The Next Trend in Design - Woudhuysen

A R T I C L E

The Next Trend in Design
by James Woudhuysen
Forecasting and

Innovation,

De Montfort

University, Leicester

After this summary verdict, Nussbaum asked, naturally enough, ‘‘What’snext?’’ This article replies to that question.

Nussbaum’s own reply was interesting. He upheld what he called‘‘humanistic design,’’ and described it as ‘‘a huge advance in the field.’’ How-

James Woudhuysen,

Professor,
I n April 20thinking (D
ever, he did n

For designdesign has alwdesigners suchLoewy, and Nor two aboutcolor forecasti

A cursoryreveals a certaprojection maydesign manageand abandon i

11, Bruce Nussbaum, one of the foremost advocates of designT), pronounced it a ‘‘failed experiment’’ (Nussbaum, 2011).

ot define, still less give examples of, humanistic design.Instead, he went on to outline a third concept—‘‘creative intelligence.’’Around that concept, he plans to publish a book in late 2012.

ers and design managers, having an opinion about trends inays been important. In prewar America alone, industrialas Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond

orman Bel Geddes positioned themselves as knowing a thingthe future. Fashion design, too, has long been oriented tong, and trend forecasting in general. Design managers have

often pronounced one trend dead and upheld another one. Still, it is a bitnew to do both of these things, and then say that a third designerly worldview deserves a book.

inspection of trends in the handling of design trends, then,in relativism of outlook. Anything goes, pretty much: One

be as good as another, and much depends on this or thatr’s point of view. In other words, design managers both adoptntellectual trends rather quickly nowadays. Before we suggest

what the next trend in design should be, therefore, we should first ask: Justwhy are trends so trendy these days?

Of course, when designers such as Loewy or Bel Geddes pushedthrough ideas about the future to clients, there was always an element ofarbitrariness about their views. In their time, style was of unrivaled impor-tance. The subjective approach of great designers had yet to give way tomore organized conceptions of design management, or of the future. How-ever, for all the realities of today’s global production, both design managersand celebrity designers still lack a sensible compass to steer them towardThe Next Big Thing in Design.

Perhaps, really, two trends in the handling of design trends are at issuehere. On the one hand, and certainly over the past 15 years or so, the growing

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impulse for companies, design man-agers, and designers has been to castthe future in terms of design for cor-porate social responsibility, ethics,lowering adverse impacts on theenvironment, and—above all—low-ering emissions of CO2.

When designers put forward abroadly Greenish interpretation ofthe future, as a future of sustain-ability, they suggest a trend of plan-etary significance. This story of thefuture is more imposing than othergrand narratives in design, such asModernism, Postmodernism, or anorientation to users.

The scale of the trend predictedhere—The Future is Green—lookslarge. Also, advocates of this pointof view feel that, when they upholdan acceleration of that trend, theyare design activists who are morallyright and who will have history ontheir side. However, the relentlessand repetitive subordination of allgoals and most other anticipatedtrends to the demand for sustain-able design suggests that somethingis wrong. Steering professionals tothe Next Trend in Design has beendone with a compass that is stuck.Here the future is always just anextension of the present. The trendis: Redouble efforts to save theearth—against which all othertrends, whether objective or hopedfor, are of little moment.

On the other hand, the willing-ness of the design world to pro-claim and then drop overfamiliarand ill-thought-out lists of many

new trends is today very high. Herethe compass spins around. Oftendescribed as ‘‘futures,’’ and embold-ened by the multiple options of sce-nario planning, the future here isvariable, protean, and hard to pindown. Interestingly, too, the spreadof multiple, pluralistic conceptionsof the future is expressed in theactivist form of manifestos fordesign (though not for design man-agement). Since 1883, more than60 design manifestos have beenpublished; and, confirming the‘‘depends on your point of view’’mentality, the trend is for moremanifestos to be published eachyear. No fewer than 35 have comeout since 2000 (Emerson, 2009).

The desire to mold the worldis commendable, but most designersand design managers lack trainingin the analysis of trends, and thatdoesn’t help. Worse, design manag-ers in particular have a weaknessfor taking on new management doc-trines in an eclectic and far-too-cozyspirit. Particularly in the UnitedStates, where Tom Peters’ andRobert Waterman Jr.’s In Search ofExcellence (1982) popularized trendycatchphrases for corporations,design managers have drawn uponbestselling management books as aninspiration for thinking about thenext trend in design.

In 1986, just a few years afterPeters and Waterman publishedtheir book, BusinessWeek ran acover story on business fads (seeFigure 1; Byrne, 1986). The cover

alone shows how capricious think-ing about trends can be—with busi-ness managers as well as designmanagers.

At least BusinessWeek hadtongue firmly in cheek. Yet giventhe alacrity with which designmanagers uphold and then forgetabout future trends, it’s worthasking: Where do such trends reallycome from? How can we forecastthe next one, and be sure that itwon’t simply be a transient fad?Most important: How can we makea simple, convincing, intelligent, andun-faddish new argument for design,which absorbs those merits that DThas, but which moves designers ontoward a more practical and yetmore ambitious practice?

How to know when marginal trendsmove into the mainstream

Influential pieces of thought leader-ship typically begin, in design aselsewhere, as more or less marginalmusings. Two examples, one in thesphere of management and one inthe sphere of economics, suggesthow marginal intellectual trendscome to gain popularity. That onlyhappens when their advantages inthe realm of ideas seem to be givenrelevance and substance by newdevelopments in the real world.

‘‘Stakeholders’’

While he was George Bush’s deputysecretary of state, in 2005, currentWorld Bank president Robert

Figure 1. Where were you in 1986? It’s notable that "touchy-feely managers" are still very much

"in" today….


Zoellick gave a speech on China. Hecalled on that country to go furtherthan basic diplomacy in internationalaffairs and instead become a responsi-ble stakeholder, capable of workingwith the United States ‘‘to sustainthe international system’’ (Zoellick,2005). Here, ironically enough, the

‘‘stakes’’ alone suggest the force thatthe idea of ‘‘stakeholder’’ hasacquired. It is used in the manage-ment not only of corporations, butalso of international affairs.

It is used in design manage-ment too. One of the unwrittenrules in DT is that managers of

design projects should, for greaterclarity, seek the participation andsupport of stakeholders. Now, ourinterest here is not to question theconcept of different groups having astake in a design project—even ifthis does tend to imply a ratherharmonious account of power andinfluence in the corporation. Norcan we go into the privileged placethat DT accords to users whencompared with other alleged stake-holders, such as suppliers, retailers,and employees in research anddevelopment (R&D), or employeesin marketing.

No—our interest in stakehold-ers lies around the intellectual his-tory of the idea and, particularly,how it gained mass recognition onlywhen the moment was ripe for it.

Now at the University of Vir-ginia, R. Edward Freeman is one ofthe pioneers of what is now knownas ‘‘stakeholder theory.’’ As he wrotein the California Management Reviewin 1983, the original idea emerged ina somewhat obscure way:

The stakeholder notion is indeed adeceptively simple one. It says thatthere are other groups to whom thecorporation is responsible in addi-tion to stockholders: those groupswho have a stake in the actions ofthe corporation. The word stake-holder, coined in an internal memo-randum at the Stanford ResearchInstitute in 1963, refers to ‘‘thosegroups without whose support the

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D e s i g n M a n a g e m e n t J o u r n a l

organization would cease to exist.’’The list of stakeholders originallyincluded shareowners, employees,customers, suppliers, lenders, andsociety. (Freeman and Reed, 1983,p. 89)

At its inception in 1963, there-fore, ‘‘stakeholder’’ appeared only ina memo at the Stanford ResearchInstitute’s offices in Menlo Park,California.

So the idea has been around along time. How can we trace itscurrent force? As Freeman andReed note, the stakeholder conceptdeveloped only slowly during thelate 1960s and early 1970s. How-ever, in1977 the Wharton Schoolof Business began to research theconcept. By the late 1970s, Freemanwrites, strategic management pro-cesses had to consider ‘‘nontradi-tional business problems’’ in termsof ‘‘government, special interestgroups, trade associations, foreigncompetitors, dissident shareholders,and complex issues such asemployee rights, equal opportunity,environmental pollution, consumerrights, tariffs, government regula-tion, and reindustrialization’’(Freeman and Reed, 1983, p. 90).

Here, in implicitly referring tothe corporate and social priorities,and the tone, of the era of Presi-dent Jimmy Carter, Freeman andReed do a good job of suggestinghow the concept of stakeholdersmoved from memo to the world of‘‘management science.’’

Pressures from the world ofobjective circumstance gave somelegs to what had previously beenlittle more than just a subjective idea.The idea of stakeholders, however,was still confined to academia.Despite Freeman following up his1983 article with a book that becamethe bible of stakeholder theory (Free-man, 1984), the Reagan years provedinhospitable to stakeholders. Theidea had to wait for the ‘‘I feel yourpain’’ sensitivities of President BillClinton (1993–2001) and PrimeMinister Tony Blair (1997–2007).

A key year for the mainstream-ing of ‘‘stakeholder’’ came in 1995.In Europe, the environmentalistlobby group Greenpeace managedto embarrass Shell into dropping itsplans to dispose of its Brent Sparoil buoy in the North Sea. Theepisode vividly confirmed how firmsneed to think about constituenciesbeyond their shareholders, theirmanagers, and their direct custom-ers. In Britain, in the same year,leading British economist WillHutton devoted a whole chapter ofhis bestselling book The State We’reIn to ‘‘stakeholder capitalism.’’ Hut-ton called for the participation ofresponsible trade unions in regulat-ing capitalism, and praised Europeas a patron of environmental stan-dards and rules of governance, thusmaking it ‘‘the stakeholder com-pany’’ (Hutton, 1995, p. xxii).

In America, it was again in1995 that we find Bill Clintonreferring to stakeholders, and signif-

icantly he does so around two keyissues: science and technology, andthe environment. In a March 29thmessage to Congress on science andtechnology, Clinton warmly refersto ‘‘the forums and workshops thathave drawn in thousands of expertsand stakeholders to help developpriorities in areas as diverse as fun-damental science; environmentaltechnology; and health; safety; andfood research’’ (Clinton, 1995a).

Within a week, Clinton wastalking stakeholders to Congressagain. Referring to the Environmen-tal Protection Agency, a regulatorybody, he said, ‘‘EPA is embarkingon a new strategy to make environ-mental and health regulation workbetter and cost less. This new com-mon sense approach has the poten-tial to revolutionize the way wewrite environmental regulations.First, EPA will not seek to adoptenvironmental standards in a vac-uum. Instead, all the affected stake-holders—representatives ofindustry, labor, State governments,and the environmental commu-nity—will be involved from thebeginning’’ (Clinton, 1995b).

After 1995, the stakeholderperspective became integrated intoU.S. government thinking. A searchfor ‘‘stakeholder’’ through the onlinearchive of the American PresidencyProject’s excellent record of publicpapers offers some suggestive results(see Table 1).

Not too much reliance need beput on these numbers. Nevertheless,

Number of mentions

1 4 1 4 7 7 12 3 3 2 3 2 8 7 7 1 24 35

Year

94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 09 10

President

William J. Clinton George W. Bush Barack Obama

Table 1. Number of mentions of the word ‘‘stakeholder’’ in the public papers of U.S. presidents, 1994–2010.

1For a journalistic account of Paul Zak, one

among many recent advocates of ‘‘neuroeco-

nomics,’’ see Mark Honigsbaum, ‘‘Oxytocin:

Could the ‘trust hormone’ rebond our troubled

world?’’ The Observer, August 21, 2011.


the broad upward trend is clearenough. Even with George W.Bush, a Republican, use of ‘‘stake-holder’’ grew toward the end of histerm; and with Barack Obama, ithas gone into overdrive.

The first lesson of this briefintellectual history is simple enough.To predict the next trend in design,design managers need to set up anapparatus to track both mainstreamand peripheral trends, bearing in mindhow changing times can give previouslyperipheral trends a mainstream status.

The second lesson ought to beclear too. Design managers make amistake when they bandy aboutmanagement categories like ‘‘stake-holder’’ without ever interrogatingthe category. If they want to predictthe next trend in design, they needto examine the changing historyand contemporary salience of cate-gories like ‘‘stakeholder.’’ For exam-ple, Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief ofthe marketing services multinationalWPP, noted as early as 2002:

Well over 50 percent of what wedo for our clients in advertising,

media investment management,information and consultancy, publicrelations and public affairs,branding and identity, healthcareand specialist communications isnow directed at internal audiences.Making sure that internalaudiences are onside is criticallyimportant in ensuring strategic andstructural messages are transmittedto customers, clients, suppliers,investors, journalists, analysts,governments and non-governmentalorganizations. (Sorrell, 2002,p. 30).

Well: Is tomorrow’s chiefaudience, or stakeholder, forcommunications design really aninternal one?

When next they try to relate aproject or program in designmanagement to future trends,design managers would do well tothink about the past and the futureevolution of key categories such as‘‘stakeholder.’’ Even the meaning ofa category such as ‘‘innovation’’ haschanged enormously over the years.The chief thing that designmanagers can do to create the Next

Trend in Design is to develop abalanced but critical spirit inrelation to the received categories ofmanagement, innovation, anddesign.

Behavioral economics

In 1970, the British artistic poly-math George Melly memorablydescribed the increasing dominationof Britain by pop culture as a‘‘revolt into style’’ (Melly, 1970).We can again, but more briefly,explore the interplay between ideasand circumstance by looking intothe revolt into style conducted bybehavioral economics in recentyears. This is a worthwhile exer-cise—because one thing designmanagers can be reasonably sureabout as a trend in the future ofdesign is that society will have agrowing obsession with behavior,decision making, psychology, andthe brain.1

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In October 2008, Alan Green-span, once head of the U.S. FederalReserve Bank, testified to a packedmeeting of the House of Represen-tatives’ government oversightcommittee. He admitted himselfshocked by the ‘‘credit crunch’’ thathad been encountered that year,and conceded that he had been par-tially wrong simply to leave the reg-ulation of some financialinstruments to the market. At thatmoment, as Duke University eco-nomics professor Dan Ariely hassuggested, belief in the ultimaterationality of humans, of organiza-tions, and of markets crum-bled—definitively (Ariely, 2009).

The inroads made by behavioraleconomics on the conventional sort,however, began well before Green-span’s mea culpa, and at the strang-est of places: the conservativeRAND Corporation, a Cold Warforecasting house based in SantaMonica, California. There, in 1961,Daniel Ellsberg began his latercareer as an insider dissenter inWashington by flouting some stan-dard axioms. He proposed that,when making a decision in the faceof ambiguity, a person might nottake what might be the expectedposition—that of ‘‘maximizing a lin-ear combination of pay-offs andprobabilities’’ (Ellsberg, 1961).

That proposition significantlysubverted the status quo in eco-nomic theory. Later in the 1960s,two Israeli psychologists, DanielKahneman and Amos Tversky,

went farther down the path takenby Ellsberg.

By 1979, after Kahnemanbegan a collaboration with RichardThaler, he and Tversky outlinedjust how oddly people make deci-sions in the face of certainty, proba-bility, losses, and gains. Partlyfunded—strangely enough, oncemore—by the Advanced ResearchProjects Agency of the U.S.Department of Defense, the paperused the responses of university stu-dents and staff to hypotheticalchoice problems. It attacked the‘‘rational choice’’ axioms of eco-nomic conduct applied by Nobeleconomists Milton Friedman andKenneth Arrow, describing ‘‘severalclasses of choice problems’’ in whichpreferences ‘‘systematically’’ violatedthose axioms (Kahneman and Tver-sky, 1979). The paper effectivelyoverturned the neoclassical frame-work in economics, and helped winKahneman a Nobel Prize in 2002.

The Nobel Prize meant recog-nition for those who had discoveredthe irrational side of decision mak-ing. But for this idea to be pro-pelled into the world of mainstreameconomic discussion, a wholeupheaval in the world economy hadto occur, in the shape of the creditcrunch. Only since 2008, when theU.S. economists Richard Thalerand Cass Sunstein published Nudge:Improving Decisions about Health,Wealth, and Happiness, has the ideareally grown that the state’s job isto act as a paternalistic ‘‘choice

architect,’’ nudging feckless and irra-tional consumers and taxpayers tomake ‘‘informed decisions.’’

The special role given to irra-tionality in decision making hadbeen entertained in the early 1960s,and it gained Nobel Laureate statusin 2002. But the Byzantine struc-ture and eventual collapse of WallStreet around 2008 was necessaryfor this previously marginal intellec-tual trend to become the stuff ofconversation all over the West.

Critiquing bestseller books on ideascan help you control the future

To forecast the next trend indesign, design managers must mobi-lize their critical faculties. Theyneed to situate today’s bestsellers onideas in a careful historical context,and subject them to an equally care-ful critique. That way, they can syn-thesize their own independentview, the better to impose it, as bestthey can, on the future—ratherthan allow the future simply toimpose on them.

A short summary of an argu-ment with a bestseller on trends,Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zal-esne’s Microtrends: The Small ForcesBehind Tomorrow’s Big Changes(2007) may help. Penn, worldwidechief executive of the PR firm Bur-son-Marsteller, is a longtime poll-ster, and larger than life: He hasbeen a key adviser to leaders asvaried as Israeli prime ministerMenachem Begin, Bill and Hillary


Clinton, Bill Gates, and Tony Blair.His book sets about identifying‘‘small, intense subgroups,’’ completewith ‘‘needs and wants unmet.’’ Inthis cause, its basic thesis is simple:

The very idea that there are a fewhuge trends out there, determininghow America and the world work, isbreaking down. There are no longera couple of megaforces [sic] sweepingus all along. Instead, America andthe world are being pulled apart byan intricate maze of choices, accu-mulating in ‘‘microtrends’’—small,under-the-radar forces that caninvolve as little as 1 per cent of thepopulation, but which are powerfullyshaping our society. (Penn and Zal-esne, 2007, p. xii)

For Microtrends, it was thedefault of just 1.7 percent of U.S.mortgages that, by precipitating thecredit crunch, brought the wholeU.S. economy down (Penn andZalesne, 2007, p. xiv).

Microtrends errs because ittreats the influence of marginaltrends in an unmediated way. Wefind here a distant echo of our oldfriend, the butterfly in the SouthAtlantic that waves its wings andsuddenly Affects Everything. WhatMicrotrends neglects is a key ‘‘mega-force’’: society’s growing fear of risk.In the years before 2008, thatfear made the United States as awhole and U.S. firms prefer whateconomist Tyler Cowen calls‘‘dubious financial innovations’’ to

technological innovations (Cowen,2011, p. 45). So it was failures inthe productive parts of the U.S.economy that gave mortgages thesway they had. America’s moneyeconomy stretched way beyond themeans of the real economy. Lead-ing-edge, world-beating designs andtechnologies, long fielded by Amer-ica over a broad front, were notgenerally seen as a tradition worthrenewing. With the exception of itstriumphs in the Internet, Cowenwrites, the United States was miss-ing out on a lot of innovation.

Microtrends ignored all this.Instead, from ‘‘cougars’’ (olderwomen who date younger men) andon through 81 other market niches,the bite-sized demography ofMicrotrends gave millions an influen-tial capsule guide to a superficial kindof trend watching—not just in theUnited States and the United King-dom, but also in Germany and Japan.

The moral of this tale fordesign managers is straightforward.Small trends can come to be impor-tant, but they depend on other,mediating trends for this to happen.More broadly, design managerswould do well to collect and suspectmore forecasts of the future and tobe particularly discriminating aboutbestselling books on ideas.

Five principles that can assist in thefuture

Looking at the state of design anddesigners today, we can derive some

five principles that can help us goingforward. I say ‘‘principles’’ becausealthough these are neglected inmuch of today’s discussion ondesign, they were important to nine-teenth-century founders of design(John Ruskin, William Morris, andothers), and could do with debatingtoday. We also like principlesbecause, when animating particularpositions on design and in designmanagement, they represent anactivist and designerly effort everybit as imposing as the efforts trum-peted by those who advocate Greendesign, and those who are alwaysoutlining new manifestos for design.

Principle 1: Improve basic design

skills

The rise of Chinese, Korean, andIndian designers has very clear impli-cations for their Western counter-parts. The basic skills of design willincreasingly become a world com-modity—a bit like accountancy skillshave long been part of the taken-for-granted baggage of business. As aresult, designers the world over willhave to be very good at differentiat-ing their basic skills from those ofother designers.

What do we mean by basicskills? At the very least, we expectthe ability to

d Draw and visualize design ideas,with or without the help of IT

d Make prototypes that takeaccount of functional, technical,and cost requirements

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US 3.6 12.3

UK 4.5 15.9

Japan 0.2 23.2

Germany 2.4 about 7

France 1.9 13.7

Brazil 6.9 about 30

Russia 9.0 not available

India 8.4 28.6

Indonesia 4.6 40.6

China 6.5 negligible

S Africa 5.4 11.6

Source: Organisation for Economic Cooperation

and Development; Wolfram Alpha.

Table 2. Rates of inflation, selected countries,

July 2011 and 1975.

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d Execute design ideas with astrong eye to aesthetics

Although it downplays thesignificance of style, Tim Brown’saccount of design thinkingrightly stresses the importance ofvisualization, and of prototypes(Brown, 2009). However, the accentabove is on active, thoughtful skillsof the hand. Even literacy, numer-acy, and communication skills arenot here, because we are talkingabout the more fundamental talentof designing.

In pursuit of really high stan-dards in the manipulation of mate-rials and media, the good designmanagers of the future will welcomethe end of superstar designers.They will be skeptical about themore elusive claims of DT—andabout the equally elusive languageoften used by design schools. Formany years, we have had plenty ofpoor theory in design, design man-agement, and design schools. Theleast we can demand of the NextTrend in Design is that we reviveinterest in the practical craft, thetrade, of designing.

All around the world, and evenin Asia, there is a cultural sense ofdrift—in the realm of design too.But designers must, to deadline,physically and ⁄ or electronicallyimplement their ideas for thoseideas to be judged, no matter inwhich court.

One can be tolerant of differentdesign solutions. But make no mis-

take: Tolerance, in design manage-ment as elsewhere, involves theexercise of powers of discrimination.Some design portfolios are good,but too many are not nearly goodenough. The struggle for betterbasic skills in design means makingjudgments about design.

It is time that the design worldrevived design’s basic bias to action.It is time that the design world wastougher with itself about its corecompetence.

Principle 2: Design for lower prices

There is no need to overdo theissue of inflation today. It is truethat, in 2011, rates of price infla-tion were buoyant in many parts ofthe world. But inflation today hasneither the scale nor thepervasiveness that it did in theearly 1970s—the period of‘‘stagflation,’’ when rates of inflationwere high, both West and East (seeTable 2).

Despite the mixed picture oninflation today, design managerswould be wise to put a specialemphasis on achieving quality, butat a low cost.

Countless companies andcustomers across the world havebeen forced to tighten belts andcount the pennies. When designmanagers propose solutions thatslash lifecycle costs, clients sit upand take notice. While DT is rarelyinterested in cutting costs, doingjust that is a great way to create

measurable benefits for firms andfor users.

In fact, there is more to designfor lower costs. As the London-based strategist Robert Bau haspointed out, lowering costs is aproductivity strategy (Bau, 2011).To qualify as a genuine Next Trendin Design, cutting costs will mean acommitment to design ideas andpractical systems that improveproductivity, convenience, and theuse of time.

It is the business of designersnot to make more work, but toobviate more work. In this context,the idea that designers shouldengage with labor-intensive technol-ogies in the pursuit of ‘‘greenjobs’’—making expensive, environ-mentally conscious goods and


services for the middle class—deserves critical scrutiny.2

Recycling, for example, shouldbe done through efficient, mecha-nized processes, not as a personallabor of penance. Similarly, employ-ing manual laborers to ‘‘weatherize’’homes is not as robust a solution asdesigning and building a new roundof zero-emissions nuclear reactors.

Designers and design managersshould take pride in making goodsand services that work well, but areas cheap to buy as possible. Designmanagers always need to keep theirfeet on the ground, in the realworld of customer preference; andthat kind of preference very muchincludes a preference for low prices.

Principle 3: Deepen internationalism

While Asian designers know quite abit about Western culture anddesign, Western designers know toolittle of the East. That has to change.Whatever the flaws of DT, its orien-tation to users of design, if consis-tently followed through, must mean afight for greater insight into the East.

In part, the need to know moreabout and uphold the achievementsof foreign designers stems from theexigencies of globalization. Western

2A recent survey of the U.S. experience in mak-

ing green jobs, conducted by a liberal and sym-

pathetic London think tank, concluded that

‘‘the US experience shows energy efficiency

schemes have struggled to create ‘green jobs,’

both in quantity and quality.’’ See Clare McNeil

with Hanna Thomas, ‘‘Green Expectations: Les-

sons from the US Green Jobs Market,’’ Institute

for Public Policy Research, July 2011, p. 23.

firms such as Johnson ControlsInternational, LEGO, and AlbertHeijn are becoming adept at gettingvarious parts of the design processhandled in the East. A city such asLondon can play host to design stu-dios drawn from Nokia, Nissan,Samsung, and Yamaha, while therest of the United Kingdom hostsdesign teams from Black & Decker,Herman Miller, and Tata. In Japantoo, a company such as Panasonichas globalized its management ofdesign; whereas, in the past, Pana-sonic’s Japanese offices designedpretty much everything the com-pany made, today Japanese teamsdevelop just 10–20 percent of theitems that Panasonic sells in emerg-ing markets (The Economist, 2010).

Internationalism in the manage-ment of design is a realistic responseto the way the world economy worksnowadays. Yet it is more than that.In the quest for discrimination indesign, for great basic skills and lowprices, the internationalist designmanager will have little time forcross-border double standards.Everyone in the world deserves thevery best that design can bring.

Once more, this principledemands a critical attitude towardcurrent developments. Take, forexample, the trend toward reverseinnovation, where lessons from low-cost designs aimed at emerging mar-kets are touted as the way forwardnot just there, but also back in theWest. Now, if famous examples setby General Electric are to be believed,

there is much for the West to gainfrom the East here. GE’s $1,000handheld electrocardiogram devicefor rural India and its $15,000 porta-ble, PC-based, and ‘‘software-centric’’ultrasound medical imaging machinesfor rural China are now sold in theUnited States, where they are stimu-lating new applications for such prod-ucts (Immelt et al., 2009).

This transfer of innovation fromEast to West is fine so long as neitherthe East nor the West loses sight ofthe need to pursue the very best tech-nology and design solutions—every-where in the world and, sometimes,regardless of cost. In 2003, ClaytonChristensen and Michael Raynor, intheir book The Innovator’s Dilemma,eloquently spoke up for ‘‘goodenough’’ ink-jet printers as an innova-tion that disrupted the up-marketworld of laser printers made byincumbent companies. Christensenand Raynor eulogized products thatwere cheap, simple, convenient, small,and portable, even if their perfor-mance was low. Yet if ink-jet printershave their place in the firmament ofproperly designed products, so dolaser printers. With Asia and Africa inparticular, internationalist designmanagers have a duty to spell out thelimitations of second-best.

In the developed world, govern-ment and nongovernmental organi-zations, educators, media, anddesign commentators like to bringweak technologies to the ThirdWorld. The British governmentand Body Shop founders Gordon

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and Anita Roddick have backedwind-up radios. From the Schum-acher Centre, near Rugby, in theWest Midlands of the United King-dom, the charity Practical Actionfavors hand-operated water pumps.In Miami, Florida, the One LaptopPer Child Association and in Cam-bridge, Massachusetts, the OLPCFoundation have since 2005 beenon a ‘‘long march from radical the-ory to reality’’ to ‘‘create educationalopportunities for the world’s poor-est children by providing each childwith a rugged, low-cost, low-power,connected laptop with content andsoftware designed for collaborative,joyful, self-empowered learning.’’3

No doubt the intentions behindthese projects are good, buthopefully they do not herald theNext Trend in Design. Designmanagers must recognize that thesemeasures are no substitute fordecent national and internationalsystems of electricity supply,irrigation, and computerization.No ‘‘Transition Town,’’ dedicatedto dealing with the challenges ofclimate change and peak oil, cangive Africans the energy they need.4

3For more about the OLPC Foundation, see

http://laptop.org/.4The Transition Towns movement began in

March 2007 when Totnes, in South Devon,

England, decided to run its own currency, the

Totnes pound, alongside pounds sterling. See

http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/. Transition

initiatives can also be found in Granja Viana,

Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in Mpumalanga, South

Africa: see http://www.transitionnetwork.org

for more information.

No amount of good design canmake a mosquito net truly effectiveagainst malaria. The Next Trend inInternational Design cannot be con-descendingly to impose dumbed-down designs on the South and theEast. That would be to lower stan-dards in those regions, and, inadver-tently or not, to make their futureevolution slow and narrow. Fordeveloping countries to embark onmore emancipatory options will notbe easy; but that’s a prospect forthe future much less utopian thanto go on believing that ‘‘appropriate’’or ‘‘intermediate’’ technology is theway out of their difficulties.

It is not hard to read theUnited Nations’ Millennium Devel-opment Goals as unambitious.5 Itis wrong to reflect those goals withquestions for developing countriessuch as ‘‘How might we find low-cost alternatives to wood-burningstoves in urban slums?’’ or ‘‘Howmight we create an infant incuba-tor that does not need an electricalsupply?’’ If this is design thinking,it is a very shallow kind of think-ing. The relevant question fordeveloping countries is, rather:How can we explain the case for,plan, and help do the design detailof working, maintainable nationalsystems for energy supply and

5For a critique of the UN Millennium Develop-

ment Goals, see James Woudhuysen and

Joe Kaplinsky, Energise! A Future for Energy

Innovation (London: Beautiful Books, 2009),

Chapter 7.

transmission that are every bit aspowerful and universal as those inthe West? From the holistic pointof view so beloved of DT, itshould be obvious that, in develop-ing countries as elsewhere, energyinfrastructure ought to be therenot just to relieve the plight ofpoor families, but to dynamizelarge organizations.

Principle 4: Uphold science and

technology

What the world needs now is morescience and technology, not less.Every design manager should takethat to heart. Where, after the2011 nuclear accidents at Fukushi-ma, Japan, were the clear-eyed mapsintegrated with charts of radiation?Where, after more than 10 years ofthe Human Genome Project, arethe memorable graphic images of it,images that both explain and cap-ture the popular imagination?When did designers last give Men-deleev’s Periodic Table the inspiredtreatments it has had from theAmerican comic singer and mathe-matician, Tom Lehrer (in his song‘‘The Elements,’’ 1959), or theItalian writer and chemist, PrimoLevi (in his book The PeriodicTable, 1975)?

The Next Trend in Designcould be about ensuring thatnew recruits to corporate designfunctions are properly curiousabout science and technology. Yes,designers need to learn morehistory, social psychology, forecast-


ing. But they make a mistake if theyaffect, in the manner of DT, to besuperior to science and technology.If they are not attracted to theromance of R&D, or to thecontribution it can make, theycannot be designers or designmanagers fit for a new century.

Designers and design managersneed to open up to corporate R&Ddepartments. The remaining skilledexperts in white coats that theWest can muster deserve a ferventcollaboration, not a dismissivecompetition. These people are notgeeks, techies, nerds, or codewarriors. They are subject tobudget cuts, are often heroes, andmust be learned from. At the sametime, designers and design managersneed to eschew both glib techno-philia and glib technophobia. Theyshould interrogate the boosterishmarket populism of Wired in IT,and of Grist in matters environmen-tal. But they should question, too,the pessimistic advocates of a‘‘steady state’’ and even a ‘‘degrowth’’economy.6

Designers and design managersneed to adopt a discriminating atti-tude toward the new technologies,just as much as they strike the sameposture in relation to all other phe-

6Voted the best green think tank of 2011, the

Center for the Advancement of the Steady

State Economy (CASSE), in Arlington, Virginia,

favors a steady-state economy. For its defini-

tion of steady state, the debt it owes E. F.

Schumacher, and its concept of ‘‘degrowth,’’

visit http://steadystate.org/.

nomena relevant to their profes-sional practice. Yet they do alsohave a duty to explain and advocatefar-reaching scientific research andopen-ended technological experi-mentation. In the West, pressuresto delay, take fright about, orunderfund science and technologydeserve resistance. Design managersneed to know who their friendsare, and should improve theirknowledge of scientific andtechnological trends.

Principle 5: See older people as quick

learners

Despite DT’s emphasis on endusers, the literature that surroundsit is weak on older people. Yet inJapan, Italy, Germany, and evenChina, design managers will meetan aging population in the yearsand decades to come. Meanwhile, inthe United Kingdom, the numberof years that 65-year-olds canexpect to live without a disability isrising very rapidly (see Table 3).

How should designersmake the best of these kinds oftrends?

The real point to grasp is thatolder people today are not ‘‘just asyoung as they feel.’’ It is too

2000-2 2004-6 2006-8

Males 8.9 10.2 10.5

Females 10.4 10.7 10.9

Source: UK Office for National Statistics, 2010.

Table 3. Years English 65-year-olds can expect

to be free of disability, 2002–2008.

trendy to think this, and too vague.This view neglects the very realphysiological changes that set inonce the human body turns 40years old.

On the other hand, it is alsotoo superficial to confine older peo-ple to a stereotype that sees theiratrophied experiences from the pastas the key to their specificity. It isnice that certain British retail chainsemploy old people because of theirgeneration’s familiarity with how toput up a shelf, or because of theirexperience of an earlier, more civilkind of customer service. Yet expe-rience, as Oscar Wilde’s novel ThePicture of Dorian Grey suggests, isby itself of no ethical value; it issimply the name we give our mis-takes. What counts are not justexperiences of the past, but also theability to learn from these, andfrom mistakes, so as to navigate thefuture adroitly.

Today’s older people possessnot just experiences, but also aninquiring outlook. Through theirexperience, older people can oftenfind solutions for tomorrow’s prob-lems faster than young people.Design managers could start anexcellent Next Trend in Designonce they make a proper, neitherstarry-eyed nor patronizing, esti-mate of the talents of older custom-ers. They should take seriously, too,the talents of older workers whouse new designs in the workplace,and the talents of older designers asemployees.

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Conclusion

This article has tried to give a hintof where trends come from. It hasalso given some guidance, if notabout how the next intellectualtrend will shape up, then certainly,in a spirit of activism, about whatdesign managers ought to beencouraging as trends in design.

The Next Trend in Designshould, we have argued, be back-to-basics, counter-inflationary, interna-tionalist, pro-technology, and pro-older people. This argument is basedon today’s realities, but seeks to gobeyond them. Discontent, as Wilderemarked in his play A Woman ofNo Importance, is the first step in theprogress of a man or a nation.Equally, in the Maxims for Revolu-tionists in his play Man and Super-man, George Bernard Shaw observed:

The reasonable man adapts himselfto the world; the unreasonable onepersists in trying to adapt the worldto himself. Therefore all progressdepends on the unreasonable man.

Tough though it may appear tobe, the perspective set out herecould form a simple, convincing,intelligent, and un-faddish newargument for the discipline ofdesign itself. Here’s why:

First, the perspective puts theaccent on the visual and functionalexecution of design, in a way thatanybody from senior manager toperson in the street can recognize.

Second, it tries to make pur-chases cheaper, and sees a role fortechnology in helping that processalong.

Third, while it can cheapenproducts and services, the NextTrend in Design refuses to cheapenthe lives of people in emergingmarkets.

Fourth, the Next Trend seeks apowerful new alliance with scientistsand technologists who want not toameliorate disease, but eliminate it;who want top-class infrastructurefor all, not Band Aid measures thatwork around the lack of infrastruc-ture; who want the best, notsecond-best.

Last, the Next Trend in Designorientates to senior citizens asactive powers, not as passivevictims.

With this trend, the compassfor design is neither stuck instop-the-world environmentalism,nor spinning through any numberof fanciful design futures. Naturally,the needle of this compass willchange position, with changingtimes. But I believe that, rightnow, it points firmly in the direc-tion of a better tomorrow—fordesign, for designers, and for theworld. &

Reprint #11061WOU27

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Author biography

James Woudhuysen is a professorof forecasting and innovation at DeMontfort University, Leicester, UK.In 1968, before graduating from theUniversity of Sussex with a degreein physics, he helped installBritain’s first computer-controlledcar park. He also spent time as

editor of Design magazine andcofounded Blueprint magazinebefore becoming chief of worldwidemarket intelligence for PhilipsConsumer Electronics in theNetherlands and director ofproduct designers for SeymourPowell. Now an independentconsultant, he has written for manypublications, including AppliedErgonomics, Computing, CulturalTrends, The Economist, The Instituteof Mechanical Engineers Journal,Long Range Planning, New CivilEngineer, The Times, and TheGuardian, and has written twobooks, Energise! A Future for EnergyInnovation and Big Potatoes: TheLondon Manifesto for Innovation. Heis also a contributor to BBC Radio.His clients have included Amadeus,Brother, Geothermal Engineering,International Federation ofAutomotive Engineering Societies,Orange, O2, Mitsubishi, Navteq,Novartis, Roca, Sage, and SAP.

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