Not just products, but anything from processes to business models can be designed. Experts offer insights from practical experience.  

by Joachim Schirrmacher

The first product ideas had barely been suggested when participants in the Design Reaktor Berlin began devising the first marketing strategies. This early interconnection was part of a concept for profiting from interdependency as early as the very first drafting phase. Nowadays, almost any product is available in every conceivable style and price range. Precise positioning was required.
Traditionally, product development comes first, followed by the distribution plan and, finally, the communications strategy. The Reaktor’s synchronous design management, however, enhances the efficiency of development ¹ and development; London 1991, pp. 14–15] , strengthens the products’ identity and contributes substantially to communicating the story behind those products to the consumer, thus generating product acceptance or even demand.

Strategic Design Management

The various definitions of design management are extremely heterogeneous ² and, at least in Germany, down to the eye of each beholder. Here, it is not about operative project management— that is, the implementation of predetermined objectives through organisation, communication, budgetary and legal concerns –, but rather about strategic goals.

Design management is a complex, non-linear and dynamic process that comprises creative, communicative, economic, organisational, technological, social, cultural and environmental factors. The process respects its intuitive creative aspects, but remains rooted in strategic work. Above all, design management is an open-ended, solution-oriented process to develop an individual strategy for each project. It always starts with the question: What is the actual problem? If we do not spend time on finding that answer, we might end up with the right technology for the wrong problem. ³

In addition to the designer’s creative impulse, the process needs to consider the customer’s view. In the Design Reaktor Berlin, this approach brought enormous advantages, as did the broad spectrum of experience of its participating partners.

Efficient Chaos

Designmanagement is a demanding task that requires much experience in order to balance the inconsistencies that arise during design processes. ⁴ In practice, it is often dominated by a wrestling match between the official, seemingly widely accepted “professional, linear attitude towards work […] in which strategic steps follow one another successively and according to plan” (like plans with consistent and sequential project steps) and a tacit, unofficial, chaotic workflow that somehow seems to be the more efficient.

Andreas Knierim analysed this phenomenon in his study, “Coaching and Product Development—Consulting Processes in Design Management.”

For the Design Reaktor Berlin, we thus opted for dynamic project management from the very beginning to assure that the work plan would be adjusted and readjusted continually in line with the findings. A highly challenging task for project management, not least because the participants continued to demand dependable plans. ⁵

Real-Life Examples

The Design Reaktor Berlin was not about solving an existing customer problem, but about developing designs and products for the general market based on the abilities of the participating companies. The students, by nature, lacked experience, all the more so because design management is not part of the official UdK curriculum. We therefore expanded the Design Reaktor Berlin by public expert discussions on marketing, communications and distribution strategies to emphasise the benefits of a holistic approach to both students and businesses by presenting real-life examples.

The prelude was the “Design Management—The Whole Story” event, presented as part of the “Design Mai” 2007, a fair-like exhibition and platform for Berlin designers. This was followed by further events, including one dedicated to “Retail Success Factors” and another one on the link between “University and Market.” All these processes and their respective interactions lead to additional design options as part of an effort to exploit the potential of new product ideas.

However, we never intended to develop a design management basis for the participating businesses. Reaktor contributors neither sketched products with specific businesses in minds, nor did they try to convince those businesses of the advantages of their designs. Instead, all parties worked together on the design management—as equal partners.

Consistent Individuality

The Swiss firm Freitag is a good example of the potential significance of not only the integration of product development, communications and distribution, but also a consistent story. In and by themselves, the recycled tarpaulin Freitag bags and accessories are simple products. The mystery of their continual success for the last 14 years is revealed by the company’s two founding brothers, Daniel and Markus Freitag, in their presentation drafted by a “marketing asshole.” “Freitag’s USP is individuality. This is the secret to our success.”

This maxim not only applies to the products, which, since 2001, can be designed online by the customers themselves, but also in the company’s communications strategy and its individual stores in Davos, Hamburg and Zurich.

The style is immediately recognisable. “We like the raw, radical and simple and the ironic, contradictory and funny,” explains Markus Freitag. “It bores me when everything comes fitted and adjusted.” Although this business attitude may seem laid-back, it draws on the success formula of many firms—“community, content and commerce.” The biggest difference is that while the brothers work primarily on content—e.g. product development—in an independent office, a separate management takes care of everyday business.

Challenge Rather than Curry Favour

Services, too, require design—like those provided by the deaconry in Düsseldorf  (Diakonie Düsseldorf) ⁶ —and this covers anything from processes to buildings and environments. The deaconry comprises around 70 facilities, 1,400 employees, 1,000 volunteers and an entire range of community services, ranging from a house for teenage mothers to an old people’s home.

Rather than reverting to the prevalent and antiquated aesthetic of community facilities, the deaconry’s chairman Thorsten Nolting places great emphasis on architecture, design and art. With this aesthetic, he hopes to stir a longing for a different life and, simultaneously, renew the deaconry from within. “The atmosphere is not highly designed, but it is organised to ensure that no one feels underappreciated or excluded. Each and every one of us should be happy to sit there.”

To this end, Nolting works with renowned designers like Bamschlager-Eberle (the campus) Fons M. Hickmann (the graphics), Axel Kufus (the café), Mischa Kuball (the art) and Tobias Rehberger (the Berger Church). Furthermore, the chairman offered some insights into what demands the work of a designer can make on an employer. Hickmann’s posters, for example, posed a challenge to Nolting: he constantly had to “make decisions about things I didn’t want to think about. It forced me to reflect on processes that I barely understood. It was like a football match—the designers kept playing the ball upfield.”

The Most Important Thing Is Presence

The artistic experiment Chicks on Speed is not only of interest for its way of merging commerce, subculture and art, but also for its path it towards global recognition. These “masters of behavioural branding in the age of the brand epidemic” ⁷  owe their success to a multitude of cross-references within their projects that tend to reinforce each other. This minimal-electro-pop band offers everything from music videos and live concerts to self-designed CD covers and a dedicated record label, COS Records. They also run a fashion label and look back on a long history of performances in art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and installations that become online shops (via web streaming), selling items produced during the installation.

This integrated do-it-yourself aesthetic—a bricolage of youth culture snippets from punk, graffiti or hip-hop—became evident in a Power-Point presentation by Alex Murray-Leslie, one of the group’s founding members. Her message was simple: “Paid or unpaid—the most important thing is presence.” No matter whether that presence is achieved via classical media or MySpace, “the true window of the world.” Not being on MySpace, explains Murray-Leslie, means “not existing in the industry.” Appropriate, then, that a Chicks on Speed show interlude poses the question: “MySpace, your space, whose space is it?”

Staying true to their motto—“whatever is missing, we make ourselves”—has also helped to fan the fame; their prototype of a Chanel bag, for example, met with great media response. “Often, you can invent stories. When you invest enough imagination, these stories become real—most notably when they appear in the media.” This helps to explain how the group developed small traces of itself that have spread like a virus, cropping up in numerous fashion and lifestyle magazines as well as in the collections of Yves Stain-Laurent, Martine Sitbon, Louis Vuitton, Dior or H&M.

Retail Sucess Factors

While huge emphasis tends to be placed on the development of new products and communications strategies, distribution often falls back on existing contacts and industry conventions. The “Retail Success Factors” event, however, emphasised the extensive freedom of design that is also inherent in distribution. The choice of distribution channel can decisively influence targeted positioning and sales potential. New and traditional specialised dealers; vertical, cultish and commercial suppliers both large and small; niche markets and mass markets; multi and single brand shops; high streets and shoppingmalls; permanent and temporary stores; mail order sales, online sales and hybrid forms (i.e. multi-channel sales)—the distribution design options seem almost infinite. The abovementioned event focused on three very different concepts of distribution, rather than concentrating on traditional parameters like location, frequency, customer profile, range of products, visual merchandising, quality of consulting and key figures like sales per square metre or stock turnover rate.

Berlinomat is a sales platform for Berlin design: 260 square metres of fashion, furniture and accessories by 150 local designers. In addition to running this showcase store, its founder, Jörg Wichmann, also markets Berlin design on a national and international scale via numerous cooperations within the industry, as outlined at the event. Particularly fascinating was the similarity of the tools of this small niche vendor to those of the ECE, Europe’s largest operator of shopping malls—although, naturally, ECE senior manager Matthias Brink employed a different nomenclature when talking about the increase in customer traffic from events and the counsel of his leaseholders.

In his work as the CEO of Globetrotter ⁸, Thomas Lipke combines niche and commerce. Founded in 1979 on 150 square metres, his “specialty store for expeditions, safaris, survival and trekking” soon evolved into a lifestyle company and Europe’s current market leader of outdoor supplies. This was achieved by participating in two communities at once: Lipke is not only an enthusiastic fan of the great outdoors, but also, as he revealed at the event, a member of the Chaos Computer Club. Very early on, he started to cultivate a widely celebrated multi-channel strategy based on outstanding community management.

University and Market

Stimuli and inspiring role models were in no short supply. Nonetheless, it proved quite a challenge to realise that design was not just being studied at a university, but also implemented. The “University and Market” demonstrated just how much both systems work according to their own rules and at their own pace.

Burg Giebichenstein, the University of Art and Design in Halle ¹³, runs its own shop in the centre of town. Professor Klaus Michel presented the many successes of the store itself and of its campaigns at the Berlin “Design Mai” as well as the trade fairs in Cologne and Frankfurt. Nevertheless, he made clear that, in the long run, the store’s continued mentoring and support would have to be provided by someone other than the university.

Professor Uwe Janssen reported on the demands of his own work and on the well-established retailers that serve as distributors for the FHTW Berlin’s in-house fashion label, 30 Paar Hände. This label enables students from various departments to try their hands at everyday design. Meanwhile, Professor Dr. Günter Faltin, who teaches Entrepreneurship at the FU Berlin, advocated a stronger free enterprise system. Among other things, he presented his best-known example of a pared-down business approach: the Teekampagne or Tee Campaign.¹⁵

Professor Dr. Jörg Petruschat, for his part, presented a design check for small and mid-sized regional businesses, developed in conjunction with his students at the University of Applied Sciences in Dresden.¹⁷ The check examined the acceptance and positioning of the companies’ products, their appearance and image cultivation and their existing potential for innovation.
Here, too, it became obvious that market launch and processes of change usually require several years to take effect.

Business Design

In principle, designers can create both products and processes—including, for example, “Business Design” or the conceptual design of business models. This is why Gui Bonsiepe ⁹, in his “Speculations on a Future History of Design,” argued that “design is transforming itself into a basic discipline at institutions of higher education because design—understood as conceptoriented activity—affects all other facets of human experience. Design [is…]—like language—a fundamental mode of behaviour in the world and attitude towards the world.”

As the Design Reaktor Berlin unveiled numerous models for the future of design, so too did the experts in their presentations. In keeping with the spirit of Bonsiepe’s comment, almost none of them were designers themselves. Still, design has a lot to learn from them. It is, after all, always about the whole story.

Published/Released

Design Reaktor Berlin, Herausgeber: Design Reaktor Berlin (Prof. Axel Kufus, Marc Piesbergen, Joachim Schirrmacher, Judith Seng), Verlag der Universität der Künste Berlin, 2008, page 153 – 156