Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 2009

Mauro Porcini, Head of Design, Consumer & Office Business Worldwide, 3M

As head of design for the Consumer & Office Business Worldwide division of 3M and having founded and run a design consulting firm, Mauro Porcini has had ample opportunity to ponder design's role in a corporate setting. "In any process aiming to generate new ideas, design-driven or not, it's possible to identify two central steps: an input phase, in which you feed the team with many kinds of information, and an output phase, in which the team delivers a result after digesting the information. The team uses filters in the input phase to select the information from the sea of available data, and then in the output phase to identify the best ideas to develop." Clearly, the kinds of filters that come into play depend very much on the people on the development team-which is why, as Porcini notes, "It is not enough to hire a designer to get the right design solution. You need to engage the right designer. And eventually you need designers to identify and manage the right designer."

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