Upheaval underway in Hamburg's design industry

The design sector includes well over 8,000 companies who work for clients in the media, consumer goods and industrial sectors. Almost every third company in the local creative scene is part of the design market. However, upheavals in the publishing world and the consumer goods industry mean that these sectors are becoming less important to the design industry, according to Lukas Cottrell, Managing Partner of the Peter Schmidt Group. "It is important to build and maintain strong relationships in Hamburg and on international markets. Designers should think beyond pure graphic and communication design. Consultancy skills are gaining importance, as IBM shows. The company brought several designers on board during its transformation from a PC manufacturer to a software group. "It started with products, then consulting, and now we have designers in every unit right down to HR," says Carlo Schulz, Director, Design Research at IBMx, who is one of more than 3,000 designers in the company worldwide.

The City of Hamburg should seize the opportunity to develop a more interdisciplinary concept of design, said Jesko Fezer, Professor of Experimental Design at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK). He noted: "Hamburg has the opportunity to develop an interdisciplinary and fluid concept of design that oscillates between product, market, city, society and environment. Other areas such as art, music and culture which already work in an extremely interdisciplinary way, prove that Hamburg can do this." Creating commissioned and self-commissioned work offers a means of escaping sometimes precarious solo self-employment without having to switch to a permanent position. Tanja Hildebrandt, joint founder of Re.Frame, is part of such a collective, which she sees as a kind of antithesis to traditional agencies in terms of working methods and transparency.

"Design and sustainability must be seen much more as one. Circular design is not a trend, but a trend reversal," she noted. The design industry is key to ecological, social and economic change. To this end, Hamburg-based studios including Indeed Innovation, Design for Human Nature and Re.Frame are developing sustainable products, services and digital worlds rather than disposables. "The economic transformation harbours a great opportunity for us," she added. Companies cannot answer the major and urgent ecological and social questions alone, Fezer pointe out, adding. "That's why I see a great dynamic in design away from industry and the market and towards a practice for urban and social actors such as foundations, NGOs and local institutions."

However, artificial intelligence will overshadow key topics such as circular design and eco-social design and will have a revolutionary impact on many jobs, said Cottrell. Production-related creative work ("creative delivery") will largely be done by technology in the foreseeable future. Agencies in Hamburg such as Loved have hired so-called  "prompt artists" to work on  programmes such as Midjourney and Dall-E that use machine learning and text input to create  images. However, that blurs the boundaries between design and programming. Thus, designers must focus more on "strategic conceptualisation and creative transformation" rather than relying entirely on their technical skills, Cottrell said.. 
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