Christian Bason on how design can be changed for the society

Female graduates allez, carmen el flucke! on-camera, © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF -WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 around all summer with a smug smile on his face, probably because he's just made a bundle of cash from selling the design for 685 million Danish kroner to Wipro. And I know, and actually I know I've had some conversations also with people here in the room that this is kind of exciting and amazing, but it's also a little bit worrying. And we actually at the Danish Design Center, we work to strengthen how design is used, both in business and in a broader society. We're kind of curious, how's this gonna play out? And having been a management consultant myself, knowing McKinsey quite well, I kind of wonder, how can you survive as a creative design company inside a very, very tight-fitting black suit? But let's see what's happening. At least you can say that there's something going on. You can call them game changers, but there's something really, really good going on. If I had, I could also have taken the front page of Harvard Business Review from this month, from September month, right? How many of you have seen the front page of Harvard Business Review this month? Not so many. You should be reading that. Anyway, it has a, it's a design issue. It has a theme on design as management tool. And it has, the headline says design thinking and the evolution of design thinking. So this is just to say that there's something going on where premium consultancy firms, I mean, there's also Accenture. There's others in Denmark, PA consulting here in Denmark has hired a very well-known designer. Something is going on with the design in context. Something's going on in the world. Of course, as you all know, rapid technological change. Some of these buzzwords or keywords we're always talking about. And all of these different trends, all of these different factors, of course, matter. And in a sense, that's probably why these companies have been buying up design firms, because they're hoping it'll help. They're hoping that some of the stuff that you can do, your professionalism, your practices, your approaches, your attitudes towards creation, creating meaningful digital experiences, for example, that somehow that can help them deal with all of this. One example is we're seeing at the DDC that you're finding new business models where suddenly, you know, one thing is that big companies, also banks, are buying up design firms. But another one is that design firms can now create products or design products that they can put into production. There's a Danish company called MoEF. They work with both sort of technological, digital design and product design. And they developed a little product called WaterWolf. WaterWolf is an underwater camera you can use when you fish. And you can film what the fish is doing. It's something that people who fish apparently have been very excited about, because, you know, what's going on under the water? And one of the guys at MoEF is actually, he loves fishing. So he's designed a camera. Now it's a bestseller across the world. And they, as a small design firm with 12 or 15 employees, have a worldwide global production of a product that is selling really, really well. Now what's that for? A new kind of business model where the design firm is on top and then they outsource production to someone else. That can happen, of course, in the digital world and in a world where it's very, very easy to specify manufacturing to factories in China. Another thing that we're seeing happening really is quite significant is the question of speed. We always talked about how there's more change now than ever. There's always more change now than ever. We talked about that for the last decade or two decades. Maybe they talked about that 40 years ago as well. I think when my brother and I wrote those computer books, we also talked about how everything is changing and there's these microcomputers coming around. But we're seeing companies being very, very concerned with speed and also new models for designing that are faster, more agile, even more agile and even faster than before. Some of the stuff that Google Ventures is doing, Google's doing design sprints, for example. And at the same time, design as itself is a discipline. And this is something, of course, we're kind of interested in that the design center is changing. And to give you an example, this issue of Wired was really intriguing because when I was reading it, it came out last year, right? The design issue. It really showed how broadly design spans. So there's an example of a 3D printed chair. There's a big article about Airbnb and how Airbnb, and of course this conference is a great reflection of that, right? You know, Airbnb is a business model, as we're very well designed. The user interface is critical for the success and the scalability probably of the model. You even have people from Airbnb here today. Then you also have a story about how New York Times has created a design lab and is working to bring design into publishing and into big data and into visualization. Oh, and you have an article also on this issue about Nike that is experimenting with new sneaker designs and new materials. So what does that tell us about what's going on with design? All in one, just one issue. I think it tells us that design is getting splintered. Even more than it already is, perhaps, into all these different kinds of strands. And you can call them, and this is probably a good thing, because it shows that design as a profession is becoming more and more nuanced, more and more precise, more and more professional in particular things. But it also means that there are some dilemmas, right? So to what extent is design still a craft? I know digital agencies, right? that talk about crafting insights and crafting experiences. Or to what extent is design and designers still the partners with big industry in creating mass products and scalable products, whether it's digital or whether it's physical, right? I just this morning on the train riding in here and on this beautiful morning across Copenhagen talked to a guy who works with digital in the government. But he said that even in a pure IT department, there's always heroic programmers who are the ones who actually build the systems. And if you lose one of those programmers, you're kind of screwed. And so basically it's like you can put your name to a piece of software as a programmer, as an IT specialist. In pharmaceuticals, I've understood that's pretty much the same. You can put your name to a product or to a patent, and it's your patent. So you're like a heroic designer or a heroic IT specialist. In design, of course, we know all these star designers, right? And in many ways, we want to express our individualism and we want to express who we are also through our design work. But to what extent are we still seeing the role of heroic designers in organizations or in agencies? Or to what extent is co-design, collaborative design, user involvement, the designer's facilitator, as catalyst, as a humble person who really has no opinion about the product or the service but is just gathering insights and letting all that flow through an innovation process? So there's something going on there. And probably, you know, when I talk to people who are looking for service designers or co-designers, it's not those that are most of. That's not the typical profile. In Denmark, at least, we're not educating more than a handful of them. And since yesterday, the government is cutting 30% off the uptake of new designers in the Copenhagen design schools. So probably we'll have fewer of these types of designers in the future. Oh, and it's design about products or services. How many of you would consider what you do as product design? How many would say what you do is service design? How many of you would call it something else? UX, digital, okay. But maybe those boundaries are blurring as well, right, with Internet of Things and with product service systems and many, many companies, also some that we are working closely with now, are saying, well, how do we shift from a product-based revenue model or from a business model and understanding that what we're actually doing is we're making money on services, or we could be making money on services, or we could be making money on data? Oh, and design is also getting a bit splintered around. Like, is it designed for growth, for just for business growth, or is it designed also for something else? Is it designed for social good, for social innovation, corporate responsibility? What are the balances there? And increasingly, I'm seeing that corporate social responsibility is becoming a more integrated part of the business model. In other words, designers need to accommodate that businesses want to do well financially, but also to do some good at the same time, and that maybe puts the designer in a particular role to make that change. So, what I'm curious about is, what are the ways, as design is transforming and splintering and changing and morphing and being consolidated and being bought up and being part of new business models, what are the ways in which design practice and design professions can still create value or create even more value than before and be positioned maybe differently? So, these are the two things I wanted to talk about, design policy or the macro level. So, like, what could we be interested in? What could we be interested about if it comes to what designers can do in society, in business? And the other one is, what might it take to, let's say, leverage the potential of design and designers in that, let's just call it interesting friction that might be between designers and managers in organizations? So, design policy or design for policy, let's just talk about that. And, of course, the reason I've chosen that topic is also, I happened to edit a book about it not so long ago. So, I thought, let's talk about that. So, let's just start with that. But how might we create public outcomes through design? And so, now you're going to have to hold on for one minute to sort of deal with the complexity of what I'm going to say. The Danish Design Center is a mostly publicly funded institution. We work to help businesses find ways where businesses can get more value from design. And when we do that, we want to use design as an approach to make it happen. So, we're a design center that wants to use design to get design into business. That's like design times three. Can you follow, more or less? So, how might we do that? How might we use design as a tool and approach to create change across the whole system, which is the Danish business ecosystem? You could also call it, how might we accelerate the value of design and business? Speaking of the speed and the competitiveness and what we need to bring Danish businesses up to speed. So, by the way, how many of you work, inside or with Danish businesses? Oh, it's about half, okay. So, the rest of you, don't listen, because this is about Danish competitiveness. So, what we do, my office is right here in this building, not so far from here in Frederiksholm's Canal in Copenhagen, center of Copenhagen. And this is the future office. I'm not so sure I'll get the corner office. I don't think I will. But this future building will be a, so-called lighthouse or a powerhouse for Danish architecture at the built environment and design on the waterfront. It's been named recently. There's been some name designers involved in this, by the way. Very expensive to get a name for a building. It took them nine years from they decided to build the thing till they got the name. It's a quite short name when you think about how long it took. So, per letter, it's pretty expensive, I would say. It's blocks. B-L-O-X. Blocks. And it's spelled with capital letters. Very modern. Very designed. And, of course, it's because it looks a bit like blocks. The idea is to bring design institutions, businesses, start-ups, innovation teams. There will be a whole innovation platform, innovation hub, like a start-up environment there. And there will be a fitness center. And there will be a restaurant. Don't worry. And there will be penthouses for Russian oligarchs on top. They will be the only ones who can afford it. But what we want to do until we move into that building and when we are in that building is to make design a really, really important competitive factor for Danish business. Top three, actually. And the European Union just came out with a study recently that said that only 15% of enterprises in Denmark use design strategically, as opposed to using design a bit more randomly or using it only to make products look better. Now, those surveys you've always got to take with a little bit of skepticism, right? The moment when I thought, hmm, that's an interesting figure. It actually matches also pretty quite well. We use this model called the design ladder that the DDC actually developed. So the commission is using our methodology. It fits quite well with Denmark. But when I looked at it, is there anyone in the room from Greece? Great. I can say anything about Greece then. I won't. Because 48% of businesses in Greece answered that they use design strategically across the board in everything they do. And I find that slightly hard to believe. If it's the case, then it's like the opposite. We should be using less design to get more competitiveness, right? So to make things simple, I said at least just make things just design squared. So how can we use design to spread design, the use of design, and the smart and the good and the effective use of design across businesses? What might be ways of doing that? So one is so just, and this is not the tool, it's a tool. This is just, you know, basically working with businesses and projects in a visual collaborative kind of way. That's sort of what we want to try to do at the Danish Design Center. This is a tool we developed to collaborate with small design startups. So it's both product and service design startups. And then, of course, in a spirit of co-working, in a spirit of co-design, we would use that. This is just a case example, right? Use that tool to map, for example, the growth journey, the pains, the barriers, the challenges that these startups encounter as they grow from a small business to a larger one. The pains and the growth barriers they encounter when they want to develop new business lines, when they want to grow internationally and begin to become a global firm. And, of course, we collaborate with these businesses then in workshops to develop insights about what could work, what could we then change in the environment, the ecosystem, what could be done politically to help them. And using visual tools like finalizing this growth journey for, this is for a Danish design business, which, by the way, also has manufacturing in China, and saying how might we map this out, and how might we engage different actors, also investors, for example, and funders, in a dialogue about what would it take to boost this business, to make it go global. This is just an example of how one might use design to engage with businesses to help them become more successful. And so we try to do three things at the DDC using design. We want to experiment and engage businesses and designers to find out. As design is being splintered, as design is changing, you know, we can't just say this is how you should use designers, this is how you should engage with consultants and so on. No, you probably have to try things out. In a complex, rapidly changing environment, that's what you do, right? You change, you try things out, you prototype, you iterate. You fail. Which is a little bit problematic, of course, since we're using taxpayer money to engage in design experiments, which might fail. But that's at least what we're saying we will be doing. The second thing we try to do is to learn. This is a photo from a talent week we ran this summer on design for the city. This strand was called Sensing the City, and you had designers, technologists, architects, urban planners work together, to create models, working models, working digital models, around sensing data about city development, about climate change. And so what we do from the DDC is we just look at what's going on. How do they work? What's difficult? What are their practices? How do they collaborate across disciplines? And the last thing we want to do is to share. And not just share and say, okay, we'll put a case example on a website. We want to create platforms for catalyzing how this learning we get from these experiments can change. So for example, for you or for your business partners or for your clients or for the organizations that you work in, we would like to create interesting, challenging, relevant knowledge, learnings that can trigger new conversations and new dialogues about how you might harvest the value from design. So experiment, learn, and share. So I've hired designers. I've hired anthropologists, different types of skills, a lot of people who have communication skills. And so we want to take a design approach where we start small scale, experiment, prototype, try out stuff with five companies, five designers, then scale it slightly bigger, still experimenting, but maybe more focused on the learning, maybe on spreading the learning, getting other actors engaged, and then finally scaling across sectors, across parts of society. It could also be internationally to say, well, what are we learning? And the platforms are the areas we work with. Both we're looking at the transformation, we're looking at the transformation of business models around design, design-driven business models. We're also looking at advanced manufacturing in design. We're looking at design in the city. We're looking at design for healthcare. We're looking for how the discipline itself could evolve and how can we contribute to the discipline of design evolving in spite of having fewer designers being starting at the design schools. And just a final example is we're running this big program where we're giving a quarter of a million Danish kroner to a handful of businesses to start experiments with designers. And they use the cash to hire designers in. And the deal is that we'll give you the cash, but there are strings attached. It's open source what you do. We track and follow what you're doing. We put the anthropologists in there, and we share it, unless it's explicitly something that's a really, really sensitive business matter. Then we share it, and we try to do it real time. So you can see that program on our website. Okay. So the other topic I would call design. It's called design leadership, which is what are we observing that happens not at the societal level or the scale level, but what is going on in the interactions between designers and managers. How many in this room would say that you are actually managers yourself, have a management position? Great. I won't be pissing too many people off then. Because I would say that, um, it kind of takes two to tango. Um, and the more I worked also at the MindLab with, uh, you know, when we started at MindLab, we're like the internal design consultancy of a number of ministries, so designing user involvement, user engagement for government. And we started out having this vision that we're going to revolutionize the public sector, like a really radical redesign. And my first job posting was, you know, would you want to join us to revolutionize the public sector? We got 400 job applications. And everybody was like, yes, we want to blow up the system. After a while, talking to a lot of managers, we found out that maybe blowing up the system is not the best sort of way to start having coffee with people and saying, can we do a project with you? You know, we want to blow up what you're doing, but still you want to work with us? So then we said, we just want to challenge the system. We just, we want to, we want to challenge the system. It kind of worked, but still, you know, again, we're running projects, collaborations, co-design with people where you're saying, we're here to challenge you. It gets a little bit, there's a little bit of tension in there, right? So we ended up after a long journey to realize we were just there to change the system. And of course, design is about change, right? Ultimately, design is about change. It can be incremental, it can be radical. But change is a bit of a more neutral word. And a lot of public servants and decision makers in government do want to change. That's actually why they joined the civil service in the first place. That's why they're getting paid half of what you get paid in the private sector. Because they want to change something in society. So change is a better word. But in that intersection with leaders and with managers, something is going on that is sometimes not so easy. How many of you experience frustrations when you collaborate with managers, with the non-designers in your organizations? Frustrations, how many of you? Not more than half? All right, anyone know who these guys are? A few of you should know who the guys to the left, or could know maybe. All right, so the guy to the right, Herbert Simon, wrote a book called The Science of the Artificial. The Science of the Artificial, 1969. A book about design. Maybe not in the sense you think about design, but he talked about the artificial sciences. The sciences are about creating the world, that are not about natural phenomena, not about natural science, understanding how the world works, but about creating the world. Engineering, architecture, design. And Herbert Simon here was really also, I mean the reason he won the Nobel Prize, by the way, he won the Nobel Prize in the 70s, was for a big piece of work on management and decision making. And just follow me for one moment. His work on decision making was, you're in a particular decision space, and as a manager, as a leader, or as a designer, you just have to find a way to make a decision between different options. And of course you don't have perfect information, he discovered that along the way. You got the Nobel Prize to find out that decision makers and managers don't have perfect information. They have less than perfect information. And they have to satisfy us. They have to find ways of accommodating, and maybe sometimes even using their gut feeling to make a decision. But his world was one of decision making between different options. And as a designer, that's a fine world to be in. You get a brief, you do decision making within that brief, you create the designs within that brief. This is a big, big strand in management thinking. But the other guy, Bucky, Buckminster Fuller, was interested in something else. He was, in a sense, a bit of a crazy radical designer, architect, slash architect. And he was interested in design as future making. Which means, how do we even know what we're going to make a decision about? How do we know this is even the brief? Let's blow up the brief. Let's challenge what the problem even is. Let's challenge why it couldn't be a different opportunity than the one that the client or the decision maker is looking at. And what does that look like then? Because I thought about, did Herbert Simon, he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon in decision sciences and so on, information science. So I've got to show a picture of his design work. It would be a book, which wouldn't be that interesting. Even a book called Administrative Behavior, which is really, really boring. But Bucky here, Buckminster Fuller, was slightly less boring. So it's not that these things are driving around all over the place right now, but at least you could say that he had some imagination. And the geodesic dome behind him is, there's one, I think it's in, there's at least one functioning, one huge one in Canada right now. It became one of his legacy designs, the geodesic dome. So that's future making. Or you could also say it's a design attitude. And a design attitude to the world, which I would say that many designers display. We had recently, not these guys, but Camille McCloskey, who wrote a new book called Design Attitude at the DDC on Friday. And he said, well, looking at projects or tasks as an opportunity for inventing is a very, very design-only way of working. And then leveraging different senses, aesthetics, visualization to do so. But of course the question is, could managers more generally, if more managers or more clients that you work with had a design attitude, your work would be easier, wouldn't it? It would probably be a lot easier. So you could say that if this is the mindset that you work with, then things get a little bit narrow and not very innovative. But if you work with a mindset that says, what's the world we can create? Where we can make new decisions, new products, new services, new digital experiences, then it gets a little bit interesting. And designers navigate between those two worlds, with your profession, with your mindsets, but also with the management mindset. This is a really design-only question to ask, isn't it? And this is really what great designers do, isn't it, as well? To expand the options, expand the possibilities we have, rather than just saying, is this going to be this one or this one, red or green? I like this one, I don't like this one. One of the things that wasn't mentioned, but I'm actually trying to write a PhD about this at Copenhagen Business School, which is what happens between designers and managers. And they interviewed 15 different managers who worked with service designers across five different countries to look at what goes on when service designers do what they do. And so in between the space between designers and managers, what's the relationship? And again, this is service design, this is in a context of mostly public services that this is coming from, but I have a hunch that this might actually work for business as well. This is another way of framing it. If we were to educate managers in how to work most effectively with you to make your life, if not better than at least easier or more fruitful or more impactful, more powerful, how would they engage? How would you design an MBA for design leadership if you're going to design that MBA? So here's some ideas. This is what designers do, at least this is what co-designers and service designers often do. Ethnography, user research, exploring the problem space, exploring the opportunity space. It's generating alternative scenarios, right? Options, call them concepts, ideas about which direction might we take design in. And finally, of course, this is what designers, this is like the unique contribution of designers because I mean, of course, you know, there's probably a few anthropologists over here as well, right? But that is to make things tangible. Digitally, experientially, tangible or physically tangible, but make things real. You can touch them, use them, engage with them. That's to me the essence of design, enacting new practices, making things happen, making behavior change, giving great experiences that makes users want to just buy and use those products. And for each of these contributions, if this is what designers do, what are the ways in which managers engage with that when things look like they're kind of working? And so these six different engagements or ways of leading designers, Challenging assumptions, leveraging empathy, empathy with users, with customers, stewarding divergence, dealing with the fact that things diverge, that things can go in different directions during a design project and allowing that to happen, allowing to navigate the unknown that you don't know where you're ending up. More radical design processes, you don't know what you're going to deliver until the end of the process. And how do you deal with that in organizations? That I'm patient. I know what the product will be. And finally, how do managers themselves engage with making the future concrete, saying well I want to see what it's going to look like. I've seen managers beginning to prototype themselves, beginning to build their own small digital prototypes because they got so engaged in like, how is this going to work for people? How is this going to look? How can we build this? And finally, the sixth management engagement is that, great design. Great design projects, great design work, of course creates value for someone. Ideally both for users, customers, clients, but also for the organization. So how do you, it actually helps working with somebody who's ambitious about that, who wants to see change, who wants to see this thing going somewhere. Who's not just going through the motions and saying, well let's see what these guys come up with and well maybe we can use it, maybe we can't. No, who's ambitious about change. Maybe willing to change something within the organization to allow a new product, a new service to go to market. So exploring the problem space, this whole process, again, this is just of course a service journey or user journey mapping. But, you know, designers of course can contribute by creating eye openers, insights, user insights. But what I'm also finding, this notion of challenging assumptions, challenging who do we think the users are, what's going on with them. The best of the leaders, the managers I've talked to, they always want to challenge their assumptions. They're always ready to ask questions. One leader, and this is a really relevant example right now because in Denmark we have a number of public IT systems crashing around and being terminated and having cost millions and millions of kroner. But this one lady, she's a director in an agency, she says, you know, she goes on summer vacation and she's at home on a vacation and she goes, you don't just buy a new IT system, kind of, do you? I mean, you actually first redesign your organization. You redesign everything you do and then you digitize it. Her problem was probably that that's also not true. What you do is probably you have an interaction between changing organization and digitization that go hand in hand. But she thought, well, I'm going to challenge the assumption and just plug IT into the organization. I have to challenge the whole assumption of what kind of organization do we have, redesign that, and then we digitize. So for her, challenging her own assumptions about what we're going to be doing next, And so, as well, it was critical to have user insight that showed what kind of value are they generating or not generating for their users. I was up at the Danish company Coloplast the other day. Anyone working with Coloplast in the room? Yeah? Okay. So I'll tell an anecdote. I hope it's true. Well, the anecdote, as I experienced it, was true, but whether it actually fits with the rest of the organization. So in the front of the building at Coloplast up in Northern Zealand here in Denmark, there were two big images. Two images of people. Two ladies. Huge, like floor to top of the building. And my colleague and I came and we were like, hmm, wonder if those are photos of employees? Like, you know, we are an employee-centric organization. We have great conditions for our staff. We love our people. The HR department running the organization. Big images in the front. Or could it be that these were images of customers? Like a customer-centric organization. And we couldn't really tell. I mean, because what they produce, colostomy bags, amongst other things, and it's not something you can really see people wearing, right? So we go in and the first person we meet is the receptionist. And we say to the receptionist, so those images outside, are they staff or are they customers? She looks at us with a little bit of awe-bearing and she goes, well, it's customers. It's customers, but we don't call them that. We call them users. You have a receptionist in a business that uses what is essentially design language. That's pretty impressive. That's an organization that has done a little bit of work to make sure that everybody knows that we are here for those who are using our products. And we actually care about that. We care so much we're going to put the users in front of our building. That empathy or that putting users first is what characterizes great managers who are great to work with as designers. So the second design activity, right, generating alternative scenarios, this is what designers do. Ideas, concepts, divergent processes, so forth. Well, here is the role of leaders to steward that process where great design leaders, or designers, help give direction to a project, but not too much direction. And understand that many minds, many hands, many professions, many disciplines need to work together to come to a result. And too much, I think, that we see management as controlling or as just letting go, but actually there's a fine balance between control and letting go in a design project. Maybe stewarding, navigating, or orchestrating is maybe a better word for what needs to be done. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some kind of loss of control when you don't know as an organization where this thing is going to end. You're posting money into it, you're putting people into it, you're putting this great design work into it. You don't know exactly, is this going to be a product or service? Is this going to be great or not so great? Who are the users who will actually use it? So forth. And this is a manager, this is again a service design project, but says, as a manager, letting designers loose and having her staff being really, really good, really frustrated along two or three months of work where they didn't know where this was going to land. And they asked her, you really didn't know where this was going? And she said, no, I didn't. But it was a positive loss of control because it leveraged the organization's own energy, ideas, professionalism, to find a better way. Finally, enacting new practices. So right, this is actually from 1508. Is anyone from the company here today? No. So they work on one of these plus program projects, right? So it's a design consultancy here in Copenhagen using Google Sprint as an approach to really speed up the development of what's going to be a whole new business model for a company developed in five weeks. A new digital but also physical new experience. And the company is so excited, they built a whole new business separately from the company to accommodate the new design. It's going to be launched in December. I can say that it's about onboarding. It's about how do you integrate new staff quickly in an organization. It's a tool for that, which is going to be... So there's a case on our website about it. But anyway, this is just images from the project where we are, where 1508 has been documenting their work on the user interface. But this idea of being very, very fast in making the future concrete is important. And what is important is that the management and the leadership of the organization is called Moment, the company, the client. It's insisting that they are actually game. They want to do this. They're going to make a deal and they're going to invest time and effort in getting to a working prototype, which ended up not just being a working prototype or a user interface, but actually ended up being a business model in 25 days. Which, by the way, is about the same as a Danish summer vacation. And they did this in July, most of July and August. So some people didn't have a vacation this year. And finally, on insisting on value, I would say that great managers, great leaders who engage successfully with designers, they want customers, users to win, but they also want the organization to win. And sometimes the resistance inside organizations to adopt and work with great design is because people are afraid they're going to lose. Staff is going to lose. Somebody's going to reorganize. There's going to be a new process. Am I even going to be in the organization anymore? So managers who can articulate to their staff, this is about value in the market or with users, but it's also about value for us. All right. So ultimately, this is the dilemma, isn't it? And this manager, by the way, this is actually a manager from the Danish tax authorities. This is a digital project. And it took them four years to figure out the consequence for the organization. But they did build it. It's a new digital platform for young people engaging with tax services in Denmark. It came online last spring. But this is like what's difficult. This is what the manager is dealing with. All right. Questions, remarks, comments, challenges? Is this the future you're seeing? Is this the way things are going? There's a microphone there. And again, we have a mic for those who are interested. And we have a question from Trine in the back. You'll get a mic. Hi, I'm Trine from Trine Madsen. You're talking about how managers should learn to manage designers, but what can we as designers do to help managers understand the values of our method and thinking? Because my experience is, my experience is that we are not very good at selling our qualities. Yeah, so when we're doing this, this is so exciting because we're doing this work, right, where we are following designers in practice, right? And so we are kind of observing how designers sell or pitch. And they're not so good, really. And actually, yesterday, I was keynoting over in Culling in Jutland, and this design firm comes up to me and they say, so one is a political science, the partners running the firm, one is a political scientist, the other one is an anthropologist. And they're also more of a user insight team, maybe not as much, but they do have a few designers there. And they said, we would never send our designer to have a client meeting. We go ourselves. And I think it's not because designers are not, couldn't be great at selling. But I don't think a lot of designers, a lot of them don't care. Because it's not really interesting, is it? Selling, pitching, convincing. What's interesting is doing great work, using your skills and your professionalism. So I think it's like there's just not that much engagement in it. There's just not much energy in it. And so we've been observing some sessions that are clearly, I mean, not impressive. So I think that's our point. So I think there's a role there. And Design Denmark, one of our partners, the Alliance for Designers in Denmark, they actually run sales pitch courses and things that can educate designers. But I think there's something more at stake, much more than just pitching or just selling. But I do think it's a major issue. And it's not just about convincing somebody. It's being able to articulate your craft. It's like being able to share and communicate how you work and the value of how you work. And one of the paradoxes is people like me who's not a designer, who's touring all over the planet to say why design is great. And actually you have so many friends, so many hangarounds that want to be designers. It's like you're one of the most gifted professions in the world. You have so many people who love what you're doing, but none of them are really designers. The people who've coined design thinking, many of them are not designers. The people who are writing the Harvard Business Review pieces about what design is, if you take up the Harvard Business Review last issue, I don't think any of them are designers who've been writing that stuff. Maybe Tim Brown from Idaho. Does anyone know if Tim Brown is a designer by education? He actually is a designer by education. But most of the other Idaho folks, by the way, are not. Like I think one of the Kelly brothers is like a humanities guy, right? Anyway, so I'd say there's lots and lots to do to professionalize designers' role, but not just about selling and pitching, but about how do you create value in organizations? How do you create impact in organizations? How do you deal with power, with organization, strategy, all those things? But if it requires that you care. Can we have more questions? Yes, we can. I'll give it to you as long as I answer next time. Any more questions? Oh, I shouldn't have interrupted you. I have a question. Because selling, yes, how can we impact? Sometimes it's said that design-oriented companies have more design and management. Do you think that's like something that would help fulfill your strategic goal of making design a competitive factor for more businesses in Denmark? Would that be for every one of us designers to go into management? Yeah. So, of course, there's the Joni Ive model, right? But Joni Ive would never have gotten to where, well, maybe he would now, but back then he wouldn't if Steve Jobs hadn't been really, really engaged with design. Steve Jobs was not a designer. I think it would be wonderful, absolutely wonderful, to have many more designers in chief design officer positions. But it's probably a long-term strategy, right? It's going to take a while. Also because a lot of designers don't care about politics, don't care about organization, don't care about strategy like that. So it's going to take a while. But I would say that we want to educate future designers who maybe take like the management track about being engaged with that. I think that would be great. And then other designers would take the non-management track, the skills track in design. But then I think that the broad game has to be that no matter how high a design is placed in the organization, you need to have a design mindset among the leaders. I think that's critical. And organizations that are successful, really, really successful, have leaders and managers who are not necessarily designers but have a design mindset. And maybe that can be trained. I don't know. So is it more like convincing management to do design thinking? To do design thinking. But again, I mean, these things that I just shared, I mean, in a sense, you could say that it's the designers that are doing the design work, right? I mean, this is not about, see, this takes actual professional, very, very, very good designers and related disciplines to do these things. And these things are like, how do we then engage with it? So I would say, yeah, design thinking. But it's also about realizing that design is not just about thinking, it's about doing, right? So I heard like one lady the other day say from a big Danish company say, my role is to take management out from the executive suite, out from the corner office, and pull the management all the way down to the executive suite. So they actually experience what users are experiencing. So it's also about getting managers engaged in the doing or the experience of design, not just in the strategic decision making and so on around design. There's a question from... Can you say where you're from as well? Hello, my name is Peng. I'm from a company called Pulse Label. And so I want to ask you, you know, in business context, there is a saying about starting with why. So if you want to sell something, you start, you know, talk about why you do that instead of talking about what and how you do it. So starting with why. Do you think it's also for designers that we should also have that responsibility, that capability to say why we design like this instead of only saying what and how? Yeah. Is that a design discipline or is it a business discipline? I think it's both. But that's also, you know, it's like almost the most disruptive question you can ask a business, isn't it? Or any organization is why are you here? Why are you here? Why are you even relevant in the market? Or why are you relevant in this organization? That's a really disruptive strategic question to ask. And because design, to me at least, and we can talk a lot about definitions of design, right? But design is in many ways, I think, the creation of meaning. It's about the creation of meaning. Like what is the meaning and experience of a product or a service? And I think that's a why question, right? So I think designers are engaged in the why because they're engaged with meaning, with identity, with experience, with who am I using this product, this service, wearing these clothes, and so on and so on. So I don't think you can avoid it. And I think, again, back to the business issue, which is you may just want to be better at connecting the why. And connecting the why of the design work with the why of the business and the business model and getting engaged in that discussion. Because you can have great, meaningful design if you don't have an organization that understands what is that meaning it's creating, right? Thank you. Question in the front. Two questions in the front. Okay. Michael from Danfoss, you were talking about the trend that big consultancies is buying the design companies. So I was wondering, are you trying to look into that? Why are they doing that? Examine it? Explore it? Yeah. So one of these companies, one of the design firms here actually invited us on field research, right? So I was like, hmm, that's interesting. So you're inviting us to field research just to... Just to learn about methods? Because we would love to go on field research to find out what happens now. Culturally, organizationally, strategically. This is going to be... It's just going to be a massive, interesting experiment, right? And because, I mean, working with design and government, I mean, imagine, you know, bureaucracy and design. And then you have... You have a culture of an Indian IT company or of McKinsey and design. How are these cultures, practices, ways of working going to fit or create synergies? And of course, it's the hope they will, right? It's because of the front page of Harvard Business Review that these businesses are doing this kind of stuff. It's because for the last decade, everybody's been talking about design as this massive differentiator. It's because DMI in America has, you know, published, you know, this, you know, design-led companies outperforming the Standard & Poor's Index by 200%. It's by 228% or something along... 200 plus percent. It's like... That's like an interesting piece of data. It may be not that valid. Who knows? It can be flawed. But it's still interesting. But I think it's... I can fear that it's just going to destroy the... I mean, the junior partner, right? And the junior partner are the design companies. And... But maybe some of them will work. And if they do work, it could also go for an organization like... I mean, if you have a company like yours, which is, you know, an extremely large company that might have different ways of working with design, but how can you make design as an organizational capability, a culture fit and be valuable within the organization also going forward? Maybe we can learn something. And maybe out of those, you know, 8, 10 experiments that are happening... Also, it's Capital One, the bank, happened to, by the way, to be sponsoring the Service Design Conference in New York. It's like... If you look at the sponsors of the Service Design Conference this week in New York, you'll see all those guys, including Wipro, who've been buying up design firms. Now they're sponsors of design conferences. Well, it's a good thing for those who are running conferences. Maybe you'll get great new sponsors, right? Yeah? But it's really, really going to be interesting. But I can... We will do everything we can to share what we can about what's going on because that's our role. We're all about... You know, we're public. We're all about open source. Great. Thanks. And I think we have the last question from Kim in the front. Do you still have a question? Yeah. I'm just thinking about... Can you say who you are? Yeah. I'm Kim from Dwarf. Thanks. What's your take on the design role? Should it be more interested in business modeling, like understanding business, or should it go further into front-end development and stuff like that? I think there's a lot of... Yeah. The roles are blurring a bit. Yeah. And maybe you have some ideas on that. So front-end, in the sense that you can do front-end on products, right? You can also do front-end on business models. Actually, doing a front-end design, early innovation on business models is like asking that why question, right? It's like saying, let's start by exploring what are we even doing as a business? What does it mean? How might we redesign the whole thing? I think from a leadership perspective, a management perspective, it's like where do you put your resources? Where do you put your energy? Where do you put your attention? Do you put it on sort of more going into refining a business model, or do you go into more blank territory, white space territory, right? And I think there are different trends, right? Some are saying, well, the world is changing fast. Complexity is rising. We're seeing scalable, exponential business models. We'd better get into rethinking our whole reason for being, while others are probably so terrified that they are just incrementally working on how do we fine-tune and make it look better and so on. And I don't have the analysis on what's going on. We're doing a major national design value survey at the DDC together with Danish Industry next year. So we're hoping to get some answers on that, to where are businesses placing themselves in that spectrum that you're rightly pointing out. But I don't have the answer. I would say that it also probably depends quite a lot on which industry you're in. But there are some industries where I would probably invest a little bit in the front end, for example, if you're in banking. I mean, it's like, did you hear this quote that, you know, the banking industry is like the record industry before the iPod? If you think about that, then if you're in banking, you probably want to work a little bit on the front end. All right. Thanks so much. Thanks for that. Thank you, Christian. Great conversation. It was a pleasure for you. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Christian. We need to talk about that sponsor thing. Yeah. So, uh-oh, England. Sorry. In a minute, we'll serve you coffee. Ready to fill up your IV bags here. Many of you have already reserved seats beforehand. We sent out a survey. And those of you who have not need to choose now. Thank you, Christian. So, in this room on the stage will be Tugur Göfte and Eska Öztürk from Think Digital. And they will be presenting what they call How to Pitch Design, the Dirty Little Secrets. In the back room will be Operate with Strategic Design. I'm sorry. I'm not completely here yet. I need my coffee. So, in the back room will be Operate with Strategic Design. And then we'll serve lunch, which will be in the middle room like yesterday. And after that, we'll have more workshops. But I think I'll come on stage and just let you know what's going to happen. So, now, coffee. And then time to choose your workshops. Have fun. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.