4 reasons why design conquers Silicon Valley

Is the value of design growing in the Valley? John Maeda, partner of the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture fund, is sure that yes. During the presentation at South by Southwest 2015, he said that the Valley is not just starting to take it more seriously, but is caught up in the design. Here are four reasons why the most successful technology companies of the future will be, in fact, design.

Moore's law is no longer enough

Since the purchase of Frog's Flextronics in 2004, the last decade has demonstrated a growing number of cases in which technology companies bought creatives. For example, Google now owns companies engaged in industrial design, and Facebook owns soft-designer Sofa, Teehan + Lax and Hot Studio. And this is gaining a critical mass: since 2010, 27 startups, among the founders of which were designers, were purchased by large IT companies, and last year six venture funds first took designers to their teams.

According to Maeda, this trend will continue, because "Moore's law is no longer enough for the road to a happier consumer." For years, the solution to every problem in IT was to use a more powerful chip. Now the answer was design, not silicon. As an example, you can take the new MacBook: in terms of performance, it is inferior to the old one, but industrial design makes it more attractive from other points of view, from conciseness of connections to effortless portability.
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The design is now taken first and not the last

They didn’t just spend more money on design, they began to approach it differently. Previously, technology companies viewed it as something that is added to the product at the very end (for example, a standard system unit into which you can stuff a computer), but increasingly, the loudest companies are those that deal with it from the very beginning, like Nest with their smart thermostats.

A happy marriage of technology and design began long before the boom of the Valley. Take at least "Chair number 14" by Michael Tonet, also known as the "Viennese chair." Created in 1859, it was designed so that exactly 36 chairs fit in one meter container in a disassembled state. This gave rise to furniture assembly at the point of use, allowing cheap manufacturing of chairs in Eastern Europe, and then sending them to distant places like New York, keeping prices low. More than 50 million of these chairs have been sold since 1859, which would have been impossible if it were not for the good design thinking that influenced the production process.



“In order to achieve heights in design, business skills are also needed in order to effectively invest in the design, and the corresponding technical side, in order to achieve productivity,” said Maeda. Allowing design to lead a business not invented by Apple. The best companies have always done this, and IT has only now come to the realization of this.

Technology is now not only for techies

There was a time when IT companies did not have to worry about design, because their audience was the same techies as themselves. Not only is it not so now, now the prevalence of technology has also made UI / UX more important than ever. In the 80s and 90s, people could encounter an inconvenient interface a couple of times a day, and now we check our smartphones hundreds of times a day, and the amount of discomfort can discourage the user from any desire to use the product.

Why designers are important for startups

Designers, Maeda argues, are as important for startups as they are for large companies. In startups, the first employees greatly influence the corporate culture, so attracting them right away is very important. And startups are increasingly paying attention to this fact: now the ratio of designers and programmers in startups is about 1: 4. According to partner Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, earlier this ratio was closer to 1:15 or even 1:30.

So designers can affect the company from scratch. But Maeda sees another trend. Increasingly, companies are hiring designers for leadership positions, which allows ideas to influence them from top to bottom. Take only one Nike, where the designer took the place of CEO.