Reimag­in­ing Design

Is the world of design in cri­sis? Pro­fes­sor Rober­to Ver­gan­ti is con­vinced that it is, but believes the sit­u­a­tion offers a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for change. By pre­cise­ly focus­ing their ideas and apply­ing gen­uine­ly human-cen­tered design, cre­ative minds will be able to rede­fine their self-per­cep­tion. In our inter­view, con­duct­ed in the run-up to this year’s mcbw Design Sum­mit, he explained his vision for the future of his indus­try. 

Bet­ti­na Schulz: You’ve just come from Stock­holm Music Week … 

Rober­to Ver­gan­ti: Yes, it was real­ly inspir­ing. Music is the future. It’s a dif­fer­ent cre­ative indus­try, but it has very sim­i­lar dynam­ics. The momen­tum is impres­sive, espe­cial­ly because of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. A play­ground of pos­si­bil­i­ties! 

The mot­to of this year’s mcbw Design Sum­mit. Are the oppor­tu­ni­ties for cre­atives real­ly greater than ever?

Yes, I think so. And that makes the task even more dif­fi­cult. Because when every­thing is pos­si­ble, what real­ly mat­ters becomes even more of a chal­lenge to find. It’s dif­fi­cult to find a focus, because our atten­tion is lim­it­ed and our focus is lim­it­ed. It’s a big shift, also for the world of design.

So is the indus­try in a kind of crisis?

Yes, the world of design actu­al­ly is in a lit­tle bit of a cri­sis. We come from almost 30 years of fan­tas­tic growth in design, in which every com­pa­ny invest­ed in design and design think­ing was sud­den­ly every­where. Before that, design was a word that did­n’t even exist in busi­ness school. Now every school has design and design think­ing in its cur­ricu­lum. So we’re com­ing from the hey­day of design. And as every­thing in his­to­ry, after a while, the gold­en age ends and needs to make way for anoth­er gold­en age. But the new one can­not be the same as the pre­vi­ous one, because the world is now different.

You already men­tioned AI as a game chang­er. Do you think design will be more about the ideas in the future? 

No, def­i­nite­ly not—quite the oppo­site! Nowa­days, if I need an idea, I can go on Chat­G­PT and say, “I need to inter­view Rober­to, can you give me 10 ques­tions?” Here you are.” “I don’t like those, can you give me anoth­er 10?” “Here you are.” So it’s no prob­lem to source ideas for ques­tions to ask me. The point is, which of those ideas for ques­tions real­ly make sense. For a long time, design defined itself in terms of cre­ativ­i­ty and pro­duc­tion of ideas, many ideas. I’m sor­ry, but that’s over. AI is tak­ing that place. How­ev­er cre­ative a per­son can be, AI will always cre­ate 100 ideas more. We need to find a new dis­tinc­tion. 

What might that be?

That takes us back to the focus. We have so many ideas, but the prob­lem is often to find a focus, find what real­ly mat­ters. And that is still a design prob­lem. There are two main bod­ies of the­o­ries in design. Design think­ing, the dou­ble dia­mond mod­el, is one. That view of design is engi­neer­ing-based and sees design as a process for solv­ing prob­lems. But there is an old­er the­o­ry, which has gained more trac­tion in archi­tec­ture and art schools, and that is not about solv­ing prob­lems, but about imagination—about mean­ing, not mere­ly func­tion. Ger­man com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­o­rist Klaus Krip­pen­dorff once said that design is mak­ing sense of things. That is a very, very strong tra­di­tion in design. But in recent years, we have been los­ing track of it, main­ly because it has been over­lain by many clear­ly defined dig­i­tal prob­lems to solve, in inter­faces and so on.

Now it’s urgent­ly need­ed again because you don’t learn how to make sense of things in a school of engi­neer­ing. I’m an engi­neer by edu­ca­tion, so I know that. We have been for­get­ting this oth­er 50 per­cent of tra­di­tion­al design exper­tise. And now it’s time to go back, redis­cov­er and refresh it.

So do you think human-cen­tered design will be more impor­tant in the future?

I think so. As long as we real­ly, real­ly, real­ly focus on what a human is. Unfor­tu­nate­ly we have been using a lot of user-cen­tered design, tak­ing a per­spec­tive of humans as a bag of needs. But that is real­ly not a human. Humans are peo­ple who want to love, peo­ple who want to imag­ine a bet­ter world for their chil­dren, peo­ple with a lot of emo­tions. 

Has the dig­i­tal age increased this long­ing for things that touch our hearts?

Yes. There is a need to touch peo­ple in a deep­er way, because we are a lit­tle bit lost. And that’s the only thing that machines can’t do. AI does­n’t under­stand what it means to touch a per­son. In music it’s the same. If you lis­ten to the lyrics of an AI song, they don’t touch you. Not because they are worse, but because song­writ­ers sing about their lives, and AI does­n’t have a life. The capa­bil­i­ty to touch the heart is a cre­ative skill. 

How impor­tant is it for today’s com­pa­nies to embed design think­ing or a design cul­ture? 

It is impor­tant. It should be the kind of design that touch­es peo­ple, that makes peo­ple fall in love. One of my ear­li­est stu­dents, Mau­ro Porci­ni, is now Chief Design Offi­cer at Sam­sung and has just designed Samsung’s first ever appear­ance at Salone Mobile in Milan, Enti­tled “Peo­ple in Love with Peo­ple.” That’s what it’s about—not engi­neer­ing, but love. 

Mau­ro told me in a recent inter­view that love is a cru­cial gen­er­a­tor of per­son­al resilience …

Jonathan Ive, who unfor­tu­nate­ly left Apple, also start­ed a com­pa­ny named Love. So there are like­ly still some design­ers, and pos­si­bly the best design­ers, who still under­stand what design is real­ly about. It’s more about feel­ings than about tech­nol­o­gy. Of course, you need to be good at tech­nolo­gies, and a lot of oth­er things. But in a team, you nor­mal­ly have great engi­neers. You have great busi­ness peo­ple. In a way, we have been edu­cat­ing design­ers in busi­ness too inten­sive­ly in the last few years. Me too. I’m one of the guilty ones for that. So we now have design­ers who under­stand every­thing about busi­ness mod­els, but have lost the capa­bil­i­ty to touch peo­ple. And it’s very dif­fi­cult to find designs that real­ly do that.

So design­ers have to find a new role?

They just need to find them­selves again. They don’t need to look far. They need to look where they are. In coop­er­a­tion, there are basi­cal­ly two kinds of inno­va­tion. For incre­men­tal changes, you need to be very prac­ti­cal, look at the prob­lems, and solve those prob­lems. Then there’s rad­i­cal inno­va­tion, which is about how you cre­ate a future. You can­not start from people’s exist­ing needs when you want to cre­ate a future. You have to dis­tance your­self from solv­ing the prob­lems of yes­ter­day, and imag­ine a new future instead. 

The pace of changes—be they tech­no­log­i­cal, cul­tur­al, or political—that demand our response has become dizzy­ing. Do we even have the time to pur­sue long-term strate­gies and goals?

Very good point. One needs to take a dual approach, and ded­i­cate 90 per­cent of the time to fix­ing things and improv­ing things, and 10% to a sin­gle vision­ary project. That clos­es the cir­cle and we’re back to focus. You can have only one rad­i­cal project. If you’re clever enough, you slow­ly get there through dai­ly activ­i­ty. You can do it in small steps—but you still need to have a long-term vision. 

Are there any design solu­tions which have impressed you recently?

That takes me back to music again. Spo­ti­fy has Song DNA, a fea­ture that tells you not only the singer, but also the song­writer and pro­duc­er of the song you’re lis­ten­ing to. It looks like a triv­ial lit­tle fea­ture, but it con­tains an under­stand­ing of soci­etal change. Cre­ativ­i­ty has become a com­mod­i­ty because every­one can make songs, every­one can have ideas. But dis­cov­er­abil­i­ty is cru­cial, and that brings in the idea of author­ship. In an AI-dri­ven world of cre­ativ­i­ty, dis­cov­er­ing if there is a per­son behind the work is becom­ing more impor­tant. With respect to design, that means we should go back to mak­ing design­ers vis­i­ble, Know­ing the names of the design­ers behind prod­ucts. We don’t do that any more. Today there are process­es, but there are no names there. 

Com­pa­nies used to be incred­i­bly proud of their design­ers. 

Yes, I don’t know when we lost that. I think it start­ed when cor­po­ra­tions got clos­er to design, and didn’t like the idea that a prod­uct does­n’t come from a process, it comes from a per­son. The author­ship I men­tioned gives more respon­si­bil­i­ty to peo­ple. If the prod­uct is bad­ly designed, I would know who’s designed it. Then peo­ple would prob­a­bly design more seriously.

Inter­view by Bet­ti­na Schulz for bay­ern design.