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AHO WORKS STUDIES 2012-2013
Design Studies
Designer’s Century
appear for hours at a time into a place that does
not exist, into a screen that is no bigger than
the palm of our hand, where we can navigate
with our fingers. We live in a society where the
service sector employs almost 80% of us, and
where service innovation has now been placed
on the agenda of both public and private sector.
Products will not disappear; they will always
be there. But innovation demands that design-
ers also address interactivity and the design
of services. During the last few years IDE
has been training designers who can design
products, interactions, services and systems,
because that is what society needs. So, we are
in the century of the designer because we are
in the century of innovation, and that is gen-
erated by the century of competition. Design
thinking and designers from IDEwill be visible
not only in the magazines on coffee tables and
in dentists’ waiting rooms, but in the services
the dentist provides, the health service’s atti-
tude to dental health, and society’s attitude to
health. This is the designer’s century!
Within what we can call product design, the
transition to a post-industrial society has led to
major changes for the designer. From having
close contact with industry and manufactur-
ers, we now have a market where the people
who design toboggans for use in Norway are
located in the Netherlands, while the tools are
made in China. This is true for large parts of
the western world, with the USA leading the
way. But can this continue? Structural factors,
like higher costs in manufacturing countries
like China, the increasing complexity of the
products themselves, a growing political will-
ingness to bring manufacturing back home,
and, not least, manufacturing technology
breakthroughs mean that we can envisage a
revitalised product design role.
If we examine some of the above-mentioned
factors, how will the product designer’s role
change? More and more companies are expe-
riencing rising production costs in connection
with competition fromChina, as well as contin-
ued risk of misunderstandings in the product
development process. It is therefore no surprise
that companies are considering ‘back-sourcing’.
Many products are so complex that the man-
ufacture of subcomponents is dispersed over
many locations before everything is brought
together for final assembly in one place. This
has many similarities with the automobile
industry, which has kept this important element
in the production chain close to its development
departments. Politicians are also beginning to
realise that the post-industrial society cannot
carry on growing ad infinitum. High unemploy-
ment levels and massive deficits in the balance
of trade have led to the introduction of incen-
tives to bring manufacturing back home. This
is well illustrated in President Obama’s State
of the Union address in 2013 in which he high-
lighted the importance of new manufacturing
technology. New manufacturing technologies,
like 3D-printing and more advanced automa-
