NextD Journal I ReReThinking Design Special Issue, April 2007
GK VanPatter |
Beautiful Diversion
NextDesign Leadership Institute, United States
Trilogy of Illusions 1. Since we have been teaching whole-brain cross-disciplinary innovation co-creation skills to organizations of all kinds, including design companies, for many years, reading BusinessWeek is always a little mind-bending. BusinessWeek has become masterful at consistently depicting a future of design and innovation that is ten years behind what is already going on in the marketplace. The truth is that a lot of what is going on today does not exactly fit the natural inclinations or strategic needs of BusinessWeek and its primary readers. Design companies have already transformed themselves and are directly competing in the innovation space with Nussbaum’s core readership: business school-educated consultants. Nussbaum seems to have a different, more constrained, future in mind for design, and it is consistently subservient and blue collar (i.e. MBAs frame the product challenges that designers should carry out, preferably with a smile). That’s no big news. The bigger story is, or should be (if we had a design press), why has it taken the design education community so long to wake up to the Nussbaum charade. The Nussbaum era, now passed, has been a wonderful advocate of change in the business community and a huge blockage of change in the design education community. Nussbaum worked the design education crowd masterfully for quite a while, but the “Enemies” piece surely shows that the “Power of Design” game is over. Let’s get that burning platform dusted off, folks. Reality just re-set in. 2. Today, “the big ego” charge is a strategic playing card more than it is a proportional statement of the primary problem that exists in the context of cross-disciplinary innovation. When you see that card being played in the direction of designers, you can almost be certain that there are folks around driving who never set foot in a design school. They are driving a strategic agenda that includes “everyone is a designer.” Their numbers are huge, and their impact is gigantic. Proportionally, those numbers are now greater than design school-educated designers. I’m guessing that this red flag connects to Nussbaum’s staff, lead collaborators at Core 77, and his advisors. He should know better. He seems to be unaware that there is a strategic space race going on out there. Here, he was used as a pawn. In the context of organizational innovation, there are big egos and other kinds of inappropriate behaviors around, but this exists in Business 1.0, 2.0, Technology 1.0, 2.0, as well as Design 1.0, 2.0. No discipline has been historically focused on teaching people how to work across tribes. What he missed by focusing on product-centric Design 2.0 all these months is that design firms practicing in the innovation-enabling space are already out there participating in the retraining of the adult population, none of whom had cross-disciplinary innovation behavioral skill building in school. Bruce, get yourself into a workshop asap! 3. BusinessWeek framing sustainability as a challenge is like George Bush seeking to take the strategic reigns on education. American business is playing catch up on sustainability with the help of some very smart folks in the design business. Besides that, the future of design is about HOW not WHAT. Sustainability is a WHAT. It is the next WHAT, now that the eBusiness WHAT wave has collapsed. WHATs come and go. WHATs are pre-framed challenges. Let’s get smarter. HOW skills are much more sustainable than WHAT skills. Design 3.0 is adaptable to all kinds of challenges, not just sustainability. In Design 3.0, the many challenges we face are framed, not by business magazine editors, but rather in co-creation.
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