INSME's Interviews

The Growing Importance of Design – What can be Learned?

INSME: In people’s mind, design is either associated to creativity, or to technical design. In parallel, the designer is for some people an artist and for this reason a very creative figure and for some others he is a product developer or an industrial designer, that is a more technical figure. What is your definition of design and consequently of a designer?

Mr. Chiarato: The designer as a creative figure and the designer as a technical figure are at the opposite sides of a continuum which represents a profession that is actually practiced in the middle. Design is for us [for the European Institute of Design] a synonym of industrial design or product design. The designer is therefore someone who is certainly creative, but above all he/she is a person who can relate to the industrial system and who uses a method in his/her work.

INSME: Are there situations in which this figure is nearer to one side rather than the other?

Mr. Chiarato: Absolutely. Think of the difference between what happens in a multinational company and in a small enterprise. The first one, besides having a whole host of designers, also has a strategic design department which interact with the marketing department. This is not the case in a small enterprise. Here the design manager is often not even considered as having a business role. So, in small enterprises it very often happens that the designer has to bring in the design culture, because this is not usually integrated in the business processes.

INSME: What is the educational background of young people wishing to go into this profession, given this diversified business scenario? For instance, in your school do you teach with an ideal figure of a designer in mind or rather a model referred to a concrete business environment?

Mr. Chiarato: When we teach we always keep the Italian industrial system in mind, which is made of a myriad of SMEs. But we also provide students with a method that allows them to deal with large companies as well.
As a matter of fact, when they prepare their final work at the end of the course, they collaborate with companies which are very different in terms of dimension. Some are multinational companies with dozens of industrial plants all over the world, and others are companies with only one plant. So the students’ goal is to use the design method we have transferred to them to interpret the companies’ needs. Sometimes these needs are explicit and sometimes they aren’t. In this latter case students have to make these needs emerge. This is a typical situation in a designer’s profession. For instance, if the company management does not have the target clearly in mind, the designer, thanks to his/her analytical skills, has to imagine what the user of the product he/she is designing wants to find in it, how he/she might use it. The final user is not someone on whom to “palm off” a product, on the contrary he/she is someone who at a certain moment of his/her life will need that product with certain characteristics, and here a dialogue with the company has to be established. If the company has a marketing department, this vision is shared with them. If the company does not have a marketing department, this vision has to be suggested.
I can make another example. It often happens that a company addresses a designer asking him/her to copy what their main competitors are doing. In this case the designer’s role is not to comply with the company’s request. Instead he/she has to find out the values that the market expresses with regards to the product that the company wants to “copy” or the values that the market perceives with regards to it. In this case the designer has to work on the values and not on the form, because otherwise he/she becomes a stylist.
So we teach a method and this method can be applied to different business situations.

INSME: Let’s talk about the role of design in the innovation processes and consider, in particular, product innovation. This can be viewed as a process whose final result is a balance between form (which has to be new), function (new or improved) and cost (reduced or reasonable). What is the role that design can play with regards to these three aspects? Is it possible to rank them?

Mr. Chiarato: As a general rule, I can say that these three elements are equally important. According to the product typology and the company’s needs, the designer has to be able to interpret them with the right weight.
Yet, it is certainly important that the designer takes into account the economic figures of the company for which he/she is working. Let me clarify this concept with an example. Consider the medical sector. This is not a sector with a mass production (a company produces a few hundred pieces per year maximum at an average cost that can even reach up to 500,000.00 euro). If a designer approaching a company of this kind suggests a technology suited for mass production, (thousands of pieces), he/she won’t be heard. Therefore the designer has to be able to consider the economic aspects and be sensitive to the production requirements. Starting from economic data, he/she can express the pros and cons of the different solutions he/she proposes, he/she can put forward the different scenarios and will evaluate these with the company in order to find the right design solution.
I can express this concept from a different point of view: if it is true that most of the design solutions seem to privilege “the form”, we cannot disregard the fact that “form” includes a whole range of analysis (ergonomic, technological and functional) which are inherent to it and contribute to the final result.

INSME: The design process is the result of the exchange of experiences and ideas between people belonging to different business departments (marketing, research, technology, production, etc.). How do these figures interact? How do they collaborate during the design process?

Mr. Chiarato: As far as the exchanges between the designer and the technicians are concerned, these exchanges take place after the designer has presented the project, that is in the so called pre-engineering or engineering phase, when the technical department is involved and the contacts between the designer and the persons in charge of production are established. It is very important to involve the designer in the production phase because this brings quality to the product. Quality results from taking care of the many different perceptive elements of a product (colour, shape, tactility, etc.). If something is missed out during the production phase because some of the details have been lost, the final result is not of good quality.
Generally speaking, in the conception of a new product the designer should sit at a table with marketing department representatives, sales department representatives, engineers and the entrepreneur too. From a certain point of view, the designer’s role consists in linking the goals of each of these business areas (making it simple, those in charge of the production say “we can’t spend money”, those involved in the R&D say “let’s invest”, marketing representatives want a fantastic product and so they want to spend money). After all the designer, when involved from the start, is a “mediator”, especially because in order to design a product he/she has to be given information from different people, occupying different roles within the company.

INSME: The design processes are inherently expensive in terms of time and financial investment, but knowledge generated from them is immense. Most of this knowledge is often lost once the goal is reached. Is it possible to transfer the knowledge gained when doing research on a certain product to other sectors?

Mr. Chiarato: The transfer of knowledge from a sector to another is inherent to design. I often say the designer is like a "pollinator": a solution he/she has used for a company in a certain sector can be translated and transferred to another company in another sector (not in the same sector because it wouldn’t be ethical). I had an experience of this kind of knowledge transfer in a company in the furniture sector which was interested in a certain material used in the car industry.

INSME: All the aspects that you have highlighted so far can be applied to companies acting in industrialised countries. But what about less industrialised ones? What is the role of design in the less industrialised countries? How can design be applied in them?

Mr. Chiarato: The European Institute of Design (IED) has developed a specific experience with regards to this kind of environment. We made a project in which design was used to solve the problem of water supply in Burkina Faso, Africa. IED students went there together with the Green Cross, an NGO that deals with problems related to the water in the world, and developed a solution not by taking importing equipment and products to the local population but by using local technologies and respecting the local culture. For instance, students suggested certain filtering systems in the North of Burkina Faso and not in the South because these systems were consistent with what the local population already did in the North and not in the South. They worked with bicycles’ tubes, pieces of common tubes, clay, concrete and cellophane.
Design can do a lot for less industrialised countries, and it mustn’t import products, but rather use the culture of project site. Our students worked with a local smiths and in half a day they built a very simple device for carrying water so that women could load the water trolleys with greater ease. It’s a simple idea, but the ability to design brought a little help to those people.

INSME: Keeping ourselves in this macro-economic perspective, do you think one can foresee a situation in which some countries will cope with globalisation and competitiveness, or at least will benefit from them, by making the most of design in the meaning you attach to it?

Mr. Chiarato: In my opinion design is not an isolated arena. It has to be considered together with other aspects. For instance we know that there are plenty of design schools in Brazil. However this doesn’t automatically mean that Brazil will emerge from global competitiveness. As a matter of fact the country hasn’t developed an industrial system. But, while design cannot be applied to mass production, perhaps it could be applied to the handicraft system which is actually flourishing in Brazil. If design has to meet the challenges posed by globalisation and be a means for competitiveness, it has to adapt to the local situation.

September, 2004 Copyright © INSME 2004

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