We, as service designers, keep telling everyone that designers can help organisations build better businesses. Not just to make things look fancier, but designers can also add value in more strategic parts of the organisation. Last week we invited Giulia Calabretta to share her research findings at ‘de Verdieping’, our monthly knowledge sharing afternoon.
Giulia is assistant professor in Design management at Delft University of Technology and is working on a CRISP (creative industry scientific programme) research project. Since 2011 she is researching the ‘strategic value of design capabilities’. She describes the added value of design as ‘design capabilities’, which can generate monetary and non-monetary value by both designing great products and helping managers crafting successful innovation strategies.
According to her findings, Design Professionals (DPs) bring to the table:
- Structuring: DPs point to their clients all the steps for an appropriate decision-making process for the problem at hand.
- Facilitating: DPs help clients going through all the steps of a structured decision-making process, by asking the right questions, providing valuable inputs, helping summarizing, indicating core issues.
- Integrating: DPs help clients in aligning different perspectives in various moments of innovation decision-making and/or in combining different types of knowledge and expertise.
- Translating: DPs help clients converting information from a certain language to another (e.g., verbal to visual, visual to verbal, tacit to explicit, explicit to tacit).
- Inspiring: By providing new perspectives, insights and approaches to problem-solving, DPs help clients generating and considering new alternatives in their decision-making processes.
- Motivating: DPs keep clients motivated and focused on their innovation objectives during the entire decision-making process.
- Co-creating: DPs co-create the innovation decision-making outcome together with their clients.
- Embedding: DPs help clients learning and retaining a certain approach to innovation decision-making and integrating the decision-making outcome in the organization.
A list like this makes explicit what we sometimes consider ‘normal’, because it is the way we work. This sometimes makes it hard to explain to people who are from a different background. So thanks Giulia, for your time and insights!
The only thing that we found was missing: no-one mentioned anything about our capability to wear designer glasses. Or even better: our capability to wear our very own 3D printed Koos service designer glasses…
