Three Reasons why We need National Awards for Digital Product and Service Design
For decades, executives have looked for dynamite advertising campaigns and new employee management techniques to push their businesses forward. But now, the potential of digital creatives to transform people’s lives through an Amazon or Uber means companies have desires that traditional marketing and consulting agencies cannot cater for. Digital Product and Service Design (DPSD from here on) remains a new concept to many companies. Most countries’ DPSD industries have existed for less than a decade. Yet, digital product and service design has developed in response to rapid technological revolutions, and so is uniquely suited to solve problems that companies face in this overwhelming time. Small agencies of designers, developers and marketers, across the world are becoming go-to creators for all kinds of businesses, and the world’s most extraordinary digital innovations are coming from DSPD teams.
It’s high time DPSD communities in all countries create national awards ceremonies to reward outstanding work in digital product and service design. Over the years, the discipline has developed sets of best practices and famous works, which means that wonderful projects and exciting innovations in how to do product and service design can be evaluated and rewarded in an awards show, like in advertising. And there are three compelling reasons for why an awards ceremony for DPSD would be very good for societies, and for business-people and young people in particular.
It is really hard to adequately or comprehensively explain what digital product and service design is, because the range of problems that DPSD agencies are able to solve is so vast. There is endless potential within digital, online and hardware technologies to create, and teams of coders, designers, marketers and engineers can unleash that potential. Q Division embodies the small, dynamic DPSD team model, and sometimes we wish our elevator pitch had the time for a few elevator rides, or at least a few dozen stories. There are just so many cool things we can do.
An awards ceremony for the year’s best projects in our industry will show our society the enormous creative scope of digital product and service design. It will highlight what kind of work we usually do and what we are capable of doing. And it will drive the watching and reading audience to investigate what goes into an industry that is developing the kinds of products and services that are changing the way people live.
Many executives already seek DPSD solutions to problems that they face. But some don’t know what kinds of problems DPSD are best placed to solve, versus consultancies or marketing and communications firms or something else. An awards show will reveal the kinds of problems that ought be addressed by digital products and services.
Crucially, a ceremony also shows business-people what the standard for excellence in DPSD industries in each country is. Without an awards show, any view on the industry’s output is murky, and it is very difficult to tell average digital products and services from good and great ones. This is because many digital products and services often exist for a niche community of users, like employees within a company, or consumers with a particular need based on profession or lifestyle. It is easier to tell what good advertising looks like because it is public and accessible in nature. This is not the case for DPSD.
Letting any industry evaluate itself can be dangerous, but the public act of validating and ranking works allows for scrutiny and comparison. An awards show will make it far easier for companies to discern what they need, what they should expect, and allows agencies to prove their excellence through award wins. This is important because the chief way to initially signal one’s value now is to mention significant clients that the agency has had before. But much of previous work for other companies can be uncomfortable or disadvantageous to talk about with potential new clients.
Many young, talented people late in their school careers and in universities want careers in coding, digital, online and design. These work arenas are developing at such a rapid rate that few education institutions can keep up, because of academia’s achingly slow response to changing circumstances in the world. Many technologies today are not taught in universities. Many practices are relatively new, but are highly sought-after by recruiters, and not taught either. Students struggle to tailor their educations in and beyond the lecture halls to suit their dream jobs in these disciplines because so much overwhelming information exists online that it is hard to know how one ought to develop oneself. Often though, many people don’t know that their dream jobs are possible and commonly exist within DPSD. There are a few of us at Q Division who had no idea that what we do now was a thing. We got lucky.
A national awards show will expose young people across countries to the kinds of projects they can be creating, the kinds of people who work on those projects, and the kinds of skills and practices that go into creating those digital products and services. This allows students to know what they could be striving to do. It shows them who to seek out to get advice. It indicates what skills they should be developing to ready themselves for the industry.
Ultimately, an awards show could inspire enough aspirant workers to create a market for universities to teach practices of product and service design. It is more likely that colleges that specialize in DPSD will open to meet demand, like they have for advertising, marketing and communications. This will lead to many more people entering an industry that is changing the way that people live and work for the better.
Originally published at medium.com on August 17, 2017.
