“Design” is in many ways a buzzword today—and rightfully so, says Tucker Marion, an associate professor of technological entrepreneurship at Northeastern University in his opening remarks at the “Design: Impact and Challenge” conference held at the university.
User interface and experience become crucial factors in the success of a business and how it serves the users requirements. “in today’s day and age, for many companies your brand really is the experience that your users and customers are having,” says Marion. A prime example of this is Google, which changes its logo every day with no pushback. “but if they moved the search bar a little bit to one side, we’d all go nuts,” he added. “So the experience of that company and as a brand is really embedded in the user interface.”
However, design is not just limited to certain fields, the interdisciplinary conference also discussed emerging design practices; how design is being applied to unconventional industries like biomedical companies and big pharma; the emergence of 3D- printing and rapid prototyping.
Now, how does one approach this design process? What design does a company or business need? One way to question is “How do we design the innovation that we’re going to address the challenges that a business faces?” The impact part is (thinking about) how one can really transform their processes and management to get users their products or services faster and being user-friendly.
Also, Jeremy Paul, dean of Northeastern University’s school of law, drawing inspiration from the field of law noted that the original designers were lawyers, saying that have played an integral role in designing laws and other things for society’s betterment. “there’s no more fundamental design document than the constitution.”
On the global level, in a rapidly developing world, new technologies like 3D printing and others are also opening up new opportunities for a varied approach to innovations and helping in maximising business potentials around the world. Technology mixed with the right design approach could become a quick fix to a number of business challenges, such as manufacturing or marketing and so on.
Anisha Naidu