across segmented functional departments or disciplines with a united goal in mind—the interests of the end user.

• Design, as in visualization, can help map out complex relationships in a graphical form that is otherwise difficult to understand in text and numbers. Mapping a complex system visually can help governments or policymakers design a better system to align various interests more effectively as well as make it more comprehensive for the general public. A picture is truly worth a thousand words.

• Design, as in ease of use, can help simplify otherwise complex financial products. The complexity of existing financial jargon allows the fudging of investment risks that has promoted the crisis to this scale. It has been created by bad communication where even financial professionals do not fully understand what they are selling and governments do not know how to regulate.

Is the Role of Design Shifting?

What this article hopes to bring home is the awareness that designers with the mind-set and approach to clarify the complex can operate at a much higher strategic level of design.

As designers, we’ve had the opportunity of bringing the field of user-experience design into a new market here in Asia; along with it comes the challenge of communicating what we do as a profession. Through our experiences, I discovered that our work as designers—if explained well on a strategic level—can have benefits beyond new product development. In fact, it can influence governmental services and organizational change. In

Hong Kong and China, since the field is so new, it could very much be a blank piece of paper with the opportunity of redefining what designers can really offer at a strategic level.

Recently, I have been engaged in a project where we presented the concept of user-centered design to the Hong Kong Government Public Services. Kaizor led a team of 16 students at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s master’s design course in proposing innovative service design concepts to improve public services in Hong Kong. This initiative is sponsored by the Hong Kong Design Center and the Hong Kong Government’s Efficiency Unit.

The course disseminated students to do field research on Hong Kong job seekers and related governmental staff to understand the problems and experiences of finding jobs. The insights served as a springboard to innovative service concepts, with an eye on redesigning governmental services to enhance the job-seeking experience on a local level. The various teams also used visualizations and scenarios to demonstrate future concepts, a method that is unheard of in the traditional approach to public services design.

Similar scenarios have also occurred in the U.K. where the government in collaboration

with the U.K. Design Council has commissioned designers to work with frontline staff and users to overhaul the new Adult Advancement and Career Service. As the U.K.’s Minister for Innovation Ian Pearson contends, “Building design into the services of local authorities and government departments

is going to be important for the future. The contribution of design to innovation hasn’t been emphasized enough until now, but user-led innovation always clearly demonstrated the importance of design in developing new products, processes and new ways of working.”

This financial crisis woefully demonstrates that designers can, and should, consider how their skill sets add value not only in designing products but also in conveying complex systems in fields beyond the traditional definition of design. Design, at a macro level, is a much-needed skill here in Asia, just as it is in the rest of the world. If the financial system were as easy to understand as Apple’s desktop designs, and were designed with the real needs of end users in mind, the world might not have had to face this devastating crash, leaving us to figure out how best to reboot our economy.

 

Acknowledgements Special thanks to Carmen Tsui, Jan Lo, Jilly Tang, James Ann, and Wu Bao Rong for their help with and contribution to this article.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elaine Ann is the founder/
director of Kaizor
Innovation, a strategic inno-
vation consultancy that
helps companies strategize
and research for the China market. Born
and raised in Hong Kong and having lived
in the U.S. for 12 years, Ann’s bicultural and
bilingual background provides unique
insights bridging cultures. Prior to returning
to Asia, she worked at Fitch, Razorfish,
Henry Dreyfuss, and Philips Design. She
has an EMBA from the Cheung Kong
Business School in Beijing and a master’s
in interaction design from Carnegie Mellon
University.

DOI: 10.1145/1516016.1516023
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0500 $5.00