About Design Thinking, Co-Creation and design in a technological world

In conversation with Sean Carney – Part 3

As Chief Experience Design Officer, Sean Carney has overall responsibility for all the capabilities around design. Burkhard Jacob, Managing Director Red Dot Institute, met him for an interview in Eindhoven. In the third of four parts of the interview, Sean Carney explains Design Thinking and Co-Creation and the influence of these methods on the way Philips works.

Burkhard Jacob: When you talk to Philips designers, you get the impression that the designers here don’t just work on products, but on solutions that make life a little bit better.

Sean Carney: Right. If you talk to graduate designers, maybe there are a few who want to work on just a beautifully crafted product, but the majority really hope to see that their work has impact, has meaning, and makes a difference in somebody’s life. That’s the added value and the question we always ask ourselves: what else can we do to enhance the human experience and provide a better outcome?

What’s the difference between “Design Thinking” and your design philosophy of co-creation?

When I arrived at Philips, Design Thinking was already well-documented. Many books had already been written about it. What I disliked about where Design Thinking was heading was that it was becoming way too academic with people looking inwards. What I wanted to do was open it up, for it to be inclusive and an approach that would be used and appreciated by more people than just those inside Philips Design.

How did you manage to democratise this approach?

Again, one of the reflections I had as I started out at Philips was that we had become too much of a consultancy, an in-house consultancy to our own businesses. We were asking them what they wanted and then making sure we provided what they wanted. As a function we have to go beyond that. As a designer in this enterprise, I have a responsibility to advocate for the user, to think beyond the ordinary and to push to the next level. And that’s still an ongoing journey – to instil confidence and trust in our designers that they have a right to be at the table as much as the engineer, the marketeer, the accountant, and to come with a functional perspective and demonstrate functional leadership.

Philips Design has a long history, but in 2019 you changed the name of the team into Philips Experience Design Team.

The name change was a very deliberate action to ensure our name more accurately reflects who we are today and what we actually do, which was no longer about simply designing the product. Today we are designing the system and thinking holistically about the user experience or the patient experience or the ecosystem experience.

The importance of design sometimes seems to disappear behind technologies like Internet of Things, Big Data, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Do all of these technological developments make the importance of design invisible?

I think it’s up to us as designers to embrace these technologies and use them as creative tools. I see design on the up again. Initially, as we moved towards more digital solutions, I think the role of design wasn’t clearly understood. And equally we didn’t take ownership in that space. We were too comfortable thinking about user interface design and Graphical User Interface ‘GUI’ or Human-Computer Interaction ‘HCI’, but it goes beyond that now. We’ve started to think more holistically about Experience Design and that became our focus and identity. Philips Experience Design is now increasingly asked to step up and start to lead this discussion about an integrated suite of solutions that fits into a broader ecosystem. It’s also worth stressing here that the traditional crafts of design are just as important. We still need to create beautiful, engaging, well-crafted products and interfaces. It’s absolutely essential that we don’t neglect our foundational capabilities and leave space in the programs we run to spend time refining a surface or deliberating over the colour or weight of type in the interface of a piece of complex software.

How will design change by the year 2030?

We are exploring data-enabled design. As more and more data becomes available, it also becomes a more valuable asset for us. If designers unlock the creative potential of the data to derive really meaningful insights, it can lead us into more guided design decisions, and then guide the experience going forward, making experiences more personal, precise and contextually relevant. If we launch a new product now, data should be part of the journey from the outset. I believe designers will increasingly be tasked with creating software-enabled hardware with enhanced features. And we are going to see more of that in the future.

Before we finish, let me ask what importance awards in design competitions have for you and your team?

Winning a design award is a moment of internal pride, recognition by our peers or panel of experts that attests we did a good job. There is also pride within the broader multidisciplinary teams, as it is recognition for the quality of their work. And it’s an external validation of the quality of who we are and what we are doing and what we are striving to do. Ultimately, of course, the final validation is the people who buy it or use our solutions. Does our design make a difference to people’s lives? Awards like the Red Dot are treasured because they can attest that the work produced is recognised by peers, by experts in the industry as being good quality design. And there is personal pride in that as well – the teams are highly motivated and it promotes internal competition. They take pride in the number of awards they win. And it will help us attract young and inspiring new talent as well.

Honorary title “Red Dot: Design Team of the Year” for necessary and innovative technologies

Not only is Philips exemplary when it comes to putting into practice its own claim for a multidisciplinary approach to design, it is also one of the few companies worldwide to offer solutions to the pressing issues of the 21st century. Against the backdrop of an ageing population, the increase in chronic illnesses, the threat of pandemics and rising healthcare costs, Philips’ strategic realignment and repositioning as a leading health tech company is also likely to provide impetus to other companies.

The Philips Experience Design Team led by Sean Carney puts these ideals and ideas into practice using innovative technologies. The team always starts from the perspective of the product’s subsequent use in practice. This approach results in devices that are intuitive and simple to use and operate but that are also effective and deliver meaningful outcomes.

For this accomplishment, the design team is receiving the honorary title “Red Dot: Design Team of the Year 2022”. Sean Carney and his team are worthy successors to last year’s recipient, Studio F. A. Porsche