Page 220 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

208 Design Meets Business
Design schools can help designers in particular to better communicate their work to business clients and validate their design processes.
To begin with, as the audiences of design have shifted as design is moving into business, designers have been facing the challenge of communicating and presenting their design(s) to clients. Whereas before designers were mostly working together with IT departments, now they are more and more collaborating with all layers of the organization including strategy, innova- tion, HR, finance and customer services. Working with these new audiences can be challenging as these audiences approach their work in different ways. For example, during fieldwork, I saw that for designers it was sometimes difficult to articulate their highly conceptual designs to their clients, who wanted to see ‘numbers’ and other ‘hard’ proof that design is worthy.
Further, business knowledge can help business to validate their work. For example, designers can learn how to back up their design decisions with statis- tical analysis, which can help them to validate their designs and decisions to clients. Instead of making two intuitive designs for a website, designers can prioritize design lay out based on statistical analysis of what has attracted customers to websites before. Also, designers can better estimate whether their idea is realizable or whether it is too costly for business to develop. For example, during my fieldwork, the design team proposed to offer their client’s customers a face-to-face guidance. Yet, offering such service to over hundred thousand customers is too costly and the clients preferred a robot advisor to offer personalized services instead. Besides statistical analysis, for designers it might be useful to know more about supply chain management, corporate ethics and business model development.
Recognizing the need for more business knowledge in design work, various design firms have introduced the role of the ‘business designer’, upon which I elaborated before. At Fjord, this role has been introduced since around 2015. Including such role in the design firm can help to bring in the management perspective and tackle the abovementioned issues. Yet, assigning a specific role to business design, might suggest that the other designers do not need to understand business know-how. Teaching busi- ness in design schools can help them to consider the business perspective in all of their design decisions and behaviors, and in doing so, help them better communicate and validate their work – instead of depending on others (such as the business designer) on it. In short, including business in the curricula of design students will help them to see the benefits of unders- tanding business and management perspective in their work, instead of emphasizing its differences. Especially, as design moved into business there is benefits for design students to better understand how business can be complementary, instead of substitute, to design.