The value of design
I'm not going to lie, it's been the better part of the last twenty years that I've heard designers complaining about how the industry doesn't recognize their value (or doesn't even understand what design is), and, on the other hand, the industry rarely (if ever) uses designers at key junctures of their processes.
As far as I'm concerned, the central difficulty of understanding the value of design for developing new innovative products is that when properly leveraged:
- Designers navigate through the whole PESTEL (political, economic, societal, technical, environmental, legal) spectrum and don't belong to a specific field or vertical, making them difficult to "read" in a corporate environment.
- While they can participate and provide input on which problem is worth addressing, which users matter (and which do not), which constraints are accepted, negotiated, or refused, and which trade-offs will be cost-efficient, they are never, or rarely, the central decision-makers.
- Very few designers can explain what they do without resorting to long, convoluted, and highly conceptual sentences. (*)
- To make things worse, very few design schools train their students in the economic realities of contributing to a business, let alone navigating a corporate structure.
- Finally, in my experience, too many designers fuel confusion by pushing into corporate strategy or organisational behavior. This is often linked to 1. and to overextending from being proper generalists into being experts (Dunning-Kruger, anyone?).
Writing all this, I know I've already managed to piss off half of my friends in the field who will roll their eyes deep back in their sockets while muttering that I don't get it through clenched teeth.
Yet, there is nothing really groundbreaking in formulating all this.
What could be a new perspective on all this is that the value of design in a corporation is not a stable, mathematical reality. It's a very contextual question. More and more, I find that distinguishing specific corporate cultures is an absolute necessity, and here yet again.
When designers tout the extreme value of design, they often refer to (or dream of) Future-Driven companies. Yes, they are the likes of Apple, Dyson, or Braun (decades ago). In these cases, we have organizations that were built and grown on the premise that their present market was underperforming and needed a deep-down reinvention. This can only be done when a rock-star designer (or enough design-minded, in Steve Jobs' case) participates at the highest level of decision-making.
So, sure, for Future-Driven companies, design is a core business. It's what will allow a ground-breaking market reinvention or not. But Future-Driven companies are a rare breed, and you don't know about most of them because they simply fail, not from design's fault but because they are hardcore difficult to pull off from startup- to industry-level.
More typical corporations are Process-Driven. They are built around efficiency, cost-control, scaling capabilities, and supply chain management. Whereas Future-Driven companies need rock-star designers, Process-Driven companies need rock-star engineers. These are the Siemens, Amazon, and modern Apple.
Such companies will find tons of value in embedding designers directly as support to engineers for process design, but also as a mitigating force, helping them compensate for their poor customer empathy, basic marketing practices, and sometimes rough product design. Part of the value of design is structural, part of it is what many designers don't want to be called for: making a better packaging or a better website.
Finally, Customer-Driven (or Market-Driven) companies such as L'Oréal or Singapore Airlines will value design differently. Being involved with very short-term decision-making, turning on a dime to adapt to unpredictable market trends, they will fuel their market connectiveness and fast prototyping of new products and solutions with a mix of marketers and designers. Which doesn't help alleviate the confusion about the role of design, and yet makes it quite strategic.
And just as with Process-Driven companies, efficient Customer-Driven companies are usually quite remarkable at mitigating their own blind spots in process management by leveraging dedicated industrial designers, often external resources, to help build common sense in what looks like pure chaos and mayhem.
All in all, my message is simple...
Discussing the value of design as an absolute thing is quite misleading.
Context matters.
The missing piece in all these discussions is that startups, enterprises, and corporations don't all operate the same way. They have specific DNA and core drivers that will always supersede any other form of rationality. This is true when discussing how they can innovate most effectively, how they value design, or how they interpret market signals to adjust course or not.
And I can only encourage you to test how effective this simple distinction between Future-, Process-, or Market-Driven cultures can be.
(*) My personal best practices from a designer at the very German Deutsche Bahn:
"My team helps everyone makes 20% better product, 10% faster, and 5% cheaper."
