I am sitting here, somewhat lost, on the afternoon of the third day of the fair at our stand at the CMEF, the huge medical technology fair in Shanghai, and letting my mind wander. In the meantime, my city manager in our office in Shanghai, General Manager Quan, is tirelessly looking after 4 groups of Chinese visitors at the same time, while I am allowed to pick out the few European-looking interested parties due to my lack of knowledge of the local language.

In the evenings, we eat well and a lot, drink beer and often philosophize about design. Yesterday I had the thought that inspired me to write this story. Looking back on more than 25 years as a designer, what were the decisive factors that made a collaboration successful?

For the design professional, design is a service that is provided FOR a client. I am a design professional and even though I work for a client, I also work WITH them. Today, it seems to me that it always takes at least two people who get on well and then create something great together. This pattern comes in a wide variety of constellations and disguises, often as the relationship between entrepreneur and designer - and if you interpret "entrepreneur" more broadly, it also includes other people with responsibility in the company.

Vosz and Jobs apparently had an extremely productive friendship, perhaps even a love-hate relationship, fueled by their different personalities.

Friendship may sound inappropriately private, but in reality it is exactly that: you make plans, trust each other, forgive mistakes and support each other to achieve your goals together. Of course, it's not about friendship as an end in itself, but about achieving the goal. Like a rope team climbing a mountain together.

It doesn't work without trust.

Business is often seen as cold and calculating, but if you look at examples of success, you rarely find people who walk over dead bodies - even if you like to tell yourself that as a consolation because you haven't yet made it to millionaire status yourself. I see business more as a game or sport in which you have to train every day to get better. Economic success serves as an objective yardstick, but it is played with partners and friends. It's a team sport.

How is good design created?

It is very rare for a single person to come up with something groundbreaking and make it a success on their own. The hurdles and barriers that pile up on the way to the finished product are too high to be tackled alone. Much more often, good design is the result of a relationship between two people who are committed to a common goal. From start to finish. Complementary skills and points of view are very important and increase the chances of success and mutual respect for each other.

You look for the right allies and set off on an adventure. Along the way, friendships are made that last a project or often even a lifetime. I like to think back on the various rope teams that have been on my career path so far. Each one is unique. It's hard to describe why great results were achieved with Paul and Thomas and why the project might even have gone down the drain with a different constellation.

I could give dozens of examples here that I am honestly proud of. But to single out just a few would be unfair to the other friends - and fairness is an important principle of friendship. I think my friends Paul, Ralf, Matthias, Christian, Hans, Rolf, Gerhard, Otmar, Michael, Marc, Peter, Franz-Josef, Igor, Manfred, Oliver, Volker, Thomas, Andy, Raymond, Helena, Quan and many others feel addressed. (There are remarkably few women - I think that could possibly be changed...

In contrast to "friendship" as the leitmotif of successful design development, there are other models of collaboration between designer and client: e.g. author design or design as a service.

Author design

Here, too, lifelong friendships are formed between the charismatic designer and the individual entrepreneur. World-famous designers team up with equally well-known brands and, in the best cases, create milestones in design history. Even if the partnership takes place on an equal footing, too much attention is paid to the author-designer. Precisely because the design star is passed around like a diva and promoted in the media. The complementary performance of the entrepreneur is often excluded from consideration and applause.

Design as a service

Even though design is mostly about a service, the human component plays a greater role. Processes can be used to bring a certain basic order to design projects, but in recent years, quality assurance and certification requirements have placed too much emphasis on processes. You get the impression that all you need is a good plan and things will run smoothly - far from it, people are not interchangeable. It's the same in the design team. It's all about the right mix and you need to put it together wisely.

So friends: look for friendship and work for it again and again. That's what design is all about. Likeability and trust are not always there right from the start. In particular, overcoming crises together, forgiving slips but also traveling together form and deepen the friendship. It doesn't always have to last a lifetime and can sometimes fall apart.

Such is life! Such is design.