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Title: assessing and accounting the contribution of intangible
design values
to business development in emerging economy.
Introduction
The presentation addresses the demand to assess the quality and
qualification of ideas in order to quantify Design as a Creative
Service within the New Economy. It describes the development of
Immaterial Value Management Tools that makes intangible factors
more tangible and transparent to both designers and clients. This
tool enables the identification, access, measurement, development,
design, application, management and communication of a company's
immaterial values, as expressed through its products and services.
Importance and Goal of study
The emerging economy is based not so much on natural resources and
technology, as on human and immaterial resources expressed in "quality-of-life".
An economy can only survive if it provides competitive human values
and services. Ethical Accounting (E-counting) assesses the immaterial
values manufacturers and designers create in their striving toward
both a sustainable ecology and economy.
Methodology
We have sophisticated systems for assessing and accounting for economy.
Over the past decade we have slowly begun to learn how to develop
ecological accounting systems too. We can build models, project
futures trends and create visions, but we lack a viable frame of
reference within which to evaluate them. This paper describes how
to build an ethical frame of reference, a code of conduct and a
strategy for the future within which intangible human factors can
be evaluated, applied and utilised.
Major findings of study
The proposed E-factors: Economy, Ecology and Ethics are the three
fundamental and inter-dependent factors governing the way we develop
the future. It takes a shift in our ethics to change the interaction
of ecology and economy.
Good values for the future are qualities like quality-of-life for
all life forms on the planet, political integrity, social responsibility,
sharing, openness, exchange, honesty, process transparency, and
equal access to knowledge and resources. These are all values that
can be expressed in products and services, and will give them vision,
purpose, meaning, direction, context and relevance (E-valuation).
Politically qualified Design, based on well-described ethical values,
is thus a vital tool if we are to base the new economy on real values,
and shape a creative culture that expresses a real hope for the
future. The paper proposes a global code of ethics for design ETHO
to correspond to the ISO technical norms.
Results
Designers must be able to understand, describe and manipulate the
intangible values that have always been the implicit foundation
of their method, far more systematically. Only then will they be
able to communicate these values to their new creative team-partners
and contribute their creative input to the development of a harmonious
new world vision.
Conclusions
In order to materialise an agenda of human values in business, the
Design Community must develop a new pro-active infrastructure for
increased accessibility and provide manageable and transparent services
that fit into, and even pre-empt the rapid development of the global
market and become an independent Creative Industry itself. Documentation
of immaterial values will be necessary tool to account for the relative
development of quality-of-life and provide a more complete base
and method for designing a better future - the ideal goal of all
designers. |
