Design Currency - Heather Fraser and Ronald Kapaz

Design Currency - Day Two Morning

Here are some of my notes from the first panel of day two and my thinking in italics.

Heather Fraser – Director of Design Works

• Little d and big D: design as a broader context; bigger challenges.
• Wheels on suitcase -form and function.
• Can use design thinking to solve problems; re-vector your entire business.
• Design of actual business e.g. micro finance; needs a model to make money and sustain itself.
• 3 gears of business design: empathy and user understanding, concept visualization, strategic business design.
• Design is a shared platform - who's at the table? Designer, business leader, marketing, product development, operations, human resource component; bring all these people together!
• Not just about getting seat at table; about engaging all in discovery and problem solving process, facilitating and taking a mentoring role, unleashing creativity, solving and co-creating.
• Hebert Simon – economist – “everyone is a designer in some way shape or form”.

Ronald Kapaz – Oz Design

• Buckminster Fuller – “what is the most exciting thing I can be in this moment?”
• Caution: everyone talks about branding in a different sense, they are losing the value.
• Change the dynamics from ‘catch a customer’ to design ‘for the customer’.
• Believe it’s about new and sophisticated questions, to make your mark, that everything they produce is a mark of their legacy.
• There isn't only one story; there are several (quantum physics)
• Design is a dialogue; not a process, not a problem.
• Why design thinking? Big issue - not in the thinking but in the feeling.
• Talk through images to an audience that left that school at age 5, from drawing to writing.
• Visual literacy stopped at age of 5; two sides of brain; thinking and feeling and design should bridge both.
• Real issue not how design serves business but how business serves culture.
• Well crafted question contains 80% of answer; art is to disturb, science reassures.

Heather and Ronald Panel Discussion

• Remember there's a human being out there you're trying to serve.
• Take some risks, stop writing business documents with empty words; use empathy, visuals.
• Apply same principles in building business; creates a common language.
• Not a competition, it's a collaboration and co-creation.
• Business people have tools and now think they are designers? Honestly I have never seen that; they don't expect to be able to do that kind of design as well. More in awe of the technical aspects of design.
• “Facilitated by design.”
• Manage resistance to change? Critical for change = co-creation.
• Example: hospital - overhaul experience around chemo, everyone said 'don't want to do'... already busy.
• Engaged the client at the right point and who else to involve.
• By the time we were done they thought it was their idea because they were engaged in the process (wonderful answer to the change question).