BACKING NERVOUSLY INTO THE SPOTLIGHT
BACKING NERVOUSLY INTO THE SPOTLIGHT
David Walker
Speech as Judge of Design in Business Awards
DIBA TROPHY designed by Dean Poole
Thank you. Thank you to Leanne and Cathy and DINZ for inviting me here. Thanks also to alt for another great piece of work.
Don’t you think their Torch award is just great. Over here we have the big yellow spotlight on the floor. Look how everyone just hangs around on the edge of the spotlight. Dipping their toes into fame. That is so Kiwi! Come on guys you can not back nervously into the worldspotlight!
The judges were very thrilled with the range and standard of the entries received this year.
We came pretty quickly to shortlist the finalists.Judges are judgmental.
In that process, I guess we are like referees or umpires, or other unpopular figures, who make difficult decisions. These decisions can be subjective and they can be error prone, but we have to live with them. The umpire's decision is final. We will not have any action replays tonight.
But I can fill in a little background.
First of all the award is given to the business, not just to a single project.
Secondly, we were looking for a complete fusion between design and business…a totality.
There are studies of left brain and right brain abilities, that map pretty well on to how businesses work and how designers think.
We were looking for that magical fusion between the rational framework and the emotional experience.
All of us on the panel are Evangelists for design. We believe in its power and possibilities. But we like to think of ourselves as grounded evangelists. So we are looking for well argued, well considered, well-informed, well delivered projects – but within businesses that completely understand design.
So with some businesses, we would argue that being stunning as designers in one single project is not enough. You may be an island of brilliance in a sea of mediocrity, then it is your responsibility to spread the message, to convey what you know about design to the rest of the organisation.
Also, this is not merely about having a good business model. Some finalists are at the start-up stage, with amazing promise but as yet no substantial proof of profitability or longer-term stability. So our message to them is. … Please come back another year, when you have achieved your targets and your business success is proven.
We were also looking for a couple of extra dimensions.
We want businesses to be really well-informed, with good R&D, and all the processes which make design based on good evidence not guesswork.
Within that we are also looking for the signs that show a strong connection to sustainability and deeper contextual issues. The triple bottom line.
The final dimension that was important to us, may be the most important of all, was evidence of design imbued across the whole organization, that it was integrated and pervasive. In last weeks issue of the National Business Review I described this property as design intelligence, something the equivalent of musical intelligence. When this intelligence is everywhere, throughout the organization, it raises the level of the game and lifts the spirit.
If you do not have that then you are unmusical…that is visually illiterate. You know you're in trouble, if members of the band are playing out of tune. You know you've got problems with a CEO who is tone deaf. You might be doing very good work on a project .But it does not count for much if you have a bricklayer running the orchestra.
We were looking for something else, where design is part of the air you breathe, where strategy provides a lyric and design provides the melody .Beyond that..the audience is captured by the tune.
These are high ambitions. These are difficult things to achieve. These awards show we can achieve them .They are very necessary… if New Zealand businesses are to compete in the global theatre
Jules Feiffer Cartoon
The absentee CEO
