By RitaSue Siegel

RitaSue Siegel is president of RitaSue Siegel Resources (an Aquent company), a search and consulting firm that helps clients worldwide find product, communications and environmental design leaders. She has undergraduate and graduate degrees in industrial design from Pratt Institute.

The following is adapted from the introduction to the third edition of “Getting an Industrial Design Job” by RitaSue Siegel.

Design is no longer a mystery. The hard sell is over. Innovation has been hailed as “the new black” by Bruce Nussbaum during a recent @Issue conference. People in business, consulting, academia and the media now know that innovation, creativity, design, collaborative organizational structures and customer focus add enormous value to developing sustainable, competitive business advantages. Of course infrastructures need to be put into place in organizations that can make design and innovation ecosystems actionable.  

These same people recognize how indispensable design, design process and design planning are for transforming concepts into realities, for increasing growth and profitability, and for designing every aspect of the customer experience for a brand, product or service. And at last they understand that design can improve lives while at the same time being environmentally responsible.           

This receptive attitude toward design has been spreading over the past 10 years and presents designers with a greatly altered landscape challenging them to perform on a more public stage than ever before. It is instructive to explore some of these new circumstances.

On the Radar
Many design leaders, business consultants and academics recommend using design thinking to understand and influence a broad range of business and government processes and policies—and even to design the organization itself. In this new environment, designers apply design thinking to plan customer-focused research, create design briefs, inform concept development and brainstorming, repeat cycles of rapid prototyping for promising concepts, get customer feedback to validate product selection, and similarly, to develop, refine and implement environments or systems.

In addition, research has arrived that supports the value of investment in design. For instance, in the UK the Design Council tracks the use of design in companies and claims the stock prices of design-engaged firms are higher. The data they have collected shows that companies that embrace design-driven innovation and new product development can escape the commodity price trap to rise above competition and charge a premium.

The media has added to the momentum by championing design-led innovation. For three years now Fast Company has published its Masters of Design issue featuring the businesses and designers who are leveraging the power of design. In addition, in August 2005 BusinessWeek published a special 29-page report, “Get Creative! How to Build Innovative Companies,” by Bruce Nussbaum, who continues his role as design and innovation advocate in his blog, Nussbaum on Design, commenting on issues and events related to innovation and design thinking. BusinessWeek also offers interactive design-focused content in its online Innovation & Design channel and through IN: Inside Innovation, a new quarterly supplement. Design can also be increasingly found in the pages and on the covers of Fortune, Business 2.0 and many other business and general-audience publications, blogs and web sites. Rotman, the magazine of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto publishes articles like Using Design to Create Fiercely-Loyal Customers, in the Fall 2006 issue.

Leading newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, The New York Times and even the Times of India, increasingly publish articles about branding, architecture, retail, furniture, and hospital design, hospitality and entertainment design, and automobile design—and covers the changes of command in design that organizations experience worldwide. Notably, the Washington Post has a dedicated design editor, Linda Hales. In the Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg, often evaluates the design aspects, especially interface design, of the technology products he reviews.

More Blips
The recognition of the importance design can have for business is also evidenced by the growing number of competitions that tie together design and business. Since 2002, the Catalyst Award, co-sponsored by IDSA and BusinessWeek, has expanded on the traditional design competition by recognizing excellence in market and financial performance—in addition to strategic and social impact—and the leverage design can provide to business.

The two-year-old Bottom Line Design Awards, a collaboration between Business 2.0 and frog design, sets its standard for good design on the impact a product has on a business and its ability to create satisfying customer experiences. Also consider the Microsoft Next Generation PC Design Competition, now entering its second year, that invites everyone and anyone to rethink the PC.

Even broader still, the biennial INDEX: Award program, based in Copenhagen, celebrates how design can improve the lives of people around the world—and comes with a princely prize of €100,000 ($125,000) for each of five winners. Winners in the inaugural 2005 competition ranged from a straw that cleans polluted water to a football stadium in South Africa that houses health clinics and HIV educational facilities, to a web site for improving the lives of more than 40 million Spanish-speaking craftsmen and artisans threatened by globalization.

Jumping Off the Screen
An awareness of the far-reaching influence design has is also on the rise, most fundamentally in regard to the environment. I believe that most designers want to create, as William McDonough describes, “safe, healthful, high-quality products right from the start,” (Innovation, Summer 2005). Just as I believe student performance critiques should not only include discussions about the students’ verbal and visual presentation skills but also their consideration for the environmental impact of their work. Designers who have not studied green design should do whatever is necessary to catch up fast.

And outsourcing, a common topic among business leaders, politicians and the media, is of relevance to designers too. (All need to understand that outsourcing is not the work of the devil.) Motorola, Whirlpool, IBM, GE, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Landor, Interbrand, Continuum and many other global American companies have teams of mostly Asian designers working for them in Asia. They employ designers from many countries in their offices in Europe as well. Many European companies, such as Desgrippes Gobé, Philips Design, Renault and Blue Marlin have offices in Asia. Consider that the US benefits when European and Japanese automobile companies manufacture cars here using American workers. The US, as well as designers, also benefits when Asian and European companies employ American designers and design consultants for their US-based operations, as does Philips Design, Hyundai, Siemens, BMW, Nissan, Lenovo, Electrolux, Samsung, Sony, DaimlerChrysler, Santiago Calatrava, Rem Koolhaas and Publicis.

The Inuit have many words for snow, which is a noun as well as a verb. Design is also a noun and a verb, and like snow, you know it when you see it, even if a simple definition is elusive. Similarly, the number of design industry buzzwords has increased dramatically as design consultants attempt to describe their expanded offerings and as corporate designers, who collaborate with co-workers in other disciplines, have a greater need than ever to communicate effectively.

Five years ago few designers used the term experience, as in experience design. Today, virtually no designer leaves the office without it. But the design-to-business dictionary can now be left behind. That what’s so remarkable about this shift: designers no longer need to use 'business speak' to have their ideas understood, but they do need metrics. Design buzzwords are now understood, and used regularly, by many business people.

So be careful when using words like user-centered, ethnography, personas, scenarios, ambiguity, belief systems, story-boarding, story-telling, interdisciplinary, human-centered, make tangible, journey, co-creation, non-zero sum outcomes, adding value, design planning and design language. Your audience may know more about these terms than you think.

Future Focus
Today marketers focus not only on influencing the customer but on influencing the nature of the relationship the customer has with an organization. As David Brown, former president of Art Center once said, “People express themselves through what they own, where they live and what they value.”

This evolved world confronts designers more than ever with the responsibility to influence what people buy, how they live and what they think is valuable. Are you up for the challenge?