Innovate Or Deteriorate—Design Or Die

The Role Of Design In Innovating For Business Success

In one sense there’s nothing new about Millennium Products.

Ever since the first industrial revolution in 1760 several British governments (and even some members of the British royal family) tried to persuade businesses to work with designers. Like Millennium Products, many of these attempts to promoted the use of design did so by showcasing examples of ‘best practice’. But initiatives were sporadic, usually tactical in order to solve short term economic problems, success was therefore patchy and economic progress slower than it might have been.

What is really remarkable about Millennium Products, in relation to all that has gone before, is the commitment of government to a long-term strategy that aims to get creativity into the heart of every part of UK culture and economy, not just the product industries, and not just for short-term tactical gains.

There are many things that make this selection of 1012 21st Century artefacts different from the great exhibitions of the last two centuries; the extreme complexity and diversity of the products which range from the steely heaviness of traditional industrial manufacturing to the lightness and invisibility of new digital media. Millennium Products encompass both product and service industries. There’s also an urgency about the way in which their economic and cultural benefits are communicated, not only to manufacturing industries but to every conceivable type of business, including the business of educating future generations of designers, industrialists and consumers. It seems that a government has at long last come to the conclusion that creativity is no longer an option, it’s a national obligation.

I’m told that the Millennium Products were originally conceived as a way of dispelling crusty and outdated stereotypes of the UK, to show that we’re innovative and forward thinking, not drowning in history and heritage. Whether this is, or isn’t true doesn’t really matter because it was very timely. Millennium Products coincided with the exponential growth of digital technologies that continue to sweep through the world like a great wind of change, transforming everything they touch and accelerating us into tomorrow’s world.

It seems that very suddenly we’ve found ourselves in the midst of a new technological revolution; the third in less than 250 years. Change on a scale that would have been unimaginable ten years ago has now become our way of life—it’s the only way of life for most businesses. We’re all running for our lives, me included, we’re all running in order to survive and to keep pace with the breakneck speed of technological and cultural change.

Having spent the last fifteen years running a ‘design consultancy’ with my architect partner Ross Hunter. I’m now told that I actually run a ‘creative industry’. It’s funny but I had the feeling that something was up when phototypesetting disappeared. Overnight the graphics studio changed shape, out went typesetting rules, cow gum and line board, putty rubbers, registration marks, mark-ups and mark-up pens, overlays, Rubalith, Schafelines, halftone line and dot screens.

In the interior design part of our company the architects and designers lost all but one of their drawing boards, complete with their parallel motions. They also lost Rotring technical pens and endless bottles of black ink. French curves and adjustable set-squares were next to go. Apple Macs began to appear in our studio, so we dismantled the process camera. It had been an integral part of graphic production and had originally been craned into position. But we took it apart bit by bit and threw it in a skip – one day it had been worth fifteen thousand pounds, but six months and one Apple Mac later, it was worth nothing—we couldn’t even give it away. Today the studio looks less cluttered. I use electronic mail, a mobile phone and a laptop, which conspire to make me work in corners of my life I never knew existed. But some important things remain, like my sketch books.

As the physical world changes before our eyes, so too does meaning of everything. Things that were once familiar and unchanging now demand that we reconsider their purpose in our lives. The sciences and the arts are merging. Hardware yields software, wetware and intelligent networks. The terms ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘art’ and ‘science’, even ‘life’ and ‘death’ now fail to define what were once ‘absolute’ conditions. Even ‘time’ takes on new dimensions in the digital age.

Nothing is as it was, five, two or even one year ago. We feel as if we can create almost anything we can imagine. Everything we have dreamed of now seems probable and possible.

As a designer I welcome this exciting upheaval. But I find it worrying that with all of this new knowledge, and all of these new opportunities, we are still surrounded by banality, mediocrity and historical pastiche in communications, products, services and architecture.

Why is it, that while the future looks so tempting, many businesses continue to live in the past rather than embracing the future? Why can’t they recognise that the world has changed? Instead they prefer to rearrange the furniture or stand still and gather dust. Are unable to face the uncertainty of innovation and become paralysed, doing nothing at all?

Perhaps these businesses have inherited a cynicism about new ideas. New ideas are often presented as mere ‘entertaining diversions’ from tried and tested ways of doing things. But the excuse that “we’ve always done it this way because it works” is no longer an option. What works today may not be good enough to work tomorrow. Digital modelling, rapid prototyping and a host of new tools for accelerating the research and development process mean that new rivals appear from leftfield and make your company obsolete overnight.

Other businesses maintain a superstitious attitude to innovation. They regard creativity as dangerous, unquantifiable ‘magic’ and creative people as unpredictable ‘artists’; reckless, irresponsible individuals who over-excite employees and ‘rock the boat’ by asking uncomfortable questions with unfamiliar, unsettling answers. It should take comfort from the knowledge that creativity is nothing new, it’s been around since the beginning of civilisation. Even ‘design’ as we know it, first appeared in the 1830s. There’s no excuse for being suspicious of a tried and tested process that’s been professionally practised for over 170 years.

In fact, it’s worth remembering where ‘design’ came from because it help us place it in context and see more clearly how we can use it to make sense of all of these new opportunities that are ripe for exploitation.In the first industrial revolution of 1760 the old creative industries broke with their craft traditions and entered the Machine Age. The first of many schools of ‘applied art’ was established 77 years later, inventing the idea of an ‘industrial designer’. The industrial designer was a person trained to exploit technology and ensure that products were both aesthetically pleasing and functional; that products were wilfully designed to stimulate new markets and satisfy customers.

But by the time the designers helped industry to catch up with the increasing pace of progress, a second revolution had arrived and its results were quite literally, ‘electrifying’. This time designers were ready to exploit scientific discoveries with brands, structural concrete, cars, cookers and Crimplene clothing.

Much has changed in the 170 years since ‘design’ was invented. That tomorrow will be different goes without saying. Because of the incredible speed of change, even today is different from yesterday; we go to sleep in a different world from the one we woke up in; Henry Lane Fox of lastminute.com will agree that a year is a very long time in the Digital Age.

Businesses shouldn’t be scared of designers because ‘design’ is just a new name for the old process by which we control the evolution of our ideas and design the products, environments and services that help us to perform our daily rituals, inhabit new technologies and satisfy our demands for new ways of doing things. Today, businesses can’t afford to be scared of change and they can’t afford to be suspicious of the creative people who can help them make sense of change and turn it to their advantage.

Unlike the industrial designers of yesteryear, modern designers rely on much more than intuition. We work in cross-disciplinery teams. We borrow from the sciences, arts and humanities. We create our own validated methodologies with which to underpin our intuition and help predict and control the process of innovation.

It’s also important to remember that every new product, service or brand helps us to communicate with one another by expressing our valuable differences; the things that differentiate you from your competitors and make you visible and attractive to customers. Designers express these differences as products, services and brands, turning them into core assets; intellectual property that can be further extended or traded in order to create the primary wealth that helps your business and your economy grow.

So how will you help your business meet the challenge of change? How will you recognise opportunities for new services, processes and products, or new ways of working that will guarantee a future for you and your employees?

Too many businesses are standing still when everything around them them is moving—they will be consigned to the past, to the slow lane of the economic motorway.

It’s no use watching the opposition because that will tell you what’s already been done, that’s yesterday’s news. It’s no use only asking the public what they want because they will describe a version of what already exists, that too is history.

‘Design’ was originally created by ‘business’ to meet the needs of industry at a time of great change. Today, in the midst of our current industrial revolution, business and design need each other as never before.

In tomorrow’s world creativity is our greatest natural resource; it’s a primary industry and a rich national asset. Unlike your forefathers, in tomorrow’s world you have no alternative: You must innovate or deteriorate, design or die.