Mark Breitenberg on the road

Take a look at this recent conversation with Tim Brown on design thinking and its wider applications.

From Guangzhou, China, I took a 3-hour flight up to Korea to celebrate the New Year’s announcement of Seoul as the World Design Capital 2010. This is an honor awarded by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) to honor the city that best demonstrates the transformative power of design to enhance its social, economic and environmental quality of life.

On a brutally cold New Year’s Eve, I was invited by Mayor Se-Hoon Oh to ring the traditional gong, along with Jung Mu Huh, coach of the Korean national football team, and Eun Hye Park, one of the country’s most famous actresses. The four of us swung a huge wooden log suspended by ropes into a 700-year old gong (see photo). I’m dressed in traditional Korean costume, which offered barely a passing nod at the frigid temperature, and is very difficult to put on (I had a dresser). Moments later, I made the official announcement of Seoul’s year of design in front of about “hundreds of thousands” (according to the JoonAng Daily) of intrepid souls who endured the cold to view the ceremony live, and another 20 million, I’m told, watching on Korean TV. It felt like Times Square.

This is an honor Seoul richly deserves, and much of the credit goes to Mayor Oh. He is the first mayor to appoint a Chief Design Officer to his cabinet—Kenneth Chung. And he’s launched many design projects in the past few years: the Dasan Call Center, Dongdaemun Plaza, designed by Zaha Hadid (to be completed in 2011), a host of eco policies and new parks, digital public art projects lighting up the sides of downtown buildings, and new human-centered initiatives for its elder citizens. Seoul is already the most IT wired city in the world, and they’re also planning a futuristic “digital city” a few miles north.

I’ve met Mayor Oh several times, and I am always struck by his warmth and low-key demeanor. He seems to deliberately understate his role as the mayor of a city of 14 million in a very disarming way, but behind the persona is a highly intelligent, ambitious, innovative thinker. He’s up for re-election in a few months, with challenges from his own party, but my sources say his chances are good. Not surprisingly, Mayor Oh is very popular with voters, and from an international perspective, he’s made Seoul a real design destination. Today’s NY Times Travel section lists Seoul as #3 of “the 31 places to go in 2010″ because of its status as the World Design Capital.

Seoul has big plans for its year as World Design Capital. The effort is led by my good friends Ken Nah, Director General of the WDC 2010, and Jae Jin Shim, President of the Seoul Design Foundation. On the agenda are the “World Design Cities Summit,” with mayors from around the world, the “Seoul Design Fair,” an ongoing exhibit called “Seoul Design Assets,” featuring the accomplishments of 51 Seoul designers, and the “World Design Survey,” led by Soon In Lee, President-elect of Icsid. It’s going to be a busy year. There is also the “Children’s Design Competition,” which comes out of the recent initiative to put design studios in the national curriculum at the secondary school level—a real sign that Korea is betting its future on innovation and creativity. On the higher education level, Korea’s superb design programs produce a remarkable 38,000 designer a year in a country of only 48 million people, and the highest percentage of students who study in the U.S.

It was also the 100^th anniversary of the establishment of the Korean Empire, still an extension of the Joseon dynasty. Since 1910, Korea has endured 40 years of Japanese occupation, ideological division along the 38^th parallel and the subsequent civil war, then a series of dictatorships, autocracies and military rule before emerging as a true democracy only in the last generation. It’s a stunning tribute to Korean ingenuity and determination that they’ve gone from one of the poorest countries in Asia to one of the richest in just 40 years—it is now the world’s 13^th largest economy. This is a country that is really punching above its weight class, and by all accounts, Mayor Oh’s design-driven “Han River Renaissance” is only going to take it higher.

As I begin writing, the 6:30 AM bus from Guangzhou to the Hong Kong airport makes its way through the empty, rain-slicked streets of the city. Usually choked with traffic and teeming with people, the emptiness is eerie. The radio speaker above my seat rattles out the choppy, up and down tones of Cantonese, and I’m halfway through a bowl of steaming noodles purchased at the 7-11 across the street.

Guangzhou is the former capital of Cantonese China, about a 3-hour drive north from Hong Kong into the mainland, bisected along the way by the Shenzhen. When I arrived in the city, one of the most populated in the country, it was experiencing a rainy, cold spell (about 40 wet degrees)—the coldest it ever got, I was told. I believed this pronouncement because most of the buildings, including Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, and the restaurants, did not have heat. I don’t mean they didn’t turn it on—they didn’t have it. Heavy coats indoors were required, mine borrowed from a generous host.

Founded in 1953, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art (GAFA) is one of eight schools in China focused exclusively on art and design education, and it is by all accounts (along with Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing), one of the best. Competition is keen to say the least: of 30,000 applicants in a given year, only 1,000 will be accepted, based on standardized tests that include foundational art skills. GAFA offers the full spectrum of art and design programs, from traditional Chinese landscape painting to animation and digital arts, as well as new programs in Architecture and automotive design (the latter housed in Industrial Design). But China’s design cultural revolution also remembers the past. I arrived just after a very proud moment in GAFA’s history: Chen Chaoguang, Secretary of GAFA, told me that yesterday, a new, 32 meter sculpture of a young Chairman Mao was unveiled in Hunan province, created by Professor Lee from GAFA’s sculpture department.

I was hosted by Professor Tong, head of the school of design, as well as Peng Xindang and Zhang Meiqin from the Foreign Affairs office. Although GAFA is in their short “optional term” between the 2 “mandatory terms,” and thus sparsely populated, I was able to visit working studios in textiles (where the students were making 60’s hippie tie die patterns!), sculpture, printmaking, lacquer and lithography. Most of this work was labor intensive and still in the process of mastering technique, but I know from the catalogues I was given that the students in design are becoming more innovative and concept-driven than their counterparts in Fine Art, where a pedagogy of imitation still rules.

This new wave of very global and contemporary thinking about design was reinforced at my presentation to the 300 design students who showed up on a rainy, cold night. The theme of my talk was based on CCA’s motto: “make art that matters,” and my context was our cradle of creativity in the Bay Area, which attracts 40% of all venture capital investment in the U.S. Speaking as a humanist, I emphasized the importance of concept and ideation, research, design thinking and human-centered problem solving, still relatively new approaches here. I believe these directions represent the current challenge of design education in China.

I also discussed at some length the importance of building bridges between schools and design companies, as we do in CCA’s sponsored studios, guest critiques, and through our working professional faculty. Even at specialized art and design programs like GAFA, it is rare for companies to be involved with schools, and almost impossible to find design teachers who also maintain professional design practices. This may reflect the fact that professional design in China is still relatively young, or the long tradition of the hallowed fine art academy, from which design education emerged, or perhaps that professors in China have a very high status on their own. Professor Tong said he had tried to enlist professional designers to teach at GAFA, but those he did often pulled out at the last minute, citing the priority of professional obligations. However, there is a new plan to create a “Center for Creative Industry” in Guangzhou that will live at GAFA and most certainly build important bridges between the school and professional design. Having built 1,000 new art and design programs in the last 15 years or so, it’s pretty clear that both the profession of design and its pedagogy will mature rapidly in China. As I often hear throughout the country, China is not content to be the world’s manufacturer—they want to be its innovators as well.

The students responded enthusiastically to the idea that we need to produce meaningful design rather than more design, and the questions following my talk were smart and progressive in their thinking, including one derogatory remark that “all China cares about is making money,” after which the audience cheered. Several questions followed up on my discussion of empathy (carefully translated into Mandarin) as the fundamental basis of good design, and the fundamental quality of good designers. And when, near the end, I told the students that their generation of designers had the opportunity and the responsibility to improve the social and environmental quality of life in China, the students broke into applause again.

One of my persistent questions to my hosts in Guangzhou was whether they saw any conflict or tension between China’s vigorous investment in design, creativity and innovation, on the one hand, and its centralized, often authoritative and censoring government, on the other. The answers I received were strictly along generational lines: the younger people said that China needs to open up its culture in order to become an innovative society, while the older generation (that is, those who remembered Deng’s transformation) felt that this had already happened, and that at least some centralization was necessary at this point in China’s development. This much is clear to me: the current system of government and perhaps the social system as well will change dramatically in the next generation as students in art and design are taught to innovate, think critically, and “make art that matters.”

One final story captures the present state of art and design education in China: GAFA’s new campus, where I spoke, is located on an island about 20 miles east of the city. This massive “education island” is the home of 10 colleges and universities and over 200,000 students, including Guangzhou University. Once the native farmers were re-located (not happily, it seems) all the educational facilities were built and operational in just one year. This is China’s pace today. The concept behind the education island was to locate all the different schools and programs in the same place in order to foster creativity through interdisciplinary learning and knowledge transfer. But a darker purpose was suggested to me as well: if the students should ever rise up in protest, the island can be closed off by shutting down the only bridge that reaches the city.

Singapore, 27 November 2009

Friends and colleagues in Icsid,

It is an honor to be here today, addressing you as the new president of Icsid. When I consider all the past presidents who have held this position, all the people who have been part of this organization for over fifty years, the great designers like Kenji Ekuan and Dieter Rams, and the remarkable contributions all of you here today have made to design, I can only say that this is a proud and humble moment for me.

As some of you know, my education is in the humanities: literature, Renaissance culture, philosophy, anthropology, art history, and critical theory. The world of ideas, mostly abstract. But my life as an academic changed dramatically when I was introduced to design at Art Center College of Design ten years ago. I saw quickly that design is about putting ideas into action, ideas that have an impact, ideas that can transform the world. Designers do things, make things, out of ideas. I was hooked, and I have never looked back.

My education in art and design as ways of thinking and making has accelerated recently with my appointment as Provost of California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, a remarkably creative institution in one of the most innovative regions in the world. CCA was born out of the arts and crafts movement and still offers programs in the traditional (and now resurgent) crafts, but it has also invented new programs, such as our MBA in design strategy. The history and growth of art and design education over the last 100 years is written in the wide bandwidth of disciplines taught at CCA today.

And my own design education is also indebted to everything I’ve learned in my six years with Icsid. I’ve estimated that in this time I’ve traveled 342 days—almost a full year—and visited twenty-seven countries. Because of Icsid, my education in design has been international, and I have had some of the best teachers I could imagine—all of you. Through my work with Icsid, I have learned and seen the power of design to transform our lives, “to enhance our social, cultural, economic and environmental quality of life,” as our mission states. Seeing the impact of design changed my own career, and it continues to motivate my work as an art and design educator today.

Fifteen, perhaps twenty years ago, my background in the humanities would probably not have led to a career in design education, or the opportunity to lead an international design organization. But as design has grown in scope and in the complexity of the problems it addresses, as design has begun to tackle problems in sustainability, urban life, health, hunger and poverty, it has needed to utilize knowledge and expertise from many disciplines outside design. Engineering and business have always intersected with design, but today it is difficult to find a field of study that does not traverse design in some way. And all these other fields are now discovering what design can offer—the translation of ideas into forms, a method of problem solving, visual communication—such that it is possible to say that design has become the lingua franca of our age, and designers, the very best at least, the Renaissance men and women of our time.

It is a great time to become the president of Icsid—we are a stronger organization with greater resources than ever before. In my six years, Icsid has grown in many ways. The Secretariat in Montreal, a small but dedicated team, has become a powerful engine that drives our operations and produces creative thinking about our future. And the past 3 presidents here today have led significant changes in their terms of office: Luigi Ferrara, who conceived and directed our move to Montreal, a transformative moment in Icsid’s history; Peter Zec, who helped restore our financial solvency and led the development of the World Design Capital, a significant part of our portfolio; and my predecessor, Carlos Hinrichsen, whose leadership led to the growth of our regional networks and a new presence for Icsid in developing regions, especially Latin America. And he reminded us above all that we are a community with a big heart. Thank you Carlos.

In the next two years, as President, I want to learn from and extend the legacies of these past presidents. You have just elected a very talented and diverse Executive Board, representing nearly every part of the world. With their help, and with your involvement, I believe we can continue the growth, impact and stature of Icsid.

I would now like to introduce six themes that will guide my term as President and shape our goals and initiatives.

1. Diversity. We will seek to build new partners and memberships, especially in developing design regions. Icsid members in countries with a longer and more established design history have the opportunity and responsibility to support (and learn from) emerging design cultures. Just as important is diversity of gender and generation—two of the keys to Icsid’s future, as well as diversity of opinion within our organization, as we saw in the passionate debates this morning.
2. Influence. We need to continue building new partnerships with non-design stakeholders around the world: governments, municipalities, NGO’s, business, economics, science and health, in order to influence their work and also to demonstrate the contributions design can make to their ambitions.
3. Collaboration. The International Design Alliance (IDA) should become a powerful voice of design around the world through the joint congress in Taipei, and those in the future, as well as through greater collaboration on the projects each organization leads. I look forward to working with our partners, Icograda and Ifi, to define our unique disciplines and to build our collaborative strength.
4. Regionalism. We should look for ways to strengthen regional involvement with Icsid through interdesigns, regional meetings, and the activity of our regional advisors. Icsid must become more of a grass roots, open-source organization, with strong engagement from our memberships and the individuals within them. In a globally connected world, the unique knowledge, practices and challenges of different parts of the world are even more important. City Move, the interdesign led by Robin Edman, demonstrates the value of addressing a regional problem with global implications.
5. Communication. This term we need to continue the development of the Icsid website as a destination for information, the exchange of ideas, best practices, displaying student work, and many other functions already available. It should become a virtual community for Icsid and a resource for the whole world. As we conceive it, the Design Impact Award will bring a lot of traffic to the website, and I thank you for your support and trust as we develop this exciting new project.
6. Shape. It is increasingly important in our interdisciplinary age to shape and define the future of Industrial Design among the design fields. I firmly believe that as the design disciplines become more fluid, it will remain important for each discipline to maintain a unique skill set, expertise, and methodology. Design is simply too big for one person to own it all. Creative collaboration comes from what IDEO call’s “T-shaped people”: designers and thinkers who bring their own vertical depth but also have the capacity to work with horizontal breadth.

I think it is interesting to note that design thinking has emerged from the process and practice of industrial designers. Design thinking is a problem-identification and problem-solving process that, as we often hear debated, offers a methodology very useful in fields outside of design, especially the management of business and other organizations. Design thinking may have a wide range of applications, but in my experience it is best performed by industrial designers, who also think with their hands, make things, transform ideas into actions.

I would like to conclude with a well-known quote from Confucius:

I hear and I forget.

I see and I remember.

I do and I understand.

Industrial designers do, and in doing, understand. That is what I want for Icsid-an organization that acts, makes a difference, has an impact, and transforms the world. For that to happen, we need to work together. You must get involved, not just as members of Icsid but also as participants in Icsid. Our organization provides a set of tools, an array of opportunities, a global network of people with diverse skills and knowledge, for all of us to build a significant future. After all, as the saying goes, the best way to predict the future is to design it.

I thank you for your support and trust to lead Icsid into the future.

The third and final day of the Icsid Congress has just concluded with the announcement that Helsinki won the competition to become the World Design Capital in 2012. This is a world-wide designation started by Icsid in 2008 to reward a city that has revitalized or improved its economic and social quality of life through design. Every two years, cities from around the world bid for the title, and a panel of international jurors make the final call. Torino hosted over 300 events during the WDC inaugural year in 2008; Seoul’s opening party for 2010 will be this New Year’s eve. Deputy Mayor Chung is leading the Seoul delegation here in Singapore, and they’ll host the final party of the congress tonight at the Singapore National Museum.

There were many very smart and inspiring presentations over the last three days, but I’ll never forget the innovative design of the venue; it was unlike any conference I’ve attended. In keeping with Milton Tan and Arnold Wasserman’s approach to stage nine independent studios in the months leading up to to the congress that would imagine the world in 2050, the auditorium was set up with nine studio spaces coming out of the center like spokes around a half-circle. During the presentations, they were filled with seats facing the stage, but in the afternoons they reversed directions and become discrete studio spaces. Instead of break-out spaces apart from the main venue, here everything took place in a single space, so the energy (and sadly, sometimes, the noise level) was buzzing.

Chris Bangle was up to his usual brilliant, antic performance level in leading a studio on Personal Mobility. Another favorite of mine was called “Architects Save the World and Bring Joy to Millions” led by Richard Hassell and the WOHA studio. They envisioned Singapore’s response to rising sea levels in a way that I’m sure made our Dutch delegates smile–the Netherlands of course had to solve this problem centuries ago.  I was also particularly impressed with the studio led by fellow San Franciscan Chris Luebkeman, which studied our over-consumption of resources: our footprint grows exponentially, while our resources stay the same. When is the tipping point?

Another Bay Area denizen, Emily Pilloton, gave a moving presentation on the remarkable work she is doing with Project H. Besides the work itself, which has had a transformative impact on many communities around the world, I was really amazed at the way the organization works. Other than Emily, it really has no central organization or overhead, and very little funding. What Emily has done is to create a kind of viral network in which designers from Project H chapters come together around a project. So the accomplishment of actual work comes first, and there are none of the  wasted resources that plague so many humanitarian organizations. It’s a nimble and highly effective network. That made me realize how the paradigm of social activism is really changing in the 21st century from the older top-down model to the open-source, bottom-up kind of work Emily is doing. I urge my readers to take a look at the Project H website.

My last two days here in Singapore were spent at the Icsid General Assembly, where we do the official business of the organization. After hearing Emily’s presentation, some of us at Icsid started to think about ways we could become a more bottom-up organization by deploying our many regional advisors and organizations around the world. One of the most exciting projects for Icsid during my presidency (which started yesterday) is to organize a design impact award, or prize, that would honor any kind of design project that demonstrates Icsid’s mission “to enhance our social, cultural, economic and environmental quality of life.” Rather than an individual product, we’re looking for to award a system, event, or project that utilizes design thinking in an expansive way to transform our lives. The idea was conceived by Brandon Gein, Director of the International Australian Design Awards, about a year ago at an Icsid board meeting in Santiago.There is a lot of work to be done on this initiative, but it was great to see the enthusiasm for it from the Icsid membership. More on this as it develops.

The most moving support for the award came from Dieter Rams, who has worked with Icsid for many years. Herr Rams said it was the most important kind of project Icsid could take on. Later that night, at the celebratory Icsid Presidents’ dinner, I had the chance to hear Herr Rams explain how his new prosthetic knee is working out. Of course he thinks of it in terms of design, and it was great fun to hear his design analysis of how it works, and also how he would re-design it himself.

I find myself exhausted but very pleased with the Icsid Congress and General Assembly. Above all it has been a week of reuniting with old friends in the Icsid family and making new ones as well. I will miss working with Icsid President Carlos Hinrichsen, who has led Icsid so well these past two years.

After a week in Singapore,  I’m ready to for the crisp, cool, salty air of  San Francisco and to get back to work with my colleagues at CCA. It’s time to come home.

Back in Singapore again–seems like I just left (which I did, last July). I’ve got a stunning vista from the top of the the Conrad Centennial of the Singapore skyline behind the iconic ferris well and out to the harbor,  a saltwater freeway of tankers and cargo ships around the clock. To the west, I can watch the work on Singapore’s new casino; from the size of the footprint, it looks enormous. I’m told it will open next fall, with great success I’m sure. I’d much rather gamble in Singapore than Macao.

But the big news is the start of Icsid’s World Design Congress: the kick off party is tonight, and the official opening will be tomorrow. Lots of design luminaries here for the event. Chatted with Chris Bangle yesterday over champagne as the sun went down; he’s become even more the design sage since leaving BMW. Caught Bruce Nussbaum in the elevator; he has recently started teaching at Parsons. And I ran into Arnold Wasserman in the lobby, the principal advisor and pretty much the lead architect of the whole event. Also having a wonderful reunion with my old friends from Art Center, two of them expatriates now. Marty Smith chairs the Industrial Design program at Hong Kong Polytechnic. Peter di Sabatino recently became the Dean of Architecture and Design at the American University at Sharjah–that’s one of the Emirates, in case you’re wondering. Karen Hoffman is here too, still doing remarkable things with the incomparable Prod Squad in Pasadena.

Today was the one-day Design Education Conference preceding the Congress held at Temasek Polytechnic. I saw some very impressive student work across the design disciplines, even more impressive since the students are fresh of high school and it’s only a three-year program. Check out keynote speaker Satoshi Nakagawa’s work on how to activate the right brain in order to open up the five senses in the creative process. Professor Nakagawa believes that people with highly developed left brain functions are actually better suited for developing their right brains, which goes against the common wisdom that we’re either one or the other, analytic or emotional, linear or holistic, and so on. That’s good news for design educators, because it means that we can teach, or at least encourage, the right side of the brain. I was always a little discouraged by Paul Rand’s crotchety claim that creativity is “all about intuition, and you can’t teach that!”

Of course all this requires us to suspend more recent neurological studies that no longer see the brain functioning in two distinct hemispheres, even less that people are innately defined by one or the other. The old research of the ’60’s has been supplanted by the idea that the brain is a much more integrated and holistic organ, moving easily between hemispheres even in the same activity. So Professor Nakagawa is–quite ironically–doing a “left brain” read on the brain itself by seeing it as an either/or, binary operation. In the end the left brain/right brain map works better as a provocative metaphor than as an actual description of how we think and create. But we’re easily seduced by somatic metaphors; as Baudrillard wryly pointed out, “the map precedes the territory.”

Big congratulations to Low Cheaw Hwei and his Icsid Congress Organising Committee: so far, so good, and I’ll keep you posted!

Guten abend meine damen und herren!

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to be here with you tonight.

Today, walking through Victoria Park here in Kronberg, I was thinking about all the changes in the world since my visit two short years ago as a member of the 2007 Braun Prize jury, but also, at the same time, how familiar everything felt. Maybe it was this old, historical town: the world changes around it, but Kronberg looks the same for the last 500 years! And this thought reminded of the well-known quotation, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” It comes from the French, “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”

For me, these past two years have been marked by a great deal of change. Last spring I left Art Center College of Design in Pasadena to become the Provost at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. CCA, my new school, developed out of the arts and crafts movement over 100 years ago. We still have thriving programs in the traditional crafts—ceramics, glass, metal, jewelry—and a strong emphasis on making, thinking with your hands. But CCA has also launched some of the most forward looking new programs in the world, reflecting all the changes in design, as well as new directions in existing programs: we’re the first art and design school to offer an MBA in Design Strategy, led by Nathan Shedroff; the new program in Animation is taught by artists from Pixar; our Fashion program is one of the pioneers in sustainable fashion, and along the same lines, our Architecture students have built an entirely solar-powered house in collaboration with engineering students from Santa Clara University that will compete this fall in the international Solar Decathlon competition in Washington D.C.; in Industrial Design, Yves Behar has led a wonderfully creative program for the last few years. And there are many more programs at CCA—twenty-seven in all.

One of the interesting developments in design education in the last few years is a renewed interest among students today in the traditional crafts. I have seen this at CCA and at other schools around the world. Of course digital media are still prominent, but perhaps that has led to a swing of the pendulum back to a resurgence of interest in materials, tactility, the singular rather than mass-produced object. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

CCA is also distinctive for its location in the Bay Area, where some of the world’s most innovative and progressive companies are located. Did you know that 40% of all venture capital investment in the U.S. comes from the Bay Area? And the region has twice the national average in NGO funding. So it’s a very creative part of the business world that also has a strong humanitarian sense of social justice. An art and design school in this kind of region needs to be a campus without walls: we look for our faculty among all the creative professionals, and our classrooms at their offices and studios.

The second significant change in the last two years also occurred in San Francisco. In the fall of 2007, I was honored to be elected the President-elect of Icsid, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design. We hear a lot today about the internationalism of design—its spread throughout the world. But we should remember that Icsid was founded in 1957 as the world’s first international design organization. Back then it was still a mostly European organization, but one of our founding fathers was Japan’s Kenji Ekuan, whom you all know. He started GK design, and its current President and CEO is here tonight—Mr. Kazuo Tanaka, a member of the Icsid board and the Braun Prize jury this year. A couple weeks ago we celebrated Kenji’s 80^th birthday in Tokyo, and I asked him why he became a designer. I will never forget his answer. He told me that he decided to become a designer as a boy while walking through the awful, blackened ruins of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had devastated the city. All around him he saw destruction, and it made him want to build something beautiful, to create life where there was only death. Of course Kenji Ekuan went on to become one of the key contributors to Japan’s economic recovery after the war through his work in design. He remains actively engaged with Icsid today.

Icsid transcends politics, but of course it can never be entirely apart from politics. During the Cold War, attending an Icsid Congress or Interdesign was one of the few opportunities for designers from behind the iron curtain to go to the west. Like the Olympics, Icsid provided a passport across political borders, and I think it’s fair to say that design in the former Eastern Europe was able to remain current with developments around the world through Icsid. Recently, we faced a political challenge when Taipei was named as the host of the first IDA Congress in 2011. At first, we met with resistance from the Chinese government in Beijing. But once again design crossed political borders, and today, plans for the event are moving ahead in harmony between Taipei and the mainland.

Icsid now has over 150 member organizations from over fifty countries around the world. If you count all the people inside this organization, Icsid represents perhaps 160,000 individuals. Among design organizations, we’re unique in bringing together four different kinds of design stakeholders: professional associations, design-driven companies, design promotion organizations, and art and design schools. We’re very proud to endorse and sponsor the Braun Prize this year as in years past. One more note here: the 2009 Icsid Congress in Singapore is rapidly approaching in November, and I urge you all to attend. Some of the most interesting designers in the world are holding studios this fall that envision the world in 2050. We’ll hear from them in Singapore—it should be a terrific event.

Today, we hear a lot about the growth of design, its increasing importance around the world, especially in the last ten years since the dawn of our new century. No doubt the practice, influence and awareness of design is growing at an exponential rate. A couple weeks ago, as you all know, IKEA changed its typeface from Futura to Verdana, and it became almost an international incident on the Internet. Millions of people around the world debated the merits of this change, and not just designers! I would guess that ten years ago this would have gone unnoticed, but today, with people designing their own websites, Facebook pages or blog sites, a debate about typeface is everyone’s business.

We also hear that we now live in a “Creativity Economy,” as Bruce Nussbaum coined it, or the “Conceptual Age” in Dan Pink’s phrase. A.G. Laffley, who is here with us tonight, recently said that it’s no longer enough simply to strive for innovation: we must go back a step further and “innovate the way we innovate.” Are you aware that 1,000 new design programs have been started in China in the last ten years? Apparently China is not content to manufacture the rest of the world’s ideas. Or that Mayor Oh of Seoul has hired a CDO—Chief Design Officer—to his cabinet, so that design can power the next economic “miracle on the Han river?” Seoul’s transformation through design led to the city winning the competition to becoming the World Design Capital in 2010, an honor bestowed by Icsid. Singapore has set a goal to become the first design-driven country (although it is sort of like a big company). Already a new design and technology curriculum is in place across the country’s secondary schools, and a fourth national university will open in 2011 devoted to innovation and creativity. You’ve all heard of the bold move in Finland: the new Aalto University, which brings together the three largest universities in the country—in business, technology, art and design—to focus on innovation as well. There are so many more examples around the world. It seems that we all agree that our quality of life, economic strength, and our ability to solve the world’s most challenging problems in the 21^st century will be in large part shaped by design.

This is all very new in terms of the scale of design’s influence and power. But the idea is not new. Buckminister Fuller said the same thing sixty years ago. Plus ca change . . . .

And of course this great explosion in the design world of new ideas and initiatives in business, education and government has led to a remarkable increase in the number of design competitions. I have served on five juries just this summer! They are everywhere—perhaps not a week goes by when there is not a design competition somewhere in the world. The first design competition in the Middle East was held in 2008, and there are many new design education efforts in this region as well. I heard that there were twice as many competitions in the first decade of this century as in the last decade of the twentieth century. 100% growth in ten years!

This statistic brings us closer to why we are all here tonight, and it also raises the question: what makes the Braun Prize so unique, so different, and so important, in this vast sea of international competitions? I think there are two significant reasons. The first is Braun—the company. Since its founding 1920’s, and especially in its famously creative years from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, Braun has a strong claim to be the world’s first design-driven company, the first to see and to practice what so many companies have come to realize today: the ability of design to lead a company’s economic success, to create iconic products and to establish world-recognized brand recognition through design. All this Braun accomplished over fifty years ago.

For me, one of the most interesting and compelling stories of the last year was the comparison between Jonathan Ive’s products for Apple and the iconic products designed by Dieter Rams for Braun. One of the reasons that Apple’s designs have done so well is because Dieter Rams trained our sensibilities–he taught the world how good design should look and function. If you have not done so recently, read Dieter Rams’ “Ten Commandments of Good Design” again—it’s just as relevant today as when it was written. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose indeed!

Dieter Rams is also an important figure in Icsid, serving as a board member in the 1990’s and today as a Regional Advisor. I know he wanted to be here with us tonight, but I am told he has finally agreed to have a much-needed knee replacement. I hope it is well designed! And I know we all wish him a fast recovery.

The second reason why the Braun Prize is so important and unique today is the rigor and quality of the competition, and this is to the credit of Peter Schneider, who has been the chairman of the prize for fourteen years, and the extraordinary team that supports him. Anyone who has served on the jury knows how hard you work, the deep analysis and debate, the integrity in every step of the process. From all my experiences on juries, I say this to you not because we are here but because it is true: the Braun Prize is the best organized, most rigorous, most prestigious design competition for young designers in the world.

The Braun Prize is also a great asset to Proctor and Gamble, the parent company, a jewel in the crown of P&G. In the last ten years, under the leadership of A.G. Laffley, P&G has itself become a design-driven company, throughout its operations, and it has a become a model of innovation for other companies in this century, as Braun was in the last century.

As for the future of the Braun Prize, that lies in the talented and capable hands of Oliver Grabes, the new director of design at Braun, and in the continued support of the leadership of P&G. My belief is that the Braun Prize should build on its powerful legacy within Braun and its growing internationalism to become the most important design competition for the next forty years. To accomplish that, the Prize can build on the traditional, enduring values of Braun design to express and embody the future of design as it grows and changes. For me that includes the emotional, human-centered design and research, the new media in which design is now created and expressed, the new applications of design, design thinking and problem solving to different spheres of human life, and of course the ethical dimension of social responsibility.

I am certain that the Braun Prize will change, as everything should, but also that it will retain the values that have made it so important in the design world. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.

And I look forward to remaining a part of Braun Prize for years to come. You know, when you come to Kronberg and to Braun many times, as I have, you feel a strong bond to this place and to the people who live and work here. So, to conclude my remarks tonight, I want to tell you from the bottom of my heart, Ich bin ein Kronberger!

Dankeschon.

From left to right, Jung Chiou Hwang, Woody DJ Duh, Mark Breitenberg, Lung-Bin Han, Tapei Mayor