The Munich Creative Business Week is nearly over, so I thought it’s about time for a personal review. I’ve had the chance to visit about a dozen of exhibitions, talks and event such as “7kg Aluminium”, “Rejected”, “toca me”, “Creative Mornings”, “Creativity and Sustainability at Puma” and the “Design Night with Karim Habib” and participated in a co-design workshop at INDEED. I had the chance to meet many interesting people, all working in the fields of design or similar disciplines. I appreciated the broad variety of projects and ideas that were showcased: Visual Art, Motion Graphics, Commercials, Product Design, Technology and Architecture, just to name a few. I truly enjoyed the high quality of graphic design (such as shown by Mirko Borsche) or the impressive visual art (such as shown by Memo Akten at toca me). BMW unveiled an impressive showcar, the 4 Series Coupé and I was amazed by the new lamp designs shown at the Ingo Maurer showroom, including a beautifully technoid LED candle.

This was all beautiful but at the same time left me with the feeling that the event was too much flooded with rather short-lived product design; things that are nice and shiny and cool but at the same time  ignore the underlying challenges that design and designers are currently facing: During a workshop a fellow industrial designer told me how the certainty that nearly everything that we create will ultimately end up in landfill (or worse, in our oceans) made him question his own profession for a long time. Many designers told me how they find it difficult to find meaning in their job when working in big companies where sense of purpose has become quite elusive. Some talks addressed the power of Design Thinking and supported the notion that design is not an object but an action – but mostly explaining what Design Thinking is and not showing how it can be put to work successfully and effectively.

I think the MCBW missed a great chance to address some of the big questions: How can we design for successful business but in a way where we also support a healthy society and environment? (Respectively: How can we create Shared Value through design?) How can we build products and services that are desirable and at the same time transform user behavior to be more sustainable and ecologically aware? How can we bring together people from different disciplines and fields to work cooperatively on a daily basis in order to solve increasingly complex problems? How can we encourage out-of-the-box thinking in disciplines other than design (such as engineering or accounting). What business models worked or failed in trying to achieve all this? And how can we instill the understanding that system-level design is extremely powerful for business in companies and corporations?

Puma showed, in a 45 minute talk, how they approached some of these challenges: They started to build a massive database containing efficiency ratings, energy use, land use, pollution data, water consumption and waste data of every single step of their supply chain. At the same time they evaluated the social side of their supply chain. While I would consider all this a hygiene factor that every company has to address today, Puma went one step further and built a comprehensive tool where designers can easily understand the impact of each and every material that goes into a product – empowering them to deliberately create greener products.

To sum it up: I think the MCBW lived up to its title “Meet the Builders of Quality” and did a good job in showcasing high quality design to the general public. But I believe that it failed, at the same time, to bring together people from all areas of business to engage in serious discussions about today’s big questions at the intersection of business, society and ecology. It also failed (to some extent) to foster the understanding that design is a unique tool set that has huge potential to find compelling answers to some of these questions. For the next MCBW I would hope to see more bold ideas, more radical approaches, more scientific research, less success stories and more personal in-depth insights in things that went wrong: To inspire everyone to build stuff that’s not only of quality and beauty but also of meaning and responsibility.