Shifting Dynamics

The articles in this issue illustrate the wide range of ways that Design can help and is already helping create a new normal as we adjust to, and make the first moves toward emerging from, the chaos and uncertainty of this past year. Whether it's redefining how we look at the connection between customer experience and a company's brand, using design-based differentiation to propel a product out of the “commodity trap,” rethinking customer and employee experience for a company with a solid tradition of quality, or considering new ways to resolve disputes requiring legal intervention, Design clearly has a prominent place. Design has always played an important role in helping solve human issues, and that will undoubtedly continue in the future, both in the growing importance of futures thinking for organizations and in shifting the ways we educate our future designers.

DMI Members Click Here to Download Full Issue

Issue Information

President's Letter
Carole Bilson, President, DMI

Emerging from Crisis: How Organizations Can Use Futures Thinking to Design for Emergence
By Liz Possee Corthell, Experience Strategist, Mad*Pow & Lindsey Messervy, Title Director of Organizational Design & Strategy, Mad*Pow

The Covid-19 pandemic has taught us a lot of life lessons—some welcome, others not—but amidst these lessons are that there are consequences to not thinking about the future.

If People Think of Brand & Experience as One and the Same, Why Don't Marketers?
By Billy Thomas, VP, Director of Creative Excellence at LPK

Whether treated as separate initiatives within the same department or managed by multiple teams in far corners of the same company, branding work and customer experience design is largely disconnected.

How Do We Get Paid for This? Beating the Commodity Trap Using Design-based Differentiation to Maintain Pricing Power
By Ian D. Parkman, Associate Professor of Marketing, Pamplin School of Business, University of Portland
Design-based differentiation represents a set of product development strategies focused on using insights about the emotional, social, and cultural contexts in which offerings are used by the customer to enhance the emotional appeal, aesthetics, styling, ergonomics, core technology, and quality of products and services.

Designing Online Mediation for the New Normal
By Sukwoo Jang, Ph.D. Candidate, Designize Research Lab, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) & Dr. Ki-Young Nam, Associate Professor of Industrial Design, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
The power of design for looking deep into people's concerns and coming up with creative solutions to resolve issues can be unleashed in defusing a hostile situation before it escalates to an expensive and damaging litigation.

A Mediator's Perspective
By T. Andrew Brown, Esq., Managing Partner of the law firm Brown Hutchinson LLP
Use of ADR for resolving disputes is here to stay and will, no doubt, continue to grow.
A primer on some differences between arbitration and mediation, the importance of the human element in resolving disputes, as well as ways that AI might be able to help.

Co-Designing a Meaningful, Empathetic, and Safer Future Experience for Volvo Latin America
By Romeu Biscaia Machado, Founding Partner and Chief Design Officer, commcepta Design; Deise Kindinger leads the Volvo Group Connected Solutions team in Latin America; Karen Wasman works as Head of People & Organization Development at Volvo; Taciane Skora is a Brazilian industrial designer currently living in the United States and driving Customer Satisfaction Strategy for Volvo Trucks North America
Working with people you can trust to be genuine and transparent is fundamental to launching a project with a scope that encompasses connecting missing pieces, breaking silos, and seeking opportunities to build a collaborative environment. 

Design, Ethics, and Humanism
By Christian Guellerin, Executive Director of L'École de design Nantes Atlantique, an institution of higher education in design, and Honorary President of Cumulus, the International Association of Schools of Art, Design & Media.
But what is left of Design, the humanist discipline born of the applied arts? What is left of the “unique human dimension and the esthetic values of traditional, small-scale production?” 

Forging Resilient Designers: An Educator's Perspective
By Dr. Rebecca Anne Price, Assistant Professor of Transition Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology
We need resilient designers who can overcome setbacks, critique, and uncertainty throughout their prospective careers. Without such resilience, there can be no focus on subsequent adaptation.

DMI Members Click Here to Download Full Issue

Purchases of this Review include a downloadable PDF available after checkout. If you wish to buy the PDF only please select "Office Pickup" as your shipping method so you are not charged for shipping.