Dutch Design Week

It was great to join our Industrial Design team at our Eindhoven Industrial Design Center (NL) during?#dutchdesignweek?2023 last month.

Thank you, Frank Rennings and his team, for hosting such a wonderful week with numerous client events that were truly inspiring and showed what is happening in the world of Industrial Design. Check out this interview with Frank talking about his impressions of the #DDW2023 and what the future holds.

#DDW2023?#Accenture?#IndustryX?#IndustrialDesign?#Engineering?#MoveToSoftware?#Sustainability?#AsAService

Sustainability in design has become a vital story to tell as designers and engineers create solutions that address the pressing issues we face today. Accenture was at the forefront of those design stories at the annual Dutch Design Week (DDW) event the last week of October in Eindhoven. We sat down with Frank Rennings, Managing Director Industry X – Netherlands, to learn how Accenture impacted DDW and what we learned from it.

Question: DDW has always been a pivotal moment in the European design calendar and this year you launched Accenture Industry X Industrial Design (the team behind the acquisition of VanBerlo). What were your key takeaways from the week and what should we look out for from Accenture in the future?

Rennings: There were close to 10,000 people attending DDW, which was exciting. In the end, the design week participation is a celebration of design first, but it also continues to be an interesting backdrop and an extra reason for clients to visit. Now Industrial Design is part of a bigger Industry X proposition, which includes more focus on end-to-end sustainability and engineering services for the design and the engineering of physical products. For example. we hosted a specific Industrial Design and Engineering Services client event on the Friday during DDW, and I think this will get even more emphasis in the future.

Question: You hosted a session of the Circular Design Forum at DDW. What are the latest innovations in circular design and how are they being implemented?

Rennings: Our point of view on Circular Design is to take a “systemic approach to sustainable design.” We ask questions from the beginning like “Do I need a new product? What materials will I use? Will it enable an efficient manufacturing process? Will it enable a sufficient supply chain? Will it stimulate proper usage? Does it enable reuse and recycling?” I think it’s this systemic approach that binds Circular Design experts together. More and more this community wants the impact to be quantified. We want it to be noted that it’s the early stage of product incubation during design that most of the material usage and sustainable impact will be determined. This year at DDW, companies could bring their own circular design challenges and present them to a group of experts to do collective thinking around them. Bang & Olufsen sought help for one of their challenges, which will help them achieve their objective.

Question: Accenture is bringing together capabilities in Industrial Design, Smart Connected Products and Engineering services. What examples can you give of how this works together?

Rennings: One example of how our Industrial Design capabilities work well with Smart Connected Products and Engineering is with Damen Shipyards, where the Industrial Design team designed a special type of Human Machine Interface (HMI) dashboard as well as the physical workspace of the captain. This is a dashboard where all the vital signs of the ship are visible. It digitizes the data of the ship and provides real-time information to the captain and crew. Another example involves automobile manufacturers and OEM manufacturers where Accenture is already working on software engineering and industrialized testing for the next generation of vehicles. The Industrial Design team started to complement the teams by helping to design additional in-car services that can monitor some of the vital signs of a vehicle’s passengers. Another example is the EVBox charger designed by the Industrial Design team, as an example of the wealth of experience that is brought to different companies in the electric vehicle charger market. As a next step, we are exploring involvement with the larger Accenture Industry X team in the software engineering for the management of these EV chargers. And because Accenture has the expertise further down the chain in engineering, that can inform with data what we’re doing in Industrial Design and ensure that we are doing the right thing in the right way.

Question: You talked of sustainable North Stars during the week – tell us a little more about that.

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Rennings: In circular design, you set an ambitious, but achievable goal that can give you direction in the years to come in terms of a roadmap and practical approaches of how to achieve this goal. And the reason you want to set ambitious goals is because the roadmap for circular design is complex. You not only want to consider whether you are designing the right product, but whether you are using the right materials, whether it can be done in a sustainable way and whether can it be recycled/reused. By setting goals, you work toward setting the right objective with a sustainable future, while making gradual steps overtime to achieve them.

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Question: What do you think the biggest opportunities for generative AI will be the field of Industrial Design?

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Rennings: One of the strengths of generative AI or Large Language Models is that it is beneficial in interpreting and processing human language, and that provides excellent value in the field of design and how products are used and how people interact with them. A practical area in which we are currently working in this area is in product maintenance. Operators or maintenance personnel need to plow through many technical manuals to understand how to troubleshoot and repair equipment. Generative AI streamlines that entire interaction with structured data and provides access to it and may also require fewer skilled people to identify and correct problems. Another example is with a German car manufacturer where we are using generative AI technology in the spoken interface in its automobiles. A common application of generative AI is in the area of software engineering . Generative AI is significantly boosting productivity among software developers by supporting and automating code and script writing, enabling test case creation and by converting one programming language to another, to give some examples. And in time, it will support enterprise governance and information security, protecting against fraud and improving regulatory compliance.

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Question: Tell us a little about the Women in Design session at DDW and how that came about.

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Rennings: Accenture is a remarkably diverse and inclusive company with a goal to be a 50/50 employer in all the fields that we work in. Industrial Design is still a male-dominated industry. The Women in Design session celebrated women in leadership positions in the field of design and featured female role models who provided inspiration and career tips for women. By creating a safe environment, the Women in Design session gave women a chance to share their challenges and to work toward solutions. There is a strong network of people in our Industrial Design team and within other service areas to champion this effort and with dedicated support from me and the senior team.

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Question: A word that struck us from DDW is “storytelling.” It implied that there are many stories to tell about Industrial Design with vital messages to convey. What’s one story you think that helps explain how Industrial Design can design for a better world for people, the planet and business?

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Rennings: One I particularly like is the collaboration with a company called Wings for Aid. The team helped design and engineer a drone airplane that can transport specifically designed cardboard boxes to very difficult-to-reach places where humanitarian aid is needed. There was constant collaboration and design innovation with this project. The drone utilized AI technology to determine a safe drop zone for the supplies. This type of storytelling in design involves visualization or telling a story and talking with pictures. This design and visualization go hand-in-hand, and Industrial Designers tend to quickly go to their sketch book to create pictures of prototypes, which makes things more tangible to people. This starts the imagination process and that’s an especially key step for building buy-in for a future that’s different.

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