DESIGN THINKING.

Fossil fuel logic

5 years ago, the Design Council published the 'Design Index', a collection of stocks which, according to the Design Council, over-perform because the companies included have something to do with design. 

If this would work, it would be good advice for investors, and it would sure make a compelling case for design. However, as it turns out, it doesn't quite do that. 60% of the stocks contained in the 'Design Index' have either disappeared or underperformed. Of 61 stocks in total, 20 stocks disappeared by acquisition, merger, going bancrupt or being taken private, 17 stocks underperformed, and 24 stocks performed well.

Stocks included in the 'Design Index' are companies which either have been nominated by Design Council experts, or have been included in Design Council 'Millennium Products', or appeared in D&AD Awards, or appeared in an Interbrand brand value study.  

Corporations usually think they know which business they are in. Yet, managers - and designers, for that matter - often do not realize that what they assume to be knowledge is in fact an assumption, a system of beliefs rooted in history and habit. These belief systems produce symbols and ways of doing things (the size and location of one's office, the rituals involved in reaching a particular person etc.). More interestingly for innovation and design, these belief systems also influence the ways in which people in an organization go about to produce artifacts - products and services. 

In this short case study, mg strategy used design to find out how the future of mobile communications could look like. Imagine a large telecommunications company. This company became big, and global, by producing mobile phone handsets with economies of scale at the right time - when mobile communication was a rapidly expanding  market. Then the market environment starts to change, and the market starts to look strange for managers in this company. Questions are cropping up if the tried-and-tested business model built on economy of scale is still valid. How to figure out what the future might hold in store?  

Mobile phones are interesting devices: they connect by distancing. The sensation of the mobile phone is its ability to create a temporary spatial permanence between moving targets, to realize a paradox: flexible distances. No matter how quickly you are moving, the other is always there. Being reachable means being present in time, yet removed in space. Mobile phones are deeply personal devices which trigger different ways of dealing with the other. Some efforts go into the display of being reachable, other efforts into rituals of being unreachable. 

The problems the company had in dealing with a changing market environment for mobile communication presented a chance for in-house innovators. However, the design function - or rather the way how design was seen there - was part of the problem, not part of the solution. There, design was understood predominantly as a tangible "3D" task with the overall form factor being the focus of attention. It was about "look and feel", and this simply meant that it was all about shapes and colors. The screen and interface, at the time a small part of mobile phones, was considered a minor problem to be dealt with by programmers and graphic designers. The product 'mobile phone" was approached nearly as if it would be a car, with questions of shape and color being at the center of attention. This particular design mindset turned out to be out of tune with the market and contributing to the problems of the company. 

To open up the view for other ways of thinking about mobile phones, I designed three phone concepts in 2004, each representing another angle to think about mobile communication devices: One concept dealt with usage and consumption and focused attention on the afterlife of a phone - the dissolving phone. One concept dealt with user interaction and focused attention on the codes of use in communication devices - the touch-screen network phone. And another concept dealt with 'embodied' aspects of communication, focusing attention on the often overlooked, because problematic, man-machine relationships in communication - the dermal strata phone.

The 'dissolving phone' was a radical design concept to provoke a rethinking of how a mobile phone was supposed to be designed. It questioned the, at the time, taken for granted idea that a mobile phone, although it is a transient object of consumption, has to be designed and produced as if it would be somewhat 'eternal', if only for the time until the contract of the user with the network provider expired. In fact, a product had to represent - or suggest, by design - durability exactly because it is a transient object of consumption. Thus there was no room to consider the actual afterlife of the product and how the phone would disintegrate and decompose. While these thoughts would later become more prominent with 'cradle to cradle', they had been absent at the time, and so we conceived a phone which was designed to disintegrate beautifully, easily and quickly. Made in reinforced jelly, it simply dissolves when put into a glass of water with Alka Seltzer. 

The next concept, the touch-screen network 'connection phone', most accurately described the future of mobile phones in the medium term. While investigating the use of phones, I found that the tangible buttons on mobile phones are directly connected to the historic convention of telephone numbers. Numbers, then, could also be seen as standing in between people who want to connect. Without physical buttons, this phone would allow you to scroll through your network, graphically animated on the screen, with a swipe of your fingers and, by tap, connect you to a network node representing a person in your network. The number is, as an auxiliary information, still on display, but it is not the focus - the focus is on the network and the name. In 2004, this concept included predictions of elements of the iPhone and of Twitter.

The last, also radical, design concept, the 'dermal strata phone', was designed around the hand gesture people make with thumb and index finger when they mean "Let's call each other". Here, the telephone has disappeared as a tangible object. Instead, it is surgically embedded in your hand, just below the outermost skin. An miniaturized speaker is embedded in the thumb and a microphone in the index finger. The very casual relationship we have with electronic devices is here pushed to the next level. We carry and use our mobile phones most of the time close to our bodies. Here, electronics are not only always close to us, they are, in an uncanny way, part of us. As we increasingly see our bodies as instruments to be technically improved upon (just think of plastic surgery and piercing), this concept shows how easily electronics can become part of our bodies.

The answer to the question "which business are you in?" was simple: The company would see itself differently if it would assume to be in the business of communication, not in the business of producing phones. Although the slogan of the company reflected part of this, its mindset was focused on tangible phones and their form factor, not on communication in a wider sense and how it could be enabled by innovative products and services. 

Product-focused mindsets are dangerous - just think about typewriter companies. If they would have thought about themselves not as being in the business of typewriters, but as being in the business of information, they might have seen that computers will at some point in time become better tools of information. 

 

It is now 3 years since the logo for London 2012 was presented. In times of general logo tiredness and brand overload, it was one heftily discussed piece of graphic design. Less than two days after the logo was presented by British agency Wolff Olins, over 26,000 people had signed an online petition for it to be scrapped. Comments included: “cheap & tacky”, “complete and utter rubbish”, “awful, amateurish, jagged, like a badly done jigsaw”, "dreadful and embarassing", "load of old twaddle", "a shame", "looks like a broken swastika”, “looks like a toileting monkey", “horrendous, spiky and aggressive”, ”a comical sex act between The Simpsons” - more for instance here. 

Patrick Burgoyne, of the Creative Review, said those he had spoken to about the logo were “quite shocked and quite outraged”. Stephen Bayley, of the Design Museum, said it is a "puerile mess, an artistic flop and a commercial scandal". The Independent wrote that the logo “claimed a medal for being the most unpopular logo in British marketing history”. 

The logo animation on the official website of the 2012 Olympics triggered epileptic seizures and had to be removed from the site. According to the charity Epilepsy Action, it was a danger to anyone with photosensitive epilepsy.

The reasons why the public was so outraged are interesting to investigate. Aesthetic questions are always relative. Interesting for innovation is that there is a loosely defined space of expectations - what is understood to be suitable and adequate. This understanding is both culture- and time-specific. In the case of the 2012 logo, its intense colors and serrated shapes obviously defied what was understood as suitable for the Olympics. Things have cooled down since, so it can be assumed that what seemed spectacularly outrageous three years ago is seen less so today.

In November 2008, I invited a group of architects, town planners, designers and engineers from Germany, the UK, France, Brazil and Japan to collaborate for one week on the blueprint for a zero-carbon community in the desert. To enable a highly focused collaboration in a very short timeframe, I developed a "shared space" process, based on one expressive medium which has to be shared by the participants. The shared space is a shared image or model which can enable a shared understanding and create a frame of reference for the instant prototyping of complex design projects. In this instance, the shared space was the projected building site, printed out on a large canvas to be the common background for the architecture scale models.  

Within one very intensive week, we came up with an advanced concept for a zero-carbon, pedestrian-friendly environment. This "creative resort" or village was envisioned to provide an inspiring working and living space for creative people and locals.

The secret to success for creative workshops such as this is in the people and in the process. Good building designers mostly work alone or in small studios and therefore mostly don't have the capacity for more complex projects. Large architectural firms, on the other hand, are primarily focused on commercial aspects, a focus which tends to take attention away from design quality. "Starchitects", finally, are under pressure to replicate their own signature style in every project worldwide, an approach not adequate for designing a varied, inspiring and human-scale community.

The workshop participants here have been prize-winning international architects and designers with smaller practices who showed extraordinary attention to design quality in previous projects. The shared space was the process to create a shared understanding. It transforms the standard mode of creative competition into collaboration. The shared space focuses efforts on enhancing each others contribution through collaboration while maintaining everybody's individual approach. 

The output is a visionary blueprint for a community which, in the harsh environment of the desert of Qatar, works only on the sun and the sea, entirely eliminating the need for polluting energy sources such as oil and gas. The system, designed as a blueprint for desert climates with only saltwater access, is powered by a solar tower and produces its own drinking water, electricity, cooking gas and vegetables through an integrated system of wetlands, saltwater greenhouses, biodigesters and greywater channels. The system is scaleable for populations of up to several thousand. All technical conditions have been calculated to ensure that the system works. See a photo gallery of the design process here (click on the images to see a large version).


The sustainable energy concept: The community runs only on the sun and the sea

A selection of my previous writings on the history of culture, architecture and design:

From Signifier to Signified: Art Deco versus Functionalism

False Images: The Invention of Industrial Design

The Invention of Leisure: Hot Dogs, Dreamland and the Globe Tower

The Tower of Babel: Gustave Eiffel and the Creation of Modernity

Redesigning history: The Vienna Ringstrasse

In 1871, German immigrant Charles Feltman invents fast food by selling "Hot Dogs", sausages in a milk roll, from his vending cart in Coney Island, an area which at this time develops from "The Gut", a seedy area with cabarets, cheap hotels and brothels, into a family-friendly seaside spectacle and entertainment park. Coney island offered camel rides, merry-go-rounds, an electric shock for 5 cents, roller coasters and "The Flood", a scenic ride through disaster. 

The "Mozartkugel", a prototypical Austrian confectionery, is known for most as a souvenir after a vacation in Austria. The winning combination of an innovative, delicious product with a sticky name was not the work of a multinational branding firm, but of an ambitious confisier in the Habsburg empire. The product most people get in airport duty free shops these days is however neither original nor handmade, but an exemplar of mergers and acquisitions.
   
The "Real Mozartkugel" by "Mirabell" is a product in a portfolio including "Miracle Whip" and "Macaroni & Cheese", owned by Kraft foods, previously owned by Philip Morris, the cigarette company which changed its name to "Altria" and spun out Kraft to its own (Philip Morris a.k.a. Altria) shareholders after having merged it with Nabisco (makers of Oreo and Ritz cookies) and General Foods (of Jell-O fame, a company they acquired in 1926 when still operating as "Postum Cereal" before acquiring General Foods and its name in 1929). In 1993, Kraft-General Foods acquired Jacobs Suchard, itself a merger of German coffee company Jacobs with Interfood, which itself was a merger of Swiss chocolate manufactureres Tobler and Suchard.

But fortunately, and amazingly, there is still the original Mozartkugel, made just as it was made back then in 1890. The original has survived both the industrialization of sweets and the vicious acquisitions of the 20th century out of a simple reason - the creator, Paul Fuerst, cared more for making delicious sweets than for securing the names for his creations. Therefore there have been no mergers and acquisitions of this familiy-run Cafe-Konditorei, and the original Mozartkugel is still produced according to the original recipe. It is handmade from fresh ingredients, delicious, and perishable. It is a bit hard to get, unless you pass by in one of the 4 outlets of Confectionery Fuerst in the city of Salzburg, where it was originally invented in 1890 by Paul Fuerst, an accomplished confectioner in the Habsburg empire who learned his trade in Budapest, Paris and Nice.

Not original, but also good and handmade Mozartkugeln are available from three other confectioners in the area - Petrik and Engljaehringer in Salzburg and Dallmann in St. Gilgen.

If you don't happen to be in Salzburg but enjoy a bit of sweet geometry, have a look at this paper dealing with infinitely many infinitesimally small folds on the wrapping of a sphere: "Wrapping the Mozartkugel".

George Akerlof, Nobel prize laureate for Economics in 2001, found out something consumers are confronted with rather often: How do you know if product X is OK, or, as Akerlof puts it, not a “lemon”? Take, for instance, the purchase of a used car. The chap who wants to sell the used car most likely knows more about it – if it had a previous accident, for example. This is an "asymmetric" market situation which is solely based on information – the party which has more information can skew the information and thus the prospective sale for his advantage. But you as a prospective customer know that, therefore you are suspicious when you buy a used car. That again makes it more difficult to sell it.

When this kind of situations occurs, one way to go about is “market signalling” which was described by Joseph Stiglitz: you inform the market about your product. You can also try to elicit information from the seller and other sources to know more about your potential risk. When you check a used car, you open the hood and look for suspicious leaks; you open and shut the door and listen if it sounds right.

But do you know what is going on in the car engine? Or in your computer? Couldn’t there be malicious programs running which record everything you do just to send it to your competition? Isn’t there the danger of viruses, worms and Trojans everywhere?
We realize via our senses. But we think that they don’t help us in checking out the complex machinery and intricate systems we surrounded ourselves with, while our way of making sense is the same our ancestors, the cave people, used. This way of making sense is still working quite well with many products - things you can smell, chew, taste and touch, for instance. Such as cheese.

But we get cheese tightly wrapped with extruded and laminated plastics.

If we don’t want to become paranoid, we have to afford a minimum of trust in our transaction partners that what we want is what we get. In historical terms, it afforded much less trust to go to an old-style grocery than it does to go to a supermarket. Every supermarket visit is an act where we need to afford a great deal of trust into what we might get when we buy this particular toothpaste or that particular cheese.

The signaling of a product has undergone interesting semantic changes. Just a generation ago, there was a simple way to find out if a product such as cheese was OK or not - you took a sample and smelled and tasted it. Now you watch a TV ad and buy a branded, packed cheese, and only at home you will be able to taste it. You cannot compare different cheeses by what would make sense - its taste, but by a replacement signal: its brand and packaging.

So an important, and problematic, aspect of design is mediation - to mediate between what you as a consumer don’t know and what the seller wants to make known. These can be very different things, of course, and in that respect, design can also be an ideal device to cover up.

Passage from de_sign, lecture by Mario Gagliardi at London Business School, January 25th 2002, updated May 24th, 2009.

I am giving a Keynote on March 3rd at 9:45 at the Icograda Design Week in Doha. The topics revolve around collaboration and globalisation. To suggest a perspective I wrote a short text:

1. Globalization, otherness, and locality

Globalization is essentially a formation process of a particular large-scale system based on the exchange of goods and services. This is not new –throughout the better part of history, goods such as textiles, pottery, spices etc. have been transported from culture to culture and over large distances. People had been well aware when things had been from other places – it was something interesting and sought after for its special value. The difference in the last wave of globalization is that products from elsewhere are often not any more made and bought as if they are from elsewhere. In having no connection to where they are designed and made, products inevitably lose a good part of what makes them interesting: Difference and otherness.

When we look at the role of design in the development of economies in the last 20 years, otherness, locality and globalization are closely connected. In the initial phase of an emerging economy, a local market is gradually more involved in international trade. In this phase, local consumers have a high regard for imported goods, either because they are not available locally, or because they are of better quality, or because they are more interesting. Consequently, in this first phase, local producers tend to imitate and interpret foreign designs, both to retain local consumers and to win new customers abroad. This phenomenon happened 20 years ago in Taiwan and South Korea, and in the recent years in China. This is the phase when “otherness” is absorbed locally and exported again. However, this is a learning process which only starts with imitation. Over time, when an economy is maturing, manufacturers and service providers move on from imitation to gradually acquiring the knowledge to create their own design language, usually based on intrinsic qualities of their own culture. See also Alchemy of Cultures (2001), and Imitated, Commodified, Experienced (2005).

Emerging economies in the last years went through a similar phase, which is one reason why newer buildings in places far apart can look quite similar. They take on “dominant designs” such as, for instance, the steel skyscraper. Originally a 19th-century American concept, it became so much a 20th century symbol of technological progress that it is now, over 100 years after its creation by William Le Baron Jenney and Louis Sullivan, a dominant design which can now be found all over the planet, in the process having pushed aside much of the traditions of local architecture. Design, however, is not about sameness, but about making a positive difference.

2. Collaboration and design as black box and process

We desire difference because we are different. People naturally have different world views, expectations and ways of accomplishing tasks. These differences increase: as professional disciplines get increasingly specialized, people get increasingly locked into their domain knowledge. This is because modes of working are prescribed within a particular domain which over time adapts to different external environments. In the course of these adaptations, increasingly specialized tools and languages are developed. For example: Mathematicians and architects both use white sheets of paper with symbols on it. They can interchange their concepts (= communicate) as long as these concepts are fairly simple. However, once these concepts become more advanced, they inevitably become more complex, less intelligible without particular specialized knowledge, and hence less interchangeable.

As a result, collaboration is easy within simple tasks. However, where we need advanced collaboration is in complex situations, to solve complex problems. But the more advanced the required knowledge, the more difficult is cross-disciplinary collaboration, because domain knowledge involved becomes increasingly specialized.

Is design a solution to enable collaboration? It depends how you approach it.  When you describe design with a traditional art school approach, design is a “black box” where talent is put in and a design, somewhat miraculously, comes out. In this approach, we don’t really know how design comes about. Design is thought to emerge from a special artistic trait which you either have, or you don’t. However, you can also describe design differently - not as a “black box”, but a piece of software. In this model, the process makes the design. Once the process is understood, essentially everybody can be a designer.
The process approach makes design a way of thinking and solving problems. To enable design as  process, it is a good starting point to acknowledge difference while focusing on common aims – here an illustration of common aims between the design and the management profession.

Design as process comes in as a fundamental tool to rethink and improve. The future of design, then, is to advance economic, ecologic and social models, systems, and services.