Look around you and you likely wouldn’t know it, if you are reading this in print in a developing country, but business is getting very, very attracted to design. If, on the other hand, you are reading this on a screen in a G-8 country, this may seem like settled fact. This is a consummation that designers have long and devoutly wished, and while isn’t, not yet, a ‘best practice’ that corporations adore, it’s no longer just conference-room hype. Power and money demonstrate that.
First published in a slightly modified form ‘Physique’ in Business Standard, 17 November, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.
Brands place a premium on attention, firing images and words shaped into messages to inform and persuade. Indeed, we live amidst a war for our attention, an exquisitely perishable wisp that lives in the now.
First published in a slightly modified form ‘The Currency of Design’ in Business Standard, 19 November, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.
“I refuse to add to the chorus,” said DOPE, as the the Designer Of Practically Everything was known to his colleagues, “dissing the Rs 2000 note’s design. Instead, let’s treat it as an occasion to ask explore what design means.”
First published in a slightly modified form ‘Brand Is UX, Or Something Like That’ in Business Standard, 5 November, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.
“The 20th century was the Age of advertising,“ said the Undisputed Strategic Panjandrum, known with awe as USP, “right up to the Great Shift or the digitisation of everything.”
First published in a slightly modified form ‘Nobel, Dylan and the twilight of authority’ in Business Standard, 22 October, in Deep Design, a fortnightly column by Itu Chaudhuri.
“The Nobel Committee has won the Bob Dylan Prize,” announced the Always Contrarian Everyman, or ACE, a lapsed academic I’d been introduced to by mutual friends, to help with some research on communications planning.