What can design do? This simple question is an ever-renewing source of motivation for us at IDEO. And for the past 20 years, our innovation practice in China has been on a journey to answer this question together with our clients and collaboration partners.
Our environment and the challenges we face are constantly changing. Design—whether you see it as visual expression, a way to solve problems, or a tool for innovation used by individuals, organisations, and even social systems—exists in that same frequency of change. The answer to what design can do is naturally and continuously evolving. It’s why we believe the question is worthy of exploration, and worth continuing to explore.
In this article, we share our current thinking on what design can do. It’s not a definitive answer: we know that as the challenges we tackle continue to change, and our expertise and experience continue to develop, new thinking will emerge.
Through a conversation with Tony Wong, Global Partner of IDEO and Remy Jauffret, Managing Director of IDEO Shanghai, we aim to show the changing face of design from four angles:
How design is practiced.
The outputs design delivers
The value it brings
The conditions necessary for success
As IDEO Shanghai celebrates its 20th anniversary, Tony and Remy mark their 15th and 10th years at IDEO respectively. In this dialogue, Tony and Remy, reflect on their work with clients and experience in the field, and share how these have evolved over time. They also imagine what new frontiers and challenges could lie ahead, and what the next 10-15 years of design might look like.
Q. Can each of you briefly recap your career paths, why you joined IDEO, and how your role as a designer has evolved along with the Chinese market over the years?
Tony:
I studied Industrial Design at Central St Martins in London and spent a number of years with Philips and the Electrolux group design teams in Europe and Asia, prior to joining IDEO in 2008. My time as a designer with these businesses gave me knowledge and insight into the role and value of design in these organisations. I was hungry to learn how external design consultants could possibly add more value to topics that we were thinking about every day. IDEO is known for creating solutions that disrupt industries with better solutions for answering unmet needs. I thought this would be the ultimate skill to learn and I was keen to acquire it.
2008 was a defining time for China, and I was curious about how the confluence of cultural and economic developments in China might influence design and innovation. Instead of moving to Palo Alto to join IDEO, I decided to move to Shanghai.
China has been a place that focuses on high growth and impact, and this has taught me, as a designer, to think much harder about the value of the work we are creating. As China shifts towards a richer and more competitive market, growth for businesses no longer relies heavily only on meeting demands, but now also on creating differentiated solutions that are tailored to the Chinese culture and way of living. As a designer, this has pushed me to deepen my knowledge about how economic conditions and demographics shifts might impact what are the right things to design, as opposed to only focus on how to design things right.
Remy:
Tony and I went to the same university even though we didn’t meet there. I was reading my Master’s degree at Central Saint Martins and did a Masters called Creative Practice for Narrative Environments. The premise for this course was to ask what happens when you bring a diverse set of creative people together to imagine impactful futures. I got to work alongside Curators, Product Designers, Artists, Writers, and Architects. It was wild and thrilling how much permission we had to collaborate and build a possible future. This created the desire to work on big messy complex things that people probably should not be working on alone, and this is where I first heard about IDEO.
China has seriously educated me on the value of perspectives. As a foreigner living and working here, I get to hold several, often radically different perspectives at any given time: how businesses are run, how leaders lead, how value is created, how systems are built. All of these aspects have matured significantly over the last 10 years and I think we are at a very intriguing moment where design—and the way that Tony and I get excited about it—has an abundance of new complex challenges to solve, significant opportunities to leverage, and meaningful outcomes to enable.
01 How design is practiced
Q. How have your years of experience of working with various types of clients in China influenced your views on what design can do?
Tony:
We have a very diverse set of clients in China. What design can do for an edgy Chinese start-up can be very different from what it can do for a corporation, a state-owned enterprise, or a multinational corporation (MNC).
Remy:
The sheer pragmatism and ambition of working with leaders in China leaves very little time for theoretical processes and so-called methodologies without results. It’s all about outcomes.
Tony:
And during my 15 years at IDEO China, I have seen how design has delivered for our clients new horizons and mindsets, stronger capabilities, deeper engagement with key stakeholders, and more sustainable and agile ways of doing things. Essentially, design has given businesses a robust set of returns on investment around purpose, people, planet, and profit.
But what I have learned most from China—which I believe is true everywhere, though perhaps more prominent in the Chinese business culture—is that trust needs to be built for design to be effective in adding value. When we design, we are delivering a point of view on a future our clients should make, and our clients need to trust that the design we are putting in front of them is the most informed choice to help them achieve their goals.
Trust is built through communications and shared experiences. Design has an unfair advantage in its ability to visualise potential futures, to create conversations and make opinions tangible, and to enable meaningful shares of perspectives before arriving at the most informed decisions. I believe design, when used in the right way, is a great tool to enable trust-building in business, not only between us and our clients, but also amongst the people in our clients organisations.
"Maple and IDEO have collaborated on multiple projects over three years. Each time, the IDEO team would discuss the market environment and the business positioning of the project with us rigorously, and validate the business strategy of the enterprise from different dimensions, to help us open up our thinking and transform our mindset. Throughout the project, we would have open discussions and even heated debates, and everyone involved would in this way reap the joy brought by continuous innovation.
Our mutual trust is gradually built up through this step-by-step practice, as well as our common desire for successful innovation. Our team members have benefited from our co-creations with IDEO and from their mentorship. One of the values that IDEO often cites is 'Making others successful,' and we are the actual beneficiaries of it."
- Jim Lu, Founder and CEO of Maple&CO
The Maple team and IDEO project team in the co-creation process. Click to learn more about IDEO's collaboration with Maple&CO.
Q. What are the most notable changes in how IDEO practices design over the last 10-15 years?
Tony:
It’s important to acknowledge how much businesses have integrated and adopted the practice of design over the last couple of decades, thanks to the collective effort we all made in the design industry. IDEO as a partner to our clients will always be adding value through complementing our client’s capabilities, and not overlapping them.
Remy:
We have intentionally shifted to a deeper embedded approach with our clients, where rather than delivering work to them, we are doing work side by side with them. This way of working tends to spread out over multiple phases and modes of engagement and it requires a very different approach to design. It’s ultimately a more agile way of working, in that our team learns faster and in-situ with our client and, simultaneously, we are building buy-in, enabling decisions, and scaling execution on the client side as soon as the project starts, not at the end. It creates deeper empathy and consideration for how our clients run their businesses. What is their current company culture, how does that affect the decisions they make, and how do we calibrate our approach to deliver the best value within these constraints? This is really important because coming up with solutions without living and breathing the reality of what it takes to make it real is irresponsible.
Tony:
And as our clients become increasingly fluent in their own design capabilities, our roles and methodology in how we help have also changed and become more sophisticated.
For example, a decade ago, it was common for our engagements to be 6-12 weeks projects where our goal was to provide a fresh perspective for our clients. The output of these projects was often a set of provocations for these clients to illustrate how their sectors have changed, and tools to facilitate the level of change to realise the opportunities. As designers, we did not have permission to be part of these ‘boardroom’ decisions.
Today, our conversations with clients often start with a business goal rather than a design brief, and we spend a substantial amount of time understanding how our client’s teams are set up, and what might be the true challenges that are making it difficult for them to design innovative solutions. While there are occasions where the 6-12 weeks project format is the right path to enable the client to get to their goals, our ways of helping our clients design better solutions have become much more diverse, many of which are not measured by weeks.
For example, the work we are doing with IKEA’s North Asia product development team has approached a business challenge through a mix of accelerated, sustained, and punctuated project typologies, as well as co-working and coaching sessions with their designers on their other projects, where we offer fresh perspectives on the craft of design and engineering.
Remy:
We have gotten really good at becoming the most optimistic and generative versions of our clients. They see us as them, and we are there to push them and work side by side to get work done in ways that are faster, more collaborative, more generative, and bolder. We're very clear about the value we should be delivering and mindful of when we should step away.
Q. How do you arrive at decisions and choices in projects? Do you use consensus amongst client teams as the benchmark for making decisions? When does IDEO’s perspective come into play?
Tony:
At IDEO, we don’t just use design to share our thoughts on the ultimate solutions, we also use design to visualise potential futures that create conversations and make opinions tangible, from the views of both users and client organisations, all in service of enabling meaningful exchanges of perspectives before arriving at the most informed solutions.
To be clear, being informed by diverse perspectives does not equate to using consensus to make important design decisions.
Business leaders we work with listen deeply before they respond with actions and decisions. IDEO’s role is to bring the desirability lens as the starting point for conversations about how best to balance desirability with feasibility and viability to enable great design innovation. This balance is about our ability to help client teams make the right trade-offs within their constraints, in service of achieving their business goals. It’s not about consensus that makes everyone happy.
The work we did with Alia Gogi, the president of Sephora Asia, is a good example. Here is a leader using design as a tool to listen deeply to the different needs of her region, in order to find the right balance between meeting the needs of an evolving set of customers and the right level of stretch in their existing constraints to enable innovation.
We transformed an entire floor of the IDEO Shanghai office into a Sephora "pop-up store" and invited real consumers to share with us their thoughts on our prototype design. Click to learn more about IDEO's collaboration with Sephora.
02 Outputs of design
Q. How would you describe the nature of the outputs of your work in these years? Has IDEO’s work leaned predominantly into the area of strategy?
Tony:
Strategy is inherent in the work we do because design is a strategic act. The outputs of our work, as can be expected, are varied. From strategy blueprints to products to spaces, to work we’ve done for clients ranging from startups to corporations to state-owned enterprises, in industries from retail to health, to food—there is no sameness about any of our outputs.
The near-decade-long relationship we have with the Shinho group is a good example of how we use design to inform their strategy and journey of transformation. We have designed from their purpose as an organisation to how they talk about themselves with a refreshed identity, to the event experiences they host with the Michelin Guide, to the most core of their condiment product innovations. There is a complex strategy we have helped design, but it is also the tangible manifestation in market outputs that makes the strategy real.
Click to learn more about IDEO's collaborations with Shinho Group.
Remy:
Another example I’d like to add here is a piece of work I’ve been involved in over the last four years, which is still ongoing, where we are addressing a systems-level challenge within the logistics industry for a commercial vehicle original equipment manufacturer (OEM).
This is first and foremost a strategic question about what value an OEM could add in a future with greater automation, higher volumes of parcels, and deeper needs for integrated mobility solutions. The ability to rapidly build and stress test feasible prototypes, in real conditions, as a manifestation of that strategy, allowed the leadership of that organisation to consider very different paths for making that strategy real, while also understanding its implications.
From a design output perspective, we needed to illustrate very unusual business models for a traditional OEM. The design of an integrated user experience between hardware and software takes into consideration multiple users across multiple organisations in a high-volume, labor-intensive ecosystem that is evolving fast.
The fact that we built and ran these live experiments, together with our clients as one team, meant that strategy was informing design and design was informing strategy—constantly. The high level of tangibility meant we could move fast and identify the next big questions to solve. This was not about building the perfect solution, but using design to get to the right level of feasible, desirable and viable fidelity to inform a strategic decision.
"The collaboration with IDEO has helped us to further understand the glamping category. Our team gained the confidence to move forward, and we began to invest in it without reservation, enriching the product line at a very fast pace. Some of the business, in fact, advances on forecasts, but because of the confidence, we were bolder in our forecasts and didn't hesitate to invest. I think this is the most valuable thing we gained."
- William Lu, Founder and Chairman of Mobi Garden
The IDEO project team converted the ground floor of the IDEO Shanghai office into a campsite, which is a physical representation of Mobi Garden's brand vision. Click to learn more about IDEO's collaboration with Mobi Garden.
03 Value of design
Q. What, in your view, is the role and value of design thinking in business, and how has that changed?
Tony:
I find the debates about the relevance of design thinking over the last few years fascinating in how they highlight the gaps between understanding design thinking as a problem-solving approach and understanding it as a set of activities to follow. Some of the activities that are associated with design thinking are out of date, and perhaps successful applications are not quite as simplistic as following these sequential activities to guarantee success.
Remy:
Design thinking has been heralded within business circles as a methodology and process to get to innovation solutions. This is not wrong, but to talk about the process without talking about the conditions for design and clearly defined business outcomes can make it dangerous. People often misunderstand what value it should be delivering. In the context of business, design thinking is a tool that should be about enabling an organisation to learn fast, de-risk bold choices, and progressively grow confidence in the right decisions before executing on costly and potentially irrelevant solutions.
Design thinking can strongly enhance the development or improvement of a process or program within an organization. For it to truly be successful, it must be accepted and desired by the people utilizing it. This is where the steps of design thinking to empathize and define are critical. When an organization takes this approach, it ensures that there is an initial deep understanding of what people really need and want. Through asking the right questions to assess these needs and interests, the most suitable design, or policy, can be developed. This becomes the core focus of the development of the design. Without such, substantial time and resources can be wasted, and the final design will not be successful.
- Lindsey Garito, Head of People & Culture, Westchester Country Club, in Forbes Magazine.
Tony:
I think this is more about understanding what value design can bring to businesses today, what role the designer’s approach plays in problem-solving, and how the skill of making can best be integrated into organisations. It is also as much about how businesses, societies, and technologies have changed, as it is about the changes in design.
IDEO often uses prototyping as a way to tangibly understand envisioned solutions to drive valuable discussions and reduce the cost and risk of decision-making. For example, when helping Boom Supersonic recreate the future of supersonic flight, the project team quickly built a full-size model of the aircraft and invited future travellers to give us feedback based on their experience with the prototype design, helping us optimise the design.
Q. As you reflect on your 10 years and 15 years in China, why do you think it's still important to talk about design—a word that is so widely used and frequently mentioned in China now?
Tony:
The design discourse is important and especially relevant precisely because design is pervasive and widely practised. The more we discuss and debate, the more progress we will make with refining and advancing design as a tool for deepening understanding and solving problems, building belief and inspiring action, delivering results, and creating tangible value. The role of design and what it can do for China’s growth remains as important as ever.
Because of China’s economic opening in 1978, there are now many large Chinese organisations that are going through generational leadership succession, where the founders' ways of working have largely been top-down decision-making that enables efficiency. As these companies continue to grow with their new leaders, the increasing complexity will require that more voices be heard for these organisations to evolve and stay relevant. While there are transformation and change methodologies that need to be applied in this succession period, these methodologies can feel academic and mechanical, on occasion. I think design can offer a more transformative and practical take that creates inspiration and useful and usable tools for people in these companies to want to change, as opposed to being told they have to change.
We have been working with one of the largest beverage companies in China where their success has been built around efficiency and the great intuition of their founder. Our work has been to help the new leaders get closer to the voices of their customers, and to allow for all departments of the product creation chain to input their thoughts and expertise in the context of the desirability we have discovered in our research work. This collaborative muscle, enabled by the inspirational nature of design, is something that I believe is critical for some of these organisations if they are to be successful in their succession.
Remy:
Any company in the world that aspires to be a global company needs a China point of view. That need for clarity and strategic relevance will only increase as Chinese organisations challenge on all fronts, domestically as well as globally. Tony has shared what it means in the context of leadership transitions and transformation for domestic companies. I would add that multinational organisations also face challenges to remain relevant, and to build their muscles learning from the level of world-class excellence that we are experiencing here. I believe this is where design will have an increasing role to play: to inspire and communicate across functions and geographies about what can be the same, and what needs to be different, to create market-relevant value.
It is increasingly clear that foreign companies can no longer design a competitive solution for this market from a distance. The need to use locally relevant insights to define solutions is a must-have. We are working with a well-known international automotive company exploring the theme of sustainability and what that might mean in the definition of a future product for China. By looking at broader cultural signals, design helped articulate that sustainability is important to Chinese consumers, but the interpretation of this theme across geographies can and should lead to very different expressions on a brand and product level. In this instance, insights to design enabled a very different conversation for a China-driven vehicle program for a global brand.
04 Conditions for success
Q. What are the key conditions for success when using design or design thinking to tackle a complex challenge?
Tony:
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach. Design is a strategic act of making. Solving complex challenges often needs more than just the expertise of design, and design thinking is not a silver bullet.
As design thinking becomes more widely adopted amongst business communities, and more people begin the learning process, I think it is important to recognize the need for mastery in the application of the approach to meaningfully solve complex challenges. A good recipe does not make great meals without a seasoned chef. Having seasoned practitioners with practical experiences in the approach, and the skills to design and make as a way of inviting others outside the design discipline to collaborate, is an important condition for success.
Design thinking strives to understand why people do what they do, and to use the act of design to create, test, and iterate for better solutions. Finding challenges that are largely in need of human analysis tends to lead to a more effective use of the approach.
An important aspect of IDEO's co-creation approach is to use design thinking as a tool to discern the real needs and existing perceptions of all stakeholders. If we hadn't carried out co-creation, the framework and details of the entire Capstone Program wouldn't be as clear... The overall quality improvement of the course through co-creation is also evident. We as teachers are the ultimate implementers of the course, and it is especially important for us to have comprehensive information and a grasp of how to land on the details.
Zac Zou, Program Lead of the Capstone Program at Yungu High School
Co-creating the Capstone Program with students and teachers from Yungu High School. Click to learn more about IDEO's collaboration with Yungu High School.
Remy:
I think what has definitely changed is using design thinking as a conduit to bring more voices into the room, consider broader and different perspectives, and to leverage its acute ability to synthesise these aspects and marry what is truly valuable to people (desirability), how these new conditions unlock what can be done (feasibility), and giving organisations the confidence that they can thrive in this complexity (viability).
A good example of this is our work in the healthcare industry, both internationally and in China. When working with multinational companies and local organisations we have to take into consideration the cultural attitudes and nuances towards healthcare that vary across different regions. We also consider factors such as funding mechanisms, KPIs for Hospital Directors, the regulatory environment, and distribution networks. By incorporating these perspectives in our work, solutions have a better chance of making it to market, and our clients are better equipped to anticipate and navigate challenges along the way together with us.
We don’t do this sequentially, but we use tangible design to ask questions about the reality of these complex systems, while learning and building towards something that must be truly different and valuable for caregivers and patients.
Future of design
Q. What does the the next 10 to 15 years of design look like to you?
Tony: Generative AI, Web3, climate change, and DE&I are just some obvious top-of-mind factors that are influencing businesses in their decision-making. Perhaps more importantly, these are complex, systemic challenges where I believe design can have a key role to play—not on its own, but alongside other disciplines such as data science, behavioural economics, architecture. It is time for design to become more porous, and more fluid. We are excited to explore with some of our trusted clients new methodologies, formats, and occasions for design. The future of design in China is bright, and we at IDEO have set our sights on the next horizon, where design will play a role in helping make boardroom decisions, deliver the multiplier effect, and achieve even higher order impact.
Remy:
The industry will change and tools will evolve, but design inherently brings an optimistic lens to problems and complexity. This is what has always nourished design and I see that still being true for the foreseeable future. The speed at which technology, society and the environment are changing will create unimaginable opportunities, but also unanticipated problems. I feel design will feed into those new cracks and continue to create new value. Some businesses will forge a path into the future and many will need to go through radical transformation to survive this next era. I’m hopeful that design, with its optimism, can lend a hand to some of these companies so they can find their next curve. That feels meaningful for me.
2023