Transforming Industrial Design
Digitalization is fundamentally changing the requirements placed on designers in the design of industrial and consumer goods. No longer designing individual products, they design complete business ecosystems consisting of hardware, software and services. Industrial design as such plays a key role in the digitalization of the economy. Germany's industry is investing billions in the infrastructure of the country and its companies. Software companies don't have to do that.
The internet revolution hasn’t only taken place in California; it isn’t comprised solely of Google, Facebook and Instagram. These are, in principle, large media companies that earn their money with customer data and advertising. But the digital revolution has occurred not only in communications. It’s also taken place in industrial production, which encompasses far greater added value than Silicon Valley.
Factory of the future
The digitalization of the factory has long since begun. And the factory of the future is in Germany. "Industry 4.0" describes the future form of industrial production with the strong individualization of products. These are produced under certain conditions: highly flexible, resource- and energy-efficient production, with the extensive integration of customers and business partners in dynamic, real-time optimized value chains and the coupling of production and high-quality services into so-called hybrid products.
Driven by the internet, the real and virtual worlds are increasingly converging. The fusion of the physical world with cyberspace has come a long way in German industry. Embedded systems consisting of electronics and software play an important role as key innovation drivers for export and growth markets. They decisively extend the functionality and thus the utility value as well as the added value of vehicles, aircraft, medical devices, production facilities and endurance devices. The keyword here is Industry 4.0 or Industrial Internet.
Today, around 98 percent of microprocessors are already embedded and connected to the outside world via sensors and actuators. They are increasingly networked with each other and with the Internet. The result are Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which are part of a future, globally-networked world in which products, devices and objects interact with embedded hardware and software across application boundaries. With the help of sensors, these systems process data from the physical world and make it available for network-based services that can directly influence processes in the physical world through actuators. Cyber-Physical Systems question the traditional boundaries between industries and disciplines as well as established business models.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence as a cross-cutting function is increasingly becoming the primary technology which covers all sectors of the economy and leads in different ways to different applications, new products and services in each industry. The application-dependent and highly individualized use of Artificial Intelligence presents designers, innovation and digital strategists with significant challenges in their work. Design, as a discipline, has to bundle and network these different experiences and tasks and define the overarching requirements of these basic technologies for the entire economy. It must likewise provide assistance during implementation in the various application scenarios of different industries.
Design thus makes a considerable contribution to unleashing the great growth potential of Artificial Intelligence. Many of the new products and services that have emerged in the course of digitization in Germany are on a very sophisticated technical level; too often, though, these are only isolated solutions in closed ecosystems or on proprietary platforms, unfortunately. Cooperation or partnering between different companies often fails because of the current structure of our economy: To whom does the customer belong; to whom does the customer experience belong?
For the customer, however, the successful customer experience consists of a seamless, positive user experience across the entire use of products and services. If different providers are involved in the customer experience, then interoperability often fails as, for good reasons, many participants do not exchange data with each other. This results in friction losses at many interfaces, something which frustrates users. There are numerous examples of this in the realm of mobility services, the networking of automobiles with software companies and telematics services, isolated solutions for smart home, smart energy, smart city, etc.
The moment of truth
These frictional losses are a real obstacle to growth for the digitalization of the industry. They also limit the success of new providers in the growing digital economy. We need more openness on all sides: more open business models, more open platforms. The design discipline should, therefore, explore new forms of cooperation and collaboration that meet the urgent demand to design a "seamless experience" in the interest of users and customers. Artificial Intelligence is increasingly becoming the basic technology which, as a cross-cutting function, encompasses all sectors of the economy and leads to new applications, products and services.
Friction losses within a company are much higher. Ownership thinking, hierarchies and claims to power often prevent transparency and cooperation in large companies. If a designer formulates a comprehensive design claim in this everyday corporate reality, it is often misunderstood as an inappropriate striving for power. Designers should, however, be involved from the outset. Many products and services are manufactured in vertical silos within large companies but are experienced horizontally by the customer.
That is why many products fail: they do not pass the suitability test in the customer's everyday life because no one paid attention to the customer's perspective during the development process. during the design process, all the conflicts in the development process materialize and the weak points of a business idea come to light.
Creative Leadership
It is not necessarily the nature of a large company to continually reinvent itself and the foundations of its success. On the contrary, it is entirely rational for a company not to renew itself. Every small innovation is first and foremost a disruption in a highly complex system that can lead to a slump in productivity and quality. Much worse, however, is significant innovation - a high-risk undertaking. While the costs of developing the new product are predictable, the returns that the new product will generate on the market are not. It gets even worse when innovations are successful in the market. They will certainly prevent the next innovation. That's why every company needs a binding innovation roadmap that is adhered to despite overwhelming success.
Innovations are also perceived as a fundamental threat in many companies. Changes are blocked because people are afraid of endangering existing revenue streams and disturbing the balance of power in the company. A culture of mistrust and demarcation then systematically hinders the success of new ideas. A lack of internal cooperation and a dysfunctional corporate culture have become, in the digital age, a real competitive disadvantage
Digital Transformation in Design
Published in the accompanying publication to Transforming Industrial Design #3 Conference on the current challenges for product development and industrial design in the Design Center Baden-Württemberg, Haus der Wirtschaft, Stuttgart, 2019
A new role for design in corporate
If innovations drive a company’s market success, who within the company operates the innovations strategically and links them to the world in which customers and consumers live? Design can play an essential role in this. In contrast to every classical management consultancy, design has an empirical basis and the creative imagination to describe the future. Design knows customer needs and can anticipate scenarios for applications and convert them into prototypes, which are always adjusted to the customer's needs in an agile process. Design builds external bridges to customers. It is the key to the strategic control of innovation processes in complex structures. This understands design as a cultural technique, not viewing it in the classical understanding of design, which gives products shape and humanizes technologies at the interfaces to people. Which is why design needs a right of veto in companies.
With design as a cultural technique, it is possible to inspire all employees in an organization to innovate, to give them the freedom and tools they need, to dare creative and disruptive thinking, to be prepared for change, and to take the risk of failure. Design Thinking has made this cultural technique available to companies and often plays a leading role in the corporate strategy of innovation-driven corporations. When design has become a relevant pillar of corporate management, it is given a leadership function.
Design leadership means that top management systematically deals with changes and trends in technology and society, developing new growth opportunities and innovative applications from this understanding. Beyond that is the core task of every entrepreneur: The intelligent combination of creative talents with the necessary future investments.
Digital System Design
Digital System Design is, therefore, particularly in demand in large and complex organizations in which many departments work on different products and services. These companies often find it particularly challenging to network their employees on an interdisciplinary basis - not least because the traditional organizational charts and processes are questioning how well they functioned up to the time of digitization. But with the dawn of a new age, new approaches and a new self-image are required. These need to be found and established.
Gone are the days when designers worked on the design of individual products; today, it's all about designing holistic customer experiences. These tasks are complex and demanding and transcend the boundaries of traditional design education. The boundaries between product design and communication have long merged in digital fields of application. To create a seamless and in the best case inspiring customer experience, however, more is needed than just beautiful surfaces - and also more than good interaction design. The customer experience no longer has to do solely with the product or service but is the result of the structure and the system behind it. In order to be able to view them holistically, designers must look at and understand entrepreneurial processes and infrastructures - without losing sight of the customer, of course.
The solution lies, among other things, in effective design guidance that plans the customer experience across all touchpoints and designs a system that consciously controls the connectivity of the internal trades. Against this backdrop, the designer not only has the task of flexibly and efficiently eliminating pain points in the customer journey in the digital world. In order to do justice to the new role of industrial design in the industry, the qualified training must be upgraded and backed up with a broad intellectual pool. Then designers will not only become the architects of digital change, they will also be able to create great moments of meaning and radically humanize technologies.
Essay by Philipp Thesen
Originally published by Design Center Baden-Württemberg 2019
Transforming Industrial Design
Digitalization is fundamentally changing the requirements placed on designers in the design of industrial and consumer goods. No longer designing individual products, they design complete business ecosystems consisting of hardware, software and services. Industrial design as such plays a key role in the digitalization of the economy. Germany's industry is investing billions in the infrastructure of the country and its companies. Software companies don't have to do that.
The internet revolution hasn’t only taken place in California; it isn’t comprised solely of Google, Facebook and Instagram. These are, in principle, large media companies that earn their money with customer data and advertising. But the digital revolution has occurred not only in communications. It’s also taken place in industrial production, which encompasses far greater added value than Silicon Valley.
Factory of the future
The digitalization of the factory has long since begun. And the factory of the future is in Germany. "Industry 4.0" describes the future form of industrial production with the strong individualization of products. These are produced under certain conditions: highly flexible, resource- and energy-efficient production, with the extensive integration of customers and business partners in dynamic, real-time optimized value chains and the coupling of production and high-quality services into so-called hybrid products.
Driven by the internet, the real and virtual worlds are increasingly converging. The fusion of the physical world with cyberspace has come a long way in German industry. Embedded systems consisting of electronics and software play an important role as key innovation drivers for export and growth markets. They decisively extend the functionality and thus the utility value as well as the added value of vehicles, aircraft, medical devices, production facilities and endurance devices. The keyword here is Industry 4.0 or Industrial Internet.
Today, around 98 percent of microprocessors are already embedded and connected to the outside world via sensors and actuators. They are increasingly networked with each other and with the Internet. The result are Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which are part of a future, globally-networked world in which products, devices and objects interact with embedded hardware and software across application boundaries. With the help of sensors, these systems process data from the physical world and make it available for network-based services that can directly influence processes in the physical world through actuators. Cyber-Physical Systems question the traditional boundaries between industries and disciplines as well as established business models.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence as a cross-cutting function is increasingly becoming the primary technology which covers all sectors of the economy and leads in different ways to different applications, new products and services in each industry. The application-dependent and highly individualized use of Artificial Intelligence presents designers, innovation and digital strategists with significant challenges in their work. Design, as a discipline, has to bundle and network these different experiences and tasks and define the overarching requirements of these basic technologies for the entire economy. It must likewise provide assistance during implementation in the various application scenarios of different industries.
Design thus makes a considerable contribution to unleashing the great growth potential of Artificial Intelligence. Many of the new products and services that have emerged in the course of digitization in Germany are on a very sophisticated technical level; too often, though, these are only isolated solutions in closed ecosystems or on proprietary platforms, unfortunately. Cooperation or partnering between different companies often fails because of the current structure of our economy: To whom does the customer belong; to whom does the customer experience belong?
For the customer, however, the successful customer experience consists of a seamless, positive user experience across the entire use of products and services. If different providers are involved in the customer experience, then interoperability often fails as, for good reasons, many participants do not exchange data with each other. This results in friction losses at many interfaces, something which frustrates users. There are numerous examples of this in the realm of mobility services, the networking of automobiles with software companies and telematics services, isolated solutions for smart home, smart energy, smart city, etc.
The moment of truth
These frictional losses are a real obstacle to growth for the digitalization of the industry. They also limit the success of new providers in the growing digital economy. We need more openness on all sides: more open business models, more open platforms. The design discipline should, therefore, explore new forms of cooperation and collaboration that meet the urgent demand to design a "seamless experience" in the interest of users and customers. Artificial Intelligence is increasingly becoming the basic technology which, as a cross-cutting function, encompasses all sectors of the economy and leads to new applications, products and services.
Friction losses within a company are much higher. Ownership thinking, hierarchies and claims to power often prevent transparency and cooperation in large companies. If a designer formulates a comprehensive design claim in this everyday corporate reality, it is often misunderstood as an inappropriate striving for power. Designers should, however, be involved from the outset. Many products and services are manufactured in vertical silos within large companies but are experienced horizontally by the customer.
That is why many products fail: they do not pass the suitability test in the customer's everyday life because no one paid attention to the customer's perspective during the development process. during the design process, all the conflicts in the development process materialize and the weak points of a business idea come to light.
Creative Leadership
It is not necessarily the nature of a large company to continually reinvent itself and the foundations of its success. On the contrary, it is entirely rational for a company not to renew itself. Every small innovation is first and foremost a disruption in a highly complex system that can lead to a slump in productivity and quality. Much worse, however, is significant innovation - a high-risk undertaking. While the costs of developing the new product are predictable, the returns that the new product will generate on the market are not. It gets even worse when innovations are successful in the market. They will certainly prevent the next innovation. That's why every company needs a binding innovation roadmap that is adhered to despite overwhelming success.
Innovations are also perceived as a fundamental threat in many companies. Changes are blocked because people are afraid of endangering existing revenue streams and disturbing the balance of power in the company. A culture of mistrust and demarcation then systematically hinders the success of new ideas. A lack of internal cooperation and a dysfunctional corporate culture have become, in the digital age, a real competitive disadvantage
Digital Transformation in Design
Published in the accompanying publication to Transforming Industrial Design #3 Conference on the current challenges for product development and industrial design in the Design Center Baden-Württemberg, Haus der Wirtschaft, Stuttgart, 2019
A new role for design in corporate
If innovations drive a company’s market success, who within the company operates the innovations strategically and links them to the world in which customers and consumers live? Design can play an essential role in this. In contrast to every classical management consultancy, design has an empirical basis and the creative imagination to describe the future. Design knows customer needs and can anticipate scenarios for applications and convert them into prototypes, which are always adjusted to the customer's needs in an agile process. Design builds external bridges to customers. It is the key to the strategic control of innovation processes in complex structures. This understands design as a cultural technique, not viewing it in the classical understanding of design, which gives products shape and humanizes technologies at the interfaces to people. Which is why design needs a right of veto in companies.
With design as a cultural technique, it is possible to inspire all employees in an organization to innovate, to give them the freedom and tools they need, to dare creative and disruptive thinking, to be prepared for change, and to take the risk of failure. Design Thinking has made this cultural technique available to companies and often plays a leading role in the corporate strategy of innovation-driven corporations. When design has become a relevant pillar of corporate management, it is given a leadership function.
Design leadership means that top management systematically deals with changes and trends in technology and society, developing new growth opportunities and innovative applications from this understanding. Beyond that is the core task of every entrepreneur: The intelligent combination of creative talents with the necessary future investments.
Digital System Design
Digital System Design is, therefore, particularly in demand in large and complex organizations in which many departments work on different products and services. These companies often find it particularly challenging to network their employees on an interdisciplinary basis - not least because the traditional organizational charts and processes are questioning how well they functioned up to the time of digitization. But with the dawn of a new age, new approaches and a new self-image are required. These need to be found and established.
Gone are the days when designers worked on the design of individual products; today, it's all about designing holistic customer experiences. These tasks are complex and demanding and transcend the boundaries of traditional design education. The boundaries between product design and communication have long merged in digital fields of application. To create a seamless and in the best case inspiring customer experience, however, more is needed than just beautiful surfaces - and also more than good interaction design. The customer experience no longer has to do solely with the product or service but is the result of the structure and the system behind it. In order to be able to view them holistically, designers must look at and understand entrepreneurial processes and infrastructures - without losing sight of the customer, of course.
The solution lies, among other things, in effective design guidance that plans the customer experience across all touchpoints and designs a system that consciously controls the connectivity of the internal trades. Against this backdrop, the designer not only has the task of flexibly and efficiently eliminating pain points in the customer journey in the digital world. In order to do justice to the new role of industrial design in the industry, the qualified training must be upgraded and backed up with a broad intellectual pool. Then designers will not only become the architects of digital change, they will also be able to create great moments of meaning and radically humanize technologies.
Essay by Philipp Thesen
Originally published by Design Center Baden-Württemberg 2019