Big in Britain #DesignIndaba

At the head of the Design Council since 2003 stands chief executive David Kester. He previously spent nine years as chief executive of D&AD. Kester is a speaker at the Design Indaba currently taking place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC).

UK Design Council's chief executive, David Kester. Source: Design Council.

Bizcommunity: What role are design and designers playing and business innovation?
David Kester: Design is the bridge between creativity and innovation. Most organisations are full of people with really great ideas, but the successful companies are the ones who use design to help understand their customers, encourage the natural creativity within the business and harness that to create innovative products and services.

Biz: How important is design to staying competitive in the global market?
Kester: In an interconnected world, every business - from micro to multinational - has to be able to compete in a global marketplace. Competitiveness means understanding customer or user needs, innovating products and services that cater to those needs and developing compelling branding, web and other channels to communicate effectively. Design lies at the heart of all of those functions - and businesses that put design around the boardroom table tend to be far more competitive as a result.

Biz: How long can design stay a key differentiator, given that worldwide so many businesses are investing heavily in design?
Kester: Great design is more than just about innovating new 'must-have' products. For businesses, it's about understanding the consumer and building value-added services around your offering. Look at how successfully Apple has done that - it's taken its technology products and innovated whole new multibillion dollar markets out of new ways of buying content (iTunes and Apps). Design lies at the heart of that.

Product life-cycles are getting shorter all the time, driven by technology, materials science, the Internet and social change. The need for innovation has never been greater, and the potential return on investing in good design is higher now than ever.

Biz: There is a lot of talk about the importance of sustainability in design. Are designers taking it to heart or do most still only talk the talk?
Kester:Sustainability is one of the most exciting and rapidly growing areas of design, and it's great to see it moving from the specialist to the mainstream as businesses likewise become sustainability-led. Huge leaps forward in technology and material science are opening up whole new worlds for designers, and they are embracing the cutting-edge thinking in areas such as recyclability, re-use and embedded carbon. Design itself is responding by evolving whole new disciplines such as service design, and these have driven the innovation of new alternatives to the 'own-use-discard' business model - such as car-clubs, which have been a huge success.

Biz: What can design contribute in the public sector?
Kester: It's not just a competitive advantage for individual organisations - design-led innovation is going to lie at the heart of the future success of whole nations, as the world faces new challenges in sustainability, ageing populations, climate change and mobile populations. Design is emerging as a key discipline in helping find answers to these challenges - from helping older people live more fulfilling lives to creating sustainable energy housing and transport, reducing crime and creating better communities.

Follow the Design Council on Twitter at @designcouncil.

For more:

• Bizcommunity special section: Design Indaba
  
• Bizcommunity twitterfall: Design Indaba
  
• Design Indaba website: www.designindaba.co.za
  
• Design Indaba twitterstream: www.designindaba.com/juitter
  
• Facebook: Design Indaba group
  
• Twitter: @DesignIndaba
  
• Twitter Search: Design Indaba OR designindaba OR DI2011
  
• Twitter Search: Design Indaba OR DesignIndaba OR diconference OR diconf OR DI2011
  
• Twitter Search: diexpo
  
• Google News Search: Design Indaba

Updated at 4.26pm on 23 February 2011.