STATEMENT ON THE CURRENT STATE OF DESIGN

Procter and Gamble, Nike, Kraft, Sony, Samsung, Tata and other large international companies, faced with fierce competition from lower-cost competitors look to move beyond mere efficiency to innovation (imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of pragmatic social and/or commercial value).

To paraphrase what Roger Martin, former director of the Boston business consultancy Monitor and current Dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, said in a Fast Company business magazine blog, …the world’s economy is radically transforming. As the production of goods and services increasingly becomes routinized, the cost advantages across a growing array of industries accrue to low-cost manufacturing based economies. Scale alone is not enough to thrive in a world where markets are rapidly globalizing; incremental improvement won't deliver a decent ROI. Our companies will continue to prosper only if they push to the higher ground of innovating and creating elegant, refined products and services.

“The upshot, says Martin, is nothing less than the emergence of the design economy -- the successor to the information economy, and, before it, the service and manufacturing economies. And that shift, he argues, has profound implications for every business leader and manager among us: "Businesspeople don't just need to understand designers better -- they need to become designers." Martin further says that companies usually "reward two types of logic: inductive (proving that something actually operates) and deductive (proving that something must be). "Designers combine inductive and deductive reasoning to create a fresh approach -- abductive thinking -- which Martin defines as "suggesting that something may be and reaching out to explore it." Instead of acting on what's certain, designers bet on what's probable. Companies such as Apple act like design shops by saying, "If everything must be proven, we'll never make the likes of an iPod."

David Kelley, Chairman of the IDEO design studio and founder of Stanford University’s Institute of Design (“DSchool”), says that businesses need to employ people with the “T-shaped” skills designers possess. "That means combining analytical thinking -- the vertical leg of the T -- with horizontal thinking: intuitive, experimental, and empathetic."