Last friday I was helping out on a article to the Danish Commerce & Service on the benefit of design in the experience economy. The article is part of a larger publication and I assumed that other articles would have marketing angle and others a communication angle etc.
It got me thinking about what differentiates the design process from the other mentioned processes on a strategic level i.e. not the craftmanship level, as in designing a product versus producing a text. On that level the differences are obvious but on a higher level the processes feels more or less the same. Isn’t marketing user-centric and creative? And doesn’t communciation take basis in who the audience is? This becomes an even more interesting question if the result of the design process isn’t physical but immaterial e.g. a service design. Is a service a result of a marketing or a design process? Or rather is marketing methodology or design methodology emphazized in a service development process?
Perhaps the "new design" perspective is as much a mixture of multi-disciplinary techniques, sub-processes and methods as it is a mixture of people in a multi-disciplinary team? If it is, is this design or a completly new discipline? If it’s new, should we call it something else? Should we re-design it?