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The geography of economies is changing rapidly. At the same time people's expectations are getting more demanding. How to move forward in a fast changing world and yet keep the value and essence of local culture? How to react to sweeping changes in markets and the environment? We can see that one-sided approaches are unable to tackle the complex issues of the 21st century. We need a fresh start.

This is why Qatar Foundation is creating the Design Zone. We believe that we can rise to the challenges of our time with integrative, connected thinking, new viewpoints, and a true global cooperation of outstanding creative minds with a genuine respect for local culture and the environment. The Design Zone will be a place to inspire, a platform to learn from the best, and catalyst for design thinking and innovation.

We are building the Design Zone as a global forum for creative minds and entrepreneurial leaders in a large-scale area exclusively dedicated to international creative industries. We are creating a new international design center, a design incubator, studios, workshops, shops and residences for all people creative. It is the first major project in the Gulf dedicated entirely to creativity and design, and as such a major impetus for the future. And most importantly, the Design Zone will give imaginative young people in Qatar and all over the world the possibility to shape the future - because it is their future.

Design Zone Qatar

ACH (Ansichten zur Architektur) is an architecture publication against the stream of glossy magazines. It comes as a newspaper and puts emphasis on quality content with intentionally very few pictures.

Published by the Institute of Public Buildings at the University of Stuttgart, the latest issue, No. 33, is out now with a delightful article of architect Max Baecher together with my images of the Tomba Brion-Vega by Carlo Scarpa (pages 2 to 5).

A little bit of earlier writing on design history:

On history and its rewriting in Vienna, about the Eiffel Tower and modernity, about the beginnings of industrial design and the influences of functionalism and Art Deco, about a famous struggle in the Bauhaus (PDF) and about the history of design organisations (PDF), also in Korean (Monthly Design): "세상과 멀어지는 디자인"

For something contemporary on design and organisations, here (doc) a few of my articles (Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations, University of California, Irvine).

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review features an article titled "Design Thinking". The message of the article by Tim Brown of Ideo is not new for designers, but it is for conventional managers. The innovation here is not design thinking per se - it was practiced and explored by designers since there is design - but that it makes its way into the business mainstream. In terms of trend research, the fact that an article on design thinking is published in Harvard Business Review shows that it is finally coming out of the fringe. It took some time - business guru Tom Peters was advocating for design since at least 10 years, which makes him already part of the avant-garde.

Less discussed, but perhaps the most challenging goal for design thinking is how to transfer its approach into everyday organisational practice. This is because in everyday organisational life it is often the unquestioned, taken-for-granted attitudes and reactions which turn out to be barriers to design thinking. What to look out for? I have started to put together a list:

Preconception: "My idea is GREAT"
People love their own ideas. On the one hand, this motivates people to come up with something. On the other hand, it makes people fall in love with their ideas although they might not be that good after all (the TV series American Inventor is a great illustration). This is an issue which also regularly comes up in design teaching, when students stick to an idea simply because they are convinced that it is good.
Design, although it has much to do with art, is not art. Art expresses individual viewpoints and relies on the approval of a select few. Design, on the other hand, needs to appeal to a wider, and often very wide, audience.

Prejudice: "These guys are wrong, I am right"
Prejudice, unfortunately, is an everyday encounter, but it's a particularly bad trait for designers. There are are some whose work probably was rejected once or a couple of times, and they consequently blame their audience, or managers. In fact, lots of good designs have been rejected throughout history - but mostly there is a rationale why a design gets rejected. A design thinker is required to find out and understand this rationale.
In the corporate realm, the one side is the "suits", the other side are the people "with the long scarf". However, both sides are needed to make design thinking work and actual design reality. The "suits" are interested in, among others, planning and efficiency, while designers, among others, look at things such as aesthetics, harmony, and effects on society (see also here).

Patronizing: "That does not work. I tell you what works"
It might work, it might not. It pays off to listen to different opinions, but it also can pay off not to give up right away and to show that an idea can work. Be aware of the sort of specialists who pretend to know their job so well that they have found the only one way of seeing a problem and insist on sticking to it - they are just (see Preconception above) people who are in love with their idea and nobody in the last 20 years questioned it.
Design thinkers and innovators do not defend their first idea to the bitter end, but welcome constructive critique, are ready to take a risk and a second look - in short, try to see things through the eyes of others.

Procrastination: A tried and tested response of organisations when faced with a new idea is to delay it (see also here). An effective way to get rid of innovation, but also an effective way to get your own company behind and right out of the marketplace.

Although there are more and more designers, products with design quality are hard to come by for most consumers on the globe. This is because developed design capability is not where there is production capability - an important observation, considering that design products are the largest chunk of creative industry exports worldwide. In Europe, where design is getting recognized as an important corporate asset, there is little large-scale production capability left, while it will take some more time once China has a design capability to match its massive industrial output.

For premier companies, design is considered a vital corporate asset which has to be protected - not least as these companies have substantially invested in design. These pictures illustrate part of the problem: Chinese car designs, looking quite familiar. Mercedes and BMW obviously don't like it.

Bayerische Motoren Werke, Munich, and Shaanxi Qinchuan Auto (Build Your Dreams), Shenzhen

Since many years, Chinese companies are aware of the appeal of Western, but also Korean and Japanese brands and designs for Chinese customers. Approaches are mixed: Lenovo bought the IBM hardware business mainly for its tech know-how, but got the valuable IBM brand name rights only for a few years. British carmaker Rover's remains was bought by Nanjing Auto, while competing Shanghai Auto got the design rights of two Rover models. The Rover brand however, it's most valuable asset, went to Ford. Chinese companies until now shopped for foreign companies mainly to boost their technical know-how and seem to have underestimated the other main factors for attracting global consumers: Design and brands. Not having gotten the Rover brand, Shanghai Auto is now selling the Rover 25 and 75 models under "Roewe" - the Chinese pronounciation of Rover.



Global brands such as BMW have a substantial image and design edge over home-made Chinese products with local Chinese customers, a similar problem Korean industry faced with local consumers when opening its market in the nineties. Korea invested heavily in design - and now has both locally desired and globally recognized brands such as Samsung and LG.

Some Chinese companies are getting aware of the importance of design, such as Gangzhou-based GAG, which started to develop a - kind of "not intended for production"-looking - prototype with a young car design studio in Shanghai. Above-mentioned Shanghai Auto also recently came up with a new "Roewe" which was designed and engineered in Britain and is not based on the old Rover designs. Also Chinese brands Geely and Chery did show new concept cars. There is no defined identity or design language yet, but it is a start for Chinese companies to understand the importance of developing design capability. Early learning in design, especially in Asia, works via imitation - see also my articles Alchemy of Cultures (2001) and Imitated, Commodified, Experienced (2005).

The first Chinese companies are now moving from the imitation to an exploration stage, where many different design approaches are tried in a quite chaotic manner. Eventually, they will move to state of synthesis and dominant designs will appear. As can be seen in Japan and Korea, this is not a linear process; it is rather a learning loop, where outer influences repeatedly play a role - see for instance the LG Prada phone, the first co-branded phone with a fashion company, and Samsung's later Armani phone. Samsung also presented it's own iPhone-inspired product.

LG Prada phone, Samsung Armani phone, Apple iPhone, Samsung F700

On the road towards the knowledge economy, many developed countries have also developed design capability. At the same time, industry has steadily declined, not least because of cheap competition from Far East. Design capability is now concentrated in the North and West of the globe, while production is concentrated in the South and East.

Will all Europeans and Americans become knowledge workers, while the Chinese are merely producing the knowledge output of the West? Not likely. I think that on the long term the situation will become equalized - some production (for instance in the area of green technology - the next industrial revolution) will need to come back to the West, while the East will pick up in design capability.

In the meanwhile, designers need to orient themselves more globally, and national design organisations in developing countries need to open their markets to international designers. I doesn't make much sense when talented Western designers in the current economic downturn struggle for local commissions while at the same developing countries need the injection of talent. Designers need to think and act globally.




Some are ahead already: Tata, the Indian car maker which came up with the remarkable Nano, a more convincing (and much cheaper) micro-car solution than Mercedes' loss-making Smart, will soon tap into the talent pool of London by opening its first international design studio there this fall. Expect Smarter and better designed cars - made in India.

There are not only brand and product life cycles, also design is subject to life cycle phases which, when strategically deployed, add value.

More radical, innovative designs are most useful in the introduction phase. Once a brand or product is in the maturity stage, the target will be the majority of consumers in the middle of the bell curve, so designs are usually more toned down to appeal to the mass market - think HP or Dell. But is that the right approach?

There is always the crucial element of innovation required to keep a product in the loop, which might be lost when a company is focusing too much at the middle of the bell curve. Companies in mature industries often have a difficult relationship to innovation. On the other hand, innovator companies are often having trouble accessing mass markets.

The issue is the “chasm”, as Geoffrey Moore calls it. This chasm is bridged only by a handful of masters of the life cycle such as Apple. The trick clearly is to bridge the chasm, to be innovator and mature player at the same time.

I got several questions lately if I am on Facebook, LinkedIn or similar websites.
I am not.
While social networking is a promising concept in principle, current sites - social networking 1.0, if you want - seem quite generic. Their mass appeal is at the same time their promise and growing problem, and I think they will soon be replaced by more specific networking services with a better user experience.

An interesting topic is name and identity, especially when you share the same name with other people, as many people do. Also both Mario and Gagliardi are, while not terribly common, popular enough Italian names.

There was an interesting incidence lately where a Mario Gagliardi joined as a member of a more high-profile LinkedIn group of the Norwegian Innovation Conference Innotown.
However, it was not him who spoke at the conference, but myself. While the chap was banned from the group after I remarked that this Mario is not that Mario, it made me think that names and identity are indeed a central topic for social networking.

In the pre-net age, it did not matter when you share the same name with some others in your town. People know you, your physical presence and characteristics, and you are identified as a whole person. On the net, you are a string of bytes, and what identifies you is your name.

As a thought experiment, when names would be adapting to its social environment, unique, unusual names will have a selection advantage simply as they have a lower likelihood of being mistaken for somebody else on the web and in social networking sites. The rules of branding - being unique and differentiated - will become an evolutionary rule for names. Perhaps there will also be something more sinister such as UPLs - "Unique Person Locators", a similar concept as URLs, verified with online iris scans. Airport security will shortly rejoice, and soon contact lenses with hacked iris prints will become a highly profitable business.

The most reliable way to know if somebody is indeed somebody is -and will be - the old town way: Knowing a person as a person.

Mario Gagliardi is CEO of the Design Zone Qatar, a new member of Qatar Foundation and visionary development project for the first global creative hub in the Arabian Gulf. He crafted the strategy for the Design Zone while leading mg strategy, a think-tank for design.

Prior to his appointment by Qatar Foundation, Mario advised the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and contributed in shaping a design culture in Korea as chief designer of LG, advisor for the Korea Institute of Design Promotion, and advisor for Samsung.

Mario was also designer and design director in the electronics, fashion, and banking sectors. He taught in universities worldwide and authored articles on design and strategy which have been published in 6 languages. Mario leads design and development projects across disciplines and was awarded prizes such as the Domus design prize and the Good Design Mark of the Korean Repubic. He holds an MBA from the University of Westminster and is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Chronology

Mario is originally trained as an industrial designer. After having studied in the master classes of Alessandro Mendini and Richard Sapper in Vienna and having won, with three entries, the first three prizes at the Post Shop telephone design competition in 1989, Mario got his first job as product designer at Philips.

For his concept for digital interior fabrics he got another design prize from the Italian architecture magazine Domus, and he went on to work as design director in the telecommunication, fashion, and banking sectors, in between designing interiors, products, and tableware which sold at premier department stores such as Bergdorf Goodman and Takashimaya.

In the mid to late nineties, the time when Korean design was only just emerging, he contributed in shaping a design vision and a design culture as a consultant for the Korea Institute of Design Promotion (KIDP) and the Innovative Design Lab of Samsung. In 1997 he was the first non-Korean national appointed to a management position in the LG headquarters in Seoul. As chief designer, he developed the future design direction, designed a host of best-selling brands and products and won design prizes such as the Good Design Mark of the Korean Republic. As head of the design strategy task force, he introduced innovative design processes and established strategic design as a driving force.

In 2001, Mario founded allevio design, later mg strategy, a first of its kind think-tank and multi-disciplinary studio for design strategy and design futures. There he pioneered and explored cross-disciplinary design collaboration models and groundbreaking design concepts such as user-generated branding, touch-screen mobile phones and generative/parametric design processes.

He also worked as a special advisor to the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture, where he advised for nationwide knowledge systems and e-learning structures and designed new learning experiences.

Mario taught at the International Design School for Advanced Studies in Seoul, at Aalborg University in Denmark, and at Salzburg University of Applied Science in Austria. As theorist, he wrote authoritative articles for publications such as the Design Management Review (US), Designmatters (Denmark) and Form (Germany), and authored the columns "Mario Gagliardi On Design" for Danish Designers (Denmark) and "Design Observations" for Korea's largest design magazine, Monthly Design.

He delivered speeches at international congresses such as Innotown, the European International Design Management Conference, the Marketing Conference in Turkey, Era 05 world design congress and Tasmeem Doha, and held lectures and workshops at leading universities such as London Business School (UK), The University College for the Creative Arts (UK), Tsinghua University (China), Bogazici University (Turkey) and Zollverein School of management and design (Germany).

The new March 2008 issue of Monthly Design features my latest article "Design off the real world" - an allusion to "Design for the real world", the seminal book by Victor Papanek, the Austrian designer teaching in the US who was the very pioneer of ecological design in the 1960's.

This is the updated Korean version of my article "Out of Touch" for Danish Designers - get it here.