Designer as midwife: Towards a new state of mind?

Design and innovation are now central themes in business, but where is role of design heading to? One of the biggest challenges in product/service development is to understand the latent needs of the customers and the meanings of these needs to them. As facilitators, designers help others "deliver" the design knowledge within these human beings (and organizations) by tapping into their "innate design ability". This article highlights the similarity between the role of designers and midwives. Designers facilitate new product/service delivery via deploying research methods such as depth-interviews, observations, interpretative methods and, participatory research, towards delivery of knowledge in the form of designed products. Given the evolving role of design, how do designers add value to the business? More specifically, can Socrates's "[mental] midwife" metaphor be used to illustrate the new role of a designer?