“Design – in terms of thinking and process – is the champion of the future, envisaging and interpreting insights and ideas through strategy, ideas, products, spaces and communications.” Peter Haythornthwaite, Principal, creativelab

Design plays its vital roles in the following ways:

• Role and value of design as a driver of innovation
• Integral part of the strategic planning process- organizational behavior, product innovation, market development and customer interaction
• Seek to minimize the risks that are internal to the business and which can be controlled
• Value research, planning and review as integral parts of business execution – leading to early identification of market trends and challenges and enhancing the ability of the business to address them
• Have inclusive management style and systems that leverage the skills and experience of all employees to optimize product development, marketing and sales processes
• Understand the requirement to identify and periodically review market needs and how the product offering meets that need
• Design led processes mesh well with agile development processes that allow a business to react fast to market change or evolution
• Understanding the needs, behavior and perceptions of the consumer, innovation around materials and manufacturing
• Emphasis not only on the output, but also on the act or the process
• Having empathy for the individual and their relationship with a product
• The flexibility of the design of a product to meet the evolving needs of a variety of user segments
• Design effort as a sole competitive strategy, which, through differentiation and positioning, helps attain a competitive advantage in the market
• Design activity extends the usefulness of a new or existing innovation and helps the products suit user needs more accurately
• Re-designs or re-innovations as “combining the existing with the new.” a re-design is a kind of product innovation that initially employs largely existing technology, but opens up a new and fast growing usage for the use
• Incremental innovations are achieved with less risk, less expense and short time, therefore, less venturing the producer in terms of financial risk and market position

Design thinking incorporates constituent or consumer insights in depth and rapid prototyping, all aimed at getting beyond the assumptions that block effective solutions. Design thinking—inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential—addresses the needs of the people who will consume a product or service and the infrastructure that enables it.

Design thinking is based on taking a human-centred approach to problem-solving. It starts with what’s desirable and then moves to what’s possible from a technology perspective and what’s viable from a business perspective. That in itself represents complexity. Design thinking needs to be cognizant of a whole set of issues that weren’t so cognizant of before.

Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as being functional, and to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols.

Therefore, Design needs to be optimistic, it’s what design’s all about. It looks to the future and imagines better possibilities for the man-made world

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org