A few months ago, Fast Company published a story highlighting the steady decline of design executives at large organizations. This piece made OCTO reflect on why the design field struggles to consistently demonstrate its value in ‘big business’ settings.
Design as a function isn’t typically integrated with the rest of business operations. That is often an error, as, at the end of the day, design is a component in a highly complex interdependent system. A well-designed product that doesn’t meet a market’s economic model will fail 100% of the time. If designers are truly doing their job, they need to understand the macro and micro economic factors that drive success for the solutions they provide.
Unfortunately, designers aren’t typically trained in fundamental business economics. Students and entry-level designers lack the necessary preparation for the realities of business finance as a part of their core education. That’s not to suggest that design students should all have business degrees, but they should certainly be able to understand a profit and loss statement. In our practice, the first design research step is to build a financial model and understand the complete system within which our ‘solution’ will exist. But that’s atypical across much of the rest of the industry.
“If designers are truly doing their job, they need to understand the macro and micro economic factors that drive success for the solutions they provide.”
Design teams tend to avoid KPIs and metrics as measurements of success. If you think back 15 or 20 years, marketing was in the same predicament. Marketing was difficult to measure, hard to explain, and lacked metrics. Today, marketers have virtually cornered the market on metrics. Listen to a marketer at any event or on the latest marketing podcast, and it’s awash in acronyms and language that is all driven around measuring success.
Design hasn’t reached that point yet, and as a function, it isn’t typically integrated with the rest of business operations. But times are changing and designers doing their jobs today need to understand the macro and microeconomic factors that drive success for the solutions they provide. The future of design hinges on its ability to merge creativity with measurable business impact. By embracing this integration and enhancing understanding of business economics, designers can propel the field towards fostering sustainable growth and innovation.
With that as a backdrop, the team at OCTO recently set out to better understand how U.S. corporations and their leadership currently value design and innovation through a business lens. To do so, we surveyed 500 C-Suite and senior managers in Q2 of 2024, and we’ve used these insights to inform OCTO’s 2024 Economics of Design, which follows here. We hope the findings can help illuminate not only the progress that the industry needs to make in the years ahead, but also some considerable strides in recent years that might actually have us headed in the right direction.
“The future of design hinges on its ability to merge creativity with measurable business impact. ”
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