The design practice has been ignored and misunderstood by a lot of companies for a long time. The influence of design on the product and ultimately on the company’s image has not been properly understood by their managers. As a result, inadequate products have been created; products, which did not satisfy user’s expectations. Furthermore, they have been working with “products”, without thoroughly thinking over their “raison d’etre” beforehand.

Companies, traditionally, have been focused on reduction of production costs, either in materials, technologies or human resources. This policy has proved not successful. There still are companies in countries like China or East Europe, were the rate hour/work is so economic that companies cannot compete with these rates within their original countries. They have been focussed on the process without taking into account the “engine” or core of successful products and services, i.e. the design process.
 
This misunderstanding has been partly due to a diffuse image of the design discipline by companies and managers. This is not surprising, if one takes into account the very nature of the design discipline, half way between art and technology. Thus, different designers have been approaching design from different points of view: some adopting a more artistic point of view, whilst others have approached the design in a more technical fashion. This variety of approaches have led to confusion and a lack of standards within the design profession. Inexperienced managers do not know what designers can provide to their company. Furthermore, bad experiences with so-called “designers” or “artists with taste” have damaged the image of the profession, creating lack of trust between managers and designers’ services.


It is clear then that the lack of information (about designers’ functions and services) that has failed to reach the companies’ managers and the bad performance of some professionals of design have led to some companies being frighten of investing in design. Furthermore, some managers are not aware of the influence design can have on the success/not success of their products in the market.
 
This situation, however, is changing and changed long time ago in countries such as USA or Italy, where design is seen as a powerful and necessary tool in order to launch successful products. Designers are not seen as artists who add their piece of work to the company, but as a continuum, people who know how the company works and channel its creativity according to the resources, image and structure of the company.

Today, some companies create design departments which work closely with marketing and engineering departments in order to create innovative products. Here, the designer represents another integrated part within the company’s structure. Designers’ opinions are valued and contrasted with other departments’, creating a feedback process, which will lead to a product that has been thought over and planned since the beginning. A product is worth the risk of investment in new technologies and materials because it is backed up by a research process.


Also, the companies’ change of attitude towards design results from a more rigorous approach of the design profession within the design process. That is, the design profession has adopted a more professional approach, adopting processes and tools from other fields such as engineering, social sciences, ergonomics, etc. Thus design has become a multidisciplinary discipline with methodologies and approaches of other disciplines and fields. And considers the creative part of the profession as the result of the solution to a problem previously researched and explored.
 
This particular and more thorough design approach is known as design research. This type of design, which represents a more thorough exploration of the issues related to a specific problem, is closely related to the user, and is called user-centred. Research has provided the discipline of design the rigour and methodologies which were lacked previously, thus strengthening the grounds of the creative part. This type of design not only is supposed to improve the quality of the output of the process, but it also provides the methods and theory backing in order to justify decisions and actions related to the product’s features that were considered random and unpredictable before.

Researchers of design have to be aware of marketing, engineering and production issues, as well as aesthetics ones. Designers do not any more represent the image of “solitary artist”; they are an integral part of a system, they understand, use and contrast other work methods integrating them in order to design a more complete and coherent product.


Design research has been misunderstood and criticized by lots of practitioners within the design field. The very nature of the research has been seen not compatible with the more creative practice of designers. This attitude has led to dividing the practitioners of design into two groups, namely, the design researchers and designers.

Some designers have perceived this type of design as a waste of time in exploring the “obvious”, and the methodologies and other tools available - a constrain to their creative skills. However, design research represents the natural evolution and adaptation of the design discipline within the companies’ structure. Design research has allowed showing proposals to managers which beforehand were justified and backed by a researcher and a studio. Thus, managers have been able to decide and think about concepts which were explained in managerial terms, then willing to cooperate, invest and risk in proposals made by designers.
 
The design discipline, unconsciously, has always been attached to certain, limited in scope, research practices. That is because the design practice implies finding a solution to a problem. Since it is impossible to find a problem without carrying out research about what type of problems exist in products or what needs are not satisfied, it is then obvious that research is nothing new within the design discipline. However, there is a difference of grade or depth. That is, even though research was necessary and has always been done, little attention was paid to the process itself, and the depth of the insights obtained was not sufficient.


The little attention paid to the process and time dedicated to the exploration of the issue related to the design briefing, may be due to the fact that companies do not pay for this stage of the process. The services they pay for do not contemplate a process or a concept, but a material object or a product, and usually a redesign of a concept or a product already existent (restyling). Thus, research is not needed since the innovation is minimal.
 
Big companies such as Philips, Siemens, Sony, etc., however, have realised the importance of incorporating design researchers in their policy in order to innovate and provide quality and meaningful products for the target users. These companies have seen the creation of new products, embracing new lifestyles, etc., as an advantage from the economic point of view. Thus, in this type of companies, investment in design research on a long-term basis is seen as the only way to create suitable and successful products, able to adapt to the change of times.
 
In this type of companies, the innovation and development is seen as a continuous process in order to grow and compete against other companies, and not as a punctual intervention. There is a culture of change and improvement which is reflected by the investment in I+D departments that are working permanently on improvements of existent products and on new products, as well as on detecting problems and needs of consumers in order to improve people’s quality of life as well as their businesses.


FROM DESIGN TO DESIGN RESEARCH, A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

Once a person has worked on design for companies, they clearly understand that projects, while carried out for real companies, are full of constraints. The other thing that may struck the novice is the fact that companies are not always looking for new and innovative products, and that most of time is being devoted to restyling which implies a relative innovation, if any.
Small and medium companies do not have resources to invest in a permanent design department, and usually commission this service to design studios. In big companies, however, internal departments within the same company may provide this service.

Small and medium companies usually are not prepared to invest in real innovation, which requires previous investment in research; thus, the innovation is very limited and linked to the policy and resources of the company. On the contrary, bigger companies invest big amounts of money in research, thus launching real innovative products and services to the market. These companies usually work with researchers in different fields such as: engineers, designers, psychologist, etc. Their approach to design is global and not punctual, and the innovation they propose is not superficial but a core one.

The practice of design studios provides short-term solutions to relative or existent problems, as a result of short-term explorations; whereas research design practices carried out by big corporations provide long-term solutions to problems found or perceived, as a result of long-term explorations. And this is mainly due to economic and company policy reasons.

If it is true that small companies may have bigger flexibility of product range and change of policy, they can also be unable to launch a new product typology, due to the lack of resources.
Designing for one or another type of company implies different practices, as well as methodologies and attitudes. Whilst designing for small companies may be more immediate and “flexible”, it also involves a less thorough exploration of the issue chosen. However, research in design implies a longer-term exploration, which requires a more thorough and rigorous process embraced by methodologies and techniques from other fields that feed the creative process inherent in design, in order to create real innovations. Of course, this type of design is more costly in economic terms, and that may be the reason why small companies cannot afford it, therefore producing, in some cases, products of lesser quality.

From the point of view of material consumption it is clear that companies can still produce “attractive” and low quality products for the existent consumer needs, with low research investment. However, these type of products that even big companies are concerned with in order to keep sales rates, do not improve or advance the quality of products, neither explore the continuous and changing needs of the user (user’s quality of life), rather they try to fill the consumer purchasing gap with a change of “face of product” already existent, in order to increase sales.    
Maybe more attention should be paid to investments in immaterial research in order to create a few but well researched and designed products rather than inundate the market with hundreds of products based mainly on commercial grounds. Maybe the pace of product creation has speed so much that there is no time left to think about the real need of the products launched.

The next step may be the investment in research to create not products, but knowledge, in order to advance the quality of products and life in general. Design not as an artistic and holistic act, but as an integrative and thoughtful one. To design less and better, and to do so as a result of a through long-term process of exploration and study about the products that surround people’s lives. All this will only be possible through a shift from design to design research, which already is taking place in some companies.