Design thinking, service design, interactive design and user experience constitute the topmost topics of discussion about corporations that seek innovation. “Maeda is to design what Warren Buffet is to finance” was recently stated by “Wired”, an American magazine. It was an article written about design and innovation by Maeda. The Rhode Island School of Design, MIT president and ex teacher said that designers being promoted to better positions at big companies such as McKinsey and IBM and “design thinking” being addressed at major universities in the world shows how important it is. 

Why are design thinking, service design, interactive design, and user experience (UX) important to companies? It’s because companies aim to achieve customer satisfaction, pleasure and the best price in the interaction between the customer and the product. The company culture is guided by design in a broad scenario where it is essential to look for different activities. 

Tourism and its services have sharply changed over the years. Airbnb was established in 2008, TripAdvisor from 2004–2005 as well as Booking.com and airfare price comparison websites. Google Maps is also from that time. Then came Google Translate. Today we see a revolution in the payment transactions and in the way we buy foreign currency without paying a traditional brokerage. It’s hard to remember travellers’ checks, printed guides and, of course, travel agencies. 

There are several other examples, and you certainly have already thought of these in a few seconds. Now reflect on what these changes have in common. They make life easier for the customer through a friendly digital service, designed to satisfy you first and then generate revenue for the company. This is a change of mindset that has long been revered by Maeda and other digital design authorities. “Design is not only aesthetic, it is about gaining market relevance and obtaining better results,” he says. That doesn’t mean we should ignore efficient services and products that were designed decades ago. 

But we have a new generation of designers who are more prepared to merge technology and business with greater agility, leading to innovation at the centre of corporate strategies, regardless of the area of activity of the company. This understanding takes design to several areas within the company, in search for products and services, search for the best relationship with customers, as if it were a thermometer that can gain scale in the market. This happens with products already in circulation, via service design, or in projects that are in the pipeline of corporation releases, through ethnographic research and experiences. 

Internally, companies can also streamline processes and create workflows that privilege innovation in business design. The record of decision-makers is increasingly falling on the need to build a new company. Today, according to a recent Deloitte survey of more than 10,000 companies, only 14% interviewers say they are satisfied with the traditional corporate hierarchy of defining and executing strategies for definition and implementation of strategies. This certainly answers the questions posed at the beginning of the text. 

This is why we talk about service design, interaction design, design thinking and user experience (UX).

São Paulo - Brazil
Co-founder and CEO of Kyvo Design-Driven Innovation