Articles - 31 November 2007
Object design, a business approach to the creative process
Object design is not in and of itself a design discipline. It refers to a way of running a business and people from a large variety of visual art, craft and or design backgrounds engage in it. What distinguishes an object design practice is the decision to be their own client - they research, develop and manage strategic relationships for the realisation of their designs.
Object designers are often, by nature, aggressively independent and entrepreneurial. They are willing to roll the dice on their creative output and share the burden of development with a manufacturer in order to potentially reap the royalty rewards from successful market capitalisation sometime in the future.
Object designers run a business more akin to fashion designers than craft practitioners; creation of prototype products (a range) that they then spruke in the marketplace in the hope of demand reaching enough of a critical mass that manufacture of mass units becomes necessary.
Currently most object design businesses have problems at every point of this production process. Many are conceiving products without conducting market research, there is not sufficient capital available for a proper prototyping process, most do not develop 'brand speak' around their practice that ensures a distinct signature identity in the design marketplace.
Yet all of the necessary ingredients for making successful individual businesses and an overall cottage industry out of Australian object design are in place and available. In this sense the parts of the sector are stronger than the whole.
Australia has more design magazines per head of population than any country in the world - the marketing capacity is strong. There are government incentives for product development available through AusIndustry, AusTrade and The Australia Council for the Arts. Stores selling homewares are plentiful and therefore access to information about what does and does not sell is readily available.
It is hard for the object designer to know where to start with business development strategies. To properly develop product they need capital. To attract investment they need profile and a healthy track record in sales. They can't get profile without product and so the vicious cycle continues.
The lack of business skills and capital within a micro-business is what often causes them to 'tread water' indefinitely; unable to develop new product quickly enough, unable to truly capitalise on the potential of well received prototypes - these are the dilemmas many object design businesses face.
An analysis of successful object design practices reveals that they roughly follow the example set by many successful architecture firms. A group of like minded designers with different skills pool resources and capacities to grow a business. Even if all partners are hands on designers they undoubtedly have different business interests: networking, team, contract or financial management can be done by whoever in the group is most inclined and equipped to do the job.
Too many object designers work as sole practitioners and therefore find themselves stretched too thin over all the responsibilities of running a small business. Too many designers conceive of their business and design practice as inseparable parts of the same entity and process. However, it is possible to create a business in partnership with other designers, benefit from the input of a group, while at the same time maintaining complete brand separation from the other designers.
The individualism of the studio practice mentality dominates every level of object design professional practice. Indeed it is this mentality that is the source of many of the ills that afflict the sector. Object designers take the brand of their 'signature' practice far too literally.
A small example of how inefficient this way of running a practice is: each year at least a dozen designers take their products off to the Milan Furniture Fair. They do so as individual businesses, spending approximately ten to fifteen thousand per person. Such a small amount of expenditure on international marketing means that none of the designers are individually eligible for the AusTrade Export Market Development Grant (EMDG), which has a minimum expenditure threshold of $15,000 and a 50% return on all marketing expenditure above that threshold.
If 3 - 5 of these designers formed a company and pooled their resources so the pilgrimage to Milan was represented as a single business activity then they would be eligible for EMDG assistance. The pooled expenditure would be between $30 - $50k. The benefits of such an approach would then naturally flow on to all other areas of the object design product development process: design knowledge sharing, manufacturing connections, marketing and distribution processes, sharing of office costs.
Being organised as a truly commercial collective would also pool each designer's product royalties. This would reflect well in a business plan and make it easier to attract venture capital or debt based financing for the purposes of business expansion.
The obsession with being a 'signature' designer inhibits this kind of intelligent grouping of financial and intellectual knowledge. The losers ultimately are the designers. The consequence is that the individual parts that make up the sector are far stronger than the whole: object designs, publishing, object design stores, manufacturers all have on their own turf interesting products. Few object designers run a practice that successfully joins all of these important parts of the sector together.
Given the enormous amount of money spent on homewares in Australia, it seems amazing that object design is not a more coherent and visible cottage industry. Simone LeAmon, creative director of Planex and object designer, puts this sad reality down to the inability of many designers to create an engaging narrative around their design practice. LeAmon applauds the professionalism and quality that many designers are capable of bringing to each product that they develop, but finds that overall brand story is missing from many object design practices.
LeAmon is making a crucial point, because what motivates a business strategist to engage with a creative enterprise is the story the project tells. Far too few object designers have an interesting story to tell about their practice. There are often interesting stories about individual products, but not an overall vision for their practice. Why is the big vision important? The answer is simple; a business relationship dependent on the success of one product is far more fragile than a business relationship built around a broader vision. If the individual product fails to gain market traction then the relationship has to start again around a new product, whenever that is conceived.
In the film industry it is recommended that the screenwriter creates a single sentence that defines the motivation for the entire script, that they print out this sentence and stick it to their computer screen. Doing so ensures that each scene the writer creates refers back to this simple core purpose. So too a designer should understand each product they create as being part of a continuous purpose of expression.
All business strategies are, in essence, narrative driven. A business plan is a story that has a coherent and easy to follow story: executive summary, market analysis and cash flow all have to tell the same convincing narrative.
Object designers must develop convincing narratives around their practice that can be carried and or translated to different potential stakeholders: design collaborators, manufacturers, distributors, the design publishing world all have to understand what makes not an individual product but their overall practice unique. If the designer feels they cannot do this, they should team up with business people or other designers who have different skills from their own.
Until object designers realise they are running a brand, not just a series of products that exist in isolation from each other, their businesses will remain diffuse. The flow on effect is that the overall sector will remain incoherent, not a major contributor to the Australian creative industries.
Lou Weis
November, 2007
Lou Weis, is a Producer working within the creative industries. He recently completed a consultancy at The Australia Council for the Arts, Visual Arts Board focusing on developing opportunities for Object Designers, resulting in the creation of The Australian Design Platform.
