India, DesignFirst Nation?
Creativity is the currency of the future.
India is a young and agile country, buzzing with ideas that can very well shape the next big innovation to transform the world. But over the past year, India has fallen down 10 places on the global competitiveness index, one of the factors being the lack of IPs created by our nation. Radical innovation lies at the intersection of desirability, feasibility and viability.
Design, which has moved from a product phase to a strategic process of desirability, feasibility and viability, has created avenues for a new integrated approach towards problem-solving. A big leap from a siloed department to a seat in the C-suite has opened doors for exploring the Business Value of Design.
As stated in the Mckinsey report, 2018 design-led companies have 32% more revenue and 56% higher total returns compared to shareholders in other companies.
Lopez Design brought together 50 stakeholders from different sectors to build on this context to explore the potential of design in nation-building. Mr Amitabh Kant, CEO Niti Aayog was invited as the keynote speaker to contribute to this approach. The in-house team at Lopez Design presented two design initiatives a ‘DesignFirst Policy’ and ‘What Design can do’ to further this discussion.
With the ‘What Design Can Do’ initiative launched at the DesignFirst Forum, it was proposed to create a ready-reckoner handbook/kit/web repository for business development. These would capture instances in each industry vertical where design thinking and design have made a difference with proven Indian or International case studies.
The second proposal was of a DesignFirst India, a holistic economy built with, for and by people, profit and planet.
The vision of a DesignFirst policy was explored, visualizing a society that — at all levels and in a responsible way — integrates the use of design to improve the quality of people’s lives, generate economic value for businesses, and makes the public sector more efficient.
There was an emphasis on the process of design — design as a verb, not a noun. This method leads to the creation of an appropriate solution — be it a functional product, efficient public service, or public policy that genuinely accommodates the perspectives of people on the receiving end. Designers are not the only people in an organization who understand users — or at least they shouldn’t be.
It is imminent to develop a new National Design Policy which pushes design out from isolated silos under the DIPP to across all-line ministries and uses all the three phases of design — Classical (I=90%), Integrator (I=50%) and Enabler (I=0%).
The keynote speaker, Mr Kant spoke about how ‘Design is a differentiator’ and is the key to creating a global brand for India. With an extensive focus on in-depth study, scenario mapping and testing to recover, expand and resolve — a beginning towards forming an DesignFirst India.
Let’s mark the beginning of this new decade by bringing people back into the system.
Read more at http://lopezdesign.com/lets-make-history
