The new importance of design (Or, how to keep your job)

Leslie Langnau
August 26th, 2008.

Automation turns the latest product and some services into commodities at breakneck speed, and then they are outsourced to the lowest bidder.  We all know many examples; software programs are coded in India, and corporate helps desks are farmed out to non-English speaking countries such as Russia. Outsourcing is a fact of business. 

As defined by wisegeek.com, a company outsources when it contracts with another to provide services that might otherwise be done in-house.  We all know what the bottom line is — it saves money.  So, how can you prevent your job from being viewed as a candidate to be moved overseas? Many of us walk a tightrope between creating products that automate various engineering tasks and figuring ways to speed design and development; at the same time, this also puts you at risk of eliminating our own jobs.  But some in the business world would say that we all should work to eliminate our jobs so that we can move on to learn more and create other opportunities.

Efforts made to learn and practice specific skills will help each of us create new opportunities and maintain employment. The skills we will need are those that cannot be done equally well for less money.  According to Daniel H. Pink, as stated in his book, “A Whole New Mind,” these skills include the creative ability “to forge relationships rather than execute transactions, tackle novel challenges instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing a single component.”

Part of this skill set rests with your ability to design, to deliver an esthetically pleasing look and feel to a product, service, device, or to equipment. Today’s product designs need to evoke an emotional

response in the buyer. How well you deliver this requirement will be a major factor that determines whether you keep your job or find it farmed out to engineers in another country.

As Pink points out, design ability requires a whole-minded aptitude; not compartmentalized thinking.  It will be the design that differentiates a product, device, or equipment in a crowded market. Plus, design has the ability to create new markets.  Take a look at the cell phone.  In less then ten years, it has spawned new markets including ring tones and casing covers, just to name two.

For so many products, devices, services, and equipment, you and your competitors use basically the same technology. Your products offer similar performance and features, as well as price.  What then, are your differentiating factors?  How do you convince a customer to purchase your product?

Increasingly, it will be through the design. When you cannot compete with price, you are left to compete with design.

As Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art, is quoted as saying in Pink’s book, “Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.”

llangnau@designworldonline.com