No sooner than we were getting excited about the evolution of design practise...
(The back story for new readers — there are a growing number of design-led groups who are pioneering new ways of extending their approach into non-traditional areas, and using design thinking strategically to improve real, everyday life situations, and services beyond consumer goods)
...than there's a backlash, where the use of the word ‘innovation’ ...
(which to Plot minds seems a fairly realistic way of labelling this new approach minus the jargon)
... becomes something used to denigrate this evolution.
The context — Bruce Nussbaum , who has been articulating what design can achieve in Business Week , starts to really turn up the volume, fuelling the subsequent growth of a Design and Innovation section on the Business Week site. Fast Company has been adding their voice to the mix through great pieces by designers themselves, who wish to unpack what is actually going on in the process. Then Roger Martin at the Rottman School of Management in Toronto catches our eye with his perceptive understanding of how design thinking works, arguing how managers could and should harness its energy in what they do. And then Design Observer kicked off a whole debate - thanks to Michael Bierut at Pentagram.
Describing the 'mania for innovation' and how innovation is the new black Michael Bierut berates the rush (?) by design groups to use “innovation” (the word, not the practice) and by extension the design groups that adopt it as a way of framing themselves. But there is evidence that many businesses, and more recently, public sector organisations, are beginning to understand how innovation —which draws much on the thinking, practices, and processes of design — can create paths out of their current crises.
Innovation/Design is a fad? If it is, then why was Gill able to study it at Masters level at Brunel nearly a decade ago? Can we suggest that the current phenomena may be the recent fruit of seeds sown long ago by people like Naomi Gornick and David Walker when they 'designed' a programme which –
• got designers to become aware that design solutions work on multiple scales.
• invited us all to be pioneers in the way we saw the potential of design practise
• encouraged us to engage with the board and decision rooms of every opportunity we could find
Naomi and David had an insight into the power of design to make real, tangible, systematic, and social differences — as well as the great pleasure it can bring through thoughtful, beautiful, crafted technique and deep material understanding. And guess what? Both are important in the world; and both contribute to making businesses successful.
They weren't alone and Brunel was not the only place. What about programs at Illinois Institute of Design , London's RCA and potentially Stanford's D School ?
One of the problems with the word “design” is that it instantly limits perceptions of your capabilities and hence what you can do. People may think, “OK — so you can work with fashion, or crockery, interiors, products, or magazines” but instantaneously dismiss the potential of what you might bring to their particular projects and strategies. It happens all too often in our experience.
So where the focus on the “innovation” word really works well is that it is a term for being consistently generative; for discovering the fluid, the new, and the desirable, and the as-yet-unnamed possible. And this is in direct opposition to the reductive models of efficiency which businesses have been using for the past 15 years with limited success. And that is exactly the point. If faced with the choice of reducing staff, resources and customer value, might not anyone want to create products and services which generate new sources of value, revenues and capabilities?
Using design approaches can make a company agile and responsive; using abductive thinking to develop scenarios of possible futures; opening up the way we, and they, think about the work we all do. Because as designers we work by creating all sorts of value — soft, un-describable value, bottom line value, emotional value.
When Bierut (and many others say) that 95% of innovation fails, then we would suggest that something needs to be done with the process that surrounds it, something that sanctions the ability to fail faster and earlier. Innovation is not about wild guessing, but a systematic process of risk reducing collaborative development. But that's a bit of a mouthful, so the i-word will have to suffice. It can feel uncomfortable, messy and unquantifiable. It is not about any one person's ego (especially a designer's), but about blending a range of perspectives into a bigger, bolder, more appropriate solution search that no-one could have individually imagined or realised.
Innovation is not a bandwagon for the fearless. Nor the shallow. Larry Keeley it the nail on the head when he said that "NO ONE should assume that this is just a change in terminology--for if that is the only way you see it, then you are most decidedly missing the point..."
There are people like John Thackara who are getting under the skin of what this means. His Doors conferences have always pushed what design can be and can achieve. His new project DOTT looks precisely at aspects of everyday life, bringing design into these areas. There are people like Live|Work who have pioneered service design post web. There are people like Engine who have been bringing innovation to many clients, and latterly service design. There are people like Bruce Mau who attract attention to what design could affect, and Jennie and Chris of the Design Council's Red team . It's not fashion, it's absorbingly challenging. None of us get it right without taking a humble approach, which reveals to us something we never knew before doing it.
And all of these people (and surely many more that we don't even know about) are making attempts to progress this new context, and present nothing but their conviction and passion. Their successes are a result of sticking their necks out, and asking awkward questions. It doesn't look to us at Plot like a rationale to dismiss what has come before, but to amplify and extend it.
Innovation and design is most definitely an and, not an or. And some of us have been learning, practising and developing this area, which is often more about choreography than specifications, and are not interested in saying one is better than another. So can we stop the fighting now? It's boring, a complete waste of time. We're better than that, and there are bigger battles to win.
Gill & Nick
