Steve Katz05.11.10
The Impact of Globalization on Design, and Design’s Impact on Globalization (in a nutshell)
It’s a global designer’s market out there, says award-winning designer Kenneth Hirst.
Written By: Kenneth Hirst
AUTHOR BIO: Kenneth Hirst, founder of Hirst Pacific Ltd, is an award-winning product, packaging and retail interiors designer with a proven reputation for design excellence and innovation. Hirst’s versatility and expertise have encompassed a wide range of disciplines—from luxury goods, consumer products, consumer packaging, home wares, and health and beauty products to medical equipment, electronic devices, lighting, retail environments and furniture design.
The world is shrinking, markets are expanding and manufacturing industries have decentralized. New industrialized nations have risen, global economies are changing the playing field and technology continues to speed forward at a breathtaking pace. The impact of this hit is as recent as the mid-1990s and has turned design and its practitioner, the designer, from a beneficial luxury within the process of getting new products to market to an absolute necessity.
The role of the product and the package designer has evolved with the shifting tides of global economic development. From purveyor of function and eye-catching aesthetics to cultural ambassador whose design unifies consumers worldwide through their desire to consume-buy-own-use-or just have the latest products and the same products that we all share in developed nations and increasingly so in developing countries.
Multinational corporations, such as Unilever, who once sold the same product they developed for consumers in their home market and launched it in the global marketplace now enlist designers to develop new products that will appeal to all the multicultural consumers of the world.
As global designers, we now initiate global reconnaissance in strategic international markets that exposes consumers’ desires, specific market idiosyncrasies and “best in class” competitors. The goal is to identify the common denominators; the function and form, the desired emotional attachment to an object that link consuming humanity, despite cultural differences, around the planet. This carefully democratizing investigation becomes the foundation for a global design solution.
Communication technology, the internet, email which has replaced airmail and the fax, PDFs which turn large documents into smaller files that can be sent via email, FTP sites which allows the transfer of very large documents in minutes if not seconds and cyber conferencing such as Skype, a video conferencing software that provides real time visual and voice communication with a counterpart on the other side of the planet, have all been instrumental in making designing globally more possible and more efficient than ever before.
No longer are we captives within our nationalistic design aspirations, but are specialists in design, delivering product that is compelling to the needs and wishes of all people. There has been a shift in the designer’s clientele; they are not just local. The global designer’s client base is spread across the industrialized world that is seeking out the expertise that delivers superior design and distinction and will give corporations the competitive edge.
However, globalization also means homogenization. More design firms are infiltrating foreign lands that have developing industrial bases and growing markets and which provide these firms with opportunities for business expansion. Our small world infused with varying cultures are spreading across the planet bringing contemporary design and sophisticated manufacturing expertise which is blurring style and bias that was once distinctly unique in forms of ethnic design. The economic, technological and social evolutionary phase we are in is creating global design and the blending of proprietary design expressions from the past into a new “global style.”
Global consumers’ desires, needs and taste have been challenged only to evolve until finally they converge in the form of a holistic design for everyone resulting in a “slick,” “slim,” “fit in the pocket,” “multi-mono functional,” “eco-friendly dreaming,” “iPod looking,” “this symbolizes me,” “this is who I aspire to be” design.
Whether we are designing cosmetic containers, soda bottles or cell phones in one country or another, at the end of the day, these products produced with the efficiency of low-cost, high-volume manufacturing, are becoming dangerously ubiquitous and will ultimately be marketed to all of us, right here, right now, right across the planet.
Website: www.hirstpacific.com