complexity. There are so many really awkward challenges that business is facing. It's a
really really complex world. Because suddenly you have to not just kind of get along with the
people living next to you but you have like this the potential of being in contact with everybody.
To me right now managing complexity is one of the huge opportunities of our time.
That's where at least from a mindset perspective design can help, creating clarity in this kind of fuzziness.
I see a changing attitude towards companies in general I have to say. If I look at where
where progressive movements are happening, there is a bit of distrust when it comes to
companies as organizations. It's about credibility, it's about being authentic. So companies have
a challenge there to stay relevant in that mindset. You have to be very much aware of
that kind of mindset and come up with proactive suggestions and solutions and they still provide
value in that context. In traditional marketing speak I think the days of push marketing are
definitely on guard. I think if you want to stay relevant you have to be in the places
where good conversations or interaction between people is actually happening, where
changes in interactions can be can be observed. They will hardly end up just you know ringing
the doorbell. You have to go out there and look for them. I'd like to add one. Maybe that's
where design steps in as well a little bit. I think as a company you have to do things,
you have to do experiments because you can go there and watch that's one way. That's an excellent
way. But another thing is that you make something, you try and you see if somebody likes it or not
or what they do with it. We have quite close relationships with our clients and as such
we grow actually to be quite adaptive and to give you some examples. We used to sell
printers. Well that's not what they were asking for so we started to sell prints. Well that's
actually what they were not asking for as well. So we started to give them the people who will
take care of the prints and stuff like that and nowadays if you go to the University of
Maastricht or the University of Amsterdam we have complete sites of OC which will take care of the
distribution and the making of the readers the students are using. We take care of providing
the readers and all the problems involved. That's what OC does. Well the only reason how we got there
is by being adaptive. So you need to get a grip on what is the dynamic context that you're
designing for? What are the different users or actors? What are the systems that you need to
interact with? What does the value chain look like? What position on the value chain do I
want to keep? And where do I see a stretch? Do I want to move towards? And who else am I going
to encounter? Because you know we're all in the same dynamic context. That's a very interesting
way of looking at the world and it does require far more openness because the design
trajectory is not as linear as it used to be. You can't predict up front what the end result
is going to be. That's the new challenge.
Like if most people think about design especially in the car industry then it's about like okay
how the car looks like. That's what the principles design. If you're like talking to someone from
the industry then they will typically ask you are you interior or exterior? And maybe what we do
is it's quite different. I mean like the first thing maybe like the foremost and most important
thing is we're not part of the design department. We're not placed in design. Design quite often is
somehow squeezed between the marketing and sales. There is like a lot of things that have been already
decided and it has to be we can't get like a shape. We define design as being something
which has an impact on business like we're not doing it for the sake of just being static.
We are like based in research what gives us the ability to to act in the really beginning of the
process. What differentiates us from like a classical design function that we don't have
like we're not in this kind of development process. We have like a certain function to fulfill
but we have we take the freedom of the of the research to explore things and find new things
but like relevant to the customers because we work with the people really in close interaction.
There's like this generation called Generation Golf because it was like so tightly knit or
integrated with this car. The car kind of became the symbol of the generation. Nowadays you see that
more people are like having much more specific needs or like lifestyles. There's like you have
basically like a different many more different kind of streams than you had previously.
You have more and more people that are not alike anymore. We don't even look into market
segmentation but we really try to find more patterns among several quite diverse people
which we then assume that based on that we can scale it up.
What makes a golf designer in our context is the ability to translate from one into the other one
translating a need or a desire of a customer into a business proposition trying to translate
business capability into a product for a user. So it's like constantly balancing different
perspectives different aspects and interpreting between different kinds of domains or areas.
I think that's in essence maybe what design in our practice means. In our experience I wouldn't
contrast business and design. We can also differentiate between two different kind of
modes of working. One is more towards like redesigning, styling, improving something.
The other one is what we do is we use the design as a tool to create something new.
I think in our perception like an entrepreneur-entrepreneur from the business context is closer
to what we do creating something new and innovative than for example someone who's like
redesigning but we're styling something. So I wouldn't contrast business and design I would rather
maybe contrast is someone trying to optimize something or is someone trying to create something.
My name is Alex Ostwaldner and I'm passionate about business models, businesses and how to
create businesses. I was always interested in how businesses work and how they come to exist
and what a business, what a company is all about and business models is this is the topic that
allows you to learn about business. So I just got into it and I started studying that for years.
Big companies they grow up usually with with the business model that they that made them big.
Now what's happening in a lot of industries is that those business models are expiring
so they know that they have to create something new. Now the big mistake that we're often making
in large companies is we're trying to use the same mindset that we applied to create our business,
to create a new business. What kind of growth do I want to create and who can help me create that
and then you put the team together and there's no way around not having designers in that team
when you're talking about creating new stuff and creating growth that's the way I create it.
Aesthetics plays an important role in design and that's the most obvious so yes at the beginning
that's what you see that's the most visible part and if you dig deeper you see well aesthetics is
one of the outcomes of the design process and there's much more. For me it's very simple
it's the tools and the techniques that people in the design profession, architects, product designers
that they use to create new things that's for me design thinking. Apply to whatever issue so if we
talk about design thinking in business in business models well for me it means you know applying the
techniques and tools that you already apply in design applying those to the business model issue
you can train people to accept that failure will lead to success that in a space where
you're creating something new you just don't know so if you don't prototype experiment fail to learn
well you're just maximizing your risk to fail big designers as large as that domain might be like
architects and product designers and web designers they have the equipment the tools to guide and the
attitude to guide this testing process. No good designer is going to design in isolation and throw
that in the market and see what's going to happen. Every good designer takes into account a lot of
variables explores a lot of stuff to see what could work playing and failing continuously
before you get to a point we say hey the design is maturing this is going to work.
I think business people and designers are the same they're people it's just that business people are
not trained to create new stuff they're trained to make decisions designers are not trained in the
same way to make decisions you make decisions in design right but you're trained a little you know
a big part of the training is to create new stuff so I think that the big difference is not are we
business people are we designers you know it's just more how we've been trained and at the end of the
day the most interesting mix is if you're trained in both if you have the analytical tools the analytical
methods and techniques and you have the design methods and the design techniques and you master both
business schools that are doing more design thinking design schools that are doing more
business thinking it's happening now and we still need to make it happen on a larger scale but I
think yes it's pretty encouraging to see all the different initiatives that are emerging
my name is Fritos Mildes I work at the faculty of industrial design engineering
in the department of product innovation management and I'm also director of the master program
strategic product design the SPD program is a program that focuses on the strategic side of
product design nowadays of course we also include service design so product service design
and then the strategic part and you can find the strategic part that two phases within the total
innovation process you could say in the front end often referred to as fuzzy front end and
in the back end where you do the product introduction or service introduction to the market
the main aim of the program is to make students literate in acting within the strategic areas
of innovation we teach students to be able to design new business propositions whatever they might be
most MBAs or engineers traditional engineers they just analyze
but but sometimes analyzes is not enough you have to synthesize and as a designer we know you need
both if we analyze we synthesize come back so we make steps forward we may step backwards
that's the way we progress in our design process and most people want to have one linear approach
we know it's always that way
they just label it like it's an only mental process but also physical we are using our hands
and we are using our body when we are doing things sometimes we roll play just by saying oh
go sit on the opposite and you go to the opposite you stand there to see another viewpoint that's
typically what a what a designer would do this is a school person would never do that
maybe we'll say that but you'd rather undo it and we do things
yeah i studied business administration and i graduated i think 15 years ago
um i'm in germany one of a very few um deans of a design school with no formally trained
um design background business education as it used to be or as i experienced it was
according to nowadays meters a bit kind of stupid because it was it was it was it was linear
it was theoretical it was it was um it was exclusive rather than inclusive um
but but again i mean once you graduate you don't stop you don't stop learning
we we know how to crunch numbers um but but the numbers are only something that come from
the past i mean if you deal with numbers these numbers come from the past you can use mathematical
models that project in the future but there's an uncertainty but i think what these numbers
do not these numbers represent a tendency of what people want what people did in the past
and how to extrapolate that into the future but really to understand what people are doing
um i think that's that's that's a that's a bit of a holy grail every company is interested
designers need more but like any other discipline like like chemical scientists they
ought to need they also need to integrate themselves in a let's call it business setup
because that's in the end what what all our planet is about it's about business it's about dealing
i don't like the idea that for example business education is dead let's make the new creative
business class school or whatever um i don't know if that if if the if pressing more complex stuff
um in one curriculum is the right way we all know that design is not learned from the book
so it's not done by just a trick of having two courses on creativity that's not designing
designing is much more complicated and and and that's what um but i have against this movement
that they the design thinking is taking outside the world of design because it takes out most of
the time only the creativity part and that's not what it is it's much more
anyone who says that design thinking is a hype is forgetting that design thinking is not something
that's happening now it's been around for decades and it's been practiced by people for a very long
time it's been studying for a very long time and it makes a hell of a lot of sense
question is is design in all its richness and all its potential um really helping to deal with
the kind of complex issues we're facing these days and the answer is of course partly yes
and we want to know how and where and when and the answer is partly no that's not over hyping
let's not pretend that design thinking is going to save the world because it's not
we designers are very good at moaning about things and and moaning yeah we are not being
understood by the rest of the planet and our contribution designers need to you need to go
out and and and demonstrate your value to business and not to and not to moan oh business is not
understanding me and and they don't value the contribution of design no if business is not
understanding what you are doing as a designer you are doing wrong as a designer it's that's the
wrong approach you need to constantly criticize and question yourself and try to experiment around
by looking at people who practice this every day who've actually achieved success with it
I think we can learn as a as a design slash business community um to um to become better at what we do
we never say we are just doing design thinking where so we combine business thinking with design
thinking that's the value that we that we provide
the kind of projects we do trying to understand a very complex human issue you cannot really do it
in a strictly analytical highly structured quantitative way it's it's about it's not about
numbers most of the time it's about understanding what the person tries to say car approached us
with interest in in sort of doing a global research study on ownership and the topic totally
jived with us we thought that getting at something like ownership which got to the foundation of
people's relationship to stuff was a crucial thing to be looking at right in a moment where
the internet was starting to put a lot of those relationships in question and in flux
Intel thinks of itself as much as a computing solutions provider meaning that our sort of
business sits on its core foundation of silicon manufacturing but thinks about the kinds of
devices that that need to be enabled the kinds of services need to be enabled kind of software
that's what enables people's technological lives
it was a global study we went to seven different countries including india china japan brazil
it was it was looking at a shift in the society which is something that's also part of your
finger on so we tried to do that by speaking to people by learning people's stories and
ways people are tackling changes in ownership then people are realizing the value of access
to experiences and services rather than owning something outright that they
have in their hands and from that moment it usually depreciates in value why not have that
join a ownership over many months or years
for us workshop is almost like the deliverable right it's like it's one of the important parts
coming from a design background often you tend to think of a deliverable as something on paper
or some finished product whereas we're very much about presenting ideas and then building on those
it doesn't have to be the designer who is brainstorming and the business analyst who
who is going to do the analysis no they're brainstorming together they're doing the analysis
together each bringing in their own perspective their own experience and their own their own
brains and in the end you're bringing brains together what I've really enjoyed about claro is
the fact that they've taken and they're they're trying to figure out how to take knowledge about
the business world and business models and and questions that inform new business model innovation
with social insights right and social understanding so there are some companies that are much more
research focused and they do a little bit of design maybe a little bit of business understanding
so there are too much research heavy and the reason there is that maybe the solutions that
they come to are actually not that creative and that maybe the the anchor in the business
reality is missing or they don't or they don't interpret the research at all yeah simply say
this is what we observed which to me is worthless yeah this fast-moving world interpretation you
can't interpret you don't I don't think it will all the future yeah my name is Damian Kernahan
from Proto Partners in Service Design we're here in Sydney Australia I'm not a designer I'm actually
a business guy with an MBA with a great love of design I think one of the biggest things we actually
do is help our organisations make really complex issues simple
for Virgin Mobile I think experience innovation is one of the key differences for us
price and product are easily imitated so I guess the key form of differentiation for us
moving forward will be experience innovation providing great customer experience particularly
as our customers expectations change so we realised that we needed some help some expertise
and a fresh perspective to make sure that we were truly taking an outside in approach
to identify the key opportunities for improvement Proto Partners helped us use a
service design approach to ensure that we're identifying the key benefits for our organisation
the challenge that we issued Proto Partners when we started this journey was to help us identify
the program of work that would improve our key measure of customer satisfaction
they helped us deliver that in two ways so the first was to produce a number of artefacts to
bring to life our customers and our opportunities for improvement things like understanding who
our customers are through the use of personas a detailed map of our current customer journey
the second has been a business case so of course any kind of improvement initiatives
require funding they require resources so we needed to be able to prove the case the customer
experience immersing ourselves in the customer's world is is really important and one of the most
powerful things we did in here we played a 12 minute phone call from a mother who'd had her
phone cut off and his daughter was having an asthma attack and who couldn't contact her family
and she'd been on hold for an hour and just playing that 12 minute phone call made all the
difference in here so quite often organisations the traditional approach is to use analytics and
rigor and logic to prove your point we actually flip that on its head and we try to convince
our clients emotionally first with something like that it's very hard for a CEO or senior
management to listen to something like that and say you know well so what their all their response
always is we have to fix that and we have to fix that now so I think the key lesson that we've
learned in working with Proto partners has been that as a business we need to spend more time
focusing on on desirability what do our customers want what are their expectations
I think by truly designing for desirability it does create experience innovation that
that will have an impact to the bottom line you actually need you know that balance of what
customers are looking for what's possible but also what's going to pay back and that's why you need
the business guys and the design guys to actually work together I don't think they can work separately
but if you can bring them together that's where some magic is
there's a big shift between the power to the brands to the power to the people
people today are make their own stories develop their own stories publish them
so I think that the people are in control at that moment that's that's a big difference
after the last few decades
so I think we're not a return on investment in a traditional way of failure of money
with a return on investment in brand loyalty and in real connections with the audience
I think it's also the only way to survive in a world that's changing so fast
I think we have to do things together and so it's just constantly
all right my name is Arne van Ossel and I run a company called design thinkers
and I'm the in-house designer for the service innovation center in Norway
design thinking for us is a way of you know finding the right method to deal with the problem
so first we help with asking questions so what is the right question and looking at the context
etc etc and then finding the right tools and what and the right approach
I love design and design thinkers collated in building designer DNA
it's a platform for people from large corporations who have the task to to innovate and to
use new methods and tools like service design tools or design thinking tools
we felt that it was very good to kind of connect them to bring you together
and to have them talk to each other
the world is changing products things become all interconnected people expect these things to
be interconnected I think that's where you see that the propositions that we're developing
also are changing because it's not a standalone product anymore
the designers DNA platform that that is initiative that was born out of a presentation
some of my colleagues gave in Berlin and actually what it's all about is that we
realized that there was a high desire and by people in businesses about learning how to do
service design service design is an emerging competence and how can we all learn quicker
and faster about how to do this effectively by just talking and sharing the ways of working
in order to do that and not to reinvent wheels that have been invented somewhere else already
they basically said well why don't we try to find a very informal platform where we without issues
of competition can just exchange thoughts and ideas on how service design can work it's very
much focused on the competence and the expertise required not about the application of service
design if you come to third design five years from now with half of what we know called product
design that effort is going to be reflected or at least as much service design well maybe there's
another opportunity for another kind of designer you know we talked about the designer as the
businessman but then the designer as the connector between where you know a makes connections looking
at problems and say well this is my company this is the problem what other organization groups
companies are part of this ecosystem and then you know and then being the real connector and you go
out as your design function to make literal connections with these businesses and see if
you can make something happen it's not design thinking or service design or what have you
that's going to be the answer but it's all part of this searching
design that that ability to you know solve a problem to make something better is a very human
activity I think I think design helps organizations to get much better insights and become much
more user centered than they otherwise would to really kind of bring to life the experiences of
their customers to them for them to them to experience themselves and understand I think it
offers a space within which people can be much more creative can you can imagine imagine new
ideas it offers a place for those ideas to be prototypes tested and developed and and specified
in a much faster and more engaging manner we were approached by camden council as they were
understanding how they could host a learning network to share best practice about how to
engage older people in the design of services they wanted to do something slightly different
and we worked with them to understand how they could move from bringing teams from around the
country together simply to share PowerPoint slides and stories with each other to the point where
actually people could start to develop practical strategies and practical tools together to take
back several organizations and propagate new practices more directly I think there is a there
is there is definitely an observable appetite and movement towards ways of thinking about
service design delivery and local government which in that sense is probably unstoppable
I think what I'm observing is that people are having an experience of design designs
that is changing their view of their own job in their own role so in that sense there's no
going back so they get even if they move on to another job they've kind of been their mindset
has shifted a little bit the way that we try to solve problems now is that we we try to apply
approving solutions from the past onto these problems but because the problems are different
the solutions no longer work and so what design brings to that is about thinking differently
it allows us to spend some time comfortably exploring an exploration phase that defers
the moment we should actually define the problem which is really important
there's off there's off the sort of knee jerk kind of reaction to define the problem I think
what design allows us to do is experiment with not only multiple solutions but also many problems
to see which is the right way to pursue
I guess within the business community you know a lot of emphasis is placed on
the analytical side of things and I think what we're finding now is that companies are realizing
that they need to you know balance that off with the more creative more design-read approaches
to understand what they don't know about a situation to imagine solutions they hadn't
thought of before to to change and find new ways of doing things
design really needs business to focus to know which problems to solve to know which objects
to design or which environments to design it's really about working together solving these
problems creating this value for people and in that sense design without business is a pointless
exercise but there's more business also needs design because problems are getting more and more
complex these are the kind of problems you can't manage your way out of you can only design your
way out of them that's quote by martin Neumacher that I really love it's not either design as a
separate thing and this business as a separate thing no design is part of business design will
sort of grow out of its role of being exclusive and being a separate department in a company to
more a skill set that or a mindset that you look for in people whether they're designers or not
it's just human nature and it's just making contributing to making this place a better
place and don't want to sing michael jackson songs now
we design this world it's a big problem sometimes but it's a great great job to do
do
You
