The End of I.D. or Not

Yes, to say they are taking a “let’s stop there” approach is ridiculous. Advances are a matter of time and experience. Soon we may be driving Chinese cars. Analysts see no reason why that would not happen. The recent car show in Shanghai is a glimpse into the future.

With the influx of new influences there is bound to be growth and push for innovation. We used to think Japan lacked innovation too but look where they have taken it? Then Korea, now China and India. They have lots of people both for labor as well as highly educated technical folks. The Chinese population abroad outside of China is quite accomplished and affluent in countries all over the world and many are returning to contribute their experiences.

It’s a huge, hard working and hungry population with a thirst and drive that is quite remarkable. My advice is start learning Chinese. I’m going to have my kids take Mandarin classes.

…to the original question…not!..change happens and those that adapt survive…those that don’t won’t…for me, id is all about change…“never leaving well enough alone”…50 years ago gm was the auto manufacturer to the world…today gm isn’t…i couldn’t careless and i don’t think id or automotive design or the world is worse off for it…funny thing, when you view earth from space those boarders we all learned about in school are invisible and america is the same color as canada, mexico or even china…

i didnt post that article as commentary on “GM”. i posted it bc it’s interesting that the industry most “American” is now viewed by those we once ridiculed (i remember “Made in Japan” jokes growing up) as in need of their charity. it’s not about GM. it’s about America as a whole.

Have any of you started to feel the pressure in your offices. I’m curious to know how globalization has caused various Industrial Design operations to change and adapt. I know that the small office where I work has been hit especially hard, How are the corporate design offices doing?

…as was mine…

yes. you did post a commentary.

the difference is that when i posted that article i didn’t post an opinion. even in reply i only posted that it was “interesting” - as a bigger issue. now if i had used your words, “i couldn’t careless and i don’t think”, then our posts would have some equivalency. right now, they don’t.

Who are you talking to? All these damn guests are making this very confusing.

mothy

Only one person it could be Gay…mrd.

I see that now. We’ve got responses whipping around up and down and zooming all over. I was losing my bearing.

mothy

The small firm I work for has been hit hard too. We have not gotten a project in the past 3 months so we are just doing our own side projects for portfolio. We get inquiries and do proposals but no projects so let’s see how long we can go…Clients seem to think they can almost get ID for free. They ask for a lot yet tell us not to go over a certain budget in our quotes. This is like going to a store and seeting your own price and say “take it or leave it.” I guess there are other more desperate ID firms who would work too cheap so it makes it harder for everyone. ID as a profession should start setting some standards so we don’t price eachother out of business.



Sweetie, don’t u think your comment and attitude of denying a culture of their past success, their unparalleled ability to adapt (think of the ratio of chinese ppl that can speak english and thrive in western culture and the number of western ppl that can speak chineses and thrive in chinese culture), and their determination as a culture to prove themselves is a sign of your own complacency? Last time I checked these factors are ingredients for innovation.

My office is having the same problem where clients now want the design for free or promise to pad the bill a little at the end when we manufacture the design. The problem starts when the clients request drawing after drawing and rendering after rendering at a great cost to us and then decide that we are way over budget and pull out.

Then they have a binder full of design work and take it somewhere else, modify it a bit, and claim that they don’t have to pay us for the design work because the design is different. I’ve seen a few try and pull that one lately, and this is from major retailers.

I’ve also been in the office all day and haven’t heard a phone ring once, not once. This place is so dead silent that its creepy. I have to wonder how much longer things can go on like this before I go to the bank and they tell me my paycheck is made out of rubber.

The value of design is changing.

Design is now considered strategic, and those that can sell strategic design will do well. Look at the reputable consultancies now: all busy. Meanwhile the design boutiques of old are downsizing and offshoring.

Why a thousand IDEO’s haven’t appeared to fill this need beyond me. My guess is limited talent pool and the recent (strategic) boom in corporate design.

Thoughts?

When was design non-strategic? Even a cosmetic restyling of a product can have purpose, justification and ultimately contribute to the corporate bottom line. Or maybe I just don’t get this tactical/strategic thing.

designers in US are particularly weak compared to their counterparts in their field or other technical fields when they actually do enjoy greater freedom to manuever from other countries.and it’s not just one factor. what everyone sees as a general cause like chinese competition is really not the issue. and what economists say about future and how it will change the world, again, is irrelevant. because we live at the moment not the future.

most of this has to do with understanding the infrastructure and development of design industry, but you can’t conceal other important facts, mainly psychological and qualification factors that are mostly portrayed as negative inputs and left as valid to influence the actual outcome of the process we call design. in other words designers are trapped between their understanding of the industry and what the industry demands as a whole but does not clearly define as a process.

therefore there’s no such a thing as an ideal design environment in a modern sense of the word design. you could create an ideal environment for what you might want to do or what you’re trained to do but that’s just you and at your level of control. when you start moving ahead you’ll see that this control starts to vanish and it turns into a void. but design is not just void control vs ideal control. right now this arguement that chinese competition has taken away design jobs falls into the void while people agueing that chinese don’t have a good understanding of design, into ideal.

we can go on and on, not just in design but other things. for instance if i was a chess player i could say that i won’t play chess anymore because someone with a supercomputer is gonna blow me away. but we see that everyone still enjoys playing chess because they have agreed it’s more fun to put the supercomputer into a void.

this is a different void. one that comes from agreement. the other void i mentioned above, although real, is very abstract and is not based on inductive or deductive reasoning or any sort of conventional stipulation. alternatively this void becomes ideal for those who use it as a platform because they have the tools to turn it into ideal.

conclusion:as designers we need to find our common goal. is it to make design or is to put each other out of business? unfortunately right now the mentality is focused on the latter maily because the environment is darwinian/survival oriented.
personally i think darwin could not find an explanation for the spirit but as designers we know without spirit, even if it’s minimal, our works would amount to junk. even bauhaus was spiritual in a sense, while many think of it in a materialistic sense and give it the economoic/survival tag, but when you look at it more closely you see that all the innovative thought behind bauhaus had spiritual context abstracted into object.

i suggest before we tell our design life stories and try to make sense of it, we should rather understand what our role is as designers and what our resposibilities are towards each other.

I’d say that with any impending change people can react with fear or a fresh sense of opportunity.

The fear shown from many on this thread is well founded because they are worried about their source of income. It is hard to delve into the abstract when your stomach is grumbling.

Like most ominous warnings of calamity, however, I believe that the outsourcing issue will prove to be a small impact on our industry. Many companies are losing their ill-founded afterglow and beginning to rethink their strategies. I recently saw a story on “rural sourcing.” Instead of going overseas, companies are moving operations to rural America were the living expenses are low.

Competition from Chinese and Indian design firms, however, is here to stay. With any business venture, the business of design in America will have to adapt.

Its time to look at the opportunities these changes will afford us AND our work.

Why a thousand IDEO’s haven’t appeared to fill this need beyond me. My guess is limited talent pool and the recent (strategic) boom in corporate design.

What do you guys tink of the article seismic shift on core right now about changing the offering from bread and butterr design to strategic planning and designh?

In terms of geopolitics and globalization I think we are putting our species into a catch22.

We have adapted our physical environment to suit or needs, by transforming materials to work for us in some fashion. This transformation of material is achieved through labor or, work. As it is viewed in the physical sciences, for something to do work it needs energy, whether it be a horse, a machine, or human.

Since we live in an enclosed system the amount of energy at our disposal is not infinite, but finite. Even our sun has finite limits of energy. At the present time we have established very complex systems of energy transformation. If you were to look at an economy as an energy converting system, than the best way to get more out of a limited supply of energy is by making it more efficient.

If we were to look at the definition of money as something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, a means of payment, or means of storing value. Then money is a vehicle for the exchange of energy that has been employed in the transformation of material in the form of goods or services. These goods and services in a very vague since exist to serve a human need or demand.

For an economic system to become efficient and thus competitive, it must use the least amount of money (energy) to supply goods and services that are in demand for profit to happen. For economic growth to happen there must be a constant demand followed by the ability to quench it with supply. This constant supply and demand ratio for growth to happen requires energy. The US economic system is slowly becoming less energy efficient, thus less profitable, and thus uneconomical. A result of this is outsourcing.

Add into this equation an underlying struggle between economic systems to control the finite sources of cheap energy, then we have a problem. The only thing that is keeping everything in check is supply and demand. The US economy has a huge demand for goods and services, but its own system has surpassed its ability to supply this demand economically, so it must rely on other economies to sustain its demand (growth) by supplying cheap goods and services that it can no longer supply economically.

In the mean time the supplying economies are growing also, because the efforts (work) in the form of energy transformation of good and services is profitable (more money), expanding there economic growth.

Again the underlying link in this equation is limited supplies of cheap energy. How long will the party last? How long will the supply and demand equation work without cheap sources of energy? How long before the supplier also becomes the demander?

ID will probably also go through a transformation of efficiency, where creative and innovative energy will be employed in other means. Maybe we will go back to being craftsmen and women?

NPR - Has a talk today (heard wile driving in SF this morning but probably statewide) on consumerism. Nice to see how prolotarians view product design.

Bart - I just checked all three SF NPR stations and all the program listings to try and find what you are referring to (a lot of these programs are archived and available for listening online). I couldn’t find anything close to what you are talking about. Can you give a little more info? Station? Time? Program? Guest or topic?