Design v/s Innovation, the emerging reality

It has been simmering. But now, one can see the outward manifestation. While designers are promoting ‘design is about design thinking and visualising’, the business world is still not ready to comprehend the holistic nature of design thinking. Even those countries where the design profession has existed for a few generations are yet to take ‘design thinking’ to the board room, much less to talk of the emerging economies.
 
Fifteen years ago when Onio started as a garage start-up, we were understood as a company that will make things ‘look good’. Whether they would ‘work good’ also or not, was much of a concern for designers in those days. Making money would still be a call of the businessman and not of designer. So things were pretty simple and small. Briefs came from marketing, designers worked on it, took it to R&D for detailing and washed their handsoff the project.

 Then we started getting involved in manufacturing viability studies for many of the product concepts we designed. In fact, the first product we designed for Godrej was ‘Home Security Door’, where we studied the manufacturing capabilities of the factory first before suggesting them ribbed-door panels that would take in adornments of other materials and thereby make the ‘locker like’ steel door, more homely. This stretched our engagement to months, bringing down the profits (being fixed cost model). But it did help propping up Onio as a company which could make things happen in real, against the backdrop of designers who just knew how to make things look good in computer renderings. Our engineering training was working to our advantage for a change.

However, this was not a lasting differentiator. Soon, there were many takers for this space. From engineering centred design companies like Tata Elxsi which were way  bigger than us to in-house engineering teams to the prototyping agencies, they all completed the picture in a way, but also competed against each other. At this time Onio’s foray into trend research (which later on expanded into a full-fledged design research division) gave Onio an edge. Our understanding of the cultural nuances of India and the ability to conduct ethnographic research on varied topics like e-learning (for Microsoft) to brand strategy research across continents (for Secure Meters) to consumer products like refrigerators and washing machines (for Korean manufacturers), we have seen it all.  

The practice today is well established and seamlessly gels with the industrial design team that takes the research ahead of insights to concepts and prototypes.Ethnography is now a done thing. Market research companies and other design companies today claim to conduct ethnographic research of some sorts. New trend of not restricting the research to one country and geography but thinking of global platforms for new products is now catching up.

 

Through it all, from design to design-research, I always felt a lack of vocabulary to explain the business world to what extent we could help them. People in the client teams also evolved in their profiles. From an R&D chief or design chief, to brand managers and category heads, the latest is product planning managers and innovation heads. Yes, ‘INNOVATION’ and not ‘DESIGN’ is the next vocabulary evolution.

 

From design industry’s standpoint, it is a non-move, but from industry standpoint it is a significant move. Tanishq, the Indian jewellery brand owned by Tatas has recently created a ‘Strategic Innovation’ department which is separate from the ‘design department’. DESIGN is now understood as being more about day-to-day new concepts which keep the yearly growth in place. ‘INNOVATION’ on the other hand is about looking ahead a few years and proposing alternative scenarios, insights and briefs which the design team can work upon.

 

Samsung is another global company to walk this route. They already have a design centre in India. But now a separate team looks into ‘innovation directions’. Most of the established auto companies have ‘advance design studios’ which work on concepts several years ahead of realisation. They conduct trend studies and look at emerging patterns of consumption. But now this ‘advance design’ thinking is coming to work for several other sectors who seem to have realised that there needs to be a semantic difference between day-to-day innovation and strategic innovation. Hence design has a sibling now - innovation. Purists are likely to laugh at it, but then there is ample business to be done.