Tuesday, 01 December 2009 00:00

Innovation via design

DemosEUROPA – Centre for European Strategy and the Danish Embassy in Warsaw organised jointly a conference on Innovation via Design, in the premises of the Ujazdowski Castle. High profile speakers coming from Poland and Denmark explained why design is crucial for an innovation-based economy and gave concrete examples where design plays a major role in the company turnover and the consumers’ lives.

“Differentiate or Die” (Jack Trout – World’s foremost marketing strategist)

According to Eskild Hansen (Head of the European Design Centre, Consumer Business Group, CISCO), design is a strategic way of improving the fate of a company. Curiously enough it is now less the technology that matters than the design: the simplicity and the beauty of the products are often more important than what is inside. Acquired by Cisco Systems in 2003, Linksys (major provider of home and small office network products) saw its sales boosted since the Cisco designers started to redesign its range of products. In the same vein, Susie A. Ruff (Director of the Health Care Innovation Centre at the Capital Region of Denmark) said that design is important for companies’ growth, and the figures talk for themselves: a company with a top-design policy is likely to export 34% more, to see its gross profit multiplied by 2.5 and to gain competitiveness. But she deplored the difficulty of “selling” design policies to public institutions. She also underlined the importance of “user driven design” that, together with “user driven innovation” focuses directly on solving peoples’ problems.

The Scandinavian design was largely praised throughout the conference, namely because it aims at creating beautiful and functional daily products, affordable for all: a way of cutting the production costs and to satisfy the demand with low prices.

Design, the economic sector of tomorrow?

Dr Iwona Palczewska (Institute of Industrial Design, Warsaw), deemed that the design sector has a huge development potential and has already demonstrated a remarkable human capital since it employs more and more people. To illustrate her speech, she explained that the value added of industrial design places it on the same level as the aviation sector or the fuel sector. This figures are based on Dutch national data, but are likely to be similar in Poland in a couple of years. What is more, some forecasts predict the creative sector taking over the financial sector in the UK in terms of value added.

For Eskild Hansen, if design has some chances to become a leading economic sector, stress must be put on education, so that children at schools get in touch with design – or even have it somehow integrated into their curricula. Design should be seen as a profession like any other that can be studied at university. Perhaps design is more culturally rooted in Scandinavia than elsewhere in Europe due to the specific climate and cultural habits. Indeed, in Denmark design can be taken up as a subject in high schools, and design is also more integrated in public policies (e.g. high design concern was present when designing the new metro train in Copenhagen).

Concrete examples of Innovation via Design: the INDEX awards

Lise Vejse Klint (Program Director, INDEX: Award), presented the five winners of the INDEX awards 2009, bi-annual competition aiming at rewarding projects which put great emphasize on design of the products, but in the same time on the ways they influence peoples’ lives. Having divided the competition into specific categories – Community, Body, Play, Home and Work, as well as carefully prepared criteria, the jury can pick the ideas that combine design with innovation.

Here are some examples of the laureates:
In the Body Category, the winning project was the “freeplay foetal heart rate monitor”, designed for ruggedness environments and easy to use, and aiming at preventing children and mothers birth-deaths. In the Home Category, the “Chulha” project was rewarded: this cooking device is easy to produce at low costs, it burns biomass fuels (that create indoor air pollution and are responsible for many cancers) more efficiently by directing smoke out of the house through a small chimney.
In the Work Category, the website Kiva.org ranked first. Somehow following the path taken by the 2006 Peace Nobel Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, this website has become the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending online platform. In the Community Category, the award went to “Better place” system, which is an example of systemic approach to electrical vehicle services.

The last part of the conference was devoted to the presentation of the HTH and BoConcept, two Danish companies with that represent contemporary design.

Presentations:

Susie A Ruff (1)

Susie A Ruff (2)

dr Iwona Palczewska

Lise Vejse Klint