DESIGN DRIVEN
INNOVATION
Design-driven innovation is a powerful strategy for creating breakthrough products and services. As described by Roberto Verganti, it focuses on radically changing the meanings people attach to products, rather than simply improving their functionality or aesthetics.
A clear example is the Nintendo Wii; while competitors pursued better graphics for more immersive virtual worlds, Nintendo reimagined the console as a platform for active, social, family entertainment. This new meaning drove its major market success.
Design-driven innovation creates value by redefining what a product represents for customers, beyond current needs or available technologies. It does not just answer user demands or exploit technical progress; it proposes bold new meanings that customers may not yet realize they want.
Here are a few examples of such projects:
Experiencia arbórea: prototyping, validation, and commercialization of a product–service ecotourism system
Project funded by the National Training Service (SENA) and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of Colombia, and carried out with the Association for the Advancement of Science (Avanciencia) from 2021 to 2023.
Design team: Ricardo Mejía (leader), Martín Gómez, Marcela Rubiano, Paola Sanchez y Daniela Ruiz.
Image: Experiencia Arborea.
Addressing the global socio-environmental crisis — which also manifests locally in both urban and rural areas — requires a complex approach that integrates design with other disciplines and with an ethical perspective capable of confronting it in ways that differ from the dominant ones, whose failure is evident.
Experiencia arbórea (Tree Experience), from such an approach, seeks to help resolve the conflict between the need for a dignified life for rural and urban inhabitants, eco-conscious habitability, and the pressing need to care for ecosystems. It does so based on a complex understanding of the needs and perspectives of those involved in the problem and its solutions and, in particular, of the role of host communities as caretakers of the territory. In turn, Vision in Design, a method of innovation through design, starts from the premise that product–service systems obtain their meaning in interaction with people, whose appropriateness is determined by context, a key element of the complex and ethical approach from which the project is developed. From this approach and methodology, the inspiration for the proposal was the tree, a living system that drove our ethical commitment and made it possible to define an experience materialized in a space of social, cultural, and natural connection, from which the product–service system is configured: an ecotourism service; the Nest, an artifact to temporarily host visitors; and those communicating elements of its conceptualization and action, such as communication strategy, visual identity, and applications. Along this path, we faced challenges — associated with limitations of time, resources, and cultural resistance — in integrating all the elements that the complex perspective allowed us to recognize.
More information will be published shortly.