Kevin Finn | TheSumOf & DESIGNerd
So where traditional business thinking is in the past and the present, designers are always looking ahead and that's something that we naturally do. When we are talking about businesses that need to go through transformation, those that need to change and to adapt, I believe—Design Thinking aside—designers are far more comfortable being uncomfortable, and businesses generally aren’t. So if you surround yourself with people who are more comfortable in a space that you aren’t, you feel reassured. With designers you feel can reassured and more relaxed while having to deal with these changes, and start to have safe conversations about possible ways forward.
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Mark Curtis | Fjord
The reason we set it up… Well, I would love to say we had this fantastic and clear vision that it was going to be service design and that was the future, but if I am being honest, that would be just bullshit. In many ways, it was more foolish than that. We were just driven by a belief, and that was that the Internet and digital was not over and it was going to become the most dominant business driver of the next few decades. We were absolutely certain of that.
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Significa | Design Agency
Our agency is called Significa (which translates to ‘meaning’, ‘to mean’) because we believe that every project we do must have a purpose, and fulfill, not only the client’s needs, but also the users’. That’s why our slogan is ‘making products meaningful’ as we thrive to create meaningful yet fully functional experiences. This work philosophy also applies to our working environment with very open and flexible policies, and complete trust in the people we work with.
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Marty Neumeier | Liquid Agency
Until we stop teaching design in art schools, we’re going to end up with the same kind of people—those who want to be artists, not designers. They’ll tend to fall short in solving business problems because that’s not really what they signed up for. Unless we can teach them that the real art of design lies in solving a business problem they’re going to keep thinking design is purely visual, or experiential, and never learn to make the connection between design and a specific business outcome.
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Dan Price | Gravity Payments
When I’m 70, I want to say I was part of completely reshaping the economy at a moment when business stopped being about making the most money possible and became about purpose, service and making a difference.
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Natalie Maher | Good
I think we have a language issue within our industry where actually we are all talking about the same thing but we call it different things. Some people call it planning, strategy, others design, and that inconsistency is fracturing our impact. In my opinion, the only reason we have introduced the term design thinking was to try and educate people outside of design that it isn’t just images on a piece of paper. For designers it is common knowledge that you don’t get those images without doing the thinking that’s behind it. It became a necessary addition to the lexicon which I think has now ended up confusing everything more than actually creating clarity
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Working at a place where design sits, for now, outside the door.
FP is a distinguished engineer at a tier-one bank (the name of the bank was omitted by request as well), and he helped my research by giving contributions related to a completely different field than design. Belonging to the group of people that fairly understands about design but works in a space where senior management doesn’t even acknowledge what it is and just thinks of it as an unrelated topic unworthy of attention. In his opinion, even though things are changing in the banking sector, ‘a lot of their practices come from the Victorian age’, where projects would last a lifetime; these mechanisms are no longer adequate.
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Jay Grossen | frog
I've done some research and discovered that Jay Grossen is the London studio executive creative director, so he would be a great person to talk to. However, in my tiny student position I thought it was probably too much of a long shot.
Regardless, I would not lose anything by calling them and if not him, I would try to get anyone from the inside to answer my questions. So... I called.
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List of Questions
Here you can find the list of questions I used to conduct the interviews, although in some cases I did not ask all of them, nor have I always asked them in order.
6. What does design mean to you?
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The Project | full info
Businesses are increasingly looking to define their purpose beyond financial profit and leaders recognise the need to build authentic brand platforms and conscious cultures on which to create competitive advantage. Furthermore, inclusive and sustainable approaches to solving problems and management issues are already in place in some visionary companies, and the evidence so far shows that it is possible to run even profitable organisations in different management paradigms than the ones used in the past.
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