Mejia Sarmiento, J. R., Simonse, W. L., & Hultink, E. J.
Industrial firms are facing a constant dilemma, being ready for the future, have a vision, and at the same time act within the current situation, exploit current products efficiently. This research examines visions that embody future opportunities and ideas, “vision concepts” such as concept cars and concept kitchens. We studied five cases of vision concepts to unravel the nature of design techniques behind these vision concepts. Our findings present a comparison of similarities and differences in nature, organizational context, and design techniques. The key contribution of the study centers on a new understanding of how vision concepts explore the future though the embodiment of ideas and how designers share and lead the concept visioning process in the organizational context. We propose an initial framework for the design of vision concepts with significant implications for industrial firms.
The design of a vision concept to explore the future of Solutions Group
Siga el link para ver un video explicativo en español – Another video (in Spanish) following this link.
Over the last few decades, design has gained a prominent strategic position. Organizations have started to look at design as a process, which adds value to the front end of innovation (Verganti, 2009). As a process, Deserti (2011) distinguishes between situational and visionary design. The latter, also known as design-led futures, is a form of design, interested in ideas and not just products (Dunne & Raby, 2011), which experiment on speculative futures (Auger, 2012) to stimulate radical innovation. Prototypical examples are concept cars, traditionally used to guide automakers through change.
Small and medium-sized enterprises have lagged behind in applying design (De Lille, 2014), especially in nontraditional forms, e.g. design-led futures, largely because there are no established methods to facilitate their implementation. We propose a tailor-made, design-led futures technique that assists designers through developing vision concepts for SMEs (Mejia Sarmiento, Pasman, Hultink, & Stappers, 2017), called DIVE. It builds on our inquiries on vision concepts in large corporations (Mejia Sarmiento, Hultink, Pasman, & Stappers, 2016).
Mejia Sarmiento, J. R., Pasman, G., & Stappers, P. J.
In the landscape of design research, several techniques of speculative design -or design about ideas- have been positioned, each with a different time frame. Design Fiction and Critical Design, for instance, emerged as making activities that explore the near and the speculative future, respectively. We previously defined Vision Concepts as a design-led technique that explores and communicates speculative futures. Even though Vision Concepts, such as long-term concept cars and products, have been part of the industry since 1938, previous work has failed to identify and understand them from the design research perspective or compared them with other speculative design techniques. This study intends to identify which spot Vision Concepts occupies within the landscape of design research. To that end, we developed a multiple case analysis that includes examples of Vision Concepts, Design Fiction, and Critical Design. This paper will help design researchers identify the similarities and differences between Vision Concepts and the other speculative design techniques and gain knowledge about when and why to apply this technique.
Keywords: vision concepts; concept cars; speculative design; design fiction; critical design
Innovation forces organizations to think about the future. The many techniques guiding these explorations are named futures studies, which are inquiries into images of the future and their surrounding elements. Although futures studies help organizations to change, their results are often difficult to interpret, and they frequently fail to involve middle-level managers or the public at large. As design is a future-oriented discipline, it is remarkable that the futures studies and innovation management literature do not cover design-led techniques to boost the innovation process. This paper fills a part of this gap in the extant literature by discussing Concept Cars in the automotive industry, a phenomenon in which design plays a prominent part. Since the first Concept Car, it has become clear that automakers do not make these tangible models to mass-produce and sell them, but they mainly view them as a brand builder. Although Concept Cars are broadly recognized as an interesting phenomenon, little academic work has been conducted on them. This paper discusses Concept Cars as a design-led futures technique, and aims to understand their purposes, outcomes, and development process. Our study used multiple methods, including ten interviews with design experts, observations on Concept Cars at a motor show, and a review of three Concept Cars. We find that Concept Cars help organizations to change through an inquiry into images of the future. Concept Cars offer a design-led approach of researching the future, where visual synthesis, prototyping, and storytelling play an important role. Concept Cars act as probes that simultaneously explore technologies and styling while also communicating a probable, plausible, and preferable future, in one time-horizon. Unlike managerial futures techniques, Concept Cars provide tangible futures that people with different backgrounds can experience, influencing several parties involved in developing an innovation. A Concept Car has two main limitations. The development of a Concept Car is a resource intensive process and results in a single outcome. We conclude that Concept Cars or Concept Products can complement other futures techniques and may also be used by companies operating in other industries when looking for new ways to innovate.