Four Takeaways: The DBA’s Design Effect event

The Design Business Association’s Design Effect event last week was an eight-hour extravaganza at the British Museum combining talks and the Design Effectiveness Awards (we looked at the big winners here).

Here are our take-aways.

1. Designers can, and must, shape the future

In her opening remarks, DBA CEO Deborah Dawton implored the 175+ participants to think of themselves as architects of the future. “Put yourself far ahead of what you’re designing today. Having that perspective on the future is now critical.”

2. Think and talk like a client

A perennial issue for the DBA – and the design industry as a whole – is where they sit at the table. Why are designers sometimes still undervalued? Is it because they don’t have the business nous, and hence business language, that clients speak?

“In order to have an impact on a business, designers need to understand the business,” said Jos Harrison, global head of brand experience and design at Reckitt. “Being able to speak the same language as commercial people in business, we need to convince that we have viable business solutions.”

Vuokko Aro, VP of design at Monzo, does this by “helping frame business problems as design problems.” She runs the bank’s 70-strong team of product designers, brand designers and user research, and interestingly chose to report to the COO rather than the CEO when she took the role.

3. And design teams need to change the way they are seen internally

Design is too often siloed in companies. But to have real impact throughout a business, designers should be omnipresent.

“We need to teach all parts of organisations how design leads to efficiency,” said Tysonn Betts, former design VP of Procter & Gamble. “If you can organise your team so that design shows up, then design becomes the point of consistency.”

That will take education and then acceptance of the bigger role that design can play. And it might also take a change in mindset from designers themselves.

4. Should designers be thinking bigger?

“There is very little 100-year thinking,” said after-dinner speaker Geoff Mulgan, former chief executive at Nesta and author of Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination and Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World.

Mulgan was a last-minute replacement for Covid-struck Richard Seymour, but what he lacked in preparation time, he made up for in provocation. “What do you do with an ageing population? That’s a design challenge. Governments are trying to encourage people to have children but none of [their ideas] work. That’s a design challenge.”

This chimed with Dawton’s opening remarks: “What do we want our legacy to be? Do we think and exist beyond the immediate design challenge? Put yourself far ahead of what you’re designing today. Having that perspective on the future is now critical.”