David Butler: Massive Change, Pop Edition

When David Butler came to Coca-Cola, it was as their first global director of design, ever. It’s not an easy task:  A quarter of the earth’s population drinks Coke products every day so maintaining that red and white across so many cultural lines calls for some pretty drastic designing. He is carrying a Diet Coke, which he slyly puts atop the podium.

David Butler, Global Director of Design, Coca-Cola

As a designer, the “preciousness” and the “smallness” of design is what frustrates him. He opted out of “Design” in 1999 and moved towards systems thinking, which is more results-oriented. “You can’t look at results without looking at behavior,” says David. “And you can’t look at behavior without looking at structure.” When Coke called, he honestly didn’t think the structure would be able to change to support new results. He wasn’t sure they were ready to take such a holistic approach.

Redesigning design.

Just a few hints at how massively massive Coke is:

450 brands
206 countries
1.6 million servings a minute
A company valued at $68 billion

David Butler breaks down the numbers

So designing for Coke really is like managing a massive system. Small decisions like paper and typography are magnified so much, into such insane applications, with seemingly so little control, he needed a different approach to his designing. “Think Do” is that new approach.

But David’s not going to talk much about Coke actually (for that, see the article in Fast Company’s Master of Design issue with his face on it that’s plastered all over the conference). He wants to use this time to tell us that in the U.S. he doesn’t see much driving innovation in the U.S. He was upset that at the National Design Awards luncheon at the White House, more people were focused on Michelle Obama’s yellow dress than the reason designers were there. Channeling Bruce Mau, he challenges us to look ahead 20 years: 7.5 people call the planet home, 1.1 billion more people added to the middle class, 1/3 of the world’s population are teens. Maybe we all need a new approach, because design in the U.S. today will not be able to scale to support that kind of change. So first, he calls for a move from Art + Design to Design + Innovation. And instead of creating ideas, create value. And a move from national blogs to national policy. From products or anything that’s physical to a morecollective goal. A focus on “we.” We are the change we’ve been waiting for, he says. And David Butler has a sip of his Diet Coke and smiles.

David Butler, Global Director of Design, Coca-Cola

During the Q&A, Kurt tried to get David to chime in on the controversial and slightly odd story of Pepsi’s recent rebranding. David declined to comment, only saying this: It’s hard to make things look simple, but it’s really hard to get things to be simple.”