What is the real world expecting from Designers?
The real world, whether private, public or non-profit, is expecting designers to deepen our mutual engagement. They need us to partake in building a strong business case around the problem statements. They want us to form alliances that can address complex societal, industrial, or ecological challenges. They need our insights to be rooted deeper, our creative solutions to become scalable and well-articulated in terms of value chain. They will need us to curate and orchestrate the quality of creative work, not just deliver on a scope of a design brief.
How ready are we as Design community?
Design community is only beginning to grasp the depth and complexity of this demand. We are yet to raise above our craft-based survival mode and to graduate from a service provider to a partner relationship. We tend to limit our roles to our job titles and rarely dare to think beyond! Our education, in most cases, is busy preparing students for jobs, not for impact oriented entrepreneurial careers. We lack a collective, systematic capability that can make us a formidable force in solving complex challenges of the world.
How might we refresh the approach to Design, and raise our profession’s maturity?
The approach would be to re-examine three fundamental aspects that sustain our creative profession and to restore balance among them. We love becoming designers because of the intellectual aspect (Purpose), the emotional aspect (Creativity), and the action (Realization). Being a Designer of the future would mean standing stronger on all three pillars equally.
- Purpose Driven Design: The purpose and fulfilment of being a designer should raise above our individual creative expression alone. We need to align our existence to a higher value creation. From being user centric to being humanity centric/ planet centric. From making incremental improvements to advocating systemic re-thinking. Aligning with a greater purpose will bring long term motivation and control over our creative endeavours.
- Omni- Creative Design: Designers have always been the proponents of ‘possibilities’ in the world that is usually driven by constraints. The rise of AI means explosion of possibilities which will require thoughtful curation and orchestration to make contextual sense. Designers with mono-specialization will find it hard to gain that capability. We will need a multidisciplinary foundation that shape our craft with multiple facets: Form, materials, graphics, interaction, systems, physical spaces, psychology, economics, business, and so forth. Designers may drop the traditional labels and be omni-creative, by intent.
- Design for Systemic Realization: This requires us to always adopt a systematic approach that calls for positioning problems at hand in a larger framework/ scheme of things. This requires us to connect the dots of products, services, economies of scale and business implications. This requires designers to leverage physical and digital infrastructures and ecosystems. This sensitises us to pay attention to the impact of our work on planet and take collective positions to balance consumption and ecology. This requires us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our stakeholders, from concept to realization and beyond.
How might Design organizations and Institutions promote this change?
The designers of tomorrow will be valued as long as they are purpose-driven, omni-creative, and trained to carry out systemic realization of ideas and solutions. Design educators will need to ensure that the students imbibe deep sense of empathy and imagination. They would know how to leverage ecosystems, understand exchange of value, form alliances with other disciplines, have the courage to challenge status quo and rethink the world from a holistic perspective. This calls for a stronger inter-disciplinary approach to education. This will also open up career diversification based on a stronger footing and rooting. Design industry might rethink their approach to form teams. They will take full advantage of diversity and omni-creative capabilities, in order to move up the value chain. Matured design learning and practice of the future will add a much stronger meaning to the experience and innovation economy.
Author’s Details
Strategic Experience Design Consultant
Founder, Director of Aarambha Asia
Former Design Director at Philips Singapore
Sachin Behere is an Experience Design Consultant who leads innovations in environment design, with a strong focus on the healthcare industry. Working closely with leaders and executives, he translates strategic goals into impactful design solutions that enhance user experiences.
With over two decades of global experience, Sachin combines expertise in architecture, industrial design, and design management. His work has earned international recognition, including prestigious design awards and features in leading publications like Harvard Business Review.
He is visiting faculty at the School of Creativity at Rishihood University.
