The human side of things

Ingrid van der Zon
Philips Design, Eindhoven
I.vanderzon@design.philips.com

A new approach to design was created at Philips Design in the early Nineties. i3magazine talked to Ingrid van der Zon, one of the Philips Design creative professionals, in order to find out how this unique 'human-focused' design approach affects not only consumers and manufacturers, but also designers themselves.

Ingrid van der Zon, Project Manager of Living Memory (LIME), is Senior Consultant in MultiMedia Design in the Advanced Interface Design Group at Philips Design. Six years ago, she was involved in one of the task forces that would analyse the changes required in the organisation to achieve its mission.
So, how did she experience the changes?

Stefano Marzano, Managing Director of Philips Design, created the High Design Process as a response to the main problems that industries and consumers are facing in our society: the phenomena of saturation (people have almost everything) and hyperchoice (people have an almost unlimited choice available). These phenomena create difficulties both for the consumers (what should I buy?) and for the industry (what should I produce to convince them to buy?).

Marzano thought that the solution to "make things better" for all parties was to create relevant products enhancing people's comfort, satisfaction, pleasure and productivity, in other words, products that would make people's lives better and that would become automatically the customers' first choice. This means to look with the eyes of the consumers, to think with them. A traditional approach to design could never have achieved this. High Complexity requires High Design.

High Design is the new, holistic approach to design, that allows Philips Design to accomplish its mission:
to create value for its customers, shareholders and society as a whole by delivering a people-focused design capable of improving the relationship between people and objects and people and the environment.

Because our approach is human-focused, the High Design Process is multidisciplinary: that is to say, it integrates human-related disciplines (such as anthropology, sociology, trends analysis, and so on) with the creative design skills. In all areas of expertise, the approach is research based and integrated with the Business Creation Process of the Philips Design clients.

High Design has completely changed the way of working of the Philips Design creative force of some 450 professionals.
In June this year, the High Design Process received an official recognition: the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen, one of the leading centres for the promotion of design, has awarded to Philips Design the title 'Design Team of the Year 1998', for its unique approach to design management.

Overall, I find working according to the High Design Process very stimulating. First of all, working together with specialists from different fields has definitely resulted in a much higher quality of the end results, which is very satisfying. Secondly, our multidisciplinary teams are also multicultural. We have some 30 nationalities represented at Philips Design, and that is very fascinating in itself!

In the teams that we form for each project, people with very different backgrounds are brought together and they have to respect each other's contribution to the problem that they are facing. One also has to consider that, because the HDP is integrated with the Business Creation Process, we work very closely with the Marketing and Development experts from our clients' organisations.

Working within the High Design Process has dramatically changed my approach to the work and, to a certain extent, to the world. Initially it was a bit like learning a new language: at first it seemed that no progress was made and you had to make some efforts, and then all of a sudden, you can speak it and a whole new world of opportunities is open in front of you.

In the teams we had to learn to understand each other's terminology and ways of working; and we were facilitated in this through a process approach based on project management techniques, which were also quite new in those days!
Now, the High Design Process is part of our daily work and the project management methods are embedded in each phase of our projects.

Through this experience of change and through my everyday work, I have learnt a lot professionally, and also from the human point of view. Currently, within the i3 programme another cultural dimension has been added: we are all experiencing the occasional clashes between the academic and corporate worlds in our projects, which again I find very enriching. I do believe that the human dimension of work is the most important factor to reach success with a team.

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