Can You Measure Design's Value?

The DMI Conference in Copenhagen sought to explore how to measure design's role in the business world. One answer: educate management

by Kerry Capell

It's a question that continues to stump designers and big business alike: How do you measure innovation? (See BusinessWeek.com, 9/25/06, Metrics Madness). The conclusion, according to attendees at the Design Management Institute's Conference in Copenhagen Mar. 14-16, is that you can't, or at least not in any standardized way. The focus of the conference was "Improving and Measuring Design's Role in Business Performance," but no one could agree on whether design metrics were meaningful and if so, which ones to use.

The one thing attendees did agree on is that designers need to do a better job communicating their value to business. Design and innovation are hot management buzz words now. But as Darrel K. Rhea, chief executive officer of Redwood Shores (Calif.)-based consultancy Cheskin noted, few CEOs really understand either. If the design industry is to capitalize on its newfound popularity it needs to explain what it does and what it is worth in terms management understands. "The central challenge of the design profession is to make ourselves relevant to business leaders," said Rhea.

It's obviously frustrating for all involved. Designers see themselves more as strategic visionaries or problem solvers, not spreadsheet analysts or bean counters. Yet management finds it hard to value something it can't quantify. "Businesspeople are from Mars and designers are from Venus," joked Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design. "But managing design for better business is what we as designers have to do." To do that, he urged designers to educate themselves about business issues in order to become more effective and better designers, noting that his own wife forced him to read the business press years ago.

Synthesizing Business

It's not just about designers getting to grips with business issues and management jargon. Many speakers noted that if design is truly to play a major role in business performance, traditional silos separating design and the rest of the organization need to be demolished. Both Rhea and Jerome Kathman, president and CEO of LPK, the Cincinnati-based design and branding firm whose clients include Kellogg's (K), Pampers, and IBM (IBM), spoke of the growing convergence of research with design, for instance. He cited Procter & Gamble (PG) as a company that understands the importance of both disciplines and is doing a good job at integrating the two.

Kathman labeled the trend "synthesis" while Rhea dubbed it "synpathic research," his own coinage referring to the synthesis of multiple design/research methods with an empathy for users' needs. But the message was the same: The future direction of design requires a multidisciplinary approach: a blending of quantitative research and empathetic user-centered design.

That may sound good in theory but, as Rhea noted, very few companies have adopted such a balanced design management strategy. For this new model to take hold, a company must have visionary leadership, a collaborative culture, and the willingness to invest. The only problem, as Rhea and every speaker who followed him admitted, is that such a combination is hard to find. "There are very few Steve Jobs around," he said. "That's why it is incumbent on designers to educate management as to the value of what we do."

Designing a Strategy

The way to do that, said Harry Rich, deputy CEO of the London-based Design Council, is to have a clearly articulated design strategy. "It's not good enough to expect clients to have faith in the power of design," he said. Without a cohesive strategy, "every decision you make becomes a battle where you constantly have to justify yourself."

His advice: Make use of the growing body of data that shows design can have a positive impact on business performance.