Design & Innovation Trends for 2012

Welcome 2012! I have to admit that I was quite lax in 2011. Somehow time just got away from me. Perhaps it was from lack of organization or lack of energy. Whatever the case it might have been, the best thing about the new year is that it is a NEW year. Clean slate for blogging. So I thought I would start off the year by looking at what 2012 might hold. A few of these are predictions from other experts while a few are my own based on what I have seen over the past year.

“Incubation is the next Innovation.”  
Ryan Jacoby, co-leader, IDEO New York speaks about how companies will learn to develop, design, pilot and incubate new businesses and new ideas due to the changing economic landscape and the lean approaches to building businesses. Organizations will become more multidisciplinary rather than specialized. This I wholeheartedly agree with. People in their 20s and 30s are no longer happy with simply having one degree or designation (I am a prime example of that!). With accountants becoming designers, engineers with MBAs and psychiatrists becoming chefs, mutli-talented, multi-faceted people building interdisciplinary organizations. The key is to figure out how these unique organizations can still work together. At archiTEXT, we are doing a pretty good job of figuring that out for ourselves. Over the past year, we have developed a new motto – What can we do together that we can’t do alone? Interdisciplinary or not, we all still need to work together.

“Design Doing, not just Design Thinking.”
I could not agree more with this statement made by Robert Fabricant, vice-president, creative at frog. We’ve done a lot of reading and research into creativity and design thinking over the past year. Design thinking is a great way to bridge the gap between the corporate world and the design world as it puts design into corporate lingo. However, definitions and lingo aside, nothing will progress if nothing is done. Beyond design thinking is design doing. I see the creation of dynamic user experiences as the next step to design thinking – it translates the talk into the walk. At archiTEXT, that is what we have discovered organizations are really needing and I see that as the trend for 2012.

“Social Communication = Design.”
As Dan Formosa, co-founder of Smart Design, put it, design is synonymous with communication and communication affects behaviour. That being the case, this means that design also affects behaviour. Any good designer can tell you that that is true. Whether it is architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, any design, good and bad design can affect behaviour. And with the explosion of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, good and bad design travels at the speed of light – or at the very least, the speed of your local internet connection.

“Creativity as a Tool.”
With the economic climate in such uncertainty and the environmental climate in such turmoil, organizations are having to adapt and run on lean capital. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work tomorrow and what works tomorrow will not necessarily work the next day. Yes, innovation and development is absolutely necessary to the survival of many organizations but more intrinsic to innovation is the idea that creativity can be a tool in an organization’s arsenal. Innovation often refers to large-scale processes and products, to the refinement of existing processes and products in order to solve a problem. Creativity can be harnessed by individuals within an organization and often refer to the creation of something unique and new. It is this creation of something new and unique that organizations should truly value and not just innovation itself (though obviously valuable).

“Participatory Design.”
Perhaps it is due to our work in the social innovation and social entrepreneurship sector but it seems to me that organizations are no longer simply seeking solutions from their designers but are looking towards their customers, their members, their community for the solution. Designers and other solution architects are simply the vehicle to ensuring that the execution is carried flawlessly. The official birth of the Centre for City Ecology in Toronto this past year seems to be a prime example of this. Through their various events and forums, they’ve worked with designers, architects, communities and residents to come up with urban solutions. These solutions could simply be provided by the designers and architects but at the end of the day, they are not the ones that would benefit or lose from the solutions, the communities are. Our East Scarborough Storefront project is of course my greatest example of this. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you are looking for a quick project solution, participatory design is not for you. Participatory design is all about process and this process is quite long. However, the rewards are that much greater. I am very happy to see a growth in participatory design and anticipate further growth in this area in 2012.

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~ by urbanspectrum on January 3, 2012.