PUBLICATIONS.

ACH (Ansichten zur Architektur) is an architecture publication against the stream of glossy magazines. It comes as a newspaper and puts emphasis on quality content with intentionally very few pictures.

Published by the Institute of Public Buildings at the University of Stuttgart, the latest issue, No. 33, is out now with a delightful article of architect Max Baecher together with my images of the Tomba Brion-Vega by Carlo Scarpa (pages 2 to 5).

The new March 2008 issue of Monthly Design features my latest article "Design off the real world" - an allusion to "Design for the real world", the seminal book by Victor Papanek, the Austrian designer teaching in the US who was the very pioneer of ecological design in the 1960's.

This is the updated Korean version of my article "Out of Touch" for Danish Designers - get it here.

The design process as it is usually taught and applied at the beginning of the 21st century is concerned with goals, aims and targets. It is dealing with business and industry, target groups and financial targets. It is looking at the often “wicked” problems found in all areas of life. It is, in general, working with – or trying to work with – the world, its structures and problems, including its systems, its territories, its politics and power struggles.

But is this the only way the design process can be approached? No. There are two other approaches – one which was the victim of a famous struggle in the Bauhaus, and one which was discovered already 800 years ago, but is known in the West only since the second half of the 20th century.

Read more in my latest article in the series "Mario Gagliardi On Design" for Danish Designers (Inform Lounge Edition 3/2007):

Looking Out, Looking In, and Looking At: The World, Yourself, and Design - Tracing Out A New Taxonomy of the Design Process

Beginning of September I presented the latest outcomes of my work in mg strategy to young designers at the LG Electronics design center in Seoul. The feedback of the vice president and the designers was that what I call generative approach will be a way to innovate the design process - a process which gets increasingly formalized and bureaucratized as the company grows. The LG design center now has over 500 designers working full-time, making it the largest inhouse design department worldwide.

The generative approach to design is also the topic for my latest article in Danish Designers' Inform magazine: Looking out, looking in, and looking at: Tracing out a new taxonomy of the design process, Inform Lounge Edition, Danish Designers, September 2007.

4 new publications highlighting ongoing changes in the design process:

The very start - the design briefing - and the need to co-develop the briefing with involved stakeholders: Read more in Your future starts here: Das Briefing - Fundament fuer jedes Designkonzept (German). This paper was developed for the German Design Council and the Zollverein School of management and design.

Next, the design process itself is becoming much more complex, involving not only attention to technical, formal, and usability aspects, but increasingly demanding a holistic consideration of the experience of the whole human. Due to its inherent complexity and its demands for cross-disciplinary, holistic approaches, Experience Design is not yet widely understood. This article for Danish Designers (Inform 01/07) provides a working definition of Experience Design by looking at historical developments in design, technology, and business: Towards Experience Design: Design in the knowledge society.

Experience Design is also a focus of this article for Monthly Design (Vol 345, 2007) dealing with three main aspects of change for the design profession in the Knowledge Economy: Chances and Challenges for Design in the Knowledge Economy (Korean).

Finally, in the last phase of the design process, when a design is brought to market, the interface to marketing plays an important role; Yet, marketers still often rely on simplistic views of the market, having trouble to identify what really makes people go for a product or service. While target groups rapidly disintegrate, product presence constitutes an incresingly important factor for attracting customers. Read more in The Age of Stance, the latest article in my series "Mario Gagliardi On Design" for Danish Designers (Inform 02/07).

The relationship between marketing and design is not always easy. Designers, when confronted with conventional market research, often hit a wall such as "We can't do that - we don't have the data to support a decision to bring this idea to market". But conventional market research, based on the idea of easy-to-identify target groups, has reached its limits, often failing to capture why people actually go for a product.

What can be done? Read more in my article for Danish Designers:
"The Age of Stance". These are the topics covered;

The Trouble with Target Groups

Ego-brands and Fringe Groups

Decision Making and Celebrities as Designers

From Consumers to Co-creators

Product Presence and Communities of Stance

Brands, Stance and Motivation

The Finding Experience

Two new articles about what will likely become the major new design paradigm in the knowledge society: Experience Design.

How does the transition to a knowledge economy affect design, and why is Experience Design poised to be the next major paradigm? My introduction to the issue, "The knowledge economy: Chances and challenges for design", is featured in the current March edition of Monthly Design (in Korean).

What is Experience Design, where does it come from, and how does it connect to historical developments in management, marketing, technology and design? These are the issues discussed in my current article for Danish Designers, featured in the April issue of Inform Lounge Edition: "Towards Experience Design" (in English).

Where are the visions? Where is the inspiration? Where are the new ideas? They are all here, but paradoxically they don't enter the mainstram of design organisations. Why is this, why do design organisations and researchers often not affect what is most valuable for design and creativity? The answer is in history and organisational design.

Read more in the final article of my series for Danish Designers:
Design organizations and design research in times of glocalisation

The new article for Danish Designers, "From design to Design", is out in the December issue of the Danish Designers Lounge Edition - download the article PDF here.

Also newly available for download: 누구를 위한 디자인인가? 산업과의 연계인가, 아니면 단절인가? from the September issue of Monthly Design. This is the revised version of "Whom is design to serve? Design with/out industry", also originally for Danish Designers.

The Danish Designers article "Future, Past" from October is here, and here the Korean version from the Monthly Design Anniversary Edition:
과거의 꿈을 언제까지 재탕할 것인가?

And All Business now features "Alchemy of Cultures - From Adaptation to Transcendence in Design and Branding", originally published 2001 in the Design Management Journal.

About Trends (PDF, 430KB) is an introduction to trend research and forecasting.

What actually are trends? This paper attempts to illuminate trends from viewpoints of cognitive science, psychology and sociology and introduces the trend domain model as a guidance for trend researchers.

It was first presented at the Product Development and Management Association, London 2003, and the Design Management Institute´s European International Design Management Conference, Barcelona 2004.