| | Good morning/afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
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| 1. INTRODUCTION
Our topic today is Lifestyle Asia, a conference about design, branding and innovation.
When most people hear the word “lifestyle,” they immediately think of trends. But I'm not going to be talking about trends. Instead, I want to talk about something I believe is far more important –choice and strategic leadership.
Why do I think choice and strategic leadership are more important than trends?
Because trends do not automatically lead to change. Trends are not what ultimately determines the future. The future is shaped by the many small and large choices we all make in our lives, in our personal lives, at work, how we vote and the products we buy.
It is those who make responsible choices today, whether as politicians, professional people or private citizens, who will shape tomorrow.
A new context
Making choices is a constant in human life. People have always done it, and they will always continue to do it. And more often than not, the decisions we take are meant to create a better quality of life - not only for ourselves and our loved ones, but also for our neighbours, our colleagues at work, and those we serve.
Today we find ourselves in a context very different from that of our parents.
Today's world is an interconnected world. It's a more transparent world, where everyone knows almost everything about everyone else. There is no hiding place. The rich know about the poor, and the poor know about the rich.
And it is a very interdependent world. Events in one part of the world can affect people in another. For example, Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico affected the price of oil, which in turn affected small, local companies on the opposite side of the world. “New” diseases, like avian flu, travel round the world at Internet speed, and require preventive actions that travel just as fast…
And sometimes a person in one part of the world may even know the future of others elsewhere, as when the tsunami hit Indonesia, and experts knew that places like Sri Lanka would also be affected, but were unable to warn Sri Lanka in time. And we all hear about disasters on TV, and are asked for support.
Looking at this new context, we can see that, in many ways, the world is out of balance – it needs sustainable, long-term solutions that can restore that balance at all levels.
This is the context in which we have to make our choices today. It is the context in which leaders need to decide which role they want to play in shaping the future, and how they want to play it.
But I don’t want to enter a broad political debate here: instead, I want to express my views on the impact this situation is having on brands, innovation and design.
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| 2. THE ROLE OF BRANDS
Like individuals, communities and nations, brands also need to think about choices and leadership – because their context has changed, too. Local and national brands have always played a useful role in their markets in proposing things of value to consumers. But they now have to operate in a rapidly globalising market. Even major multinationals face a new context: the whole world is now the arena in which they operate. These days, development, manufacturing and creativity may take place in different locations, just as, on a much smaller scale, tradesmen and craftsmen used to work in different parts of a town. Today, the world really is the new global village.
Brands are also increasingly being held to account by their shareholders and other stakeholders – the business and social communities within which they work. They’re being held to account for the consequences of their actions – not only in terms of profit, but also in terms of their effect on people and the planet. And they’re finding that they’ve become one-sided in serving only part of the world’s population.
So the challenge for brands is to find a new type of role for themselves in this new environment.
To do this, I believe they need to revisit and understand their true purpose, their mission in this new paradigm. They need to ask themselves who they are, and where they want to go. They need to regain their inner self.
Roberto Assagiolo and Psychosynthesis
We’re used to thinking of brands as having a personality – and like most personalities, often they can benefit from a bit of therapy! In the early part of the last century, Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagiolo developed a theory called psychosynthesis. This theory assumes that the personality consists of many sub-personalities, and these are governed and kept in balance by the Self. We know somehow deep inside us how we’d like to behave in certain circumstances, and it’s the Self that tells us that: it’s our ethical core, if you like; our ideals. When we’re behaving as the Self wishes us to behave, we’re ‘in balance’.
In therapy
Brands can also get out of balance. Some brands may be acting in tune with their circumstances, providing people with what they want, but are perhaps less than perfect when it comes to the environment or employment conditions. Other brands may be so concerned with cutting costs that their products become unreliable; while still other brands provide good products but bad after-sales service; or are very good in marketing but poor in research and development… and so on. Successful brands are those that strike the right balance: brands that lose this balance are the ones that may need a bit of therapy to find their Self again.
Getting the brand back on track
How does this brand therapy work? Its main task, of course, is to try to get the brand as a whole back on track, so that it can see which way it should be going and what it should be doing. Like normal psychotherapy, brand psychotherapy can’t work miracles overnight. You have to work at clarifying your long-term goals, while in the meantime working for small, step-by-step improvements every day.
Going back to basics, brands have traditionally existed to identify and meet the needs of their customers. So what needs should they be looking to meet today? What scarcities should they be seeking to fill?
Needs in two different types of market
We first need to consider which markets they should be active in – because markets are obviously not all the same.
C.J.K. Prahalad recently described the world’s population as a pyramid, with a small group of 75 to 100 million people at the top, in the rich, industrialised or post-industrial countries, a middle group of about 1.5 billion, and some 4 billion people – almost two thirds of the world’s population – at the bottom, living below the poverty line.
(a) Saturated markets
Multinationals have traditionally served the small group at the top of the pyramid. In these (essentially saturated) markets, people have been buying marketing-driven stories, experiences, events and lifestyles. Nonetheless, we’re seeing the emergence of new scarcities there: the loss of qualities of life that they once had, such as trust, optimism, a sense of feeling safe and carefree, belief in leaders, governments and companies.
At the same time, in those markets, people have become concerned about issues such as safe food and water, a lack of time and quiet places where they can enjoy nature, a lack of contact with neighbours, health issues, whether they’ll be able to have a decent pension and a comfortable life when they retire, and so on. Of course, this applies particularly to Europe: in other parts of the world, cultures are looking forward to a much brighter future. But such scarcities all have a direct impact on people’s quality of life and happiness.
Incidentally, the New Economies Foundation recently defined the task of democratic governments as being to promote “the good life”: a flourishing society in which citizens are happy, healthy, capable and engaged….in other words to promote ‘well-being’. This view has now received the support of the UK government (Model Life Satisfaction GDP Report, Clifford Cobb, December 2001: www. Redefiningprogress.org
(b) The poorest markets
At the same time, in the poorest parts of the world, people at the bottom of the pyramid are frustrated and angry at the unfair distribution of wealth that they see. Their response is either to react violently or to try to move to parts of the world where they believe they will able to make their condition better.
In each of these markets, at the top and the bottom of the pyramid, brands, design and innovation each have a new and crucial role to play – although it’s a different role in each case.
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| 1. BRANDS
Pine & Gilmore’s Experience Economy model can provide food for thought here. In this model, they argue that the ultimate value a brand can offer people is the ability to improve and transform their own lives.
(a) Saturated markets
That suggests that the new role of brands in saturated markets in the industrialised world will be one of the counsellor, adviser, or consultant, someone who listens to you, discusses options and suggests new ideas, based on knowledge of what you’re like, what you think is important, and what you want to do with your life. Brands will join with people to develop new solutions in a process of co-creation. Real value will no longer be created in factories, as it is now, but rather in the interaction between the brand and its customers and end-users. This new type of brand therefore goes beyond the traditional brand, by providing guidance and transformation.
(b) The “bottom of the pyramid”
The people at the bottom of the pyramid have normally not been seen by big multinationals as a viable market for their products. But, as Prahalad has pointed out, there are still many ways they can help, taking on the role of enabler, providing expertise and facilities to local people to help them set up stakeholder enterprises, and producing useful, affordable products for those local markets.
For example:
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Marriott Hotels are training poor people in the hospitality business, even if they’re not able to become employees.
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Procter & Gamble are working with UNICEF and local partners in developing countries to produce and distribute affordable products that will make sure poor people get enough iron and iodine in their food.
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TNT, the logistics company, is helping the UN World Food Programme to improve its logistics and distribution of food aid in emergencies.
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And Grameen Bank and Grameen Foundation USA, both founded by Muhammad Yunus, the creator of microcredit, are helping small entrepreneurs in rural areas to get mobile phones they can use to make their businesses more successful.
Projects like these help people at the bottom of the pyramid to improve their conditions, create wealth and, by providing the latest technologies, help them to leapfrog into the future.
It’s my belief that companies will need to operate in both the saturated and the developing markets. Growth for brands will not just mean doing the things that pay or maximise profit, but doing the things that are right – and that because they’re right, create sustainable profit in sustainable world. As Jeremy Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, says: “To be a great company today, you also have to be a good company.”
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| 2. INNOVATION
Innovation also has to adopt the new paradigm, taking sustainability as its guiding principle. It needs to adopt a way of thinking that is inherently future-focused and people-focused. It needs to take a long-term perspective, so that innovations create value and well-being not only today, but in the future as well, raising the quality of life, not creating new scarcities further down the line.
Innovation also needs to be more radical and include system innovation – that is, innovation involving multiple stakeholders – and also social innovation. In fact, it requires an infusion of holistic creativity in business thinking and solution thinking.
Five strategies
How can a brand set about taking a new direction like this? I believe there are five main strategies one can apply to achieve this re-direction.
- Focus on providing benefits and shaping end-user and customer solutions.
- Look at the world as your market: escape from the myopia of the market you are already serving. Open your eyes to new possible markets.
- See your company not as a collection of business units but as a portfolio of competences that can be combined and recombined in all sorts of new configurations.
- Look for “elective affinities” – people who share your values and attitudes, or who have complementary skills and interests – both inside and outside your own organisation. These are people you can work together with, to develop new ideas.
Finally, look carefully at how you take your product to market: search for and try out new ways of doing this. You may be able to reach new people in new ways.
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| 3. DESIGN
If the context for brands and innovation has changed, it has also changed for designers. And that means design also needs to revisit its personality or inner self.
What is design’s inner motivation? I believe it is to be a creative engine for civilisation, inspired by the overall idea of beauty: in the sense of harmony, balance, or the perfect fit. It has strong humanistic foundations, encompassing everything that relates to people and their situation. By taking a holistic approach, it bridges the gaps between people, technology and business.
As designers, we face the same problem as brands: imbalance in the world. How can we transform the paradigm of growth from things that pay off to things that are right and because of that pay off, things that generate sustainable profit in a systematic way?
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| 4. PHILIPS
How we are approaching this at Philips
At Philips Design, I started this process of re-examination in the early nineties, outlining my ideas in a speech called Flying over Las Vegas. In it, we re-set our vision to focus on the growth of people, in harmony with their natural and man-made environment. We see design as being – above all – about people: how they relate to each other and their surroundings.
At the same time, I redefined our strategy and design process, introducing the concept of High Design. This was a new type of design methodology, one that could help us deal with the various complexities we were confronted with – the complexity of consumer markets, of the environment, of the business context, of technology, and so on. The approach helps us to understand these layers of complexity and develop appropriate products. It involves multidisciplinary teams, and basing ourselves not on intuition but on research, using insights and methods from sociology, psychology, anthropology and technology.
On that basis, we then set about building up three broad competences.
- Understanding People– Researching and capturing the dynamic complexity of people’s lives and aspirations in certain areas;
- Innovative Integration– Integrating and synthesising our research results into feasible concepts and solutions; and
- Design Articulation– Applying design skills to give some tangible, visible or other sensory or experiential form to the chosen concepts and solutions.
Let me describe these in a bit more detail.
1. Understanding People
In the first broad step, capturing the complexity of human insights, we look at what’s relevant today, and the direction we need to be going in the future.
At Philips Design, for over ten years, we’ve been applying research methodologies and insights from the social sciences to analyse current societies in terms of their key components and drivers. We take relevant research into social, cultural and visual trends by various international institutes and universities, and combine it with our own research. Sometimes we work with like-minded companies and futurologists to conduct this research in a type of think-tank. All this gives us a good understanding of people around the world: how they live, what they cherish, their attitude to technology, and so on.
In particular, it allows us to identify trends at many different levels, from macro-trends that will shape the social, governmental, technological and business landscapes for the next 5 to 20 years, to sociocultural trends for the next 10 years, and local trends that will mature in the next two or three years. We look across a number of themes – food, personal care, healthcare, communications and so on – as well as domains (home and work) and geographic regions. But we also look specifically at how different generations view things, and carry out research into everyday life and people’s real-life experiences, using techniques and models from psychology, sociology and ethnography to gain insight into the everyday application of new concepts.
Personas – representing real people
To help us get closer to the individual, we create what we call “personas”: hypothetical ”stand-ins” for actual users. Personas drive the decision-making during a project. We define them as precisely as we can: in particular, we focus on their goals: what do they want to do? In that way, they serve as a perpetual reminder of who our users are and how we should approach them.
We use these personas to create scenarios of realistic situations and experiences, and define roadmaps to help us get there. These scenarios specify what given individuals might want to do in particular circumstances, and how future products or services might help them do it.
2. Innovative integration
Then comes the task of developing new solutions for products, systems or services, based on these scenarios and personas. To do this, we bring together a variety of people to share and develop ideas – engineers, marketers, strategists and designers. To facilitate their discussions, we’ve developed a set of skills based largely on visual and sensory language. This enables us to lead the brainstorming sessions in such a way that they can all understand each other and participate fully. Again, the results of this phase are given a ‘reality check’ by international experts.
3. Design articulation
Finally, there’s design articulation – the actual shaping of those ideas into tangible, visible or experiential solutions. These solutions may be anything from a product (or service) to packaging, from a book to an interactive interface, or from a fashionable electronic garment to sophisticated medical equipment. This calls for more traditional design skills, so that we can give abstract ideas a concrete shape, with colour, visual expression and tactile qualities.
In applying these three main competences, our focus is to develop hypotheses of Desirable Futures, to find what is relevant and meaningful to people in their socio-economic and cultural context. We call this Imagineering process “Strategic Futures.”
Over the past ten years or more, we have applied the Strategic Futures process to explore many different areas of people’s lives. The most extensive of these projects was our Vision of the Future project. Another was called Living Memory, which explored how real physical communities interact and how new technologies can help them stay in touch.
Ambient Hospital Experience
We’re currently using this process to create what we call Ambient Experiences. To illustrate, I’ll describe a project we undertook for a hospital in the United States. The hospital wanted to develop a new radiology department. Together with our colleagues at Philips Medical Systems, and talking to hospitals both in Europe and North America, we started developing ideas about what the ideal total hospital experience might be like – and what is actually feasible.
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The macro-trend view gave us insight into the changing healthcare landscape, its support systems, and the shift in power between hospitals and their patients.
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Ethnographic investigations helped us to understand why the traditional configuration of the radiography department was hindering procedural flow, patient comfort and ease of working for the clinician.
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Field interviews with patients and radiography staff helped us to understand the various requirements, conscious or subconscious, of these stakeholders.
In this way, with a rich array of personas representing patients, medical staff and hospital administrators, we developed concepts, made prototypes and tested them with groups of stakeholders.
The result is a dynamic environment that is highly attractive both for patients and for clinical staff – accommodating the needs of medical procedures, and responsive to the individual patient’s state of mind.
Let’s look at a few highlights.
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The scanner has a clear, sympathetic patient zone, with maximum openness to reduce anxiety or claustrophobia.
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The mood is created by coloured light cast on softly detailed walls and other surfaces. Animations projected onto them are related to the procedure and the instructions the patients need to follow. For example, children are asked to keep still as long as a seal swims to and fro. The light washes and the animation theme can all be selected by the patient.
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In the family waiting area and dressing room, families can follow what’s going on through audio-video interfaces. While they’re waiting, children can play at scanning a variety of soft toys, and print out a copy to take home and show their friends.
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And for the medical staff, the control rooms are less cut off from the imaging room, and patient and staff can communicate through audio-video links, so the patient never feels alone. The rooms are also less cluttered and more conducive to professional calm.
The impact of design
As a result of the new Ambient Experience, all the stakeholders involved saw enormous benefits:
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Children needed less intravenous sedation.
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Patients needed fewer scans, so they were subjected to less radiation.
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Patients were more satisfied with the care they got.
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Staff found the open, friendly spaces more pleasant to work in.
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The hospital received more applications from top-class professionals, due to the innovative work environment.
In short, by designing a holistic solution that took account of the values, needs and perceptions of all the parties involved, we succeeded in altering their responses and behaviours. Children and their parents were more relaxed; staff were less stressed and derived more satisfaction from their work; and management was pleased with the spin-offs in terms of better staffing, increased patient satisfaction, increased throughput, and an improved reputation for the hospital.
Clearly, this experience can be made even more personal, and therefore even more effective. The closer we get to the individual’s own experience, the more effective our stimuli will become in triggering the desired reaction.
Projects for the bottom of the pyramid
We have also been working on projects more suitable for the bottom of the pyramid.
Emude
For example, we’re currently working in a consortium funded by the European Union called EMerging User DEmands for Sustainable Solutions, or Emude. The aim is to identify social innovations that will advance sustainability, evaluate and filter them, clarify what products will be needed to implement these innovations, and work out how they could be produced.
HiCS
Another project, also partly funded by the EU, concerned the creation of highly contextualised and customised solutions to provide food to those with limited access to it, whether because they’re old and can’t get out, or because they live in remote rural areas where food is scarce. The project focused on developing sustainable solutions that are environmentally friendly, socially valuable and economically efficient.
4 b Brand
In a project started in 2001, at Philips we undertook a re-examination of our Philips brand – a sort of psychosynthesis of our own. This has resulted in the Philips Brand Foundation book, which defined who we are, where we have come from, where we are going – and why!
The new Philips brand: Sense and Simplicity
One of the main outcomes of this psychotherapy was the strategic re-focusing of Philips as a Health, Lifestyle and Technology company. These are three areas of activity which are highly relevant to people’s quality of life, and in which we believe we can make a useful contribution. Another important outcome was our new brand promise, which we introduced about a year ago – Sense and Simplicity. This promise underlines our conviction that relevance and ease of use are key concerns of consumers in choosing products. It represents a promise to make things that make sense within people’s lives, things that help them, in relevant and meaningful ways, to get more out of life. And to make those things as easy to use and as accessible as possible, so that life becomes simpler rather than more complicated. Sense and Simplicity also serves as an important touchstone for us, as designers, to help us produce only products or services that are consistent with and authentically reflect those values.
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| 6. The world does not stand still
The world is constantly changing. This means we need to be flexible and adaptive. And this means we need to apply the principles of education. Designers need to be taught:
- To continually broaden their range of skills, to look out for relevant new competences they can master – to become, together, the modern-day equivalent of those Renaissance geniuses, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, always looking for new things to discover, to learn, to understand or to express.
- To challenge existing paradigms, and explore new technologies.
- To develop a sense of business leadership in a holistic world, so that design-educated business leaders can stand up and take leading roles in major multinationals.
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| 7. Over to you!
Finally, I’d like to address the Chinese and Asian design community. You’re at the start of what is likely to be a great upsurge in design activity in this part of the world. In the coming decades, you’ll find yourself running in an exciting race, designing for people around the globe, as part of a developing, growing economy and one that has great potential for good.
Through your designs, you’ll have a great influence on people and on the form civilisation takes in the 21st century. This brings with it great responsibility.
It’s important to be confident of your own strength. You don’t need to follow the paths that have been trodden over the past century. Ever since the 19th century, industrial countries have seen increasing quantity rather than quality as a sign of progress. Although quantity brought a better quality of life to many, it also created many problems. Now that we’re aware of those problems, you’re in position to leapfrog them, and to move directly on to a better future.
I would urge you to make sure that design in China and Southeast Asia in general keeps a balance and improves people’s quality of life, not only by what you do, but also by what you decide not to do – in other words, by making the right choices for people in the long term; serving people and society; and leading industry in the right direction, not simply following. Seek to find beauty in the widest sense of the word.
So when it’s your turn to take on a global and leading role in design, step up and occupy the position that can be yours.
Focus on the challenge of developing a holistic view of the world and of the market, and leapfrog the present paradigms.
Design for sense and take the world towards a sustainable future!
The choice is yours!
Thank you.
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