DAVIN O'DWYERreviews Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Business, Your Life, and Maybe Even the WorldBy Warren Berger Random House Business Books, 352pp, €16

STEVE JOBS famously once said: “People think [design is] this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

While Jobs was talking primarily about object design in that context, this book from US journalist Warren Berger expands on that central premise and, taking inspiration from progressive designers, applies that fundamental truth in a wider context, as the subtitle implies.

Like a refashioned eureka, the glimmer moment is “the point when a life-changing idea crystallises in the mind”.

For Berger, the glimmer moment seems to have been Massive Change, a pioneering design exhibition curated by renowned Canadian designer Bruce Mau.

Opening in Vancouver and Toronto back in 2004, Massive Change took a broad look at the problems that design could embrace, an ethos articulated by a large banner which read: “What if we looked at the world as a design project – how might we begin to make it better?”.

Mau’s intention was that Massive Change would turn the expectations of a design exhibition on its head: “Instead of being about the world of design, it would be about the design of the world.”

The show, which travelled extensively in the US after its Canadian debut, featured innovations addressing issues such as environmental sustainability and poverty reduction, and some of the designers who contributed to the exhibition, including Segway inventor Dean Kamen and Yves Behar, the designer of the ground-breaking One Laptop Per Child computer, are profiled in Glimmer.

Berger interviews dozens of other designers and, while their names might not mean much to most people, they are massively influential in the world of industrial design. But most importantly, they have successfully utilised the design principles that Berger applies to business, social issues and everyday life.

The principles, with names such as “Make hope visible”, “Work the metaphor” and “Go deep”, sound like the ugly spawn of MBA jargon and an Oprah- friendly self-help book. But they are conflations of other design guidelines espoused by some of the designers, particularly Mau in what has become known as the Incomplete Manifesto.

Mau has shown the adaptability of these principles by working on a host of design challenges, including regenerating urban spaces, reinvigorating Guatemala and reimagining third-level education.

It is in the section dealing with the business applications of design thinking that Glimmeris most substantive, with an eye-opening look at the small Umpqua bank in the Pacific northwest, which designed its "stores" – not branches – to be a mix of boutique hotel reception, community centre and Starbucks.

This approach demonstrated the benefit of narrowing the “innovation gap” – the gulf between a company knowing its technology and business models, and knowing how that might apply to how people live their lives.

Perhaps the most salient principle that is applicable to the world of business is Mau’s maxim that one must “design what you do” or, as Berger explains it, apply “design principles and approaches to the full spectrum of a company’s behaviour – encompassing everything the company does”.

This is a radical use of the word design, but reflects the fact that a company that functions well internally has a natural advantage over companies that struggle with inefficient and poorly designed management structures.

Berger concentrates on the efforts of Coca-Cola, a client of Mau's, to redesign its company as well as its products, but a recent New York Timesarticle by former Microsoft vice-president Dick Brass is a more revealing example of how poor structural design matters. "Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation," Brass wrote. "Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation."

It sounds like Mau’s advice was sorely needed at Redmond.

From its title to its occasionally forced attempts to paint the "glimmer moment" as a kind of design-centric "tipping point", Glimmer owes a great deal to Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point.Yet it lacks Gladwell's curious authorial voice, and as a result it is light on those "aha" moments of revelation, which is odd for a book about the power of innovative thinking.

Instead, Glimmerreads like an extended, finely crafted Wiredarticle. Despite those caveats, Berger's book has a relevance not only for people with an interest in design, but for anybody interested in rigorous, analytical thinking and problem-solving.

Reading the book from our current perspective, it encourages us to consider our woes through the prism of design thinking. As Berger puts it: “If there’s one quality designers all seem to have in common (aside from a tendency to doodle on napkins), it is their optimism. Where many of us see troubles, they see opportunity – because designers actually thrive on new problems, and the more difficult the better.”

Indeed, tackling the question “How do we redesign Ireland?” seems to offer more possibility than the more pervasive “How do we get out of this mess?”.

Time for everybody to start sketching on napkins, then.