Th UK Design Council recently published a rich qualitative study of design in action at eleven leading global organisations.

The study looked at the way design is used in these firms, how designers work with staff from other disciplines and how the design process is managed to deliver consistently successful results. How is design managed across complex, global, product and brand portfolios … we asked leading design teams how they select and organise their designers, and when they bring designers into the product or service development process. We also wanted to find out what skills today’s designers need in order to succeed.

One exercise that we have done in workshops is to take a service or product and imagine how a “best practice” company might redesign that experience. How would Ryan Air sell automobiles or Google run a bank. You can examine your own organisation through the lens of another organisation. The idea as the following blog post states, is not “to follow each … specific policy but instead to understand the philosophy behind their practices then apply those philosophies in your specific context.”

In specific, Google makes everyone responsible for innovation and hires to bring idea generators into its organisation. It also gives these people a creative outlet in the form of free time. Google looks for good ideas outside its four walls as well as inside. The also consistently challenge pre-existing expectations and norms in all the products they release.

The first book I would buy all the designers hired into Crayola would be Orbiting the Giant Hairball. Ironically, the book was written by a former employee of Hallmark Cards, who happen to own Crayola. Even an organisation boasting one of the largest internal creative staffs in the world can develop into a hairball and Gordon wrote the manifesto for creative survival, support and nurturing within the large organisation.

I was reminded of the book again, coming across this video homage put to music by a Stanford d.school student.

It is always comforting to have your own theories endorsed elsewhere. Here is Thomas Fisher, Dean of the University of Minnesota’s new School of Design :

“The idea of the design economy is that, for developed countries like ours, which cannot compete in a global marketplace on price or even quite often on the quality of a product, we have to compete on the basis of innovation, creativity and imagination, which takes you to design. By design, I don’t mean just aesthetics but function and cultural adaptability.”

Now, if America is saying this, how much more important is it for Ireland?

India has just published its first design policy. Does something strike you as odd about this? Perhaps if I were to tell you that Ireland has no design policy you would be surprised?

Of course it grows out of a realisation that they cannot compete forever either as a low cost producer or a high-tech sweat shop. In short, it is going to establish design and innovation centres around the country, 4 new design colleges, design courses in all institutes of technology and a national Design Council.

The policy is good. It is coordinated, collaborative and focussed; how long before Ireland recognises the need to follow suit?

Designers draw. It is the most expressive way we know of communicating ideas succinctly and freeing up imagination. We wish everyone drew more (hence the doodles that make up our corporate identity).

Here is a wonderful little tool from General Electric that I found whilst browsing their site for the previous entry. I have already used it to send an image to an old friend who edited it whilst we were talking on the phone; it is a breeze to use and can help anyone draw and communicate their ideas. It is addictive and, I reckon, pretty useful.

I had what, as a man, I consider one of the greatest privileges of life last week when I attended a scan with my wife who is pregnant for the third time.

Our experience of this moment has been mixed in the past; elation at the first sight of a new human baby contrasting with confusion at the complex analysis that assesses the risk of genetic abnormality.

This time, a lovely user-focussed innovation from General Electric allowed an easy assessment by combining a range of complex indicators to give a simple decision tool. Prospective parents are given not a percentage risk as in the past (which is fairly meaningless), but the age of someone who shares the same risk profile. Thus the couple can make an informed decision using information that has meaning to them. Simple and elegant.

Charles Leadbeater, all-round innovation and creativity thinker, and James Wilsdon, Head of Science and Innovation at DEMOS, have spent the last two years researching The Atlas of Ideas project with colleagues at DEMOS. In a strole of collaborative genius, the work was part supported by Tom McCarthy and his team at the Irish Management Institute. The study looks at the reality behind the hyperbole of Asian innovation:

We used to know where new scientific ideas would come from: the top universities and research laboratories of large companies based in Europe and the US. While production was dispersed among global networks of suppliers, it was assumed that more knowledge-intensive tasks would stay at home.

All that is changing fast. As globalisation moves up a gear, ideas are emerging in unexpected places and flowing around the world as easily as money and commodities, carried by mobile diasporas of knowledge workers.

This shift is most visible in countries such as China, India and South Korea, which are fast becoming world-class centres for research, particularly in emerging fields such as stem cell biology and nanotechnology.

Since 1999, China’s spending on R&D has increased by more than 20 per cent each year. India now produces 260,000 engineers a year and its number of engineering colleges is due to double to 1,000 by 2010. According to Thomson ISI, Asia’s share of the world’s scientific papers rose from 16 per cent in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2004. At the same time, there is a growing flow of multinational R&D to the new knowledge centres of Shanghai, Beijing, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

These shifts in global knowledge production are likely to be every bit as significant as the shifts in manufacturing that occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. The big question is how we should respond. Some view Asia’s growing scientific strengths with alarm, fearing it will mean the loss of highly-skilled jobs in Europe and the US. But innovation is not a zero-sum game: more in Asia does not mean less in Europe or the US.

Alongside new sources of competition, the rise of China, India and South Korea creates new opportunities for collaboration. We need to develop better mechanisms for orchestrating research across international networks, and for directing innovation towards shared goals of development and environmental sustainability.

The thinking is challenging and nicely non-simplistic. Yes, there is a threat, but no, it is not as we currently perceive it and we should grasp the opportunities it presents swiftly and with determination.

The Irish Management Institute hosted a conference with this work as a focal point. It was really pleasing to see Martin Cronin, Chief Executive of Forfas, give a really considered response to the ideas in the report but my overwhelming impression was that our insularity will mean that there will be precious little impact in Ireland

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It’s hard to ignore the design prowess of Apple, but beyond the incredible appearance of their products lies intuitive user interfaces and innovative material and manufacturing processes that border on a “daily battle with the laws of physics.” Love them, or loathe them, you can’t ignore the impact chief designer Jonathan Ive has had within the company and on product development as a whole.

Apple’s quest to put us at ease with technology

via BusinessWeek …

Design has always been important to Nokia, and now it’s reaching a new level. The world’s largest maker of mobile handsets is remodeling its headquarters in Espoo, Finland, part of a reorganization that will put design at the center of the company, literally and figuratively. “We are sending a strong message to designers that they are respected, and to the rest of the organization that design is important,” says Nokia Chief Executive Officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.

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