DESIGN AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY

In these times, many companies have had to reinvent themselves in order to survive and enter the economic recovery. In this article we will talk about how design can also matter.

The coronavirus crisis has been a crisis not only health or humanitarian but also an economic crisis. All sectors, including industrial and also design, have been affected by the decrease in work and / or the closure of many businesses. So to resist, many have had to reorient their businesses.

In the field of industrial design and the textile sector, companies have turned to creating new products to alleviate the coronavirus crisis; As portable artificial respirators, face protection visors, masks, gowns … at Designplast we have developed a collective protection product, an anticovid-19 door opener.

Thisdoor opener is ideal to prevent the spread of coronavirus, is a productdesigned exclusively for postcoronavirus months that everyone will be protected.

Many of the companies will have reinvented themselves only for these months, but there will be others that will continue with their previous business when everything happens.

BUT WHAT WILL THE “NEW NORMALITY” LIKE FOR BUSINESSES?

In addition to all the protection methods that will have to be taken to prevent coronavirus infections, measures will be taken at the business strategy level. Many companies have postponed new product developments due to the coronavirus crisis earlier in the year. But from now on, companies will begin to invest in new product designs and R&D because in a world that until now has been “asleep” and in which many companies have fallen or have suffered a decrease in their production, the first to launch an innovation and stand out from the competition, it will be the winning horse.

Society has changed, we know that it is home office, not getting close to people, going down the street with a mask… all this after the coronavirus pandemic. But it has also made a much more humanized society that has seen that it is necessary to help local producers, the neighborhood shops and ultimately their own. So in such a globalized world where all companies manufacture in China, many have realized that proximity manufacturing matters. Because local production has a plus of quality, rapid problem solving, immediacy, a reduction in CO2 emissions and wealth remains in the country.

In any case, globalization has not come to an end. According to Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Europe will continue to depend on non-European trade relations in the future, especially for the scarce materials that are essential for future technologies.

So this crisis may end up balancing globalization and we begin an economic recovery that will be slow but more local.