Design: Howling Winds of Change Upon Us

The city of Chicago has been beaming with pride since last Tuesday when our favorite Hyde Park resident became the President-Elect. A large part of the two-year campaign and its success was premised on the condition of Change, and in response to this idea, Chicago Public radio interviewed Al Gini, professor of Business Ethics at the graduate school of business at Loyola University Chicago. You can find the audio podcast of this program at the Chicago Public Radio Archive

Some key issues that Professor Gini touched on have a much wider impact and a certain application to the trade show industry. Four key points specifically grabbed my attention:

• Change is an inevitable part of the human condition and is not an option.
• We can’t solve the problems of change by using the same language of the past.
• We often spend greater effort at resisting change than the cost associated with facilitating the change to occur. and lastly,
• Many of our current dilemmas aren’t as much about the acceptance of change as they are about the pace and rate of the change itself. It forces us to cope increasingly faster.

As a designer, I can’t help but notice how each of our clients has had to adapt their product lineup to embrace emerging technologies. It’s easy for me to also notice how the way they demonstrate and effectively sell their product is also a vital part of the process. The latter of these two types of change is the more fleeting target, and that’s where it’s important to be open to possibility. For example, most clients see the need to introduce big video screens to their exhibit, yet a surprising percentage of them aren’t fully certain of the messaging or content ahead of time. They just know they need to do something to further engage prospective buyers.

How do you effectively integrate multimedia into your sales approach? This will depend on many things of course and lies beyond the scope of a simple blog article.

At Echelon we can only hope that our expertise can help guide a more integrated approach to design challenges. In times of change, we strive to speak the right language and understand the greater concepts of messaging and exhibiting the right message in the optimum way.