schneiderism

The perspective of this interesting article I found at BusinessWeek is that design value is increasingly driven by very effective and highly collaborative teams. Behind this is the ever-increasing realization that design has the potential to transform and grow business in ways not previously considered. Business leaders are getting this, and as the value of effective design teams become more widely recognized and understood, they are paying more focused attention to how they might effectively support these teams in new and different ways. This is in part due to the complexity of the situations engaged by design teams, that they defy an object approach and rely intensely on an effective collaborative process to achieve the desired end. It is also partly due to changing expectations for the value of design, that it has definitively moved beyond the domain of creating beautiful things and resoundingly into the realm of creating beautiful things that work really well and provide an experience that exceeds audience expectations and solves important problems, while increasing shareholder value. A choice quote from the article:

“The tastemaker idea is out of date. Perhaps there’s a place for taste-making within the consumer market, but the approach is out of date when it comes to more complex stuff, where it’s not just about creating beautiful things…Take sustainability. You can’t have an iconic object approach to the problems of sustainability. It’s a systematic thing.”

Jeremy Myerson - Director of Innovation, Royal College of Art

None of this is to say that process, which I have posted about before, should suddenly take precedence over individual inspiration. It is that the complexity of problems demands a more holistic approach to addressing potential solutions. This is about the power of an effective team, the power of successful facilitation, to take solutions far beyond what perhaps a lone genius may be able to provide. At the level of designing complex interactions and environments that must address a matrix of need, this is increasingly evident.