THE PLUS Within DESMA, we are working with a strong brand and visual identity. Our visual approach is not just a logo and a colour. It is a concept that conveys who we are and what we do. The “+” represents what DESMA stands for – design “+” management, academia “+” practice = something new rather than something in between.
Content: Copyright © 2015 the authors Proof reading: Margaret Myers Layout and design: Oriana Haselwanter & Anna Bloch
The “+” is the basic element for the playful and experimental part of the logo representing the growing of the knowledge and the network. This is why our visual identity is dynamic. Just like
Paper: Munken
the nature of design + management research.
Font: Static & Times New Roman Print: Elanders Sweden Publisher: ArtMonitor University of Gothenburg Konstnärliga fakultetskansliet Box 141 SE 405 30 Gothenburg www.konst.gu.se © DESMA 2015 ISBN: 978-91-982421-2-6
DESMA research is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions. The content in this book reflects the authors’ views and the European Union is not liable for any information that may be contained therein.
PREFACE DESMA, which is short for Design as Driver of Innovation and Competitiveness, is an Initial Training Network funded by the European Commission, FP 7 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions. It brings together twelve partners to train a new generation of researchers, bridging the disciplines and various streams of design and management, as well as bringing the worlds of academia and industry closer to each other. Over the last couple of years, in addition to DESMA research projects, we have opened up the network through various events and our online platform, with the aim of sharing our research insights and discussing the future of Design Management with a wider community. This follows from the main objective of DESMA – to reinvent the area of Design Management and to create an open platform for Design Management research in Europe and beyond. This, we hope, will build a solid ground for further development and growth, long beyond the closing of the project in December 2015. This book provides a peek at the research projects conducted by the thirteen Early Stage Researchers (ESR) within DESMA in 2012-2015. Each ESR has written a chapter reflecting some critical aspects of their research, and we have asked some of the DESMA Advisory Board members to reflect further on the insights of the ESRs. More information about the research projects and the DESMA community can be found at www.desmanetwork.eu
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11 INTRO
137 MEANINGS
CONTENT
13
+ Introduction + Anna Rylander Eklund Claudio Dell’Era Toni-Matti Karjalainen
19
21
TRANSITIONS
+ Introduction + Anna Rylander Eklund Toni-Matti Karjalainen
+ Establishing new design capabilities in healthcare + Andreas Benker
53
55
PROCESSES
+ Introduction + Anna Rylander Eklund
101
103
105
MATTERS
+ Introduction + Toni-Matti Karjalainen
+ The role of the body in a design mind-set + Ariana Amacker
139
141
153
+ Introduction + Roberto Verganti Claudio Dell’Era
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23
+ The practice of exposing – innovation from inside the box + Åsa Öberg
+ Who helps you to innovate? The power of Radical Circles in vision creation + Naiara Altuna
185
187
TENSIONS
+ Introduction + Ileana Stigliani
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CONTENT
47
+ Negotiating design transitions in a postindustrialising context Ulises Navarro Aguiar
+ Reflection + Bettina Maisch
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71
+ Spotting fires in the wild: Lessons from friction in collaborative designing Andrew Whitcomb
+ Shaking consultancy practice: From research to innovation Sara Jane Gonzalez
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133
+ Brand and product management: Towards a renewed modernism? + Fernando Pinto Santos
+ Reflection + Barry Katz
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179
+ Creating futures through visionary projects + Marta Morillo
+ Reflection + Rob Chatfield
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201
+ Authentic adaptation as a strategy for success + Eva Kirchberger
85
95
+ Pandora’s box + Veronica Bluguermann
+ Reflection + Kathryn Best
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225
+ Service design in business + Marzia Aricò
+ Reflection + Bettina von Stamm
+ The organisational design of social ventures:a contingency perspective + Lien De Cuyper
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+ ENGINE SERVICE DESIGN + + IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF LONDON +
+ Ulises Navarro Aguiar +
+ Eva Kirchberger +
+ Lien de Cuyper +
+ LIVING LABS GLOBAL +
+ VOLVO +
+ Veronica Bluguermann + + Ariana Amacker +
+ UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG +
+ VERYDAY +
-8-
+ Andrew Whitcomb +
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+ Marzia Aricó +
PREFACE
+ Fernando Pinto Santos +
+ Andreas Benker +
+ AALTO UNIVERSITY +
+ PHILIPS +
+ LIVEWORK +
+ FUTURE CONCEPT LAB +
RESEARCHERS & PARTNERS + Sara Jane Gonzalez +
+ Marta Morillo +
+ CASSINA +
+ POLITECNICO DI MILANO +
-9-
+ Naiara Altuna +
+ Åsa Öberg +
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INTRODUCTION Anna Rylander Eklund Claudio Dell’Era Toni-Matti Karjalainen
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INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION Over the last few years, we have seen a real explosion in literature in which scholars and companies alike have been making efforts to link design with management. Consequently, design is currently recognised as a key strategic resource for companies and, for this reason, many scholars are studying the link between design and competitive advantage (Gemser & Leenders, 2001; Platt, Hertenstein, & David, 2001; Boland & Collopy, 2004; Hertenstein, Platt, & Veryzer, 2005; Veryzer, 2005). This is not an easy task, however. One of the reasons that make scientific investigation of design a hard challenge is that the definition of “design” is fluid and slippery. With a very synthetic effort we can cluster those definitions around three areas: design as the form of things, design as a creative approach to problem-solving, and design as making sense of things. The first approach looks at design from a narrow perspective: design as associated with the form of products, often in juxtaposition with the product function. Indeed, when it comes down to the real essence of the concept, many people believe that design basically, and mainly, deals with form. The most frequent applications of design in business in the past century have been infused by a prevailing attention to form. These views have complied with the dogma “ugliness does not sell” coined by Raymond Loewy, the French-American designer who is a founding father of “styling”. And most businessmen today still associate design with the beauty of products. To broaden this narrow conception of design as form, the reaction of many experts has recently been to enrich and stretch its definition to a point where it embraces any kind of creative activity. As Herbert Simon states, “everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1982). If we view design through this broader meaning, it concerns all major creative activities and professions that produce a modification in the environment: “Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design” (Simon, 1996). - 13 -
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Recently however, there has been an attempt to associate design with a “better way of thinking” (usually referred to as “design thinking”), that can be used to address any kind of problem (Boland & Collopy, 2004; Brown, 2008 and 2009; Martin, 2009). Since this view is often promoted by design consultants, design thinking is assumed to express a better capability in designers (as a profession) to address and solve problems. According to other scholars such as Krippendorff (1989) and Heskett (2002), design is the activity through which we make innovations in the meaning of things. The meaningful dimension of design has been recognised and underlined by several design scholars and theorists (Margolin & Buchanan, 1995; Cooper & Press, 1995; Petrowski, 1996; Friedman, 2003; Lloyd & Snelders, 2003; Bayazit, 2004; Norman, 2004; Redstrom, 2005; Verganti, 2009). In the different sub-projects of DESMA, as highlighted by this book, the multitude of design views becomes very clear. However, the DESMA focus is particularly on the views of design thinking and design as sense making, shared by the participating universities and companies. DESMA grew out of a need expressed by the four university partners and the companies we collaborated with in our research. In order to raise the quality of Design Management Research, we needed to assemble a critical mass of researchers. On the one hand, as we all had several years of experience of doing research at the intersection of design and management, we were convinced of the great potential of design as a driver for innovation and competitiveness. On the other hand, we felt a certain unease when confronted with the field of Design Management. It had been around for decades, but as a research field we felt it had not developed sufficiently. Could it fully exploit the potential of a design perspective on innovation, in order to help tackle Europe’s challenges in the twenty-first century? One reason was of course that design and management have different historical roots and professional cultures as well as different educational and research traditions, which make research collaborations prone to misunderstandings and conflict. Another reason was that the field was still regarded as nar-
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row, meaning that there were too few researchers who were also dispersed around Europe. It was difficult to create a shared community for developing high quality research training. Making progress in the area of Design Management requires researchers with an understanding of the two disciplines of design and management; individuals who are mobile and flexible and can translate the different languages and practices of design and management. It requires new experimental approaches to research that can capture the constructive and practice-based nature of design. And in order to capture the latest developments in the field, it is necessary to collaborate closely with practitioners who are at the cutting edge of design management. The objective of DESMA was to create a kind of an experimental research laboratory, distributed across Europe, to support a new generation of researchers able to cross the design-management divide. As we wanted this initiative to live long after the end of the project, we opted for an open and emergent approach. This included physical meetings as well as creating an online platform that could serve as a virtual meeting point for interested people outside the network. For example at the DESMA Forum in London in September 2014, we included the advisory board members in the discussion about the future of the field and invited them to comment on the direction of the ESRs’ research. The event was streamed online to allow other interested Design Management researchers to join the conversation and the discussions can be accessed on the DESMA website. The open approach means that we have allowed the network and the direction of DESMA to emerge “naturally” and to be reshaped in progress. The ESRs have driven the development of DESMA, based on the direction of their individual research interests, their learning and insights throughout the programme, as well as their backgrounds and collaborations within and outside the network. Reaching out to the world outside academia has been the central concern of DESMA, to explore collaboratively, as well as to communicate, the value of design as driver of innovation and competitiveness. The ESRs initiated a range of activities such as online DESMA chats
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with experts on various topics of relevance to their research and the field in general. The DESMA tours provide another example, interacting with local Design Management research communities around the world, e.g. the DESMA Latin American tour. Some DESMA ESRs have also written a paper reflecting on their experiences of taking part in a multidisciplinary research training network, which can be accessed at the DESMA website for those interested in learning more. This book however, focuses on the insights from the ESRs’ research projects. The chapters all relate to selected aspects of their ongoing projects that they wanted to bring forth at this stage of their research. The book contributes to the ongoing discussion on the integration of design and management, the role of design as a driver of innovation and competitiveness, and of the future of the field of design management.
REFERENCES Bayazit, N. (2004). Investigating Design: A Review of Forty Years of Design Research. Design Issues 20:1 Winter. Boland, R.J. and Collopy, F. (2004). Managing as Designing, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Brown, T. (2008). Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review, 84-92. Brown, T. (2009). Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. HarperCollins. Cooper, R. and Press, M. (1995). The design agenda, John Wiley and Sons, Chicester UK. Friedman, K. (2003). Theory construction in design research: criteria: approaches, and methods. Design Studies 24, 507-522.
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Gemser, G. and Leenders, M. (2001). How integrating
Redstrom, J. (2006). Towards user design? On the shift
industrial design in the product development process
from object to user as the subject of design. Design
impacts on company performance. Journal of Product
Studies 27, 123-139.
Innovation Management, Vol. 18, Pp.28-38. Simon, H. (1982). The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 129.
Hertenstein, J.H.; Platt, M.B.; Veryzer, R.W. (2005). The Impact of Industrial Design Effectiveness on Corporate Financial Performance. Journal of Product
Simon, H. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd
Innovation Management, Vol. 22, Pp. 3-21.
ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), xii.
Heskett, J. (2002). Design, a very short introduction.
Verganti, R. (2009). Design-Driven Innovation. Chang-
Oxford University Press.
ing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean. Harvard Business Press, Boston.
Krippendorff, K. (1989). On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition that ÂŤdesign is Making
Veryzer, R.W. (2005). The Roles of Marketing and
Sense (of Things). Design Issues, vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring),
Industrial Design in Discontinuous New Product
9-38.
Development. Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 22, No. 1, Pp. 22-41.
Lloyd, P. and Snelders, D. (2003). What was Philippe Starck thinking of? Design Studies, Vol. 24, Pp. 237-253. Margolin, V. and Buchanan, R. (editors) (1995). The Idea of Design: A Design Issues Reader, Cambridge: MIT Press. Martin, R. (2009). The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Norman, D.A. (2004). Emotional Design. Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Basic Books. Petroski, H. (1996). Invention by Design, Harvard University Press. Platt, M.B.; Hertenstein, J.N. and David, R.B. (2001). Valuing Design: Enhancing Corporate Performance through Design Effectiveness. Design Management Journal, Vol. 12, No. 3, 10-19, summer.
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TRANSITIONS Anna Rylander Eklund Toni-Matti Karjalainen + Andreas Benker Ulises Navarro Aguiar + Bettina Maisch
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TRANSITIONS
TRANSITIONS Design management is a field undergoing continual transition. Design is constantly evolving and expanding into new territories, thus offering serious challenges to organisations in terms of management and leadership. This section presents two interesting examples of established and traditional companies that have eagerly looked for new ways of bringing the best out of their design capabilities. In his chapter, Ulises Navarro Aguiar discusses expanding design awareness in the context of a specific business and manufacturing case: Volvo Product Design. He argues that the expansion of design in this case is not a priori but merely negotiated, resulting in successful expansion, displacement, and legitimisation of design within the organisation. Andreas Benker describes the establishment of new design capabilities in the new product development processes of medical devices at Philips. He provides a micro perspective on the evolution of new design capabilities and identifies the key organisational aspects making them possible. Both cases illustrate the importance of the organisational mind-set and the commitment to design renewal. Finally, Bettina Maisch reflects on these chapters and the huge demand for such research in business-to-business companies. In order to make academic research valuable to practitioners, she concludes, researchers and practitioners need to collaborate in more designerly ways. Anna Rylander Eklund, Toni-Matti Karjalainen
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+
ESTABLISHING NEW DESIGN CAPABILITIES IN HEALTHCARE
+
Andreas Benker
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ANDREAS BENKER Andreas is a PhD student at Aalto University School of Business, Department of Management Studies, and is doing his research as part of the International Design Business Management (IDBM) programme. He has a (Econ.) and a B.A. degree in IDBM from Aalto University School of Business. His research is about user-centred design approaches in technologyintense environments, focusing on usability design practices and design capabilities within a new product development context.
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ESTABLISHING NEW DESIGN CAPABILITIES IN HEALTHCARE This chapter is about the establishment of new design capabilities within the new product development processes of a medical device manufacturer. New standards and regulations are emerging in the healthcare industry explicitly stating that manufacturers need to comply with specific usability design practices throughout their development processes. In a technologybased environment like that of a medical device manufacturer, that requires the establishment of new design capabilities. This study is based on a three year ethnographic research during which I worked as an active team member within a research and development department at Philips. The purpose of this research is to provide a micro perspective on how a new design capability evolves within the context of a medical device manufacturer’s development department and how to facilitate the transition towards a more user-centred development approach. There are specific aspects within the context of a technology-intense environment that can enable such a development of new design capabilities: (1) having a catalyst within the organisation who has managerial influence and can drive change, (2) building internal understanding of and trust in new design approaches, (3) using one development project as prototype for new processes and showcasing the lessons learnt, and (4) establishing credibility for new practices by having external legitimacy.
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THE DEMAND FOR A NEW DESIGN CAPABILITY
Safety and performance are established product characteristics that are critical in the healthcare industry and an inherent part of medical device manufacturers’ development processes. Product safety, on the one hand, is essential because regulatory bodies like the Food and Drug Administration or the International Organization for Standardization require healthcare companies to comply with international safety standards in order to bring a medical device to market. Furthermore, it is in the companies’ own interest to launch products that are safe to use and do not cause harm to either patients or users of the device, in order to avoid any financial, legal or reputational consequences. Prior to a product launch, companies also need to provide proof that their devices’ clinical benefits outweigh any potential risks or side effects they might have for patients who are exposed to them. Performancerelated product characteristics like treatment precision, patient throughput, and patient recovery time are major competitive factors in the healthcare industry and are engrained in medical device manufacturers’ DNA. That means companies have established specific core capabilities within their development teams that enable them to develop systems according to industrial standards and the competitive market environment.
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Especially for medical device manufacturers operating in a business-to-business context, it is crucial to focus on the safety- and performancerelated product characteristics throughout their development efforts. However, driven by new international standards for medical device manufacturers and the opportunity to create more customer value through a usercentric design approach, there is yet another product characteristic gaining importance in the healthcare industry: product usability. An inherent part of a product’s usability is its ease and efficiency of use, including factors such as low use error rate, learning and remembering how to use a product, and user satisfaction (Nielsen, 1993). Usability is a complimentary product characteristic to safety (low error rate) and performance (efficiency), two dominant product characteristics in the healthcare industry that drive product marketability and competitiveness. That means medical device manufacturers need to apply specific useroriented processes, skills, and methodologies in order to design for usability. For manufacturers with a strong technological background and development focus, this requires the establishment of a new design capability within their development teams. But how does a new design capability become established within a development department? And what are the context-specific aspects manufacturers need to consider in order to facilitate such a transition towards a more user-oriented approach?
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A MICRO PERSPECTIVE ON CHANGE
In order to explore such questions about changing environments in organisational settings, it is necessary to clarify the perspective from which one looks at the phenomenon at hand. From the macro perspective, one looks at change from the organisational level as an episodic event or flow of repetitive actions that can be triggered or not, whereas the micro perspective provides insights into the ongoing adjustments and continuous modifications in people’s daily practices (Weick & Quinn, 1999). In this study, I am exploring how change occurs within a social context as part of the everyday practices, rather than from an outsider’s perspective. Therefore, it is productive for the researcher to be socially engaged with the people interacting in the research context, and to stay receptive to unpredictable situations in a social environment (Strathern, 2002). The study is based on my involvement in a research and development department of Philips HealthTech for approximately three years. The department specialises in the development of medical devices that are based on magnetic resonance imaging technology, and can be used for therapeutic purposes. It is located in Finland and employs approximately 200 people. As an active member of the development team, I was able to participate in the daily practices and follow how the integration of usability design unfolds over time. The long time frame and closeness to the case enabled me to maximise the fieldwork experience and produce “interpretive knowledge relationally with those studied rather than searching to reveal information that is unambiguously present prior to the researcher’s intervention” (Trigger, Forsey, & Meurk, 2012, p. 515).
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DEVELOPMENT OF CAPABILITIES
Now, when speaking about the establishment of new capabilities, it is important to distinguish them from core capabilities that are already established and have a strategic significance for a company. It is crucial for managers to understand how to take advantage of such core capabilities without letting them become constraints inhibiting the development of new capabilities and hindering the organisation from adapting to external changes (Leonard, 1992). In order to challenge the status quo and apply new practices within an organisational setting, companies need to have dynamic capabilities, meaning the “ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments” (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997, p. 516). For medical device manufacturing companies, which generally have a strong technological background, such dynamic capabilities are necessary in order to develop a new capability that stems from a more user-centric design approach. Since manufacturing capabilities in general can be defined as “people, skills, knowledge, processes, systems, and equipment” (Zahra & Nielsen, 2002, p. 377), it is helpful to differentiate between the more technological capabilities and those that are design-related. The first are grounded in skills to build and improve technologies and systems in which a firm has experience (Zahra & Nielsen, 2002; Song, Droge, Hanvanich, & Calantone, 2005), whereas the latter relate to skills necessary
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to consider aspects such as product-user interaction, ease of use, aesthetics, but also technical performance and functionality to some degree (Ho, Fang, & Lin, 2011). Nevertheless, it needs to be considered that both technological and design capabilities are not exclusive of each other but rather interdependent within the context of new product development. Furthermore, the establishment of a new capability is a continuous and ongoing transition. Capabilities can be regarded as part of an organisational learning process, and they “develop through the coevolution of three mechanisms: tacit accumulation of past experience, knowledge articulation, and knowledge codification processes” (Zollo & Winter, 2002, p. 348). Especially within the context of a medical device manufacturer, this learning process is crucial to make new knowledge available and applicable to the existing development process. Nonetheless, it is challenging to introduce new approaches or even make changes to existing processes when operating in a technology-intense and highly regulated industry. In order to leverage on new knowledge, this requires a manufacturer to have an absorptive capacity and the ability to value, assimilate, and apply new knowledge (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). Zahra and George (2002) differentiate between the potential absorptive capacity, which includes the acquisition and assimilation of new knowledge, and the realised absorptive capacity, relating to the transformation and eventual exploitation of
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knowledge. Those four stages are useful in mapping out the progression of absorbing new design knowledge, from the initial recognition of design values up to a company-wide rollout of new design practices (Acklin, 2013).
TOWARDS A NEW DESIGN CAPABILITY
Exploring usability design practices as part of a new product development process is a topical subject in healthcare. In view of the international standards about usability, it is a necessity for medical device manufacturers to
document usability approaches that are linked to risk management and safety aspects of the devices under development. Furthermore, new regulatory usability standards and the increased attention given to good product usability in the markets have led to a “force majeure from the environment, predictably or not, for better or worse� (Winter, 2003, p. 992), which can be a challenge for a development team to cope with. Implementing new usability design practices in a systemic way implies the introduction of new methodologies and makes them an integrative part of the iterative development process.
Figure 1: Aspects enabling knowledge absorption to establish a new design capability.
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Leveraging on my active involvement in a research and development department of Philips HealthTech, I was able to follow how new design knowledge is absorbed and translated into the ongoing processes. Four aspects were identified as crucial to facilitate this process from new knowledge acquisition to establishing a new capability, meaning that it becomes an embedded part of the development process. The four enabling aspects can be mapped onto the knowledge absorption stages in order to highlight to which phase of organisational learning they contribute (Figure 1). For managers working in healthcare, it is beneficial to understand these absorptive capacities and the enabling aspects that contribute to the respective stages of organisational learning. Driving change and enabling the transition towards user-centred design processes implies several stages of knowledge absorption before establishing usability design as a new core capability. Firstly, it is crucial to have a catalyst within the organisation who is perceptive of the potential value a new design capability entails. This person ought to have sufficient influence to champion the acquisition and assimilation of new knowledge. However, establishing new design capabilities is not only about some championing managers who drive the change initially, but also about the assimilation of knowledge by the people who are part of the processes. The second aspect relates to building up trust and understanding across the department for such a change. That
requires sensitising people who are not familiar with user-centred approaches. This can take place in the form of presentations and trainings but it is best if the members acknowledge the value offered by usability design as a new capability themselves. This is why lessons learnt and small success stories from projects that introduced usability design support this. Thirdly, it is necessary to start small and scale up. Prototyping new design practices in one development project enables manufacturers to make them an integrative part of the established development processes without taking too great a risk of radical changes in the processes. Since medical device manufacturers have to comply with several international standards, it becomes crucial to all that such a transition should happen organically and not ad hoc. The aim is then to adjust working practices towards more user-centred design without downsizing the other efforts demanded by regulatory bodies. Fourthly, it is beneficial to have an external design agency involved in the translation and early exploitation phase because that gives the new practices credibility and legitimation to be implemented on a wider scale. It is crucial to abstract the knowledge provided by design agencies during the time of their engagement, and to translate it into internal processes in order to facilitate the establishment of a new design capability.
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REFERENCES
Acklin, C. (2013). Design management absorption
Weick, K. E., & Quinn, R. E. (1999). Organizational
model: A framework to describe and measure the
change and development. Annual review of psychol-
absorption process of design knowledge by SMEs with
ogy, 50(1), 361-386.
little or no prior design experience. Creativity and InWinter, S. G. (2003). Understanding dynamic capabili-
novation Management, 22(2), 147-160.
ties. Strategic management journal, 24(10), 991-995. Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive capacity: a new perspective on learning and innova-
Zahra, S. A., & George, G. (2002). Absorptive capac-
tion. Administrative science quarterly, 35, 128-152.
ity: A review, reconceptualization, and extension. Academy of management review, 27(2), 185-203.
Ho, Y. C., Fang, H. C., & Lin, J. F. (2011). Technological and design capabilities: is ambidexterity possible?.
Zahra, S. A., & Nielsen, A. P. (2002). Sources of capa-
Management Decision, 49(2), 208-225.
bilities, integration and technology commercialization. Strategic Management Journal, 23(5), 377-398.
Leonard, D. (1992). Core capabilities and core rigidities: A paradox in managing new product development.
Zollo, M., & Winter, S. G. (2002). Deliberate learning and the evolution of dynamic capabilities. Organiza-
Strategic management journal, 13(2), 111-125.
tion science, 13(3), 339-351. Nielsen, J. (1993). Usability engineering. Boston: Academic Press. Song, M., Droge, C., Hanvanich, S., & Calantone, R. (2005). Marketing and technology resource complementarity: An analysis of their interaction effect in two environmental contexts. Strategic management journal, 26(3), 259-276. Strathern, M. (2000) Afterword: accountability and ethnography. In: M. Strathern (ed.) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge, 279-304. Teece, D. J., Pisano, G., & Shuen, A. (1997). Dynamic capabilities and strategic management. Strategic management journal, 18(7), 509-533. Trigger, D., Forsey, M., & Meurk, C. (2012). Revelatory moments in fieldwork. Qualitative Research, 12(5), 513-527.
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NEGOTIATING DESIGN TRANSITIONS IN A POSTINDUSTRIALISING CONTEXT
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Ulises Navarro Aguiar
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ULISES NAVARRO AGUIAR Ulises is a researcher at the product design department of Volvo Group and a PhD candidate at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg. His research examines value practices in design work and explores the workings to expand the scope of design in organisations. Ulises holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Design from Monterrey Tech in Mexico and a Master’s Degree in Design Management from a joint programme between the University of Salford in the UK and KEDGE Business School in France. Prior to his involvement in DESMA, Ulises worked as a service designer in France.
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NEGOTIATING DESIGN TRANSITIONS IN A POSTINDUSTRIALISING CONTEXT In recent years, design has gained importance in broader discourses, especially in relation to innovation. In our post-industrialising context, marked by the ubiquity of digital technologies, design is in transition and expanding beyond narrow, traditional bounds. Issues of experience, services, and wider societal transformations are now the playing field of design. However, some organisations still struggle to apprehend this transition. Today, manufacturers can no longer thrive by making and selling products, so they are increasingly ‘servitising’ their offerings, which opens possibilities for novel design explorations. Yet, in business-to-business (B2B) manufacturing, the use of design for services is not commonplace practice, since the role of the discipline is often limited to the styling of products. In this chapter, building on an ethnographic study at Volvo Product Design (VPD), I provide a brief sketch of an unfolding design transition in which designers seek to expand the scope of design by securing involvement in service development at Volvo Group. In my work, I characterise this process of expansion as the formation of an actor-network. I argue that an inquiry into how design is translated – that is, how it is expanded, displaced, and legitimised in organisational life – is fundamental to unravelling design transitions and understanding the construction of design value(s).
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THE RISE OF DESIGN
TRANSITIONS
Today there is widespread recognition that design is relevant for business and society. Indeed, we are living in times of unprecedented design awareness across different sectors of society. Perhaps there has not been a time when design has been more part of the public discourse than today. This renewed – and, within the design community, long sought-after – cultural authority rests upon the recognition of design as being something more than a mere cosmetic add-on. The general reputation of design throughout the twentieth century – despite the best efforts of the functionalist movement – was one of a profession concerned with purely decorative matters. Professional designers – I mean the ones having other aspirations than becoming the next Philippe Starck or the next Karim Rashid – have had to carry the weight of this unwanted legacy. It is only in recent years that this widespread belief has been changing in the eyes of the wider public. As Bruno Latour (2009, p.2) points out: From a surface feature in the hands of a notso-serious-profession that added features in the purview of much-more-serious-professionals (engineers, scientists, accountants), design has been spreading continuously so that it increasingly matters to the very substance of production.
Thus, the rise of design in the twenty-first century is being forged on a new understanding of what the discipline is all about; a new common sense around the idea of design is slowly emerging. We have gone from design as styling, to design as innovation. The triumph of design thinking has contributed to a wider acknowledgement of the discipline. Large companies are increasingly employing design not only as a way to differentiate their offerings, but as a means to foster a culture of innovation within their organisations (e.g. Procter & Gamble, IBM, Deutsche Bank). According to a report published by the venture capital firm, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB, 2015), thirteen design agencies have since 2010 been acquired by corporations seeking to enhance their design capabilities, including technology companies (e.g. Google, Facebook), management consultancies (e.g. Accenture, McKinzey & Co.), and banks (e.g. BBVA, Capital One). The rise of design is also made evident in the emergence of design-related leadership roles in organisations, such as Senior Vice Presidents of Design (SVPs) and Chief Design Officers (CDOs). Traditionally, design teams reported to product and engineering managers. However, the tide is turning and design teams in some corporations now report directly to top executive management. In fact, thirteen of the one hundred and twenty-five companies in the 2014 Fortune rankings have executive-level positions or CEO support for design (KCPB, 2015).
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THE EXPANDING SCOPE OF DESIGN AFTER MODERNISM
TRANSITIONS
So it is fair to say that the relevance of design is increasing and spreading beyond the aesthetic styling of objects. However, this is not just a case of design climbing the corporate ladder. Rather, it is a much more profound change, a transition in design practice that is blurring traditional disciplinary boundaries. Today, design is expanding its scope of work into new fields, becoming increasingly transdisciplinary as a result. This expansion is transforming traditional understandings of what an ‘object’ of design can be. As design expands, new kinds of problems arise. For instance, designing a new service to improve healthcare in remote rural zones in Latin America entails a wholly different set of challenges from designing medical instruments and devices. While the latter is known territory in the product design profession, the former is still terra incognita under exploration. Designing an urban transportation system entails a wholly different set of challenges from designing a bus. While the latter involves experts and stakeholders familiar to the world of product design (e.g. engineers), the former involves a complex ecology of political, economic, technical and civil actors. These encounters with new problems demand appropriate tools and a renewed set ofskills, making design practice evolve as a result.
As Modernism collapses, design is in transition. According to Thackara (1988, p.11), Modernism painted a vision of production rooted upon the belief in unlimited growth, the progressive nature of technology, and the celebration of the machine. The function of design was simply expressing those ideas in material form (Thackara, 1988), and consequently it became a functional and technical specialty in the grand scheme of production, another tiny cog in the great machine. Indeed, the specialisation of labour and the search for efficiency contributed to the advancement of knowledge and refinement of production processes, but also to their fragmentation in hierarchical organisational arrangements built for efficiency rather than for innovation. However, as modernist assumptions slowly fall apart, the ecological crisis sharpens, and as we come to apprehend the unsustainable character of our consumption and production patterns, a new philosophy and practice of design are emerging. Freed from narrow limitations, design is now redefining its ‘object’ and steadily and pointedly becoming more integrative. Not limited to mere technical expertise, design is increasingly being used to raise questions about what is worthy of being produced. We can make sense of this expansion in Latourian terms. Objects of design are no longer matters of fact – that is, mere artifacts of material and symbolic character – but rather matters of concern – that is, artifacts of material and symbolic character located in a fluid ecology of “complex assemblies of contradictory issues” (Latour, 2009, p. 4). In this sense,
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design and the ‘objects’ of design are not what they used to be. Richard Buchanan characterises this expansion of design in his ‘Orders of Design’ framework (see Buchanan 1992, 1998, and 2001). He provides a perspective to conceptualise distinct ‘objects’ of design and delineates an expanding trajectory for design thinking. In his framework, he highlights four broad areas in which design is explored (i.e. orders of design). He conceives of these orders as places of discovery, rather than fixed categories. The first order focuses on visual communication with symbols, the second order on material artifacts, the third order on interactions, services and processes, and the fourth order on organisational systems, environments, and values. The trajectory of Buchanan’s framework follows the historical development of design and reflects the issues and changing circumstances that have shaped the discipline. Design began as a decorative art concerned with the use of symbols for communication, giving birth to graphic design (first order). Design was also used as a decorative art for the styling of already-engineered products,
and eventually, it started to engage with the actual designing of products, giving birth to industrial design (second order). With the advent of new technologies and important changes impacting industry, design shifted to a concern with the experience and activities around products in use, giving birth to user experience (UX) design and service design (third order). Buchanan’s framework suggests that design will keep expanding to encompass complex ecologies and organisational systems including also the ideas and values that give them sense and make them hold together (fourth order). In a way, the sequence from first to fourth orders can be seen as a progression from parts to wholes, or from concrete to abstract. The trajectory of design thinking over the last couple of decades has been increasingly pointing towards the third and fourth orders. We have witnessed the emergence of new disciplines of design that are focused on systems of relationships and action, such as interaction design, service design, and business design. These design
Figure 1. Four orders of design (adapted from Buchanan, 1992, 1998, and 2001)
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disciplines have come to the fore in a background of growing connectivity and rapidly evolving information and communication technologies. In this post-industrialising context, the tangible object becomes just a prop within an intangible system, and the new disciplines of design are thus concerned with orchestrating complex socio-technical assemblages, such as systems, processes, and organisations.
POST-INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING
Interestingly, novel applications of design are taking off in industries or sectors where design did not previously have a role or strong presence. In the worlds of technology startups, software, banking, management consulting, and policy-making, design is steadily and deliberately being integrated as a core activity for innovation, and there are more designers working in those spaces than ever before. However, in sectors where design has had a long tradition, namely in manufacturing, the exploration of new orders is at odds with established conceptions of the design discipline. Indeed, in manufacturing contexts, the activities of designers have usually been focused on graphics and material artifacts (first and second orders), rather than on systems of relationships and action (third and fourth orders). In the world of business-to-consumer (B2C) manufacturing, design has typically been perceived as a competitive asset to address new consumer demands via the form-giving of products and branding. In business-tobusiness (B2B), however, the role of design has traditionally been perceived to be less critical. As previously argued, design was thought for decades to be the superficial feature that appeals only to the (irrational) retail consumer, so B2B manufacturers had no motive to put emphasis on design when selling to (rational) corporate buyers. This assumption is now dissolving. Considering the slowdown of manufacturing in today’s post-industrialising context, the imperative of innovation has made B2C and B2B manufacturers more open to experimenting with new approaches. In fact, many manufacturing firms are undertaking efforts to shift from selling products to selling services and/or integrated product-service systems (PSS);
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AN INITIATIVE OF EXPANSION: THE CASE OF VOLVO PRODUCT DESIGN
a phenomenon known as the servitisation of manufacturing (see Lightfoot, Baines, & Smart, 2013). However, despite the wider acknowledgement of design, the role of the discipline in B2B contexts still tends to be somewhat tangential to the central concerns of manufacturers. Design in B2B manufacturing often remains ‘technicooperational’ and lingers on in the first and second orders, even when a shift to services and PSS clearly entails a thorough engagement with the third and even the fourth orders. Arguably, this is due to the overpowering influence of a deeply ingrained product-oriented industrial logic and the legacy of Modernism. According to Morelli (2002, p. 3), the involvement of designers in the development of PSS requires an expansion of designers’ activities to areas previously covered by different disciplinary domains. And herein lies a key challenge. How does expanding design actually work in the context of B2B manufacturing? How do actors provoke and navigate this expansion in a setting where design has a limited role? How does the shift from graphics (first order) and objects (second order) to interactions (third order) and systems (fourth order) work in practice?
The expanding trajectory of design delineated in Buchanan’s framework needs to be confronted by the realities of organisational life. In this section, building on an ethnographic study at Volvo Product Design (VPD) in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, I provide a brief sketch of an unfolding design transition. For almost three years, I have followed the activities of design managers undertaking efforts to broaden the scope of design work in the organisational context of Volvo Group, a large B2B manufacturer. VPD works globally across different business areas including Volvo Trucks, Volvo Buses, and Volvo Construction Equipment, among others. VPD has strong expertise in industrial and automotive design and, in the past few years, UX design – mostly focused on digital interfaces onboard vehicles – has also become an important aspect of the work being carried out at the studio. The increasing demand for onboard UX design work has triggered discussions concerning the expansion of design to offboard experiences and services in order to create holistic and integrated brand experiences. In their efforts to increase the scope of design, these actors are developing new practices and devices, and sparking discussions about the value of design and its potential contribution to the development of innovative services and PSS.
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In my work, I characterise this process of expansion as the formation of an actor-network, a web of relationships composed of human and non-human actors. The process of formation of an actor-network begins with an identification of actants – those who act and are acted upon (Czarniawska & Hernes, 2005). These actants carry forward a programme and seek to enrol and mobilise other actants for the same cause, forming a network. They do so through the translation of diverse interests into a common programme. Actants who survive anti-programmes and are successful in network formation then stabilise and become actor-networks (Czarniawska & Hernes, 2005). Invariably, the formation of actor-networks is materially heterogeneous and happens through translation, involving people and technologies such as texts and artifacts. For Callon and Latour (1981), translation is the process of negotiation and persuasion by which actors gain authority to act and speak on behalf of other actors. Callon (1986) identifies four sub-processes in translation: problematisation, interessement, enrolment, and mobilisation.
PROBLEMATISATION
Problematisation has to do with actors assuming an active role in the definition of a problem. Initially, they raise unsettling questions about a state of affairs, framing a particular situation as problematic. Also, they establish roles for themselves and other actors, define identities,
and place themselves as an “obligatory passage point” (Callon, 1986) in order to address the problem they are defining. In this sense, they delineate a programme and make themselves indispensable in the network of associations they are trying to build (Callon, 1986). In this case, the problem, as defined by actors at VPD, is that the role of design is often limited to the ‘styling’ of products, and so its potential contribution to service development is not properly acknowledged across the organisation. Furthermore, actors at VPD observe that service development at Volvo Group is quite fragmented. While key to the company’s strategy for over ten years, the shift to services is perceived to be haphazard and mostly done in silos. According to a design manager: [Service development] is ad hoc, it’s not connected, it’s disjointed. And so what we see is Design [VPD] as kind of a natural place to start connecting these things … in order to present a more holistic brand experience for our customers … So we can imagine, if we look out a few years, we are going to have a mess … ‘cause there’ll be all these completely ad hoc disconnected systems that our customers are forced to use. The programme laid out by these actors makes the case for the systematic involvement of VPD in cross-disciplinary service design projects. With a brand distinction mandate, VPD plays an integrative role and has a holistic perspective on brand experience. This programme situates
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VPD as an obligatory passage point in problem resolution. It is argued that design is a connector and catalyst to address wider transport needs – as opposed to only making transportation hardware. As a designer explains: “we see that service design is the future product design”.
INTERESSEMENT
Interessement has to do with the use of devices by which actors attempt to stabilise the identity and roles of other actors that they more or less defined in the stage of problematisation. These actors seek to interest other actors in their programme and turn them into allies. To do so, they place devices between yet-to-be allies and all other entities (if they exist) who attempt to define their identities in a different manner (Callon, 1986). Interessement is about interrupting competing associations. In this case, actors at VPD come up with devices to engage new actors and seek involvement in new service-related projects. By showcasing and performing the value of design, actors seek to persuade, build trust, and interest others, as affirmed by a design manager, below: Through that process (of showcasing design value), we hope to continue to build this network, but then also start to actually demonstrate … learning through building. Getting more people involved in this kind of (design) process and (designerly) way of working, but also demonstrating it through the outputs … and slowly that’ll give some case studies.
ENROLMENT
Enrolment has to do with the consolidation of alliances, that is, “the group of multilateral negotiations … that accompany the interessements and enable them to succeed” (Callon, 1986, p. 211). The identities of actors are determined and tested in negotiations. The distribution of roles is stabilised and inscribed in notions of desirable states and how to get there.
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In this case, though still volatile, the role of design is tested and negotiated in actual projects in which designers are given the space to work with services. A design manager explains: We are trying to use Project X as a pilot case … We need tangible things because it’s easier … Project X had all the features as a case story. Very early engagement by design. If you distil those stories it will really help the transformation. If you show that in some areas you have been working in that way it will build more confidence. The desired state as conceived by actors at VPD – that is, the systematic engagement of design in service projects and the furthering of a company-wide design culture – is inscribed in visual representations and artifacts, enacted in presentations and articulated in documents. If these inscriptions are not contested, they help to coordinate and stabilise emerging roles, and to consolidate alliances. Actors at VPD acknowledge that artifacts play a crucial role when it comes to gaining legitimacy and making their agenda reach new places: “We have ownership over design artifacts [such as] personas, digital touchpoint map, service map …” a designer explains. According to him, “creating strong brand artifacts that convey meaning … helps the transformation.” These artifacts assume the role of actors themselves, as they re-present the interests of the programme.
MOBILISATION
Mobilisation has to do with ensuring that enrolled actors or allies accurately represent the programme as spokespersons (Callon, 1986). Through different methods, the interests of the programme are re-presented and displaced, that is, they are rendered mobile. If successful, then the actor-network is formed, which means that the initial propositions and roles established in the programme become credible and legitimate. In this case, design artifacts are mobilised as non-human actors in the emerging network. But mobilisation would also mean that other actors enrolled by VPD have given credence to the programme, and have themselves become supporters or spokespersons. According to a design manager: [People at Business Strategy] are starting to realise … They are seeing the value of taking design onboard to push change and attitude... I think it’s happening right now that it is becoming more obvious to them... To me, what this opens up for as well is Product Design [VPD] moving more into the communication area, and I see that as the next big step for the department to broaden the presence and the competence... As argued by Callon (1986), the four sub-processes of translation are dynamically intertwined. Translation is an ongoing process, rather than a fixed result. At any moment, alliances and roles can be contested. At Volvo, the sketch of an actor-network is starting to emerge. At the moment of writing, some signs of enrolment and mobilisation are increasingly surfacing but the prospect of stabilisation is still hazy.
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Figure 2. Expanding design through translation
TRANSLATING DESIGN
Without a doubt, an important transition is currently unfolding at Volvo Group. Arguably, a paradoxical one. The more design expands its territory of action, the less clear is what design (thinking) actually is and does. Though increasing in importance, its role is becoming ambiguous, uncertain and more open to question than before. As design enters new spheres, engaging new actors and establishing new connections, it is becoming something different. In other words, design practice along with its devices and methods is translated into new situations, and therefore, transformed. So translation in this context is the process by which design expands, displaces and legitimises itself through acts of persuasion and negotiations performed by actors or spokespersons; an inescapably transformative process. Going from designing the style of products to designing innovation through services could be characterised as a process of translation in which actors enrol others, forming an actor-network that legitimises design as a valuable approach to wider issues in the organisation.
In this sense, when design, both as a form of knowledge and as an organisational department, expands its scope of work, from one order to another, it undergoes a process of translation in which practices and material artifacts play a key role. In organisational life, this expansive application of design is not straightforward; it is better understood as a transition that needs to be negotiated in rhetorical situations. Approaching design transitions from the angle of practices and network formation provides alternative perspectives to grasp design value(s). In this manner, the value of design becomes an effect or result of actions, rather than a cause. It is not because design is valuable that a design transition is successfully negotiated; rather, it is through the actions and negotiations performed by actors that design comes to be perceived as valuable. Design values are made, provoked and assembled by actors via translation. In this way, the role of design in organisations and society is determined through the socio-technical process of translation.
REFERENCES
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5-21. Buchanan, R. (1998). Branzi’s dilemma: Design in contemporary culture. Design Issues, 14(1), 3-20. Buchanan, R. (2001). Design research and the new learning. Design Issues, 17(4), 3-23.
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Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of
Thackara, J. (Ed), (1988), Design after Modernism,
translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fish-
London: Thames and Hudson.
ermen of St. Brieuc’s bay. In J. Law (Ed.) Power, action and belief. A new sociology of knowledge? London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 196-229. Callon, M. and Latour, B. (1981). Unscrewing the Big
NOTES
Design as styling: Within some design circles, the
Leviathan: how actors macrostructure reality and how
notion of styling has a negative connotation. It is often
sociologists help them to do so. In K. D. Knorr Cetina
portrayed as a reduced and superficial conception of
and A. V. Cicourel (Eds.) Advances in social theory
design work limited to ‘making things prettier’.
and methodology: Toward an integration of micro- and macro-sociologies, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
The triumph of design thinking: Far from being a
277-303.
clearly defined notion, different versions of design thinking have been making the rounds in contempo-
Czarniawska, B., & Hernes, T. (2005). Constructing
rary design discourse – from the managerialist pop
macro actors according to ANT. In B. Czarniawska &
version, via versions accentuating cognition and/or
T. Hernes (Eds.), Actor-Network Theory and Organiz-
socio-material practices, to versions associated with
ing. Malmö/Copenhagen: Liber & CBS Press, 7-13.
broader philosophical projects (see Kimbell, 2011; Johansson-Sköldberg, Woodilla, & Cetinkaya, 2013).
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (2015). Design in
However, setting aside all controversies over the
Tech Report 2015. Retrieved from KPCB website:
variegated conceptions of design thinking, the point is
http://www.kpcb.com/blog/design-in-tech-report-2015.
that the momentum generated by the label as such has largely contributed to the rise of what can be charac-
Latour, B. (2009). A Cautious Prometheus? A Few
terised as a new heyday for the discipline.
Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (With Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk). In F. Hackne, J. Glynne
Translation: Drawing on the work of Michel Serres,
and V. Minto (Eds.) Networks of Design: Proceed-
Callon and Latour (1981) apply the concept of transla-
ings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of
tion to the field of sociology. More specifically, this
the Design History Society, Falmouth, 3-6 September
concept has been widely applied in the field of science
2008, Universal Publishers, 2-10.
and technology studies (STS) to account for the construction of scientific facts, or to put it another way,
Lightfoot, H., Baines, T., & Smart, P. (2013). The
“the transformation of rats and chemicals into paper”
servitization of manufacturing. International Journal
(Latour, 1986, p. 3-4).
of Operations & Production Management, 33(11/12), 1408-1434. Morelli, N. (2002). Designing Product/Service systems: A methodological exploration. Design Issues, 18(3), 3-17.
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BETTINA MAISCH Bettina is in charge of the industrial Design Thinking (i.DT) Program Siemens Corporate Technology (CT). With strong support from the former Head of CT, Dr. Arding Hsu, she set up a Design Thinking project framework and facility in 2012 in Beijing, China. Bettina and her team adapted the methodologies from Stanford University and the Design Company IDEO to the requirements of an industrial company like Siemens. After three years of experience in setting up the industrial Design Thinking Program and lab in China, Bettina has been ramping up the i.DT activities in Germany since January 2015. Bettina holds a PhD in Business Innovation from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She spent one and a half years doing research at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program. Bettina gained working experience at the advertising agency Ogilvy, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication FOCUS in Berlin and in various research projects at the University of the Arts in Berlin and the University of St. Gallen as well as at Stanford University.
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Reflection
DESIGN IN TRANSITION AND TRANSITION BY DESIGN Steve Jobs once said: Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Design as a discipline is in transition, as is the importance of design within companies. The transition of design as a strategic instrument, and not just a way to shape the aesthetic of products, is already established in most business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. Apple was not alone in understanding that consumer markets were changing towards a design-driven and user-centred economy. The users, who are usually also the customers, are decision-making factors beyond just the appearance, functions and functionality of products. Nowadays, user experience is significant through the whole product life cycle. The world for business-to-business (B2B) companies is also changing rapidly and drastically. Companies are facing increasing pressure to deliver solutions that provide explicit customer value beyond the facts and figures of the performance of a product. The transition from technology-driven towards customer-value-driven is a major shift for B2B companies. The business in industry is complex. Users are usually not the customers in terms of decision-making, but they are often major factors influencing value creation over the product life cycle. The application of a user-centred design approach in B2B companies involves dealing with a network of users who are involved in producing, installing, operating and maintaining single entities that are however embedded in complex systems. These systems do not just affect the direct customers of the B2B companies, but also suppliers further down the line and, of course, their customers too. B2B companies need to acquire better understanding of these systems, to identify the right lever to create unique, and not easily copied, customer value. Last but not least, they need to find ways to implement these solu-
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tions in a fast manner with low risk. Design (Thinking) provides methods and tools to address these needs. Still, many B2B manufacturers are struggling to grasp the possibilities offered by the integration of design into new areas beyond the appearance and usability of products. However, even B2B companies who have understood, and where change is in progess, are confronted with challenges. They must consider how to take the changing notion of design into account, not just strategically, but most importantly, in terms of their operational set-up. Decision-makers have huge uncertainties concerning how to manage – plan, execute and measure – the transition from an often purely technology-driven, towards a design-driven, company. The two articles on transitions deal with different aspects of the design transition in B2B companies: the implication of designing new objects (e.g. services, business, organisational systems) and the requirements of creating new sets of skills to make a transition happen. Ulises Navarro Aguiar investigates the integration of service design approaches in the context of the product design department at Volvo Group. In his contribution, he describes the transition of design from traditional design disciplines, like industrial and graphic design, towards new disciplines like Service & UX Design, and System & Policy Design, in today’s post-industrial economy. The focus of his research is how actors at Volvo are seeking to drive this transition. He highlights the relation between the new design disciplines and network formation. The roles and values of the different actors are in transition too, and are being negotiated, tested, contested and legitimised through a series of interactions involving artifacts and rhetoric in projects and presentations. In order to explain current hidden practices of innovation, and to create a new understanding of design in B2B companies, it is important to understand the manner in which design roles and values are constructed. This chapter helps researchers to understand the practical implications of Buchanan’s order of design. The transition from one order to another is more than a mere conceptual shift; it is a close interplay between the new design objects and the roles and values of the actors in the design process.
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For practitioners, it provides a perspective on the challenge of introducing a new form of design thinking and doing so particularly in a B2B manufacturing context. Andreas Benker reflects on the change of development processes towards greater user-centredness, in the medical device department of Philips. In his contribution, he describes how new standards and regulations became major forces in the healthcare sector to implement user-centred design practices in established development processes. Change towards a new development approach takes time, has to be carefully managed from the top down, and is played out on the operational level by people responsible for the processes as well as the actual design implementation. To build up the required design capabilities that focus more on users, in addition to the necessary but already existing focus on technology in this industry, is a major shift for business-to-business companies. It requires the sensitising of individuals as well as the introduction of new skills and methods. In his research, Andreas Benker has identified two dimensions of the transition. Firstly, the interplay between processual change (establishing formal processes) and individual learning (capability on the doing level) promotes change. Secondly, acquiring knowledge from external sources as well as promoting knowledge creation within the organisation facilitates the establishment of new design capabilities. There are still research gaps on how to incorporate a designerly way of thinking and doing into existing development processes, or how to change these processes accordingly. The implications for practitioners lies in the understanding that in order to facilitate the establishment of new design capabilities, they need to manage the interplay between formal process description, the introduction of external vs. the development of internal skills, the sensitising of development team members, and iterative learning from ongoing projects. From the perspective of someone in a business-to-business company, there is still a huge demand on research to understand the various challenges of practitioners in industry and to give guidance to address these. The first challenge is how to get the transition started. Not all managers and deci-
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sion-makers in business-to-business companies have a clear understanding of the new aspects and importance of design. In many companies, designers are still looking for persuasion strategies to create awareness and interest on the upper management level as the basis for initiating the transition from technology-orientated towards design-orientated. As to the next level – the active transition – explicit guidance based on research is also still missing, when it comes to how to manage the transition efficiently and effectively. Transitions like this lead to radical changes in companies, implying time and money and the existence of great uncertainty and perceived risk. Understanding the needs of the various and complex networks of stakeholders in B2B companies, and creating a desirable, feasible and viable new business structure also needs iterations of ideating, prototyping and testing. And here comes the final challenge – how to test the outcome of the transition in order to learn for improvement and to measure the impact? In order to make academic research more valuable for practitioners in industry, the way practitioners and researchers collaborate will have to change and become designerly, which means: obtaining an all-round understanding of the status of industry, uncovering the critical and hidden needs of practitioners, and ideating, building, testing and iterating solutions that are desirable, feasible and viable.
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PROCESSES Anna Rylander Eklund + Andrew Whitcomb Sara Jane Gonzalez Veronica Bluguermann + Kathryn Best
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PROCESSES
PROCESSES Design is about creating experiences for people. Traditionally, this has been through products or visuals. But what happens when the designer’s expertise is instead focused on processes of bringing people together, and aiming to create new ideas collaboratively? This section presents insights from three different research projects that explore the use of design methods, skills and tools in such contexts. Andrew Whitcomb describes the tensions that have arisen with organisational members in projects he has been involved in, drawing attention to the importance of engaging with the ongoing practices of people and organisations. Sara Jane Gonzalez lets us in on how the Future Concept Lab turns research into practice by helping their clients generate consumer-led innovation. Veronica Bluguermann shares her experiences from running a series of workshops with public-sector decision-makers, concluding that the value of design methods is not as much in the outcome as in experiencing the process. Therefore, to have real impact, design needs to be embedded in the core of organisations’ strategies and values. Finally, Kathryn Best, author of some of the real classics of the Design Management literature, reflects on the texts in this section and what they imply for the future of the field. Design plus Management, she argues, implies conceiving and organising in new ways. Anna Rylander Eklund
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/PROCESSES
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PROCESSES
+
SPOTTING FIRES IN THE WILD: LESSONS FROM FRICTION IN COLLABORATIVE DESIGNING
+
Andrew Whitcomb
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PROCESSES
ANDREW WHITCOMB Andrew is a Research Fellow at the Swedish design consultancy Veryday and a PhD candidate at HDK – the School of Design and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Through his research project with Veryday, he explores design practices for engaging collaborators across physical and digital encounters. Andrew holds a BFA in Visual Art from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University. In his professional practice, he has worked with communication design in the public sector as an inhouse designer for the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh.
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SPOTTING FIRES IN THE WILD: LESSONS FROM FRICTION IN COLLABORATIVE DESIGNING A rapidly growing area of design focuses on shaping services and organisations, increasing the need for design approaches suited to the dynamic practices of people’s lives. Yet designers often seek to foster change in organisations through discrete events that offer limited potential to engage the practices shaping how people value certain courses of action over others. This chapter draws upon three cases from collaborative design projects in order to explore how frictions emerge among the day-to-day practices of organisations. The findings suggest that reflecting on moments where frictions between practices arise can highlight the ongoing processes influencing what people value. In turn, accounting for frictions among practices can inform the development of design engagement approaches that effectively open up alternative courses of action by working with the valuing that people do in their daily lives.
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INTRODUCTION
Have you participated in a design brainstorm, workshop, or jam session recently? If you are reading this book, my guess is that you probably have. Designers have long used such formats to bring people together and hash out visions of the future. Yet people and organisations have practices that exist before and after collaborative events. Indeed, the action of daily life ‘in the wild’ sets the stage for when and where collaboration happens, who participates in it, and what issues those people address. Today, as design practitioners increasingly focus on changing services, strategies, and even organisations, they need to step back from engaging people and find ways of working with the day-to-day moves of valuing certain courses of action over others. In line with the theme of our section – Processes – rather than focusing on the outcomes of design, in this chapter I investigate how designers engage with the ongoing practices of people and organisations. By providing glimpses into three different projects that in some way tried to engage collaboration, I show how friction emerges when the practices from different organisations rub against each other. Although a potentially discomforting process, I suggest that identifying and reflecting on the frictions among practices can be an important guide for shaping desirable futures. Indeed, the findings I present open the door for new forms of collaboration that explicitly aim to engage the values guiding design processes.
BACKGROUND: ENGAGING PEOPLE AND PRACTICES IN DESIGN.
A growing amount of professional design work revolves around shaping not just an end product or service, but also the processes, strategies, and structures within organisations. Over the years, both systems perspectives and anthropological studies of organisations have highlighted how designing extends beyond product development, engineering, or marketing departments. Additionally, design processes often begin long before anyone with the title of “designer” gets involved, and continue well after they leave. In response, designers have developed a number of ways to engage the various stakeholders connected to design processes. - 60 -
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For instance, in the 1970s and 1980s, participatory designers began using prototypes, mock-ups, and scenarios to bring the skills and expertise of ‘end-users’ forward into the exploratory phases of design projects (Ehn, 1990). By creating situations for people to show how and why they approach their work in certain ways, designers could develop products that fit with – rather than make obsolete – the skills workers have developed throughout their careers. More recently, approaches such as participatory innovation have emerged. Building on participatory design’s heritage, designers following a participatory innovation approach seek to facilitate ideas moving among stakeholders from event to event (Buur & Matthews, 2008). Indeed, nowadays a large part of design work involves setting the stage so “everyone can make design moves and be part of exploring and negotiating views in order to create common images of possible futures and the prospective design work” (Brandt, 2006, p. 64). As such, informed in large part by participatory approaches to design, a core activity for contemporary designers involves engaging and even facilitating stakeholder participation in design processes. Looking beyond the project, designers have also started working with engagement on the scale of communities and organisations. Design approaches such as “infrastructuring” (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2012) or “meta-design” (Fischer, 2003) aim to establish systems of support for open-ended and ongoing participation. For instance, in describing a process of developing ICT for a co-housing development for seniors, Botero and Hyysalo (2013, p. 40) suggest that “design engagements should begin not in the studio or in concept design workshops but in the practices, infrastructures and development trajectories of people who come together to become the ‘clients’, ‘users’ and ‘designers.’ The set-ups that surround all those who engage in a project largely govern what is sensible to design and how to do it”. The foundation for each of the perspectives presented above resides in the recognition that people bring different expertise and practices into the design process, which influences the outcomes of designing. In line with this view, scholars have suggested that researchers focus not on the design
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MINING VS. SHARING PRACTICES
activity of individuals, but on design activity as a messy combination of minds, things, bodies, structures, processes, and agencies (Kimbell, 2012). Following a practice perspective on design, in this chapter I step back from individual interactions to explore the context where each design project played out. In doing so, I draw attention to how the actions and perspectives that emerge within different groups shape what counts as a valuable design outcome – just as much as individual people.
SHORT STORIES OF FRICTIONS BETWEEN PRACTICES
Each of the three projects in this section departed from a desire to develop approaches for engaging people in collaborative design based on open-ended participation that spans physical and digital environments. For each of these mini-cases, I highlight the context of the project, an incident that reveals frictions among the practices of groups involved, and a brief reflection on how the situation reveals the values at play in the engagement. Rather than presenting in-depth analyses, I provide brief glimpses into the projects as a way to open up reflection and discussion about how designers might engage the practices of the people and organisations they work with.
The Family Bike Life campaign was a 10-week side project of a year-long research effort called the Lead User Innovation Lab (LUIL). Funded by a grant from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems, VINNOVA, the LUIL responded to their call for the development of methods that engage lead users (von Hippel, 1986) to drive innovation within companies. The Family Bike Life project team consisted of two Master’s students and myself – a first-year PhD student at the time. After some initial briefings with the project leaders of the LUIL, the three of us undertook an effort to engage the online crowd in co-creation activities as a way to identify lead users and other potential user-collaborators. Dubbed internally as the “digilab” team we departed from a common interest in opening up design and innovation through online tools. To support our efforts to find lead users, our team came up with the plan to run an online pop-up research campaign that we called Family Bike Life. Through a variety of online platforms – a website, a Facebook page, Twitter account, and e-mail address – we launched an effort to reach out and ask about the challenges people experience while bicycling as a family. We even created some friendly illustrations to give our campaign a welcoming visual identity. The campaign fostered a modest level of engagement with the online family biking crowd, reaching about 70 “Likes” on Facebook. Indeed, through-
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out the project we only received a handful of responses to our prompts – until one morning during the last week of the campaign. Right before our final communication blast we received a new post on our Family Bike Life Facebook wall (Figure 1). The author of the post had started following our page the previous week and even responded to some of the questions we posed to the online crowd. The provocative post served a vital role in helping us realise that we had not clearly communicated the goals and stakeholders of the project. After reviewing the post, however, we realised that the author and another person who engaged in the exchange came to our page through their membership in another online group – a place where people were sharing family bicycling experiences for a crowdsourced documentary. Looking at this online group revealed a community of individuals who freely shared tips and tricks, lessons, and
ideas amongst themselves. Our branding, which obscured our intentions and identity, and our repeated prompts for participation did not gel with a community of people who shared with each other based on similar values and lifestyles. The friction created by this tension led to someone raising serious questions about our intentions.
EXPLORATORY VS. DIRECTED PRACTICES
Running for approximately six months, The People’s Supermarket (TPS) project involved collaborating with a social enterprise seeking to provide high quality food at an affordable price to its surrounding community. Initially formed as a member-run cooperative, over the years TPS had gone through several changes in its leadership and organisational status, resulting in uncertainty of the purpose, direction, and operation of the organisation. Our team of four DESMA Early Stage Researchers came in with
Figure 1: A post we received during the Family Bike Life project that shined light on our team’s values.
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Figure 2: The People’s Research blog that we launched became a key indicator of the mismatch between our practices as a project team, and the practices of the supermarket’s leadership. the aim of supporting the members of the organisation in exploring their current challenges and determining where the supermarket should go in the future. After our team formed in March, the project ran for five months during the spring and summer of 2014. Committed to conducting our research in collaboration with the members of the organisation, we made a proposal outlining our research aims and an open-ended approach that we would shape in collaboration with the members of the supermarket. Over the course of the project we wound up making several efforts to explain what we could offer the supermarket, yet each time we were asked for more specific details regarding what we would deliver. Already, from the early stages of the project we encountered friction between the way we presented our work and the way the organisational leadership worked.
The tensions came to a head after our second visit to the supermarket. Over the course of our research we had interviewed a few members, volunteered on the shop floor, and run a short activity at the monthly members’ meeting. Through these activities we recognised different and occasionally competing values among members of the organisation, which we wanted to explore further. To support open dialogue about the outcomes of the activity, we created a blog (Figure 2) for sharing our results and receiving feedback from the members. Before long, however, the blog became a sensitive issue. We were asked to host it through the supermarket’s website, which could be password protected for privacy. As a research team, however, we felt the need to keep an open platform for engaging people during the project. Shortly after we shared our position regarding the blog with the director, he suggested that we put the project on hold until the supermarket had implemented a new membership programme – an initiative perfectly aligned with the offering we outlined for the research collaboration.
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The incident with the blog revealed contrasting perspectives on how and why to engage the members of the supermarket in the project. Establishing a direction for the project appeared critical to the leadership – who described the process as getting people on board a train that needed to get to the next station. In contrast, we wanted an open forum to explore and deliberate on possible directions the supermarket could take. During the project, we even heard directly from some members who did not agree with the direction the leadership wanted for the organisation. As a research team, we sought to engage all of these perspectives. However, such an open approach did not fit neatly with the practices of alignment and direction sought by the leadership of the supermarket.
MEDIATED VS. FACE-TO-FACE PRACTICES
The Internal Methods Project took place over about six months within the Swedish design and innovation consultancy Veryday. The project aimed to explore the different perspectives on methods existing within the company, and develop resources that communicate how Veryday approaches design. With a strong heritage in industrial design, the company now employs a range of designers working in human-centred design research, digital, product, and service design, as well as business transformation and innovation. As such, a number of different approaches and perspectives exist within the company about how to go about designing. Our three-person team – an experienced design researcher, a young member of the communications team, and myself – set out on an effort to engage people in the office in a discussion about the ways that they approach design.
Figure 3: Our passive forms of engagement, such as posting to the internal social network, did not fit the active and personal ways people engage with each other in the office.
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Conducting the project internally, we needed to navigate the day-to-day realities of the organisation. In response to the fluctuating demands faced by designers around the office – unexpected requests for proposals, shifts in deadlines, etc. – we chose to engage people through unobtrusive spaces and platforms. For instance, in seeking participation for a series of co-creation workshops called the “Friday Fika Forum,” we posted flyers in a public area of the office, announced the event at all-staff meetings, sent out several e-mail invitations, and posted summaries on the internal social network platform (Figure 3). Over the course of the project we had relatively low attendance at our events, usually around a handful of people. At one point in the project, however, we decided to send targeted invitations for a select group of people to participate in a concept generation workshop. Prior to the workshop, we emailed invites and followed up with several people in person. When the time came only two people arrived to participate. Both participants, however, held more senior positions than the two of us hosting the workshop. They quickly decided to go around the office, visiting people directly at their desks and inviting them to participate. Within 10 minutes we had over 10 people join the session.
Engaging people through the internal social media platform, printed materials, and at all-staff meetings yielded low participation in our events. These forms of engagement were mediated, and did not involve face-to-face discussion with people. As project demands emerged, or internal training efforts took place, people prioritised other activities over ours. The strong response to the rally call from the seniors highlighted the mismatch between our forms of engagement and the practices of the organisation. People around the office valued the direct request of leaders approaching them in person. Indeed, throughout the project, we learnt that engaging with people in face-to-face interaction – even if that meant disrupting work – would lead to much more active involvement.
EXPLORING FRICTIONS TO REVEAL VALUES
Although the goals were different in each situation, the issues that emerged in these three cases draw attention to how our approach to engagement rubbed up against existing practices of communities and organisations. As other researchers investigating participatory approaches have noted, design engages overlapping communities-of-practice (Ehn, 2008). Indeed, the situations presented here display how we not only engaged individuals, but found friction between our practices of engagement and the practices of the groups we sought to engage.
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Rather than looking at how people learn, share, and construct together in an event or project, these lessons draw attention to how practices shape designing over time. Reviewing how frictions emerge among ongoing forms of engagement offers the potential to reveal, or make apparent, values in organisations and communities – values that influence how designing happens. For instance, in the Family Bike Life project we encountered a community with a history of learning based on member-driven contributions. People accepted into the community freely shared lessons, insights, and experiences about their bicycling lifestyles. The friction that arose when we entered the community with our requests for participation revealed different values at work in our practices. Our design team had organised around the search for information. Additionally, from my perspective as a graphic designer, it made sense to develop a sleek visual identity for the campaign. Yet these practices led to the impression that we were not participating in the community – we were trying to “mine” it. Experiencing the situation, we encountered the difference between organising around shared passions and organising around innovation for business. Similarly, with The People’s Supermarket and the Internal Methods projects we encountered different values at work in the way people organised. Our engagements revealed practices organised around values such as ‘clear direction’ or ‘face-to-face contact.’ As such, the frictions in practices reveal lessons that can ground design efforts directly targeting change in services and organisations. In describing the change of cultural contexts – i.e. the practices of organisations – design scholar Richard Buchanan (1998, p. 16) suggests that transformation departs from “discovering the core idea, values, and thought which organise a culture or system and propel it forward in a new search for expression in appropriate activities and products.” Reviewing the frictions that arise when practices rub against each other represents one way to begin opening up the values fostered by different practices, and reflecting on how they could be organised differently.
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CONCLUSION
When describing design processes, academics and practitioners alike frequently stress the importance of collaboration. As such, events that bring together diverse stakeholders have taken centre stage in designing. Additionally, designers continuously develop new tools for bringing out people’s creativity, skills, and expertise during co-design events and projects. However, when we shift the focus from the people participating in design to the practices of organisations and communities, we can find forces beyond the individuals that shape design processes, and ultimately, design outcomes. By accounting for the frictions among the practices involved in design projects, designers can identify and engage the values of organisations and communities. The short cases presented here represent just one small step toward working with practices. Moving forward, designers need to develop resources for recognising, reflecting on, and working with frictions between practices. In doing so, we can engage more constructively with the often overlooked daily activities shaping how people – ourselves included! – make judgments about the future.
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REFERENCES
Bjögvinsson, E., Ehn, P., Hillgren, P.-A. (2012). Design
Kimbell, L. (2012). Rethinking Design Thinking:
Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Partici-
Part II. Des. Cult. 4, 129-148. doi:10.2752/17547081
patory Design Challenges. Des. Issues 28, 101-116.
2X13281948975413.
doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00165. von Hippel, E. (1986). Lead Users: A Source of Botero, A., Hyysalo, S. (2013). Ageing together: Steps
Novel Product Concepts. Manag. Sci. 32, 791-805.
towards evolutionary co-design in everyday practices.
doi:10.2307/2631761.
CoDesign 9, 37-54. doi:10.1080/15710882.2012.760608. Brandt, E. (2006). Designing exploratory design games: a framework for participation in Participatory Design?, in: Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Participatory Design: Expanding Boundaries in Design - Volume 1, PDC ’06. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 57-66. doi:10.1145/1147261.1147271. Buchanan, R. (1998). Branzi’s Dilemma: Design in Contemporary Culture. Des. Issues 14, 3-20. doi:10.2307/1511825. Buur, J., Matthews, B. (2008). Participatory Innovation. Int. J. Innov. Manag. 12, 255-273. doi:10.1142/ S1363919608001996. Ehn, P. (2008). Participation in design things, in: Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008, PDC ’08. Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA, pp. 92-101. Ehn, P. (1990). Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. L. Erlbaum Associates Inc., Hillsdale, NJ, USA. Fischer, G. (2003). Meta-design: Beyond user-centered and participatory design, in: Proceedings of HCI International. pp. 88-92.
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SHAKING CONSULTANCY PRACTICE: FROM RESEARCH TO INNOVATION
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Sara Jane Gonzalez
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SARA JANE GONZALEZ Sara has a degree in Industrial Design from Icesi University (Cali, Colombia) and a Master’s Degree in Business Design from Domus Academy (Milan, Italy). Her experience ranges from product, service and retail design to brand management and design management research. Sara joined DESMA at Future Concept Lab, a consultancy partner based in Milan. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering (DIG) at the Politecnico di Milano. She is passionate about the human-centred approach and researching methods facilitating collaboration between external sources and organisations to produce innovation. Her research interest includes design thinking, design-driven innovation, co-creation and the radical innovation of meanings.
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SHAKING CONSULTANCY PRACTICE: FROM RESEARCH TO INNOVATION Design and management fields explore different approaches for consultancy in innovation. The consumer-led innovation approach focuses on innovation based on deep understanding of consumer needs and insights and the use of consumer-centric methodologies. This chapter shares some observations after experiencing an innovation process at Future Concept Lab, a company that harnesses its extensive experience in marketing research and offers consultancy in innovation. The analysis aims to identify the main similarities with and differences from other consultancy practices’ focus on consumer-led innovation, and to identify some opportunities at the level of process, tools and approach.
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INTRODUCTION
Innovation has become a key competitive advantage in nearly every business sector. Organisations are facing the constant challenge to innovate and introduce to the market new products and services at an ever faster speed. Consumers are more demanding, expecting new and better experiences from companies’ offers. Thanks largely to the Internet, consumers have been increasingly engaging themselves in an active and explicit dialogue with the manufacturers of products and services (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000). With a wide range of communication tools, consumers have moved from being a passive audience to being active players, both in consumption and innovation. In particular, from a consumer (or market-pull) perspective, firms put consumers at the centre of the innovation process, which encompasses different stages from ideation to implementation. The main difference from other perspectives (e.g. Technology-push or Meaning-push) is that strategies emerge from analysis and understanding of people’s needs and behaviour. The undeniable importance of consumers in innovation has been studied over time, giving rise to different approaches in academia where scholars from design and management fields have focused on topics related to human-centred design, such as user-centred, consumer-driven, customer-centric customer integration, and user-driven innovation, among others. Acknowledging consumers’ major role in innovation, the interest in consumer-led approaches has been
widespread, not only academically. Recently, some firms have implemented user involvement or consumer integration in their innovation processes, using methods that allow them to obtain information that does not emerge from marketing techniques or R&D activities. In addition, a wide range of consultancy firms has shown interest in consumer-led innovation, including entries from marketing, design and management. The success of major firms such as IDEO, Fjord and Continuum has been key in showing the potential of the intersection between design, consumer research and innovation while using a human-centred approach. I have focused my research on the consultancy context, specifically studying the activity since 2012 of Future Concept Lab. Future Concept Lab (FCL) is a research institute and consultancy in innovation based in Milan, Italy. Founded twenty-five years ago by sociologists Francesco Morace and Linda Gobbi, FCL offers services to companies and institutions around the world on consumer research, coolhunting, trend foresight, international observatories, future scenario development and training for innovation. In this chapter, in line with the section theme “experiencing processes”, I share some information regarding my observations of the process followed by Future Concept Lab in projects developed within the last three years for different industries (e.g. digital/electronics, paper goods, consumer goods, fashion industry) and the analysis of the portfolio of the company of the projects developed before my arrival.
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FROM MARKETING RESEARCH FOCUS TO INNOVATION FOCUS
It is common that some creative design firms, market research institutes and management consultancies have linked their activities and services to innovation in recent years due to the growing interest of clients in developing innovative solutions. By looking into the Future Concept Lab story, the different methodologies the company uses for developing the projects and new services they offer, it is possible to understand how the initial approach was a focus on marketing research, conducting quantitative and qualitative research to study consumer behaviour. From the beginning, FCL has harnessed the knowledge on sociology to conduct research, and used social sciences research methodologies including ethnography, observation, interviews, focus group, survey, product testing, etc. These methodologies became in-house research programmes or “tools�, which constitute the base of FCL’s constant research activity, including two programmes created in 1995: MindStyles and StreetSignals. Some research programmes were transformed into operational and functional services and the commercial activities were focused on selling valuable information to companies about their consumers and brands, through research reports, macro and micro trends reports, qualitative analysis, brand check-ups, quantitative data, Delphi research, coolhunting reports, etc. For this reason, the company is recognised as a leading research institute, where the training in and sharing of valuable information represent a fundamental part of the services provided by the company. In recent years, FCL activity sharpened a focus on innovation and how to help companies to create new products and services using the information supported by research evidence in a strategic manner. From 2001, new services were introduced (e.g. the Lab, Fast Track) to enlarge the consultancy activity beyond the sharing of information, to the point of developing ad hoc analysis, stimulation of new ideas and concepts, future scenarios and possible directions. This enlargement of the services and programmes of the company brought the need of understanding how to apply the information gained during FCL research activity and generate a more strategic
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Figure 1: Research programmes and Consultancy services offered by FCL.
application of the in-house research methodologies, adding to research reports, practical guidelines on how to turn information and insights into innovative products and services. The transition from a focus on marketing research as a research institute to a focus on strategic directions as a consultancy in innovation has influenced the activity developed by FCL internally (Figure 1). I will share observations on how the process of research and consultancy is conducted in practice, by highlighting some similarities and differences between FCL and other consultancy firms focused on consumerled innovation. Most important, however, is a discussion of some key opportunities identified at the level of process, tools and the approach followed by the company.
CONSUMER-LED INNOVATION As mentioned above, there are different approaches from academia and practice to studying and applying market-pull innovation. Different labels have been created in design and management fields to refer to consumer-centric processes that recognise and enhance the active role of consumers and their involvement in innovation. Even though all of them refer to people, there are some differences between research streams and domains around the definitions of users, customers and consumers, sometimes related to the stage of the process in which they are being considered (e.g. user vs. customer in service design practice). For the purpose of this chapter, I have decided to focus on the consumer-user as innovator. Consumer users – users of consumer goods – are typically individual end customers or a
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community of end users who buy goods or use services to satisfy personal needs (von Hippel, 2005; Bogers et al., 2010). Consumer-users live and enjoy the innovation process and they represent a group of consumers that is ahead in facing needs before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them. This definition is pretty close to the concept of Consum-authors developed by FCL in 2008, with some similar characteristics to consumer-users: consum-authors were recognised as “creative enterprises�. Previous studies explored the role of consumerusers in innovation by providing companies with evidence that users innovate, some of the critical inputs that they need to develop, and market products that better meet customers’
needs (Burns & Stalker, 1961; Myers & Marquis, 1969; Rothwell, 1977). They argue that users can be sources of innovation (von Hippel, 1988) and that consumers can be involved in the innovation process through cooperation with companies in terms of an intensive interaction (Enkel et al., 2005; Rohrbeck et al., 2010). In this chapter, by consumer-led innovation I am referring to innovation where consumer-users are placed at the heart of the innovation process, where ideas for developing new products and services emerge from input and insights about consumer behaviour and needs. Figure 2 illustrates how Future Concept Lab supports the consumer-led innovation pro-
Figure 2: FCL consumer-led innovation process
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cess. There is a previous stage in the process of alignment to define main objectives and to plan research activities (i.e. people involved in the project, methodologies, locations, logistics, briefs, etc.). This phase is often conducted only by the senior researchers of the company and in some cases is supported by secondary research using online resources, publications, statistics and previous FCL material. The initial stage of the process of observation looks at collecting information regarding the behaviour, needs, values and ways of thinking of consum-authors in different contexts. For this stage, FCL uses a network of correspondents such as coolhunters, cultsearchers and researchers who gather data using on-the-spot observation or in-depth research methodologies related to general concepts relevant for the project (e.g. urban context, domestic highlights, product scouting, shopping experiences, working environment, life organisation). This phase constitutes the broadest part of the process in terms of opening, external sources involvement, and amount of information collected. The next phase is analysing the data collected, organising and regrouping information, and capturing main insights. In some cases, clients interact with the team before the final step, using meetings to share progress and receive their input. Only researchers conduct subsequent analysis and interpretation. Coolhunters and cultsearchers deliver information and insights but do not participate in the following steps of the process. The last phase is interpretation which aims to develop useful guidelines, strategic directions, new concepts and/
or future scenarios. The company develops this part of the process internally and it ends with the presentation of final results to the client.
SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES
If we consider the consultancy context, there is a growing number of companies from marketing, design and management (e.g. Brainjuicer, TNS Global, IDEO, Fjord, Continuum, Frog, McKinsey, Deloitte) following processes to produce consumer-led innovation. There are some similarities between the process followed by Future Concept Lab and others: 1. Innovation is created through research. The process aims to provide companies with insights that do not come from in-house marketing and R&D activities, but that need an outside-in perspective that research methodologies provide. 2. The process is consumer-centred. Main data collected emerges from consumer-users, and the interpretation to generate new concepts is based on consumer insights. 3. Social sciences and design converge. Many consultancy firms use methods and professionals from these two fields to conduct their consumer-led innovation process.
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At the same time, looking at the process implemented at FCL, it is possible to identify some aspects that are different from other consumerled approaches: 1. The sociological approach of Future Concept Lab (supported by in-house research programmes) aims to conduct observation and analysis regardless of the consultancy activity. FCL generates additional information regarding paradigms, collective imagination, cultural differences, macro and micro trends that is not limited to a particular business sector, but that provides relevant information supporting the development of projects. 2. A large-scale observation enables a different level of analysis that is not only focused on identifying consumer insights, but on capturing and interpreting major changes in societies (from consumer-driven to society-driven interpretation).
OPPORTUNITIES IN A RESEARCH-TO-CONSULTING TRANSITION
In the following section, I elaborate on three different opportunities identified at the level of process, tools and approach, which emerge after studying the FCL process. These considerations are restricted to the experience of Future Concept Lab, however they could be useful to other companies that are also experiencing a transition from research (or other activities) to consultancy on innovation. Regardless of the innovation approach and perspective used in practice, from the clients’ perspective the overall innovation process to create new products and services encompasses different phases from inspiration, ideation, implementation, until the point of commercialisation. By looking at the process followed by Future Concept Lab, it is possible to identify that it is strictly related to the initial stages of this process, in particular a large phase is dedicated to inspiration (observation and insights) and some early-stage ideation (scenarios and concepts). However, there is a big portion of the process that is not followed by the company, including the design phase, generation and selection of ideas related to new concepts and future scenarios, prototyping and implementation (Figure 3). Very often, these phases are developed by the clients using other consultancy services with or without FCL’s participation, thus in some cases
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Figure 3: Innovation process vs. FCL consumer-led innovation process. is difficult to link final outcomes to the FCL process. Most clients recognise the experience of a research institute in FCL’s services, but still clients often involve a third party to achieve the development of innovation. This is reflected in the projects that finish at future scenario development after which they involve a creative firm (e.g. a design studio). It is also reflected in the large number of companies that work with FCL only through another consultancy (e.g. a communication agency), which then continues the process and gives life to the final product or service. Thus, one of the main opportunities in the transition to link research to consultancy in innovation is to extend the company’s participation in the later stages of the process. By expanding the coverage of the process, there are some opportunities also at the level of tools and methods. As described above, most of the tools used by FCL are based on social science techniques that today are also applied in design research. Some others were developed by the team to support FCL’s process of observation and interpretation. However, FCL’s process may benefit significantly from some unexplored design methods. This is the case when it comes
to brainstorming or co-creation sessions aiming to transform insights and concepts into ideas to test. It is also the case in prototyping using mock-up, role-play, storyboards and experience maps to discuss and evaluate tangible ideas. There are also opportunities to create new in-house methodologies for the phases not yet covered. In both cases, it is necessary to include design tools and integrate them into the process at the same level as other research methodologies. This is especially true because research tools are very strong in the early stages as experienced by FCL, but do not cover all the needs in the most creative phases. Finally, I would like to close with an opportunity in terms of approach based on my personal experience as a researcher during the past three years at FCL. From the beginning of the project, my research has been focused on the understanding of the process and methods followed by the company. However, by asking simple research questions I realised how easy it was for the team to describe what FCL is (“a research institute and consultancy in innovation”), but how difficult it was to explain what they do and how they do it. It is important to
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mention that except for one member, at the moment I joined FCL, all the researchers had more than ten years in the company. They were all very familiar with each other and they all knew how to conduct projects even if it was difficult to explain the processes behind them. By immersing myself in the day-to-day activities, following consultancy projects, conducting different workshops and interviews to discuss these topics, and exploring other alternatives (e.g. Mind maps, Lego 3D models, Mapping and positioning tools, etc.) we all managed to communicate what was difficult to explain using words. However, reflections on process and methods were affected constantly by the lack of a common understanding of the approach followed by FCL. There were some contradictions between the purpose of conducting research and the practice of developing innovation, as well as the idea of “natural causality” between these two (“by doing research, innovation is produced”). My role as a researcher looking into theory and practice allowed me to understand how important it was to define whether FCL
activity was close to “user innovation”, “humancentred design”, “market research” or a mix of several approaches, considering the implications the approach has on my unit of analysis. The importance of the definition of approach does not lie in positioning the company with competitors or forcing a correlation between theory and practice, but on the relevance of the approach when it comes to guiding internal activities and describing externally to the clients what FCL’s offer consists of. When moving from research to consultancy, there is a need to define consultancy activities clearly, and to explain how the company helps clients to achieve innovation. In addition, once an approach is defined, there is an opportunity for ongoing exploration at different phases of the process, modifying roles, using new tools, using new alternatives to deliver outcomes and in measuring the impact of the changes applied. This exploration is based on a perspective that looks first at the approach. After that, changes in the process are decided, and finally the methods necessary
Figure 4: Current: from methods to approach vs. Opportunity: from approach to methods.
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to support such changes. This differs from the current strategy where the company looks at how to add tools and research programmes annually, and then integrates some of them into the process, finishing with the overall understanding of the consumer-led approach followed by the company (Figure 4). As a consequence, some of the new entries in terms of FCL’s services or tools are used only for a short period of time. Thus, the last opportunity identified regarding the definition of approach and how to connect with other levels may have an impact of the future strategy of the company.
CONCLUSION
The growing number of consumer-centred consultancy practices and academic studies offers a wide rage of information that helps to clarify the strategies used by companies in order to achieve consumer-led innovation. The identification of an approach is relevant for the definition of activities, services, processes, and methods and also helps to understand the process of transition from research, creative and management practices to consultancy in innovation. For companies that are facing these kinds of transitions, it is important to define where the process is similar to others, but most important to identify key differences to compete with and differentiate from others. Due to the challenges of developing innovation, it is also important to reflect on process, methods and approach when only covering a small part of the process. All changes may benefit company’s activities through the exploration of new alternatives, which represent the further opportunities for this research study.
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NOTES
innovators: A review, critique, and future research
monitoring of cultural influences (i.e. creative activities,
directions. Journal of Management, 36 (4): 857-875.
opinion leaders, mass media content) that shape the collec-
Bogers, M.; Afuah, A.; Bastian, B. (2010). Users as
MindStyles is a programme that focuses on consistent
tive imagination. StreetSignals is a programme that focuses Burns, T., & Stalker, G. M. (1961). The management of
on street observation of signs (i.e. fashion, consumption,
innovation. London: Tavistock.
retail, communication expressions) that represent the spontaneous behaviour of consumers.
Enkel, E., C. Kausch, and O. Gassmann. (2005). Managing the risk of customer integration. European
The Lab (2007) is a long-term tailor-made laboratory de-
Management Journal 23 (2): 203-13.
signed for integrating different FCL tools to support companies’ innovation through the implementation of specific
Myers, S., & Marquis, D. (1969). Successful indus-
projects. Fast Track (2012) is a short-term service aiming to
trial innovations. Washington, DC: National Science
answer specific questions and to support concretely compa-
Foundation.
nies’ innovation by mixing research and consultancy.
Prahalad, C.K., & Ramaswamy V. (2000). Co-opting
Consum-authors: Consumers who live and produce in-
Customer Competence, Harvard Business Review, 78/1
novation. With higher expectations in every field, they are
(January/February 2000): 79-87.
trendsetters and early adopters who identify opportunities before the average consumer. There are twelve generation
Rohrbeck, R., Steinhoff, F. and Perder. F. (2010). Sour-
nuclei that incarnate the creative condition of new consum-
ing innovation from your customer: How multinational
ers, and six types of consumption describing their main
enterprises use web platforms for virtual customer
characteristics (i.e. Convivial and shared, Archetypical,
integration. Technology Analysis and Strategic Man-
Transitive, Deconstructive, Vital memory and Consump-
agement 22 (2): 117-31.
tion of the occasion).
Rothwell, R. (1977). The characteristics of successful
Coolhunters are young creative people, usually freelancers,
innovators and technically progressive firms. R&D
who gather and report all those interesting (cool) expres-
Management, 3: 191-206.
sions emerging in the urban and domestic reality of a specific city where they live and work, giving photographic
von Hippel, E. (1988). The sources of innovation. New
and written evidence. Cultsearchers are creative profes-
York: Oxford University Press.
sionals but also young researchers, usually older and more experienced than coolhunters, who do not only gather in-
von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation, MIT
formation, but also give an interpretation to their findings
Press.
and turn them into insights. Researchers are the core team of FCL, professionals from design (e.g. graphic, interaction, fashion, product, business and concept design) and social sciences (e.g. sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, economists, communication experts, journalists) who develop projects by covering all phases of the process.
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Veronica Bluguermann
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VERONICA BLUGUERMANN Veronica is a Research and Service Designer at Living Labs Global, Denmark. Through her research project she explores design practices for engaging public sector agents in re-thinking problems. In addition, she manages the development process at the company. Veronica holds a BA in Industrial Design from Buenos Aires University and an MA in Strategic Design at Aalto University, Finland. She has more than ten years of working experience as a product and service designer and teaches Service Design at the IT University of Copenhagen.
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PANDORA’S BOX Companies already recognise design as a key factor in competitive advantage. However, in the last decade the design discipline has also increasingly been used when exploring opportunities to tackle complex challenges in the public sector, such as increased healthcare resources due to the ageing population, the effects of climate change, and economic crisis. Because of this increase in interest, numerous professional design firms, governmental units and academic programmes have started to offer different kinds of design services to the public sector. In addition, many publications in diverse formats (books, papers, toolkits) on how to use the methods, techniques and processes of design are also now available to a wide audience. In my project, hosted by Living Labs Global (LLG), I experienced first hand the introduction of design techniques to non-designers. This chapter will present my case studies consisting of ten workshops conducted with healthcare organisations in several European cities. These sessions gave me the opportunity to explore the use of design techniques for defining and re-defining problems as a way to envision solutions. Following the success of the first couple of workshops, interest in the sessions increased from both the company LLG, who saw them as a business opportunity, and healthcare organisations. The original idea, of using the workshops as research for exploring design methods to identify and define problems, resulted in its becoming one of the company’s main service offerings. In the following section, I will present some of the challenges and advantages of bringing a design approach to a management context.
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BACKGROUND
My research was based at Living Labs Global (LLG), a small organisation whose mission is to solve social and urban problems. Since 2009, LLG has run a programme offering the possibility to publish challenges provided by local governments or other public institutions. Each challenge is an open call for solving a specific problem. The concept is different from other crowdsourcing idea contests, because the process involves seeking solutions already de-
My initial research phase consisted of interviews with the LLG team, a first exploratory step for encountering the problem to be investigated. The team expressed the view that the success of the programme depended on the definition of the problem (or challenge) provided by the client organisation. The LLG team helps their clients to articulate the problem, since they believe that a well-defined challenge enhances the possibility of finding diverse and innovative
veloped and implemented around the world, to solve the published challenge. LLG believes that the benefit of this open process is that cities are able to acquire business intelligence that reduces the cost of the research and development needed to develop a solution from scratch. It also avoids reinventing solutions that have already been implemented elsewhere.
solutions on the market. It was at that point that I began to wonder, what is a well-defined problem? And furthermore, how do decision-makers make sense of a problem in order to define it? The difficulty with the promise to solve complex social and urban problems, using LLG’s process, lies in the definition what the problem is actually about. These types of problems are
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described by Rittel, Horst, and Webber (1973) in Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning as wicked problems. They are characterised as being difficult to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often hard to recognise. One of the main attributes highlights the indeterminacy of wicked problems; that they have no definite formulation, but that every formulation of a wicked problem corresponds to the formulation of a solution. Considering these characteristics, they argue that most of the problems addressed by designers are wicked problems. For example, if the task were to design a chair, the designer would start shaping it according to the requirements, such as: where it will be placed, who will be the user/s, which materials could be used, and of course, the designer’s own interpretation. Buchanan (1992) explains this looking for solutions as placements. “[Placements] allow the designer to position and reposition the problem and issues at hand. Placements are the tools by which a designer intuitively or deliberately shapes a design situation, identifying the views of all participants, the issues which concern them, and the invention that will serve as a working hypothesis for exploration and development.”
approach based on an exploratory and experimental process using participatory design methods. I designed a workshop to be conducted with different healthcare stakeholders, in which I introduced design techniques to help participants share different perspectives on problems and to help them envision solutions. I wanted to see what happened when design techniques for generating empathy, making sense of data, or exploring different meanings could help non-designers from different backgrounds to explore problems and solutions. After a few sessions, LLG saw these workshops as a potential business opportunity to engage customers in a more meaningful way. They were also seen as a possibility to gather a significant number of insights with the potential to become challenges suitable for publication on the company’s online platform. Subsequently, LLG started to offer the workshops as a service for identifying and finding solutions to challenges. I conducted ten sessions in different European cities with an average of fifteen participants in each session. The participants had diverse backgrounds such as healthcare practitioners, hospital administrators, health technology developers, etc., and from this LLG was able to publish over 100 challenges. However, this meant the workshop purpose changed from a research method to a service offering.
In this context, I was interested in introducing a design approach to trigger exploration for defining sets of problems to be matched with solutions. As opposed to LLG’s analytical process of describing the issue, I proposed an
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LESSONS LEARNT
1. The value of introducing design to nondesigners is in experiencing the process rather than focusing on the outcome. The workshops began as a design research method and a way of constructing new knowledge and participants were also able to gain value from experiencing the design process and techniques. What started as an experimentation and reflection on design techniques, developed into a service with the goal of having very clear outcomes. The focus of the sessions transformed into being more about the outcomes (quality and quantity of solutions) than what actually occurred during the process.
term “design thinking” as “methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos” (Brown, 2008). Furthermore, they claim that it is not necessary to be a designer to apply design thinking to create innovative ideas. The intention of my project was not this promise as such, but in the eyes of the participants this is what they perceived as the service offering. In some ways the promise was broken. As one of the workshop participants expressed it: “The topics or solutions found are very general, and I doubt if you really get new insights.”However, the participants expressed in the feedback questionnaire the opinion that the workshop presented a way of working that was new to them. Some of them stated the value of exploring problem definitions as: “looking into problems from other side,” and “staying in the problem and not jumping fast to solutions,” while others valued the process and methods used in the session as follows: “Methods used are nice and refreshing – good that we did not end up only talking and discussing.”
With such an objective, the promise is that by applying a design approach, we can achieve innovative solutions; a very trendy offering these days. The methods used by designers that help them understand the context and users, to manage complexity of information or explore opportunities, started to gain popularity in the management realm as a new wave of innovation practice. Companies such IDEO popularised the
“Meeting with people, finding new knowledge about finding new solutions.” “The different professional profiles from different organisations and that enrich the debate and a wide view.” I believe that the new move towards offering design as a technique for innovation in a busi-
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ness context reflects the earlier movement of ‘Design Science’, which can be traced back to ideas in the twentieth-century modernist movement of design. The design theorists stated that “in order to construct a new object we need a method, that is to say, an objective system.” Even though the methods might not be the same as the ones used in what we called design thinking today, the idea of replication to achieve certain outcome is what I want to highlight here. In Designerly Ways of Knowing, Cross (2006) says: “There may indeed be a critical distinction to be made: method may be vital to the practice of science (where it validates the results) but not to the practice of design (where results do not have to be repeatable, and in most cases must not be repeated or copied).” This happens because we give non-designers the techniques as if they were straight off the shelf. We have not uncovered the design of the method in the design process. I believe that designing the method and the tools is as important as applying them, and is something we lose when we give the participants everything already ‘digested’ for them. Often, the promise of applying design thinking is to achieve a result rather than to generate a designerly mind-set in an organisation, and this is important for tackling social and urban problems in the public sector. 2. Design should seek a place at the core of the organisation. Introducing design as a set of techniques for non-designers is an easy starting point that might lack impact in public organisations, and therefore in society. Junginger (2015) says: “the thought of design as a technique is appealing for many managers because a technique can be mastered, applied and controlled.” The risk, as she points out, is to apply these techniques randomly and not as part of a larger operational or strategic purpose. Whether introducing design as a set of techniques or the often stand-alone project (such as improving tax payment systems, or better appointment systems at hospitals), it might have little impact in the way public organisations operate if design is not embedded at the core of the organisation’s value and strategy.
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CONCLUSION
3. The designer’s role is misunderstood. Finally, this piece will finish with two considerations about the role of the designer. One view of the designer comes from the company. As LLG wanted to expand the service offering through the workshops, their ambition was to train other employees to serve as facilitators of the workshops. This suggests that the understanding of the designer is that he/she is like a performer, someone who is there to explain activities and facilitate interactions. However, the value of the designer in this case is the one that comes after the session, applying designerly ways of knowing to make sense of data. During synthesis, designers attempt “to organise, manipulate, prune and filter gathered data into a cohesive structure for information building” (Kolko, 2007). The other consideration is the view of the participants. When asking them at the beginning of the session “what is design?” the answers always had to do with the tangible outcome a designer produces: product, graphic, fashion, etc. However, the workshop’s feedback surveys showed the appreciation of the facilitation, someone who is able to challenge their thinking and propose a different way of working. I believe that this ‘promotion’ of a different designer role brings us, as designers, closer to a role of design in the public sector.
In classical Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman on Earth. As her wedding gift, she received a box (some say it was a jar). It was sealed, with a note that said: “do not open”. Eventually she did, releasing into the world death and many other evils. She hastened to close the container, but the whole contents had escaped except for one thing that lay at the bottom – Elpis (usually translated as “hope” or “expectation”). Today the phrase “to open Pandora’s box” means to perform an action that may seem small or innocent, but that turns out to have severely detrimental and far-reaching consequences. In this chapter, I shared my experience of “opening the design box”, meaning introducing a design approach to non-designers. I have reflected on the positive and negative consequences. And as the myth tells us, there is something left inside the box, the hope or expectation, that is for me the figure of the designer. During my case studies consisting of workshops, I shared the way that designers work. This was received with great enthusiasm and people could see the potential of applying the methods in their working lives. The methods and tools are understood and well accepted. But what about the designer? I think he/she is still inside the box.
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REFERENCES Rittel, Horst, and Webber (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. pp. 155-169, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Inc., Amsterdam. Cross, N. (2006). Designerly ways of knowing. London, UK: Springer Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues 8(2): 5-21. Junginger, S. Thoughts on Design as a Strategic Art, in Junginger, S. and Faust, J. (eds.) Designing Business, Bloomsbury, 2015: 37-49. Kolko, J. (2007). Information architecture: Synthesis techniques for the muddy middle of the design process. 23rd International Conference on the Beginning Design Student Proceedings. Savannah, GA. Brown, T. (2008). Design thinking (PDF). Harvard business review, 86(6), 84-92, 141.
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KATHRYN BEST Kathryn is an author, speaker and entrepreneur, with over twenty years’ experience in academia, architecture and design consultancy. Kathryn provides insight on the power and value of design as an enabler of positive change in business and society. She has worked extensively in Europe, Asia and the Americas, coaching and inspiring students and professionals at universities, conferences, design centres and government organisations. Her experience includes professional engagements with HOK, RTKL, WATG, Wolff Olins, Starbucks and Orange, a professorship at the Inholland University of Applied Sciences and academic positions at the University for the Creative Arts and the Royal College of Art. Kathryn is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (FRSA).
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Reflection
EXPERIENCING PROCESSES: A BRIEF REFLECTION By its very nature, design is a noun and a verb. To experience the results of design (the outcome/noun), it is not necessary to experience the process of design (the journey/verb). However, with the increase of collaborative and participative processes in our politics and societies, interactions and ideologies, and the challenges we face as humanity, feeling we have some say in where we are going is increasingly important. Much of the success of design thinking as an experiential process tool within organisations is to be celebrated. However, success can often come with unintended consequences, and for many designers, the short-term high of being taken seriously by business (design management 101 pre-2004) may well evolve into a greater awareness of what happens in a world where design has been ‘upsold’ so as to make everyone a designer. In which cases does design thinking put people at the heart of the experience, presumably in order to make things better for all of us and not just some of us? Are there cases in which design thinking is, in effect, giving morally bankrupt institutions an explicit ‘customer journey’ map with which to dehumanise and reduce the quality of our interactions to the benefit of ‘shareholder value’? Who are these people whom design is serving and making things better for – is it for all of us, as humanity, or not? Experiencing Processes ideally starts with an open and honest conversation with each other and with ourselves. What is the intention behind a particular project? Is this intention aligned with a sense of shared value? Do I want to align with this particular way of operating? Are these (short-term) measures the right ones for the nature of design? Should we challenge whether (long-term) quality of life issues are even measurable? Do we align to Design (an identity and process toolkit) or design to Align (a conscious choice and intent for the future)?
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Fortunately, the fresh research presented in this chapter on Processes leaves plenty of scope for being both serious and playful in how we can invent the future together and how we can take good care over the input design can bring to management decision-making and the strategic directions in which we are moving. Andrew Whitcomb’s contribution, Spotting Fires in the Wild: Lessons from friction in collaborative designing – a design collaboration, hashes out what shape the future should take. Participatory innovation and the opportunity for design to help change services, strategies and organisations inevitably comes with a daily level of friction between people and practices. This is often a catalyst for ensuring we shape more desirable futures (processes, strategies and structures within organisations) and not just the end result (product/service offer). Andrew Whitcomb reminds us that our differences are cause for celebration, not judgment, and that ‘people bring different expertise and practices into the design process, which influence the outcomes of designing.’ Sara Jane Gonzalez offers experiential insights into the relationship between research and consultancy in her contribution on Shaking Consultancy Practice: From Research to Innovation. Sara Jane investigates user-involvement, consumer-led innovation and innovation as a competitive advantage as practised within Milan-based Future Concept Lab (FCL). What processes do FCL use to develop new ideas and concepts, future scenarios and possible directions? What research methodologies can best turn information and insights into innovative products and services? We are taken on a journey of the design process, from brainstorming, co-creative sessions and consumer-centric processes in which people live and produce innovation; via the transformation of insights and concepts into ideas to test and prototype, mock-up and role-play; to the acts of storyboarding and experience mapping; and finally to the discussion and evaluation of tangible ideas.
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Veronica Blugermann’s contribution, Pandora’s Box, looks at the introduction of design as a set of techniques for non-designers in public organisations. In many parts of the world, the nature of public organisations is currently going through great political, societal and organisational transition. What are the opportunities and risks involved at an organisational level and beyond in seeing design as an applied technique, and not as a valuable contributor to debates on strategic purpose, value creation and operational intent? Veronica raises important questions about the possible roles of the designer as performer, facilitator and co-creative partner within public services. What could Experiencing Processes mean to us in the future? In the context of design plus management, 2015 is a time of great change, and design management may well need a considered redefinition so as to be in tune with the times in which we live. One of the shifts happening in several countries is the drift away from ‘old’ management (the organisation, coordination, command and control of activities and people) towards ‘new’ management (self-organising systems and reliance on agility, communication, collaboration and co-creation). What would a self-organising, designled entity look and feel like, and how could design processes be managed to maximise value creation? People are naturally creative, if they are allowed to be, and within selforganising systems, we are all creators, designers and makers of value. If design is about putting people at the centre of experiences and decisionmaking processes, then the opportunity for design (to conceive, invent, plan and build) management (to organise and coordinate) is to conceive and organise in new ways so as to empower more people to become creators, designers and makers of value. Whether we act as individuals, employees, citizens, or members of humanity, or operate within a ‘system’ called an organisation, a locality or a global community called planet earth, we could say that: Design + Management = Conceiving + Organising in new ways.
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Will it be easy to envision and implement how this might work? It will be spontaneous and messy for sure. It may also be quite a lot of fun. What will make it easier is to have a sense of purpose (for example improving all lives) and a destination (for example the wellbeing of all). Design management tools and processes could in that case very well catalyse new and courageous concepts, behaviours, visions and innovations. For example, how can we best facilitate and harness the innate talents and capabilities of anyone and everyone involved in a dynamic, creative and ongoing process of change? Let the spontaneity begin.
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MATTERS Toni-Matti Karjalainen + Ariana Amacker Fernando Pinto Santos + Barry Katz
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MATTERS Despite the positive impacts made by the expansion of the design thinking approach in organisations, the current design discourse sometimes seems to overlook the role and importance of physical products and the processes of making. There even appears to be a dualistic view in which design is regarded merely as a mental construct – a tool of creativity and innovation – and set apart from the physical practices of designing. In this section, two chapters aim to bring matter back to the core of design. Firstly, Ariana Amacker aims to bring into view the aesthetic and embodied dimensions of design practice and, by doing so, proposes that the mental and physical practices of design actually inform one another. She uses John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience and empirical work with movement-based practices from the performance arts. Secondly, Fernando Pinto Santos addresses the cases of Veen and Costo, companies that have clearly disregarded the dualism of mentality and matter – the symbolic brand and the physical product in particular. By challenging design dualism, these two chapters point out the need to explore different systems of design management, in which matter still matters. Toni-Matti Karjalainen
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THE ROLE OF THE BODY IN A DESIGN MIND-SET
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Ariana Amacker
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ARIANA AMACKER Ariana has practiced architecture in New York City and is currently based at the University of Gothenburg as an artistic researcher. Her PhD work is focused on testing body-based methods in design from an anti-dualistic stance of pragmatist philosophy. She is a member of The Collaboratory and has been working with performance artists exploring sensorial experiences. She is interested in perceptions of the ‘self’, learning and play, and neuroscience.
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THE ROLE OF THE BODY IN A DESIGN MIND-SET The idea of design thinking has enabled design to gain attention for its innovation potential in organisational and social contexts of practice. Meanwhile, the rhetoric on design thinking that suggests that design is no longer only about products or involving only designers, has provoked critical design research to try to determine what is core to design as a way of thinking. More exactly, this rhetoric has raised questions about what is core to design creativity, and in that respect researchers studying design thinking have emphasised a particular design mind-set of openness and exploration. In doing so, however, the tendency is to present a dualistic view of design as mental construct apart from the physical practices of designing. This chapter asks how the mental and physical practices of design actually inform one another. Instead of taking design as a kind of mind-set, my discussion here brings into view the aesthetic or embodied dimensions of design practice. This stems from my PhD research that draws on John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience, empirical work with movementbased practices fromthe performance arts, and in particular the Japanese experimental dance practice of Butoh. I propose that designers, in the same wayas Butoh practitioners, “think� and explore foremost through their bodily perceptions. The evidence presented shows that Butoh practice involves particular aesthetic criteria or bodily conditions of openness that foster a culture and philosophy of openness to experience. It is a mind-body practice of openness.
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INTRODUCTION
Designers are constantly facing questions about design’s value and methods. The general response that has emerged in design theory and practice over past decades is a case being made for design as a specific way of knowing (e.g. Cross, 2007; Frayling, 1993). Whereas the kind of knowledge that revolves around how designers do and think about things has been debated
core to design thinking. Although there is much confusion and debate around the essential nature of design thinking, researchers have consolidated two main components of design thinking from the literature (Hassi & Laakso, 2011). The first includes the tools and methods entailed in the actual practices or doing of design, and includes secondly an integrative and abductive cogni-
and referenced in different literatures (e.g. Schön, 1983; Lawson, 1983; Simon, 1969), the concept of ‘design thinking’ has recently gained attention in different social contexts of practice including management, since being promoted as boosting innovation (specifically Brown, 2008). This perception of design as a creative resource has spurred a current generation of research aimed at deepening an understanding of what is
tive style connected to a distinctive mind-set (Fraser, 2007; Lockwood, 2010; Carlgren, 2013). This design mind-set or “attitude” (Boland & Collopy, 2004), “mentality” (Hassi & Laakso, 2011), “gestalt” (Yoo, Boland Jr, & Lyytinen, 2006) as it is referred to, is characterised by a set of emotional and attitudinal characteristics towards work and the way in which designers respond to situations. This mind-set is claimed
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to be a central component of design thinking as an agent of change, by inclining designers to embrace discontinuity, ambiguity or open-endedness, to work fluently and flexibly, and to have practices that are experimental and explorative (Michlewski, 2008). Ultimately, the mind-set contributes to the opinion that design thinking is innovative by involving creative ways of perceiving and approaching problems and producing “breakthroughs” (e.g. Martin, 2009; Verganti, 2011). By posing questions in imaginative ways and being willing to take risks or being comfortable not knowing precisely what the outcome of the project will be, an explorative mind-set indicates that the practice of design itself is to some extent about changing mentalities, giving up established ways of thinking and working, and the ability to remain perceptually open. In other words, as a creative approach for innovation, a critical quality of a design mind-set lies in the fact that design practice itself cannot be captured or defined, but rather, it involves an attitudinal openness on the part of the designer towards learning new methods, ideas, and practices. So although the notion of a mind-set seems to say something about design, the aim of formalising design with this kind of mental construct still “risks relegating design skills to the vague realm of creativity” (Borja de Mozota, 2006, p.44). This discussion begs the question about how design activities, i.e., the concrete physical practices, actually inform the mental practices of openness and exploration.
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AESTHETIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE BODY IN DESIGN
It has recently been argued that aesthetic knowledge, or the engagement of bodily senses is at the heart of design thinking (Stephens & Boland, 2014) and probably central to design’s contribution to innovation (Carlgren, 2013; Jahnke, 2013). In the perspective of aesthetic knowledge, based on ‘aesthetic’ from the Greek aisthànomai meaning to perceive or feel through the senses, it can be argued that doing and thinking in design are integrated. And as a non-dualistic perspective, it mirrors an embodied view of cognition and the theory that bodily conditions constitute active sense-making (Johnson, 2007; Scarinzi, 2015). In other words, because thinking does not transcend the body, all thought is understood to have inextricably intuitive, emotional dimensions (Damasio, 2005). This aesthetic knowledge, as it is understood, gives shape to the very feeling of logic in rational decisionmaking (Johnson, 2007) and comes into being as it is expressed in and through the integration of mental and bodily action. An example of this philosophical framework of aesthetics is found in John Dewey’s (1934) book Art as Experience with the notion that aesthetics is in and through the body, and thus, integral to experience. In Dewey’s view of aesthetic experience, he avoids theoretical interpretations of aesthetics that confine it to a mind-body dualism separating aesthetic and functional concerns and making aesthetics only a matter of judgement or taste (the mind). The body, not separate from the mind, is a source of inquiry. By implication, design, like art, can be seen to rely on bodily experiences which are irreducible to language or thinking, and to assign value and meaning to ideas or concepts (Johnson, 2007). This hands-on, bodily approach to knowledge is manifested in design’s educational tradition and philosophy that consists of studio-based training and aesthetic critique through doing and making. In that sense, the notion of a design mind-set can be seen as a reflection of a pervasive mind-body dualism in research approaches to thinking as a process, and a received view of knowledge as existing in the mind. This “body problem” of design thinking in organisational culture (Stephens & Boland, 2014), along with the pervasive neglect of, and inherent difficulty
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with, using methods of bodily perception in design research have been the point of departure for my PhD study. I have drawn on the Deweyan perspective of aesthetics to investigate the integral role of the body in design as experience. One aspect, which is the focus of the remainder of my chapter here, is the relationship between the corporal engagement of design and the specific aesthetic qualities of a design practice of openness and exploration.
DESIGN PRACTICE AND CONTEXT OF OPENNESS
To begin with the distinction of design as bodily experience opposed to design as a function of thinking, there is not just a difference between how designers do things, but also why designers do things. Aesthetic knowledge is driven by subjective interests and feelings (Taylor & Hansen, 2005) which directly relate to experiential
qualities of creative ways of working (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Research shows that creativity is linked to intrinsic motivations (Amabile, 1988) such as “interest in varied experiences for its own sake” (McCrae, 1987 p.1259) and also as “joy for the unknown” (Bozic & Olsson, 2013). Likewise, in studying the culture of designers, Michlewski (2008, p.385) observes that the way that design serves as a means of exploration is important to designers since it, “signifies the freedom to explore and follow unexpected but promising leads”. The rationalisation of design as a cognitive process often excludes a designer’s creative motivations, intuitions, and desires to explore possibilities, to experiment and to push the limits of what exists. Designers “connect to work on emotional, rational and aesthetic levels” (Michlewski, 2008, p.387) because any personal motivations of a bodily ‘self’ involving desires, upbringing, memories, aspirations, identities, insecurities, etc. are embodied in their
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experience of shaping the “product” of design. Given the physical necessity of experiencing design as the only way to access aesthetic knowledge, in my research I have sought particular aesthetic criteria for an embodied feeling of openness and exploration in my experience of design. This search led me beyond traditional management contexts of design practice to engage in body-based methods from the performance arts, specifically the experimental movement practice of Butoh. Briefly, Butoh is an avant-garde performance art founded by Tatsumi Hijikata in Japan in the 1960s. It is described as both a philosophy and a movement practice, the result of Hijikata’s and his contemporaries’ interest at the time in investigating dance as a broader medium of perception and expression within Japanese culture. Butoh’s philosophy of the unified mind-body revolves around researching and uncovering instinctual or natural bodily actions that are traditionally limited and repressed under social norms. My interest is in Butoh as a creative practice that is deliberately designed and practised with the intent of continual exploration and experimentation. From my design experience, Butoh exemplifies an aesthetic approach to the physical and mental practices of openness, which should also be recognised as classic design: the form (of practice) supports the intent. Butoh practitioners are hyper-aware of the experience of generating new movement so are attentive to how they, as embodied selves, are inseparable from the process and the product. Comparable
Eikoh Hosoe, Kamaitachi #17 1965. Picture of Tatsumi Hijikata. to my background in a practice-based design education, Butoh practitioners ultimately locate practice between the individual and the process at hand, and they explicitly draw from “knowledge of the body”. In Butoh, the phrase “trust the body” is often repeated, which resonates with the mantra from my design training to “trust the process”. In both, physical actions are a way of working through thoughts (Gallagher, 2005), meaning that a designer’s intuition of “I think with my hands” (e.g. Collopy, 2004) is quite literal in that the way a person physically engages with the world shapes the way he/she mentally perceives or “grasps” a situation. Therefore, I suggest that Butoh and design are analogous in that they are physical experiences of exploratory activities, and as aesthetic practices, neither deals with given forms or mediums (Dewey, 1934) but continually experiments to find new ways of doing and making in order to think differently – to perceive something novel
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in the familiar. Both can be seen as forms of aesthetic training in bodily perceptual capacities entailing intuitions, emotions, and empathy (Shusterman, 2008).
BUTOH: A CASE OF EXPLORATION
I have participated in several Butoh courses over the past year with a pragmatic focus on how Butoh practitioners organise, collaborate on, and frame experiences in order to support the creation of radically new performances. It is significant that Butoh practice puts equal focus on the awareness of the dancer’s subjective experience of movement (body as a subject), in contrast to other dance forms that focus primarily on functional training for executing physical technique (body as an object). As an experience-driven approach, Butoh is ambiguous as a coherent dance form or style because its aesthetic is not imposed from an outside view of the form. Instead it is defined by a training approach that draws freely from any physical and meditative technique to inquire into the emotional and sensorial content of movement. Butoh advocates discovery, “moving beyond expectations”, “pushing to new places”, “not repeating”, and challenging oneself rather than “just executing”. By aiming to support the unpredictable and unfamiliar, it is a disciplined practice of openness in perception that includes the embodied feelings of being tolerant and open to change and learning from one’s own subjectivity of experience.
In the following section, I briefly summarise two intertwined qualities of Butoh’s work process that I have found are important to understand how qualities of openness and exploration in design inquiry can be shaped or managed through aesthetic or bodily dimensions. These qualities include being present and letting go.
BEING PRESENT
An essential aspect of Butoh practice is that it rests on subjective awareness and actively perceiving the body through the senses. In other words, its mode is always being present or “tuned-in” to experience, what is going on inside and outside the body both emotionally and physically. While movement can be choreographed or structured to different degrees, Butoh’s organisational framework is improvisational because of this active mind-body attentiveness. Rather than focusing on the future and predetermining goals or processes, there is concrete language around ongoing temporal coordination through physically affective,
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LETTING GO
back-and-forth relationships of “giving and receiving”, “listening”, “letting things come”, “going with it”, and “meeting” or “collaborating” with the surroundings. Practitioners speak of their work experience as “being one with the material” and themselves as being “responsive”, “moved”, “shaped” by the process.
In order to tap into and discover unexpected movements, Butoh employs an overtly physical and mental approach to letting go. A person must actively clear her/his habitual patterns in moving and thinking that are deeply ingrained and reinforced in everyday contexts. By “letting go”, one gives up the feeling of sense of security or “knowing” that arise through recurring perceptive encounters and doing things in the same ways. In this context, novel performances are generated by challenging a sense of familiarity in experience by constantly trying things out, working with a “beginner’s mind” and not “overthinking”; and by trusting the body.
Butoh recognises that processes will change over time, which makes it important to be aware of both bodily and mental images, feelings, and relationships, and to structure the progression and exploration of one’s actions. Perceiving and responding are simultaneous so that “ideas take shape” through innumerable corporal senses and intentions – something not being right, a tension, an impulse, a curiosity, etc. It is crucial, then, that Butoh practitioners learn to be extremely precise with their bodily or felt sense of inquiry so that they can recognise their focus; and subsequently, that they learn to be critical and precise about aesthetic criteria and their intentionality in their process.
This “letting go” is practically achieved in Butoh training which is composed of three main phases identified as relaxation (i.e. tuning-in or warming-up), play, and confrontation (Kasai, 1999). This structure is specifically designed to foster “being present” as described above and to elicit and accept unpredictable and unconventional movements among practitioners. Letting go in Butoh training deals with feelings of exposure, vulnerability, or uncertainty that are related to psychological processes of ‘self’ preservation and fears such as looking strange or stupid or accessing an expanded set of emotions in oneself. Because such tensions and anxieties with these encounters are bodily, they
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are methodically thwarted with relaxation and play exercises that help break normal rules of social conduct. This physical work helps minimise the importance of how a person believes he/she should behave, work, or operate in order to allow and motivate her-/himself to let go of control and respond more spontaneously and instinctually. It also helps build a tolerance and trust in the group, and trust in one’s intuition or bodily knowledge to go beyond mental fears.
CHALLENGE TO THE CONCEPTUALISATION OF DESIGN AS A MIND-SET
My claim here is that design cannot be understood as a mind-set, but must be both a corporal and mental practice of experimenting with methods and being receptive to learning through such perceptual encounters. In that respect, I am showing how the embodied perspective and practice of Butoh employs the body as a reference for understanding and transforming how Butoh practitioners relate to their experiences. This is important to design education and
research as an aesthetic practice in a couple of ways. One way is how Butoh practitioners depend on concrete physical actions using the widest possible range of emotions and actions in order to have new relationships to these experiences and repeatedly to make sense of them. To maintain this sense of exploratory freedom, to be literally in the unknown, they work carefully with embodied feelings of “doubt” (Locke, GoldenBiddle, & Feldman, 2008) and uncertainty. They first manage felt relational conditions to work in the present, “in the process”, instead of prescriptive planning or determining shared visions. There is systematic attention to physical and mental interactions happening in the present that support the ability to recognise and change perception, to relinquish feelings of control and the need to know where the process is going. Thus, Butoh practitioners consciously engender physical feelings of trust in relationships and in one another’s capabilities as sensible and responsible bodies, rather than trust in analytical tools and measurements. A second way is how Butoh’s form of exploration goes hand in hand with the way that its practitioners recognise and value the body in their thinking and as a source of creativity. Openness is not seen as a passive or a loose mental state, but as an exacting practice with concrete training. Thus, recognisable linguistic categories do not preclude Butoh’s doing things in novel ways to pose aesthetic, open-ended questions about experience.
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In conclusion, it may not be obvious that one unique value of design is how designers learn to trust and work from corporal information that is not simply an object of thinking but a subjective experience of exploration. The sensorial and emotional qualities of perceptual encounters are part of what designers learn to make sense of, communicate with, and inspire particular feelings of human experience. However, since there is typically suspicion of the practicality of sensory knowledge in organisations (Gagliardi, 1999), feelings of distrust about design and using the body as being “silly” (Stephens & Boland, 2014) erode the value of the countless ways that designers, and anyone else, viscerally connect to concepts and find meaning through their bodily and emotional encounters with the world. And these bodily sensations are what give the experience of design – the product and process – integrity or coherence for designers. Especially in terms of openness, I presume that one value of design is as an embodied activity of exploration and a designer’s value for experiences that are perceptually open to exploring meaningful possibilities. So without precise feelings for a quality of openness in the physical circumstances of designing, it cannot be just assumed that design thinking is innovative. Seriously pursuing design activities that foster an emotional, meaningful experience of exploration will require confronting the bodily conditions and kinds of feelings that come with not knowing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Anna Rylander Eklund for her helpful feedback and suggestions.
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Damasio, A. R. (2005). Descartes’ error: Emotion,
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Lawson, B. (1983). How designers think. London,
Stephens, J. P., & Boland, B. J. (2014). The Aesthetic
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McCrae, R. R. (1987). Creativity, divergent thinking, and openness to experience. Journal of personality and social psychology, 52(6), 1258. Michlewski, K. (2008). Uncovering design attitude: Inside the culture of designers. Organization Studies, 29(3), 373-392. Scarinzi, A. E. (2015). Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy A. Scarinzi (Ed.) doi:10.1007/978-94-017-9379-7. SchĂśn, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Shusterman, R. (2008). Body consciousness: A philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Simon, H. A. (1969). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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BRAND AND PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: towards a renewed modernism?
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Fernando Pinto Santos
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FERNANDO PINTO SANTOS Fernando is a PhD candidate at Aalto University School of Business, at the Department of Management Studies. Parts of his doctoral studies have been carried out at Stanford University. Fernando’s doctoral research is interdisciplinary, addressing organisation studies and brand and design management. His research interests are related to materiality. Fernando has been a manager at different companies, working on four continents, for more than a decade. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in management, one Master’s Degree in marketing management and another one in design.
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BRAND AND PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: TOWARDS A RENEWED MODERNISM? Throughout the twentieth century, brands have become widespread in the marketplaces, and a dualism has emerged between the brand and the product. A world-view where products and their materiality are essentially distinct from the intangibility of brands is still pervasive. In this view, products are regarded in their materiality as passive and inert, while brands are commonly seen as lively and endowed with creative possibilities. My research addresses the cases of Veen and Costo, companies that are particularly illustrative of a disregard for dualisms. The cases clearly allow challenging the divide between the materiality of products and the intangibility of brands, and point out the need to explore further the different ways in which matter might matter in terms of brand and product management. Veen and Costo have developed a commercial offer that, in its simplicity and emphasis on aesthetic and material qualities, mirrors modernist ideals. In the cases presented here, one cannot really separate products from brands. Products, their materiality and design, co-constitute the brand strategy and communication as much as the brand and the design of different brand-related materials co-constitute the products and the overall experience made available to consumers. In this chapter, I discuss this view and suggest that we will have more companies explicitly pursuing strategies inspired by the entanglement of products, brands and design, in order to create a commercial offer where one cannot really separate function from form or brands from products. I consider that this can be regarded as a kind of renewed modernism.
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PRODUCTS AND BRANDS
the broader dominant perspective on materiality in social sciences, where objects are usually envisaged as marginal or irrelevant (Preda, 1999). While there are obviously many studies that address products and brands with their interplay and mutual influence, the divide I am emphasising here is a philosophical one. A world-view where products and their materiality are essentially distinct from the intangibility of brands is still pervasive in the literature, and it ends up impacting the theory and practice of brand management. In this view, products are regarded in their materiality as passive and fully controllable, while brands are commonly seen as lively and endowed with creative possibilities.
Throughout the twentieth century, brands have become widespread in the marketplaces, and a dualism between the product and the brand has started to emerge. The traditional marketing view on brands as something essentially distinguished from the materiality of products has been enduring in the literature (e.g. Kotler & Keller, 2006) and especially since the 1980s this divide has become even more evident with the increasing acknowledgement of the value of brands for companies (Nakassis, 2013). Brands often became represented as entities valuable in themselves and separate from products, a kind of floating signifiers (Beebe, 2004). Can the dualism brand/product be challenged in the contemporary markets? Moreover, how does this dualism relate to design? The purpose of this chapter is to delve into these issues and develop a reflection that addresses brands and design in contemporary companies’ management. Manning (2010, p. 36) explains that brands have been traditionally defined as opposed to products: “the definition of brand develops over time by a kind of mystical via negativa, defining itself not so much by saying what brand is as what it is not: the product”. Studies about brands generally disregard or take for granted the role of their materiality (Diamond, Sherry Jr, Muñiz Jr, McGrath, Kozinets & Borghini, 2009). This is related to the increased theoretical and practical interest in the ideational dimension of organisations experienced at the end of the twentieth century (Alvesson, 1990) as well to
This prevailing dualism brand/product can be seen as relating back to René Descartes’ huge influence on Western philosophy. Descartes’ legacy and the other Rationalist and Enlightenment philosophers left us with a notion of matter as passive and inert and the human mind as active and creative. The Cartesian understanding of materiality yields a conceptual and practical domination of nature and matter, as well as a specific attitude of subjectivist potency (Coole & Frost, 2010). Ultimately, the binary opposition between mind and matter ended up influencing all our thinking in the modern world (Guignon, 1993) and led to dualisms such as mind/ body, immaterial/material, form/function, and symbolic/technical.
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FROM RAPHAEL TO MORRIS
Descartes’ perspectives also influenced the evolution of design by reinforcing a world-view where some objects are useful but not necessarily beautiful, and where beautiful things are related to art, that had started to emerge in the sixteenth century with the work of the Italian painter Raphael (Katz, 2014). Only in the nineteenth century was the separation between usefulness and beauty challenged by William Morris (1834-1896), who sought to cross the divide created in the Renaissance. Morris proposed the unity of fine and applied arts and for him good design was both an ethic and an aesthetic, and art should be accessible to everyone. The highly influential ideas of Morris led to the creation of the Arts and Crafts movement, which pursued the reuniting of manufacturing and creativity, and later inspired other movements like Modernism. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the industrial revolution, urbanisation, new technologies and new forms of communication influenced the rise of the modern movement. Modernism can be seen as a philosophical stance that emerged amid these changes and as a reaction to Enlightenment thinking, impacting politics, culture, art and even mass production. Modernist ideas have pervaded every form of design, standing against dualisms like form and function. The main tenets of Modernism, in terms of mass production and design, revolved around the ideas that manufactured goods should be enjoyed for the way they looked
and not only for their functional application; in other words that utility was as important as beauty, as defended by Morris. Mass-produced artifacts should be simple, aesthetically pleasing and available to be experienced by anyone. Moreover, an interest in exploring new materials and in being true to their material qualities was a hallmark of the modernist design of massproduced goods.
THE CASES OF VEEN AND COSTO
My research has been motivated by an interest in design and brand management and, in particular, by an attention to materiality. I have investigated a number of different perspectives on materiality, developing research on topics such as how the material heritage of organisations can be purposively employed to
sustain strategic change (Burghausen & Santos, 2015), how the material dimension of commercial products is mutually constitutive with brand strategies (Santos & Morillo, 2014), and how the materiality of products and brands is critical in processes of organisational ordering
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(Karjalainen & Santos, 2014). In the autumn of 2013, I started following different companies in Finland, developing multiple case studies. These companies commercialise physical products with their own brand and in this chapter I will focus on two of them: Veen and Costo. Veen Waters was founded in 2006 with the purpose of commercialising a brand of water with the same name, from a spring located in Finnish Lapland. The brand was orientated towards international markets to begin with and originally targeted a select number of high-end restaurants, hotels and nightclubs. Veen’s distinctive glass bottles won several design awards. In 2014, the company entered the Indian market, this time with water from springs located in Bhutan. Both of Veen’s water sources have purity as their main sales characteristic. Costo was also founded in 2006 by three Helsinki-based designers who started to utilise industrial leftover fabrics to produce accessories like hats, ties and backpacks. Sustainability and ecology have been core values for the company and there is an intention to develop products that, ignoring trends and fashion fads, stay fashionable regardless of the period in question. Costo has been growing steadily, and is nowadays selling to seven countries. Costo’s products are created in its headquarters in Helsinki that include an atelier and concept store, and production is carried out in Estonia.
BRANDS AND THE QUALITIES OF MATTER
The origins of both Veen and Costo were closely related to the physical qualities of matter. In the case of Veen, the physical characteristics of the water from Lapland inspired the strategy of the company, as Aman Gupta, the CEO of Veen waters explained in 2013:
“Our strategy is to create specific products for specific niches. So, our first product is a culinary product, which is specific to that niche of restaurants. We are developing other products that will then be targeted at different purposes, and different niches.” At the time, the strategy of the company was based on the concept of ‘culinary water’ and its products were promoted as particularly wellsuited to be enjoyed together with high-quality food, wine and whisky, for example. It was claimed that Veen water does not interfere with the fine taste of food and drink since it has an extremely low mineral content. This distin-
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guishing physical characteristic of the water inspired the brand strategy and its communication in the first years of activity. In the case of Costo, the characteristics of the materials were also deeply related to how the company started its activities. Actually, the availability of fabrics that could be upcycled was determinant for the decision on the kind of products that would be developed, as well as the overall strategy of Costo, as Hannes Bengs explained: “when we started the company we wanted to be ecological and work on that field but we didn’t actually know that we would start to produce accessories out of industrial leftovers. (...) we realised that there was a huge amount of fabrics on rolls, for example, like their [furniture manufacturing companies] old fabrics… that they don’t sell anymore, they take it away from the catalogue and also fabrics where there was some small colouring problems, you know? That the colour was not right… just this kind of things… Then we realised that there is a bigger potential, actually, to gain, to use these fabrics…” A decision was made to manufacture hats and caps and to start the company with these kinds of products since they could be manufactured with a mix of small pieces of fabric. Thus, the availability and characteristics of the materials influenced in a decisive way how the Costo strategy was crafted: a strategy that is deeply
entangled in the materiality of its products, drawing inspiration from their qualities. This is essentially different from views influenced by Cartesian dualisms that generally regard products as the outcomes of strategic decisions, in a perspective of the domination of matter. By designing the products in accordance with the material qualities of the available fabrics, and by analysing in depth and being influenced by these qualities, the strategy itself was also created. The material qualities of products were not only decisive in inspiring the initial strategies of Veen and Costo, but they have also been critical in influencing how the strategies of these brands have evolved through time. Thus when the founders of Costo continued to find materials that were only available in small quantities, this had an influence in terms of further decisions on the product portfolio: “So, because of the size we realised, you know, that we could use it [leather] for other smaller things, like wallets”. In the case of Veen, the new water sourced from Bhutan, with its high mineral content, led the company to change its brand positioning and communication, very tied in the beginning to the low mineral content of the Finnish source and the concept of culinary water. The purity of the water became the overarching idea for the waters from both Finland and Bhutan. Thus, the characteristics of the water influenced the decisions pertaining to the different elements of the brand strategy, as explained by Aman Gupta
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just before the launch of the new water sourced in Bhutan: “... [the] current product is only for the culinary environment. Because it’s packaged that way, we market it in this way... because the characteristic of the water is pertained to that particular purpose. Now we’re going into PET, so we’re going to create a new package, with a different type of product, for a different purpose, which is coffee shops in India... (...) ... one water has got one characteristic, and has a separate purpose to another water, that has a different characteristic and a different purpose. And that’s what water is, every water is dependent on the ground that it comes from, the area that it comes from, the journey that the water takes through the soil and to the land, and what it picks up along the way, in terms of minerals, geology and all of these things.” The physical qualities of Veen water became entangled with the brand strategy and its different elements, like the award-winning bottles and the communication materials. The way the material characteristics of Veen waters influenced the creation of the brand, inspiring and legitimising the strategy and its evolution, as well as the communication, is illustrative of how the brand is not disconnected from the products. The Veen brand is not a floating signifier, a source of symbolism or any other kind of value that is wittingly attached to the product. Rather, the Veen brand strategy and communication emerge from the material qualities of the products, while also inspiring further product development and management. We thus have here a deep entanglement between product and brand where there is not simply influence or dependence, but rather co-constitution. In both companies, design has been critical to create the distinguishing aesthetic qualities of products and brand communication materials. At Costo, the design of the products is obviously central to the company activities since its accessories compete in the fashion market. However, there is also great concern with the overall experience of consumers, and every aspect of the contact between the company and the markets is carefully designed. Packages, labels and communication displays are designed in the company and considered as key elements in its commercial offer. Similarly, and al-
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though water is essentially a commodity, design is also absolutely central to Veen strategy, as explained by the company’s CEO: “As a brand everything we do has a design element into it because design has played an impact in our product. So, as a company all our communication is design-focused… packaging… everything else… so, it becomes like a brand value in a way… where design and presentation becomes very, very important. (...) ...when we talk about doing other things and creating new products… even though we might have a product idea, design is key to how we will position it…” The focus on design is related to the intention to provide holistic experiences for consumers, where the physical products are part of a broader set of elements, like packages and other communication materials. All these different elements are brought together by the company in a purposive way to create a commercial offer that is aesthetically compelling.
TRANSCENDING DUALISMS
Veen and Costo illustrate how products might simply not be the detached outcome of a strategy but can rather influence a company’s strategy with their material qualities. Costo and Veen are not merely taking advantage of the physical qualities of products to create differentiated competing attributes or to sustain communication purposes. Instead, these companies seem to embrace fully the qualities of matter to inspire their activities holistically. This attitude yields a view on matter as something that in itself has vitality and offers opportunities to influence businesses positively. These cases can be regarded as extreme examples of the entanglement of brands and products in a context where there are actually many companies that instead purposively extend their brand names and strategies across different market categories with an apparent disregard for the materiality of their commercial offer. I believe that Costo and Veen are valuable because they unveil implications that are relevant beyond the specific settings of these two companies, without the intention of being generalisable to all cases, however. The cases of Costo and Veen clearly allow the challenging of the divide between the materiality of products and the intangibility of brands. They also point out the need to explore further the different ways in which matter might matter in terms of brand management.
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Moreover, Veen and Costo seem to be particularly illustrative of a disregard that resembles a modernist quest when it comes to artificial dualisms. As at the beginning of the twentieth century, we are witnessing profound changes in our societies. In these turbulent times, some companies seem once again to focus on developing a commercial offer that embraces the changes while also proposing products that are simple and available to be enjoyed not only on account of their function but also on account of their aesthetic and material qualities. Costo and Veen explore and are inspired by new technologies and materials, where design (now not only of products, but also of brandrelated materials) is regarded as a way to create pleasing and holistic experiences to be enjoyed by anyone in the marketplace. It may be argued that other companies have already done this throughout the last decades. However, I believe that we are witnessing a new paradigm in product management, as at the beginning of the twentieth century, where there is a growing trend towards a renewed interest in the technology, design, brands and materials of products (including their sustainability, for example); and especially, an interest in the entanglement of all these in order to develop an engaging commercial offer. This paradigm stands out against the over-emphasis on image and intangibility that seems to have gained preponderance at the end of last century.
In contemporary markets, brands assume a critical role in the commercial offer of companies. However, and as Veen and Costo illustrate, brands and their related materials can be fully embraced as co-constitutive of products, holistically contributing to aesthetically pleasing mass-produced goods. This is not only the case in the companies addressed but also something that one can observe in a number of different contemporary companies. Burberry and Apple, for example, are also illustrative of this entanglement. In these cases, one cannot really separate products from brands. Products, with their materiality and design, co-constitute the brand strategy and communication as much as the brand and the design of different brand-related materials co-constitute the products and the overall experience made available to consumers.
A RENEWED MODERNISM
In this chapter, I have addressed the dualism brand/product and suggested that this can and should be challenged. The cases presented illustrate how products and brands can be regarded as co-constitutive of the commercial offer, and unveil the value of embracing their entanglement. Furthermore, a disregard for artificial dualisms, the quest for exploring and being inspired by the physical qualities of matter, and the pursuit of the aim to design simple and aesthetically pleasing mass-produced goods all resonate with modernist ideas. I believe we will see more and more companies explicitly pursuing strategies inspired by the entanglement of
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products, brands and design, in order to create a commercial offer where one cannot really separate function from form or the brand from the product. I consider that this can be regarded as renewed modernism.
Guignon, C.B. (1993). Introduction. In C.B. Guignon (Ed), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (pp. 1-41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karjalainen, T-M. & Santos, F.P. (2014). Brands, materiality, and organizational ordering. Paper presented at the 30th European Group For Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium, Rotterdam School of
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The
Thanks to Toni-Matti Karjalainen and Andreas Benker for their helpful feedback and comments on earlier versions of this text.
Netherlands. Katz, B. (2014). History and Theory of Design. Personal Collection of Barry Katz, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
REFERENCES
Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2006). Marketing Manage-
Alvesson, M. (1990). Organization: from substance to
ment (12th ed). New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.
image? Organization studies, 11(3), 373-394. Manning, P. (2010). The semiotics of brand. Annual Beebe B. (2004). The semiotic analysis of trademark
review of anthropology, 39, 33-49.
law. UCLA Law Review, 51(3), 621-704. Nakassis, C. V. (2013). Brands and Their Surfeits. Cultural Anthropology, 28 (1), 111-126.
Burghausen, M. & Santos, F. P. (2015). Exploring corporate material design heritage as strategic resource for corporate marketing. Paper presented at the 5th
Preda, A. (1999). The turn to things: Arguments for a
International Corporate Heritage Symposium, Brunel
sociological theory of things. Sociological Quarterly,
University, London, United Kingdom.
40: 347-366.
Coole, D. & Frost, S. (2010). Introducing the New
Santos, F. P. & Morillo, M. (2014). Materiality, design
Materialisms. In. D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.). New
and brand management. Paper presented at the 19th
materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 1-43).
DMI: Academic Design Management Conference,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
London College of Fashion, London, United Kingdom.
Diamond, N., Sherry Jr, J.F., Mu単iz Jr, A.M., McGrath, M.A., Kozinets, R.V, & Borghini, S. (2009). American girl and the brand gestalt: closing the loop on sociocultural branding research. Journal of Marketing, 73 (3), 118-134.
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BARRY KATZ Barry is consulting professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc., the Silicon Valley-based design and innovation consultancy. Barry Katz is the author of six books, including Change By Design with Tim Brown, (Harper Collins, 2009), and Make it New: The History of Silicon Valley Design (MIT Press, 2015). His writings on design as a strategy of innovation have appeared in many academic, professional, and popular journals.
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Reflection
THE MATTER OF DESIGN At a time when so much of the design world is caught up in the frenzy of the digital, the provocative essays in this chapter serve as a welcome reminder that every one of us inhabits a body that occupies mass and is located in space. Even as a growing portion of our days are spent entangled in social networks and downloading apps, there remains an irreducible materiality to everyday life that will never entirely submit to the virtual. Design, as a distinctively modern way of rendering the world intelligible, meaningful, and accessible, had its origins in the passage into a world of mass production, mass media, and mass culture. As the individual, handmade (“manu-factured”) artifact came increasingly to be relegated to the museum, the antique shop, and the craft fair, a profession emerged to grapple with the challenges implied by the separation of making or printing from devising a pattern or laying out a page. Design was born of the abstraction from the real, and abstraction has governed the course of its history. Predictably, the passage from the industrial into the digital age has only served to amplify and accelerate the abstraction of design from the immediacy of the physical; one need only pause to think of how many mediations have been introduced in the space between logging on to Airbnb or summoning an Uber and – a few days or a few minutes later – settling into a rented bed or the backseat of a car. And it is not only the consumer-citizen of this brave new world who experiences this deepening remove from lived experience. Designers, too, have had to undergo adaptations – cognitive as well as technical – as surely as did their ancestors in navigating the passage from craft to design. The movement popularly known as “design thinking” would seem to acknowledge the distance they have travelled from “design doing.”
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This is the context in which Ariana Amacker and Fernando Pinto Santos have conducted their complementary researches into what can only be called “the matter of design.” Grounded in, but reaching far beyond the familiar tropes of design management theory, they draw upon the philosophies of René Descartes and John Dewey; aesthetic traditions ranging from the Arts and Crafts Movement to Japanese Butoh dance; the commercial strategies of upcycle clothing manufacturers and purveyors of bottled water. With remarkable clarity, Amacker challenges what she correctly identifies as “a dualistic view of design as mental construct apart from the physical practices of designing.” Drawing upon the Pragmatist insights of John Dewey, she explores the proposition that design is an essentially embodied practice, and that “the way one physically engages with the world shapes the way one thinks about or ‘grasps’ a situation.” In arguing for a post-Cartesian reconciliation of mind and body, she is reminding us of the essence of design practice, which involves modes of cognition but also, in the famous definition of Charles Eames, “a method of action.” Designers venture out into the field to conduct ethnographic research; they return to the studio to build tangible prototypes; they draw, sketch, sculpt, weld, solder, and code. If they are any good, they return to the field to test the balance of their private aesthetic visions against the requirements of their users and their clients. As behavioural economists such as Daniel Kahneman have shown, the way we physically engage with the world cannot be separated from the way we perceive the world. Nimble academics may have learnt to “think on their feet”; designers have learnt to think with their feet. And their hands. And their eyes and ears. Sometimes even with their stomachs. What Amacker has done to heal the breach between the minds and bodies of designers, Fernando Pinto Santos does for the symbol and substance of the products they create. In his analysis, modernity has been characterised by a growing divide “between the materiality of products and the intangibility of brands.” Brand has come to function as an independent système des objets that privileges system over object, the mental connections between products over the products themselves, and companies routinely invest more time and money protecting the integrity of their brands than
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in the design and engineering of their wares. In a bizarre inversion of the nineteenth-century theory of commodity fetishism, trademarks, logos, packaging, advertising images, and the indecipherable names of Silicon Valley tech startups come to function as floating signifiers, untethered to anything in concrete lived experience and dissociated from the sensuous qualities of the products they supposedly represent. “In this view,” writes Santos, “products are regarded in their materiality as passive and fully controllable, while brands are commonly seen as lively and endowed with creative possibilities.” There are indications, however, that this situation may be changing, that a post-Cartesian approach to management may be in formation and that the word may once again become flesh. In a pair of case studies, Santos examines two Finnish companies that have developed strategic branding campaigns grounded in the specific physical characteristics of their products. With an unmistakable note of optimism, he suggests that companies such as Veen and Cosco illustrate how the mental construct of brand and the physicality of matter can be reunited as “co-constitutive” of products. Santos dares to suggest that these examples may point to what he calls “a renewed modernism” which transcends the alienation of product and brand, materiality and design, corporate strategy and consumer experience. The two explorations that comprise this chapter make the case that matter matters. The body, Amacker demonstrates, is a source of cognition, and not just the mind. Santos shows how the molecular qualities of a Finnish aquifer or a woollen fabric can – and should – shape the manner in which their respective products are designed, promoted, and sold. In a world in which the virtual has become a more immediate source of enjoyment than the real, in which the traffic in symbols has overtaken the exchange of goods, and in which the very notion of “value” has become hopelessly vaporised, this is a comforting thought. Metaphysics may have returned with a vengeance to the modernist project, but as these two imaginative studies suggest, physics will always have the last word.
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MEANINGS Claudio Dell’Era Roberto Verganti
+ Åsa Öberg Naiara Altuna Marta Morillo + Rob Chatfield
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MEANINGS Studies of innovation management have often focused their investigations on two domains: technologies and markets. However, design has recently gained much attention among practitioners and scholars as a source of innovation. Firms are increasingly investing in design and involving design firms in their innovation processes. Section four entitled “Meanings” leverages on the interpretation proposed by Krippendorff (1989), Heskett (2002) and Verganti (2009) according to which design is the activity that allows the innovation of the meaning of things. Åsa Öberg explains the practice of exposing, an important aspect when a company wants to innovate from a meaning perspective. She emphasises the idea that if one wants to discuss the meaning of products, this is a personal matter. What one person finds meaningful, another might not. According to the research developed by Åsa Öberg, proposing new meaning increases if one first subtracts what one finds meaningful, the inner content. This involves a deliberate activity of Pre-emptying oneself, which seems to help to start the discussion on new product meanings. Naiara Altuna elaborates the concept of Radical Circles, a phenomenon that spurs the creation of radically new visions. Exploring different case studies such as Homebrew Computer Club, Memphis and Slow Food she explains how Radical Circles can contribute to creating radically new meanings. More specifically, her research defines Radical Circles as few selected members working clandestinely and leveraging on criticism, in order to challenge and reinterpret the rules of a given industry. She highlights the characteristic elements constituting such a circle, i.e. leadership, locational resources, voluntary participation and the transition from closed to open. Marta Morillo explores the role of design in envisioning potential futures. More precisely, she analyses a project-approach to futures, identifying the specific characteristics of projects that enable firms to explore long-term innovations and generate strategic visions. Using multiple cross-sector case study research, her research draws conclusions on the role of experimental design-driven approaches to future studies. Investigating three Visionary Projects (OurUNIVERSE by Cassina, Five Fingers by Vibram and GaiaX by Volvo Construction Equipment), Marta Morillo analyses potential sinergies between technologies and meanings. Claudio Dell’Era, Roberto Verganti
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THE PRACTICE OF EXPOSING INNOVATION FROM INSIDE THE BOX
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Åsa Öberg
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ÅSA ÖBERG Åsa is a researcher at the Information Design Department at Mälardalen University and a visiting scholar at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano. After ten years of experience in marketing and design in different industries, she is now conducting research on innovation through new product meaning. Her studie sare being conducted in cooperation with both Swedish and International organissations such as Unilever, Gucci, Abb Robotics and The Västmanland County Administrative Board, Sweden. She has a special interest in expressing meanings through sketches and she is a member of the Urban Sketchers local group in her hometown of Eskilstuna.
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THE PRACTICE OF EXPOSING – INNOVATION FROM INSIDE THE BOX In a 2013 interview with Fast Company, Tim Brown, the CEO of the design firm IDEO discussed some basic principles of their innovation process. “We come with what we might call a beginner’s mind”, he explained, and continued: “We do rely somewhat on the value of having an open mind when we approach a new question.” (Baer, 2013). “A beginner’s mind” is a common mind-set in the innovation discourse. The assumption is that people who are free from existing solution heuristics, and therefore free from preconceptions, can ease a type of “thinking outside the box”, valuable in the innovation process. Not all theories see preconceptions as an obstacle, however. A fairly new current in innovation research is focused on product meaning as a driver of innovation. As meanings spring from individuals and their beliefs, the personal perspective becomes a natural starting point. By leveraging on theories in the philosophical field of hermeneutics, this chapter shows that innovation, when in search of meaning, is supported by a positive use of preconception, rather than abandoning it. A type of “thinking inside the box”, from within individuals, drives this type of innovation forward. Through four case studies, this chapter describes a practice of “exposing” one’s own personal beliefs as beneficial in the striving to design new, meaningful products. What has emerged through the case studies points to the value of an “experienced” mind, towards preconception as a positive, rather than a negative, factor.
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INTRODUCTION
When innovation comes through a search for new product meaning, it goes beyond a pure technology- or market-driven approach to new products. One example is Nintendo Wii that changed computer gaming from being an expert activity in a “virtual” world to becoming a socialising activity in the “real” world (Verganti, 2009). Meaning relates to the why of a product (its purpose) rather than the “how” (its feature or business model). It connects to “design”, from the Latin designare, to designate, to give meaning (Krippendorff, 1989). However, it is not always evident what the existing meaning of a product is. Neither is it always evident what a new potential meaning might be. Let us consider the R&D managers of the multinational consumer company Shinebridge. They had been working for a year to clarify both the current and the potentially new meaning of one of their core products. After several stages of exposing and sharing personal reflections, a few words had been carefully selected to describe the old, as well as a new, meaning dimension. When the marketing manager, Mr Q, entered the project in its last phase, he looked very sceptical. “What do you mean by this word?”, he asked. On his request, the whole group had to open up and expose their personal deep thinking again. “Now I have said what I feel, I am ready to discuss the other perspectives. Let’s move on”, exclaimed Mr Q finally. Once the current meaning became clear to him, and once he had shared his own individual thoughts, he could start to take in the proposed new meaning.
THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX – “A BEGINNER’S MIND” AS THE START TO INNOVATION
Tim Brown at IDEO is not alone in his approach to innovation. Academic perspectives on innovation and design also put forward the idea of “a beginner’s mind” (Stefik & Stefik, 2005, Bokeno, 2009, Brown, 2009, Kao, 2011). The starting point is that existing solutions are to be found “inside the box” but that beginners, unaware of the box, are more likely to search in other directions, or “outside the box”. In innovation management, the same arguments are also put forward, for example by theories of open innovation (Dunbar, 1995, Chesbrough, 2003, Lehrer, 2010) and of innovation as “problem solving” (Sutton, 2007). However, other studies, such
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as those on organisational change, show that preconception is an issue to be dealt with, rather than just ignored. New thinking needs to become visible and to be discussed so that people can “leave it aside” (Lewin, 1947, Levy, 1986).
THINKING INSIDE THE BOX – AN ALTERNATIVE START TO INNOVATION
Not all theories see preconceptions as an obstacle, however. The field of hermeneutics pays attention especially to the role of preunderstanding when in search of new interpretations. The focus is on proposing several alternative understandings, and trying deliberately to reinterpret the situation, starting from one’s own perspective and later including others. New meaning does not come from an empty mind, but, on the contrary, from a mind built on preinterpretations, a mind with a horizon (Gadamer, 1960/2004). In other words, the existence of preunderstanding is a positive and necessary asset to drive reinterpretations toward new meanings of products. More pragmatic is Theory U by learning and leadership scholar O. C. Scharmer (Scharmer, 2008). It provides guidance for how people and companies can strive for deeper awareness, for example of products. By freely opening up and “diving into” a situation, it proposes a process of presencing, which is a combination of the words “being present” and “sensing”. It includes actions of seeing the most intimate part of our
selves (our potential, or our “Self”) instead of sticking to the present version of ourselves (our “self”). By a clash of our old thinking (including our preinterpretation of something) and our future will (the future Self), new understandings emerge. From a theoretical point of view, both hermeneutics and Theory U challenge the idea of “a beginner’s mind”. They suggest that no one can be a beginner when searching for new meaning. Instead we need to acknowledge each preinterpretation, make it explicit, and fuse it either with the preinterpretations of others, as in hermeneutics, or with our own interpretations of the future as it emerges, as proposed by Scharmer. Both these theories suggest an act of exposing one’s own personal beliefs, an act of becoming aware of one’s preinterpretations, examining them, discussing them and building on them.
EXPLORING FOUR CASES
Over a period of four years, I studied four companies as they were investigating proposals of new product meanings. Their insights were sorted as internal, stemming from the managers themselves, or external, contributed by experts in other industries. These external experts acted as interpreters by offering their own perspectives on a predefined future scenario, as decided by the firm (see Verganti, 2009, Altuna et al 2014). As well as these insights, the level of clash between different interpretations was also recorded. I checked whether or not the innova-
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tion project had created a common arena for discussing product meaning and whether or not any new understanding was shared among the participants (see Figure 1). The companies all showed different levels of exposing the participants’ own personal beliefs.
MARRON – STARTING FROM EXTERNAL INSIGHTS
Marron, a multinational corporation in consumer electronics wanted to establish a new range of products. Out of two options (starting from external experts and then generating visions inside, or else starting from internal visions and then bringing in external views), the R&D manager decided: “We would prefer to first meet outsiders. If we start from generating visions ourselves I’m afraid we would come up with the same old ideas.” However, after a workshop with eight interpreters, the managers struggled to make sense of the new insights. They did not show a shared understanding of potential new product meaning. Instead, the managers kept their own perspectives and preconceptions. In short, Marron did not seriously expose the personal thoughts of its own participants, and did not build an arena in which to discuss and develop common understanding. In the end, the innovation project did not propose any new product.
BLANC – STARTING FROM AND KEEPING OLD INTERNAL THINKING
Blanc, a global corporation for consumer goods wished to enter into new business. Contrary to Marron, they started internally. From individually envisioning new meanings, they arrived at one integrated meaning proposal that they then discussed with seven external interpreters and further. The implementation of the proposal was promoted by the most influential managers. Blanc showed attempts at exposing participants’ own personal thoughts when starting from internal insights, but did not invest very seriously in deepening their understanding by bringing in new, possibly critical, participants. They managed to create a common space to discuss the proposed new meaning, but still understanding was scattered rather than shared. - 146 -
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JAUNE – LEVERAGING INTERNAL VISIONS
Jaune, a global player in consumer goods wanted to address a growing market segment. As in the case of Blanc, the first part of the innovation project consisted of an internal phase and the second of an external meeting. In contrast to Blanc, however, more engagement and deep reflection resulted in seventy possible new product meanings. In additional working meetings, new participants challenged each meaning by delivering their own visions. By exposing these visions, they managed to open up to new thinking. The team managed to create an arena to discuss and engage top executives outside the project, and the proposal moved into implementation. Jaune clearly demonstrates the exposition of personal ideas and visions. This project started off with the internal insights of the team members, and when new participants joined the project, everybody’s combined understanding was deepened.
VERT – A NEW SHOPPING EXPERIENCE
Vert is a luxury fashion brand that wanted to create radical change in the meaning of the shopping experience. The process was similar to Jaune’s with the difference that much more time was dedicated to analysing critically the individually proposed meanings without time constraints. The discussion went on until everyone felt that their proposed meaning was thoroughly listened to. In this way, there was time to transform each individual proposal into a common understanding. The team fully shared a common interpretation of the new meaning. It moved into implementation, bringing onboard the less supportive top executives. In short, Vert represents the case with the most profound activity of exposing the participants’ own personal beliefs. Internal insights were deeply reflected upon with the help of new participants, resulting in a common arena and shared understanding.
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Figure 1 The parameters (Insights, Level of clash and Outcome) used to analyse the observations in relation to the four cases.
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FOUR LEARNINGS OF THE PRACTICE OF EXPOSING
The first observation aligns with hermeneutics and Theory U: “a beginner’s mind” does not apply when developing new meanings. Project Marron, which explicitly opted for “a beginner’s mind”, did not succeed. Project Blanc, that partially exposed its participants’ own beliefs, achieved only partial results. Projects Jaune and Vert instead acknowledged that people’s minds are never empty. They dedicated a lot of energy to exposing their own perspectives. Each individual reflected on possible new meanings that enabled her or him to expose her or his thoughts, signalling that every person’s vision was considered. The second observation reveals that the act of exposing one’s innermost ideas is not a simple act in which a person unproblematically divulges her or his vision. “Exposing” does not happen in a moment. This is clearly visible in the story of project Blanc, where the company started from the inside, and asked each member to envision a new meaning. However, it seemed that the company did not dedicate enough time to critical internal discussion of these new meanings, in other words, to criticising each other’s perspective. Projects Jaune and Vert demonstrate instead that this activity is a very complex, detailed journey. After repeating the process with personal expositions at least four times and after close to a year of reflection, different acts of envisioning and the fusing of horizons finally built new understanding. A third finding is that the act of an engaged exposition of participants’ own beliefs does not happen only at the beginning but instead during the whole process. Firstly, in the case of the Vert company, the team actualised the new meaning while simultaneously recognising the understanding of the old one. This is in line with Scharmer and Theory U: the past and the future co-evolve; you understand the past (your “self”) by learning from the future (your “Self”). Secondly, as new team members joined the project, the journey of understanding new meaning continued. In project Jaune, a top manager joined the project towards the end and only after he had shared his own vision, did he finally feel more comfortable about embracing the proposal on new product meaning. - 149 -
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Finally, the act of exposing is not only an act of forgetting the past, it is a first step towards imagining the new, the future. In fact, as described earlier, it does not start by sharing the vision of the past, but by envisioning a new meaning for the future. It is by feeding in new horizons that one get rids of the old. As Gadamer says, there should never be a state of empty horizons (Gadamer, DATE, p.XX). Rather than searching for individuals with “a beginner’s mind” (if they exist at all), organisations should instead acknowledge the existence of preunderstanding, and deliberately create actions to make this preunderstanding explicit and shared within an innovation team.
CONCLUSION
This study sheds light on the activity of laying bare or exposing one’s own beliefs. It points to the fact that when the participants in these four cases did not expose their own beliefs with sincerity, the process of seeking to establish new product meaning seemed to run into difficulties, and the unspoken old meaning seemed implicitly to govern the discussions. Both theories of hermeneutics and Theory U underline the importance of preunderstanding and the act of exposing it. However, neither of them offers guidance on how to do it. This study proposes, that the act of exposition does not happen in a moment. It takes several repeated attempts to analyse thoroughly, discuss and fuse each team member’s vision with those of the others. In addition, this act of exposition does not focus solely on the past but also on the future. The starting point is an exchange of old and new thinking between the members of the team, and not just an empty “beginner’s mind”. In other words, rather than searching “outside the box”, a valuable way of innovating product meanings is to search “inside the box”, inside each person’s self. By a deliberate act of exposing each individual perspective, new interpretations can evolve.
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REFERENCES
Baer, D. (2013). IDEO’s 3 steps to a more open, inno-
Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in Group Dynamics:
vative mind. Fast Company 12 June.
Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Social
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Bokeno, R. M. (2009). Marcuse on Senge: personal
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Scharmer, O. C. (2008). Theory U: Leading from the
22 (3): 307-320.
Future as it Emerges, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San
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Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design
thinking transforms organizations and
Stefik, M. and B. Stefik (2005). The Prepared Mind
inspires innovation. New York, Harper Collins.
Versus the Beginner’s Mind. Design Management
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Chesbrough, H. W. (2003). Open innovation: The new
imperative for creating and profiting from technology.
Sutton, R. I. (2007). Weird Ideas That Work: How to
Boston, MA, Harvard Business School Press.
Build a Creative Company. New York, US, The Free
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Dunbar, K. (1995). How scientists really reason: Scientific reasoning in real-world laboratories. Cambridge,
MA, MIT Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1960/2004). Truth and Method, Bloomsbury Academic. Kao, J. (2011). Clearing the mind for Creativity, FT Press (Pearson), e-book. Krippendorff, K. (1989). On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition that design is Making Sense (of Things). Design Issues 5 (no. 2, Spring): 9-38. Lehrer, J. (2010). Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Crewing Up. Wired, Jan. http://www.wired.com/ magazine/2009/12/fail_accept_defeat/all/1. Levy, A. (1986). Organizational Transformation: Approaches, Strategies and Theories, Praeger, New York.
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WHO HELPS YOU TO INNOVATE? THE POWER OF RADICAL CIRCLES IN VISION CREATION
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Naiara Altuna
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NAIARA ALTUNA Naiara Altuna is a researcher at the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. She is currently finalising the last year of her PhD studies in the field of innovation management, where she is exploring the role of networks on a specific approach to innovation: the innovation of meaning. Moreover, in collaboration with MaDe In Lab, the Laboratory of Management of Design and Innovation at the MIP Politecnico di Milano, she has followed and researched multinational companies in different industries on their journey towards the innovation of meaning (P&G, Gucci & Prysmian among others).
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WHO HELPS YOU TO INNOVATE? THE POWER OF RADICAL CIRCLES IN VISION CREATION The ultimate goal for those who innovate, and quite likely the greatest challenge they face, is the creation of a radical new vision. Indeed, when the willingness of an individual or company goes beyond solving an existing problem the question is: how can I find new visions? This work is a manual and inspiration for those willing to propose a radical new vision. It explains whom you can leverage on in the search for new visions. The answer is, radical circles. These are circles of a few selected members who work clandestinely and leverage on criticism to challenge and reinterpret the rules of a given industry. The outcome, as the title suggests, is a new vision. As such, following, collaborating with or being part of these circles can be of great interest for companies or individualls willing to innovate. The research is based on a number of case studies appertaining to different industries – computing, food, climbing, and design. The first part of the chapter presents the concept of radical circles and highlights their importance in the generation of new interpretations. The second part presents the characteristic elements constituting such a circle (i.e. leadership, locational resources, voluntary participation and the transition from closed to open). Each of the elements is presented through a case in the form of storytelling.
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A QUEST FOR A NEW VISION – THE STORY OF HOMEBREW It was March 5th, 1975, when a bunch of electronic enthusiasts and early computer hobbyists first met in Silicon Valley. The meeting was arranged by Gordon French and Fred Moore and was held in Gordon’s garage. At a time when computers were recognised as indispensable only for work-related issues in the corporate world, these people were interested in bringing computers into their homes to play, create, study and have fun. They were neither formal nor official and the theme of the club was “Give to help others”. The introduction of the Altair made them think that the dream they had been sharing was real. The club was eventually named the Homebrew Computer Club.
The Homebrew Club managed to overcome a number of computer fears such as “getting electrocuted”, “not being able to understand how to operate it”, “losing the privacy of my data” or “losing the ability to do things on my own” that were vividly present in the society at the time. They also addressed and challenged some truths that others would hardly ever have questioned: “Computers have more capacity than I need”, “Using a computer will lower my status”, “A computer is mathematical and not for creative types”, etc. A shared emotional discomfort or malaise towards the above-mentioned truths, coupled with their willingness to revolutionise the computing world made the Club members jump into an
explorative journey that lasted almost a decade. After the very first meeting in March 1975, the meetings occurred on a regular basis until 1986. These revolutions do not happen all of a sudden. Indeed, when the aim of innovation is to re-interpret the meaning of (i.e. to rethink the purpose of) a given product or reality, an explorative journey is needed. This search is necessary because reinterpretations are not the result of spontaneous creative work but rather an outcome of a thoughtful process based on criticism (Verganti, 2009; Altuna, Öberg, & Verganti, 2014). In the world of computing, the Homebrew Computer Club enabled this quest. The Club acted as a protected laboratory where its members could explore and try things out, pushing the boundaries of the ordinary while breaking the “rules” of the industry. The Homebrew Computer Club is an example of a radical circle. The contributions of a radical circle are mainly three things. Firstly, encouragement. Being part of a circle where there are people willing to listen to you and know about your thoughts gives you power. It proves you are not an escapee with crazy ideas. This gives you faith to keep working and to surpass yourself and your thoughts again and again. Secondly, criticism. The protective environment in which these people meet allows them to be very critical not only towards their industries but also among themselves. Challenging “taken-for-granted assumptions” is recognised as their cardinal value.
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Lastly, resources. Resources might be simply money or facilities to host the meetings or develop their work. These circles are often not very popular, especially at first. Nonetheless, their impact in the long term is remarkable. For example, the Homebrew Computer Club produced the founders of a number of microcomputer companies, including Adam Osborne (Osborne Computer), Harry Garland and Roger Melen (Cromemco) or Steve Wozniak (Apple Computer). Actually, the Apple I and II were shown off every two weeks at the meetings.
CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP
The fact that leadership matters is not new. The leader’s role and relevance has been studied and proved in different contexts, and innovation is no exception. For the particular case of radical circles, the leaders play a transcendental role. This idea will be explored and explained in the coming lines. A leader is someone who is able to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or goals (Northouse, 1997). To be a leader nowadays implies to promote and realise innovation; therefore willingness to challenge the status quo should be on the DNA of each leader. On top of being good at setting directions and managing change towards the new vision, good leaders must be inspirational and great communicators. All these functions resonate well with the concept of radical circles, but there is one more hint that deserves special attention: true leaders must be willing to change themselves internally to manage the external changes caused by their decisions. This fact is beautifully reflected in a quote by Tolstoy: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy In radical circles, the willingness to change needs first and foremost to come from the leader, who must be able to guide the members in the coconstruction of a new vision. Co-construction is the essence of circles, and
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therefore the leader must be good at infusing the trust and openness needed to make the members feel comfortable and willing to share their thoughts and ideas in every single meeting. In Memphis, Ettore Sottsass was not only the progenitor of the circle, but actually its great leader. Ettore Sottsass was an Italian architect and designer in the late twentieth century. He was one of the major forces behind the flood of design that came out of Italy after the second world war. When Sottsass arrived on the scene, electronics was a serious business, and the machines were large, cold and scary. Ettore made them fun, friendly and sexy. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for Olivetti, culminating in the bright red, plastic, portable Valentine typewriter in 1970, which later became a fashion accessory. When he got bored with Olivetti and mass production, he went on a trip to India. There he became fascinated by the power of
colours, and this fascination stayed with him for the rest of his career. After a trip to America, he returned to Italy convinced of the need to shake things up. On December 11th, 1980, when he was in his sixties, he invited a group of young designers and architects in their twenties and thirties to a meeting in his apartment. The design collaborative was named Memphis, a name taken from the title of the Bob Dylan song ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’, which had been played repeatedly throughout the evening. This meeting heralded a new beginning: up until that point the Modern Movement in architecture and design favoured clean, undecorated lines and industrial materials. In complete contrast, Memphis products were a cacophony of colours and patterns, often asymmetrical and playful. Memphis was set up to experiment with design in the way artists do, and they produced and exhibited their furniture and design objects annually from 1981 until 1988. This would not have been possible without the guidance and commitment of Sottsass. Despite being the initiator and leader of the initiative, Sottsass’ thoughts in relation to leadership and Memphis were quite bizarre but interesting. In an interview soon after he passed away his wife explained:
Picture 1 – Memphis members in the 80s
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“He didn’t like the idea of being a leader. He was aware of his talent, but he detested any type of institution or hierarchy. … He believed everybody should find their own way of doing things. … Everybody contributed, but nobody ever set rules or said what you could or couldn’t do.” (Radice, 2014). In Memphis, what Ettore Sottsass somehow imposed was the point of departure, not the destination. He clearly stated that they were reacting against the Modern Movement but never imposed where they were heading. As mentioned by Radice (2014), what “those designers really had in common, and which kept the group together, was a desire to challenge the status quo. Their idea was to escape that.” In sum, Sottsass set the point of departure of the circle – whom they were opposing – and guided and encouraged the members in the co-construction of the new vision. He was the charismatic leader of Memphis. This is the kind of transcendental figure needed to make radical circles work. As such, the leader has to state clearly an initial reference and create the context and atmosphere to enable the co-construction of the vision. Imposition does not work here; instead, the ability to listen and flexibility are well appreciated.
LOCATIONAL RESOURCES
The members of radical circles develop routines that revolve around specific places. These locational resources are an environmental factor that plays a crucial role in the circle formation. A very special place is often the one in which they gathered for the first time, which symbolises the beginning of a new journey. The place chosen by Memphis, or rather by Ettore Sottsass, for the first meetings of the collaboration, was his apartment in Milan. In the long run, these places become emblematic and symbolically rich. Indeed, the apartment in which Memphis used to meet has space dedicated to it in Sottsass’ biography (Radice & Sottsass, 1993). Farrell has also pointed to these locational resources in his research on collaborative practices in creative work (2001). He calls them the “magnet place”, and defines them as a place where people value expertise and practise the skills the prospective members hope to acquire. Moreover, for Farrell, the “magnet place” does not evolve with the group and thus plays only a limited role in the progression of stages.
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VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION, BY INVITATION ONLY
There is a detail that distinguishes circles from groups. In social sciences, the latter have been defined as two or more people who interact with one another, share similar characteristics, and collectively have a sense of unity (Turner, 1982). The former constitute a shape in Euclidean geometry. Its particularity is that this simple closed curve divides the plane into two regions: an interior and an exterior. Therefore, radical circles are closed by definition. These collaborations, as mentioned earlier, are formed by someone with the very specific intention of negotiating a new vision in opposition to established rules in their discipline. They do not take the form of an open call or simply a group but rather possess an exclusive character where the initiator invites selected people to join the meetings. Moreover, none of the invitees is forced to participate, but is simply invited. Constructing a vision or new interpretation is a very delicate and profound action. The vision comprises the set of beliefs about what is wrong or right according to the circle members. Discussions can get very emotional, and therefore nobody can be forced to join such a circle but only invited. It is then a personal decision whether to participate or not. So this is what differentiates closed groups from circles: the former are somewhat assembled, while to be part of the later you need firstly to be invited or to ask for permission to participate, and secondly, you need to be accepted. The selection and intimacy mentioned above give a closed character to radical circles. This favours what Farrell (2001) named instrumental intimacy, which is a type of exchange between dyads of the group denoted by trust, mutual support, and the free transfer of ideas, resulting from deep knowledge of one another acquired through long and persistent interaction. Going back to the Memphis case, this exclusive dynamic that characterises circles is here very clear and concrete: in December 1981 the sixty-year-old design grandee Ettore Sottsass invited his young friends, Matteo Thun, Martine Bedin, Aldo Cibic, Michele De Lucchi and Marco Zanini to his apartment in Milan. Sottsass was lucky, because they all accepted and he
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had them all in his apartment, where the movement in reaction to the slick, black, humourless design of the 1970s started to happen.
Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits,
MOVING FROM CLOSED TO OPEN
pervades the privacy of our homes and forces
The fourth element refers to the evolution of radical circles. As mentioned earlier, these circles emerge and somehow work “clandestinely”. It is the creation of this protected space that enables the members to expose their malaise and work on the new vision. Nonetheless, once the new direction is quite defined, there is an impulse that stimulates these people make a public statement of their beliefs and intentions. This often takes the form of a manifesto and is the very first action of their transition from being a circle (i.e. closed) to becoming a movement that will hopefully shake the rules of the industry (i.e. open).
us to eat Fast Foods. To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction. A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency. Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive
This transition from closed to open can easily be seen in Slow Food – an international movement in food and nutrition born as a circle of a few pioneers led by Carlo Petrini in 1986. They strive to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and claims for good, clean and fair food as an alternative to fast food.
answer. That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects? Slow Food guarantees a better future. Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can help turn this (slow) motion into an international movement, with the little snail as its symbol.
After years of reflections and intense work, the international Slow Food movement was officially founded in 1989 in Paris, and the Slow Food Manifesto was signed. The Manifesto was the first footprint on their journey towards
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becoming a globally known movement. As stated by Petrini (2013): “when we came back from Paris, we understood that we had to consolidate our profile and to really build an international movement�. In fact, during the first years of Slow Food, a number of internal initiatives were organised to raise awareness of the movement, opening it to anybody sharing their values. Salone del Gusto, Slow food Presidia, Terra Madre or the University of Gastronomic Sciences are just a few of the examples. Here the main message is how crucial it is to start an initial journey immediately, once the vision has been defined. Details on how this journey happens will be reported in the thesis following this chapter.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
This work looks into the creation of radically new visions, which are the ultimate goal of those who innovate. In particular, the study focuses on the creation of visions that have challenged and reinterpreted the rules of a given industry. Challenging taken-for-granted truths and shaking things up is not an easy task, and this journey can be really tough without the support of others. Indeed, this research presents the concept of radical circles as closed collaborations that empower their members to take their thoughts forward and reflect without barriers/limitations. These closed groups first define their enemy and work on criticism in their journey towards the creation of the new vision, which will therefore be in opposition to the ideals and values promoted by the enemy. The combination of their radicality and thought-provoking work makes these circles extremely interesting for companies willing to disrupt the market. It is clear that it is hard to find such circles, especially early on in their lives. Nonetheless, the research presented here should firstly encourage companies not to disregard fringe or extreme movements, as the most disruptive innovations often come from such contexts. Secondly, this encouragement targets single individuals who might be willing to jump into the adventure of creating such a circle. These stories have hopefully shed light on how to gain strength for oneself and one’s thoughts when these are not yet clearly defined, but still the willingness to act is strong.
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REFERENCES
Altuna, N., Öberg, Å., Verganti, R. (2014). Interpreters – a source of innovations driven by meaning – Paper presented at the 21st International Product Development Management Conference, Limerick. Farrell, M. P. (2003). Collaborative circles: Friendship dynamics and creative work. University of Chicago Press. Kruse, K. (2013). What Is Leadership. Available online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2013/04/09/what-is-leadership/ (5 June 2015). Northouse, P. G. (1997). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Radice, B. (2014). Barbara Radice on the anarchy of Ettore Sottsass. Available online: http://www.disegnodaily.com/article/barbara-radice-on-the-anarchy-ofettore-sottsass (5 June 2015). Radice, B., & Sottsass, E. (1993). Ettore Sottsass: a critical biography. Rizzoli International Publications. Verganti, R. (2009). Design-Driven Innovation – Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating what Things Mean. Boston, MA, Harvard Business Press. Verganti, R., Öberg Å. (2013). Interpreting and Envisioning – A Hermeneutic Framework to look at radical innovation of meanings. Industrial Marketing Management Journal 42(1): 86-95.
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CREATING FUTURES THROUGH VISIONARY PROJECTS
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Marta Morillo
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MARTA MORILLO Marta is an innovation professional with more than thirteen years years of international professional background in innovation, product and project management roles with leading multinationals and design consultancies, driving and delivering innovation across several markets and industries. She is experienced in driving new product strategy and development as well as defining and deploying innovation processes and managing projects, particularly multidisciplinary projects with a strong creative driver and highly innovative tech requirements. Marta is currently Executive PhD candidate at Politecnico di Milano (Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering). Her professional and research interests lie at the intersection between innovation, design, technology and business: innovation management, design strategy, and technology management.
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CREATING FUTURES THROUGH VISIONARY PROJECTS: A DESIGNDRIVEN APPROACH TO (INNOVATION) STRATEGY In an era of global markets and rapid technological advances, corporations face the need of strategically driven innovation. The technology-push view of innovation traditionally disregards the potential of design for generating radical innovations. The role of design in the exploration of strategic futures and the generation of corporate visions is still a subject for research. How do companies use design to envision futures? Traditional foresight techniques predict the most plausible or several possible future(s) in order to get ready to react to it/them. Literature is however scarce regarding how to generate plausible futures actively and purposively, through more interventionist approaches. These will create the events that will change the course of things, rather than just preparing firms to react when they encounter them. Using multiple cross-sector case study research and explorative inquiries on methods, processes and management strategies, this research draws conclusions on the role of experimental design-driven approaches to future studies and their potential for innovation and corporate strategies. In particular, the research explores a project-approach to futures, identifying specific characteristics of projects that enable firms to explore long-term innovations and generate strategic visions. The aim of the investigation is to contribute to the fields of innovation management and strategy. Moreover, by identifying the characteristics of visionary projects, I provide some guidelines for practitioners to embrace this explorative approach to innovation.
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INTRODUCTION
The performance of a firm with regard to innovation is directly related to the strategic intent of the company: the more future-orientated the vision pursued, the more discontinuous the innovation, the higher the uncertainty and the greater the chances of long-term success. Traditional innovation management studies have focused on two domains: breakthrough technological innovation and market-pull innovation. Design has gained attention among practitioners and scholars only recently, and firms are raising their investments in design and involving design(ers) in their innovation processes (Nussbaum, 2004). Each technology has many potential meanings embedded in it. The most immediate ones are generally those endorsed and boosted by the persons who managed the technological development. Others are more hidden and quiescent and do not fit into the current sociocultural models. Sometimes companies fail in fully exploiting the opportunities provide by new technologies because they interpret them as means aimed at substituting and improving previous applications. Recent streams of innovation management highlight the importance of the ‘meaning’ dimension in the identification of new applications that connect with people and may capture the full potential of new or existing technologies (Technology Epiphany). DesignDriven Innovation (Verganti, 2009) focuses on the reasons ‘why’ people value, use, and buy things, rather than trying to satisfy the operative
needs of customers. It addresses the emotional reasons and socio-cultural connections that are not contemplated in traditional technology-push or marketing-pull approaches to innovation. This investigation is based on a cross-sector multiple case study using a qualitative approach. The three cases represent radical innovations in meanings enabled by technologies: ourUNIVERSE, FiveFingers® and GaiaX, from the companies Cassina, Vibram and Volvo respectively. By exploring the contribution of technology to the creation of new meanings, the research identifies managerial practices utilised for envisioning new futures with technology. This study will thus help to create a framework for the concept of ‘Visionary Projects’: a purposeful project-driven approach to envisioning futures and accelerating innovations through technology and meanings.
EMPIRICAL CASE STUDIES CASE STUDY 1: OURUNIVERSE (CASSINA SPA)
Cassina SpA is a leading firm in international contemporary furniture design, with a long craftsmanship tradition and a high reputation in innovation and technical expertise in the industry. The firm has an open approach to innovation, involving external partners in projects with new product creation.
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Figure 1. Analysis of meanings, Cassina’s ourUNIVERSE project. In 2013, after acknowledging the socio-cultural impact that new technologies are having on the way people communicate, interact and behave, the firm in collaboration with the studio of Carlo Ratti (MIT Senseable Lab), pursued a ‘visionary project’ aimed at understanding how technologies might impact future home environments and consequently furniture. According to Gianluca Armento, the General Manager of Cassina and main ‘sponsor’ of the project, ourUNIVERSE had two main goals: to envision new possibilities derived from technological changes, and to generate more practical outcomes in the form of new (product) proposals. To do so, the company wanted to collaborate with an interpreter who was an ‘outsider’ to its well-established network. Thus it contacted Carlo Ratti, a forward-looking partner coming from a radically different context, so that he
could provide high-tech visionary insights and technological perspectives to the home-living context.
Figure 2. Analysis of technology, ourUNIVERSE project.
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In ourUNIVERSE, the role of technology was the starting point of the project, in other words: the driver of the project brief. The case represented a very peculiar project for Cassina. The contribution of technology did not only occur at project level, but had substantial impact on the firm. The visionary nature of the project resulted in a series of new insights for future developments within the firm. Additionally, the project broadened the network of interpreters in the firm, unveiled new ways of working with outsiders, and generated technological competences, developing new knowledge in areas outside the firm’s core competences.
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CASE STUDY 2: FIVEFINGERS® (VIBRAM)
Vibram SpA is an Italian firm founded in 1937 that currently has a presence in markets worldwide. The now third-generation family business has been a world leader in the production of high-performance rubber soles, primarily supplying the outdoor market in Europe and the industrial and safety markets in the U.S. In 2006, Vibram launched FiveFingers®, a revolutionary product that relied on a sensorial approach to running and a disruptive shoe design, becoming an unexpected success and boosting revenues over the course of three years. The radical innovation in the case of FiveFingers® is evident. The project was initiated outside the company, following the intuition of Robert Fliri, at the time a design student. Soon
Figure 3. Analysis of meanings, Vibram’s FiveFingers.
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after the project landed at Vibram, the president and CEO of the firm, Marco Bramani, pushed the firm to bring this novel meaning to reality. He believed in the potential of this new paradigm. It ultimately became a disruption in the running shoes industry. Since the start, what mattered to both Fliri and Bramani was what design-driven innovation scholars call the ‘product’s emotional and symbolic value – its meaning’ (Verganti, 2003). As Bramani explains, maintaining the essence and the ‘emotional product value’, or what Fliri calls ‘the natural connection to the terrain’ was the main driver of the project. In the case of Vibram FiveFingers®, technology enabled the creation of the meaning, thus the development of product, having a clear supporting role for the realisation of the new meaning. Moreover, a key contribution of technology was
Figure 4. Analysis of technology, FiveFingers® project.
to the generation of knowledge in anthropometrics and biomechanics of the foot, a field that was under-researched. Vibram developed new skills; competences required to work with one of the most complex mechanisms: the human body.
CASE STUDY 3: GAIAX (VOLVO CE)
Volvo Construction Equipment (Volvo CE) is a business area part of Volvo Group Global, which develops, manufactures and markets equipment for the construction industry. In March 2014, at ConExpo, Volvo CE unveiled a revolutionary compact excavator, which was not only aesthetically disruptive, but also had a highly advanced human-machine interaction (HMI), and a pioneering useful application for augmented reality (AR). The goal of the GaiaX project was to build on real technology in order to explore the aesthetic and operative futures of construction equipment. Sidney Levy (Design Director Volvo CE) explains that the project started as a provocation from the design team wanting to experiment with radically new ideas and discuss future possibilities. The project was rapidly supported by Corporate Communication, the department that initially sponsored the project. The project became of key importance to the overall Volvo CE unit, revealing the significance of User Experience (UX) to the organisation and its potential for future innovations. GaiaX reinterprets the way construction equipment is used,
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Figure 5. Analysis of meanings, Volvo’s GaiaX project. experimenting with technologies to make a machine that is meant to be partly autonomous and that allows for a more eco-friendly approach to excavation.
Figure 6. Analysis of technology, GaiaX project.
The most obvious role of technology in the case of GaiaX is on the user experience (UX) and the human machine interface (HMI), allowing the creation and implementation of the meaning. Developing technology thus becomes a ‘tool’ for discussing future possibilities. The project served thus as a confirmation of the crucial role that the design department could have for innovation activities and projects at Volvo CE. Moreover, it helped to acknowledge the importance of design to other Volvo departments. In Levy’s words, the project represents a great opportunity for “paving the way to the future of Volvo and perhaps the industry too” (Volvo, 2014).
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DISCUSSION
This research explores the process of envisioning futures by interpreting technological venues and challenging existing paradigms, using design and technology projects to generate new meanings. The visionary projects under study represent a form of exploring futures as an alternative approach to the more linear technological development depicted in classical future studies methodologies. Despite the differences between the cases, firms and industries, all three projects represent radical innovation in meanings enabled by technology. The cases come from firms whose primary focus is neither the development of novel technology itself, nor its commercialisation. The companies under study work on projects that focus on why people use things rather than how. Technology therefore acts as a vehicle for the creation of radical innovations, and towards the envisioning of new meanings. All three cases utilise existing or emerging technologies, or at most, require incremental technological developments for the realisation of the new meaning, as in the case of Vibram. Technology thus adopts a supportive role in the implementation of the proposed innovation of meaning. Despite certain similarities among the three projects, the study reveals that firms adopted different management practices in relation to the way they access, use and integrate the technology during the envisioning process. In the case of Volvo, the skills and competences necessary to pursue this meaning-driven project were built internally, and the project was developed in-house, from concept incubation to public presentation, within a project team of internal stakeholders. For Vibram, it was a combination of external and internal collaboration. While the technology development and specific competences were built in-house in the firm’s development premises, the role of external partners was essential for the generation of meaning, from Fliri’s insight to the role of the barefoot running community during adoption and commercialisation. Cassina’s project revealed instead collaboration with an external partner in the exploration of new meanings and the screening of the technology as well as the generation of the knowledge and skills necessary to develop the proposal.
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Table 1. Contribution of technologies in envisioning new meanings Interestingly, the study also shows that even within the same project, there are several levels at which technology can have an impact, depending on the perspective used to analyse its contribution: people (meaning), firm and industry (Table 1). While the contribution of technology to meaning can be regarded as the actual impact on people, exploring futures with technology has other implications within the project context and the innovation framework. If we regard innovation as a process of generation and integration of knowledge about users, technologies, and product languages (Verganti, 2003), it can be argued that using technology during the envisioning of meanings generates innovation. In all three cases, technology had an overall impact on the firm’s technology base, regardless of the specific project. Companies learnt
about their future users (Cassina), their new customers (Vibram) or their existing ones (Volvo CE). All three companies generated and integrated new and existing technology into their own products and processes, moreover often using them as a new platform for future projects. Findings also show that technology epiphanies driven by meanings may result in new business models as in the case of FiveFingers. The project meant entering the B2C of sports shoes, denoting a considerable change in the way Vibram had of doing business and relating to final customers, in this case accessing the final customer directly. In the case of Volvo and Cassina, although both projects are at early stages of maturity, findings show that the projects might impact the firm’s business models substantially, due to the fact that new services are required in order to bring the concepts to life. Finally, all three cases show possibilities to
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influence change in their respective industries. In the case of Vibram, FiveFingers® contributed to the disruption occurring in the market with the emergence of natural running shoes. In the other cases, the early stages of the project do not allow conclusions in this regard, but the potential created by these explorations is evident. Additionally, this research highlights the essential role of leadership in the manner in which the new meaning is brought to people. Once a new meaning has been envisioned, it is fundamental that someone with power of decision in the firm identifies its potential and drives the project forward within the organisation. Evidence shows that in the case of ourUNIVERSE and FiveFingers it is the same person who acts as a project champion within the firm (Armento and Bramani). At Volvo, the project champion changed when the project initiator left the firm, but the ownership of the project remained within the same unit, and it was taken over by her successor (Levy). Having a ‘meaning-sponsor’ who drives the process of bringing the innovative proposal to people is thus fundamental. Present research provides a conceptual framework to the emergent interplay between design and technology, and suggests several forms for using and experimenting with technology during the envisioning phases of innovation. Although the findings show clear evidence on the contribution of technology to the envisioning of new meanings, the results are of a qualitative nature, except in the case of Vibram. I believe that a further development of the study
to include some forms of measurement of the contribution of technology when exploring technology epiphanies may enrich the research.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Thanks to Gianluca Armento at Cassina, Carlo Ratti and his team, Massimo Randone, Marco Bramani and Robert Fliri at Vibram, and Sidney Levy, Magnus Andersson and Glen Barlow at Volvo CE for their time and insightful ideas and comments.
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ROB CHATFIELD Rob graduated from Bristol University with a PhD in Physical Chemistry, and then joined Unilever in 1993. Following technical roles in R&D projects in Laundry and Skin Cleansing, he moved into Competitive Technology Intelligence in 2000. This role focused initially focused on threats, but soon broadened to encompass finding external leads that could drive projects forward and open up new opportunities, and from around 2004 Rob built Unilever’s Scouting Capability as part of the emerging Open Innovation Group. Rob has since supported both Oral Care and HomeCare R&D in Open Innovation while creating and leading disruptive innovation projects in both areas.
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Reflection
REFLECTIONS ON USING MEANINGS TO DRIVE DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION About six years ago, I was introduced to a Swedish designer called Pär R.E.W. Blanking by my colleague Francisco Andrade. Together we built and ran an ideation exercise to imagine new oral care products for Unilever, using a methodology often referred to as ‘Design Thinking’. Here, a carefully selected team of people come together to iterate consumer insights, technology / product and Business Model over time towards ever-stronger propositions. That work introduced me to the strange notion that “people do not buy products, but meanings”. This is not a new idea, but it became cemented further in my mind through a book recommended by Pär called ‘Design Driven Innovation’ by Roberto Verganti. At this time I began to understand more clearly how new meanings can disrupt markets when companies successfully propose to people new products that make more sense and so become more meaningful. This led us to initiate specific projects to explore and create new meanings for some of our product innovations. Why is meanings research important? We live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous), with many forces driving rapid social change. Nowadays, people are more than ever searching for meaning in the world. These conditions make markets ripe for disruption, and companies need to find a way to make a difference amongst the myriad of products and services available. One way to do this is to make products more meaningful to people. Unilever has developed the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, through which our brands focus increasingly on helping to improve health and wellbeing, reducing our environmental footprint and driving positive social impact, which is proving very successful. For example, Lifebuoy is tackling infant mortality from diarrhoea by promoting hand
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washing, while Dove is helping to build body confidence and self-esteem among girls. The reflection here is about how brands and companies can very deliberately bring a meaning perspective directly to the heart of the process of innovation and the development of new products. In one specific project, we set out to develop a new meaning for a potential new market sector. We built a multifunctional team of people from both within Unilever and outside who engaged with enthusiasm in the work, open to the idea that the current meaning of products could be changed and that new meanings could be developed and proposed. Interestingly, this team was almost “self-selecting” – once people heard our intentions and asked or were invited to join, full commitment and engagement followed easily. Going through the process and reflecting on the meaning of things required us to share our thoughts on a deep emotional level. This process brought us closer together, creating strong bonds and high levels of trust that still remain between the team members today, even though many have moved on to new things. Indeed at the most productive times in the project, people said it did not really feel like work at all, and our reflections led to insights and arguments that became increasingly “sharp” at these moments. It is hard to define and describe exactly what happens during the search for meaning (and in Design Thinking), but one certainly knows it and feels it when it is working well! A key element in the work was exposing our shared thinking on new meanings to carefully selected so-called Interpreters, who helped build on our new meaning and confirmed that it made sense to them, and so could make sense to people in our target markets. Through this process, it became possible to sharpen our products ideas to reflect the new meaning, iterating towards stronger and stronger propositions by seeking and carefully interpreting feedback from consumers and ultimately from the market. A significant challenge in the search for new meanings is to transfer the results to people who join the project later but who did not share the common reflections and journey. This challenge exists for a number of reasons. The word “meaning” itself is not an easy concept to explain clearly in a way everybody can understand and agree on. Indeed, what is meaningful is
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a personal matter and it changes over time, so to decide what is meaningful is really an impossible task! The search for new meanings can also appear a rather abstract and “academic” endeavour disconnected from the need to create a real business in the real world. And in some senses this is true, since only after the new meaning is defined can new products be created to test the new meaning with consumers and the market. In addition, meanings work is typically distilled into a simple and crisp articulation, and can often seem “obvious” in retrospect when done well. For those who did not share in the journey, this can undermine the richness of insight developed along the way, since it could appear to be a spark of creative insight rather than the product of deep reflections over time. A further challenge emerges from the intersection with the world of traditional marketing science, which also seeks to make brands more meaningful to people. Marketeers may ask, “Is this not just marketing by another name?” Experience shows that designers and R&D personnel easily accept and engage with meanings research, and indeed many of the great design schools now teach it in their courses. This is understandable since meanings research comes from the design perspective, which automatically brings the product into focus. Creating products is of course a central endeavour for both R&D and design, but perhaps not always central in marketing work that is often concerned with incremental innovation around pre-existing products. Disruptive innovation needs a holistic approach, and integrating product-orientated thinking into meanings research ensures that we iterate easily towards disruptive new products that are meaningful but also doable in the real world. Meanings research is most useful where a firm is looking for disruptive innovations. For example, it could be beneficial when planning to enter new segments, or for finding the most impactful way to introduce a new technology. Nowadays, companies are often very rich in ideas for new products, and the central challenge is deciding which ideas to pursue with limited resources. Sharp articulation of a disruptive new meaning can thus form an important reference point to guide innovation strategy.
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Creative R&D teams are very good at defining what a product could be, but a well-articulated meaning offers a way to understand why a product should be – leading to more meaningful products. Thus, reflection on meanings is immensely valuable in deciding which direction to take among the many possible paths. It also helps secure alignment because key personnel join together in the endeavour, and the richness of insight in a wellcrafted meaning seems to endure strongly in participants’ hearts and minds to influence ongoing developments in more subtle ways, even if it is not pasted on the wall to be reviewed every day. The DESMA researchers point to some interesting directions for the subject of meaning. Companies need people who are prepared to engage emotionally and listen with their hearts, curious to go beyond everyday language, daring to open up because they feel trust amongst the group – and finding such a space is often a challenge amongst the hurly-burly of corporate life. This can be helped by creating a secure environment where people can be invited to join or self-invite, participating because they are excited by the opportunity. If we can make space to ask ourselves the deeper reasons why people would use our product, we have the opportunity to deliver something much more powerful than an instant idea. With space and the right heart, we can disrupt markets and change the world for the better.
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TENSIONS Ileana Stigliani + Eva Kirchberger Lien De Cuyper Marzia Aricò + Bettina von Stamm
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TENSIONS In section five of this book entitled “Tensions”, the three chapters focus on and explore some of the thought-provoking tensions inherent in the association of the two different disciplines of design and management. Eva Kirchberger tackles the fascinating paradox currently faced by the incumbents in the Service Design category, i.e. how to respond to the entrance of new big management consulting firms into the category. Leveraging upon empirical insights from one of the pioneering members and leaders of the category, Engine Service Design, she suggests the interesting “Theory of Authentic Adaptation”. Specifically, she argues that the possibility to survive under such competitive pressure rests upon the organisation’s ability to reinterpret the category while staying true to its heritage. By a similar token, Marzia Aricò focuses on the influential tension between, on the one hand, the acquisition of Service Design agencies by large IT and Management Consulting firms and, on the other, the transition of some Service Design agencies into Business Design. Drawing upon observations from Live|Work, another pioneering company of Service Design, she unpacks the consequences of this transition for Service Design agencies in terms organisational capabilities, processes and outcomes. Finally, Lien de Cuyper addresses the tension between social and economic objectives faced by social ventures, using organisational design as a possible means of reconciling such tension. By identifying how social ventures differ in terms of the relative importance of both objectives, she develops a contingency perspective about the organisational designs adopted by social ventures (hybrid vs. non-hybrid). Ileana Stigliani
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AUTHENTIC ADAPTATION AS A STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS
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Eva Kirchberger
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EVA KIRCHBERGER Eva is PhD Candidate at the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Department at Imperial College Business School where she researches on how service design firms respond to newly arising competitive pressures. Due to her Marie Curie Fellowship, she had exclusive access to partner Engine Service Design for three years, being deeply embedded in landmark projects with clients such as Dubai Airport, Fiat and Nordea Bank. Eva is a frequent speaker and writer on service design and business strategy for firms in a vibrant and fast-pace market. Throughout her career, Eva has blended management with design, by holding several roles within the creative industries – from working for a James Bond movie on the production side to setting up an insights department at Elmwood Branding Consultancy.
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AUTHENTIC ADAPTATION AS A STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS Recently, the success of service design has been attracting management consultancies, which include service design as part of their core offering. The challenge for existing member firms and the market leader in particular is twofold: on the one hand, further modifications of the practice increase its ambiguity and as a result the market category as a whole could suffer from devaluation by audiences. If no consensus is reached, service design is likely to turn into a fad. On the other hand, new entrants introduce value-enhancing features that are appreciated by consumers and put service design firms under competitive pressure. In order to succeed, members have several strategic options at their disposal. In the following, I argue for the best-suited response option: by drawing on their heritage while also adapting to the new context, existing firms can prolong their own longevity and that of their market concurrently. Six major dimensions are described which capture the shift in self-conception from a service design agency to a creative professional service firm.
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INTRODUCTION
Since the co-pioneers Livework and Engine started to design services in 2001 and 2003 respectively, service design has developed into a global practice. With a strong product design heritage, service design is the artistic response to designing the interactions of people and technology in physical and digital space, blending in tools borrowed from marketing, service management and digital design. Today, there is a global Service Design Network with national chapters, and prestigious art schools as well as, increasingly, business schools offer service design as part of their curricula. It is not only academically that the interest in service design has spread beyond design. Recently, a wide range of service firms inside and outside the creative sector has been showing interest in practising service design as well. More specifically, this includes entrants from related fields such as architecture, branding and digital design, as well as professional service firms from business-related practices. The latter comprise top-tier management consultancies and accounting firms who buy in service design agencies as a way of innovating their offerings. These multidisciplinary giants engage in organisational diversification by adding a new “practice area” (Greenwood et al., 1990).
THE PARADOX TODAY
A great success, one might think, for DESMA’s co-pioneering partner Engine as well as the profession as a whole. As one of the first firms offering service design as a distinct practice, Engine has been key in developing the practice and “fill it with meaning” (Director, 2014), and is still leading the market today. From a socio-cognitive perspective, Engine is perceived as an “exemplary firm”, representing the collective identity of service design firms as a whole. As the most salient firm, the market leader is particularly prone to changes in the market. Moreover, firms might model themselves after the leader when forming their own organisation. Due to this symbolic importance, I will discuss the impact of market changes on member organisations with particular focus on the exemplary firm.
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Paradoxically, the huge success of service design puts existing member firms, especially the leader, under huge competitive pressure. This is quite surprising, as existing strategy literature would argue that market leaders are particularly well positioned to fend off new entrants. To shed some light onto the specifics in this context, I will further elaborate on the socio-cognitive view on the service design market. Simply put, this perspective captures people’s understanding of what is meant by a market (Kennedy, Lo, & Lounsbury, 2010). Focusing on existing members, what does it mean if a firm is perceived as authentic? And what happens if the interpretation of a label such as service design becomes ambiguous? I will try to disentangle this puzzle in the following.
AUTHENTICITY
We know from socio-cognitive research on markets, that both sides – producers as well as consumers of an innovative product – co-develop what that practice comes to mean (Rosa, Porac, Runser-Spanjol, & Saxon, 1999). Take the product category of SUVs, for example. American Motors put a new type of vehicle on the market, and as was recognisable in their marketing efforts, originally designed the SUV for ease of driving in difficult conditions. However, consumers changed the meaning of the SUV. Initially advertised as an “offroad vehicle”, buyers started employing it for the city as well as long distance rides, and by interacting with it and talking about it, they made sense of
the new car type. Car manufacturers proposed a new vehicle as well as its usage and buyers interpreted these claims and reconstituted the innovation as a prestigious vehicle in urban contexts (Rosa et al., 1999). In these early days, both sides co-constructed the understanding of the product innovation and its usage. Once a product has been developed, any new iteration or modification can only be compared against the apprehended templates we developed from the beginning, and the same goes for the organisational form that develops around it. In other words, every firm that starts as service design firm and resembles a service design agency in its structure, is perceived as authentic. Any further change on the consensual understanding on “service design” will be compared to the originally learnt mental representation. At a later stage, it is difficult to modify our apprehended understanding (Rosa et al., 1999). Basically, the more the real vehicle matches the mental representation, the more we perceive it as “the real deal” and authentic. To be perceived as such is rewarded highly by consumers with legitimacy and higher desirability. Consequently, one might think that Engine as the firm at the core of the category would be well positioned to defend itself against entrants from other categories. However, two threats exist for all member firms – at firm and market level.
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As a whole, the concept of service design lacks coherence. The term has become increasingly ambiguous as various definitions exist, but no single clear-cut one (SDN, 2014). Additionally, the new entrants stem from different disciplines and introduce new interpretations of the practice. In general, if a practice is not coherent, but shows high diversity, it creates uncertainty among buyers, which results in audiences starting to devalue it (Zuckerman, 1999). Once devalued, demand and desirability decrease. At company level, if those new entrants, classified as professional service firms, bring with them new features which actually improve service design in the eyes of audiences, this can lead to the creation of new client expectations and update the understanding of service design at two levels: that of the practice and that of the firm. Put in simple terms: huge management consultancies for example have developed a high standard of client services that could put competitive pressure on existing service design firms to keep up with this level. In summary, new entrants threaten the sustainability of service design, concurrently the desirability of the practice as well as the existence of service design firms, through two mechanisms: firstly introducing further diversity, and secondly the superiority of some characteristics. The representative firm at the core is particularly prone to those pressures, as its own fate is closely tied to the fate of the service design category as a whole.
RESEARCH QUESTION
If these new intruders redefine what service design means today, how should existing member organisations respond? In general, as far as we know from prior research in strategic management, firms in these situations have five strategic response options: 1) Not adapting at all and staying true to their originally created prototype 2) Changing their practices to mimic the new ones introduced 3) Moving on to the next practice and call their category ‘a fad’ 4) Opposing the newly imposed service design identity by forming a coalition with other “typical firms (Negro, Hannan, & Rao, 2011) 5) Reinterpreting the category by adopting some elements and asserting others In the following, I will further elaborate on the five different strategies listed and explain why. In my opinion, firms in this situation are advised to reinterpret the category while remaining true to their heritage. One alternative response option might be that existing service design firms decide to survive on the basis of their authenticity. This implies the notion of not adapting at all, but of further emphasising what differentiates them from the new entrants. Yet, as we know from ecology theory, when firms do not adapt to changes in their niche, they will not survive in the long run
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(Hannan & Freeman, 1977). Therefore, this is a strategy leading to inferior competitive capabilities, signifying that typical firms lagged behind the new service design radicals. This could either lead to the emergence of a new label (Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003), for example “emotional design”, or the withdrawal of the typical firms (Crane, 1987; Negro et al., 2011). A second strategic option comprises mimicry of the new intruders. However, it is difficult to imagine how a service design firm can be able to imitate a huge management consultancy quickly and be competitive in this new playground. This seems logical, if we consider that resources, routines and capabilities are honed in on artistic mastery, which is considered incompatible with a management consultancy’s expertise. Alternatively, current members could choose to exit and move on to another promising category, such as “business design”. This is risky in two respects: firstly, those movers would be perceived now as “inauthentic” intruders in the new category, and it would then be up to them to introduce superior capabilities as well as to spend considerable time and money to attract attention to their new affiliation. From a socio-cognitive perspective, audiences might be confused about the radical change in their social identity and not believe they could become legitimate and true members. One could argue that in existing market categories, it is difficult to bypass resistance against new modifications, due to already pertaining expectations. As an alternative, it might be easier to join a newly emerging category, one that has not yet been defined. But caution! This decision comes at a price, as new categories demand engagement in pioneering activities by investing a huge amount of resources as well as promotion efforts. In the example of Italian winemaking as described by Negro et al. (2011), some winemakers started to disobey the code for Barrollo Wines by introducing two new features into the production process. This came as a shock to the rest of the producers, as the regulation for Barrollo Wines clearly prescribes the procedures to be followed. As a result, the modification was interpreted as a violation.
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Immediately, traditionalists formed an opposition with the intent of protecting the code of authentic Barrollo winemaking. In contrast, consumers began to appreciate the novel characteristics and welcomed those. What can be learnt from this example of category modification, is that the rejection by traditionalists of value-enhancing new features has not proven to be sustainable. Thus the majority of member firms started to offer both products after a while – the authentic one and the new version. So far, the options presented have focused on company-level strategies. Yet, as mentioned earlier, firms need to solve two problems: the steering of their own boat and the navigation of the stormy waters they find themselves in. Seizing on the theories mentioned earlier, both authenticity and adaptation are essential strategies for firms to survive in a market (Carroll & Wheaton, 2006; Hannan & Freeman, 1977) by adhering to audiences’ expectations (Zuckerman, 1999). Translated into practice, member firms remain true to their heritage while being open to adopt some new features introduced by new competitors. In the following, I call this the theory of ”Authentic Adaptation”. This requires soul-searching within service design organisations: What is our essence? What makes us service designers in the first place? However, what should we learn in order to stay competitive? What new capabilities do we need? As the competitive landscape has shifted from primarily design agencies to increasingly Neo-PSFs, “Authentic Adaptation” means in this case to move from an organisational form as a design agency to being classified as novel form of Creative PSF. To understand what this means, I will firstly expand on PSFs in general, followed by creative PSFs in a second step. Professional service firms (PSFs) are an extreme example of knowledgeintensive firms (Nordenflycht, 2010). These organisations are elitist service providers distinguished from others by the high complexity of knowledge involved, which is embodied in the individual members (Starbuck, 1992). The type of knowledge differs among PSFs according to the kind of expertise involved. Therefore, PSFs are very dependent on an intellectually skilled workforce (Nordenflycht, 2010). Consequently, their main investment is in human resources, not in the technology or inventory involved.
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Thus PSFs are characterised by low capital intensity. PSFs can be classified into classic PSFs, which fulfil all criteria, including the employment of a fully professional workforce. One rank below are the so-called Neo-PSFs, which comprise management consultancies and creative PSFs such as architectural firms or advertising consultancies, in which not all the workforce is
always fully professional (Nordenflycht, 2010). This is where service design as a Creative PSF can be situated. As Neo-PSFs possess superior knowledge compared to their clients, the problem of “opaque quality” exists (Nordenflycht, 2010). Due to this knowledge asymmetry, the principals struggle to evaluate the quality of the services provided. The difficulty of assessment creates a situation of uncertainty on the market side.
While classic PSFs draw on professional status in order to evoke credibility and trust, this is more difficult for Neo-PSFs. As in the example of management consultancies, firms use certain mechanisms to signal quality. As the idiosyncratic reputation of the firm becomes an important selection criterion, management consultancies compete for prestigious clients and feature high investment in their brand. At the individual level, some consultancies introduce partner accountability in case of failure, and employees are expected to embody competency through their personal characteristics and appearance. To increase trust, establishing ethical codes can prove additionally beneficial. In this context, Creative PSFs exhibit specific challenges, as they have to manage their artistic side as well as acting as reliable service providers (Canavan et al., 2013). This can become a pull test for a firm, trying to balance the logics of both art and efficiency (Thornton et al., 2012). Learning from another design practice, Canavan et al. (2013) investigated how Irish architectural firms managed this tension. The conclusion showed that architectural firms follow Porter’s
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strategies to create sustainable competitive advantage, by either deciding for cost leadership (efficiency) or for differentiation embracing their artistic side (Porter, 1985). Translated into the service design context, neither extreme aligns with the strategy to adopt some new elements and assert others: here, firms have to balance efficiency elements adopted from management consultancies with their idiosyncratic artistic mastery. Based on my observations, this requires a significant selftransformation process in terms of consequentially redefining the organisational identity and individual membership. I identified six dimensions that require a shift in mind-set. These serve as managerial implications.
MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS
1) Knowledge is key. Convert the tacit knowledge embodied in individuals, that is “knowledge by doing”, into codified knowledge. Once documented, it can be externalised and becomes sharable across the firm. 2) Create outcomes. Shift the emphasis from being a producer of artistic outputs to being a service provider to a client. Use available tools and methods to make the client adopt the changes proposed. A creative service provider should sell both aspects: involvement in the creative process and engaging documentation to involve the client actively.
3) Invest in people. Great employees are key for the quality of the organisation and they embody the firm’s knowledge. In order to retain and nurture them, career trajectories must be created, individual incentives must be offered and they must be treated as partners. 4) Be an expert. Advise and consult clients based on the expertise gained in previous cases. 5) Signal Quality. Nurture personal reputation and the professional appearance of the workforce, demonstrate accountability and create an occupational ethos. 6) Communicate. Diffuse knowledge, and collaborate with other members in the market in order to create coherence.
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THE ORGANISATIONAL DESIGN OF SOCIAL VENTURES A CONTINGENCY PERSPECTIVE
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Lien De Cuyper
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LIEN DE CUYPER Lien is a PhD candidate at the Imperial College London Business School where she is part of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship research group. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Engineering and a Master’s Degree in Finance from the University of Ghent in Belgium. Her research interests include social entrepreneurship, social enterprises and the organisational design and identity of ventures with dual commercial and social purposes.
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THE ORGANISATIONAL DESIGN OF SOCIAL VENTURES: A CONTINGENCY PERSPECTIVE By taking a contingency perspective based on the interrelation between social and commercial objectives, we contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of the organisational designs that various social ventures adopt to create social and economic value simultaneously. We argue that social and economic objectives are not necessarily balanced equally, as most of the previous literature on social entrepreneurship tends to assume. Instead, typically one objective is subordinate to the other. We offer a better understanding of the relative order of commercial and social objectives and show how this impacts on whether social ventures adopt a hybrid structural design or not. In addition, we argue that the order of objectives has an impact on whether social and economic value creation is integrated or differentiated.
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This chapter deals with social ventures and the organisational designs they adopt to combine social and economic value creation successfully. Social ventures are organisations that aim to solve environmental or societal issues by combining nonprofit principles and practices with classic, profit-orientated business methods. A characteristic element of social ventures is that they have multiple objectives to achieve. They have both a social and economic objective as they seek to contribute to a social or environmental cause while being financially self-sustainable. The social or environmental mission is an explicit and most often primary objective, and this is what sets these ventures apart from commercial businesses. In tackling social and environmental issues with business methods, social ventures combine principles, practices and values from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors in an unprecedented way. Although social ventures have become increasingly popular as an organisational form (Battilana & Lee, 2014), we know little about the organisational designs that enable social ventures to reconcile dual objectives successfully. The purpose of this chapter is to provide more insight into the different organisational designs adopted by a variety of social ventures.
THE ORGANISATIONAL DESIGN OF SOCIAL VENTURES
In this chapter, we define “organisational design� as a holistic concept consisting of the structures, practices and processes implemented by the organisation. The study of organisational design focuses on the form, the overall design, the gestalt, or the configuration taken on by the organisation (Mintzberg, 1979). A central notion in organisational design literature is that organisations are made up of structures, processes and systems and show a pattern in the way they combine strategic, structural and environmental elements. Organisational design has also been recognised as being more than just structure, also including cognitive processes of sense-making, creation and discovery (Van De Ven, Ganco & Hinings, 2013). Scholars have suggested that social ventures reconcile multiple, and possibly conflicting logics by creating novel, hybrid organisational designs (Tracey, Phillips, & Jarvis, 2011). Social ventures are hybrid organisations that are exposed to multiple and often conflicting institutional logics and demands (Greenwood, Raynard, Kodeih, Micelotta, & Lounsbury, 2011). They act in an institutional environment characterised by multiple for-profit and nonprofit logics and are arenas of confusion as there is no standard organisational design to adopt (Greenwood et al., 2011). Research suggests that in order to bridge multiple institutional logics, social ventures create novel organisational designs that diverge from the established organi-
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sational templates considered appropriate within a given field (Battilana & Dorado, 2010; Greenwood et al., 2011; Pache & Santos, 2010; Tracey et al., 2011). Interestingly, most of the research on social ventures has been idiosyncratic, focusing on one specific type of social venture in a single context. Sparse attention has been paid to the contextual mechanisms that have an impact on the differences among hybrid organisational designs adopted by social ventures to strike a balance between for-profit and nonprofit logics. Hence, the question has been largely overlooked concerning which different hybrid organisational designs are used by a variety of social ventures and which specific designs fit best in a certain context. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a more fine-grained understanding of this by taking a contingency approach to how hybrid organisational designs enable social ventures to balance out economic and social objectives and the associated institutional logics. Based on a comparative study of eleven social ventures, we developed insights into the relative order of economic and social objectives and the implications for the organisational designs of a variety of social ventures. We focused on social ventures that engage in some sort of commercial activity and hence did not consider social enterprises relying on government funding or those resembling traditional charities. Based on a business model canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010), we compared data about the value offering of the ventures; their intended customers; key partners; core activities; resources; revenues; costs and channels to reach the market; and the intended target populations.
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A CONTINGENCY PERSPECTIVE ON ORGANISATIONAL DESIGN AND THEIR SOCIAL VENTURES
By comparing several case studies of social ventures, we find that they differ in whether or not they adopt a hybrid organisational design. More specifically, we identify that the relative order of economic and social objectives forms a contingency that has an impact on the organisation’s structural design. We identify that there are two types of social ventures that have similar structural designs. We find that one group mainly draws on elements from the for-profit market logic for their legal, operational and financial structures. They have a for-profit legal status and a single operational structure, with their core activity being focused on selling products or services. Their profit from sales is reinvested in business development and/or partly donated to an external nonprofit organisation supporting a separate group of individuals or community. The other group of ventures uses hybrid legal, operational and financial structures in which elements from market and social welfare logics are blended. They typically have either a nonprofit legal status or a hybrid legal and operational structure with one part of the business functioning as for-profit, while the other part operates as nonprofit. They rely on self-earned income from sales of products and services and receive extra support from a government or foundation. The money they make is reinvested to support their social mission and the creation of social value. A closer look at those two types of social ventures shows that they differ in the relative importance they give to social and economic objectives. This relative order of both objectives has an impact on whether the social venture adopts a hybrid structural design or not. Despite the fact that both economic and social objectives are at the core of all social ventures, it is exceptional for the economic and social objectives in the ventures to receive equal weight. Some ventures focus mainly on creating social or environmental change and use the commercial transaction as a mere leveraging and supporting activity. In contrast, other social ventures concentrate primarily on economic value creation, using social value creation as a supporting activity that enhances commercial opportunities. Hence, it is not
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the mere having of different objectives that counts, but the weight attached to each objective. On one hand, we find that for the group of ventures that does not adopt a hybrid structural design, the social objective is subordinate to the economic objective. These social ventures are for-profit and sales-driven, but despite the fact that they use their social mission to leverage their economic objective, this goes beyond traditional corporate social responsibility. Their social objective is not a by-product but core to their business model and organisational design. On the other hand, we find that for the group of ventures with hybrid structural designs, the economic objective is subordinate to the social objective. We observe that they organise economic activities to achieve their social mission. They are based on the idea that commercial activities are needed to tackle societal problems.
THE INTEGRATION AND DIFFERENTIATION OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC VALUE CREATION
An analysis of different social ventures’ value-creating activities shows that the two types described above differ in how their social and economic value creation is linked through their organisational design. Social ventures without a hybrid structural design typically engage in a single commercial retail activity. By selling their products to the mass market these social ventures indirectly create social impact. The social value creation is inherently embedded in their organisational design, through their core activity, the production process, the resources used, the people hired and the products or services that are eventually sold. Having a social mission differentiates them from purely commercial competitors, and thus helps to increase the chances of commercial success. Characteristic of these types of ventures is that the different objectives are intrinsically linked and that they deploy an integrated model. There are no separate activities to create social impact, but instead the entire company breathes the importance of the social mission, reflected by the identity, the production processes, which are sustainable, and their dividend policy, which is targeted towards other social stakeholders as well as the regular shareholders. Hence, their social value accumulates throughout the different components of the organisational design. For these types of social ventures, the creation of so-
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cial value is inherently linked to the creation of commercial value: the more they sell, the larger the social impact they create. In contrast, social ventures with a hybrid structural design take a social need as their point of departure, turn this into a business opportunity, and develop an organisational design around this. They use commercial activities to support their social mission and interact with customers and beneficiaries on a separate basis. The social objective is primary and their main goal is to
improve the conditions for poor individuals or deprived communities. Thus they act as intermediaries between the customers, who provide the financial resources, and the beneficiaries of some sort of social value. They sell products or services to customers, and with the profit generated they typically create social change for a different population of beneficiaries. Hence, the commercial activity facilitates the social goal of the venture. These types of social ventures develop a hybrid structural design whereby social and commercial value creation is differentiated.
Figure 1: characteristics of two types of social ventures - 208 -
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They use separate activities to generate financial return and create social impact. However, the two streams of value-creating activities are mutually dependent upon each other. There is a two-way interaction whereby an increase in financial value generation leads to a potential increase in social impact creation and vice versa. Figure 1 summarises the characteristics of the two types of social ventures in terms of their organisational design and the link between their economic or financial value creating activities (E) and the social value creating activities (S).
CONCLUSION
Despite the growing interest in social ventures, scholars have paid little attention to how social ventures differ in how they reconcile dual objectives. The implicit assumption in most studies has been that both social and economic objectives are of equal importance and compete with each other for attention. By looking at the interrelation between social and commercial objectives, we contribute to the academic discourse on this topic. We offer a better understanding of the relative importance of multiple objectives and show how this impacts on hybrid organisational designs. Social and economic objectives are not necessarily balanced equally as most of the previous literature on social entrepreneurship tends to assume. Instead, typically one objective is subordinate to the other. We find that there are two types of social ventures. These two types differ in the coexistence and linking of economic and social objectives and this impacts on whether they adopt a hybrid structural organisational design or not. On one hand, there are social ventures that use their social mission to support their commercial objective. They do not develop hybrid structural designs but their social value creation and economic value creation are integrated. On the other hand, there are social ventures that use commercial activities to support their social mission. They adopt hybrid structural designs and create social and economic value through differentiated activities.
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SERVICE DESIGN IN BUSINESS
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Marzia Aricò
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MARZIA ARICĂ’ Marzia believes in the power of collaborative intelligence and in the potential of the crosspollination between business and design. In the past ten years she has been involved in a series of cuttingedge projects aimed at bringing design thinking into innovation processes, working with more than one hundred Fortune500 organisations worldwide. She currently works as a Business Designer at Livework, one of the very first Service Design studios founded in the world, that from an early stage helped to frame and shape the discipline. Marzia is also a PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School, where she is proving the value added of Service Design for Businesses. She regularly speaks at a number of international conferences and seminars on Service Design, and she is a visiting teacher at a number of universities worldwide, such as Iceland Academy of the Arts, TU Delft, and CBS.
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SERVICE DESIGN IN BUSINESS Management and IT consulting firms, as well as large corporations, have started bringing human-centred design capabilities in-house through the acquisition of design agencies and design talent. At the same time, Service Design agencies are moving into Business Design to increase the business relevance of their projects for clients. This is happening in response to a growing number of organisations struggling to find solutions to achieve digital capabilities, meet customers’ expectations, and deliver consistent quality of service across different channels. This chapter shares a number of observations on how the Service Design Studio Livework is tackling the shift toward Business Design. It also describes the consequences of this transition in relation to the agency’s processes as well as the consequent outcomes for clients.
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INTRODUCTION
Design is trending in business. Management and IT consulting firms have started a race to acquire strategic design firms, bringing human-centred design capabilities and talent in-house to improve their digital offer. In July 2015, the IT consulting giant Wipro acquired the strategic design firm Designit; in May of the same year the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company acquired Lunar; and in 2013 the management consulting services firm Accenture acquired the design agency Fjord, to name a few. While business experts acquire design capabilities, design firms are broadening what they do in order to remain competitive and relevant to their business clients. I have always been fascinated by the potential of design to impact business. When I joined Livework in 2013, the company was undertaking a profound transformation towards increased business relevance. Therefore, my arrival at Livework could not have been timelier. In this chapter, I will share observations from the last two years during which the team worked on developing an understanding of how Service Design could become instrumental in tackling some of the most pressing business challenges. Looking at the projects that Livework has been running since my arrival, there are three major business challenges clients are looking to solve: (1) Digital Transformation (2) Customer Blah (3) Cross-Channel Experience.
(1) Companies started in the last two decades have been built in, and for, the digital age. For those businesses that have been around longer, developing digital advantage is a daunting and pressing task. Creating digital advantage is not as easy as it may seem, since it requires more than digitising a service or building a new app. A sound digital strategy involves not only a deep understanding of customer-facing activities, but also a strong integration of internal functions, namely IT, operations, supply-chain, customer support, sales, HR, and finance. Today, digital activities are often fragmented within the organisation, with senior management unsure about who should own the digital transformation – is it the CTO, CIO, or CMO? Digital enablement brings with it the need for a new culture, skills and roles within the organisation. Unfortunately, the pressure to hit shortterm revenue targets prevents businesses from making the long-term investment in a digital transformation. In addition, many organisations lack a clear understanding of the ROI of digital projects. Finally, digital programmes often end up impacting existing legacy IT systems, which many organisations are not ready to change for either political or structural reasons. (2) Customer Blah embraces all managerial mantra related to customers. For example, “get closer to the customer”, “listen to the voice of the customer”, “become more customercentric”. Solving this challenge may be a more daunting task than the previous one because it requires truly listening, understanding and em-
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bracing customers’ expectations. Virtually every organisation on the planet collects customer feedback via surveys and focus groups. These methods have the limitation of being closed systems that force people to respond to a specific request. The results rarely generate new information since the feedback mostly validates what the organisation already knows. (3) Only customers have the pleasure of experiencing organisations as a whole. By visiting a branch, calling the call centre and trying to shop online, customers get to experience the organisation and its silos. Every department works for customers, but no single one truly knows them. Providing a smooth and holistic experience across all the different channels, while ensuring consistency of quality requires a fundamental shift of thinking from internal processes to customer experience – from inside-out to outside-in. These are no new challenges. Many organisations have been struggling to find solutions to these challenges for years. The majority of them opt to seek help from traditional management consulting firms, which often tackle these challenges through a quantitative approach and “off-the-shelf” solutions. As a consequence, organisations can be left with solutions that are difficult to implement, as they are not tailored to the organisation, or solutions that simply do not meet customers’ expectations. Other organisations opt to seek help from Service Design agencies. In this case, what businesses are often left
with is a great concept for customers that fails to take into consideration the current organisational capabilities for service delivery. A survey run for a global research project called “Design for Service Innovation & Development” reports that 51% of the projects run by Service Design agencies never get implemented. The agencies’ contribution is often at the Idea Generation and Customer Insight phases (Sangiorgi, Prendiville, Jung, & Yu, 2015). At Livework we call this “corporate entertainment”: generating ideas to entertain and inspire an innovation department at an organisation whilst being fully aware that those ideas will never see the light of day. As a consequence, Service Design agencies have started a transition towards a more business-relevant language and offering. Today, almost half of the Service Design agencies around the globe offer Business Design as part of their offering (Sangiorgi et al., 2015). Livework is one of them. Business Design is now a complementary capability added to any Service Design project to the point that every project gets assigned both a Service and a Business Designer. This is done to ensure that every project meets customers’ expectations, leverages on business drivers and metrics, and takes into consideration the organisation’s policies, practices, processes, people, and systems. Livework is in the midst of this journey. As part of the team that is leading this transition, I am researching the value added through Service Design – what it is and how to measure
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Figure 1. A simplified diagram of the process of a traditional Service Design project from inception to conclusion. The exploration phase looks at customers and involves the organisation in understanding relationships and interactions with customers. The insight phase keeps diverging while drawing insights from the analysis of the exploration phase. This will eventually inform the idea generation, concept development and prototyping phases, which will produce a number of deliverables that are tailor-made to the potential customer experience.
it. At this stage, I will share observations on what it means to run a Service plus Business Design project in practice, what the consequences are for the agency that delivers it, and the gains from the perspective of the client organisation. My observations are restricted to the experience of Livework Studio, the partner organisation in my research project. However, I believe that some of the aspects that I will share in the following section will resonate with other Service Design agencies too.
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SERVICE PLUS BUSINESS DESIGN
A Service Design project puts the customer at the centre of any intervention. Understanding the customer and designing a superior customer experience are central aspects of any Service Design project. An eager reader of design thinking or Service Design publications would expect the process of the project to alternate between stages of divergence and convergence. And this is exactly what it looks like to an external observer analysing the process. In reality however, what often happens is that the exploration continues without a real moment of convergence of the information. Figure 1 shows a simplified diagram of a Service Design project by Livework, as seen from the inside. The initial stage of exploration looks at developing a deep understanding of the customer from the outside-in. It also involves the organisation in the process of better understanding the customer experience from the inside-out. Without clear boundaries being defined by the organisation, the project keeps diverging into an insight phase, which will eventually inform the idea generation and concept development. The result is a number of possible deliverables that often do not leverage on business drivers, and that do not take into consideration the consequent impact on policies, processes, practices, people, and systems. Moreover, the organisation is left with a number of concepts, which are tested to work extremely well with customers, but are not tested with the internal organisation. When no clear ownership is agreed upon, there will be lack of clarity on who should move concepts forward. Without clarity on leadership, vision, budget, or business case, the outcomes of a Service Design project are difficult to implement. Figure 2 shows a simplified process behind a project that combines Service Design and Business Design capabilities. The customer remains central and becomes the lens through which the team looks at the business as well as the organisation. The process explores three angles, focusing on: (1) Understanding the customer (2) Understanding business drivers and measures (3) Understanding policies, practices, processes, procedures, people, and systems. - 219 -
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Figure 2. A simplified diagram of the process behind a project that combines Service and Business Design capabilities. In addition to the usual customer research, the team makes an effort, at an early stage of the project, to understand the business as well as the organisation. This understanding creates boundaries for the project. The deliverables are designed to serve the customers, the business and the organisation.
The business and organisational understanding provide the natural boundaries for the Service Design project. The deliverables are three important activities (on the right side of the graph): (1) Justifying choices by building a business case model. This is particularly important to support the sponsor of the client organisation in selling the concept internally and ensuring implementation. (2) Visualising the desired customer experience. This is particularly important to create a shared service vision internally at the organisation.
(3) Building a plan for execution and implementation based on current capabilities. This is particularly important to ensure quick results. Let us have a look at what this means in reality. Vodafone, one of the largest telecommunication companies, approached Livework with a cross-channel challenge. As discussed before, cross-channel experiences are one of the three areas organisations are struggling to get right. Livework suggested tackling the challenge using a Service plus Business Design approach. The team, a mix of Service and Business Designers,
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developed in-depth customer research while ensuring the achievement at a very early stage of a clear understanding of the business drivers and the practices, processes, policies, people, and systems in place at Vodafone. One of the many insights that emerged from the customer research phase was that when people buy a new phone online they prefer to collect it at the store rather than receiving it at home. It turned out that they want staff to help them transfer their data from their old phone and they
want to be advised on how to use it. The receipt, set-up, and early-use stages of a new phone subscription are the major sources of inconvenience for customers in telecoms. A regular Service Design project, which looks solely at the customer experience, would have designed a solution that includes the option of collecting the phone at the nearest branch, but Vodafone was simply not set up for that. There was no way, with the current system in place, to know which phone was at which branch.
Figure 3. The picture shows the analysis of the impact of the “Collect Phone at Branch” scenario on the policies, people, processes, procedures, practices and systems. The scenario affected three key phases of the customer’s lifecycle: Receipt, Set-up, and Early Use. The blocks in red are specifications on the limitations from an organisational perspective.
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Vodaphone’s system was set up for home delivery. Therefore, the company was unable to inform customers where to go to collect their brand-new phone. Suggesting the addition of the option of picking up the phone at the nearest branch would have meant costly and lengthy work on Vodafone’s IT system. Moreover, employees at the branch were there to sell, not to serve customers. Their KPIs were around contracts closed and upsell, and therefore they had no interest in wasting precious time on helping customers set up their phones. In other words, proposing the possibility for customers to collect their brand-new phones at the nearest branch would have affected the company’s systems, policies, and people (Figure 3). As a result, the project would never have seen an implementation phase. By gaining an understanding of how the company is set up and how people are rewarded, the recommended service scenario suggested the possibility for customers to order their phone online and to assign one of Vodafone’s branches as the delivery address. Moreover, a new metric was added to the front line staff’s KPIs, which rewarded post-sale support, even if the sale happened in a different channel from the physical shop where they were based. The solution had zero impact on the systems, and very little impact on policies and people, enabling Vodafone to pilot the new scenario straight away with 10,000 customers.
CONCLUSIONS
Organisations worldwide are facing profound challenges related to digital transformations and customer understanding. These challenges are increasingly undermining their capacity for remaining competitive in their market, and also uncovering the tension between what customers expect and what organisations actually deliver to them. The solution to these challenges does not only reside in the design of better services for customers, but also in understanding how to transform the organisation to deliver the services. The process of tackling these challenges requires a combination of capabilities that leverage both Service Design and service transformation.
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A number of Service Design studios across the globe are investing in building such a combination of capabilities. Service Design agencies are often small, and half of them do not employ more than ten people (Sangiorgi et al., 2015). It is plausible to think that this transition will happen quickly and will soon become visible in the implementation rates of projects as well as in the way they are measured against the impact they produce in the organisation. However, what will happen in organisations as big as Accenture or Wipro through the acquisitions they have just made? Will the design capabilities they have just acquired permeate into something tangible for their clients? Or will they get lost in the huge machine they represent, going back quickly into business as usual? At a guess, we will discover sooner rather than later. Either way, this transition represents an important opportunity for the Service Design practice to grow, and a learning opportunity for those who believe in the potential of Service Design in business.
REFERENCES
Sangiorgi, D., Prendiville, A., Jung, J., Yu, E. (2015). Design for Service Innovation & Development. Final Report retrieved from http://www.de-sid.info/ Stigliani, I., & Fayard, A.L. (2010). Designing new customer experiences: a study of socio-material practices in Service Design. Discussion Paper, Imperial London College Business School.
NOTES
Livework is one of the pioneering design studios that in the early 2000s invested in Design as a medium to improve or create new services. Since then, they have been one of the most recognised Service Design Studios, helping to shape the practice and the discipline. Livework today has offices in London, Oslo, Rotterdam, S達o Paulo, and Beirut.
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BETTINA VON STAMM Bettina is described as a passionate, original and visionary thinker in the field of innovation. The passion, first kindled during her MBA (1990-1992) was deepened further when she returned to the London Business School for her PhD in the field of Design Management (1994-1998). She founded the Innovation Leadership Forum in 2004 to help individuals and organisations understand and embrace innovation, holistically and sustainably. In her armoury, she has the Innovation Wave 速, a facilitated tool for developing innovation capability, two sets of Picture Cards and three books: The Innovation Wave (2002), Managing Innovation Design & Creativity (2008), and The Future of Innovation (2009).
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Reflection
SYNERGY THROUGH TENSION It was a privilege to read the three contributions of Eva Kirchberger, Lien de Cuyper and Marzia Aricò who all in their respective ways shed light on challenges characteristic of our times, times in which we experience “a tornado of change, which is unprecedented in terms of its speed and magnitude”, as Marzia Aricò puts it. In her chapter, she casts light on the evolution of the role of design services in the context of business. In her contribution, Eva Kirchberger explores the consequences that fast developments in a newly created market have for its creator. How social ventures move towards embracing both economic and social objectives is the focus of Lien de Cuyper’s work. Each in her own way picks up on something that is a consequence of a mismatch between the prevailing mind-set and a changed context. For Eva Kirchberger, it is a growing tension between organisational context and a changing environment which poses the question of what to hold on to, and what to change. In Lien de Cuyper’s work, is it the tension of simultaneously pursuing economic and social objectives. For Marzia Aricò, it is the tension between design and business in general, and the consequences of designers engaging in services as well as business design in particular. In their own ways, they are all grappling with the consequences of the new reality of the twenty-first century: complexity. Before sharing some thoughts on each individual contribution, I would like briefly to take a closer look at the unprecedented change and the resulting complexity that we face. For me they can be explained by looking at ‘the five C’s’: Change! Never before has so much change been introduced in such a short period of time. Connectivity! Never before has it been so easy to find and connect with people, information, knowledge, and things.
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Convergence! Never before have boundaries meant so little, be they geographical, between.industries, or between bodies of knowledge. Consumers! Never before have we as consumers been more demanding, better educated, and more aware of the consequences of our purchases (e.g. social, environmental) Challenges! Never before have we faced challenges so severe and so manifold: a world population reaching plague proportions, health issues related to both obesity and starvation, depletion of resources and a decrease in biodiversity to name but a few. The speed of change, connectivity and convergence leads to increased levels of complexity where predictions are ever more impossible; change is experienced in the moment and requires an immediate response. The challenges, consumers, convergence and connectivity simultaneously demand innovation while also creating tremendous innovation opportunities. The one undeniable consequence of these six C’s (the five above plus complexity) is that collaboration, across diversity and boundaries, has become essential. All three contributions are navigating the sea of C’s... Eva Kirchberger’s observations have for me the following three implications: Firstly, more than ever before, organisations need to reflect and revisit their reason for existing, to find and sustain their own place in this fast changing world. Five- to ten-year planning cycles are no longer realistic – yet at the same time we need to have a vision towards which we move, a red ribbon connecting the past to the future. If we try to absorb every change and customer demand, we risk our actions becoming reactions, and our decisions becoming random. Secondly, we need to stop looking for the ‘one right answer’ – this message is clear from the examples of Fiat and Dubai Airport. Letting go of the search for ‘the right answer’ is a challenge to many of us as it goes
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against what education instills in us from the beginning. The ‘one-rightway’ mind-set is in my view also at the root of a widespread resistance to change: if someone holds the belief that there is only one right way, and a different way is being proposed, does this person then not feel that he/she must have been wrong all the time? No wonder we resist new ideas! A third consequence, mainly driven by convergence, is that we need to learn to rely less on the ’boxes’ that our brain finds so useful. This means, as Eva Kirchberger points out in her contribution, that we need to develop a new language to embrace and reflect our new reality. I believe that we are well advised to take a closer look at the insights and lessons that complexity theory has to offer, namely that in order to survive and even thrive in a complex system we need to • observe and monitor constantly – to identify changes early, and collect feedback on the relevance of our current position • keep moving and move slowly – so as neither to get left behind nor to get disconnected from the wider system • move towards a ‘strange attractor’, i.e. have a focal point towards which to move. One way in which Lien de Cuyper’s work connects to Eva Kirchberger’s is that it too is concerned with the challenge posed by ‘boxes’ to the reality of the twenty-first century. In our currently prevalent thinking, organisations are aligning themselves either to the profit or to the nonprofit mental model (box). Yet I would argue that given today’s challenges to society and the environment, it is increasingly irresponsible to pursue one ‘P’ of the triple bottom line of Planet, People, Profit, to the detriment of the others. The mental model of ‘either or’ might have worked in the past, yet in the present it is dysfunctional, and it is undermining our potential for actually having a future. One of the reasons that it was possible to operate under the ‘either or’ mind-set in the past is that the pace of change was much slower. If change is slow then we can afford to focus on one aspect at a time. This is experienced as the swing of the pendulum over time: for example from a focus on cost-cutting and efficiencies, to a focus on innovation and growth.
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With the rate of the introduction of change having increased so dramatically, today we have to do things simultaneously rather than consecutively. We need to excel at operational efficiencies as well as at innovation; we need to focus on the social implications of our actions as well as the economic ones. Indeed, this is relevant not only for social ventures but for all organisations. We need to find ways to appreciate, measure, and balance organisations’ effects on profit, people, and planet. Frameworks such as the cone developed by Lien de Cuyper offer a starting point. Finally, Marzia Aricò picks up on the old tension between business and design. It is over thirty years since the value of design in the context of business was first made explicit by Philip Kotler and Alexander Rath in their seminal article “Design: a powerful but neglected strategic tool.” One might wonder what has changed businesses’ minds to make more of an effort to embrace it! My own explanation is that innovation was recognised about fifteen to twenty years ago as being a major force in sustaining businesses. Soon it was realised that the prevailing mind-set in business was not exactly supportive of innovation. This was followed by the realisation that there was a body of knowledge and a ‘tribe’ who seemed to have a more suitable mind-set as well as a strong preference for turning things inside out, questioning everything, and thriving on uncertainty and ambiguity: designers. Some early initiatives aimed at bringing design and business together died an early and undeserved death, due to a lack of both vision and appropriate leadership. Examples are the Centre for Design Management at the London Business School set up by Peter Gorb in the 1980s, and the Zollverein School of Management and Design in the early 2000s. The advent of ‘design thinking’, separating designers’ tools and methods from designers per se, has started to achieve what seemed unachievable for so long: the business community embracing design. What is still lacking, in my view, is a shared language and a deeply embedded appreciation of each other’s strength and contribution, which is the necessary foundation for allowing one plus one to equal three, or four or ten! Indeed, it needs a holistic approach that, as Marzia Aricò puts it has a “... focus not only on competences and capabilities, but often at the level of People, Processes, Practices, Policies, and Systems in place.”
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What all three contributions confirm for me is that a new mind-set is needed to conquer the challenges and contexts of the twenty-first century. We need a mind-set that no longer requires thinking in boxes and boundaries, that accepts fluidity and connectedness, that appreciates and thrives on diversity, and that embraces experimentation and exploration as it is built on the insight that there is never only one most appropriate way, given the specific context, and the particular point in time.
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EPILOGUE
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DESMA PARTNER VOICES “The most interesting part of the experience in DESMA was actually being part of an international network that was gradually transformed into a think tank consisting of professionals and researchers with their visions on the future of design plus management.” Lucia Chrometzka, Future Concept Lab
“It is necessary first to establish a common language to identify common paths and systems, and to encompass and involve diverse design and business cultures. By these means, we can reinforce the collaborative spirit.” Lucia Chrometzka, Future Concept Lab
“Bridging the gap between design and business is by far the greatest challenge confronting the design group of an industrial B2B company.” Sidney Levy, Volvo
“DESMA has provided a fresh platform for many forms of research and hopes for a continuation in this direction.” Malin Orebäck, Veryday
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“The DESMA network provides us with a unique opportunity to share experiences with other design managers who may perhaps be facing similar organisational challenges to ours. While there are many articles written about design as a trade, it is harder to find honest documentation about design management, other than the texts written by design consultancies promoting themselves.” Sidney Levy, Volvo
“DESMA displays an extensive variety of ways to interpret and deal with design management.” Rob Kommeren, Philips
“Anyone engaged in design work needs to thrive in the new intersections between disciplines, competences and roles.” Malin Orebäck, Veryday
“The value of design management is the ability to master new evolving design principles in an integrated fashion with other design practices, while developing a state-of-the-art high-end product.” Rob Kommeren, Philips
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CONTRIBUTING MANAGEMENT TEAM MEMBERS ANNA RYLANDER EKLUND
CLAUDIO DELL’ERA
Anna is the project manager of DESMA and scientist-
Claudio is Assistant Professor in the Department of
in-charge for the research theme on design
Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
management methods.
of Politecnico di Milano, where he also serves as Co-Director of MaDe In Lab, the Laboratory
She is a senior researcher at the Business & Design
of Management of Design and Innovation at MIP
Lab, a collaboration between the School of Design
Politecnico di Milano. Research activities developed
and Crafts and the School of Business, Economics and
by Claudio Dell’Era are concentrated in the area of
Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Anna
Management of Innovation.
holds a PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, and has a professional background
Research interests are specifically about two main
as management consultant. Based in London, UK, she
streams: the former concentrates on innovation
helped clients in Europe, the US and Australia to
strategies developed by leading companies that
formulate their strategy and identify, manage and
operate in design-intensive industries where
measure their intangible assets.
symbolic and emotional values represent critical success factors to generate competitive advantage
ORIANA HASELWANTER Oriana is the communications strategist of DESMA and has been responsible for the graphic profile and the visual language of DESMA. She has project managed the production of this book as well as the main DESMA dissemination events such as the DESMA Forum 2014 in London and DESMA Vibes 2015 in Gothenburg. Oriana has a Master’s degree in Business & Design from HDK, School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and a Bechelor in Visual Communication form the Glasgow School of
(Management of Design-Driven Innovation); while the latter analyses approaches and practices adopted during innovation processes by high-tech companies that face turbulent environments (Management of Technological Innovations in Turbulent Environments). He has published in relevant international journals, such as Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning, R&D Management, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Industry & Innovation, International Journal of Innovation Management.
Art, Scotland. She has several years of practical experience as graphic designer and art director. Besides developing DESMA and the Business & Design program, her research interests are in design knowledge and learning.
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TONI-MATTI KARJALAINEN Toni-Matti holds the degrees of Doctor of Arts (Art & Design) and M.Sc. (Econ.). He is Academy Research Fellow at the Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki. He works as a lecturer, seminar and workshop facilitator, and supervisor at a number of universities and schools in different countries. Toni-Matti has worked in collaboration with several Finnish and international companies and institutions. His publications include over one hundred articles in books, journals, international conference reports and other fora. The topics range from design management, visual communication, branding and product
ROBERTO VERGANTI Roberto is Professor of Leadership and Innovation at Politecnico di Milano, where he directs MaDe In Lab, the laboratory on the MAnagement of DEsign and INnovation. He has twice been a visiting scholar
development to, most recently, the popular music
at the Harvard Business School, at California
industry and heavy metal.
Polytechnic University, and at the Copenhagen Business School. Roberto serves on the European
ILEANA STIGLIANI
Design Leadership Board of the European Commission.
Ileana is Assistant Professor of Design and
His research on the management of design and design
Innovation at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship
clusters has been awarded the Compasso d’Oro (the
Department of Imperial College Business School,
most prestigious design award in Italy). Roberto is
London. Her research is situated at the crossroads
the author of “Design-Driven Innovation”, published
between managerial and organisational cognition, and
by the Harvard Business Press and selected by the
organisational behaviour and innovation. It focuses on
Academy of Management for the George R. Terry Book
understanding how people create, use, and exchange
Award as one of the six best books making the most
meaning within organisations (e.g. when developing
outstanding contribution to management. It has been
new products and services, when creating new
translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian
organisations, occupations and industries, etc.).
and Portuguese.
She is currently studying and theorising the meaning-
Roberto has published more than 150 articles in
making mechanisms underpinning the emergence of
journals such as the Harvard Business Review,
Service Design as a new field of design practices.
Management Science, and Research Policy. He has
Her research has been published in the Academy of
been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New
Management Journal, the International Journal of
York Times, the Financial Times, and BusinessWeek,
Management Review, Organisational Dynamics and the
and is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business
International Small Business Journal. She teaches
Review online magazine. Roberto is currently framing
‘Management of Design’ and ‘Design Thinking’ to M.Sc.
his latest research, inspirations and experiences in
and MBA students and also Executives. She received
the book “Innovation of Meaning”, due to be published
her Ph.D. in Management from Bocconi University.
in 2016 by the MIT Press.
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MANAGEMENT TEAM
STEERING COMMITTEE
Anna Rylander Eklund
Jakob Rasmussen (Living Labs Global)
(project manager, University of Gothenburg)
Gianluca Armento (Cassina)
Oriana Haselwanter
Lavrans Løvlie (Live/Work)
(communications strategist, University of
Lucia Chrometzka (Future Concept Lab)
Gothenburg)
Malin Orebäck (Veryday)
Claudio Dell‘Era (Politecnico di Milano)
Oliver King (Engine)
Roberto Verganti (Politecnico di Milano)
Rob Kommeren (Philips)
Toni-Matti Karjalainen (Aalto University)
Sidney Levy (Volvo)
Mikko Koria (Aalto University) Ileana Stigliani (Imperial College)
SUPERVISORS
Bart Clarysse (Imperial College)
Alexander Styhre Anna Rylander Eklund
DESMA ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS
Bart Clarysse
Alicia Chavero
Bosse Westerlund
Anna Meroni
Cecilia Lagerström
Barry Katz
Claudio Dell’Era
Bettina Maisch
Davide Ravasi
Bettina von Stamm
Gianluca Armento
Brigitte Borja de Mozota
Giulia Calabretta
Cabirio Cautela
Ileana Stigliani
Christian Bason
Jakob Rasmussen
Davide Ravasi
Kristina Fridh
Erik Bohemia
Lavrans Løvlie
Ezio Manzini
Lucia Chromotzka
Francesco Zurlo
Malin Orebäck
Giulia Calabretta
Mark Kennedy
James Moultrie
Mike Wright
Jeanne Liedtka
Mikko Koria
Kaja Tooming Buchanan
Oliver King
Kathryn Best
Rebecca Piekkari
Lisbeth Svengren Holm
Rob Kommeren
Martin Kornberger
Roberto Verganti
Neal Stone
Sidney Levy
Rachel Cooper
Stefan Meisiek
Richard Buchanan
Toni-Matti Karjalainen
Roberto Verganti Sabine Junginger Stefan Meisiek
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We want to thank Barry Katz, Bettina Maisch, Bettina von Stamm, Kathryn Best and Rob Chatfield for contributing with their valuable reflections to this publication. Furthermore we want to acknowledge the engagement of our management team and advisory board, our steering committee and our research supervisors over the past few years.
“THE VALUE OF THE DESMA NETWORK IS WHAT WE ALL MAKE OF IT IN THE FUTURE – KEEP IN TOUCH!” Toni-Matti Karjalainen, Aalto University
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BDL (Business and Design Lab) is a research centre founded by the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts and the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg and hosted by the School of Design and Crafts. The purpose of the centre is to support research within the cross-disciplinary fields of business, management and design. BDL aims to increase our understanding of design and how it can contribute to society, businesses, community and public organizations. www.bdl.gu.se
JOIN THE CONVERSATION DESMA will continue to explore new avenues for Design + Management in new formats hosted by the Business & Design Lab. Please register at www.desmanetwork.eu to join the conversation and stay updated on news and events.
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European Commission, FP 7 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions. It brings together twelve partners to train a new generation of researchers, bridging the disciplines and various streams of design and management, as well as bringing the worlds of academia and industry closer to each other. This book provides a peek at the research projects conducted by the thirteen Early Stage Researchers within DESMA in 2012-2015. Each researcher has written a chapter reflecting some critical aspects of their research, and we have asked some of the DESMA Advisory Board members to reflect further on the insights of the ESRs. With texts by Andreas Benker, Andrew Whitcomb, Ariana Amacker, Eva Kirchberger, Fernando Pinto Santos, Lien De Cuyper, Marta Morillo, Marzia Aricò, Naiara Altuna, Sara Jane Gonzalez, Ulises Navarro Aguiar, Veronica Bluguermann, Åsa Öberg. Introductions and reflections by Anna Rylander Eklund, Barry Katz, Bettina Maisch, Bettina von Stamm, Claudio Dell‘Era,
Ileana Stigliani, Kathryn Best, Rob Chatfield, Roberto Verganti and Toni-Matti Karjalainen . From 2016 the DESMA network will be hosted by the Business and Design Lab at HDK - School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg.
© DESMA 2015 ISBN: 978-91-982421-2-6
DESMA, which is short for Design as Driver of Innovation and Competitiveness, is an Initial Training Network funded by the