Bob Bockheim understands the importance of design and designers.
Bockheim is president of Nucraft Furniture, and business depends on it. He is working to ensure that all Nucraft employees, from managers to marketers, accountants to engineers, understand design's importance. That's why Bockheim contracted John Berry, senior consultant with Greystone Global to educate Nucraft employees through his seminar, "Design for Non-Designers."
Bockheim's reason is simple.
"Nucraft used to sell to furniture dealers who sold our products to designers. Then, about five years ago, the way we did business changed. We began selling directly to architects and interior designers, and it became apparent we weren't keeping up with their wants and needs, and that we didn't understand their thought process."
Now Nucraft, based in Comstock Park, is becoming an innovation company, instead of furniture company.
Increasing the awareness of the importance of design to business and drawing together West Michigan's assets in design is one of the missions of a newly forming InnovationWorks Design Council.
If the InnovationWorks Design Council accomplishes its mission, the West Michigan tri-plex (Grand Rapids, Muskegon, Holland) will be known as a hotbed of design excellence.
It's a powerful asset in a knowledge-based economy, and one that can help foster new businesses, much as California's Silicon Valley is known for information technology and Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C. is known for biomedical and pharmaceuticals.
"Design is an area where we have a competitive edge and can build from a position of strength in the knowledge economy," said Randy Thelen, president of the Holland-based economic development group Lakeshore Advantage. "Our ultimate goal is to bring people with strong design skills together with people and companies with new product ideas. We want to provide a well-marked path by which entrepreneurs can bring new product ideas to market."
The Design Council is one of dozens of economic development initiatives spawned by a $15 million federal WIRED grant. The West Michigan Strategic Alliance won the three-year Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development grant to be used on 12 projects. It was one of only 13 areas in the country to receive it.
InnovationWorks is a partnership between economic development programs The Right Place in Grand Rapids and Lakeshore Advantage. The group is managing a portion of the WIRED grant that is working on four areas of innovation, including design.
One of the missions of InnovationWorks is to form the regional Design Council.
Industrial design, furniture design, exterior and interior automotive design, textile design, multi-media design, interior design, architectural design, graphic design, advertising design … the list goes on and on. Their products are very different, but the people behind them share the ability to innovate.
Birgit Klohs, president of The Right Place, said the group plans to leverage the region's talent in design much like a physical asset like roads or buildings.
"You have both homegrown talent and design talent being attracted to the region," she said. "In the business world, we believe that design is very heavily imbedded into the innovation process. If you are innovating a new product, or have a new product idea, it has to have a design. From our perspective, we have a core competence in design."
InnovationWorks is developing a comprehensive innovation strategy. That means putting together a plan on how create new things better than other people are doing it. How can the region be known more for its thinkers than its builders?
Ben Delphia, former automotive designer for General Motors and an industrial design professor at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids puts it another way, "We're going to move from a metals-based economy to a mental-based economy."
Berry, who has one of the first Design Council seats, said one of the first missions of the group is to get designers to talk to one another and to get them to start trumpeting their own worth.
"There is a lot of very good graphic design talent, there also is a very good base of architectural and interior design (talent). The problem is, they don't talk to each other.
You get this odd West Michigan 'we don't need to brag' sort of thing. The design community around here is really pretty good by the visibility of it suffers because it is not a collective force."
Interior designer Gayle DeBruyn of Lake Affect Design Studio in Grand Rapids is part of the core group charged with writing a plan to unite the design community together. She said designers aren't always good at communicating or connecting with the more traditional side of business and have been left out of major decision-making.
"Designers pride themselves in being freethinkers and non-conformists. And that can be scary to management, engineering and marketing, and as a result, designers are not a part of the inner circle," she said. "And those who hire us don't know what to do with us or how to work with us. They can't see how design can help their business. Instead they see TV shows like Trading Spaces and Flip This House and they think 'Look at that! Anyone can be a designer or an architect.' These shows are dumbing-down design to the point where people don't understand or appreciate its complexities."
Oliver Evans, President of Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University feels every organization should follow Nucraft's model. Designers should be empowered to "lead from the center," he said.
"The designer is often not perceived in any political or hierarchical sense to be the leader. And yet the designer is frequently the one at the center of the process, making the key decisions, getting input from and giving feedback to everybody else," Evans said. "I want to suggest a different kind of leadership here — where the designer, instead of being an afterthought to the process, is thought of immediately at the beginning — where the designer becomes actively involved in defining the issue, helps to articulate the goals develop plans and evaluate the outcome. When the designer is seen as leader, people don't approach the designer with solutions already set in their minds and say, 'Will you please make this happen?'"
Furniture photographs courtesy of Nucraft Furniture
Birgit Klohs photograph courtesy of The Right Place
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