Humanities Centered Innovation through
International Design Competitions
Utilizing the Diversity of Designers
for Culture Oriented Result Driven Design Competitions
Cobanli, Onur Mustak.
[email protected],
Politecnico di Milano
Advanced Design Research Unit
Milan / Italy
Ph.D. Student
Abstract
Each passing day, the world is becoming more global meaning the values of different cultures are
merging together to a unified global culture, on one hand, this infusion creates opportunities to design
products and services, that due to globalization; everyone in earth could use, while on the other hand,
this unified approach to product and service development leads to rejection of products and services
where cultural heritages still play an important role.
On one part of the picture we see that while companies try to become global players, the concept of
serving the needs of local while keeping global; being glocal has become of importance, thus, products
and services are re-thought and re-designed to fit the sub-cultures and different and diverse nationalities
they are referring to. On the other part of the picture we see that companies which cannot localize their
products or services due to production or supply chain constraints try to create a “world-infusion”
design mix, which hopefully would apply to all users in the target segments.
Meanwhile, due to the development of online platforms and interactive tools, companies discovered
how to use “Design Competitions” to arrive at design solutions and innovations, which replaces
country-specific design consultancy and gathers data and results directly by relying on the diversity of
designers.
Given all these, this article discusses: 1. How could design competitions be utilized to create “worldinfusion” products and services i.e. by utilizing the diversity of designers. 2. How could design
competitions be used to arrive at “localized” products. 3. How design competitions could be used to
gather statistical data regarding the preferences of end-users within a specific country, territory or
geographical region. 4. How could design competitions be used for value chain design and innovation
creation.
Keywords: Design Competition, Statistical Analysis of Preferences, Design Configuration, Design for
Diversity
Until the recent decades, design competitions has been organized for procurement of design purposes,
however today, we have many possibilities due to the advancement of online platforms. One of such
possibilities is merging humanities and design over competition platforms, to organize result oriented
competitions to make innovation utilizing the diversity of participants base. There are several ways to
come up with innovation, and this paper gives for examples on how design competitions could be
integrated based on our goals.
1. How could design competitions be utilized to create “world-infusion” products and services i.e.
by utilizing the diversity of designers.
Global access to world markets opens up new opportunities for commerce and expanded access to
talent and business resources creating new opportunities [Lockwood 36]. One of such opportunities is
crowdsourcing innovation through design competitions or contests, to come up with world-infusion
products and services.
World-infusion services or products intelligently combines the best aspects of other local products and
services in different cultures to create a new level of service or a new type of product that is better than
the existing products and services. World-infusion means, gathering together all bits of information for
product and service development in the world to come up with a much better product or service. This is
possible by working with multi-national design consulting companies that have offices worldwide or
via an international design competition to utilize the diversity of participants. Innovators are not always
the idea generators. Innovation is all about integration: integrating data, information, knowledge and
experience from many different sources. [Gaynor 54], and design competitions allows us to integrate;
innovate at a whole new level.
The international design competition method is a thousand times cost effective way to do so, but an
intervention is necessary because it is an algorithm. The algorithm generates savings by turning
judgments – a general way of getting toward the desired solution – into a formula or a set of rules that,
if followed, will produce the desired solution. Algorithms can be run by less experienced and less
expensive personnel, thus are more efficient then heuristic way of solving issues. [Roger 75] . As also
suggested by the famous wired magazine article in 2006, the cost is literally 1/500th of what it would
regularly cost. [Howe 5]. In addition platforms that help crowdsourcing such as the Mechanical Turk
largely eliminates recruiting effort, makes it easy to extend or modify a study, and automates
administration, furthermore very large scales can be reached. [Heer 206]. In design competitions and
contests hundreds of users can, be recruited for highly interactive tasks for marginal costs within a
timeframe of days or even minutes. However, special care must be taken in the design of the task.
[Aniket 456], thus we design a system of two-step competition.
To be able to create new world-infusion products and services, a special type of two-level international
design competition must be held. The design of the first step of the competition starts with a brief that
aims to fulfill our initial mission of gathering the “local aspects”, thus participants are asked to create
specific new products or services, that are nurtured through the culture of origin of the participants; i.e.
the brief says create neo-traditional products or services, and furthermore in the brief it is asked from
the designers to write a paragraph about the tradition, and how it was transformed into something new.
This first competition is aimed at sense-making process, utilizing the distinctive characteristic of the
designer through her ability of giving new meaning and new symbolic qualities to object; thus making
sense of things. [Baldwin 722]. The sense-making is required in order to be used as filters and
references to build upon. Furthermore, the transformation description part is also required to increase
the statistical significance of a design rooting from traditions; otherwise designers would just design
whatever and say that it is traditions, many crowdsourcing papers confirms this idea of a controlparameter to be embedded in order to increase the quality of responses.
The results of the first competition, aside from the designs, is an extensive study that no consulting
agency would be able to generate; given thousands of participants from hundreds of countries, this is a
study that identifies the “local aspects” that could be converted and utilized in new product
development to come up with better product or service design.
While, for designers, the aim of the first competition would be to come up with neo-traditional designs,
the real aim of the first competition, from the perspective of the organizer, is to create the “brief” of the
second design competition. The second competition is about utilizing the previously found “local
aspects” and combining them together. The “local aspects” could be considered as hidden information;
“opportunities”, “potentials”, “discoveries” etc. The second competition is about utilizing the
previously uncovered information from different cultural diversities to come up with a product that
“infuses”. The second competition is not necessary an international design competition; it can be held
within a design unit of a company, or a design research unit, and does not require the initial participants
to re-join, but it could also be possible.
The results of the second competition is synthesis of different local aspects into singular products and
services, that are reinforced through collective knowledge and experiences of different cultures, if an
example is required, we could point out the Starbucks Coffee’s Frappucino, a combination of cultural
heritage and knowledge of many cultures. Frappucino was not developed as a result of a competition,
but rather through an eureka moment of its creators using their experience and luck combined, while
our two-step competition is a methodological way to come up with new products without the eureka
moments; to create an algorithmic way to come up with world-infusion products and services through
utilization of diversity of participants especially in the first level.
The design of the competition does matter a lot, the initial competition must be international and should
have a control mechanism to ensure the quality of submissions (in order to avoid wrong information)
and the second competition must provide access to the information supplied by participants in the first
step, however the idea is very simple and clear; to utilize the diverse participant base to collect insights,
and to re-utilize the same participants base or new participants to combine the collected ideas to come
up with world-infusion products that would include more insights and know-how than products that
would otherwise developed within isolated countries.
To summarize and conclude this section, design competitions be utilized to create “world-infusion”
products and services i.e. by utilizing the diversity of designers through two-step design competitions;
the first competition being an international design competition with a specific brief to collect both
designs and local-knowhow (as also a control parameter), and through a second design competition
which requires participants to combined the primarily collected know-how or designs.
2. How could design competitions be used to arrive at “localized” products.
Imagine, you are a company that is producing gift items, worldwide, as it is now a new trend, you
would like to come up with hundreds of different phone covers, mugs or bags, representing a country
each. Design competitions can help save both time, and resources.
Coming up with localized products is easy through organization of regional or national design
competitions with a brief aimed at re-innovation and re-consideration. We can organize two distinct
type of design competition for this purpose; first by limiting the participants to a specific area, and
furthermore by requiring the participants to not come up with new products but rather improve existing
products in the local market, the design competition could be used to arrive localized products that are
going to be better from others in the market with design that is both local, and of course slightly global.
Here, the organizer of the competition must provide what kind of “local” products do exists, and could
provide guidelines for the participants to come up with products; i.e. the organizer could provide a list
of local products that has space for re-thinking for the new century, as given in the earlier example, this
could be also a challenge, however, an earlier contest could also be organized to create the brief for
defining products to be improved.
Second, we can require the participants to come up with products that are continuation or
complementation of existing ones; in this case, we would ask the participants to design products that
are fed from the local heritage. The result of such competition is very similar to what you would find in
“museum shops”; updated, high-tech versions of old items; usually new materials or production
techniques are used to produce traditional products, making them once again economically feasible.
Both type of competitions find great press attendance and interest, in addition to be able to respond to
the initial request of coming up with localized products.
The concept of “local” is quite large, and could also be interpreted as nation-wide, continent-wide as
well, however the original idea is the same; the competition participants are limited by the brief and
eligibility conditions; only “local” designers are admitted, and they are asked to come up with new
versions of “local” products, of course alternatively, they can come up with products that were inspired
by the local products, or products that compliment them; thus the design of the brief is important in
arriving the exact type of “localized” products one would seek.
Thus, for this section we could conclude that through an optimized brief around heritage and culture
and through eligibility conditions that limit foreigner’s participation, it will be possible to organize a
competition that pushes designers to come-up with “localized” products.
3. How design competitions could be used to gather statistical data regarding the preferences of
end-users within a specific country, territory or geographical region.
Designers, when they partake in a design competition, reflect in action; they reflect their preferences
through their selection of forms, colors and materials when creating or coming up with new products.
End-users also reflect their preferences in action, they do reflect their preferences when they compare
products, especially when all other things are kept constant such as the price; here we will notice the
preference of end users are revealed by effectively buying the product that appeals to them most.
To understand what the clients or consumers like, you would normally ask them to compare products,
to have a clear understanding, binary comparisons with everything else constant, would be the best; this
means; for example given two products with the same price, we could understand why a consumer
chooses a particular product, we could ask consumers to choose based on colors, forms and many other
details too, to understand their aesthetic preferences, if we repeat the process thousands of times,
making them compare colors, materials, textures, i.e. at each binary comparison, meanwhile making
sure that not only price but all other elements are constant and repeat the process tens of thousands of
times, for each specific country or sub-region and we would perhaps analyze the users’ preferences in a
statistically significant way. However, in this case, we would be spending quite a lot of resources,
therefore, we can conclude that this is not a good idea; i.e. millions of binary combinations is too much
to be feasible.
Fig.1: Configurator, a tool that lets end-users to design (configure) a product through simple selections and decisions.
Alternatively, we could organize a design competition to gather data on end-user preferences, with a
cost of a fraction of the research and comparison cost that you would be paying for the approach above.
The system is much intelligent, instead of trying to discover what the clients or end-users want to
achieve through reverse engineering of preferences through binary comparisons, we can, through
design competitions, directly identify the preferences, in a way that it also makes sense.
We can know for instance, the colors preferred by end-users, and the percentage distribution of these
colors. We can see for instance, the materials preferred by end-users, and their percentage distribution,
but more importantly, we can make the end-users tell us, which colors or materials they would be
paying more; if a material is more expensive, we can understand if they would be willing to pay or not,
this applies for other parametric components as well.
These type of design competitions that allow you to configure (within restrictions), could help
organizers to optimize their supply and operation chain: By knowing how many yellow mugs we will
sell in a year, we can stock the right amount of them; not less, not more. Good forecasts and
statistically significant insights can be derived through the analysis of the results of the design
competitions which utilize the configurator tool that other design competitions does not utilize
normally. This means profit maximization. This means optimization.
The tool is called a configurator, a configurator is an interactive user-interface software with the aim of
gathering user preferences through configuration with restrictions, unlike design competitions that are
open to all sorts of submissions, the configurator allows you to be very specific; it allows you to
configure a product or service, through existing options and choices and restrictions. The restriction
part is important, as this is the core factor to come up with statistics, the user-interface and an easy-to
use tool is important, as this is what it helps us to include the end-users in the process.
A very simple example; lets imagine that we are a company that produce ceramics, and we want to
analyze user-preferences for a new mug that we want to launch. We have 6 options for the handle for, 6
options for handle color, 6 options for exterior color, 6 options for interior color, 6 options for exterior
decoration, with a total of 6*6*6*6*6 = 7766 possible combinations, how could we know which
options would lead to the most successful product (i.e. a product that sells more)? It is easy.
We have 5 questions, with their respective choices. We ask several thousand users to join our
competition, (it is common to have 2-3 thousand participants for such competitions as it is really easy
to configure products using such tools, no design skills required).
These thousands of people first decide the handle form, giving you a distribution table for handle form.
Second they choose handle color, giving you a distribution table for handle color. Third they choose the
exterior color, which gives you a distribution table of values for the exterior color. Etc.. These options
determine the form and color. Then we can see statistically which color and forms are most commonly
used; this gives us the median preference; i.e. what the general public would want to have. Furthermore
for colors, we have a statistically significant (correct) pie-chart that is exactly telling us what the people
will want to have; the percentage value of color choices, the top 3 colors are perhaps what would sell
most as many people prefer them to others.
This configuration tool help us to know especially understand preferences for simpler unrelated
parameters easily. A good configurator tool will have all elements independent. For instance, let’s say
that we want to measure preferences again for the mug, but in this case, we will have the volume fixed
(height and width predetermined), and we want the user to choose a handle, and color. Then we can
actually see what users prefer for handles, and colors. This is of course the simplest example possible,
but gives us insights on what could be built upon.
The Power of the configurator tool is the ability to come up with statistics that are relevant to optimize
supply chain. Each participant, before utilizing the configurator, registers to the competition, while
doing so, supplies demographic information such as birthdate, nationality, income etc. These supplied
information can be matched with the results of the competition, thus we can for instance see, country
level statistics, or demographic level statistics; while for instance country-level statistics could be
helpful to choose number of green mugs to send to France, the demographic statistics can help us
choose the right color mug for our advertisement to university graduates. (Now, when advertising
online, you can see the demographics of websites in which you advertise, so this information is highly
relevant to increase clickthrough rates).
By making a reverse data analysis, we can for instance see what Italian nationals like, an arch model
could be displayed by the software that shows the most common options picked for our initial test
where we were for instance configuring a coffee mug, choosing 5 options for interior and exterior
color, decoration, handle form and color. We can see the most common models, but also second
common options or preferences. These information are all relevant, to optimize supply chain; we can
know how many red mugs, green mugs, yellow mugs and purple mugs we would sell. Of course, if you
are in the business for the last 40 years, you already know this, but if you just started this new segment
of business, the competitions statistics provides good insights.
The configurator tool can help us identify the differences between preferences through diverse
nationalities; we can understand what a coffee mug means for a “British”, and what a coffee mug (not
cup!) means for “Italians”. Knowing these preferences we can create diversified products that appeal
more to the distinct cultures of the world.
By being able to design specific products for diverse cultures, we would also be increasing the overall
utility of these cultures, making them effectively happier by providing a choice that appeals to them. To
remind you once more, we discover the needs or preferences of a cultural dominion by reverse analysis
of the results for the configuration competition; we check from the database by filtering countries, to
see for instance what Italians like when it comes to mug design.
Of course, knowing the preferences of all different types of cultures, we could come-up with products
that are appealing to all, thus this is another way of coming up with world-infusion designs through
aggregated analysis and collection of preferences of designers through many diverse cultures.
For this section, we can conclude that statistical analysis of preferences of end-users could be done
relatively easy through the configurator tool based design competitions, combined with the initial
survey questions during registration, and configuration of products based on choices, and perhaps also
through an added layer of voting (within group), it is possible to analyze the preferences of not only
different diversities, but also very specific demographics through database queries.
4. How could design competitions be used for value chain design and innovation creation.
Design competitions and awards are considered one of the prominent ways to enhance design
awareness in order to create added value for the whole chain. [Choi 11], In this context, we do the
opposite of the configurator tool, we do run a specific type of design competition that allows designers
to make total design.
Total design is: design of the product, design services related to the product, design a package for
product, design product manual, design how the product would be sold, design its stores, design
everything related to product perhaps including the way the product would be produced. Here, the
restriction we impose is that the function of the product; nothing else, but all aspects should be
developed. The method of using design competitions involve design thinkers at the very start of the
innovation process, before any direction has been set, thus this approach of design thinking will help
you explore more ideas more quickly than you could otherwise. [Brown 6].
Of course, to be more realistic, we can impose also production technology and several other of our
company restrictions to the competition, but this will not be helpful so much, in any case, designers
will not create products that are ready-to produce (unless you require 3d data to be submitted instead of
renderings; which effectively decreases the number of participants greatly), so it is best that you let
them run wild.
In this case, a panel of judges should evaluate the submissions, criteria could be the extend of an idea’s
breakthrough thinking, its potential value to customers, its relevance to your company’s strategic goals,
and the ease with which it could be implemented. [Govindarajan 106]
Therefore, we could say that design competitions can be used to collect innovative ideas; which could
serve as a basis for value creation through innovation. However, design competitions which are
organized within the company are shown to increase the creative-outputs, thus adding a new layer of
value for innovation, in addition, design competitions has been demonstrated as a way to create brand
awareness as well, though even this does not create an innovation creation, could be useful; companies
who organize design competitions, will be able to attract better designers, who would be able to
provide higher creative outputs.
Thus, for this section, we could conclude that the design competitions can be used for value chain and
innovation creation through externalities provided such as increase in inner-competition in company for
added output, by attracting new talents, and also through direct benefits such as collecting innovative
ideas. This kind of design competitions must focus more on the prestige through organization; i.e.
providing high intellectual benefits (such as better jury, higher visibility, respected patron or sponsors
stc) will attract more real-designers.
5. Conclusions and Feature Work
Design competitions are great tools to come up with statistics (through configurator tool based
competitions), to identify cultural differences, to come up with localized designs or to come up designs
that are appealing to the all diverse cultures at once, as much as it could be, by outputting worldinfusion products. However, in each case, the initial design of the competition itself is very important;
the brief, the preparation of the configurator tool or other tools if any, the clarification of the eligibility
conditions etc. are all relevant and drastically change what we would get from a competition. In future,
especially an in-depth experiment would be conducted to test the validity or strength of the statistics
provided by the configurator tools.
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