Is Design Becoming Too Important To Be Left To Design Agencies?
Thoughts On The Future Of The Design Agency
The world has become more digital. There are no two ways about it. Services and communication are digital-first. Interactions have to be functional, seamless and efficient. Good services need an integrated approach between design, business, and technology. This changes the mental model for design. Beauty alone doesn’t cut it anymore. Best practices, templates, and even robots are determining more and more how things look and feel.
On the other hand, design is becoming more important by the day. There is a growing need for business projects to be more creative, flexible and engaging. In addition to data, there is a need for stories. The left side of the brain needs help from the right. This creates unprecedented opportunities for design and designers to impact business performance and bottom lines.
Design agencies left in the dust
Design is becoming more important, but agencies could be left in the dust. Traditional management and IT consulting firms have long discovered the value design can bring to the businesses they serve. Advanced tools and design systems and kits have made design easier. If you use the right frameworks you can have a nice looking design up on a screen in no time. Couple that with the value design can bring to the process in discovery, design and delivery phases and you have yourself a powerful business consulting service with a low barrier of entry. You can offer design as a separate service and use design thinking to use design to boost traditional management consulting. The traditional consulting firms already have the clients, so they can easily extend their service to include design. They also have the resources to buy design agencies and attract design talent.
Design is becoming more important. But the question arises whether design is becoming too important to be left to design agencies? Do design agencies understand the value they can bring to business enough? Do they know how to translate their design skills into business value? Do they understand the technology landscape enough to create a difference there? Can they still be a relevant player in the new game that has materialized in front of their eyes in the last years? Or will they be pushed back into a niche market for exquisite, artistic beauty? Can they embrace the new game or will they try to resist and ridicule it? Can they get their heads out of the sand in time to stop traditional management consultancies to take over the design business?
Design will change
If they cannot, design will change, things that are good will be at risk of being lost. If design is in the hands of management consultants and IT experts, design will change. People without the traditional design education and experience might see design differently. They might miss the things that are below the surface. They might miss the emotion, the feeling, the relations of the whole and the parts, the surprise, the friction, the cultural history. They might miss the things that make design human. They might miss the core of design that fuels it. They might think sticking huge amounts of post-its on a wall makes them designers. They might think data is more important than stories and intuition. They might turn design into a left-brain activity.
But then we will have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The rise of design is linked to a growing need for right brain thinking. The creativity, different viewpoints and fundamentally different way of thinking and doing that right-brainers like designers bring to the business are needed to deal with the speed and complexity of modern business challenges. If we leave design to MBA’s and IT-ers, design runs the risk of being hollowed out, of becoming superficial. They will be able to ride the design wave that is being powered by the need for right brain thinking and the fact that the war for the user is being fought on the battlefront of UX. But without deep knowledge and experience with using the right part of the brain, they will be unable to tap into its full potential. They will only use it to add business value. Designers will cooperate because they can earn more money and have more impact that way. The fragile, difficult, hard core of design will be lost. This will inevitably lead to inhuman dreadful design. Eventually, this will give rise to a new breed of designers that will turn this dreadfulness into great design again in a totally new way. Design will never be the same.
We have seen this before…
We have seen this same development in architecture. When Bauhaus architects like Le Corbusier made design more left-brainy, businesses jumped on it, created dreadful buildings and then a new breed of architects like Rem Koolhaas came and turned this dreadfulness into great design again.
Now is the time to step up to the plate
So maybe this is an inevitable phase design has to go through. But these developments also offer chances for design agencies. They know design better than management consultants. This enables them to tap into the full potential design has to impact the bottom line of businesses. But this requires them to understand the business as well. This requires deep understanding of how design can help business, to awaken to the economics of their contribution. This requires them to adapt to the new reality. This means they have to become accountable, use beauty as a means to aim for value. For me, the holy grail is deep knowledge about design in combination with a new design-powered perspective on business. Management consultancies are moving in on design. So to counterbalance this, design agencies have to move in on business. They have to stand up, own this new arena. If they don’t, design will be lost to the management consultancies for years to come.
Power
The biggest challenge is power. Management consultancies seem to hold all the best cards and the rules of the game seem to be in their favor. Adding design capabilities to management/IT consulting seems easier than adding business and technology acumen to design. This is also where the whole design thinking concept originated: from engineers at Stanford adding design to their process and skillset. Digital design agencies have mastered (part of the technology part), but business for designers seems a terra incognita. I don’t see design agencies buying management consultancies. Who is buying who? That is bound to have some impact on the power relations.
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