I am in paris right now at the international DMI conference, writing this in my hotel room. I’ve been trying to find time to blog about it but somehow Eiffeltowers, finnish people, lunches, dinner parties and, er, the conference itself got in the way. So for now I will post the presentation I held at the academic conference in the beginning of this week (to quite some acclaim I’m happy to mention). And here’s a pictorial overview of the conference and all the distractions around it.
And check out the new zilver website by the way, it is officially on line!
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Hey! This is a good way to exchange notes on what we are seeing.
So here is my critical and acid assessment;
. One lucky girl with friends in the advertising world, doing what she wants with a brand that was dying, on a franchise business model that depends on local skills (I bet scaling is gonna be a probelm in 3 to 4 years..)
. One lucky woman that is working with a boring product, dealing with 2 of the 12 drivers she could be dealing with, the best way she can, unquestioned in an industry where you don’t except more. Let’s see what lifts is she going to produce with the last personas and scenarios que proposed…!
. One gentlement that made a difference for 12 years in the automobile industry, but then sold his soul to the corporate world and now does not speak for design in the sector…you just needed to see the concept car sequence to see where he was going…and now he is going to “standardize” the whole corporate communications program!
Let’s see what we get tomorrow.
it’s great to see how my cup is always half full: although you are right in your critical attitude I saw three presenters demonstrate to us how design has helped their companies find direction and translate their vision into meaningful consumer touchpoints. To me the limitations of an engineering driven company (KONE) or a cost&standardisation driven company (Renault) make the story even more appealing. Without these every day constraints, design becomes art. These people tried to push the boundaries of their corporate context with design, not to let design thrive outside of that context. See you at the conference,
erik
Great to follow this short conversation amongst you! I think, Erik, your positive attitude indeed lets you see things that otherwise remain ignored and that’s a real gift. I do fully agree with your assessment and I do think that design management is exactly aiming at solving (even at first sight ‘hopeless’ cases) wicked problems and pushing the boundaries.
On the other hand José is exactly describing one of the key weaknesses of DMI conferences over the last couple of years (if you are in the lucky situation to have attended several ones): The roster of speakers in a retrospective appears to be some sort of ‘randomly chosen’ and more the result of one or two key stakeholders exercising ‘thumbs up/down’ decision making. I can lively imagine the talk of the ‘lucky girl with friends in the advertising world’ and how this has been some sort of ’snapshot analysis’ (taking into account that I might be fully wrong here!).
What is definitively lacking is synthesis at the end (and I don’t mean the presidential farewell) that is only possible is the speakers are carefully aligned in advance according to the conference theme. Active user (aka conference visitor) participation in many ways via live twitter comments and other interactive formats like live blogging, videocasting etc. would give far better (and incidently critical/honest) feedback and foster quality of experience for the conferences to come. I’ve proposed this to DMI several times, but apparently ….
you’re right ralf, what amazed me again today is how hard it is for presenters to combine nice ‘design’ content with more insightful methods, tools and approaches in their presentations. I don’t want to see just nice results, i want to know how the presenter got there. And then, once they’ve found the right balance between result and process, they have to be able to communicate that to their audience in a compelling manner. for the attendees reading this: who of the DMI presenters fulfills these three criteria do you think? Or which other criteria do you use to judge a presenter?
Hi Ralf and Erik,
What I would be interested in is how does this compare with the Design Education conference. Perhaps Erik can give his thoughts since he has been at both events? Personally, I do think that the professional conferences still suffer from the perfection syndrom, that is one shows the perfect solution and leaves out the messy process. This has been a problem for design all around.
I’d actually say that the criteria for a good academic presentation are somewhat different: the goal at the academic conference was not to present a convincing case for the value of design management or design thinking in practice, but the critical reflection on a specific topic. Here it is of importance that the presenter can step back from their own work sufficiently to explain their research in a convincing manner. What I found at the academic dmi conference is that there were quite some presenters who were still so lost in their own processes and thoughts that they were unable to reflect upon their own work. This makes for presentations that are very hard to follow.
In essence though the problem is the same as for the business conference as you point out so well Sabine: presenters are so full of their own results that they are unable to view their work from a distance and reflect critically.
todays presentations were great though: Clive Grinyer, miguel Angel Munar, Surya Vanka and Pierre Yves Panis all did a great job of balancing result and process, presenting it in a very inspiring manner and rfelcting critically on their work.