1. “Good design is good business” has
been an obsession of the design profes-
sion ever since Tom Watson said it in
1975. In the years since, contributors to
many journals have explored the
causative link between design and ROI,
which we assume Watson was referring.
Is it true? What exactly did he
mean? Why doesn’t everyone believe it?
How can we prove it and convince our
management once and for all? These
and similar questions have fueled con-
ference agendas for more than a quar-
ter-century, as designers have
scrambled for the silver bullet that
would finally establish a universal value
proposition for business design.
Watson, the son of the founder and
the chairman of IBM from 1946 to
1971, was indeed a champion of indus-
trial design. But frankly, having been a
speechwriter for the office of one of his
successors and knowing a little about
how these things work, I’d bet that the
“good business” bit originated simply
as a hack’s fortunate turn of phrase on
behalf of the retired chairman. (“What
a great line! No way he won’t deliver it.
And nobody’s going to call me to
account—even if I do turn the entire
profession inside out for years to
come.”)
If my hunch is correct, then “good
design is good business” was funda-
mentally misconceived. I have a couple
other misgivings:
KEYNOTE
Evaluating the nexus between business and design, Carol Moore asserts that
companies can establish and sustain a competitive advantage by investing in
experience design, simultaneous design, and the design and delivery of urgently
needed information. She identifies five promising business-design “themes” and
urges designers to work in collaborative teams and fully immerse themselves in the
context of their endeavors.
Declaring victory:
Toward a new
value proposition
for business design
by Carol Moore
10 Design Management Review Spring 2004
Carol Moore, Director,
Parsons Design Lab,
Parsons School of
Design

2. First, the concept is outdated. Corporations
are infinitely more complex, with many more
variables at play, than in Watson’s day. We could
all name examples from the past 25 years in
which good design did not overcome bad busi-
ness decisions or when “bad” design succeeded
commercially.
Second, Watson’s adage—simply because it’s
so facile and exclusive-sounding—tended to iso-
late designers within the enterprise (which many
came to prefer). Colleagues took that in and
reacted accordingly, compromising for a long
time any inclination to work cooperatively.
In short, the mantra that still looks so right
on the surface may not be all that appropriate. I
suspect that by publicizing and defending
Watson’s phrase so passionately all these years,
designers took on a battle they didn’t have to
fight then and don’t have to fight now.
It may be time to declare victory and move
on to a new value proposition. Adopting a sin-
gle-point manifesto might not be wise—haven’t
we learned?—but we might consider a larger
and more inclusive idea. In fact, management
consultant Brian Gillespie suggested just such a
candidate in a recent DMI e-bulletin: a link
between business design and sustainable com-
petitive advantage for the enterprise.1
“Good design helps build and sustain com-
petitive advantage,” Gillespie wrote. Well, it defi-
nitely doesn’t have the zing of Watson’s bon mot.
But it does acknowledge that design is one of
many players essential to business success. And it
goes to the heart of the issue. As any manage-
ment consultant will tell you, most clients’ ques-
tions ultimately boil down to: “How can my
company become more competitive?”
Design for competitive advantage, as Gillespie
points out, can be researched and engineered.
It’s measurable—at even the simplest level, with
before-and-after market share statistics—which
appeals to the marketing guys. It’s a valid objec-
tive no matter how your organization is struc-
tured or which product or service you supply,
because everybody has competitors. And,
frankly, it takes a more realistic view of responsi-
bility; if designers are working toward “sustain-
able competitive advantage,” they focus more on
methodologies for collaboration and synthesis
across the enterprise.
If the profession chooses to explore this
notion, I think it will require delving into three
of the newer, more holistic frontiers for business
design: first, experience design; second, a process
I call “simultaneous design”; and third, informa-
tion design and delivery for very complex issues
that desperately need explaining.
Experience design
Experience design, of course, is the process of
engineering every aspect of the interaction
between customer and brand to reinforce
desired values and ensure brand loyalty and cus-
tomer retention. It’s what writer Bruce Sterling
calls “pulling the guy
into your tent.”2
The
seamless customer
experience offered by
Disney World is the
classic example.
Experience design
has been championed
over the past few years
primarily by Joseph
Pine, author of The
Experience Economy,
and Lou Carbone, of
Experience
Engineering, author of
the forthcoming Clued
In: Creating Experiences
that Customers Will
Value… and Will Pay for Again and Again. Pine
and Carbone assert that providing the best cus-
tomer experience in any industry is the only way
to secure and maintain a sustainable competitive
advantage in the marketplace.
Experience design is the art and science of
the very, very big picture—what John Seely
Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox
Corporation, called “the design of institutions.”3
I like to think he meant not only individual
institutions, but also Institutions (the societal
building blocks of “the way things work”).
Declaring victory: Toward a new value proposition for business design
Design Management Review Spring 2004 11
1. Brian Gillespie,“Strategic Design Management in 250
Floors or Less,” Design Management Institute e-Bulletin,
April 2003.
2. From Chee Pearlman (moderator),“A Conversation
About the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Wired, January
2001.
3. As quoted on designfeast.com from Nate Burgos Inc.,
a “webliography dedicated to the family of design disci-
plines.”
I suspect that by
publicizing and
defending Watson’s
phrase so passionately
all these years,
designers took on a
battle they didn’t have
to fight then and don’t
have to fight now

3. Medical care, for example, is an Institution—
one that Steven Skov Holt, distinguished profes-
sor and chair of the ID program at California
College of the Arts, makes the case for redesign-
ing from an experience perspective.“Couldn’t
instruments and med-
ical environments be
designed so that
patients’ needs come
first?” he asks in a
recent article in ID
magazine.4
“Couldn’t
the complex web of
interactions between
fixtures, tools, instru-
ments, garments, nurs-
es, doctors, technicians,
and patients—and
between mind, body,
spirit, color, light,
material, and space—be the inspiration for a
revolution in healthcare design?” And then, ulti-
mately (italics his),“Couldn’t we designers go
beyond our normal scale and scope of projects
to aspire to something bigger than the next Gold
IDEA Award—couldn’t we mass-produce hope
while we humanize healthcare?”
Another article in the same magazine details
a start: the Ambient Experience Design system
from Philips Medical Systems, a division of the
international electronics conglomerate. Within
the system’s two-room, hotel-like suite,“smart”
electronics and comfortable furnishings adapt to
any type of medical treatment or procedure:
radiology, dialysis, chemotherapy, or what have
you. Customizable lighting and other mechanics
are geared to reduce patient stress and tension.5
Medical centers will discover, though, if they
haven’t already, that just developing the hard-
ware isn’t enough—that the Institution will have
to adapt its operations and its culture if the
transformation is to be a success. That’s because
experience design cannot be a collection of the
random, achieved by pulling together whatever
is out there. Indeed,“A complete, holistic
approach to design is more and more what our
clients want,” says Fred Dust, leader of the Smart
Space practice at IDEO San Francisco, citing
requests for design services for “products
through signage” for a clothing retailer or “com-
plicated technology through the physical space”
for a hospital.
Moreover, he says,“Our business didn’t suffer
badly during the bust because our clients
believed that design and innovation would lead
them out of the swamp. They said,‘We need
design for differentiation’”—that is, for compet-
itive advantage.
Experience design focuses on integrating
environments, products, services, and their
background processes, all of which must be
planned carefully via “simultaneous design.”
Simultaneous design
Simultaneous design systematically produces
things that are intended to work together.
Simultaneous design is the opposite of “cop-
ing”—which is what we do when we struggle
with legacy thinking, processes, and technolo-
gies. When Steve Jobs said,“In most people’s
vocabularies, design means veneer… But to me,
design… ends up expressing itself in successive
layers of the product or service” (italics mine),
what he was talking about was the need for
simultaneous design.6
The opportunity for simultaneous design is
increasing with the economic upturn and the
aging of the huge IT infrastructure installed in
the 1990s. It’s an exciting chance to reinvent
products and services—correctly, this time
around. The first product opportunity that
comes to mind, inevitably, is the computer.
Of course, computers have improved only
slightly since software guru Mitch Kapor wrote
his Software Design Manifesto 14 years ago.“The
daily experience of using computers,” Kapor
wrote,“is still fraught with difficulty, pain, and
barriers for most people.”7
Don Norman, tellingly, believes that it’s too
late to make a difference.“It’s impossible to
make (a computer) better because it’s hoisted on
its own petard,” he says.“You can’t get rid of the
history.”8
Design as a Business Resource
12 Design Management Review Spring 2004
4. Steven Skov Holt,“Why must healthcare design be a
sick joke?” ID, March/April 2004, 31-33.
5. Lisa Skolnik,“Medi-Care: Philips Ambient Experience
Pavilion takes some of the stress out of medical tests,”
ID, March/April 2004, 85-86.
6. As quoted on designfeast.com.
7. Mitchell Kapor, The Software Design Manifesto (1990),
on www.kapor.com/homepages/mkapor/
Software_Design_Manifesto.html.
8. Chee Pearlman, op. cit.
Our business didn’t
suffer badly during
the bust because our
clients believed that
design and innovation
would lead them out
of the swamp

4. That’s true—and you can’t get rid of the IT
industry as we know it, either. So the onus falls
on the third important area for future business
design: information design and delivery for
issues that desperately need explaining. Again,
computing and its problems come to mind.
Information design and delivery
Take my ThinkPad (please). After its recent cata-
strophic crash, I replaced the hard drive, rein-
stalled Windows, expurgated all manner of
viruses with the “help” of Norton, updated the
BIOS—and dealt with tech support from three
companies (not to mention “help” from three or
four different Dummies books). Each “support
rep” pointed the finger at the others, just as no
plumber or electrician you hire ever views the
work of his predecessor with anything but scorn.
I reached my personal all-time nadir of service
experience when an IBM support rep asked,
“Hey, do you have a Philips screwdriver handy?”
What if we consumers didn’t have to spend
so many hours with, or rely so completely on,
“support sites,” imperfect search technology, and
our own faulty research skills and ignorance?
Imagine a Web-based guidance system that
would pull together the hardware, software, cus-
tomer support, and process information for all
the players (all of whom, of course, would adopt
common standards and processes behind the
scenes to make this possible). Then the system
could ask me for an ordinary note about my
problem(s), stir the details around in some uni-
verse of computing knowledge that includes
relational (not just “factual”) information from
every possible player, and serve up an interac-
tive, step-by-step solution. What if I could
receive a guide that began,“Well, you have four
separate problems, and you have to do the fol-
lowing in this order: First, …”
Many people could use a real-time, you-spe-
cific “guide” about how to address a cancer diag-
nosis, about the maze of adoption, or about any
topic that involves both content (the what) and
process (the what you should do). Not that these
guides would or should replace trusted physi-
cians, advisors, or technicians. At the least,
though, they would break down the first stage of
complexity and provide a sort of holistic road
map. At best, they could actually provide solu-
tions.
Wait. Wasn’t artificial intelligence supposed
to do this? What happened to cognitively based
expert systems that would convey information
within your context? These visions earned a
response because they acknowledged immense
frustration and promised a better solution.
Instead, the knowledge management fad of a few
years ago produced awkward “team rooms”
curated by administrators with the information
architecture skills of walruses (example, Third
Communication from the Committee). Is that
the best we can do?
Sanctity evolves
As cartoonist, novelist, and playwright Jules
Feiffer said,“Design is so important because
chaos is so hard.” Design leadership is uniquely
suited to integrate experience design, simultane-
ous design, and complex information design
into the coherent systems that develop and sus-
tain competitive advantage. Designers, above all
other business professionals, have the ability to
master chaos for the teams they work on, thus
enabling top performance.
Is it serendipitous that the need for such lead-
ership coincides with designers’ discarding
decades of professional
baggage? I’m no histo-
rian, but this is what
I’ve observed over the
past couple of decades:
By the 1980s, react-
ing to a considerable
history of being under-
appreciated and under-
valued, the design
profession had taken
upon itself an odor of
sanctity (the “you
couldn’t possibly
understand” syn-
drome). It was a kind
of protective col-
oration. Fortunately,
the rationale for this
attitude weakened as
the effects of long-term design advocacy from
corporate giants like IBM and others took hold
during the course of the decade.
The Web’s highly visible challenges further
helped designers come into their own. I remem-
ber that in the early ’90s, it was difficult to com-
municate or qualify to a team of strategists and
Declaring victory: Toward a new value proposition for business design
Design Management Review Spring 2004 13
In fact, design has
become a bona fide
celebrity, complete
with a posse: Martha
Stewart’s home skills
empire, Frank Gehry’s
buildings, Michael
Graves’ and Isaac
Mizrahi’s designs for
Target...and so on

5. technologists the benefits that designers could
bring to the Web. After all, the strategists set the
business agenda and the engineers made it hap-
pen on the site, right? It took many spectacular
and expensive crashes before business learned
that code alone did not a Web site make—before
nondesigners under-
stood that designers
had a crucial and con-
tinuous role in site cre-
ation, development,
and operation.
The success of Web
design fueled the
demand for, and the
appreciation of, design
in other forms.
Certainly, the high pro-
file of popular design,
architecture, and
design marketing today
owes a great deal to the
showcase of Web
design. In fact, design
has become a bona fide
celebrity, complete
with a posse: Martha
Stewart’s home skills empire, Frank Gehry’s
buildings, Michael Graves’s and Isaac Mizrahi’s
designs for Target, Newsweek’s special issue on
design, and so on.
Thus, with no more need to posture and two
decades of evident success—not to mention the
special pressures of a difficult economy—busi-
ness designers pretty much dropped the idea of
design sanctity. The designers who developed
the 1998 Nantucket Manifesto set the tone when
they called for infusing design with the trap-
pings respected by business (“goals … roles and
responsibilities… organizations … process”)
and for approaching design from an uber-practi-
cal perspective (“Design … yields useful, use-
able, and desirable products for people”).9
By contrast, the 2000 First Things First
Manifesto asserted that designers were no longer
“handmaids to business” and called for a move-
ment toward “more useful, lasting, and demo-
cratic forms of communication—a mind shift
away from product marketing and toward the
exploration and production of a new kind of
meaning.”10
Maybe that idea touched a chord in
some quarters, but the timing was hopeless.
Product marketing had been on an unstoppable
trajectory for a couple of millennia.
Today, measurements for business design are
largely the same as for the rest of the business:
competitive advantage, revenue, customer
recruitment and retention, distribution, brand
reach, mindshare, or whatever else the organiza-
tion values.
Design frustrations
Of course, it can take years to establish true syn-
ergies with the hard-core processes that make or
save money for the business, and I won’t mini-
mize the acute frustrations of business design.
Instead, I’ll contribute one of the worst stories I
ever heard.
The designer in this case was an architect
designing a new corporate headquarters. The
headquarters was first conceived as a three-
building campus. When somebody worried
about the stockholders’ reaction to such an elab-
orate plan, the architect was told to meld his
objectives into two buildings, one for the highest
executives and the other for the staff. When
somebody worried about the staff’s reaction to
that one, the architect was obliged to smush the
plan—you guessed it—into one building, with-
out much time for actual redesign. Did that
work? Well, the halls were immense, but the
cubicles… weren’t. Employees had to eat in
shifts to fit into the cafeteria. Parking lots
stretched for miles through the bulldozed
woods.
These are tough situations; creativity, after all,
does matter—on several levels—and it is diffi-
cult not to let creative disappointments loom
large. The point is, coping with ambiguity, per-
versity, and illogic is the reason people get paid.
Turning out iconic work that clears the gauntlet
unchanged, being appreciated,“having a seat at
the table”—these are all nice-to-haves that very
few employees anywhere routinely enjoy. And
designers actually have more opportunities than
most of us drones to break through the sludge.
Fortunately for everybody, there are lots of
ways and places to claim a design leadership
role. Established designers tell me, though, that
Design as a Business Resource
14 Design Management Review Spring 2004
Thus, with no more need
to posture and two
decades of evident
success—not to
mention the special
pressures of a difficult
economy—business
designers pretty much
dropped the idea of
design sanctity
9. See AIGA, The Advance for Design Timeline,
http://advance.aiga.org/mission/index.html.
10. See First Things First Manifesto 2000, at
www.adbusters.org/campaigns/first.

6. their colleagues should hone two business skills
in particular if they want to succeed.
Teams and context
The first skill, as you might expect, is the ability
to work well in teams—intradisciplinary design
teams (which are more and more common) or
interdisciplinary function teams. Fossil, the
watch and fashion products company that
licenses designs to more than a dozen clients,
including Armani, DKNY, Frank Gehry, and
Philippe Starck, works extensively with intra-dis-
ciplinary design teams. It’s often a balancing act.
“The industrial design folks get frustrated by the
pace of our design process—the way we speed it
through,” says Brad Beach, Fossil’s vice president,
watch design and product development.“That’s
why we also need fashion people, who are used
to working really fast.”
The design consultancy IDEO is known for
fielding interdisciplinary teams; a typical
research team for a project with a retail client
might include a child psychologist, a space
designer, and an interaction designer. IDEO
believes that its meticulously developed method-
ologies are the keys to allowing its diverse team
members to coalesce and to adopt a common
language.
The second business skill is rare—the ability
to think contextually about the job, the business,
and the industry.“We see great design talent,”
says IDEO’s Fred Dust of recent design-school
graduates.“We see people willing to do anything
to gather good design research. What we haven’t
seen routinely are recent graduates who are great
at synthesizing what they see”—of stretching
beyond the traditionally held boundaries of
design to the place where product, process, and
environment are one.
What’s so valuable about that? Well, that
holistic context is the way customers perceive
and experience businesses. Their experience of
the context determines why they choose one
brand over another. Ultimately, understanding
and enabling an optimal context is the soul of
creating sustainable competitive advantage.
Context is of particular concern to design
schools, which are working to introduce it as
early as possible—to “push budding designers
into the messier problems of the world,” says
Richard Koshalek, president of Art Center
College of Design.11
Several other design schools, including
Parsons School of Design, in New York, build
context by running project-based programs with
corporations, nonprofit institutions, and other
organizations. The Parsons Design Lab, of which
I’m the director, enlists these organizations to
sponsor corporate-stu-
dent projects that,
more often than not,
require intradiscipli-
nary teams (Parsons
incorporates more
than a dozen degree-
granting design
departments).
The Lab runs five
programs, developed as
a matrix of Parsons’
academic strengths
crossed with relevant
growth industries and
business areas. The
programs reflect the
contexts of future
employers (businesses
based on science and the media), the context of
business environments (design and the law,
design and business), and the context of process
(business methodologies, digital technologies,
and product design, for example):
Design and Science
• Design solutions for the life sciences,
biotechnology, pharmaceutical, healthcare,
and medical industries
Design and the Law
• An ongoing study of areas of the law, such as
intellectual property, that affect designers
and users of design
Design, Technology, and Society
• Products, technologies, and applications
for consumers, business-to-business, and
education
Design and Business
• An ongoing analysis of the practices that
maximize design’s contribution to sustained
competitive advantage for the enterprise
Design and the Media
• Device design and applications for publish-
ing, gaming, movies, personal electronics,
Declaring victory: Toward a new value proposition for business design
Design Management Review Spring 2004 15
Context is of particular
concern to design
schools, which are
working to introduce it
as early as possible—
to “push budding
designers into the
messier problems of
the world”
11. Cathleen McGuigan,“The Gospel of Richard,”
Newsweek, October 27, 2003, 88-89.

7. training, sports, music, and the Web
If the Design Lab gets it right, students working
on projects experience virtually everything with-
in the business context (including the demonic
project manager, if not the occasional wacko
client).
If not now, when?
Some final thoughts about developing a new
value proposition for business design:
• Now is fine. The profile, the power, and the
reputation of designers have never been
higher. IDEO’s Dust, for example, cites the
appointment of high-level corporate design
executives, what he perceives as increased
interest in design by business schools, and
businesses’ interest in applying design
methodologies, such as collaboration and
rapid prototyping, to other areas of their
operations.
• Helping the organization build sustainable
competitive advantage strongly implies that
designers are available, skilled, cooperative,
and focused on business success. Given the
history of business design, these inclusive
attributes should be included in any new
value proposition so that nondesigners and
business management will welcome and buy
into it.
It’s been 25 years. Do readers believe that it’s
time to try again? Should an international com-
mittee under the auspices of DMI, AIGA, and
other design organizations evaluate the develop-
ment of a new value proposition for business
design? Write to dmistaff@dmi.org. Ⅵ
Reprint# 04151MOO10
Design as a Business Resource
16 Design Management Review Spring 2004