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Vol. 14, No. 3, Summer 2003
Roberto Verganti, Professor of Management of Innovation and Creativity, Politecnico di Milano
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In Italy, as in the United States, the role of designer has evolved significantly over the past two decades. Designers are taking on roles that go beyond the function of stylist and ergonomics expert to encompass product and process engineering, brand design, and strategic consulting. Companies are discovering they have a significant range of options for interacting with design consultants. Which leads to the question: What role should a company envision for designers? What type of design consulting will be most useful? There is, of course, no single answer to this question, but Roberto Verganti, director of the strategic-design master’s program at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, has some thoughts culled from the design practices of his native land.
“As design services become more relevant and options unfold, the capability to build one’s own system of relationships with design consultants is increasingly becoming a source of differentiation and competitive advantage,” says Verganti. In Italy, which is known for design-intensive industries such as furniture, kitchenware, lighting, and small appliances, the interaction between manufacturers and designers is considered to be central. It’s a strategy based on radical design-driven innovation, which Verganti describes as “the radical innovation of a product language and meaning,” where designers are brokers of these languages.
As designers know, a product’s style or appearance is just one of several ways it may speak messages to the user. Products also have emotional and symbolic value. Some Italian designers have actually minimized, to some extent, the appearance of the physical object to give more value to the message delivered by the product. Verganti gives as an example the Metamorfosi lamp, which was designed to give the kind of light that is kindest to the human eye and that will produce a feeling of well-being. The designers minimized the form of the lamp itself and used translucent materials to call attention to the light it produces.
A further message here is that radical design-driven innovation implies, at least to some extent, the willingness to be a driver of change in society. As Verganti says, it’s “closer to technology-push (an engineering-led process) than to market-pull innovation.” Still, the types of products produced in this way do not represent “dreams without a foundation”; on the contrary, many of them have been great market successes. But how do companies manage to make radically innovative “proposals” that are profitable?
“These manufacturers have developed a superior capability to understand, anticipate, and influence the emergence of new product meanings,” says Verganti. “They search for radically new design languages by looking at socio-cultural phenomena that are not so visible now but that will be trends tomorrow and reality in the future.” And it is here that design consultants can make a central contribution.
This approach, however, needs to be built over time with three ingredients: a network of long-time relationships with “brokers of languages”; an array of “alternative channels” that complement and enrich the access to this knowledge; and an internal process that will integrate all these contributions. The great thing about this combination is that it produces unique products that are not easily imitated: which is a fairly good description of the products that have given Italian design its particular cachet.
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