What role might the government play in supporting design?

The U.S. government spends a vast amount of money each year on procurement (essentially, the purchase of goods and services)—$535 billion in 2010. With that scale of investment, the government becomes a design leader by virtue of purchasing policies alone. If a client of this scale was to set explicit criteria of effectiveness—citizen experience and civil well-being that could override least cost—think of the transformation that would occur in the civic experience! Half a trillion dollars a year demonstrating the value of design…

Unfortunately, government doesn’t tend to behave like a design champion. Civil servants are—if not by nature then certainly by training—cautious. To my knowledge, rarely in the history of government procurement have either superiors or the citizenry at large encouraged civil servants to innovate, to be creative and to accept a degree of risk (with the notable and oft-cited exceptions of the space program and advanced military systems).

Without creativity, though, public sector services are unlikely to achieve their ultimate goal: to enhance the lives of citizens and improve the global perspective of the U.S. If government officials think good design is expensive, it has often been said that they should consider the cost of bad design.

Periodically there are conversations, usually strictly within the design community, about how our country should have a national design policy, but it has never been clear what a national design policy would encompass. Our ultimate goal should be a presidential statement in the State of the Union address: “Design forms an integral part of the government’s plans for innovation and growth, and our upcoming research and innovation strategy will have design at its heart.”

It will take many years to put an advocacy plan such as this one in place. But you can help.

If each designer began by relaying the same message at the city, county and state level, we could create a groundswell of learning about effective design throughout the country. The first step is to write your local newspaper about the issue and attend town hall meetings of candidates during the current campaign. Ask the candidates if they see design as critical to the long-term competitiveness and innovation of the U.S. economy. Don’t take lower taxes as the answer!

If there are ways that you or your firm have advocated for design by working with local, state or federal government employees, share your success stories so we can encourage others to follow your lead.

Considerations in AIGA’s positioning and activities. (7) Positioning implications for AIGA

Given the nature of AIGA’s current role, there is an alternative approach to the challenges faced by AIGA membership. AIGA has long felt there is a need among the many professional design associations to collaborate more closely in order to enhance the volume, resonance and relevance of the voice used to communicate the value of design to business, the media and the public. It has also long felt there is far too much duplication in the provision of back-office services for under-capitalized organizations.

The result is that there is inadequate focus in the messages reaching business, and there are rarely adequate discretionary resources among existing associations for what is needed most by the profession: research, advocacy and public awareness campaigns.
As a result, AIGA has encouraged collaboration among associations, so that the Stonehenge illustrated above becomes more like a civic Greek model, with the pediment representing a focused, cooperative effort to communicate a message—a message that is broadly about the value of design and its ethical underpinnings—to audiences outside the design community.

While collaboration has been difficult for organizations that guard their identities and prerogatives, AIGA’s mission of demonstrating the value of design can occur without direct reference to AIGA or its constituents. In the context of cooperation, AIGA believes its members will benefit as the entire design economy grows, rather than worrying solely about its share of the economy. In this regard, AIGA may have reached a liminal point in its role in pursuing certain activities, since it can afford to be seen as a facilitator (rather than the owner) of outcomes that are consistent with its goals.

AIGA will work hard to achieve collaborative efforts with other professional design associations.

Considerations in AIGA’s positioning and activities. (6) Who is involved in the designing process?

AIGA has adapted itself as an institution to represent and lead the professionals who are engaged in the contemporary practice of design, even as the practice changes over time. AIGA was created by a gathering of printers and publishers in 1914. It has grown to include editorial designers, corporate identity, branding, interaction designers and many more mutations over the years, as the profession itself has changed. Now that design, as a profession, is more multidimensional, strategic and conceptual; represents a way of thinking and solving problems; and includes form, content and context; it must also include many different disciplines.

The following map of the disciplines involved in the designing process also becomes a map of the potential professions that are working with designers on collaborative teams. It is not clear on this map where the boundary for AIGA membership may lie. AIGA may not actively seek to represent all of these practices, although practitioners in each of these disciplines are likely be interested in and served by AIGA’s activities—and they are welcome to join.

The implications of this expansion of the profession is evident in the challenge of AIGA’s current efforts to assist the U.S. government in defining the profession accurately for its data collection and information efforts.

Considerations in AIGA’s positioning and activities. (5) Does AIGA represent a process, a discipline or a profession?

As the communication design professional has been drawn into projects with dimensions beyond the traditional ones, so has AIGA evolved in what and whom it represents. AIGA membership consists largely of communication designers who work in many media and are involved in research and strategy in their work for clients. At its core, AIGA membership consists of communication designers (broadly defined, involving many media and disciplines), researchers and strategists.

The most successful, in their strategic engagements, contribute a way of thinking that we call the designing framework. This way of approaching problem-solving offers potential solutions that evade the traditional business mindset. For communication designers, this approach often deals with communication, branding or positioning strategy. Yet the approach can be applied to many other forms of design, including industrial or product design, architecture, and interior or landscape design. It is strongly in AIGA’s members’ interest for this approach to problem-solving to be communicated to business, to assure that they seek and make the highest and best use of the communication designer. Every designer will benefit from this communication effort, even if he or she is not an AIGA member or a communication designer.

AIGA supports promotion of this broadly applicable designing framework and design thinking, regardless of the design discipline to which it is applied. Within this pursuit, AIGA also supports one genre of design and designer—the communication designer—but also seeks to represent those involved in research and strategy. Other organizations support other disciplines of design who also benefit from AIGA’s advocacy of design thinking.

Considerations in AIGA’s positioning and activities. (4) Multidimensional, strategic and conceptual design involve design thinking

As the highest and best use of designers by their business clients has assumed new dimensions—moving away from simply designing artifacts and toward designing multidimensional, strategic and conceptual outcomes—the special skill that designers bring to problems is the way they conceive of solutions. This is designing (as a verb), integrative thinking or design thinking.

AIGA has placed a high priority on transforming the public understanding of designers and their contribution from one of creating appealing things to one of helping solve complex problems. This has been conceived as a designing framework or process. AIGA has crafted a formulation of this process that is meant to create a common vocabulary and provide an example that is very similar to the approaches used by many designers. It is not meant to be the authoritative model; it is simply one way to provide a vocabulary for designers to use in describing their broader role. The idea behind it, however, is critical for designers—to experience the understanding and respect for their role that the profession seeks.

There are many ways to approach this process and each firm has its own articulation of the process, sometimes couched in proprietary terms. The process consists of three stages in problem solving, with four steps in each stage. And it is imperative that designers be involved at each stage. This framework is described as follows:

Considerations in AIGA’s positioning and activities. (3) The central attributes of clarity, authenticity and simplicity

Although AIGA considers the discipline or practice that it represents to be experience design and its characteristics to include increasingly multidimensional, strategic and conceptual counsel to clients, information design is central to the perceived value of design.

Design is the intermediary between information and understanding; its role is to make the complex clear and useful. Great design does this in a way that elevates the spirit. This holds true in both communication design and industrial design. Clarity, authenticity and simplicity are critical and central attributes in effective design.

This observation holds true of industrial or product design as well, where the design role is the intermediary between function and understanding (accessibility, usability). Clarity, authenticity and simplicity remain critical and central attributes in effective industrial design.

Considerations in AIGA’s positioning and activities. (2) From communication design to experience design

We know that graphic design is an archaic description of the current practice of design. For some, communication design seems to encompass a broader range of disciplines. Yet if we define the profession by what clients either need or want in the current competitive global economy, we have seen the expectation shift toward the design of experiences.

When design simply involved issues of form, it was graphic design. When the designer was expected to be responsible for both the form and content of messages, it became communication design. Today, the designer is responsible for communicating complex messages clearly, considering the form and content of the message as well as the context in which it is received by audiences over time. We consider this experience design.

Considerations in AIGA’s positioning and activities. (1) From craft to strategy: the evolution of the profession

This is the first post in a series titled “Considerations in AIGA’s positioning and activities.”

The design profession and practice have evolved dramatically over the past twenty years. If one were to map the profession in a two-by-two matrix—with the vertical axis defining the continuum from the maker of things at the bottom to the conceiver of things at the top, and the horizontal axis defining the progression from artifacts at the left to more intangible outcomes, like strategies, on the right—then, we have watched AIGA’s membership and the most successful practitioners in the profession move from the lower left square, the maker of things, toward the upper right, or the conceiver of strategies.

Now assume that this matrix represents two-dimensional design and that there were actually yet another set of dimensions that extended this observation from two-dimensional design to three-dimensional design. The third dimension may stand for space (as in designing objects), time (as in interaction design) or motion (as in motion graphics). Each of these attributes reveals the complexity of the demands placed on the communication designer today, when the greatest value that is contributed from communication design is captured in the rear, upper-right cube, where design outcomes are more conceptual, more strategic and more multidimensional.

Yet, to the benefit of the tradition of graphic design, many of the strongest practitioners are those who were trained within the dimensions of finite outcomes—the makers of two-dimensional objects.

The future relevance of the profession’s competitive advantage—which takes the form of integrative thinking in solving problems with human-centered solutions—may reside where the conceptual, multidimensional and strategic dimensions converge.

AIGA believes its role is to be the central place for community, information and influence for a design profession that operates in either of these shaded cubes, and to celebrate design that is executed anywhere along the transverse axis, from the lower front to the upper rear of that cube of designing functions.

AIGA does not believe every professional designer must evolve toward the more strategic practitioner. However, AIGA believes its role is to support and respect designers who are practicing at any place along the axis. The organization must assure that every designer has the opportunity to move up and down that axis.

What design positions are firms recruiting for most intently?

Word from talent agencies is that they are online project managers, search engine optimization and marketing specialists, user experience designers, video producers, web analytics specialists and web designers/developers. This comes from a number of sources.

Research by Xerox suggests that 87 percent of adults believe the design of marketing materials influence the success of a product or service and 15 percent have made a purchasing decision solely based on the graphic design used to sell a product or service.

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