by society and its implications for design researchers. Our discussion above points out that there is an additional reason for changing the way we have been thinking about design. A reason that is pragmatically rooted in the dynamics of competition and of strategy. Also businesses will be shortly looking for a radical change in their processes of change. Design needs to propose a new paradigm if it wants to stay high in the agenda.

Well known for their iconoclastic power, they were recognized as major driver of linguistic change in the arts and in architecture.
They also had the stronger, although less direct, role of anticipating and catalyzing major socio-cultural and political change.
In design and architecture, it was their ability to “give shape” to change that allowed them to have a revolutionary role comparable, if not larger, to the one of “true” politicians.

At the end of the last century, the independent exploration of designers grew inside large companies, and took a different format, combining the scenarios of a future life with a potential vision for the whole company and its strategy. In this case, the culture that designers try to change is both the external one, the user culture, and the internal one, the one of the company.

Today, the role of Design Research, or Strategic Design, is giving to designers in a company the responsibility to represent the transformation of the world “Out There” and bringing it inside the company. Among the many ‘sensors’ that a company tries to develop to get in touch with its users, Strategic Design is the one that has the most visionary role: rather than asking users what they may like in the future, Strategic Design needs to imagine the future before taking it in front of users. Designers in this case need to be involved in a sort of mutual ‘seduction’ with their audience: designers need to be ‘seduced’ by the desire for change that people is about to express, but they also need at the same time to create visions that are so exciting, tangible and plausible that can catalyze this desire for change and spin it into demand for new products and services.
To be so concrete and credible, designers cannot just rely on ideas or concepts. They need to develop a new aesthetic, an innovative language that can at a time render anything past obsolete and uninteresting, and open new iconic references for the future.
In this sense, visionary designers today wouldn’t be much different from the ‘constructive iconoclasts’ of the original avant-gardes. They just work in an environment much more integrated in their company.
But there is another dimension that makes this job today way more complex that in the past: the eco-system dimension. Eco-systematic approaches are not only limited to environmental eco-systems: it seems that any major innovation today needs to face the complexity of large systems that no designer, or even no single company, can control. Any innovation in digital communication, for example, such as social networking or mobile communication, touches multiple points of contact with the user and multiple networked systems that support them. In the same way, an innovation in manufacturing, like a new material or manufacturing cycle, touches many globally sparse components and suppliers.
Under these circumstances, any design vision needs to be supported by a certain degree of feasibility that spans across the whole ecosystem, which translates in the opportunity to steer the whole ecosystem toward a better balance.
And this is what makes visionary design today so exciting and important: never before the culture of design has been so strategically necessary (for companies), so socially relevant (for the users), so impactful (for entire ecosystems) and so communicative (of new aesthetics).
It has also probably never been as difficult before, but this challenge is what makes it even more interesting.