in hard economic times like these days every product or service has to fight for its right to exist. and this challenge comes from both sides the public sector as well as the private one.
while one shouldn’t make too strong generalizations ‘design investments’ in its broadest sense belong to the group of services which are susceptible to be deleted from the register at an early stage.
and this is exactly the domain of the design management profession. design managers should definitively work on attempts and solutions in order to convince companies and institutions of the value of design investments.
in any case the challenges are strong as an article in ‘Global Province, June 2004′ evaluates:
“Design–whether aesthetic or engineered–has become more pervasive, but that does not mean design quality has risen. To the contrary, it has probably declined in a 1,000 different ways. We suspect that the computer is the principal handmaiden of mediocrity. Anyone with a PC or an Apple can now devise cookie cutter designs for almost anything at low cost, and everybody is doing just that. While the cost of almost everything else rises, the cost of computer power and design has sunk. In the sector of design we know best, graphic design, the ‘commodization’ of design has so depressed the prices paid for design work that many of the most talented designers we know have gotten out of the trade. They simply can’t make a living there and their work is not valued above that of instant keyboard artists. Production designers, who can grind out heaps of work, have inherited the playing field. As importantly, the temptation, with the computer, has been to over-design, covering every square inch with doodads, eliminating white space, inventing whorls of unreadable manuscript, and decking the pages with blurbs and small pictures that bespeak severe overload. Graphic design has become very, very ‘cluttered,’ and woe to the designer who bucks this messy trend.”
in order to improve the quality of design services the authors refer to a concept from engineering ‘Concurrent Engineering’. even though this concept is absolutely not new “Companies are bringing to the table, right at the conceptual stage, all the people who will be associated with the total lifecycle of the product—from concept to disposal.” it brings valuable insights. finally, there even exists a ‘Society for Concurrent Product Development’ at www.scpdnet.org.
as a best case for ‘concurrent engineering in design’ the article refers to the recent Business Week article about IDEO’s approach (read my posting) to work on client and customer solutions.
read the complete article at >>> http://www.globalprovince.com
