Investing in design

Design Council research has shown that for every £1 that businesses invest in design, they gain on average over £4 net operating profit, over £20 net turnover and over £5 net exports.

And there is increasingly widespread awareness in industry that when the remit for design is widened beyond the traditional focus on products or graphics to provide benefits such as improved strategic thinking, morale and productivity, then design can add significant value to organisations.

A new report, Leading Business by Design, suggests that rather than being a method solely for creating desirable objects, design can be fundamental to businesses in helping them innovate and define strategy.

The report was commissioned from Warwick Business School by the Design Council, and came up with three main findings;

1. Design is customer-centred – Benefit is greatest when design is intimately related to solving customers’ problems.
2. Design is most powerful when culturally embedded – It works best when it has strong support from senior management in the commissioning organisation, and is integrated into product / service development from beginning to end.
3. Design can add value to any organisation – Design can benefit small, medium or large manufacturing and service-based organisations by driving innovation and opening up uncontested market spaces, differentiating products and services to attract customers, and improving recognition by strengthening branding to embody a company’s values.

Using case studies, the report provides practical examples of how these three design themes have benefited a range of organisations, and provides clear evidence that structured design thinking offers a set of widely applicable principles that can be of huge benefit to all businesses.

Essentially, it suggests that rather than being a method solely for creating desirable objects, design can be fundamental to businesses in helping them innovate and to define strategy.

Less than one second

Paul Butt / Section Design

Structuring and visualising data is a discipline that always appeals to me, so it was with a sense of anticipation that I took a trip to Shoreditch to see a two-day exhibiton of information and data design curated by London based information design agency, Signal Noise.

Signal Noise commissioned a series of print-based data visualisations that explored the theme of “less than one second”, based on the premise that time is of the essence now more than ever before.

We now access enormous reams of data in ‘less than a second’, thanks to technologies such as cameras that captures the movement of light in slow motion, or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that observes sub-atomic activity happening in millionths of a second.

Technology enables a vast number of data points and events to be read and understood across a variety of fields - from automated trades to F1 analytics - but filtering and making sense of the data so that it provides a useful insight is the job of the information graphic designer.

Despite the wide range of subjects used as source material for the exhibition, including athletics, cinematography, F1, GPS, the LHC and stock trading, I found it significant that the base structure of the majority of the visualisations was circular.

Mapping the data - Josh Gowen

The visualisations that eschewed circles were, I thought, less intuitive and less visually attractive, even though timelines are traditionally depicted as, well, a line.

Imposing a clock face metaphor seemed to provide a familiar ‘carrier’ structure for the message, enabling the viewer to quickly interpret the information.

The most successful visualisation seemed to me to be Josh Gowen’s ‘Mapping the data’, combining the clock metaphor with the shape of the LHC and a graphic that showed how the volume of data crunched by the LHC is filtered and then delivered to 151 research centres worldwide.

Telling the story by combining seven pieces of information in one graphic, plus some cool stats. What's not to like?