The Indian Challenges for Design Management

In India we tend to acquire new professional knowledge from the developed world, and deploy them generally without much of contextualization and further development of the concerned knowledge domain. As a result, educational institutions continue imparting generic knowledge and skills to their students. In order to further their understanding, examples and case studies from the developed countries are frequently used. This approach for education in the country leads to an aberration in the understanding and their applicability in our local context. 

Design Management is an emerging profession in the country. The roots of this profession can be traced to the countries like UK and USA, as indicated by the literature available in English. The Design Management Institute (DMI) and the Design Council of UK have been at the forefront in this regard. The emphasis in the design management literature has been on branding and new product development in the context of the developed markets with high consumer spending and awareness levels. The insights gained from this context have only a partial relevance to the societies and markets with a significantly different demographic, geographic and psychographic profiles. 

Professional education in any domain has to be supported with indigenous research, explorations, and learnings for it to be relevant for effective and sustainable ideas and solutions. It is then imperative that we explore the Indian context of the issues and challenges in the area of design management.  

(C) Copyright  Vinai Kumar

User, Context, Quality and Design

In the previous post I recorded my thoughts on the need for a framework and methods to assess the value of design in a business context before the design takes its place in real-life.  In my experience, I have found two key components that are central to the assessment of the value of design based on an understanding of user and context. Here it is important to note that the user is the central theme of all holistic human-centred design activities, and the customer is the central theme of business activities. 

A design (of a product or service) must meet the physical, psychological and task requirements of the end-user as well as the customer (the latter actually pays for the perceived value/quality of the design). Many essential and desirable specific value parameters emerge from a detailed analysis of user and context. For example, a user may like to have a good camera in his or her mobile phone but may not require a good music and radio features. However, the same person may require a different set of features in his mobile phone if he switches to a job profile that requires extensive international traveling.  

The context in which a user and product relationship exists is made up of the natural environment, societal practices and culture, individual's work and life patterns, technologies available, and man-made environmental factors.  

Design as a professional discipline provides a way of thinking and developing solutions based on the understanding of the user and context. A design activity with this orientation culminates in defining a set of product values and accompanying specifications. For the marketplace, these values and specifications would appear as the quality characteristics and features of a product. 

I believe that if we target the appropriate user samples and the relevant slices of the contexts for research and product evaluation, it would be possible to produce evidence of the greater possibility of product success in the real marketplace. 

The discipline of ergonomics provides a comprehensive knowledge base and methodology to understand the users and their activities in a given context. Also the approaches of anthropology and ethnography prove to be useful in observing and recording the activities and behaviour of people in their real-life situations. The designer's way of observing people and recording information visually and textually is an open-ended, open-minded, and intuitive way of understanding people and their behaviours. Combined with inputs and insights from engineering, business management, and many other relevant areas, design and design thinking are capable of producing user and context relevant products.

Copyright (c)  Vinai Kumar

Business Value of Design

Business Value of Design

How does one assess the business value of design? The question is not easy to answer. Precise measurements are possible only when an event takes place in real, and when the number of variables is small. The real-life, however, is too complex and dynamic to enable the development of valid metrics and to facilitate their precise measurement. 

The Economic Times, Ahmedabad (21 July 2009) reported Coca-Cola's intention to engage their advertising agencies on the basis of a result-based payment system. This is an interesting development though for a long time there have been doubts about the usefulness of advertising in terms of fetching business in proportion to the spend on advertising. However, the concept of advertising along with its glamour quotient has been sold so well that businesses did not question its Return-on-Investment (ROI) ability. 

The issue of the value of design (as a professional activity and its ensuing  deliverables) is in some way similar to case of advertising (design). If the proof of the pudding is in eating it, the proof of design is in its intended users paying for it and effectively using it. In this competitive and media-driven world some designs are often given "good" design awards - as it happens so frequently in the design and architecture communities. However, the intended users might be reluctant in using these, and in some cases abandon them all together. The Palio car from Fiat is a good car, technologically speaking, though it has failed to make any significant impact in the marketplace.  A lot of buildings designed by professional architects are good as signature forms in a landscape but fail miserably when end-users use it and experience it. 

Though some companies like IKEA, Apple, and 3M have leveraged design and innovation to impact the economic bottom line of their businesses, most of those involved in running businesses still lack a framework and methods to assess the business value of their offerings before they put them in the marketplace. I believe that there is a need to research this area in a concerted and holistic manner. 

If design as an important management function has to claim its rightful place in business, the design and design management researchers have to develop frameworks and methods that would aid in assessing the value of design in a business context. In some of the following posts I will present some useful directions in this regard based on my experience and learnings in the field of design, human factors engineering, engineering, and design management.

(c) Copyright  Vinai Kumar