Podcast: What brands can learn from design thinking during the pandemic
Design Week caught up with Design Council chief creative officer Cat Drew to talk about how design thinking can help brands and businesses coming to terms with the effects of coronavirus.
Design thinking helps brands and organisations improve their products, services and internal processes by taking a human-centred approach and balancing it with what is technologically possible and economically achievable.
It’s an approach that could help businesses protect themselves, their staff and customers, while doing some social good; in some cases mitigating the effects of coronavairus by changing the way their products, services and knowledge are accessed.
Join Design Week editor Tom Banks and Design Council chief design officer Cat Drew as they discuss how brands can use design thinking to tackle organisational change and disruption in these unprecedented times.
This podcast is part of The Lowdown, a series of broadcasts from Design Week and its sister titles helping to connect our combined audience with thought leaders in the design, creative, marketing and advertising industries.
Hello good morning from Colombia,
Yes, of course, today all designers are turning in times of crisis to interpret new solutions from the tragedy and we are looking for methodologies such as Design Thinking that for more or less 40 years, designers in the privacy of our work rooms with interdisciplinary groups have used to build many paradigms that are not always optimal solutions and only become useless objects that only increase and drive the consumer society.
Although the methodology is transversal to many topics, it is organized and very effective, today we react to the imminence of extinction. Of less than it seems to me a little opportunistic to propose that the Coronavirus is a source of inspiration for many, because it would surely come to focus on solutions for the construction of a renewed consumer society in isolation. Yes, of course it is important to understand this historical moment from Design Thinking, but you do not think that you have to take long steps forward so that brand building does not focus on useless actions, products and strategies.
We have seen in a very short time the concept of solidarity flourish, we have seen fragility flourish, we have seen misgovernment and terrible policies flourish. But it is easier for the great powers to sell the return to normality or the new awakening of humanity. Brands must not survive, and if we focus on products and services, many of them, due to their condition close to daily use and socialization, will disappear.
I believe that the first focus of the strategy should be a new look at the world, because the contemporary world of the human race should not return to unbridled consumption but rather to strengthen support networks to protect the entire context of the universe that surrounds us.
Today it is evident that we forget the value of life and preservation around the planet, and we are more aware of social inequality, we are more aware that regardless of race, color or condition, we are all vulnerable. communicated in networks, through objects to act globally and move around the world under the concept of open skies, but today the extreme condition of losing life has returned us to the interior of our habitats. At the origin of the instinct of preservation of the species.
Before thinking about how we are going to establish a new strategy through a methodology to establish the behavior of brands, I think we must look for the Insight of human origin. Of course there is a wave of organizational developments, developments for the protection of health, public policies and a large number of strategies to avoid unrestrained consumption to which we are all accustomed. I warn that this new world must be re-designed in its entirety and just as the First Industrial Revolution put it at the time precisely in England, it is necessary to reflect before the methodology.
We do not want objects, we will look for the design of protection systems, construction and intelligent consumption and in space look for the way to understand that we are not here to attend fashion catwalks or look to get out of the newspapers or magazines, we are here to build a new planet from creativity.
Ramiro CORREDOR Zambrano
Industrial design
ramirocorredor@gmail.com
Colombia