Bar fights: design intervention to reduce cost and injuries

Our penultimate session is billed as an innovation master class with the Design Council

Professor Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning at the Pentacle The Virtual Business School and the man behind the monetisation of MSN, the innovation burst at Cadbury and the turn-around of Rolls Royce motor cars introduces some principles of design-led innovation. He’s also our incredibly enthusiastic host/facilitator jumping around the stage spilling words and images at 100 miles an hour.

Eddie introduces us to some numbers: 23, 7.1m, 366,000 and 1 in 100,000

23% number of projects that set out and actually achieve what they intended
7.1million results in Google for ‘Innovation change consultants’
1 in 100,000 ideas that you have in your organisation that actually get to be realised
366,000 Number of books on Amazon about Innovation

He shares a number of diagrams with us to help us understand the change from an old world where we where able to understand and react to the pace of change to one where that ability is diminishing and as a consequence so is our inclination to take risks.

He also illustrates the area of innovation he believes we need to concentrate on today – User-centred design-led innovation

Eddie paints us picture of the traditional ideas funnel, the more you put in, eventually the more you get out but challenges this assumption. He prefers to focus on developing an understanding of where ideas die – at the point of creation, due to lack of focus, because people don’t collaborate and finally at the point of production. These are the places we need to be devoting our efforts.

And the biggest threat to innovation today? People are terrified of failure.

In the old world failure was considered to be a bad thing and as a result people shied away from risks. In the new world we have to understand failure is divided into dumb and smart failure. Smart failure is the failure we embrace and learn from.

Eddie leaves us with a thought to ponder “50 people die each year from underwear related injuries”

Next up Richard Seymour, Director of Seymour Powell.

Richard reasserts the importance of watching and makes the case for the specialist designer. He is a firm believer in the fact that people can tell you want they have liked and what they do like but not what they will like. A good designer is an empath. They take in their surroundings, process and reprocess it.

Design is not linear like a production process it is chaotic and needs people who can function in this chaos and extract insights. He uses the example of the cordless kettle that he developed following an incident he observed where his mother threw a kettle lead into a gravy boat by accident.

It is essential that we understand that design affects behaviour and that understanding behaviour is key to design. We need anthropology. Designers now, more than ever, need to also be anthropologists, we need to watch what people do. The future is in emergent behaviour. Watching is the key to understanding new behaviours that we can design around and for. Richard describes this process as beginning at the end. Finding out what the emergent behaviour opportunities are and work your way back to creating the product

Finally he reasserts that not everyone is equally creative. Ideas are a dime a dozen great products are not. If you want great design to be part of your business seek out the best people, the best empaths and the best watchers.

David Kester, Chief Executive at the Design Council, and Bonnie Dean, Senior Advisor at Quantum Property Partnership, both discussed case studies (respectively, hospital equipment designed to reduce hospital acquired infections, theft-proof mobile phones) that have been generated through Design Council programmes, in the context of ‘how to create the safe space’ for innovation to happen. However I would question the usefulness of these lessons for the audience: they spent less time explaining the creation of that space, which I really wanted to hear, and much more on the products that resulted, admirable as they are.


With Design Bugs Out, the Design Council, with backing from the Department for Health, issued a competition to industry on the basis of a series of briefs for products. And the briefs were the result of sending designers and ethnographers into hospitals to watch and work with staff and patients – to find out through observation where the sticking points occurred. This approach is ‘at the heart of design thinking’, according to David – ‘the design bit starts much earlier’ (oh good I was worried he was going to be vague). The design and manufacture teams were given some initial funding to deliver the prototypes but had to invest much more themselves, but with a strong likelihood that these prototypes would be taken up – and critically they were allowed to retain the IP for their designs. The programme did fast-track the time to market of these ideas. But David admitted that there was a long way to go in terms of changing the organisational mindset of the NHS, which is a separate and massive challenge.

A similar process was applied to designing new ways of making mobile phones less tempting to thieves, or less of a security risk in terms of loss of personal information once stolen. In this case the turnaround was even faster, six months from idea to prototype, and there has been plenty of interest from industry.

 So the resulting ideas, and the technology transfer that has gone on, are impressive. But as part of an ‘innovation masterclass’ for the assembled audience (designers, senior business managers, a very few civil servants) I’m not sure what the relevant moral of the story is.

[This post was written in collaboration with Jocelyn Bailey.]

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The Economist’s Robin Bew, who opened the conference yesterday by reminding us of exactly how deep the s*** is we’re in, posed what are perceived to be the four trends (or challenges for business) that will shape tomorrow’s world.

Sir George Cox (former Design Council Chairman), in his calming, measured, reassuring way, offered some reasons why we shouldn’t all start panicking and freak out. This was a nice reflective antidote to the information overload of the last two days, and perhaps the most genuinely insightful session for those business leaders who had attended to learn what they should be planning for.

So, the 4 Trends:
1. the shift to emerging markets
2. rich world ageing
3. carbon pricing
4. a lack of capital

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Session title: How understanding the customer’s experience has led to innovative services that encourage more people to fly Virgin.

Joe Ferry, Head of Design at Virgin Atlantic Airways spent 10 minutes talking us through the recent design challenges he’s faced during the last few years. Virgin have 7,500 staff, 5,000,000 passengers and 40 aircraft, which is just a fraction of what the other major players have. Joe insists that Virgin Atlantic has no right to exist and the fact that it does and is successful is entirely due to the fact that it is different. What separates Virgin Atlantic according to Joe is service and product—design is at the heart of everything they do.

Despite the collapse in the market in response to September 11th Twin Towers tragedy Virgin undertook a multimillion dollar upgraded the first class seats and experience that launched in April 2002.

Where you sleep is now no longer where the travellers sits. The level of investment required to develop a new seat for the fleet is around £1-2m. Then to role that out across the fleet is around £100m.

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Hugo Spowers, Founder and Project Leader, Riversimple

Riversimple determinedly don’t think of themselves as a car manufacturer, although in terms of existing business models that’s probably how they are too often described. Founder Hugo Spowers believes, perhaps unusually for someone engaged in manufacturing, that an industrial society based on the sale of products will never be resource efficient. Which puts a big question mark over pretty much every industry you can think of.

The motor industry began with a notorious innovation, when Ford said something like ‘if I gave my customers what they wanted I would have had to invent faster horses.’ As we are all aware, the motor industry is no longer fit for purpose, modern-day constraints are very different to those faced by Ford, but we have yet to see another such step-change in response. Unfortunately, as a hugely advanced, mature, specialised, technology specific industry—it is now ill-suited to achieving a step-change.

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First session: How the change imperative will continue to shake business in the next three years

The Big Rethink has officially begun.

Vjiay Vaitheeswaran of the Economist and Martin Temple of the EEF opened, setting the agenda for the discussion for the next two days: how design can help us get out of the mess we’re in. It’s a good move to get two people who aren’t designers by trade to open by asserting the power of design in not just ‘business’, but in meeting the global challenges we face today – which obviously will affect, and be affected by, business. However, they are preaching to a room of the converted. It will be interesting to see how and if anyone disputes this view over the next couple of days, (but as most of the attendees will have paid 1.5k to be here: I think it’s unlikely.)

Attendees range from designers to business, economists and civil servants. We have a great line-up of speakers, and a slightly disappointing turn-out—the lecture hall is not full. It quickly becomes apparent that the format of discussion is better suited to the fast-paced presenters. And the first session of the morning has set the pace—very snappy indeed, perhaps to match the pace of change in the outside world on which we are here to reflect. (We’ve been given little remote controls to text in answers and questions.) Short shrift was given by VV to the lengthy intervention during Q&A.

Robin Bew: How the change imperative will continue to shake business in the next 3 years

Welcome to the new world of business, definitely not the same as the old world of business.

Robin Bew, Editorial Director and Chief Economist at the Economist Inteligence Unit, steps up to the platform and describes the scorched earth that is the world’s economy and reminds us of the recent traumatic past.

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Jeff Denby is Chief Creative Officer and Co-founder of PACT.

Jeff starts by sharing his ethical values and then follows up with a slide of two crotches. A guy and a gal. Could this be overshare? It turns out Jeff has developed a new business designing the underwear that encompasses the 12 foot high crotches we’re looking at. Now were looking at two generations for Calvin Kline undies ads. To date innovation in underwear has tended to focus on updating the advertising models who show off the items. In over 15 years we have only progress from Marky Mark to David Beckham it seems.

Jeff and his partner spent 18 months researching the market before stepping into it and is a firm believe that when you’re looking to innovate you need to leave the building – ‘the answer to your research is not on the Internet’. He also confesses he had to hang around in the underwear section of department stores to watch people buying and trying. Another nice gem shared was that being open about what you are interested in and researching, rather than keeping secrets, has a tendency to attract useful and generous people towards you and your business. (This is something I definitely recommend from personal experience.)

What Jeff’s company PACT do is create premium, ethically produced cotton underwear that brings three stakeholders together. Each new design is developed as a partnership between one charity (who gain 10% of all sales), a designer (who creates the pattern for the briefs) and the manufacturer, PACT (who manage, produce, distribute and sell the underwear). The value in their product lies in the stories that can, and are told, through the creative process and the connections between the stakeholders.

As Yves Behar says

• Design brings stories to life
• Stories bring design to life
• Life brings stories to design

Not content with just creating a demand for ethical undies Jeff and his gang have also focused on the packaging, designing cotton bags, created using the off-cut material from the underwear. Instead of throwing this packaging away many purchasers utilise the bags and even send photos of how they’re using both the bags and the undies back to the company (see the wedding above).

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Over the next couple of days my colleague Jocelyn and I’ll be blogging live from the Economist’s Redesigning Business Summit in London for Core77. Under the title ‘The Big Rethink‘ the event sets out to develop some fresh ideas on how design thinking can be used to seize business opportunities in our increasingly volatile world.

Over the two days we’ll be hearing from over 30 speakers from across business, academia and design. Take a look at the full programme and if you have any questions to the speakers or any particular workshops you’d like us to report on please share below.

If you’d also like to follow the event on Twitter the hashtag is #redesign2010.

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A newscast released today by CCTV discusses China’s industrial design boom. Unfortunately the newscast is poorly produced, poorly written (“industrial design” is written “industries design,” for instance) and laden with good ol’ Commie propaganda-speak (i.e. “highest levels of achievement,” etc.), although, if the figures are to be believed, there are some interesting takeaways:

Chen Dongliang, Director, Beijing Industrial Design Center, said, “The output value of industrial design in Beijing reached 80 billion yuan in 2008. Now around 250-thousand employees are working for nearly 20-thousand design companies in the city. Beijing is also expanding technology service and high-end manufacturing industries, both of them can help boost the industrial design sector.”

…The global financial crisis has made more and more companies realize that it’s not sustainable to depend on cheap and low-end products. They must think more about added value. The central government has also called for more attention on industrial design, pledging to change “Made in China” to “Invented in China”.

Chen said, “Industrial design is the key point of the value chain. Figures show that in Britain, 100 pounds of investment in design can yield 225 pounds of output. According to our survey, in China, one yuan investment could bring 13 yuan of output….”

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The past two years have seen a lot of upheaval in the auto industry, with some operatic rises and falls. Two of the world’s automakers that have been chugging along largely unnoticed amidst the drama (while quietly making profits and increasing in size) are Hyundai and Kia; and the good news for us is that in both companies, design is playing an increasingly significant role, particularly since they have each invested in design centers on three continents.

In an article looking at Kia, the BBC reports that

[Paul Philpott, Kia Motors Europe's COO] believes the key driver to future growth lies within the cars’ design, penned in Kia’s global design headquarters in Frankfurt, as well as in Seoul and in California.

“With the new products that we are now bringing to the market, the product design is coming together as one family,” he says.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal’s report on Hyundai points out that

Hyundai slowly beefed up its design capabilities over the past decade, adding staff in South Korea and building new design centers in Irvine, Calif., in 2002 and Russelsheim, Germany, in 2003…. Inside Hyundai, the designers battled a tradition that gave engineers and factory-process experts the final say in product design. In one recent instance where designers won out at Hyundai, the new Sonata has a thin line of chrome that stretches from the headlights along the hood and top of both doors to the back window. Keeping that lined up in production is a challenge for factory workers and, as a result, engineers resisted it, say company officials.

The article also points out that Hyundai, like BMW and the other big dogs, is seeking a unified design aesthetic across its fleet, the sort of “design DNA” we often hear about at lectures championing the importance of design in business.

Speaking of business, the already-giant Hyundai’s global sales grew 10% last year, while the rest of the industry’s declined by 2.5%; meanwhile up-and-comer Kia saw a staggering 1,200% (that’s not a typo) increase in net profits and a 270% increase in operating profits in 2009. So while there are currently tons of auto designers being downsized worldwide, hopefully they’ll soon have a place to go.

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