“Silent design”, Frans Joziasse, Park

“SILENT DESIGN”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Frans Joziasse, PARK Advanced Design Management, Germany

Frans Joziasse is one of the two founding partners of PARK (1998), an international network of strategic design management consultancies that works with clients like Audi, LEGO, Roca, Siemens, Lafarge, Johnson Controls, Hyundai & KIA Motors, Bugaboo, Amsterdam Airport and Reckitt Benckiser.
He holds an MBA in design management from the University of Westminster (London) and lectures/teaches at several universities in Europe and the US and at the Conferences of the Design Management Institute on strategic design management issues.
He founded PARK in 1998. Joziasse has been cited for numerous awards for design excellence by the Gute Industrie Form in Hanover (Germany). In 2003, he developed the module ‘strategic design management’ for the MA design management at the INHOLLAND University (taken over by EURIB at the Erasmus University in 2005), in Rotterdam, where he continues to teach the module.

Design has developed into a mature profession and industry over the last 20 years. Globally the investment of companies in designers has dramatically grown. Companies like P&G have a few hundred design managers in order to manage their design projects with externals, while Samsung has 500 designers or so to boost the brand image and power up their innovation levels. Haier the Chinese multi-national has just opened design and research centres in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. Also the Indian conglomerate Tata has just communicated their plan to open design offices with 100 or more designers in Europe (Germany and UK).
The professionalization goes hand in hand with management practices, a part that is not really visible to the outside world. A company with successful designs is a company with successful design processes, said Peter Gorb already back in the 1980s.
So what, he asks, do these management practices look like? How are they linked with the long term direction of companies and how are they integrated in the other business processes? And how are other departments of companies involved? What are the main ingredients of what Joziasse calls silent design?
Joziasse offers three key points of departure: having a strong mission and vision; having processes in place; having the right culture and organisational alignment. On the first of these he points to the Dutch electronics giant Philips, long a champion of design, he maintains, with a vision that is strongly focused on the consumer, on society and the environment we live in. He maintains that innovation should be managed as an intentional and disciplined, reliable and repeatable business process. And finally, he asserts that design is becoming increasingly a bridge between technology and consumers, and that to realise that bridge companies have to create the right culture and organisation around their design community. Therefore design has to think out of their design black-box, which means teaming up with their peers as well as with the consumer.

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