I think it was Paris Hilton who said sometimes you have so many friends it’s hard to remember all of their names. Today I’m sitting on an Atlantic Ocean cliff in Ogunquit, Maine attending my sixth Design Management Institute conference, and I’m beginning to understand what she means. I’ve connected with old friends and met many new ones. With the number of elbows I’ve rubbed, I’m going to have a hard time remembering everyone’s name.
This year’s conference theme is “ReMix”. DMI President Tom Lockwood clarifies: “the role of design in business is undergoing a sea change” challenging the design management community with a new mix of requirements, responsibilities, and roles. As design becomes increasingly more relevant to business, design practitioners must be able to think bigger and do more.
When design has a place in the executive boardroom, the challenge is this: how do we not only remain relevant to business strategy, but help architect that business strategy? How can design extend beyond the material artifacts we deliver into the experiences that people have?
In his DMI talk, Engine co-founder and director Oliver King touched on the theme of moving beyond material artifacts as a way of introducing us to his presentation on “service design”. Service design has found its way into professional dialog and practice over the last few years, but I’ve remained skeptical of the need to create a new field in a world already choking on ways to characterize design. King started his presentation by describing his frustration with his increasingly niche role as an industrial designer. I loved his example of the Electronic USB Travel Mug as the epitome of misguided design. According to King, a service design strategy is about the process of “making something better for someone” and “the act of helping someone to do something.” King described service design practices, case studies, and principles that include systems of value creation, and systems of people, processes, and product. These methods and principles are useful things to leverage for generating design solutions, and very familiar to many of us doing design today. Something this familiar doesn’t need a new name.
Today even Paris Hilton is designing things. If we call Ms. Hilton a designer, then do we have the impetus we’re looking for to define a new discipline of design? No way. No matter how scary that sounds, I’m still not buying the need to slice up design into smaller pieces.