how can design best help to increase awareness of its value?

Design Week’s Editor, Lynda Relph-Knight challenged designers to post ideas and enter a debate on how can design best help to increase awareness of its value.

Lynda’s challenge comes from a recent debate about public procurement to purchase design, and the issue that, despite the value of design to improve communication and services, and despite the existing funding for innovation, it (design’s value) still misunderstood by governmental bodies (or is the society in general?), and therefore not correctly procured. It seems a large majority of design stakeholders - inside and outside the design industry - still don’t know much about design and even less about new disciplines and roles of design, beyond traditional areas of the design of ‘things’, ‘messages’ and ’spaces’.

Ideally, and strategically we would need to replace the idea that design is just good to make things look pretty, or the tool to manipulate ‘perceived value’ of products and brands for a profit-driven aim.

My thinking: why not…Establish a VAD © stamp!  (Value Added Design)

The problem: How can design best help to increase awareness of its value?
The big idea: a national VAD* © stamp! (Value Added Design) 

Step 1: Design Audits: why not train 100 (unemployed ?) designers to become design auditors, and conduct national design audits in main public services?

The main task would be:
-identify key problems
-identify best practice KPIs
-link KPI’s with design disciplines
-find links between best solutions and design/ers involvement
-find missing links between inefficient/poor quality services and lack of design
-quantify value and measures of KPIs with VAD (value added design)

Audit process - 3 parallel strategies:

Mystery shopper: the auditors act as real:
      Clients (when needed - special access to info should be arranged with head of services)
      Employees (as if they were doing a temp job, or internship)

Customer Journey / ethnographic
     shadowing clients
     shadowing employees

Simply Auditors - clearly identified as such - with pre-arranged access to information

important:
Design Auditors need to be skilled observers without the designer’s urge to solve the problems.

Step 2: Repositioning design
A large majority of design stakeholders - inside and outside the design industry - still don’t know about most of the new disciplines and roles of design, beyond traditional areas of ‘design of things, of messages, and spaces’, such as design thinking, designers as problem solvers, design as research/scenario setting, the 360º approach for user-centred innovation, experience design, interactions design, and so on. It suggests we have to improve the public and business awareness of this, to replace the idea that design is good to make things look pretty, and great to manipulate the perceived value of products and brands for a profit-driven aim.

How?
-  Weekly features for the FT + other media titles targeted for business, procurement and public services
-  Introduce a Design Knowledge and Practice module in other professional HE courses
-  CPD workshops developed in coordination with other professional development areas, such as business innovation, service management, skills development, etc.
-  Publish more books on the new subjects and LOBBY BOOKSTORES to create new sections for design as most still only have product, graphic, interior, web, packaging and fashion design.
-  Create a VAD* © stamp (*value added design) for products, services and brands that have consciously made good use of design in their performance management decisions.

Step 3: Support business-mind designers:
Provide designers with a toolkit for business performance:
-  tools for language: how to understand and speak business
-  tools for power: how to understand and build personal + professional power
-  tools for measure: how to measure and provide evidence the impact of design in quality, innovation, service excellence, and impact on the triple bottom line.

Question: who would finance and be responsible for the implementation? The Design Council? The DBA? Design businesses? the Government? Or the APGDI? Or a multi-stakeholder group? 

Any (good) ideas? looking forward to hear your views!