As senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, Paola Antonelli strives to promote a deeper understanding of design's transformative and constructive influence on the world and how designers help bridge the path to the future.

Designers, as she sees them, are interpreters. They help companies sense needs and preferences and understand consumer behavior. Their work is deeply intertwined and mutually dependent on science and scientists, Antonelli said, because new discoveries and ways of unleashing their potential and connectivity with the human experience hinge on creativity, exploration, imagination and the innovation that results.

"Designers, in our view, are the ones who take innovation from research and development, engineers, and politicians, and turn it into life and light," Antonelli told the delegates at the 2011 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees. "There is a [human] desire to destroy that new piece of innovation when it frustrates you, when you can’t figure out how to learn it quickly," she said.

That's why scientists and designers and their collaboration are so important. They must find new ways of providing intuitive, flexible solutions for the elastic mind and for the needs and wants of an ever-evolving technological environment.

Antonelli termed this critical collaboration as, "a beautiful coming together of possibilities." The rewards, she added, have all the potential for "amplifying human rights and obsessions through innovation."

The MoMA curator and university lecturer said the nanoscale, the tiny universe in which all things are measured in nanometers or microns, is one of the new fields of design that are extremely promising, and a playing field on which designers and scientists are coming together in some really exciting ways.

"How does nature do it?" Antonelli asked. "We've been imitating structure, form and other conditions of nature to its most detailed nature and level," she added, and yet it appears we've only scratched the surface of what’s possible on the smallest of environmental scales.

No matter how transformative the impact of new discoveries, invariably there arises a debate about this marriage of science and art, and scientists often question the utility of elegance and of beauty. "What's your problem with elegance?" is a common design retort. But, Antonelli acknowledged, the challenge for designers is recognizing that if their interpretations of science are perceived as being too elegant, the scientists may not take them seriously.

In the business world, designers also have a powerful creative and interpretive influence. With so much data churned out by computers, people need help making sense of it. Often, a designer can see the context and pattern and flow of data from a creative sense and thereby inform those whose appreciation for the same data may be different, or whose view may be obscured because they're simply too close to the data.

Looking to the future, Antonelli said, scientists, business leaders and others should seek collaboration with designers because they can open up new windows on the world, and on customer segments. Leaders should seek to leverage design's infinite possibilities by:

• Understanding how the design perspective can help translate data into new innovations
  
  
• Allowing designers the creative space to interpret what they see so they can inform decisions
  
  
• Connecting science, art and the human experience to create new, emotional connections with customers.
  
  

"Designers always have this touch; they bring you back to reality from time to time," Antonelli said. "It helps to have a real designer making sense of it, making a point. It truly is powerful what design can do."

Joseph Daniel McCool
Joseph Daniel McCool is senior contributing editor with ExecuNet and principal of management recruiting/succession advisory firm The McCool Group. He is also the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, recognized widely as "one of the best business books of 2008," and its Brazilian Portuguese translation, Escolhendo Líderes, published in June 2010.

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