There isn’t an industry today that is immune to the effects of globalisation, including design.
Peter McCamley of Group GSA has been working in the design industry for over 35 years, and has seen the increasingly globalised economy change the sector. With burgeoning market competition from all over the globe as well as increasingly informed clients and a growing complexity in project requirements, designers of all walks are beginning to experience a shift in how they work together, who they work with, and the imperative need to collaborate in order to stay ahead.
In response, practices are collaborating with external consultants – other designers, strategists, user-experience experts, psychologists, digital transformation experts, and the list goes on – in an attempt to stay in front of their competition.
“Modern-day factors have driven greater innovation and relationships, not only between designer and designer, but also between designer and those outside the industry,” McCamley says. While designers have always collaborated, it is the way in which they now collaborate, and who they collaborate with that is changing. “There is now tremendous freedom for people in all disciplines to free themselves from the shackles of ‘this is what I do; that is what you do’, and engage in the broader conversation together, a conversation that is beyond just ‘design’,” reflects David Constantine, Design Director at Ellis Jones.
This lateral shift is increasingly pushing designers to collaborate and cross-pollinate in partnerships that were virtually unseen pre-globalisation. Strategy and design practice Relative Projects positions this kind of collaboration at the core of its business model, allowing the organisation to take on complex and future-driven projects. “For over 15 years, I have been constantly developing new, less linear approaches to the endless factors that constantly impact and change the work we do. Now it’s possible, and at times necessary, to introduce broader solutions to how we can take advantage of, and work with the complexity we now face,” says Dhiren Das, Director at Relative Projects.
“We have a core team, but beyond that, we have a network of specialists who are embedded in various sectors that aren’t necessarily related to design. To do our work to achieve to the best standard in a contemporary landscape, we need to collaborate with specialists who have really deep experience within their sectors – because they are the kind of people who can shed new light on complex projects and problems.”
Depending on the focal points of a project, Relative Projects will team up with specialists in branding or wayfinding, or with those in roles completely unexpected, such as material scientists, statisticians, economists, management consultancies, food specialists and chefs. “The work of these specialists might be 20 percent of the project scope for us,” Das says, “but that 20 percent plants a new seed of innovation within the project that we never would have had without the collaborative exchange.”
While not all projects require collaboration in this exact sense, or even any collaboration at all, being connected and inspired in as many ways, angles and streams as possible can only do good in a world that is morphing faster than most of us can keep up with. There is now a widening complexity in the projects designers work on, a complexity that is, at times, something that can’t be taken on as a single firm or even as a multi-disciplinary design team.So breaking down silos, collaborating with outside disciplines and bleeding design into a magnitude of other professions is what allows studios to excel and cover new streams and projects. After all, as McCamley says, “We’re not ‘just designers’ anymore,” and we never will be again.