The winners of this year's Designer of the Year are:

Tham Khai Meng, the Worldwide Creative Director of Olgivy & Mather, New York

Chris Lee, founder of Asylum Creative (I had lunch with him and he's great talent. Lee also spoke in Mandarin to his dad when he accepted the award--the only person in the evening to do so)

Koichiro Ikebuchi, director of Atelier Ikebuchi

Look Boon Gee, managing director of LOOK Architects

The US equivalent is to have the annual winners of the National Design Awards go the White House and be thanked by the President's wife. So the message in the US is, what? Women know design and real men aren't interested?

Here's the talk:

Life in Beta: How Design Thinking Can Help Us Navigate Through This Time of Continuous, Cascading Change.

"Thank you. President Obama was just in Asia, announcing that he is the first Pacific US President, having been raised in Hawaii. I think a more historically significant “first” is the fact that for the first time in modern history, Asia is leading the global economy out of recession, indeed the worst recession since the Great Depression. Asia—I should say Continental Asia -- is growing faster, producing more millionaires per year, and amassing the biggest hoard of US dollars, than North America, Europe, Latin America and even the Middle East.
Totally impressive. And, I would like to argue here today, totally problematic. The past and even the present are not good predictors of the future. Reliably repeating past success ever more efficiently is a poor predictor of a new, valid future. And we are entering a new future, a very different future, where the low-cost, efficient production of things and services for export to a single subset of overseas consumers--American consumers-- may not generate the same kind of economic value and prosperity as it has in the past. This may be especially true for high-income societies such as Singapore, Korea and coastal China.

I would like to provoke you today by arguing that the engineering/efficiency/reliability model of past Singaporean success needs to be augmented with a new model based on culture/generation and validity.
So allow me to sketch out a narrative that may challenge some of Singapore’s and Asia’s assumptions about it’s future. Let’s talk about Designomics, a term I first heard about out of Korea just a month ago. I like it because both parts of the word—design and economics--are undergoing vast changes. The global economy is emerging from the Great Recession, with a very different shape, a very different trajectory and a very different set of growth engines. Design is also emerging from the recent crisis, with a different form, function and name--Design Thinking. A design-based business model and a design-based economy may well provide the best new opportunities for creating value, growth, revenues, profits, jobs and wealth for the decades ahead.
Why do I say this? Because we now live in a world of constant, cascading change, which is eroding our business and social institutions, reshaping our careers and remaking our lives. Powerful geopolitical, demographic, technological, and economic forces are disrupting life as we know it. Old behaviors and methods of generating growth no longer work as well as they once did. Traditional business and economic models based on making efficient choices among existing options within stable business and economic systems are starting to lose their value for many companies and countries.
Increasingly, people are turning to Design Thinking as a new paradigm to understand the needs and desires of changing cultures and create new options that never existed before. It is the ability to generate new concepts that lead to new products, services and even social systems of great value. In a life always in beta that doesn’t pause or end, Design Thinking is providing a pathway to the future.
This speech, Life in Beta, will examine the major forces changing our lives today and show how Design Thinking provides a package of tools, methodologies and perspectives that has relevance to all our social systems--business, health, education, entertainment.

First, I will discuss three of the five most powerful global forces at work transforming our lives--geopolitics (the rise of Asia and fall of the West); demographics (the rise of the Gen Y generation (which is the demographic group between 16 and 27 years old) and the decline of the Baby Boomers); and innovation (the rise of social media and the spread of new digital cultures). The other two global forces at work are mega-cities and global warming.

Secondly, I will examine the rise of Design Thinking and explain how it is the most appropriate means of generating economic growth today. I will explain how the tools and methodologies have evolved so that Design has moved from creating artifacts to shaping human interactions; from focusing on materiality to engaging social systems. I will end the talk with a suggestion that the organic, generative, culture-based model of Design Thinking may be an appropriate model for Singapore in addition to the mechanical, efficiency-based engineering model.

Let’s begin with the forces sweeping through global society. First, the rise and fall of nations and what it means for culture and commerce. Last month, the internet regulator, ICANN, announced that it would allow web addresses to be written in non-Latin languages. In effect, it reflects the end of English dominance of the web. Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Arabic speakers will be able to address their email in their own language. I predict this move will go down in history as being as important as the dollar going off the gold standard in 1973. In fact, they are two data points on an historic arc representing a trend—the economic rise of Asia vis a vis the West.

So what does this mean for the future? When one nation has the economic, technological and political power to lead world society, it’s tends to dominate much of world culture. Music, education, economic models, art, political systems. We know this. What we sometimes forget is that the homogeneity of world culture also makes it easier for world commerce. You only have to worry about a handful of cultures that you do business in—the dominant one, and the others that copy the dominant one.
Here is the talk that I delivered at the Singapore Design Thinking Symposium: Life in Beta--How Design Thinking Can Help Us Navigate Through This Time of Continuous, Cascading Change.

Today, the dominant global culture, the US, and specifically, the dominant consuming culture, the American consumer, are in retreat. American consumers have woken up to find that they’ve lost a decade—maybe two-- of prosperity and that debt and speculation allowed them to live far beyond their means. For tens of millions of Americans, globalization has meant immiseration. Blue collar, white collar, knowledge workers—all have lost. The S&P 500, even after recovering dramatically, is no higher than it was in 1999. A lost decade.

So the main driver of Asian growth for the past 3 decades, the homogeneous culture of the American consumer, is fading as a force. At the same time, we see rising prosperity around the world. We are moving from global cultural homogeneity to diversity as we move from geo-economic hegemony to multiplicity and multi-polarity. To do business now means understanding many cultures. This means that employing standard business practices ever more efficiently may well generate less and less value.

Let’s now talk about the second big trend, demographics. The rise of the Gen Y or Millenial generation and fall of the Baby Boomer demographic is perhaps even more important than the rise and fall of nations. Each Millenial generation in each country varies of course, but most share a distinctive culture that is very different from older generations. In the US, Gen Y has a unique and powerful culture—urban, collaborative, participatory, green, generative—it likes to use tools and make things. It is also pan-ethnic, trans-gender and trans-national. Millenials in China share many of these traits—but they are very nationalistic and are pro-ethnic. I don’t know what are the cultural characteristics of the Gen Y generation in Singapore, except that the gap between them and their parents is probably much wider than the gap between their parents and their grandparents.

Millenials in the US tend to live in a culture of free information that is instantly available, with constant communication with friends that is global in scope. They live on social media digital platforms that are ever changing. They inhabit a participatory media that gives them the tools to create, share and reappropriate content, including their own fluid identities. I call Millenial culture a Learn-Share-Make culture.

In the US, the Gen Y generation is already changing how society shops, brands, communicates, educates, delivers health care, transports itself and even raises families. The biggest changes appear to be coming in service delivery—of health and education in particular. This Learn-Make-Share generation is already causing a de-massing and disaggregating of all kinds of service delivery in the US. Millenials live in social media and would just as soon have their classes and their medical care delivered through iPhone applications than go to big building and listen to sages on stages.
The third transforming force in our lives is digital social media. For the first time in history, it is now easy and inexpensive to create our own communities, our own cultures, anywhere, anytime. We can belong to hundreds of cultures of our choosing, not just the one of our birth. Social media is creating tens of thousands of digital cultures every year—and they are cultures you need to understand and engage if you want to sell them products or services. We all know there are 40,000 villages in, but 40,000 digital villages are created every week on the web. I’ve heard there is one for Mommies with twins in Brooklyn. Do you know their culture?

These three global forces—the rise and fall of nations, the rise and fall of generations and the spread of digital social media—are combining to transform our world and especially our global economy. We are on the cusp of a New Normal. This New Normal situation in the world will need a new paradigm and fresh tools and methods to generate economic growth and prosperity.

Which brings me to Design. During the time that big political, demographic and technological forces of change have been reshaping the global economy, the field of Design has been evolving into a serious discipline that can help us navigate today’s economic uncertainties and generate value for tomorrow’s products and services.

Design has made a revolutionary journey in the past decade from a narrow field able to focus on the making of stuff to the design of social systems and the transformation of healthcare, transportation, supply-chain, education, not to mention shopping. Today, corporations are asking designers to design brand strategies as well as the products and services composing the brands themselves. And not just companies. The Mayo Clinic and the Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer hospital are using Design to change the way doctors relate to patients while branding themselves nationally as elite medical service deliverers.

How so? Building on the user-centric roots of industrial design, Design has an ethnographic core that allows businessmen and others to connect with any and all cultures, real and digital, anywhere around the world. And Design’s ability to learn from these cultural connections and translate that data into new concepts for products and services gives it the power to generate revenue and profits in a global economic environment of deepening uncertainty. If Six Sigma and management thinking were our guides to efficient choice-making and profit maximization in yesterday’s era of global hegemony, stability and homogeneity, then in an era of global heterogeneity, instability and diversity, Design Thinking can be our guide to deep consumer understanding, visualization of possibilities, generative option-making and strategic brand finding.

So what does this mean for Singapore, especially as the world moves into economic recovery? Technology used to dominate innovation. Today, technology is everywhere and accessible to all. Design Thinking is far more important to innovation than technology. Finding relevance and meaning to people living in a multiplicity of real and digital cultures is the new key to success. There were many touch-screen cell phones available in the world when Apple came out with the iPhone. Motorola had a good one in China. But Apple designed the touch-screen platform to make it so easy to use and opened the platform to developers who created 100,000 applications for millions of consumers. Empathy. Connection. Engagement. Interaction. Options. That’s Design. In the US, the iPhone is the social media, digital platform of choice for Gen Yers. The entire economy is becoming “iPhonized, “ leading to what I call the “iPhonization of service.” Young people want service delivered over Facebook or iPhone or MySpace where they can instantly access it, share it, change it and use it. That means designing games, tax-advice, healthcare, movies and educational curricula so they can be delivered on a social media platform that is key to their individual culture. Knowing their culture, just like knowing the culture of a poor southern Indian farming village, is the key to understanding how to create the new and generate value.

Take the Kindle, the electronic book delivery device by Amazon. The Kindle is the first online technology platform embraced by the elderly in America. Why? It was designed to do just one thing very easily—it delivers and presents books cheaply and easily online in a way that people in their 60s and 70s can use. There’s no interaction, no color, no video. The Kindle provides print on an electronic page, exactly what the elderly, book-reading elderly demographic wants. Designing for specific demographics and their own cultures is crucial when generations are so far apart in their use of technologies.

The challenge ahead for Singapore is to add a new competency, a Design Thinking competency, to its excellent model of efficient engineering. The challenge is to
learn to understand cultures all over the real and digital world in order to deliver what people want, wherever they live, and on their platform of choice. This is where economic value is created today.
I would like to end on a philosophical note. One reason why people are turning to Design Thinking today is that it is essentially optimistic. Design has a future-facing perspective and a tool-using core competence. The whole purpose of Design is to make the new. We live a life of constant beta, a place of uncertainty and cascading change. In this new world, Design Thinking can be our navigator. We should embrace it."

That's it. What do you think?

Kim Saxe, the director of The Nueava School talked about her founding a Design Thinking grade school in Palo Alto (where else), inspired by David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO and the D-School. It was mind-blowing to see the kind of creative work kids can do when given the chance and direction. It's Design Thinking as pedagogy--helping students develop skills to solve complex problems creatively.

Now I'm off to dinner with the Singapore President who is presenting the President's Design Award tonight to Chris Lee of Asylum. It's the opening of the Singapore Design Festival, a paen to Singaporean design. Very cool.

Now Fareed is saying what we concede to be increasingly true--the U.S. is losing its edge in innovation. And with that loss, comes the loss of geopolitical clout. President Obama's trip to China is about soothing our banker, not pressuring for civil rights.

Americans are finding it hard to accept their decline in the world. They can't admit that smart Asians and Europeans and others are not coming to the U.S. nearly as much as they used to for study. Or that there are increasingly more innovative startups outside the U.S. than inside the country. They don't see all the people who got advanced degrees at U.S. universities going home to greater opportunities.

Our policy-makers find it hard to understand the consequences of U.S. corporations outsourcing their R&D to China and India or the firing of top-rate engineers, scientists and designers in the U.S. so they can be replaced by cheaper brains overseas.

Mike Mandel has a great cover story out that says "Over the past year, U.S. employment of scientists and engineers—the people who create the next generation of products and make the U.S. more competitive over the long term—has fallen by 6.3%, according to a BusinessWeek tabulation of unpublished data. Yet overall employment has fallen only 4.1%." Corporations are firing designers, engineers, scientists while cutting back on employee education—outsourcing just about everything overseas. To what consequence?

In Washington, they don't see the consequences of an immigration policy that favors the uneducated over the educated. Or an economy based on illegal cheap labor rather than one based on high-value skills.

Perhaps the wake-up call is the growing realization that we have just had what we said we would never have—A Lost Decade. Just like Japan, we're waking up to see the S&P 500 recover to 10,000--where it stood in 1999. We're discovering that our past decade of prosperity was bought with debt and speculation, not innovation and productivity.

I'm not totally despairing. Gen Y is a Learn-Share-Make generation that appears very comfortable with a Design Thinking-type of collaborative, iterative, generative paradigm necessary for innovation. Their use of social media platforms and a general comfort level with digital technology makes Gen Y a born-again innovation generation. I see it almost every day at the Parsons School of Design and so do my buddies at Stanford, the IIT Institute of Design, CCA, the Rotman School of Management, CMU, the U of Cincinnatti and dozen other places of higher learning in the US. They are a tool-using generation that likes to remix and makes new stuff.

I don't see much of this at the policy-making level. President Obama is making some good moves in the direction but not nearly enough. City mayors are way behind their conterparts in Asia and Europe. And as for our business elite, I mostly do despair. There is a big nostalgia binge for Peter Drucker because he saw management as a practice, a calling, like a doctor, with all the social responsibility to employees and community and nation that the notion implies. What we now have is a business elite divorced from nation, community and employees, working only for "shareholders" who belong to a narrow speculative financial culture. It's hard to make innovation work in that environment.

Maybe the Boomers who are messing up badly should all just move over and let Gen Y take power now.

It's got an interesting program and the audience promises to be a mix of government, private industry, and local creative folks.

Singapore is pretty much an engineering/technology driven society and my job will be to explain how it will take more than efficiency and technology to prosper in the future. I will try and explain that it will take empathy and the ability to understand real and digital consumer cultures, tools to iterate and visualize concepts, creative methods of generating new options where none existed before and a desire to venture into the unknown rather than rummage in the declining present.

Should be very interesting.

Here are my favorite quotes. If you were in the audience, post yours.

Roger Martin: "The business world is full of two kinds of people--builders and traders. Over the past 20-30 years, traders have increasingly ruled. They receive the highest compensation. We need to tame the traders."

Tim Brown: Paraphrase here--"We can use analytics to generate new questions, not just answers. Data visualization is very powerful."

Me: "I don't see any intelligent design in the design of design thinking."

Roger Martin: "27% of all graduate education is in business."

Will Setliff: paraphrase--"We have to reeducate people out of business schools to work at Target. We have classes and they learn what they don't in school."

Roger Martin: "We have to change the way we teach the scientific method. We have to ask, What is the question?"

Someone: "We need a Montessori MBA."

I started off the discussion by saying that I was on Twitter asking people what I should ask Roger before coming and 3/4 of questions involved what to do to get Design Thinking introduced into their organizations. So I asked Roger why we are still at the stage of just beginning to bring Design into business culture. His answer? The discipline of Management Science, with its focus on reliability, totally dominates business organizations and business education. Analytics and efficiencies leave little room for intuition or the design method.

That was a bummer. But Roger is an optimist and he pointed to Target, P&G, RIM and other companies (also in his book) as examples of change.

And Buffett just might be right. He has a great track record betting against innovation. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is famous for investing in insurance companies and utilities, and avoiding high tech and innovative corporations. Its stock is up 84% over the past decade, while the S&P 500 is down by 18%.

I'm hoping that Buffett's vision of the future is wrong. I'm hoping that a US economy based on making, not consuming, green, not carbon-centric, based on digital not metal network platforms, will drive economic growth and prosperity. I'm betting on innovation.

The purchase of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad may have one benefit lost on Buffett. A 19th century network platform that is a railroad may have new life in an energy-conscious 21st century economy. Railroads, as we all know, are among the most energy-efficient modes of mass transportation for goods and people. Updating that platform, making it even faster and cheaper, could help propel the U.S. into a very different kind of future than the one envisioned by Buffett. That would be a future where railroads shipped exports of innovation new products and capital goods that reduced carbon energy.

And, of course, what role will Design Thinking play in navigating this uncertainty, revealing cultural needs and iterating new options for products and services?

Here is the press release for the event. If you miss it, go to Parsons the next night, November 12, at six to see Roger Martin sign books and yak with me on stage about business, innovation, design and life.

Here's the release:

"You and your guests are invited to register for this next session in our ongoing Rotman School of Management Design Thinking Experts Speaker Series.

Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Timing: 3:00 to 3:55 check in; 4:00 sharp to 6:00pm discussion; 6:00 to 7:00pm reception

Place: 30th Floor Auditorium, Thomson Reuters Building, 3 Times Square, New York

Topic: “Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage”

Expert Moderator: Bruce Nussbaum, Professor of Innovation and Design, Parsons New School of Design and Contributing Editor, BusinessWeek

Three Expert Panelists:
Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO; Author, “Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation” (Harper Business, Sep. 09)

Roger Martin,Dean, Rotman School; Author. “The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage” (Harvard Business, Oct. 09)

Will Setliff, VP, Strategy, Insights & Innovation, Target

Their biographies are below.

Fees: per person (include “Change by Design”, “The Design of Business”, the discussion, cocktails):
US $300
US $225 for Rotman or UofToronto Alumni and “Rotman Magazine” Subscribers
US $150 for individuals who work for non-profits and governments

To Register:
If you have not already registered, please do so by noon on November 11. Register on-line here or visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca/events. Questions can be directed to events@rotman.utoronto.ca or call us at 416-946-7462.

If you are unable to attend but wish to purchase Tim and Roger’s new books they are available from leading book retailers.

We hope to see you on November 11th."

That's it for the PR release.

Then I remembered this piece on Fiskerin IN:Inside Innovation that I launched with Reena Jana, Matt Vella and Jessie Scanlon. It was reported and written by Matt, the brilliant auto maven.

Hey Venessa, you are doing an incredible job covering Design!

Check out this interview with Seoul's Chief Design Officer, Kyung-won Chung who talks about his "Designomics" strategy for the city and South Korea.

Does New York City have a Chief Design Officer? San Francisco? Chicago? LA? New Orleans? Toronto? New Delhi? Shanghai? Singapore? Paris? London? Berlin? Rome? Rio? Abu Dhabi? Tokyo? Beijing? Bangalore?

Tim talks about the hot Shanghai design scene, design education in China, high complexity design, and sustainability and lots of other important issues.

Continuum, Frog and IDEO all have offices in Shanghai.

Joel Tower, the dean of Parsons School of Design reminded me over dinner that most cities in the US are on the coasts. The wind blows pretty steady and with force most of the time over the ocean. Put the windmills offshore, and you can power cities from green energy that is nearby.

That reduces the need for smart grids that transmit wind-generated electricity over hundreds and thousands of miles (yes, Chicago is the big exception). Of course there are big issues to resolve--cost, birds, aesthetics, recreation.

There was a time when the sight of a windmill in a city such as New Amsterdam or Sag Harbor was a sign of modernity. Today, when you fly into Toronto or Copenhagen, the same vision of windmills means the same thing--modernity. We might want to try that vision once again in America. And perhaps save billions as well.

I'm following the new Dachis Group since it is the only consulting firm I know out there that is building a practice on promoting a new business model--social business. It's the latest iteration of service innovation. Very interesting.

Here's are notes and comments from my Muji notebook:

Dr. Nicholas LaRusso, Director of the Center for Innovation & SPARC Lab, Mayo Clinic. SPARC has 8 designers embedded in the core business--the care of patients. One project is designing a new OR from scratch. Another is developing a patient-centered medical home. SPARC has 2 designers living in a community to understand what people feel about their own health and develop new models of delivery.

In this discussion that followed, it came out that a "Mayo consult" anywhere, anytime, is a branding/busines concept that is being developed. With new social media, medical technology and conferencing tools, it may be that you can consult with a Mayo doctor without going to Rochester Minn. Is this the beginning of a hospital consolidation in the US, with the best brands expanding nation-wide--or globally?

BTW, all doctors at Mayo are salaried. Think about that.

Dr. Gary Kalkut, Chief Medical Officer of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. It has a David Rockwell-designed children's hospital and the choice of architect is telling. Rockwell is all about the experience and building a new hospital from a child's experience point of view is wonderful. It focuses on the families of patients, with fold-out sofas and showers in the room. Doctors are taught to have a good bedside manner--so they can learn from the patient.

Montefiore has inner city issues. One quarter of its patients are undocumented. It's emergency room is the fourth largest in the country. The two are related. Think about it. And think about the current health care reform bills that refuse health care to undocumented people and what that means to your health--and wallet.

The Bronx is the poorest of the five NYC boroughs (and BTW, the only one connected to the mainland). Some 40% of Bronx teens are obese.

MOMA senior curator Paola Antonelli was on our panel and she talked about how designers were the translators of technology to larger society--perfect for a discussion about medicine. Paola had a great idea. Start a movement--Take A Designer to Work Day. Doctors, CEOs, managers, city bureaucrats, school principles, transporation execs--few have any idea of what design can do to help them reframe their problems and solve them. So, lets Take a Designer to Work folks.

Jeneanne Rae, co-founder of PeerInsight, a top service innovation consulting firm, was in the audience and we walked to Central Park afterwards, talking about the day. Jeneanne's suggestion--a Mint for medicine. She said we need a new brand that organizes our family's medical flows the way Mint organizes our financial flows. Most of the Boomers are dealing with aging parents, children and their own health, trying to keep track of medicines, appointments, doctors--and treatment options.

Hey Gen Yers out there, this is a perfect job for you. It's your platform. A Medical Mint. This would be a perfect incubator startup project for our Gen Y Research Collaborative at Parsons.