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• Design value: not if, but how by Taylor Lies on June 18, 2008

  I recently attended the IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference (IDSC), held in late May in Chicago. The conference is billed as “an international executive forum addressing how businesses can use design to explore emerging opportunities, solve complex problems, and achieve lasting strategic advantage.” And in that regard it really delivered, bringing together champions of design from business, education, media, and beyond.

  Technologist John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar at USC and former director of the Palo Alto Research Center, kicked off the conference with a theme that would be present throughout: how the rapid changes in technology we’re experiencing will be a constant in the years to come. Unlike previous periods of change that were followed by periods of relative stability, technology continues to evolve at such a pace that instability will be the norm for the foreseeable future.

  While this change creates uncertainty about the future, it also creates opportunity—and this is exactly why the value of design and design thinking has never been higher. This was not a point up for debate at IDSC, as in previous years, but was clearly agreed upon by conference presenters and attendees. To paraphrase Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week, the question is no longer if design has value. The question is how to execute to deliver that value.

  Bill Buxton, from Microsoft, and AG Lafley and Claudia Kotchka, of P&G, made strong cases that organizations need to rethink how they position design. Is it actually valued? Who makes design decisions? What commitment is made to design? Buxton espoused that design should be one of three pillars of an organization, along with business and technology. P&G is a great example: it transformed from a place where “design was the last decoration station” into one where design is built into the corporate DNA.

  Other IDSC presenters gave examples of how design helps organizations in challenging times. Scott Cook of Intuit and Hardik Bhatt from the City of Chicago highlighted how consumer research helped create what we at Lextant call “design clarity”—the ability to build organizational understanding and drive consumer-facing innovation.

  Still, when various presenters alluded to user research, the common word seemed to be “watch” – meaning, the passive observation of consumers to identify unmet needs. While such ethnographic methods are powerful, they leave some questions unanswered or, at best, answered by the research staff rather than the user. At Lextant, we’ve found that combining participatory research methods with ethnographic methods delivers a more thorough consumer understanding – one that reveals current behaviors and unmet needs as well as aspirations, emotions, and descriptions of the ideal consumer experience.

  All in all, IDSC was a good conference with some exciting, dynamic speakers. But the hosts will need to continue to focus on Nussbaum’s question to keep attendance up. It’s no longer a question of if design adds value. And for many firms, it isn’t a question of how, because there are a lot of us out there doing it. The best question is, what can we all learn from our efforts thus far, to make design and design thinking an even more powerful force?
  

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