DMI Conf. Day 2 Recap

Design Education
Second day was a full day packed with provocative speeches and hot taboo topics. Let’s start with John Maeda, the President of Rhose Island School of Design (RISD).

Here is what John said:
Design + Art
= Creating solutions to meaningfully asked questions

Technology + Business
= Using new possibilities for customers

Design + Technology + Business
= Using new possibilities to create solutions for customers

Design + Art + Technology + Business
= Using new possibilities to create solutions to meaningfully asked questions for customers

All the discussion about “design thinking”, designers solving complex problems, designers role in corporations, got me thinking about the definition of design. How do we raise design awareness and the standards of design to the level where designers are treated as true professionals and as equals to other professionals like engineers, programmers, lawyers and doctors?

Maybe designers can’t be treated seriously because there are no standards to define our profession. Should there be standards? And what are those standards? And who determines them? Maybe there is a need for legislation similar to the interior design or architecture profession. If we have such high regards for design and expect designers to “change” the world and designers are the “catalysts” for innovation, then treat us with respect, dignity and as equals.

Empathy

Dev Patnaik from Jump Associates came on next. Here are some interesting quotes from Dev on empathy:
“When companies get successful, they start to loose touch.”
“When you get too focused on one group of people, you start to loose touch with everyone else.”

Dev showed different examples on how having empathy strengthened the position of Microsoft’s X Box brand against Sony Playstation 2. And the difference between X Box and Zune. How the same team that worked on the successful XBox, also worked on Zune, but the latter failed to capture the market… Pretty cool examples. I can’t wait to order a copy of Dev’s book, Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy.

Sustainability

Lorrie Vogel, the General Manager of Considered Design at Nike Inc. gave the most impressive presentation on sustainability and design. As a consumer and a sustainable designer, I am always very leery about corporations making claims on their efforts on sustainability. After all, we all know that when it comes to corporate America, it’s all about the bottom line. But Nike’s Considered Ethos, truly makes me feel that this is one of the few product manufacturing companies that have successfully embraced “green” principles, not for the sake of joining the trendy green movement, but rather they’ve made it their company CULTURE in which every employee understands the company’s environmental footprint across it’s entire supply chain.

Fun fact: Did you know that it takes 700 gallons of water to make one t-shirt?

Sex and Sensibility

Agnete Enga from Smart Design presented some cool insights on designing for women. When I first heard of Femme Den, I actually thought it was a contraceptive pill or a new sanitary product for women. Well, it’s more than that of course. Femme Den, is an internal movement at Smart Design, dedicated to studying gender through design. Agnete showcased how they addressed gender in medical design, particularly, scrubs with 75% of operating room staff in America are women, and yet scrubs were designed for the male body.

And she also brought up a really cool observation on how MOST product companies now slap PINK on their products to address the women market, even if the products were not designed with women in mind or for unisex usage. Personally, I think Agnete did a fantastic job in presenting this very taboo subject. Of course her presentation, caused a stir among female audience, with the way Femme Den had chosen to use the word “boobs” instead of “breasts”. Hmmmm…what are your thoughts on that?

I strongly recommend the Femme Den’s website. It has great pdfs that you can download design and gender.

Health
Michael Conard a research scientist at Urban Design Lab at Columbia University presented an in depth study on how developing local food systems would improve health through increased accessibility. Does easy access to healthier grown foods lead to healthier sustainable lifestyle hence solving obesity? Or is solving obesity greater than policies and food infrastructure?

Interesting quote from Michael Schrage, Fellow MIT Sloan:
“Innovation is not what innovators create, it’s what clients adopt.”
” Design leadership means facilitating value-added simplicity.”

Coding
The day ended with Ben Fry and Casey Reas, showing us the really beautiful work. It was such a treat, after a full day of power point presentation.

Here are some projects done using their open source programming language Processing and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.

Flight 404, PixelRoller

Tags: business, conference, DMI, health, inspiration, sex and sensibility