Can you (effectively) manage design without a formal background in design? While we have seen in a few (rare) instances of design being well managed by a non-trained designer, in our experience, you do need to fully understand design to effectively manage it. In my opinion, only an academically / professionally trained designer can most effectively manage design.

Some arguments as to why include:
1) Able to understand, appreciate and adapt to the design process
2) Able to translate business strategies into design strategies
3) Able to work cross functionally across the organization
4) Able to effectively communicate and work with design partners                      (internal or external)
5) Able to translate ideas into physical reality

It will be quite interesting to see the long term results of this bold move of doing away with design management at a world leading FMCG/CPG.
Do I think our profession is in jeopardy? Not at all. Contrary, I see a growing need for professionally trained managers of design.
In your opinion, or better yet in your experience, do you believe that design can be managed by non (trained) design professionals?

‘Working less can actually produce better results’. This is exactly how to treat a design project: Be precise what type of design work is needed at which moment. Just stop doing design work that’s not really necessary to bring the project to a next phase. ‘Time is a limited commodity’. You will always have too little design resources. That’s corporate reality. Stop complaining and be smart about how and where to best use them.

Ready for more? The following article is guaranteed to give you plenty of inspiration to be even more effective and efficient as a Design Manager:

7 Things You Need To Stop Doing To Be More Productive, Backed By Science.

This year’s ESN workshop was a success for all – the sponsoring company, the students as well as PARK. The program focused on developing, evolving and reinventing the retail experience by taking a renewed look at products, brands, services and other offers.

The initial kick-off focus was on the ideal design process to get to the creation of an ideal future consumer retail experience. The outcome was a proposal for various opportunities & concepts in the area of non-food, non-food & food, and retail experiences & services to drive future sales and add value to the business.

“Adding value to business through design & innovation” was the topic of Frans Joziasse’s speech at the Norwegian Design Councils annual Business and Innovation conference on 2nd April 2014.
This was a joint presentation with our client Allan Krog Erlandsen from Bang and Olufsen (B&O) who demonstrated how implementing successful design and innovation leadership at B&O have added value to their business. Allan highlights the core principles of their design and innovation culture, how this is embedded in their corporate strategy and how this is measured.
For inspiration guaranteed please click on the Vimeo link

With the recently created role and appointment of a new Chief Design Officer at Johnson & Johnson, design is getting even more responsibility at one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods producers. While the role of Chief Design Officer is nothing new at J&J, having been previously held by Chris Hacker for more than seven years,  that role was reportedly “limited” to J&J’s consumer businesses and namely to consumer products. In a move to step up innovation, the newly appointed role at J&J’s is the first corporate-wide role, encompassing the company’s portfolio. Interestingly, the newly appointed CDO, Ernesto Quinteros, comes from a tech background having held a previous role as Chief Brand and Design Officer at Belkin International. Seeing how Ernesto built a successful company culture and increased business value around design at Belkin, he is now in a prime position to do the same for J&J.

According to Wikipedia  the description for Chief Design officer is: an executive in charge of an organization’s design initiatives. The CDO is typically responsible for overseeing all design aspects of a company’s products and services, including product design, user experience design, industrial design, and package design. They may also be responsible for aspects of advertising, marketing, and engineering.

Fortunately, in recent years we have seen increasingly emerging roles of Chief Design Officers, such as the newly appointed roles at; Pepsi, filled by former 3M Chief Design Officer Mauro Porcini, at Philips Electronics, filled by Sean Carney, at Kia Motors, filled by automotive guru designer Peter Schreyer (who is now also the first non-Korean president in the history of Kia Motors) and at the outdoor retailer Backcountry.com, filled by Fab cofounder and former Chief Design Officer Bradford Shellhammer, to name a few.

It seems all in all this is great progress, and it truly is, but in my opinion, we still have a long way to go. Case in point; the recently created CDO role at J&J is introduced in a recent wall street journal article as “a new role that reflects the importance that design is playing in the development and marketing of products”. The development of products is the foundation of design, yes, but design is & can be much more than the development of products and a means to market them. Further outlined as in the Wikipedia definition to include services, package & user experience is maybe even still too limiting in my opinion. While design is not the be all end all, design does integrate across many business functions to create value for not only the business, but equally if not more importantly the customer. Design can also greatly contribute to the company’s triple bottom line (social, economic, environmental) as design does often play into the design of business (recently coined “Business Design”). Design does create enjoyable meaningful experiences across all of the customer touch points, and that goes beyond product & packaging, so how can we make that more clear?

While the creation of these new roles paints an underlying shift in company culture and attitude to embrace design on a higher level,  the scope may be still limiting. Unless design has an equal (or greater influence such as at Apple) to the traditional executives roles, it will always be an uphill battle. We see that most of our clients still position design under marketing or R&D holding design to the mercy of scope and budgets of their hierarchies. Design is still simply misunderstood by most.

In my opinion, the real challenge to make a case for design is how:

1) it is understood in a corporate context

2) how it is structured in large organizations

3) how it is communicated to the (general) public

This is not a concern of titles or semantics, but a clearly communicated benefit of design.

So without clearly communicated role & benefits to non-designers, design will likely still sit within the preconceived notion of creating artifacts. Creating Chief Design Officers is certainly a good step, but the first step of many more to go to keep moving the design agenda forward and creating meaningful value. Maybe we can say just that.. design creates meaningful value. Meaningful to business and consumers alike. Not limited to domains or individualized practices. And having someone to champion that from the top down will only help create more meaningful value.

At PARK, we support our clients in their pursuit of design leadership, moving up the ranks from design manager to design leader, which may now encompass the title Chief Design Officer. We look forward to seeing many more Chief Design Officers emerging in the years to come!

sources:

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/j-j-taps-chief-design-officer/292259/

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304256404579449290361956838

http://www.fastcompany.com/3028298/most-creative-people/fab-cofounder-bradford-shellhamer-named-chief-design-officer-at-backcounty

http://wot.motortrend.com/designer-peter-schreyer-becomes-first-non-korean-president-of-kia-motors-309041.html#ixzz2xFYnj8nY

In Google alone, Design Thinking produces 325.000.000 results, that’s excluding the 101.000 video results and 1.790 news items. In the last dmi:Review, “Design Thinking & Doing” headlined as the its 2013 summer publication topic, and even HBR produces 212 results coining the term. The Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) offers a range of courses boasting classes on “Design Thinking for Better Health” and “Design Thinking Bootcamp: Experience in Innovation and Design” to anyone interested in thinking beyond their current discipline.

But can anyone tell me what Design Thinking really entails?

The numerous attempts found online alone to do just that, tells me all that I need to know. Much like crane, dove, or date, Design Thinking doesn’t automatically mean the same thing to everyone.

This multi-faceted approach to the meaning of the term, is essentially what I feel is the core of Design Thinking. Today’s (business) challenges do not need one formulated answer, but rather ask for solutions that are multidimensional. Design Thinking in this sense brings together all facets in and outside an organization; it is a human-centered, repeatable, creative problem solving methodology that encompasses business strategies, technology, and creativity to form innovative solutions, offers, and concepts.

Unlike many problem-solving methods, Design Thinking is focused on solutions and concrete actions, not problems. It is for this reason Design Thinking is gaining popularity and acceptance, and being translated and used across and between professions and industries – and no longer being used by black-clad, horn-rimmed, designers alone.

Now, though that might be how I define Design Thinking, many have attempted to do the same. So what commonalities do these definitions on Design Thinking have?

Let me try to summarize:

1. Design Thinking is collaborative.
As much as you might like to believe, you don’t always know best. Collaboration allows for different opinions and thoughts. It considers new perspectives that you may not always have been aware of, especially if we do the same thing day in and day out. We become so accustomed to only seeing our own reality and often forget to look to the right or left.

2. Design Thinking is multidisciplinary.
This principle goes hand-in-hand with collaboration. The more disciplines and competencies from varying backgrounds that can be integrated into the process the more holistic and wholesome the end result.

3. Design Thinking is empathetic.
In the past, organizations referred to you and I as consumers, customers, maybe even buyers or clients. Design Thinking, considers the human. It is emotional. It seeks to understand different feelings, recognize needs and deliver on those by creating meaning.

4. Design Thinking is inspirational.
Design Thinking is used to solve complex challenges that may be relevant today, tomorrow, or in ten years’ time. It provides inspiration and visionary foresight to create solutions and to get people thinking beyond the obvious.

5. Design Thinking isn’t afraid to fail.
No one enjoys failure, but it is how you fail, and what you do with that learning that is important. Design Thinking is often associated to the phrase “fail early and often” – meaning if you are to fail, then do so before it is too late. The power of rapid prototyping and delivering bullet-proof business concepts is an attitude associated to Design Thinking.

First and foremost however, I believe you must start small; take baby steps. Only then can you achieve an all encompassing approach to Design Thinking.

Patrick Whitney, Dean of IIT Institute of Design, states, “if business and design are to come together fruitfully on a large scale… change must come from separating design thinking from ‘the crafting of things’. The power of design thinking must be freed up to deal with all sorts of issues on a global scale.”

For more on Design Thinking, check out IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown’s TED talk, “Designers –Think Big!”

And if you haven’t seen the Design & Thinking Documentary, do yourself a favor and watch it.

Chances are, not one of these came to mind. In today’s fast paced, mass consumer culture it has become a challenge for anyone, regardless of industry, to create a lasting impression, whether in a grocery store or otherwise.

So, how has a small, Dutch brewery, who has been around since 1873 been able to do just that? It’s simple really; a total 360⁰ approach to the brand. Today, 140 years after developing the Heineken A-yeast formula, the brand has become one of the most premium brands globally, boasting over 200 international, regional, local and specialty beers and ciders. That in itself says a lot when considering the saturated market for alcoholic beverages, coupled with the micro-brewery frenzy across the Americas and Europe.

Heineken however, does one thing that many brands underestimate – alcoholic or not. The brand has succeeded in uncovering new ways of interacting with their consumers by taking a holistic approach to their assets. Finally, we see a brand (other than the usual suspects like Nespresso, IKEA, or Virgin Atlantic) that has utilized design to truly create an experience and add value – for both the consumer and the business.

Take a step into the Heineken Experience Center, located in the heart of Amsterdam. You’re immediately greeted with strong sulfuric aromas, loud chatter from the friendly staff looking to point you in the right direction, and a general positive atmosphere that can only put a pep into your step. It is distinctly Heineken. Take a second look around and you’ll come to realize that this was no accident.

Mark van Iterson, Global Head of Design & Concept at Heineken outlined three distinct areas design has played a role in creating this 360⁰ brand experience:

1. Design as key differentiator and source of added value.
2. Design to create continuous excitement on shelf and in bar.
3. Design as territory of interest and engagement.

Apart from taking the most obvious attribute of the brand, the logo, design looked at the more tangible items; think about the point of sale packaging, the cooler they’re stored in, or even just the glass you sip on. Heineken took this opportunity to create consistency.

Beyond physical product and offer, Heineken took this a step further to ensure the brand wasn’t stagnant. Unlike many brands, Heineken interacts with its consumers beyond the shelf – open design contest (which resulted in an amazing 30,000 connected bottle designs!) among the many initiatives.

But what was it that took Heineken from a beer brand to an experience?

They’ve taken a generic, undifferentiated product (beer) and created an offer that is unique, desirable and essentially worth paying more for, and lets be honest, one you won’t easily forget.  They have achieved this through a range of partnerships with music festivals, movie promotions, sport championships, and extended it into new concepts that simply speak to consumers. Take Heineken’s first smart bottle, igNITE, the iconic Heineken bottle throbbing to the beat of the music. What more could a beer consumer ask than a party in a bottle?

Or maybe you remember James Bond uncovering Heineken in the global “Crack the Case” campaign. It may be too much too say Heineken is everywhere, because Heineken’s presence is carefully selected. However, the experience they deliver, whether in the sports arena or at your local grocers, is certainly unforgettable.

So, next time you walk down that grocery isle, take a look around – are there any brands that speak to you beyond the shelf?

The new NIVEA design language gives evidence that iconic brands like NIVEA can embrace innovation without compromising their values or heritage. Last year our client Beiersdorf received the Design Management Europe Award. We are proud to see that now also the design results are honoured by the Red Dot jury.

Product description
The new design language of NIVEA consistently translates the brand values of superior care, quality and trust. The history of the brand and the original NIVEA tin with its clear design served as a source of inspiration which, due to the numerous design elements, have been transferred into a modern, unique expression. Using characteristics of the original tin such as the circle around the NIVEA lettering allows for the products to be in all categories immediately recognisable. The new design language bridges the huge complexity in packaging design of 11 categories, the sub-brand NIVEA Men, 1,600 products and 13,000 country adaptations. While being introduced into the market step-by-step in order to take the consumer on a journey, the NIVEA Body bottle design already features a new 3D shape, the new logo and a transitional design for 2D graphical elements. In addition, the rethinking of the whole brand design also considered sustainable production processes and thus managed to reduce the packaging by up to 15 percent, saving more than 350 tonnes of plastic per year.

Statement by the Red Dot Award jury
»The redesign of the brand identity of NIVEA convinces with clarity in typography and form on the one hand and the maintaining of the original brand values on the other. Both the round lid and the round logo are inspired by the aesthetics of the traditional NIVEA crème tin, lending the brand with its plain colours of blue and white a strong visual impact.«

Our well known and highly talented Sorena Veerman has been promoted to Senior Consultant. Amrita Bhui continues to establish her expertise as a Consultant, while we have a new person on our team by the name of James Hall as a Senior Consultant & Business Developer. James joins us following an extensive career working for both Hasbro and LEGO across multiple global locations. Additionally we are pleased to welcome Marjolein de Wilde back after her one year sabbatical break.

These developments will enable our Partners Frans Joziasse and Tim Selders to focus on bigger projects and new innovative services which are coming up, such as the LEGO Brand House, Bang & Olufsen and Grow. Places for the Grow CC4 design training program are filling quickly with only 2 places left; if you have high potential candidates that could benefit from this fantastic program, please be quick to register them!

However the more recent trend to try to measure design effectiveness sets a near-impossible task, at just the wrong moment. Many of the current attempts focus on short-term results by only defining CSF’s and KPI’s for the next quarterly meeting with the boss, others try to prove the effect of design in the limits of one design project (e.g. measure perceived quality in craftsmanship clinics or identify the design effect in brand equity). Ironically many neglect (conscious or unconscious) the importance of setting up a quality management program. Are they too busy with justifying their results? More and more design managers have turned to crunching numbers. Sometimes they do this to reassure themselves; sometimes they do it to look professional; more often, we hope, they do it for substantive reasons. It’s fine to keep watch on a few very vivid measures of design effectiveness. But to be governed by a search for the quantitative impacts of design is a mistake. In design, it’s particularly hard to measure both inputs and outputs. Even at its most successful, design is only part of a wider budgetary mix of technology and marketing, and on the output side? There the effect of design is computed on revenues, profit margins and even stock market performance. Statisticians make little allowance for the time lag between studio drawing and first-year sales.

Designers and design managers may have felt the need for numbers when they were in the corporate wilderness. But apart from the inherent difficulty of producing those numbers, they should focus on design effectiveness. While design effectiveness is focusing on doing the right things, design efficiency is focusing on doing the things right.
The down-side of high design efficiency is that it comes at a price we probably don’t want to pay – low effectiveness. Good design management cannot look at design efficiency and design effectiveness in isolation, but has to seek a good balance between both aspects. Design management must evaluate the degree to which design effectiveness and efficiency matter in a particular situation and ensure results with the right proportion for the particular situation.

As a design management consultancy we talk to practicing design managers in international companies every day, here are some of their comments on this:

• “Finally! At a time when we are trying to let go from over-engineered planning and risk assessment, liberating design, from wasting time trying to prove its effectiveness, is both liberating and necessary. Proving our effectiveness was always a demonstration and a re-enforcement of our insecurity.”
• “I believe it is true that design has been more accepted into the mainstream of business culture, and that it’s potential as a business driver is more understood now than it has ever been. Nowadays, even the international business press has become a proponent of design as a contributor to business success. The design industry no longer needs to feverishly generate doubtful statistics as a matter of survival. Design is recognized, it has a place in the world.”
• “I would wish that design effectivity was of no importance, but today there is a general tendency to think that only things we are able to measure have a value. If therefore, we had some good, simple tools to measure design effectiveness with, it would be much easier to sell the message that good design is good business. Finance Directors do not wish us to be bean counters, but to many of them it is still hard to understand what design actually is about.”
• “We do not need to measure design as long as the design efforts within a given context (like a company) are doubtlessly successful. However, when they are not, then you need to get better. Better performance is what? Something somewhere between measuring/estimating/sensing that design has done a better job. Or you might be asked to reduce your resources (people etc.) in order to perform the same mediocre job as before with less strain on the financial system. How do you react? You justify. You explain. You develop and propose actions to improve performance. Your vocabulary will be close to measuring your own performance – - – just like anyone else in a corporate environment.”
• “You can’t measure design effectiveness as you could measure the impact of an advertising campaign on the sales. But I am convinced that if you abandon the effort to identify what should be measured, you can enter in an illusion land where you will forget to fix the aims of design.”
• “[While] it might be true that Design is more and more recognized for its added value to the success of companies by senior management, it’s certainly not the case on most lower levels in the organizations. Where top management start to think in terms of value, operational level still tend to think in terms of costs. We therefore might consider to sell our services more often on a value base, e.g. on an hourly compensation base.”

Wouldn’t it be better to strike a midway position?

Design is part of mainstream corporate culture nowadays. That means that designers and their managers are asked to account, numerically, for what they’re doing. This is fine – in costs and budget allocations, design managers need to run a tight ship. What we don’t need to worry about is measuring design effectiveness, which is a rather different matter. Such an endeavor is time-consuming and much more subjective than its pretensions to objectivity allow. It’s hard to isolate the effect of design from other effects. For instance, we help companies to follow activities to maximize the value of design. On top of this there is (in most companies) no need to measure the value of design. 

• Efficient and effective design process:
  Making design a quality program (related to requirements of ISO 9001) with clear roles, responsibilities, timings and deliverables.
• Setting clear objectives and strategies for design management:
  Defining, monitoring and communicating KPI’s and CSF’s for design management, which are linked to the corporate strategy.
• Training and establishing leading practice:
  Implement design management training and define the leading practice for a particular situation.
• Establish a structure for effective design:
  Building design management capabilities and clear interfaces to other disciplines
• Ensure quality of external design partners:
  Select and review external design partners and ensure high quality.
• Creating an understanding for design in purchase and HR departments:
  Educating relevant decision-makers (e.g. in human resource and procurement) to understand the value of design and provide decision-making tools that are not only cost-based.
• Communicating visions and successes:
  Visualizing a vision, running lighthouse projects and communicating successes explain the value of design without the need to measure it.

This chapter was initially pusblished in the book: Meanings of Designed Spaces

It was a very simple, very powerful, statement.

“LOOK INSIDE THE BOX!”

But really, what does it mean?

Essentially, Brazier’s point was that as a society we have everything. We are spoiled. So much, in fact that we forget to see what is right in front of us. Why is it that we constantly look elsewhere? A valid question when really we need to start considering what we do have and how we can rework and reframe to innovate.

This argument brings me to Jugaad, a Hindi mindset that captures what many know as frugal innovation. This mindset, this term, though inherent in practice in many parts of the world for centuries, is still something unthinkable to many others’ – a point also made by my colleague Amrita Bhui in a blog post.

However, looking inside the box was exactly what Mansukhbhai Prajapati, a group of four Stanford students, and Nicolás Gómez did. Three case studies presented by Simone Ahuja, author of the acclaimed book “Jugaad Innovation,” at the DMI Conference that still resonate in my mind. What they teach us is something that we all should do more often: open our eyes! And make do with whatever means we have!

Mitti Cool
One man, one idea – to keep food from perishing under the Indian sun without the use of electricity. Mansukhbhai Prajapati took what he knew best, clay, and utilized it to develop a mini-refrigerator that keeps food fresh for up to five days. For a market where per capita income is $1219 – cutting electricity costs and inadvertently saving perishable foods from going bad can mean a good amount of saving.

Embrace
A regular assignment for Stanford’s Institute of Design students, whose project was to come up with a low cost product for the market, a group of four students came together looking to help save premature babies. They began by looking at what materials were available to the common population of Nepal – and how to make use of these resources. In this case, a sleeping bag, needle and thread. Today the simple to use, low cost Embrace baby warmer saves lives every day – a great alternative to the traditional infant incubators sold at prices as high as $20,000 in the United States.

Landfill Orchestra
Creative to say the least, when it comes to this frugal innovation. Nicolás Gómez, a carpenter & Canteura landfill recycler took everyone else’s trash and turned it into music.  Gómez sifted through mounds upon mounds of rubbish to craft violins, guitars, and cellos, later to be used in the one and only Landfill Orchestra composed entirely of recycled instruments.

Though the above stories exemplify  frugal innovation at its best, I believed that opposed to traditional, structured innovation – frugal, Jugaad, or whatever term you may be familiar with that looks at alternative ways of looking at fixing or solving a problem – that these case studies all teach us to:

(1) See opportunity in adversity.
(2) Do more with less.
(3) Include the margin.
(4) Keep it simple.
(5) Follow your heart.

Some more primitive innovations than others, people around the world are using frugal innovation on a daily basis.

Look at what is happening in corporations. Down at the shop floor and right up to the board, in laboratories and in the IT department, all sorts of ideas are constantly being born, but don’t get used. And it’s the same story in corporate design departments. There, concepts, clever applications, user insights and styling proposals emerge all the time.

Some of these ideas are taken to the next stage and move on up inside the corporation to be judged professionally and refined. But if they are not taken to next stage, most, if not all, of these creative ideas simply vanish from the corporation’s premises. And yet, on the very next project, especially if it is done with different personnel, those ideas may be relevant, but forgotten. Members of the design department have the task of starting from scratch.

In the 1980s, Japan became famous for pioneering the ideas of W. Edwards Deming. Japanese car manufacturers set up workers’ ‘quality circles’ to capture assembly line operatives’ ideas for process improvements, cutting waste and improving just-in-time systems.

Over the years, however, the doctrine that one should search for and make use of upwardly mobile creative ideas has, like Total Quality Management, tended to recede into the background. The emphasis now is on getting hold of innovations from outside the company through ‘open’ innovation – outsourcing innovation to universities and small firms. In the same way, we frequently hear that consumers themselves are a vital source of innovation.

So it’s not surprising that, in 2007, firms are not very good at exploiting all their ideas. Even the vogue for ‘knowledge management’ is not what it was.

On top of this, designers need self-critically to remember that they are often not very good at documenting even the basics of a design project – fuzzy front end, process, end result, end result in use. So it’s again no surprise that they are poor at documenting ideas which have been ‘rejected’ but which still might be useful.

Few design departments save, share and nurture all their creative ideas. Apart from the ideas that are taken forward all the way to the market, some may have enough potential to be usefully revived when the time is ripe. Others may have the potential to ignite new ideas. Still other ideas may help us decide not to go in a certain direction again.

The failure to foster creative ideas represents a massive waste of time and money. By contrast, design managers now have a responsibility to be much more professional in systematising the capture, storage, access to and revival of design ideas.