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A Global Standard on Design Procurement

The pitch hit the fan on both sides of the pond this week. In America, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the US government agency responsible for supporting and funding the arts in America, put out a request for proposal (RFP) soliciting designs for a new logo. Across the Atlantic, the advertising agencies of Belgium went on strike in protest over the free pitching practices of Belgian marketers.

All of this should be good fodder for a panel on global design procurement that I will be moderating at Design Currency 2010, ICOGRADA’s Design Week in Vancouver in April. On the panel will be designer and current AIGA president Debbie Millman, former Proctor & Gamble procurement chief John Gleason and Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) brand chief Ali Gardiner. We have 45 minutes to discuss an issue that probably needs hours, but the conversation will continue in May when a variation of the panel is reconvened in New York for the annual meeting of the Association of Professional Design Firms (APDF). I hope to also devote some web real estate to the project and perhaps carry the conversation to other parts of the world.

The NEA and Vancouver Olympics

You can read about the NEA’s call for logo design, here. AIGA Executive Director Ric Grefe responded with this open letter. The NEA countered. Most parties have so far been professional in their discourse.

VANOC had their own outcry over the design contest for Vancouver 2010 Olympic logo, so I plan to put the question of the validity of design contests to the panel. Surely there is a proper time and place for design contests? If so, what are the appropriate criteria?

The Belgian Ad Agency Web Strike

The Belgian strike is an interesting one. Twenty five leading Belgian advertising agencies took their websites down for a week and replaced them with an open letter (one that required readers to visit all 25 sites to read in serial) to the Belgian marketing community about their unhappiness with the state of free pitching requests.

It seems the Belgian Association of Communication Companies (ACC) has a signed competition charter with their counterparts, the Association of Advertisers (UBA) that outlines the agreed-upon rules of engagement when it comes to pitches. ACC member agencies went on “web strike” over what they see as UBA members not living up to their end of the competition charter.

I’m sure many observers from outside Belgium see this competition charter as a progressive model that other countries should aspire to, but I’m not one of them. While the charter strives to keep free pitching to a moderate level, I see its standardized selection process, similar to others advocated by design associations around the world, as contributing to the commoditization of the offerings of ACC member firms.

Beyond the Charter: A Global Standard

I believe we can do better than the Belgian charter. I think that designers, clients, procurement and the trade associations of each can probably agree on some basic rights and responsibilities of each party when it comes to the buying and selling of design.

I’ll give you an example. I believe it is the right of the designer to give his work away for free. Understand that I don’t think it’s a good idea for designers to do this - I certainly don’t advocate it - but I believe that attempts by design associations to save designers from themselves are futile and misplaced. Here's another: I believe it is the responsibility of the client to acknowledge that individual designers and design firms, like other professional practitioners, develop their own methods of solving problems, and to impose a uniform client-directed problem-solving process on them (as most pitches do) is likely to lead to poorer quality outcomes.

It is rights and responsibilities like this that I would like to propose and debate in these forums.

A prescribed process for buying and selling design is not the solution. The solution, I believe, will be arrived at when each party agrees on the rights of the others and when each party takes responsibility for its own contribution to the inefficiency of the process. From there, the details of how client and designer vet each other should be left to them. We don't need to agree on process; we need to agree on the more fundamental rights and responsibilities of each party and then leave the details of the selection process to the parties involved.

Let’s take the first small steps in Vancouver and New York this spring and see if we can make some movement towards something that just might form a global standard on design procurement. Thanks to ICOGRADA and APDF for providing the forum to begin the conversation.