This article was authored by Christian Guellerin, Honorary President of Cumulus and Executive Director of L’École de design Nantes Atlantique (WDO Educational Member).
The perception of design has evolved in recent years to finally become applicable to all issues and fields and to establish its strategic nature to support businesses and society in general. Design continues to reflect on the shape of objects, interior architecture and graphics but it now embodies all the strategic concerns of transformation of economic and organizational models. By becoming strategic, design has become a discipline of management. To help organizations conceive, produce and sell products or services differently, designers are called upon to take management positions in all public and private structures. Universities and design schools will have to adapt their programmes to observe and support this evolution.
From creation and applied arts
During a recent conference at the China Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing (China), an event organized by Cumulus, Professor Cai Jun presented recent developments in perception of design as a creative discipline. Traditionally attached to applied arts, design has long accompanied developments in technology and in particular those in materials and their transformation. In its industrial posture, design has made it possible to rediscover the semiotic values of artisanal work in mass production. It accompanied the industrial era of what is technologically possible and economically profitable. Designers have traditionally sought to return to handwork to signify a return to a certain humanism at a time when assembly lines exclude or alienate. They left the strategic financial, commercial and more recently marketing positions to others to validate profitability, costs, market needs, price, performance. Engineers, marketers and financiers traditionally dominate organizations. Designers are the artisans of form, creation and transgression, sometimes marginal and perceived as such.
Innovation and experience: towards a strategic position
But everything changed when the paradigm of innovation shook up the paradigm of mass production and quality. Traditionally, this is what American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor teaches us in his work Scientific Management published in 1911, the industrial paradigm is based on the following technoscientific project: “Doing better and better what you know how to do”. If this is the case, the company has the opportunity to do better than its competitors and, benefiting from better profitability, to remain in a lasting leadership position. This model works perfectly when companies are subject to equivalent market and production conditions and when competition is fair. Globalization has obviously completely called into question this model, all industries are shaken up by the arrival of new international operators who operate with other conditions, particularly social ones and/or access to energy, and which unbalance the levers of competition.
“Doing better and better what you know how to do” is no longer enough. It is appropriate to change this paradigm to complete the previous one, “Being able, in a sustainable and recurring manner, to do something else with what you know how to do.” This is the paradigm of innovation.
If the evolution is notable, it is nevertheless not very far from the profession and the practices of the origins, it is the context of the companies which changes, not the intention, nor even the mission of the designer. But evolution is decisive. The position loses its tactical character in favor of a more strategic one. It’s about representing the uses of tomorrow to help structures innovate.
For many companies to be more efficient, uses have taken precedence over consumption in their strategic thinking to anticipate markets and prefigure them. The designer can draw the contours of a future use without there being any definition of consumption needs and for which, in fact, marketing is powerless. Marketing questions the needs, design questions the desire and the uses and is preeminent to anticipate the next move in terms of strategy.
Digital has perfectly accompanied this evolution in the perception and role of design. Many new services were born without any real needs being detected. No wristwatch consumer asked for connected watches, no phone user wanted to be able to pay with their mobile. Designers have represented this world to make it real, objective, acceptable and desirable. Designers have become these digital professionals, capable of appropriating both the IT and scientific technological approach, the use and the meaning of what should be done with it. The projection of graphic know-how makes up the rest of the aesthetic approach.
From profit to meaning
The world is being turned upside down by two major changes in context which will profoundly modify our environments: the emergence of societal responsibilities and duties to save resources and limit the impacts of the climate crisis, as well as the evolution of the human–machine relationship as soon as robots equipped with artificial intelligence will be more intelligent than the humans who built them.
The consumer society on which wealth generation is based operates on the pillar of market renewal. Each time a white goods company sells a dishwasher, it generates added value, as much wealth as it redistributes in part, first to its employees, then to society in the form of taxes to the owners of the company finally. The company is growing as it regularly sells new products that replace old ones.
The foundation of capitalistic development is linked to this perpetual renewal. The emergence of environmental and responsible awareness encourages another model, that of saving resources, sobriety and sharing. A dishwasher must be able to operate for many years and be repaired to avoid having to change it. It is about saving the resources necessary to save humans on the planet. Likewise, and since social networks allow it, the same dishwasher must be shared between several families in order to optimize its performance. If the dishwasher runs for one hour a day, it will have to be shared with 23 families, thus auguring profound changes in our homes and our life in society in general.
For the designer, the playground is vast and conducive to all speculation on the side paths. Little by little, the consumer society will be replaced by a contribution economy, where each consumer will make a moral as well as an economic choice, as soon as they consume, especially as they are encouraged or forced to do so by the law. Companies must adapt to continue to develop, for many, the challenge is to move from product to service and to change their model. “What else can we do with what we know how to do?” is the new industrial paradigm, that of innovation.
Corporate Social Responsibility is a hoax if it involves making people believe that the company sells products out of duty rather than out of interest. No one believes the head of a capitalistic organization who claims to take care of its customers and its markets out of moral duty. As Adam Smith reminds us: “you should not count on the goodwill of your butcher to have good meat, but rather hope that he manages his own interests well.” A company has never sold anything out of duty, always out of interest. Moralizing the company as a system is a mistake. Don’t believe the business manager who tells you he loves you, unless you have to flog yourself when you are rejected. The company has an economic virtue, not a moral virtue.

Nevertheless, and this is the main thing, all companies will have to adapt to a new awareness among customers towards a desired and planned sobriety. The responsibility of the designer is directly involved in this transformation, and it is important not to distrust anyone or any structure. Once again, it’s about building. The designer is the architect of social responsibility. Thinking and building tomorrow means doing so more soberly, otherwise having to definitively set the limits, those of life on earth.
The climate crisis, resource scarcity and carbon production certainly threaten our humanity. But another issue is perhaps even more prominent at this risk even if it is less publicized as a generator of disasters. Industrial design finds its roots in the concern of the first designers to find the semiotic codes of craftsmanship in the industrial production of the early 20th century. The anthropophagous machine as it is metaphorically represented by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times invites us to think about the role of humans in their relationship to the machine.
What does it mean to be human, once robots are more intelligent than us?
The robot equipped with artificial intelligence poses the same problem. It’s about answering the question: what does it mean to be human, once robots are more intelligent than us?
Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen, rector emeritus of the Designskolen – Kolding in Denmark writes: “Companies of the 19th and 20th centuries asked themselves the question of what was technologically possible and economically profitable, those of the 21st ask themselves the question of what makes sense.” So what role for the designer whose action has become strategic, obviously that of giving meaning, of representing, of producing images, of writing scenarios for a more sober and more human world. If it is a question of transforming businesses and society in general and projecting ourselves into a desirable world, then the designer must occupy the most strategic positions tomorrow.
Ethics as a new frontier
Emmanuel Levinas writes that “morality makes us feel sorry for those who are hungry, Ethics obliges us to feed them.” Ethics requires action, it is no longer a question of thinking about the world or drawing it as we would like it to be, it is a question of building it. Beyond his position as a giver of meaning, the designer becomes a builder and symbolically returns to the origins of applied arts and the work of the hand. It’s about reconciling doing and getting done.
The place of the designer in tomorrow’s organizations is central and determining for the structures which think about their future. We must act to help them design, produce and sell differently. They will be forced to do so by the standards which will undoubtedly be promulgated at a time when political leaders begin to legislate to limit carbon production or are tempted to limit certain industries for the benefit of others.They will also be forced to do so by changes in consumption. The consumer will want to obtain guarantees of responsibility from companies. The consumer will become a citizen-consumer.

The development is interesting because it will revolutionize the UX design approach, which could become an approach much more focused on the consumer who has become a citizen. UX could be replaced by CX design. The consumer experience enshrines both experience, sense but also consumption which becomes acceptable as soon as it is reasoned. CX design could replace marketing focused on profitability alone.
The emergence of societal awareness and new human-machine relationships are the two major issues that now guide the entire pedagogy of design schools. The “consumer experience” enshrines both experience and use but also consumption which becomes acceptable as soon as it is reasoned. CX design could replace marketing focused on profitability alone. Finally, industrial requirements will completely change in nature, the inability to rely on the renewal of markets to order its activity, will force all companies to ask themselves the question of moving from product to service. Dishwasher manufacturers will have to move from selling a machine to marketing “hours of operation” of the machine. Designers are called upon to occupy strategic positions because industrial and commercial models are shaken up by innovation and the duty to change all paradigms.
The concept of Ethical Leadership
Marx writes that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, what is important is to transform it.” Ethics obliges us to act. Design thinking has only laid the foundations for thoughtful design. Nothing will remain except memories of post-it meetings during which everyone felt like they were freeing their creativity. Without a scientific basis other than a drawing to justify that creative thinking went in all directions, and therefore had none, it will not be able to survive except as a recreational stage in the emergence of the designer towards strategic and management functions.
Design thinking is dead, make way for design doing
The role of design schools in learning and training must change in nature and prepare students to become entrepreneurs of their own idea. It is a profound evolution of the programs that must be made. Most programmes are focused on learning techniques, whereas these will be assumed tomorrow by intelligent robots. Thinking that robots will not be able to create is a mistake. We will have taught them to do it and to take our place in all technical activities. It remains for humans to take the position of manager and facilitator of what machines will be able to do. This is the challenge of positioning design tomorrow. If design has become strategic and if the technical tasks are assumed by artificial intelligence, if it is a question of giving meaning to science, technology and/or marketing and finance, then design becomes the key function. But this will only be possible if design schools profoundly change their program towards more professionalization, understanding of the economy, organizations and the levers of their development.
The challenge of hybridizing disciplines between science, humanities, business and design is becoming imperative but not sufficient. It is the objective towards the strategic functions that should be ordered. Student designers can no longer just create and leave their creation to others, it is about entrepreneurship. They are called to become the leaders of this profound economic revolution towards greater moral responsibility and sobriety. They must be leaders on the condition that they are aware of it and that schools allow them to objectify this outcome. Or else, design will only remain on the margins while top-strategic positions are wide open to them.

Christian Guellerin is the Executive Director of L’École de design Nantes Atlantique since 1998. The school has become one of the French and international references in design and innovation education. It has 1,650 students in France and several branches abroad (Shanghai, Pune, São Paulo, Montréal and Cotonou). He is also Honorary president of Cumulus, the largest international association of universities and schools of design, art and media. The association includes 340 international institutions on 5 continents. Its headquarter is in Helsinki. He is president of France Design Education, an association of design schools whose purpose is to promote design and applied arts as training, creation, innovation and research activities. Since July 2018, Christian Guellerin has been the Honorary President of the Chinese French designer’s association. He speaks at numerous conferences in France and abroad about design, strategy and innovation management. He is the author of numerous articles on design and pedagogy in France and abroad. He is President of Design Creative Innovation in Shanghai and President of Africa Design School in Benin, a member of DIID’s Scientific Committee, and Deputy Director and founder of NACAA, the first Franco-Chinese design institute in Hangzhou.