Una charla bien contada

The Economist organizó a principios de marzo la conference The Big Rethink, una de las charlas a las que a uno le gustaría asistir para poder documentar de punta a punta, sacándole el jugo hasta exprimir todo el limón. Precisamente eso es lo que hizo Kevin McCullagh y por suerte compartió sus impresiones en el blog de Core77.

Evitando la complacencia habitual en este tipo de reseñas, McCullagh hace un análisis muy lúcido del encuentro, en el que estuvo presente David Kester, Director del UK Design Council y a quien queremos traer para nuestro Festival Internacional de Diseño en octubre. El cruce entre diseño y empresa no parece estar del todo resuelto en el Reino Unido:

There's something odd going on when business and political leaders flatter design with potentially holding the key to such big and pressing problems, and the design community looks the other way.

To understand this paradox, we need to look back at why business and political leaders have become so enamoured with design, and why so many designers struggle with the concept of Design Thinking.

(...)

From a personal point of view the most useful thing about the conference was that it brought into sharp relief the chasm between post-recession realities and how stuck in past design still is. After all, what's notable about the design thinking debate is not so much how design practice has changed, but rather how the audience for design has changed and raised its expectations.

El diseño se ha vuelto un commodity por lo que ahora lo importante es el "buen diseño":

Verganti, Professor of Management of Innovation at Milan Polytechnic and author of Design Driven Innovation, argued that after two decades of designers successfully selling themselves to business, most companies use designers and therefore design on its own provides no competitive advantage. Just as companies competed on product quality in the eighties, and now it is an accepted standard, design is now just a ticket to the game. This is backed up by the lack of data to prove that design leads to profit. The point is not to argue for more design (he does not use the term design thinking), but how to deliver great design.