Recapping dmi's Madrid 2023 Conference: On the Value of Design & the Responsibility of Designers

Last month, around 100 Design leaders from around the world convened in Madrid for DMI Design Management Institute's Design Management Conference. Speakers hailed from leading brands including BMW, J&J, and Ford; influential schools including Royal College of Art, NYU, and SCAD; and top consulting firms including Smart Design, Lextant, Harmonic Design, and our very own Delve.

Over two and a half days of keynotes and workshop sessions, we explored a number of trends defining the Design world today. Below are five themes that stood out to me, as well as my take on each.

The Role of Constructive Friction

Starting off focused on creative collaboration itself, Holger Hampf from BMW Designworks emphasized the importance of friction in designers' work together. His talk, as well as many conversations throughout the conference, played with the question of how to most productively make use of friction to move Design & innovation forward. His take? Five things: give it direction, moderate it (facilitation!), leverage the (physical) place for inspiration, mix it up (by challenging expectations & assumptions), and outlaw dodging it (embrace friction head-on).

My take: while this may not be a groundbreaking concept, I appreciated the renewed emphasis. His wasn't the only talk that called out the critical role of trust in teams, for example, and collaborative trust is far more difficult to build in the remote & hybrid world we now accept as normal. And given our ever more volatile political and social discourse, a differentiating superpower of designers (of all types) right now is the ability to identify and harness otherwise destructive friction for productive, collaborative progress.

Communicating the Value of Design

A theme that emerged in conversations among attendees perhaps more than any single talk (aside from a panel led by Ernesto Quinteros) was the constant challenge of communicating the value of Design to business leaders & decision makers. Frustration and fatigue were palpable among the folks I spoke with. In his conference workshop, Jan-Erik Baars illustrated one such tension: the delicate balance between efficiency (business operations) and effectiveness (business innovation). What influences a decision maker to choose managing what is over designing what could be? That, one could argue, is the role of Design.

My take: I get it, and I've experienced it firsthand. But what was challenging for me in some conference conversations was the level of blame placed on others in the business ecosystem. Sure, it's not always in our control whether the business opts to invest in Design or to cut it out. But it's our job to demonstrate the value (show don't tell) to those decision makers by applying our own methods and approaches to the situations we're trying to influence. Further, I observed a bit of an identity crisis of Design throughout the conversations...what is Design? What is it not? Is it synonymous with Innovation? Is it about customer experience? Business strategy? Round edges and attractive colors? It's difficult to communicate the value of something we can't define among ourselves. So, what is Design to you? Does that definition align with your colleagues, your leadership, your community?

Accelerating Change

Multiple talks focused on the rapidly evolving technological and social landscape of our time. In what ways has COVID fundamentally changed how we work, how businesses relate to their customers, and how innovation happens? How is AI already redefining work and workers, including Designers? Anat Lechner, PhD from NYU delivered a provocative talk on AI and data analytics in Design, firmly stating that AI is here (not "AI is coming," like we frequently hear) and emphasizing that right now it must be seen as a tool, not a panacea.

My take: Change defines life, and it's easy to fall victim to the borderline fallacious thinking that "everything is more different now than it's ever been." Sure, it's been a crazy few years. But if we live our lives and progress in our careers forever waiting for the dust to settle, we'll be waiting a long time. Designers ought to thrive in times of change, when assumptions are challenged and expectations are reset. On the topic of AI, the most spot-on quote I've seen (here I use Design as the context; feel free to insert any field or job) is "AI won't replace Designers; Designers who use AI will replace Designers who don't." (Forgive the lack of reference; all I can say is that the quote is not my own.) And speaking concretely, generative AI will transform how divergent thinking is done, while Designers' careers will be defined by their ability to converge on the best solutions from there.

Design for Community & Humanity

Human-centered design is obsolete. Not because individual human needs don't matter – but rather because Design that ignores collective human needs can no longer pass as true Design. Clive Grinyer from Royal College of Art challenged the classic viability-feasibility-desirability Venn diagram to capture a more holistic, systemic, responsible approach to Design. In his augmented framework, for example, desirability is reframed as "Human + Community." This means solutions that are beneficial to all (rather than a select, privileged few), inclusive & co-created (design with > design for), and fair to employees, not just end users (employees within organizations are humans too, after all, even if HCD is your default approach).

"In an abundant future, to be valuable is to be shareable." – Shel Kimen on the importance of collective value of Design solutions

My take: My colleague Eric Mackey and I recently published a conversation of ours highlighting this critical reframe, so I was of course thrilled to 1) witness the message on such an important stage and 2) learn how other Design leaders talk about similar mindset shifts. From the perspective of Design, this reframe is in fact simply a return to the foundations of what the field is all about. HCD has been a well-marketed distraction – albeit an effective one through the lens of some metrics – from the core intent of Design. But its limited view can be dangerously narrow for inexperienced practitioners. (Disclaimer: my training in Design started with HCD, and I am a believer in its power to transform product & business; the last 10+ years have simply shown me what else Design means.)

The Designer's Responsibility

Digging deeper into the prior section, Clive's talk emphasized sustainability and equity/equality as necessary layers to add to our trusty old triple Venn of Design. Viability becomes "Sustainable Business" – yes, sustainability is a business strategy, not merely environmentalism – and feasibility becomes "Ethical Technology." One data point highlighting why the former reframe is important: 80% of environmental effects result from the design stage of development. As for the latter, we've already seen what it looks like when AI is trained with data that reflects the human and systemic biases in our world.

My take: The wicked problems that are worth solving are, well, wicked. They're complex, and it takes courage to even get started. For too long, we've chosen (consciously or unconsciously – but either way, the choices have been made) to ignore enormous parts of the problem spaces as well as the consequences of our Design work. To name only a couple, I am thrilled to see circularity and scope 3 emissions elevating to the forefront of sustainability discussions and decision making around the business world.

Design is the business of making life better for everyone. It's time we focus a bit more on the "everyone" part, not just on the "business" part.