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board of designers by MA Neff

The so-called design century has arrived. Here's a look at what it could be like when designers lead major organizations — or at least your next big initiative.

Psychologist Richard Farson, founder of the nonprofit Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, CA, holds that it is time we become design-driven. Designers are well suited as leaders, he says: they're adept at recognizing context and historical perspectives in the arts, sciences and humanities; they appreciate working in ensembles and often are environmentally aware and are willing to stretch beyond the limits of technology; designers depend on a high level of creative thinking and appreciate esthetic dimensions of leadership. The first step, then, is for designers to begin to imagine themselves as leaders — of design firms, of communities, of cultural organizations, of corporations — and especially as board members. In Farson's thinking, "design my soon become the byword of leadership and management."

["Management by Design" and "Designers as Leaders", commentary by Dr. Richard Farson]

:: hospitality experience for the young discerning affluent

When hospitality starts talking about "freshening" as in "youthing" and suddenly eschews the term "destination" in favor of "experience", you can be sure such positioning campaigns have scented trend. Following the 2001 brand downshift of LVMH Moët Hennessy, when Louis Vuitton unfurled the quotidian Graffiti Bag by designers Marc Jacobs and Steven Sprouse, came the debut of the Peninsula Hotel campaign "Portraits of Peninsula" in the fall of 2004. This April Ritz-Carlton launched their first new positioning campaign in three years aimed at what is being dubbed the "discerning affluent", a generation beyond baby boomers that in market-speak means though faster at spotting trends, they have less money to spend. The ad "experiences" were photographed by Annie Leibovitz in Manhattan, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, and are running in supposedly more "youth-ier" venues in the U.S. like Vanity Fair, W and Wallpaper and in the Chinese Travel & Leisure and Asian Condê Nast Taveler. In the ads the youthful patrons are shown in surreal settings as if they are poised on top of a silver tray proffered by the hand of an invisible butler. Positioning is the act of catching the best wave and keeping yourself balanced between your most loyal and new audience. One wave and the next. Ask any surfer. Or read the story for yourself. And call us when you're ready to brave the currents.

[Ritz Blitz to Target Young Travelers, Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2005 - must be WSJ subscriber to view ]

:: Yahoo! and NBC: original tv content for web

In April rumors portending new online concepts skittered the web like long due sunshine after a deluge of ad-showered surfing. First, Universal Television Group CEO Jeff Zucker admitted there isn't enough interactivity on shows like 'Dateline', 'Nightly News' and 'Today'. Zucker told the audience at the Yahoo!-sponsored broadband conference in New York that besides blogs, NBC had its eye on creating short shows specifically for the web. Although fellow panelist Lloyd Braun, head of Yahoo! Media Group, didn't spill the beans, other industry speculation suspects as much after since November when Yahoo! hired former ABC Television exec Braun and then promptly announced plans to open offices (read "studios") in Santa Monica. Online storytelling is the lingo spilling from the lips of Scott Moore, a Microsoft veteran who left his MSN programming manager role to become VP of content operations at the fledgling Yahoo! Media Group in May. The first thing conspicuously absent from the story line so far is that the success of concepts will no doubt involve co-creation with not only advertisers but also customers. The second mystery is how to come up with original web concepts. And that's why creative work lies ahead for all of us.

[20 & 27, 2005, Online Media Daily, Media Post]

:: Overstock.com: don't call us, we'll call you first!

Customer experience is about turning interaction into dialog. The aim is actionable dialog that can evolve and recur in many places, many ways. A customer, in a store or on a website, to a great degree depends on store design or site design that is explicit and "understandable" at first sight. But well-thought out design stimulates interaction with customers only so far. Online website analytics give a bird's eye view of your customers' entries and exits. Still, between the two is where customer experience happens — what customers browse, click on to review, download or purchase. What do they like? Why did they lose interest, get lost if their visit didn't translate into a transaction? One company, Overstock.com, is using new analytics and live agents who monitor real time activity and initiate customer dialog before visitors give up on the site and click away. It's working and the upside and implications are a breath of fresh air to web experience pioneers. Sales of high ticket luxury items increased. The redesign chiseled the checkout process from seven pages to three. Conversion rates during the check-out process shot up and calls to customer service dropped. Read more...

[CMO Magazine, April 2005 ; DestinationCRM.com, October 2004, Online Media Daily, Media Post]

:: Bruce Mau's napkin drawing has designs on the world

At the 2004 Art Center Design Conference in Pasadena, CA, the Toronto-based but internationally recognized designer Bruce Mau showed two sets of four concentric circles. Yet another "napkin drawing", it became the seed for an exhibition called "Massive Change". In the first drawing, the outer ring is labeled "nature", moving inward is "culture", then "business" and finally "design". The point is that the world up until now relegates design to least important and last place, in such a way that decisions in the world are market-driven. Design is an after thought, tacked on after a solution has been decided.

On the right, Mau depicts the vision of this massive change with four more concentric circles, where the outer ring begins with "design" which encircles the smaller sphere of "nature" which in turn surrounds "culture" and at the center the smallest circle is "business". The point is that as participants in a global community in the march of time, we can no longer afford not to design our future well-being. The health of our environments, our cultures and the success of business increasingly depend on learning how to design beneficial outcomes.

[Bruce Mau's napkin drawing for Massive Change]