Design Capability – Where is Turkey in this trend? Where do we stand in terms of design capability?
While a production-weary world is being rocked by a series of crises and the top players are changing places with unprecedented speed, Turkey, as a rapidly growing and steadily developing country, has the 17th largest economy in the world. As in the other developing countries, we have a vital need to create global brands that produce goods and services that are self-renewing and high in value added in order to grow and strengthen our economy. As a first condition, all our production units, from the biggest to the smallest, need to appreciate the value and significance of product design and the need for R&D investments, and to realize that this requires infinite patience, and that sustaining such investment is actually not a costly risk.
As the western world is slowing down, Turkey is developing. The west’s brand designers are taking an interest in our country and want to play an active role in the dynamic transformation of that static energy. That means competition, and more. The playing field may not look level, but that doesn’t scare us. On the contrary we regard those developments as an opportunity to strut our stuff. We might say that we have more than gotten used to playing away from home, by global rules, and getting good results. The design team we put together and developed on our limited resources has received a total of 45 design awards, 30 of which were international, in the last five years.
That more than gives us hope for the future. Garnering awards simultaneously in seven categories in A’Design Award 2010 to become European champion is not an extraordinary and astonishing feat for us any more. But bringing our country to the attention of the foreign firms that that are watching us is even more gratifying than the awards themselves. It is no coincidence either that our name appears on a U.S.- published list of the world’s top ten design firms.
Design Capability – You have chalked up 45 design awards, 30 of them international, in the last five years. What keeps you going as you develop these ideas and designs? What do you pay attention to?
Those international successes are the result not merely of joining the ranks of those who can recognize the world’s steadily growing environmental problems early, but having the courage to propose solutions.
Meanwhile the diversity of the awards we have won and the fact that a given product has won similar big awards in different contests can be linked to the development of a common global awareness of what constitutes a good product. At the same time I see those results as consistent with a growing trend towards the formation of a common global taste in the world.
