43 COVER CO RS STOR STORY 43
heart of their decision-making processes and they’re developing solutions to meet customers’ needs, not just evolving what already exists, so design is essentially the revolution not just the evolution,” says Godber. Companies wanting to benefit from this knowledge have two choices. They can either enlist the help of external design consultancies or install their own in-house design team. Both options have clear advantages and disadvantages. David Fisher is Director at the global design and innovation company Seymourpowell, which has helped a great number of international brands produce some of the milestone products of the last two decades, including the fi rst cordless kettle for Tefal in 1985, the fi rst truly mobile phone for Nokia in 1987, the Baby G watch for Casio in
1996 and the interior of Virgin Galactic in 2006. Explaining why Seymourpowell attracts such big international brands, Fisher says: “We’re experienced and have a reputation for not only working with global companies, but challenging them and their beliefs, because we understand how they work and the microclimates they inhabit – and they know we know.” However, Zec believes that if the competition is particularly strong it may be necessary for a company to install their own in-house design department. “Companies who want to be successful with design have to understand the meaning, the value of design, and they need to work with design strategically, and this is almost easier if they really invest into their own design department.”
Design case study Marko Ahtisaari, Director of Design Strategy at Nokia, outlines the importance of user experience and how the Finnish company hopes to radically change the smartphone market of the future. The design culture at Nokia definitely has a respect for people and their daily use of devices. Perhaps Nokia as a brand more than any other company, perhaps even more than any other nongovernmental organisation or nation, has done more to impact social change by making technology accessible to people and I think with that comes a sense of responsibility. The designers are quite wary of the impact that the technology is having, and this means that there is a lot of respect for observation, looking at everyday use. There are several billion people that rely on a basic key map daily to make calls and to text message, and given the way we’ve designed our phones for true mobile use, they can text one handed and nearly blind. And this cultural kind of muscle memory is critical. So incremental innovation is important in situations like this as you must respect usage and not suddenly forget about how people are used to using technology and how it fits into their everyday life. Incremental innovation is important because behaviour changes slowly in that sense. Radical innovation is important when an industry is in its early stages, trying to locate a dominant design, and that I think is the situation with smartphones. And I think in smartphones and these mobile computing devices, we need to make a radical innovation in the ease-of-use and how that operating system is designed. Where the industry is really missing a trick with the move to touch interfaces is that they are immersive. You have to sit there and stare at these things close, use two hands, for the most part, and your head is down. If I’m successful in the coming years, in addition to innovating the smartphone platform, the basic setup of the operating system, I want to allow people to hold their head up again. And I think that’s a worthy, radical innovation to look for.
Business of design.indd 43
23/09/2010 13:13