Another excellent example is Apple. By hiring Jonathan Ive as a design consultant, they reinvented themselves from a company in decline, to a leading company, both in product concepts and design. In many cases, young designers like to be in this profession because they feel that they can change the world. Make it better and more beautiful. And many of them believe that it is possible to create utopias and societies where everything can function well, perform well, and look good too. However, the people that hire them are profit oriented. And when designers are hired, they are hired to increase the profits of their employers by creating all those things they want‌well, at least to a certain degree. And that is the cold reality. Design is to make profit, and if making profit requires beautiful, functional, and meaningful products and services, than designers are the right people for the job. Because of this, design has become a war. War to win the consumer’s loyalty. With the huge investments required developing products and brands, strategies are employed that could rival many military operations. For one victorious product, other must fall. The competitors have become enemies, and behind every popular brand there are armies of designers, marketing experts, sales persons, scientists, and even philosophers. Business today, along with the design, is executed as a military strategy. The sooner the designers accept that, the sooner their positions in the hierarchy of the organizations will change. In spite of this, many designers don’t want to accept this to be true. And who can blame them not wanting to be identified with a corporation, knowing the negative publicity many corporations recieved in the past. But I do believe, that if new generations of designers participate more in the middle- and upper-management in these organizations, than they can truly make things better. Or, like Karim Rashid says, perhaps even change the world.
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*4 Siegel, RitaSue; Taking Marketing to Market, Short Film; Presented online by Aquent; Link: http://www.ritasue.com/video. html?id=hp; 2004
Eighteen months after changing its policy, from a debt-ridden basket case as described by Time Magazine, Nissan has transformed itself to a profitable global car company*4.
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