Innovation Spring 2013: Design in Unexpected Places

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

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AUTHENTIC INNOVATION

Pujols Kitchen Cookware designed by Metaphase

Cultural Immersion

Kitchen on a Mission

Looks Good, Cooks Good

Pujols Kitchen Cookware is the culmination of 4 years of ethnographic research alongside women in the Dominican Republic who cook traditional recipes using age-old cookware. Our cookware brings Dominican–influenced flavors and style to the North American kitchen.

Profits from cookware sales are donated to families in poverty around the globe, providing them with cookware and non-perishable food.

From the hand-balanced utensils to the handle shape of the lids, pans & calderos, each piece has been ergonomically engineered to be more comfortable and easier to use than any other cookware on the market.

BUY NOW | Support the Cause at pujolskitchen.com

INNOVATE NOW | Contact us at metaphase.com

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

THIS YEAR WE’RE REALLY BREAKING THE RULES We’ve combined the best elements of previous conferences with some cool new features to inform and inspire you like never before!

Get ready for things like: World-class speakers Chicago downtown venue The cool wall Unconference sessions Party on the river Architecture tour Midnight fight club Conference app Social impact venture 3D printer bakeoff Yoga And massage!

Join us in Chicago on Aug. 21-24 for the 2013 International Conference, BREAKING THE RULES

CHICAGO

2013

AUG 21-24

“Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.”

Dalai Lama

YOU CAN’T MISS THIS ONE!

Find out more on www.idsaconference.org.

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

spring 2013 速

Design Unbridled, see page 24.

Publisher Roxann Henze IDSA 555 Grove Street, Suite 200 Herndon, VA 20170 P: 703.707.6000 x102 F: 703.787.8501 roxannh@idsa.org www.innovationjournal.org

Executive Editor Mark Dziersk, FIDSA Managing Director Lunar | Chicago mark@lunar.com Advisory Council Gregg Davis, IDSA Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Managing Editor & Designer Karen Berube K.Designs 3511 Broadrun Dr. Fairfax, VA 22033 P: 703.860.4411 k.designs@cox.net Contributing Editor Jennifer Evans Yankopolus

Advertising Katie Fleger IDSA 555 Grove Street, Suite 200 Herndon, VA 20170 P: 703.707.6000 x104 F: 703.787.8501 katief@idsa.org advertising@idsa.org

速

The quarterly publication of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), Innovation provides in-depth coverage of design issues and long-term trends while communicating the value of design to business and society at large.

Annual Subscriptions Within the US $60 Canada & Mexico $75 International $110 Single Copies Fall/Yearbook All others

$35+ S&H $17+ S&H

design in unexpected places 22 Hidden in Plain Sight

by Jim Couch, IDSA, Guest Editor 24 Design Unbridled

by Clive Grinyer

features 16 Design’s Impact Mobility at Work

by Douglas Nash

28 Meaningful Coincidence

by Shelley Evenson 32 Designing Better Public Services

by Chelsea Mauldin 36 My Very Own Extremely Personal Slightly Anti- Innovation Rant

by Marcelo Marer 40 Playing with Doctors

by Mary Beth Privitera, IDSA

45 Avoiding Communication Breakdowns: Bridging the Gaps in Innovation User- Centered Design

by Drew Smith

18 Performance, Style and Efficiency in a Zero Emissions Package Tesla Roadster

Patrons of Industrial Design Excellence investor IDEO, Palo Alto, CA; Shanghai, China; Cambridge, MA; London, UK; San Francisco; Munich, Germany; Chicago; New York Newell Rubbermaid, Atlanta, GA Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, OH PTI Design, Macomb, MI Webb deVlam Chicago, Chicago, IL

by Dave Destler

53 Leveraging the Kano Model for Optimal Results

Cultivator

by Jan Moorman

Continuum, Boston; Los Angeles; Milan, Italy;

In every issue

Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH

4 From the Editor

Dell, Round Rock, TX

Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL Seoul, South Korea; Shanghai, China

by Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

6 Design Defined

by Paul Hatch, IDSA

8 Business Concepts

by Michael Westcott, IDSA

9 Book Review 49 The New Horizons of

by Scott Stropkay, IDSA

Design 10 A Look Back

by Tony Golsby-Smith

by Carroll Gantz, FIDSA

14 Beautility

by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA 57 Showcase 64 Signposts

by Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Design Concepts, Madison, WI Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN Jerome Caruso Design Inc., Lake Forest, IL Lunar Design Inc., Palo Alto, CA Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO Nokia Design, Calabasas, CA Smart Design, New York; San Francisco; Barcelona, Spain Stanley Black & Decker, New Britain, CT Teague, Seattle, WA Tupperware, Worldwide Charter Patrons indicated by color.

For more information about becoming a Patron and supporting IDSA’s communication and education outreach, please contact Katie Fleger at 703.707.6000 x104.

Quarterly oF tHe industrial desiGners soCiety oF ameriCa innOVATiOn Design in UnexPecTeD PlAces

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Cover photo: Cat in the Hat at Universal Studios Orlando by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

sPring 2013

Innovation is the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the professional organization serving the needs of US industrial designers. Reproduction in whole or in part—in any form—without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited.

The opinions expressed in the bylined articles are those of the writers and not necessarily those of IDSA. IDSA reserves the right to decline any advertisement that is contrary to the mission, goals and guiding principles of the Society. The appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement by IDSA. All design and photo credits are listed as provided by the submitter. Innovation is printed on FSC-certified paper with agricultural-based inks. The use of IDSA and FIDSA after a name is a registered collective membership mark. Innovation (ISSN No. 0731-2334 and USPS No. 0016-067) is published quarterly by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/Innovation, 555 Grove Street, Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170. Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/Innovation, 555 Grove Street, Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2013 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 32, No. 1, 2013; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

Advertisers’ Index 1 2013 IDSA International Conference c4 Lunar c2 Metaphase Design c3 PTI

from the editor

Big. Sticky. Wicked

Bodum

Problems F

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or the past 10 years, I have been teaching a class on design at Northwestern as part of the Master of Product Design and Development program. For the last six years, I have been using the text A Whole New Mind

by Daniel Pink. In it Pink foretells the coming of the conceptual age, an age when right-brainers (read: creative types) will rule the world. When published in 2006, it was pretty provocative stuff. Interestingly, it’s now become time to retire the text. I am finding classes are not so impressed with the newness of this argument anymore. For the last 10 years, design has been cropping up in so many unexpected places.

Design is familiar now. From “Project Runway” to the “Apprentice,” the act of designing is emerging into the mainstream once again. Yes, once again. In the 1930s, in the midcentury and now today, design has enjoyed golden ages in which its popularity rises, and it is discovered anew.

The great part about this phenomenon is that with each rebirth design’s reach and influence expands. Entire companies based on design as a strategy emerge; Method, Herman Miller, OXO, Bodum and Nikon were born this way.

They are all excellent examples of companies who use design as a business strategy. Additionally, design can be used to change the game; think the Whirlpool Duet, the Oral B toothbrush, every Dyson product or the Wii Fit—all set the bar at a new standard. And at times, the whole of the experience and brand of an offering is enabled through design: Virgin, Nike, Nespresso.

These examples give credence to the argument that design is not exclusively about the artifact; in fact, it never has been. Objects support experiences. As Jim Couch, IDSA, this issue’s guest editor eloquently points out, “Design is so much more than materials, aesthetics, form, shape, function, typefaces, processes, color, texture, branding, ergonomics and everything else that goes into the realization and creation of a product. Design is about com-

Virgin Atlantic

of the very best at finding design where you don’t expect it, the classic example of a design mind not defined by narrow boundaries. He designed products, designed businesses, designed conferences and, through a dedication to education, designed designers themselves. As this issue celebrates the multidisciplinary reach of design, it celebrates Shaun and all designers like him.

Designers and design thinkers are not defined by boundaries, and as Jim Couch suggests, the designers profiled in this issue are “individuals who are thinking beyond the artifact. Those who see design’s potential as limitless. Those who are taking design thinking and applying it to big sticky wicked problems.” These are the best of all of us, change agents who are fearless in accepting challenges and boldly imaginative enough to think and believe in the impossible truth: that design can and does change and shape the world and always for the better. It is not our what or how, it’s our why and its limits are endless.

Herman Miller’s Hub Space by David Allan Pesso and Eric Chan

municating meaning and affording desired experience.”

I remember RichardsonSmith; Years ago it was the biggest thing going in design consulting, the company everybody wanted to work for. Before there ever was an IDEO or fuseproject, there was RichardsonSmith, and at RichardsonSmith there was this star designer. Impossibly talented and really great at giving form to objects, Jim Couch was a rock star. Jim grew as design grew, and in the last two decades, both have expanded their reach. It is our privilege to celebrate this thinking in this issue, which in turn celebrates alternative thinking: design in places where you don’t expect it to be and design used in ways that aren’t obvious.

Earlier this month the design world lost a great designer, educator and friend, Shaun Jackson, IDSA. He died from injuries received in a small-plane crash. Losing Shaun is a huge loss for us, his family and everyone he influenced so meaningfully throughout his career. He was one

—Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, Innovation executive editor mark@lunar.com

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design defined

To Design Is Human C reative people have always needed ways to get into the zone, the frame of mind that allows for great ideas to appear. Numerous techniques have been explored, from painting upside down, abstinence and drug use to jumping off tall buildings, all to kick-start a rush of free thought. But it’s not just adrenalin. When we reach this heightened state, several higher brain functions in the prefrontal cortex are suppressed, reducing critical thought and enabling unregulated creative improvisation—essentially turning off the naysayer.

In creative thought, the limbic centers of the brain are also unregulated, enabling a heightened emotional response to thoughts. These emotions draw us to the more interesting ideas that we comVision is the bine using gut feel to create a greater whole. But this particular engine needs very high-grade fuel; the more varied the mix, the greater the scope of ideas. This is good news for us designers; we are inherently eclectic in our information gathering. But we do need to continuously replenish this fuel with new inspiration, ideas and information.

One major way to replenish ideas used throughout history has been through social networks, not the virtual ones we now use, but guilds and associations. Architects as early as ancient Greece discussed methods of workmanship in collectives, and artists formed guilds to share their work and discover new inspiration. Fast-forward a few centuries and you can imagine how incredibly inspirational the first world expos would have been, where for the very first time a person could see artifacts and inventions from across the world side-by-side. When it comes to visual inspiration today, however, expos and trade shows are overshadowed by what we can find on the Internet.

Independent of where a product is sold, the visual influence of the Internet reaches designers everywhere. Our

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art of seeing what is invisible to others.

—Jonathan Swift own visual perception is changing rapidly, and the forms and details we now create are the result of the global influences we digest every day. Without knowing it, we are removing local idiosyncrasies and creating a homogenized global style.

Humans need inspiration. It is a basic human need to share ideas and learn from one another, one of the attributes that has led to the progress of our species. To counterbalance the mass of information we have at our fingertips, personal contact and sharing has made a resurgence.

Traditionally, conferences have been a place where people with shared specialized knowledge exchange their ideas among peers. More recently, conferences such as TED have brought people together from entirely different backgrounds.

In this environment, attendees are not learning in-depth information about their particular profession, but are seeking lateral stimulation, essentially inspiration that they can bring into their own discipline.

David Schalliol

The unconference turns attendees into presenters.

I recently experienced the difference at an “unconference” in Chicago. In contrast to the traditional conference where an on-stage speaker presents to a large audience, at an unconference, attendees lead the sessions in many small, intimate groups. As many as 10 different sessions may run in parallel, each addressing a different subject matter. It sounds chaotic, but it isn’t. The lack of structured rules enables more flexible social rules to prevail and fosters a shared feeling of responsibility. The mass and range of intellectual stimulation in such an informal situation seemed to heighten the senses.

This made both the learning experience and the personal connections much stronger. Some of this thinking is helping evolve this year’s IDSA International Conference, too, which you will be able to experience firsthand in August.

Seeking creative inspiration from other disciplines has become mainstream; it is no longer the exclusive tool of the creative. And no wonder; people’s workplaces are being redefined and their roles are becoming ever-more interdisci-

plinary. There are more entrepreneurs and startups in the US than ever before, partly driven by current economic turmoil but also due to an increased awareness of creative opportunities.

The public’s need for visual stimuli seems to have increased dramatically too. The meteoric rise of Pinterest, a site centered on sharing inspirational images, demonstrates how important the visual has become. Users collect “boards” of images to reflect their tastes or interests—essentially mood boards, traditionally a tool almost exclusively used by designers and architects. Even Twitter now allows images to accompany a user’s 140-character tweets.

So the public has become more like us: open to creative approaches, visually stimulated, emotionally connected to objects and constantly seeking new ideas. This is clearly a great time for industrial design, an opportunity we cannot squander. We, too, need to widen our scope of inspiration and evolve our profession to bring new approaches and ideas to our now very receptive audience.

—Paul Hatch, IDSA, president, TEAMS Design and chair of IDSA’s 2013 International Conference phatch@teamsdesign.com

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B usiness Concepts

Time to Move Past Semantic Arguments and into the Future?

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he ongoing debate about the phrase “design thinking” has been a source of amusement. Designers seem to get tired of their own vocabulary well before the rest of the world does. There are many who dismiss it as an inaccurate description of a more strategic use of design. Other will simply say it is design. While no less than Donald Norman, IDSA, author of The What is labeled as ‘design thinking’ is what creative Design of Everyday Things, has stated, “What is being labeled as ‘design thinking’ is what creative people in all disciplines have always done. people in all disciplines have always done.” This may be true, but the perpetuation of design think—Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things ing has achieved a few things:

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1. Changing perceptions. For many, design is no longer a department to help “make pretty,” but rather a resource that can serve as a powerful component of the strategic tool box for uncovering needs, reframing market opportunities, designing new business models, visualizing strategy and making a major contribution to the top and bottom line.

2. Integrating organizations. Many organizations see designers and design methods as an integrating force to break down traditional boundaries and silos in ways that release creativity and enable organizations to better adapt to the necessity of change.

3. Expanding influence. By shifting the conversation and context of design from products and communication to systems, services and strategic solutions, designers are making their presence felt far beyond the borders of corporate design departments.

”

To complete Don Norman’s thought (and avoid taking his words out of context), design thinking “will help spread the word that designers can add value to almost any problem, from health care to pollution, business strategy and company organization. When this transformation takes place, the term can be put away to die a natural death.

Meanwhile exploit the myth. Act as if you believe it. Just don’t actually do so.”

While talking about fading terminology with Michael Schrage, he suggested it might be time to retire the term industrial design since we emerged from the industrial economy decades ago. How about integrative design? Even the term R&D has seen better days. Successful innovation in the 21st century is more than research and development.

It requires another “d”: design. Perhaps R&D2: Research, design and development better describes the engine of innovation today.

Whatever you choose to call it—design, creativity, design intelligence—let’s agree that what the world needs are more CDOs (chief design officers). CDOs place the integrative power of design alongside the CFO, COO, CIO and CMO to help CEOs make organizations more united, more responsive, more adaptable to change and more purposeful in their business pursuits.

—Michael Westcott, IDSA, president, DMI mwestcott@dmi.org

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book review

Need, Speed, and Greed

D

people are “purpose maximizers, not just on’t judge a book by its (in this case) profit maximizers,” Vaitheeswaran qualifies title; Need, Speed, and Greed is a his definition of greed as “greed for good,” a masterful synthesis of the world’s people + planet = purpose equation that he most influential thinking on innovation. Citing believes is the only way any organization can leading academics like Peter Drucker (Harvard survive in our modern world and, therefore, Business School), creativity experts like Daniel deliver “good” over time.

Pink (A Whole New Mind), technology entrepreDesigning effective solutions and designneurs like Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) ing effective organizations are core ideas in and social capitalists like Jessica Jackley (Kiva, the book, although solutions originating from ProFounder), Vijay Vaitheeswaran compares professional designers appear only twice. their competing opinions and future visions to Yves Béhar, IDSA’s work with PACT, a comdescribe the innovation landscape and shows pany making sustainable underwear, was how these innovators are changing the pracused to exemplify a design-as-output contice of innovation itself. cept; design-as-process was mentioned with Vaitheeswaran, a global correspondent for The Economist, presents an economist’s view of innovation. Microeconomically, he describes Resourcefulness will matter more than resources— the critical role of the individual’s passion, vision and ambition. Macroeconomically, he and success or failure will be determined inside the frames the social and technological forces that mind of the innovator. affect local, national and global communities.

—Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran The subtitle, How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to reference to Tim Brown’s work promoting design thinking.

Greatness, and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems, Vaitheeswaran broadly defines design thinking as “an more deftly captures the book’s mission. Vaitheeswaran open-minded, no-holds-barred approach that designers describes problems or needs, as economic engines. He bring to their work ... embracing experimentation via rapid details how problems inspire new ideas, how ideas become prototyping and fast failure.” In the book he advocates for innovative solutions and how and why solutions scale. this approach—but not for designers being necessary to Overlaying and connecting the macro trends of globalization the process. He emphasizes that any smart goal-driven and “Googlization,” he describes the radical democratization team can use design thinking methods to its advantage, of innovation processes. and that’s an important perspective for designers to appreComparing innovation potential at a national level, ciate as they work to earn their place on various innovation Vaitheeswaran asserts that the new source of economic teams in nondesign environments. power is ideas and that changes in aptitude, interest and Need, Speed, and Greed asserts that innovation is capacity are shifting the balance of power between counhappening everywhere, that entrepreneurship is the valuetries. He speaks specifically to the strengths and weakgenerating vehicle that brings innovation to market and that nesses of the US, China and India: our aging populations, “greed for good” is the equation for success as we address our relative productivity, our business and government our biggest global challenges. Designers can either enable practices and our interdependence. innovators and entrepreneurs or become innovators and Addressing the value in greed, Vaitheeswaran makes a entrepreneurs. In either case, if we’re ambitious enough to strong argument that market forces, capitalism and ambidrive positive change into our communities, the insights in tion are required to scale innovation to the level needed Need, Speed, and Greed can help us affect change at the to address the big social, economic and environmental scale business allows. problems of our time. Referencing Pink’s assertions that

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—Scott Stropkay, IDSA scott@essential-design.com

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a l o o k b ack

Pioneer Design Educators

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Carnegie Mellon University Archives

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for Westinghouse engineers while working as a supervisor e all remember in vivid detail those professors of the woodworking shops in Pittsburgh’s public schools who taught us about industrial design when we under the director of art, James Boudreau. were young and impressionable Westinghouse, like many other industries, and how they held the secret knowledge of was struggling to increase sales during the the lifelong profession we had chosen. But Depression and to meet the increasing conin the early 1930s, there were no such prosumer demand for modern design. Based fessors and not a single academic program on Westinghouse’s enthusiasm for applying teaching industrial design. The new field, art to industry, Wilfred Readio, head of the just breaking onto the scene in 1934, desDepartment of Painting and Illustration at perately needed educators. Coincidentally, CIT, instituted a new course in basic design among those few who responded to the in 1929. That same year, Kostellow and his call, the following five started in Pittsburgh: wife Rowena joined the faculty, he in paintDonald Dohner, FIDSA, Alexander Kostellow, Donald Dohner, FIDSA ing and she in sculpture. An émigré of Iran Rowena Reed Kostellow, FIDSA, Peter in 1916, he had studied in Europe and at the Müller-Munk, FIDSA and Robert Lepper.

Kansas Art Institute.

They became pioneers of design education in America When Dohner left CIT in 1930 to join Westinghouse, by establishing the basic techniques and academic prinLepper filled his slot on the night class faculty. Lepper ciples of industrial design that influenced the practice of had graduated in painting from CIT in 1927 and spent a design for generations. What were they like? Where did year in Europe soaking up modern art. His 1932 painting they come from? How, where and what did they teach?

Crankshaft, a realistic image of a Lincoln 12-cylinder crankWhat were their contributions to education? This series of shaft and pistons floating in air, celebrated the machine as articles seeks to answer these questions partly through the art, as did many modern artists of the time, such as Fernand words of their former students and colleagues.

Léger. Not much later in 1934, the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art exhibition also celebrated the abstract beauty Part 1 of shapes made by machines. Art and machines were conIt all started at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT), verging upon the design world. where all were faculty members in the 1930s. Dohner, one According to an interview Jim Lesko, L/IDSA conof the 10 leading industrial designers identified by Fortune ducted with Lepper, upon hearing the news of Dohner’s magazine in February 1934, instantly became a celebrity of firing, Kostellow exclaimed to department head Readio, the new profession, along with others, such as Norman Bel “Donald’s on the loose! Let’s get him! It [industrial design] is Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, FIDSA the wave of the future! Painting is dead! Start an option in and Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA. Since 1930 Dohner had been industrial design!” “Option 3” was added to the two majors director of art at Westinghouse, where he designed 128 (teaching and painting/illustration) already offered to juniors. products, including locomotives, ranges, water coolers and The interview was published in the 1997 article “Industrial ashtrays. Fortune revealed that Dohner’s department cost Design at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1934–1967” in Westinghouse $75,000 per year ($1.5 million in today’s dolthe Journal of Design History (http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/ lars), a fact apparently previously unknown to management, content/10/3/269). who were shocked by the cost and promptly fired Dohner Thus, in the fall semester of 1934, the first degreed proand staff. gram in industrial design was initiated, developed and headDohner was well known at CIT. Before joining ed by Dohner, with faculty including Kostellow, Lepper and Westinghouse, he had taught a night class there in design

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series about pioneering industrial design educators.

from the ’Burgh

Robert Lepper

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Photo: Chris Schweer/UR Creative Services; WVU all right reserved.

Readio. In the first class of five was Maud (Bowers) Rice, a Philippine national, who in another interview with Lesko, described Dohner as “The key man … always so dignified and very serious-minded and quiet.

Average height. Serious, dedicated to what he was doing. Very enthusiastic.” Rice described how Dohner took them to different plants, such as Westinghouse, Fostoria Glass and Alcoa, to show them how things were made and told them to “think about Alexander Kostellow new designs when we got home.” Rice won a student competition by the Pittsburgh Water Heater Co., received $25 and had her design produced.

Rice also described Kostellow as “dynamic—I was scared of him—everybody was scared of him. But he was a good guy. … He was short, a bit robust. He was domineering. A brilliant man. Good artist. Very forceful. I always did what he told me to do, so I could learn more from him. I liked him, he was such a dear.” But, according to Rice, he wasn’t always a dear; sometimes “he made them [other girls] cry.” Kostellow taught graphic design, and Rice remembered that he gave students “assignments using a few letters of the alphabet to design monograms.”

At the end of her junior year in 1935, Rice recalled that Müller-Munk, an award-winning silversmith from New York, gave lectures about design. Müller-Munk had worked for Tiffany’s and had just designed his classic art deco Normandie pitcher, a sleek streamlined chrome form shaped like the prow of its namesake, the latest French luxury ocean liner, a symbol of technological progress.

In the fall Müller-Munk replaced Dohner as head of the industrial design program. Dohner’s former employer in the

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Pittsburgh public school district, Boudreau, dean of Pratt’s Art School since 1928, had invited him there to organize and supervise a similar industrial design program. Boudreau had previously retained Dohner as a lecturer and Müller-Munk and Kostellow continued Dohner’s practice of taking students to tour manufacturing facilities and having them design innovative products based on what they learned. Rice recalled sketching a coffee server with strong Bauhaus characteristics. Müller-Munk exclaimed, “Oh, I love that, Maud! Go ahead.” So she prepared a mechanical drawing and built an appearance model in Fred Clayter’s industrial processes class and got an A. According to “Industrial Design at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1934–1967,” Lepper became an assistant professor that year, but unlike other professional designers who focused on form and manufacturing, he tended more toward the the philosophical and theoretical aspects of design.

Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), formed in 1935 during the Depression, offered grants to artists to paint murals. Lepper began painting murals for the WPA in post offices, culminating in his masterpiece, a huge mural at West Virginia University in 1940–42. The WPA also granted funds to establish a design school for industry in New York called the Design Laboratory, headed by Gilbert Rohde, design lead at Herman Miller. Teague and Dreyfuss, both of whom by now had huge design firms, served on the board. According to Rohde, the school was patterned after the Bauhaus and survived until 1940.

When Rice, the first ever to receive a degree in industrial design, graduated from CIT in June 1936, Kostellow Carnegie Mellon University Archives

Mural at West Virginia University by Robert Lepper.

Carnegie Mellon University Archives

Waring Pro

and wife Rowena Reed joined Dohner at ments used by all artists (line, area, volume, Pratt, where, according to Arthur Pulos, space, value, color and texture) and comFIDSA in The American Design Adventure: pared them with industrial equivalents from 1940–1975, “Kostellow representing the manufacturing. That same year Kostellow philosophical, Rowena the aesthetic and developed and initiated Pratt’s foundation Dohner the practical, they laid the triangular program based on “the simplest and clearfoundation for Pratt’s program in industrial est elements of design and structure … design.” That fall Pratt initiated Dohner’s proline, plane, volume, value, color and texgram, offering a four-year certificate, not a ture,” according to Industrial Design at Pratt degree, in industrial design.

Institute published by the Department of Industrial Design at Pratt Institute in 1974.

By 1937, however, other schools had entered the scene. Bauhaus émigré László (Sound familiar?) By 1940 he was promotMoholy-Nagy had established the School ing his program in Design magazine. of Design in Chicago and was joined by Industrial design programs continued to proliferate. In 1939 Bredendieck initiated Bauhaus graduate Hin Bredendieck, György Kepes and Alexander Archipenko. The and directed a program at Georgia Tech. At California Graduate School of Design orgathe California College of Arts and Crafts in The Original Waring Blender by Peter Müller-Munk, FIDSA (below). nized a two-year graduate program direct1940, a program was initiated with Walter ed by architect Hunt Lewis and joined by Landor and Jo Sinel. Donald Deskey, FIDSA Kem Weber and Karl With. At Cranbrook founded New York University’s School of Academy of Art, Charles Eames initiated Industrial Design. and led the Department of Experimental By this time, however, World War II Design. The Cooper Union Art Schools in had ended the Depression but slowed New York offered a four-year certificate in the profession. Industry began making war plastic design instructed by Paul Feeley and materials, not consumer products. Potential Lila Ulrich, a Bauhaus graduate. students as well as many faculty and practiThe program at CIT continued with tioners joined military service or contributed Müller-Munk, Readio and Lepper. In 1937 to the war effort.

Müller-Munk designed Waring’s classic —Carroll Gantz, FIDSA chrome waterfall blender and the following year, opened his carrgantz@bellsouth.net design office in Pittsburgh, which became quite successful.

In 1938 Lepper developed a chart titled “The Elements of Some references were inadvertently omitted from the print Visual Perception” in which he identified seven basic eleedition and have been corrected in this digital version.

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Rama Chorpash (on left) comparing the beautiful new garden tool he just purchased with one used by a gardener in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

beautility

What Matters:

Form & Beauty

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reativity, talent, innovation, culture, behavior, civilization and success—all are grounded in form and exhibit beauty. Although this sounds obvious, it’s good to remind ourselves that form giving is the heart of industrial design. What we do matters—both in the sense of physical matter (anything that has both mass and volume and occupies space) and in the legal sense of what matters (allegations, importance, consequence). We seem to forget which is more powerful, the pen or the sword. The good news is that designers bring them together—things and thoughts are inextricably connected. Strategy, tactics, branding are only thinking until we make them tangible.

Theory and practice—two hard things industrial designers are stuck between. Ideas and reality. Dreams and schemes. Form and function. Price and value. Marketplace and junkyard. Cradle to cradle. This and that! Long and

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short term. Comfort and convenience, excitement and safety, hot and sweaty. All the complexity and contradiction come together on our drawing boards. Our never-ending quest to bring it all together—the industrial designers’ balancing act. It’s not easy transforming new ideas and technology into things people want.

We can’t create things that just work; our job is to make beautiful things. Obviously things need to function, and we can figure out how to make them work more efficiently, fit more people and not hurt the environment. It’s good to make people more comfortable. It’s good to make life easier. It’s OK to make more money. We need to be practical, but is that what really matters? Students come into our profession because they want to make cool things.

Compared to survival, cool may not be a necessity (unless you’re a teen). Beauty may not be either—but it is

Tucker Viemeister runs Viemeister Industries in New York, designing things, places and experiences. He is most famous for the OXO Good Grip kitchen tools designed with Smart Design, the company he helped found.

He is the vice president of the Architectural League and chair of the Rowena Reed Kostellow Fund at Pratt.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles expanding on the spring 2012 issue on form.

certainly not a luxury. Beauty has a practical purpose in our lives. It has utility. That’s why I have coined the word “beautility.” Even in our mercenary world, beauty has value that reaches beyond rational, form not as following function but as something that is a function. Beautility is a new way of framing beauty. When a thing has a name, people can recognize it; it’s easier for them to appreciate the value.

Beautility gets beauty elevated to the bottom line.

I am getting ready to jury the IDEA competition this year at the Henry Ford Museum. IDSA’s criteria for IDEA are the following: n Innovation: n

design, experience, manufacturing

Benefit to the user: performance, comfort, safety, ease of use, ergonomics, universal function, quality of life, affordability

n Responsibility:

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benefit to society, environment, lifecycle, material usage, waste reduction

Benefit to the client: profitability, increased sales, brand reputation, employee morale

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Visual appeal and appropriate aesthetics

ful surface? You can judge a book by looking at the cover.

In simple terms, beautiful is the opposite of grim. Beautiful stuff looks good and makes us happy—the most beautiful things are magical. Rowena Reed Kostellow, my teacher and one of the founders of the Pratt Institute’s industrial design program, said: “Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization.”

The dictionary defines “civilization” as “a relatively high level of cultural and technological development.” The goal of the designer is to advance that level to improve things—all those improvements fuel progress. Better science, medicine, art, technology, commerce, entertainment available to people advance civilization. Making beauty is a driver. Beauty is not a static experience; beautiful things inspire. A beautiful thing breeds innovation and creates value. “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success,” said Nikola Tesla in 1896. Creating a beautiful thing in the designer’s hands is even more awesome.

Designers are key players in the beauty business. We figure out how to make things more attractive. That’s what makes design such a great way to “win some victory for humanity.” Usually people think Horace Mann was talking about curing cancer or ending poverty. But couldn’t creating a great piece of art or a beautiful product be a bigger win?

These are the metrics IDSA has established to measure and evaluate good design. It’s pretty simple. As Jeffrey Osborn said, “It’s like anything: aesthetics, function and cost.” But I say for us beauty has to be most Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization. important. Aesthetics must always count most. Do we have to ask, —Rowena Reed Kostellow does the thing look good? You’re There’s always room for more. There’s always a shortage not going to buy it if you’re not attracted to it in the first of beauty. Designers need to work harder. We need more place, and you’ll be happier using a good-looking thing. For beauty (at least, clean up your room). Beauty is the ultimate an entry to win, it has to be beautiful (appropriate, appealexpression of making the world better. ing or whatever). That’s the crucial standard for entry. It’s Designers have always been engaged in making things a design contest. It needs to be physically appealing. If it more attractive. For the past 20 years, we’ve been pitching passes the test of aesthetics, then we can judge the other that to business. Now in the age of slow food, let’s rememfour attributes. We are the creators of good aesthetics; we ber that we can calculate our contributions to civilization in are the advocates for beauty. That’s what we award. nonverbal, nonrational and nonmonetary terms. We are not What’s “visual appeal and appropriate aesthetics”? just doing “pre-tail” and fueling the economy. There’s a more Beauty is debatable. The jury should discuss how beautiful subtle economy of happiness, insight, health and joy. Design a finalist is—but a winner cannot be ugly. That’s the most makes sense, not just cents. obvious sign of bad design. The way things look is imporCelebrate beautility! tant. It may be only skin deep. What’s wrong with a beauti-

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—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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By Douglas Nash doug@mobilegear.com

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www.mobilegear.com

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www.facebook.com/mobilewkrs

Douglas Nash is the founder of Mobilegear.com. He has been deeply involved in product design and development throughout his career. Most recently, he worked for North America’s largest office-products wholesale distributor where he managed its $1.6 billion technology product category. In that role he drove the product and brand development for its private brand business.

Design’s Impact

mobility of work

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am betting that any designer reading this article has at sometime worked outside a traditional office environment and the standard 9-to-5 hours. In fact, the work environment often inspires the most creative designs. In today’s world, designers are already leading and living an exciting emerging trend

that focuses on workplace mobility. Home is now an office, Starbucks has become a conference room, and cars are mobile workspaces. Talk about finding design in unexpected places. What about creating designs in unexpected places? Hotels, airports and shared office spaces are the places where work happens

iStockPhoto

most often and can promote or discourage creativity and energy.

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Historically, it was the road warrior who knew where to connect to Wi-Fi or find the best parking lot for catching up on calls—but now mobile working is a fast, growing part of the entire US workforce. Most designers are working in multiple environments at all hours of the day. It is estimated that 40 percent of today’s workforce, or over 42 million people, are mobile, global and 24/7. The walls, chairs and cubicles of the traditional office no longer exist. But designers already know this.

Why is this happening? Three major market dynamics are driving these changes: (1) Corporations want to lower their facility overhead expenses, so they continue to close offices and look for ways to optimize their space. (2) Tablets, smartphones and laptops have become ubiquitous, and the ability to connect through Internet calling, video conferencing and in-flight broadband service provide around-theclock virtual working. Think about how often clients have overseas connections that need direct interface. (3) Anyone under 35 is demanding flexibility with their hours and their workplace. If companies want to hire the best from the next generation, forcing them into a 9-to-5 office job won’t work.

How many designers would want to be chained to a single desk and confined to specific hours?

This demand and need for mobility in the workplace is dramatically changing the way traditional manufacturers approach product-development strategies. Product design needs to keep up with these emerging mobileworker trends and the resulting multiple work environments. Products that enable all of us to work effectively anywhere and anytime are the ones that create the highest value proposition, and innovative design must lead the way to creating this value. Mobile product designs that focus on four key product characteristics—portable, durable, multiuse and personal—will capture this mobile-working trend.

Portable. Is the product easily moved from one work environment to another? Does the product promote portability?

A great example is a portable surge protector. For the mobile worker, such an accessory promotes working in multiple environments by ensuring that critical electronic devices are protected anywhere there’s an outlet. And a retractable plug makes it even more convenient. Even tweaks to standard office supplies—such as retractable built-in tabs for hanging file folders—make the transition from office to mobile seamless and more efficient.

Durable. Can a product survive going from the coffee shop to a car seat or shoved into a briefcase or backpack all while being exposed to heat, air conditioning, rain and

snow? Mobile workers want durable products that can take a pounding in harsh environments. For instance, a backpack made with ballistic polyester—with a removable laptop sleeve that makes navigating airport security easier—is the perfect accessory for those on-the-go. For mobile workers, product materials matter, and the more durable the more valuable.

Multi-use. Can a single product solve multiple mobile-work challenges and therefore reduce the number of products needed to work remotely? The less stuff mobile workers have to carry around, the more they can be mobile. For instance, a zippered portfolio that houses a tablet, built-in stand and compartments for pens, paper and business cards combines three products in one—convenient and simple. Another example are products that combine a tablet stylus (which are proven to increase efficiency) with a pen.

Personal. As the days of centralized purchasing quickly fade away, mobile workers have been empowered with a budget and have become responsible for their own product purchases. With this new authority comes the opportunity for personal expression: Who do I want to be in my mobile work environment? Decisions like backpack versus briefcase versus messenger bag have enabled personal statements through design and appearance. While commodity prices may be a result of this tough economy, commodity design is fading away. Consider the pen. One of the most personal choices mobile workers make is what pens they want to use. By definition, pens are mobile, but what about a pen that offers added leak protection for frequent flyers and ink that protects against document and check fraud? Add external features like a comfort-fit grip and sleek detailing and you now have a pen that makes a personal statement about its owner. Products that can provide a personality through design create higher value.

Design will continue to happen in unexpected places, and the work environment of the future will continue to be even more mobile and timeless than ever. There will be a day when, like Star Trek or Harry Potter, beaming up or using a portkey to travel is common, and real offices with cubicles and chairs may not exist. Attending meetings will be done by holograms, and the workplace will be everywhere and nowhere. The future of product design for the mobile worker must continue to have a revolutionary approach that uses the four key product characteristics.

Designers have always lived an inspired mobile work life, so be reflective about what matters and turn that inspiration into products that enable mobile-workers to work effectively in any and all environments. n

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desig n case study

Performance, Style and Efficiency in a Zero-Emissions Package

Tesla Roadster

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lectric cars have long been the folly of misty-eyed dreamers and the subject of dismissal by the motoring public and industry. Tesla Motors changed that with the Roadster—a credible realworld electric car that surpasses all previous battery-powered attempts and, in general, the

performance and panache of most exotic cars.

An Age-Old Dream The electric vehicle is not by any means a new idea. The first electric vehicles actually predated internal combustionpowered vehicles by a half century, evolving from the unlikely union of horse-drawn carriages and electric motors as early as 1828. When the four-cycle internal combustion

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By Dave Destler dave@destlerbiz.com Dave Destler studied both industrial and graphic design at California State University, Northridge when the Earth was still cooling and went on to a career in magazine publishing. More recently, he is plying his skills as a wordsmith in the field of design and business writing. He collects vintage motorcycles and cameras and enjoys good single-malt Scotch.

engine dawned, attributed to the work of German inventors Nikolaus Otto, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1876, development of the self-powered automobile began in earnest and the virtues and vices of each type of power source—electric, steam, internal combustion—were considered and debated. Electricity was found to be the superior solution. It was clean, odor-free, relatively silent. Had a usable range in the small villages where most were used.

Its linear torque curve negated the need for a multispeed transmission and gear changing. By the turn of the 20th century, the automobile was catching on with a prosperous America, and the electric vehicle reached its competitive zenith, outselling all other types of cars.

Despite the advancement of electric-car technology, battery development—and therefore, range—did not keep pace. By the 1920s, America was developing a network of roads and highways that connected cities and encouraged motorists to venture further afield than ever before. The limited range of the electric vehicle became an issue, and the internal combustion engine with a range limited only by its fuel capacity, surged ahead. The electric starter, invented

by Charles Kettering in 1912, removed one more drawback associated with internal combustion engines, and the die was cast. Electric vehicles all but disappeared by 1935.

In the 1970s, the potential benefits of electric vehicles— especially with the growing national consciousness regarding air pollution—had engineers, inventors and automotive companies again thinking about electricity and batteries and a future where petrochemical fuel might become short in supply or exhausted completely. It was dawning on them that it wasn’t too soon to begin designing for that future. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that there was a real impetus to develop viable electric vehicles for the masses.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB), through its Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) program, mandated for more fuel-efficient lower-emissions vehicles, with the ultimate goal being zero-emissions vehicles. In response, automakers developed a number of electric models: the Chrysler TEVan, Ford Ranger EV pickup truck, GM EV1 and S10 EV pickup, Honda EV Plus hatchback, Nissan lithium-battery Altra EV miniwagon and Toyota RAV4 EV. The initiative, however, was fraught with controversy. Chrysler, Toyota and a group of GM dealers eventually sued CARB, which resulted in the neutering of CARB’s ZEV mandate. Toyota offered the last 328 RAV4 EVs for sale to the general public in November 2002. Nearly all other production electric cars were withdrawn from the market and were in some cases destroyed by their manufacturers.

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Thus, the electric vehicle was pulled from the annals of automotive history, was redeveloped and refined and hummed its way back into the light of day, only to once again be unplugged and relegated to the pantheon of automotive dead ends. In the 2000s it was becoming apparent that there were no guarantees of plentiful supplies of crude oil.

Global warming became recognized as a result of excessive hydrocarbons being pumped into the atmosphere, depleting the protective ozone layer. A weakening economy threw inefficient fuel-guzzling SUVs into stark contrast to what the world really needed. This perfect storm of fossil fuel opposition left few options: low-emission hybrid vehicles using both electricity and gasoline (or diesel) power or pure electricity-only zero-emissions vehicles. One company was geared up and ready to take on the challenge.

Back to the Future Nikola Tesla did not invent alternating current, but his work in the first half of the 20th century enabled alternating current to be harnessed as an eminently viable, plentiful and controllable energy source. Recognized for his contribution to modern electrical technology, his surname was chosen to identify a nascent car company, which in 2004 began development of a highly efficient high-performance electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster.

The genesis of Tesla Motors resulted from a collaboration between Martin Eberhard, Mark Tarpening, Elon Musk, JB Straubel and Ian Wright, all acknowledged as cofounders. Since college, Musk had a vision to bring electric vehicles to the mass market. In 2004 he met Eberhard, an engineer, who proposed building a sports car with a lithi-

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um-ion battery. Musk, who was involved in Internet startups Zip2 and the enormously successful PayPal when in his 20s, agreed to underwrite the company. It took four and a half years and $140 million to bring the car to production.

Carbon fiber, by this time, was de rigeuer for race cars, safety helmets and other constructs that required light weight, immense strength and ease with which to manufacture complex shapes. Incorporating carbon fiber into an electric sports car was seriously upping the ante for this project, elevating it to exotic car status. Musk’s vision was to not compromise anywhere in the effort to produce a world-class car that would outperform anything electric that had gone before— and the majority of internal combustion supercars, as well.

In their effort to demonstrate that an all-electric car can compete against conventional internal combustion vehicles, they developed the concept in-house and went outside when involving other suppliers to ensure the best possible result. The most obvious example is the use of Lotus “gliders” (a vehicle minus its power plant, akin to a glider airplane that is an airframe without an engine) as the basis for the Tesla Roadster chassis.

“Tesla coordinated with Lotus Engineering,” said Ted Merendino, product planner with Tesla Motors, “to tune some of the vehicle’s systems using their many years of experience and contract with Lotus Cars, a separate manufacturing entity to subcontract part of Roadster’s construction. Tesla identified the Elise as an ideal starting point. The Roadster chassis is quite different from that of the Elise, most noticeably in the stressed battery and revised rear suspension.”

“The Roadster body itself was a collaborative effort between Tesla and Lotus,” continued Merendino. “Notably, the Roadster shares no body panels with the Elise and is nearly 9 inches longer. There is only six to seven percent shared content between the Elise and Roadster. This is mainly the windshield, side mirrors, some of the front suspension and the extruded aluminum chassis tech.”

The design language of the Tesla Roadster was essential in establishing many things: an immediate perception of aggressive beauty, balance and performance; it needed to look like nothing else but to not go the well-worn route of infusing the design with an odd or even whimsical appearance so common to electric vehicles and hybrids; it needed to not be overly extreme, which would quickly become dated; and the design language had to be the DNA for future Tesla offerings, many of which were already envisioned by that point. The success of the effort between Tesla and Lotus is obvious from the almost absolute lack of criticism from the press or public. If the product didn’t scream credibility from first look, all the technology beneath the skin was for naught.

The first Tesla Roadsters were delivered to customers in 2008. While aiming at a sub-$100,000 price point, the Roadster reached the market with a $109,000 price tag, a typical consequence of aiming at a moving target over the course of a vehicle’s multiyear gestation period.

While skeptical of electric vehicles in general, the motoring press was quick to praise the newcomer.

Partnering with such a vaunted chassis builder as Lotus and collaborating on the styling and surface development with the British firm were applauded not only for the impressive results but for the commitment Tesla had to getting it right the first time.

What were seen as extravagant claims of 0–60 mph in 4.0 seconds and 12.7 seconds at 105.3 mph in the quarter-mile (Porsche 911 Carrera S territory) were verified in testing. Road & Track commented in its 2009 road test: “We are delighted to have spent some ‘quality’—and instrumented—time with the Roadster. We’re also pleased to see its extravagant claims confirmed.”

Motor Trend also weighed in. “Lotus has done a laudable job of stretching its Elise chassis two inches and accommodating a near-1000-pound battery (offset by a carbon fiber body) while keeping the thing a frantic road dart on twisty roads.” It went on to describe the car as “humbling to just about any rumbling Ferrari or Porsche that

makes the mistake of pulling up next to a silent, 105-mpg Tesla Roadster at a stoplight.”

A Method to his Megawatt Madness Musk is a busy man. His “day job,” according to him, is running a space transportation company called SpaceX. As the chairman, CEO and chief product architect of Tesla, he has helped formulate the business and product strategies that guide the company’s goals and activities.

He has a deep vision for the company, which he revealed in a blog post entitled “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)”: “As you know, the initial product of Tesla Motors is a high performance electric sports car called the Tesla Roadster. However, some may not be aware of the fact that our long term plan is to build a wide range of models, including affordably priced family cars.

This is because the overarching purpose of Tesla Motors is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.”

Explaining the logic behind starting the quest with a high-performance sports car, he wrote, “Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.” All available cash is put back into R&D to develop the next model: the Model S, a sporty four-door family car that will sell for about half the price of the Roadster. “When someone buys the Tesla Roadster sports car, they are actually helping pay for development of the lower cost family car.”

Merendino concluded, “The Roadster changed the way people think about electric cars, enabled the development of increasingly higher volume, lower-priced Tesla vehicles. There’s no doubt that it was a game changer.”

The future of the electric vehicle seems more assured than ever. The prevailing world politics, economy and technological advancements provide a logic and viability never before enjoyed by electric vehicles through their long history. And Tesla’s proof that such a vehicle can not only be viable but provide the way to a new generation of more efficient and cost-effective models points to the fact that we’ll all be plugging into the electric grid someday, rather than pumping dead dinosaurs into our tanks. n

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design in unexpected places

Hidden in Plain Sight

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s a child I often saw faces and images hidden in various inanimate objects: wood floors, bubble baths, shower tiles, Oriental rugs, baseball gloves, lamp shades, car seats, boulders, cracked asphalt, coffee beans, stones, bricks, clouds, tree bark. I’d see Vikings with horned helmets,

Roman gladiators, smiley faces, ghostly faces, birthday candles, presidential caricatures, princesses, airplanes, tanks, big-headed aliens, demented squirrels with dilated eyes, oversized teeth and top hats driving racing boats and other comical, nonsensical things. Things that clearly weren’t there. At least not by design or by intent.

When I’d try to point them out, my parents, siblings and friends would strain their faces, squint their eyes, slant their heads and, after a few seconds, proclaim, “You’re nuts. I don’t see anything.” Initially I didn’t care; I couldn’t be held responsible for their lack of imagination. As I aged, I continued to share my interpretive skills, but 99 times out of 100 it was to no avail. People became increasingly annoyed and occasionally displeased with my invocations. If we went to my cousins’ or grandparents’ houses, before we got out of the car I was reminded to “behave,” code word for keep your imagination to yourself. Upon hearing my bizarre interpretations, my friends would say, “You’re weird.” I took these reactions as an acknowledgment of my uniqueness, with a dose of self-consciousness. Eventually, though, I stopped sharing my visions. What was the use?

In college, I was delighted to discover others with similar interpretive talents. We were all a bunch of proud weirdos—definitely not part of the mainstream. Midway through a freshman foundation photography class, we got an assignment to discover and capture images hidden in inanimate objects. After hearing the assignment, you could see numerous heads snap up and look around with furrowed brows of confusion. But for the weirdos, we knew

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exactly what was being asked. I was ecstatic. Finally I had confirmation. I wasn’t insane after all.

When I graduated, I landed my dream job with one of the most progressive design consultancies at the time: RichardsonSmith, based in Columbus, OH. We were doing some really amazing, uncommon things at the time: adding cognitive psychologists, industrial systems engineers, anthropologists, information designers and mechanical and electrical engineers; experimenting and developing design vocabulary languages for NCR, Xerox and Kodak; and generally talking about affordances, semantics and communications theory. It was the early ’80s, and it felt like the age of enlightenment. During that experience, I came to realize that design is not exclusively about the artifact.

The artifact exists only to support the experience. Design is so much more than materials, aesthetics, form, shape, function, typefaces, processes, color, texture, branding, ergonomics and everything else that goes into the realization and creation of a product. Design is about communicating meaning and affording desired experiences. How the artifact makes people feel is as important (if not more) than what the product actually is. This was pure heresy for an industrial designer, yet at the same time it was impossible

jcouch@lextant.com

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By Jim Couch, IDSA www.lextant.com n @jim_couch

Jim Couch is vice president of client services at Lextant, an ideal experience firm that helps clients understand their customers’ desired experiences and bring those insights to life to help inform and inspire great design. Before Lextant, he held numerous positions for various design consultancies and a medical-device startup firm. He is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati.

to argue against it. I was fortunate and grateful to have had that experience working at RichardsonSmith.

It opened my eyes to the broad interpretative potential of design.

Fast-forward 30 years.

It’s shocking how slowly new ideas migrate, especially radical concepts that challenge the status quo.

Nonetheless, a new era is blooming, not only in the design community, but also in business, society, education and government. People are fed up with inefficiencies and the lack of creativity, and businesses and governments are at their wits’ end. The options? Continue with the same rational processes that got us here in the first place or try a new approach—maybe this new thing called “design thinking.” And that is exactly what we’re beginning to witness: acts of design cropping up in unexpected places.

This issue of Innovation is dedicated to those individuals who are thinking beyond the artifact. Those who see design’s potential as limitless. Those who are taking design thinking and applying it to big sticky wicked problems. Problems such as water conservation, homelessness, pollution, child abuse, mental illness, peace and public policy, among others. This is not to judge or denigrate the traditional

designers who are passionate, driven and committed to making incredible commercial products and systems for everyday consumption. On the contrary, I applaud you and encourage you to keep up the good fight. Your courage and perseverance is needed to help advance business and industry and to make society a more enjoyable and beautiful place.

However, I’m excited about celebrating this emerging camp of designers—the restless, inquisitive, won’ttake-no-for-an-answer and no-problem-is-toobig provocateurs. The ones who are applying their design knowledge and sensibilities to look at the root problems plaguing society, identifying issues that have become institutionalized over decades or centuries of rational-oriented thinking.

Whether it’s teaching medical students to think like designers, rewriting public policy, devising new tax structures, enhancing communication and understanding, or creating new value experiences, there is no place a designer’s contributions can’t be realized.

I hope you find these articles inspiring.

And perhaps you, too, will see beyond the obvious and discover unexpected messages, signs and patterns hidden in plain sight. Enjoy. n Francois & Jean ROBERT photography

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By Clive Grinyer cgrinyer@cisco.com Clive Grinyer is director of customer experience for Cisco (IBSG) Innovations, designing innovative new digital experiences for Cisco’s clients. He has held senior design-management roles in a number of consultancies and corporate design teams, including IDEO, Tangerine (co-founder), Samsung Europe, Orange France Telecom and TAG Mclaren Audio. He was director of design for the Design Council in the UK from 2002 to 2005.

Design unbridled

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t was Bill Moggridge, FIDSA, who said (in an accidently perfect tweet) that “few people think about it or are aware of it, but there is nothing made by human beings that does not involve a design decision somewhere.” For most designers, this observation will be understood to be true for the act of making.

Creating any sort of physical reality, especially if it has any type of interface, clearly requires a human-centric design process (rather than the wider, technical aspect of design you would use in laying out a circuit board, for example).

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Moggridge’s comment says something about the allpervasiveness of design that has always interested me.

For him, design was a verb, an activity that could not be avoided. Design, as a conscious process of working out what something is and how it will be achieved, is a decisionmaking process that has to happen; it’s not an option. In making these decisions, we can be more or less conscious of the impact on the person who will use that something or the process required to bring it to life. How we consider and balance the what and the how is at the core of almost every activity.

As a student, all I wanted to do was design a toaster my mum would like to buy, or a piece of industrial equipment that was comfortable and easy to use or create systems that were easy to understand and operate. Design was neatly fenced in around my discipline of product design and creativity defined within parameters of materials, process and economics. My first job was designing car radios, an interesting challenge involving the cognitive understanding of digital functionality and ensuring long fingernails could press the buttons.

Since then the nature of what I design changed radically. I moved from the physical to the interactive and developed mobile and Web user interfaces, but I was still able to describe myself as a designer. Now, despite using exactly the same techniques and thought processes I was trained in, I am rarely described as a designer, and I operate in completely new worlds creating experiences a million miles from car radios.

In my role at Cisco, I work with companies and publicsector organizations who want to understand how technology can help them do things better, more efficiently and at a larger scale. The development of technology over the last decade has, of course, had a major impact on how people communicate, work, shop and spend their leisure time. So working in this technology world means that the problems I work on are extremely diverse. When I was designing fake domestic irons or floor-cleaning machines at London’s Central Saint Martins design school, it never occurred to me that I would be asked to work out how technology might help a fishing cooperative in Yemen or local government workers find new opportunities when they lose their jobs.

But those are just two examples of how I have used design skills to help solve problems.

Translating Technology into Meaningful Experiences One of the interesting features of technology is the enormous trust people have that technology will solve all their problems. So when an international aid foundation wanted to solve a set of problems around youth unemployment, problems that were shared by many countries, it was natural for them to presuppose that a range of Web applications, platforms, call centers and videos would be the solution. It was assumed that this technology would enable the foundation to reach a younger and culturally diverse audience and put them directly in contact with the services and opportunities that could help them and the businesses who might provide sustainable employment. What was not understood at all, however, was just how this technology would actually work. What channels would this audience be able or want to access? How would these services be provided in remote and unconnected areas? How would training or information actually be received?

These questions might seem unimportant, details to be worked out later. But it was clear that the investment was at risk of being ineffective if we didn’t start understanding how we were going to provide easy access to this great technology and make the services and information attractive and relevant. We needed to convert spreadsheets and process flow charts into meaningful experiences that would succeed.

Suddenly, and unexpectedly, this became a design project. Understanding the people at a street level, their cultural references and their preferred channels was vital.

Working out how generational attitudes and traditions would be respected, changed or worked around needed to be understood. Creating a vision of how the project would attract, engage with and succeed would then enable everyone to understand what and how to make the project a success.

What is perhaps surprising is that the same methodologies used in designing the car radio were required here.

Understanding the users (replace fingernails with cultural traditions) provided insight into how they would understand, see benefit in and consume the services. Analyzing the different delivery channels, content and style led to a series of design concepts that enabled us to evaluate what would work best. Visualizing the service as stories that would show

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how each aspect of the experience would work could be done as a rough prototype. In this case, a narrated cartoon brought the stories to life and communicated the vision to the project team and to the potential users for their feedback.

This approach enabled us to tell the stories of how local businesses expand their markets; how young people receive effective training in a style that suits them; and how a local trainer could download a training video, travel to a remote location (with a laptop, projector and solar power pack) and teach an illiterate fishing community how to fish and distribute their catch to more lucrative sushi-craving markets.

Conventional design activities ensured that the applications were well-designed and the websites were easy and attractive. But design here had transformed a worthy project into an effective one. And everyone on the team, for what many said was the first time, understood exactly what they were doing and what success would look like.

There is often criticism that stories such as this overemphasize the contribution of design. Many smart people worked on this project and are making it a success as we speak. Design had a pivotal role in creating a coherent vision

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and a shared sense of how all the different parts could work together to deliver benefit.

Unexpected Outputs I am not called a designer at Cisco. My specialism is described as “customer experience.” What this means is that I only occasionally get involved in designing a thing—a product, user interface or interior. And yet I have never done so much design activity in any previous roles.

I draw more than I ever have, but not to sketch a shape or draft a Web layout. I use drawings to help people visualize their strategic decisions—“Is this what you mean?” I help people communicate their perceptions of a solution through drawing to see if we all agree. It’s much more powerful than words, and I have been asked to teach drawing to senior management because they find it so useful.

The principles of an early prototype are vital in the technology world. So many projects waste money by developing what they think people want before they find out that they thought wrong. People find it difficult to believe that you don’t have to build the technology to try it

out. Designers are great at using all sorts of simple techniques to simulate reality (from a fabricated model that looks exactly like a finished product to a Flash demo of a digital experience) that you can put in front of people to find out what they like and dislike long before you have to develop anything real.

Of course, what every designer wants to do is make the world attractive and beautiful, and the importance of remembering this early in a process means you don’t have to put the lipstick on the pig at a later date. You can make sure that everything about the experience is attractive and delightful. So why not design it right the first time, rather than having to do it twice?

For all these reasons, designers have found their skills applicable to a great many unexpected outputs that don’t look like conventional design. A whole crop of new consultancies has evolved in the UK around service design. Companies like LiveWork, Engine or, in the public sector, Participle, are full of designers designing unconventional things for unconventional clients. Designers design better policing practices, programs to combat obesity and communities in deprived urban locations. Not a split line or radius or font in sight.

For the last few years, I have been working on projects that address our aging population. People are living longer, some affluently, and need to remain independent or receive support for a longer time than previous generations. My first project in this area was in the city of Almere in Holland. This rapidly growing city still retains its original pioneers who first moved onto the reclaimed land (polders) in the ’70s. As they live longer, the city wanted to understand how technology might help these people retain their independence and continue to enjoy their city as they grew older.

As a designer, my first reaction was to understand the people better. Interviews and photos made these older residents of Almere real and gave us all insight into their needs, desires and surprisingly open attitude to technology.

Making the people real and developing personas changed the attitude of the city planners; they saw their citizens in their own minds and better understood their needs.

In Almere we used video technology to connect two choirs in different parts of the city so they could sing

together, keep fit together and stay connected to their local communities. The results were phenomenal; many physical and mental-health improvements occurred, and the choirs now sing to others around the globe.

In Torfaen, a district in Wales, UK, we aimed our attention at a slightly younger generation preparing for transitions in their lives as they grow older.

Changing jobs, retiring or redundancy are likely transitions in the 55–65 age group. Here our objectives became capturing the knowledge and skills of these people and connecting them with younger people just entering the job market or older people who need care and assistance, or helping them become entrepreneurs and develop new businesses themselves. As a designer, it was my job to create and visualize concepts that might solve these issues. As a result, we created the Wisdom Bank, an online platform where people can upload their wisdom—their accumulation of skills and knowledge, latent and otherwise—and connect with and mentor others.

All the tools of design were needed to create the concepts, visualize them through stories, mock them up and create a prototype that could be tested and improved by user involvement. Showing how understanding your own knowledge and wisdom and helping people collaborate together is probably the most satisfying and surprising design project I have ever been involved in—certainly a long way away from designing mobile phones, toasters or car radios.

We must be careful not to claim too much for design.

But every day I experience how design methods and processes that were established in designing artifacts and objects help us make decisions that are better informed about people and their emotions (so important and so ignored in conventional development processes), easier to test and learn from, and easier to adopt, engage with and enjoy. For me, there is no limit to the application of design skills to the smallest or largest issues in the world. These skills can play a huge role in ensuring that the intellectual, economic, strategic, organizational, industrial and technological efforts of mankind will be effective. After all, as the great man said, “There is nothing made by human beings that does not involve a design decision somewhere.” n

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Meaningful Coincidence

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was sitting in a classroom in Columbus, OH, in the late ’70s watching and listening to an animated man with a gentle voice. It was memorable not only because his voice so clearly contrasted with his boundless intellect, but also because he was saying something that none of the other design profes-

sors had said in my then short tenure in design. He told us we were the luckiest people on earth but with a huge responsibility. “You are going to be designers, and being designers means that you can help people do just about anything,” he said. The suggestion was that we change the way people are treated in hospitals, offer new ways for people to think about their finances or even conceive of products that change the way people work. He was essentially telling us that with design we could help people approach any problem small or large.

He was promoting then what’s now been popularized as design thinking.

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By Shelley Evenson shelley.evenson@fjordnet.com Shelley Evenson is the executive director for organizational evolution at Fjord. Previously, she was a research manager at Facebook, a principal user-experience designer for Microsoft and an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Now at Fjord, Evenson’s past lives and passions for learning, service and technology converge by fostering in-depth learnings inside and outside the company.

What he said resonated with my Midwestern values and my upbringing. My dad was an engineer and naval architect. He taught me the power of design, if not as explicitly. He made me believe that if you were smart and persistent—a man or a woman (important in those days)—you could face any challenge with a solution driven by innovative design and realized by iteration in development (you just keep trying).

There weren’t many of us in the room that day, but if you were listening you walked away never imagining that design was simply about styling. For me it was a meaningful coincidence—I entered the room believing that you could design a solution for any problem and left with the added belief that you could also change the world through design.

In the decades that followed I’ve consciously designed my career. What follows are two examples where I’ve been designing for change.

Designing for Service I worked with and eventually married the man from that classroom who so inspired me about the breadth of potential for design. Fast-forward nearly two decades. I took him to the local hospital for a colonoscopy, and we left with the shocking diagnosis of colorectal cancer. It was simple health-care service with rippling effects.

In service, people interact with producers through touch points that, over time, define a journey that serves to facilitate the service experience. In the hospital many of the touch points were people with roles, such as the receptionist or the doctor who performed the service, but the spatial organization of the waiting rooms and even the chairs also played a part.

My husband, John Rheinfrank, was a participant in the colonoscopy service, but so was I. We co-produced the experience along with the receptionist, the doctor and a host of others who we met or who were working behind the scenes. Most colonoscopy service experiences have different outcomes than ours did, but each colonoscopy journey has the potential to touch off a larger one: a journey of treating cancer.

The experience we had that day and the series of experiences we had throughout his larger journey aggregated to form our impression of the hospital that provided the service—it influenced our brand perception. The people were caring and the hospital was a good facility, but no one had considered the design of the resources that would support us in our journey (and support others in their journeys too). Nothing could change the results of the procedure, but perhaps if the resources had been crafted more carefully, such an important experience could have been different—and better?

I began a quest to take on the challenge of designing for service by working with health-care professionals to craft better resources for everyday people in these kinds of health-care situations. Through the years, people in healthrelated situations were taught to sit back, listen and wait to be told what to do—they were de-skilled. They followed doctors’ orders, rather than tried to make sense of all the information they already possessed about themselves and how they felt. Medical language is specialized, and everyday people have limited access to it. The influx of technology, and more specifically the Web, started to change this. But I wanted to understand how we could skill people for sensemaking in health care—help them make models about what

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was happening and how we could support them in their conversations and in navigating such a challenging journey.

Working with an exceptional set of students at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to explore what it means to design for service, we started simple with CMU’s student health services. Then just a year later my students began to work with the Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation (CQII) at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). We worked on projects ranging from reducing no-show rates at a local clinic to optimizing the family and patient experience at a neurosurgery clinic and from emergency rooms to a cardiac catheterization lab. Although this course was in the school of design, student team members came from many different disciplines, including computer science, business and, of course, design. We added members of the CQII so that their specialized medical knowledge complemented the students’ human-centered design methods and their fresh eyes.

We quickly learned that because services are coproduced, service design requires skills and methods for intentionally providing the resources to integrate and choreograph systems of interaction with people and artifacts to create value, establish or reinforce a brand, and differentiate providers.

We combined the best academic research in service marketing with our design methods and defined service systems as involving five Ps. People, directly or indirectly involved in the service delivery, including employees, partners and customers. Products, as artifacts that facilitate interaction between the customer, any mediating technology and representatives of the service organization—the service evidence. Places, as the physical or virtual, synchronous or asynchronous settings for the service delivery.

Processes, governing the flow of activities by which the services are experienced over time. And finally, performance, the dynamic among the people and artifacts (associated with both the customers and the producers) to achieve synergy in value creation and perception of quality.

Eventually I began teaching the concept of servicedesign languages as a way of thinking about enabling co-production on the interface level. Here designers build meaning into the service interface (the people, products

and places that people interact with), and the service interfaces express themselves and their meanings for people in what is known in service as evidence. A diagram or timeline of what a patient might expect before, during and after a cardiac catheterization that a caregiver can use in a conversation with a patient or family member is an example of service evidence. By providing a common service-design language through the evidence across a journey, we watched people—both patients and caregivers—quickly learning to understand, use and engage in experiences associated with the health-care context.

We recognized the potential for patients to become fluent in their service interactions and begin to co-design and co-produce value in their experiences. Finally, we saw the awakening of providers/producers (such as UPMC) to this potential by embodying service values and establishing industry standards for quality, market presence and customer satisfaction.

Expanded Horizons It’s been several years since I left Carnegie Mellon University, but the work we did in health-care and service design has had rippling effects. Students have gone on to practice service design, some working with health-care institutions as clients and some working as insiders at institutions like the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC. Today I’m seeing needs similar to those that we spotted in health care nearly 10 years ago pop up in a whole host of other domains: financial services, education, government.

I’ve jumped back into the world of technology where we’re in the midst of a transition from designing software solutions to designing service solutions supported by software. I’m once again teaching design for service—as methods and ways of thinking and collaborating inside my organization and outside to clients in engagements, workshops and conferences. I believe that these ideas make for fluid organizations that can outlearn, outforget and outrespond to the competition. If we’re successful, you’ll be seeing intentionally crafted evidence in consciously designed service-design languages appearing in the industries around you—providing you with the resources for interaction so you can design for yourself. n

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Designing Better Public Services

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ecently I received a notice from the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) informing me that my driver’s license is due to expire. What the DMV likely didn’t imagine is that I was delighted to get the form letter: a real-life artifact from the agency I’ve long used to explain the

work of the Public Policy Lab, the nonprofit organization I lead. Imagine, I like to say, that you’ve gone to the DMV to get a new license or vehicle tags. Think about what it feels like to visit the office, the forms you fill out and how you’re treated. Then imagine you’ve gone to the Apple store to pick up the newest iPhone. A different kind of experience, certainly—but why?

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info@publicpolicylab.org

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By Chelsea Mauldin www.publicpolicylab.org n @publicpolicylab

Chelsea Mauldin directs the Public Policy Lab, a New York City nonprofit dedicated to improving the design and delivery of public services. Previously, she’s led a business improvement district, overseen government partnerships at a public-space advocacy organization and consulted to municipal and federal agencies. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the London School of Economics.

Service Design for Public Programs Many leading service and product companies are now enhancing their longstanding graphic, communications, environmental and industrial design programs with ethnographic research, co-creative design exercises with endusers, and the time- and systems-based holistic thinking about service touch points that characterize the emerging field of service design.

Over the past 10 years, these methods for successfully involving the viewpoints of end users in product development have migrated from design and engineering into public policy. By working with designers and design methods, government agencies better understand how a public service is used and experienced by citizens and by agency staff, and they can then apply that knowledge to create, test and refine service-delivery improvements at a low cost and with low risk.

Deeper engagement with the public’s needs and capabilities also enables policymakers to more productively generate citizen-centered

service responses and facilitate service activities co-created or even co-delivered by the public.

National and local agencies in the UK, Australia and Scandinavia have been at the forefront of public-sector service design, perhaps because those societies more widely embrace the government provision of social goods, from health care to job training. In some countries, publicly funded NGOs lead service-innovation efforts. Denmark’s Mindlab, for example, was chartered by the Danish federal ministries of taxation, business and growth, and employment to improve how those agencies serve the Danish public. (For an American analogy, picture if IDEO were fully funded by the IRS and the departments of Commerce and Labor.) One of the core missions of Sitra, an independent fund reporting to the Finnish parliament, is the development of “more efficient and human-oriented public administration.” In the UK, the Innovation Unit, the Design Council, the

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Apple is selling luxury goods and obviously has deeper pockets than any state’s motor vehicles department, but that’s not the only or the most important cause for distinction. Even a budget-conscious retailer like Costco delivers a better overall user experience than almost any public agency. What successful retailers have—that most US government agencies do not—are explicit methods for understanding and shaping their interactions with customers while also maximizing cost savings and operational efficiency.

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Young Foundation and a number of other public and private enterprises are dedicated to applying design and social innovation methods to improve public services and generate positive social change, while The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI) and others are doing meaningful work with public agencies down under.

The application of service design to public programs is new in America. The Public Policy Lab is the first US nonprofit to advocate this approach and provide access to these same service-design methods. Our interest isn’t just in making my upcoming trip to the DMV more enjoyable. We believe that improving the design and delivery of public services will help Americans build better lives.

After all, public programs are how our society invests in citizens: Head Start, Pell Grants, the GI Bill, food stamps, Medicare, Social Security. These services exist so we all get equal opportunities to pursue healthy lives, good educations, rewarding work and secure retirements. But too often public programs don’t feel very helpful or even very useful.

Nearly every US family benefits from public services, 45 million Americans get food stamps and 47 million receive Medicare benefits, but we often despise the government’s efforts. The American Customer Satisfaction Index provides consumer rankings from surveys of nearly 50 industries; in its federal government benchmarks report for 2012, government received a mark of 68.4 out of 100, the lowest score of all eight major economic sectors.

Poor service delivery isn’t just a hassle, it’s a tragedy.

It shortchanges our vulnerable populations, weakens economic mobility, misuses public funds and ultimately undermines trust in government and the social compact. We’ve ended up with subpar government service delivery because of underinvestment in service infrastructure—an unheralded analogue to the underinvestment in our roads and bridges driven by the same budget and ideological concerns—and because of an institutional discomfort with innovation on the part of many agencies. This conservatism is not unjustified.

Government should be tight with taxpayers’ dollars and wary of change that may have unintended consequences

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for vulnerable beneficiaries. But we have the methods and skills to do better, and we must. Rather than needlessly complex processes, wretched offices and wasted resources, we need clear, efficient services that help Americans improve their own lives and fulfill their individual potential, creating a stronger society for all.

How We Improve Public Services Here at the Public Policy Lab, we think the solution lies with the people themselves. When services are thoughtfully designed to serve the needs of their users and are engaging and easy to use, then we believe they’ll be more satisfying for the public and more effective and cost-efficient for government.

I mean “the people” in the broadest sense—not only members of the public, but also the public-sector providers of services. Our founding board members and I come from diverse design backgrounds. What we share is a wealth of experience working with government agencies and a strong belief in the capabilities, dedication and public spirit of policymakers and civil servants, most of whom work very hard under significant constraints and with limited resources.

From our founding in 2011, we’ve committed to partnering with government agencies as a powerful alternative to seeking solely private-sector solutions to social innovation. We’re reaching out to federal and New York City agencies to start, but we look forward to partnering with other municipalities and states in the future. The specific populations that the Public Policy Lab helps varies, depending on our partner agency, but our focus is on improving safety-net services for seniors, veterans, children, the disabled, and unemployed and low-income Americans. Currently, we’re working on projects related to affordable housing and public-school innovation.

In addition to institutional risk aversion, procurement hurdles and lack of R&D funding are significant constraints on government innovation. Still, we ask our public partners to pay “low-bono” program fees and share some hard costs, both to support our work and as a form of skin in

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Jennifer Rose for the Public Policy Lab

the game. (We seek individual, foundation and corporate sponsorship for further program support. Our first major project received a significant grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, a promising sign of donor interest.)

After we form a partnership with an agency, we assemble a working team of government staff and project fellows. For our fellowship recipients, we seek privatesector experts, from anthropologists and psychologists to service, graphic, environmental, user-interface and communications designers. Steeping professional service designers in the requirements and constraints of a public-policy environment, while also embedding agency staff in a design team, is crucial to our model.

A model public-sector service-design process.

We want all our team members to not just tackle the project at hand but also develop skills that Can Design Actually Improve Services? deepen their practice in public-interest projects to come.

Government may be slow to innovate, but it has Each project kicks off with a research phase. We evalamazing scale. By partnering with agencies, we’re able uate comparable agencies’ best practices and assess any to impact vastly more lives than we would by operating transferrable commercial innovations. We identify metrics on our own. for cost and time savings, increased customer satisfaction

Our first project, on affordable housing, begins pilot and other positive social impacts. And we dig deep into testing this spring. If adopted, our work will improve seruser needs. We investigate the preferences and current vices for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in the experiences of program stakeholders, including not just coming years. members of the public but also the front-line service providAs a condition of our programs, we require partners ers that represent the agency. to track results and publish findings. (Risk-averse agencies Once we complete our preliminary research, we are often reluctant to measure outcomes for political and generate possible improvements or new ideas for service cost reasons; that lack of data stifles service innovation.) provision and then rapidly prototype and iteratively test Sharing data and best practices is core to our publicsolutions, to gain insight into what works and what doesn’t. interest mission.

Then we create more realized visualizations and documenIn that spirit, I’ll be using my driver’s license renewal tation to support our findings; stress-test the service conas a case study! My need for a picture ID is pretty low on cepts to meet legal, budgetary and policy requirements; any scale of vital public-service needs, but I look forward and create pilot implementation and monitoring plans for to informing my speculative example of DMV service with our agency partner. true-to-life experience. n

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My Very Own Extremely Personal Slightly Anti-Innovation Rant

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Followed by a 10-Point Manifesto*

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By Marcelo Marer Mmarer@gmail.com Marcelo Marer is director of UX at Intel’s Mobile Communications Group, focusing on the development of new experiences and form factors for intelligent things. Previously, he was general manager of UX and design at the BBC, creating digital products and services for audiences in the UK and worldwide.

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nnovation. I have a difficult time with innovation talk. I also have a difficult time with the assumption that there is an exclusive

category of companies or people who are innovators (you know who makes the list, don’t you?) as opposed to everyone else. Even though we live in times of mind-boggling innovation speed, I wrestle with the angel of new ideas, with how we can consistently and unreasonably deliver on our creative ambitions, and lastly with the very idea that we can meaningfully talk about “it”: innovation.

That said, I’m not suggesting that innovation is something ineffable and better left to business-school academics, mad scientists, genial artists or, God forbid, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and consultants along the way.

Fundamentally a practice, innovation is what we do or try to do when we innovate. That means that after-the-fact narratives on innovation are at face value simply stardust memories that always fall short of any pedagogical mark without an implicit or explicit practical application right now.

We must trust, practice and verify, and answer the question “Does ‘it’ work for me/us?”

*While reading this article, I recommend you listen to Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit” in What’s Opera, Doc?

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Moreover, no matter how well-written the books on innovation or how compelling the TED talks, all innovation discourses are at best nice stories or, more strongly put, a bunch of baloney without us, the practitioners. We are key, the ones who put a proposed innovation pathway to test and verify whether its methodology makes us work better and delivers on the promise of innovative products and services today. Again, we must trust, practice and verify, and constantly answer the question “Does ‘it’ work for me/us?”

Of course, the same applies to this little piece you are reading. So, go through it. Doubt it. Love it. Hate it. Put it to a test of your reality.

In addition to answering the question “Does ‘it’ work for me/us?” we may also need a moratorium on innovation talk.

Just look at this cornucopia of random innovation-related terminology that we have been devouring. Transformation, paradigm shift, success, fail fast, agile, risk, autonomy, lean startup, diffusion, visionary, simplicity, early adoption, influencers, wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, thinking outside the box, 10 faces of innovation, new new, genius, collaboration, teamwork, Harvard dropout, Stanford Ph.D., visual thinking, emotional thinking, critical thinking, design thinking, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, evolution, revolution, history, science, engineering, mavericks, theory of relativity, quantum leap, Apple, Apple, Apple, Facebook, Google, iPod, iPhone, Apple again, the Gospel according to Steve Jobs, creation, imagination, creativity, breakthrough, white spaces, margins, and the list goes on and on. Don’t we need a break to clean the mind’s palate?

(Even if you must talk about innovation, please promise me, no more Apple talk! Do not ever mention an iPod or iPhone again—great products from an extraordinary company whose trajectory is unique and not repeatable. Repeat with me: “I, [your name here], do solemnly swear not to ever use Apple or Apple products as examples of innovation again!”)

After working in an agency-cum-digital consultancy, a broadcaster and a technology company, it seems to me that there is always a time when we wake up to the big “I.” Not innovation. Irrelevance. The fear that what we do, sell or enable might no longer be of use and ultimately that people will stop supporting us with their pocketbooks, credit cards and purchase orders.

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When faced with the prospect of irrelevance, organizations urge their best minds and/or best consultants to come up with new ideas, processes and methodologies that might engender the next (big) thing. Or perhaps someone may have gotten as a birthday gift one of Clayton Christensen’s books or CDs (which by the way I love to listen to on long flights) or went to one of Stanford’s Summer Intensives on design thinking. Yes, once we hear the gospel of innovation, it will save us (but not the competition, of course).

Innovation is the muse that organizations cling to when faced with the ghost of irrelevance.

Currently I find myself working on an innovative product that I feel proud of and that I believe will have market impact.

However, it’s not public yet, so I can’t tell you more about it.

That said, despite my inner certainty, I obviously don’t know what will happen once we get our innovative product to the marketplace, but I’m certain that my fellow travelers and I have an innovative product in our hands. So what are we to do? Just plow ahead, respectfully listen to the naysayers and avoid getting engaged in innovation talk as much as possible.

The great and innovative 13th-century Zen master and mystical realist Eihei Dogen said that “to understand the self is to forget the self.” I respectfully submit that I could substitute the word “self” with the word “innovation” here: to understand innovation is to forget innovation. You and your fellow travelers, aim at it and then forget about it. Good luck. n

Here is my own personal manifesto to protect myself from innovation talk. I submit it to you as a human being (not as an organization) and to other human beings who toil with you on the business of innovation.

1. Be generous.

Share your ideas and find great partners in mischief. Great partners disagree a lot, and yet they are fellow travelers who check the weather conditions together. You’ll need each other when the going gets tough, and chances are you will have challenging moments if you truly have an innovative product in your hands. (Just a side note here on getting new people on board: I do love great consultants, but I’m extremely unlikely to hire consultants with an innovation remit. Actually, I’m extremely unlikely to hire anyone whose job is to produce innovation.)

2. Be brave.

Stay away from team spirit and collaboration talk; they’re consensus-building machines that will likely water down innovative product ideas. I would take your genius over your team spirit any day; just don’t be a jerk.

3. Be open.

Challenge your first instincts; they often keep you trapped in your own existing preconceptions, which may act as barriers to true innovation.

6. Be talented.

Conduct participatory research with the people you think your product will benefit the most, but don’t trust users to solve your problems. You’re the expert.

7. Be agile.

But forget Agile (the software development methodology) if you need time to work out fundamental systemwide nuanced problems that are unlikely to be resolved through a methodology, such as Agile, that is optimized for binary codes and/or existing products that were built on binary codes.

8. Be disciplined.

Pick a process—it doesn’t matter which one. There are lots of prophets of innovation; they’re all good enough if you have something worth pursuing. You’ll need a road to go on. Remember that “method” comes from the Greek meta + hodos, roughly translated as a “traveling way.” Find one that suits you.

9. Be contradictory.

Trust your instincts. They’re right but not in the way you first thought they were: they’ll keep you going when the going gets tough.

If you have an innovative product in your hands, there’ll be internal contradictions, things you will work out over time. It’s fine. Really. Or to quote the poetry innovator Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

5. Be unpopular.

10. Be compassionate.

4. Be resilient.

Be especially leery of market research. If you think your product is truly new, market research will likely only show existing market trends and usages within the current ecosystem; market research has a gentle and yet cruel way of squashing great untried, fragile ideas.

It’s a just way of reminding yourself to be kind not only to your partners in mischief but also to yourself. As success is uncertain, innovation feeds the soul, and yet it can kill the spirit if you believe in your ideas too much. Have fun. Don’t be a stranger to the world out there.

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Playing with Doctors

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By Mary Beth Privitera, IDSA www.ucemergencymedicine.org Mary Beth Privitera is currently director of the Medical Device Engine at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and associate professor of emergency medicine, biomedical engineering and industrial design. She serves as faculty for and a member of the AAMI Human Factors Committee, is associated with over 30 medical-device releases, has authored several scientific journal articles about device design and is co-author of AAMI HE75.

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t started when I was working in the College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. I was an adjunct instructor of industrial design spending my days working with students and happily consulting in the medical-device industry. Randomness had me sitting in a meeting with a

group of biomedical engineers, and for better or worse, I joked that I would join them full-time. A few months later I was an associate professor of biomedical engineering running the university’s medical-device innovation and entrepreneurship program. And it just happened again. Now I find myself a faculty member in the University’s Department of Emergency Medicine; my clinical specialty is design. All patients are beautiful.

It makes sense for me to be here, but what would a nationally ranked department of emergency medicine want with a designer?

It’s the same reason it started the first residency program for emergency medicine in 1970.

“It makes too much sense not to!” said department chair Dr. Arthur Pancioli. The practice of emergency medicine is inherently creative. The environment can be chaotic, and there is no way to predict who will walk (roll, fly or be carried) through the door. The entire system has to be ready. The University of Cincinnati’s Department of Emergency Medicine runs three busy emergency rooms across the city with a combined patient volume of over 150,000 a year. It provides medical direction to over 95 percent of the city’s emergency medical services, and it operates Air Care and Mobile Care—mini intensive care units that fly and drive the sickest patients to the best doctors in the region. The department has about 100 physicians, two hospital CEOs, a world-class clinical research infrastructure, an observation unit, a hospitalist group, a neurocritical care service, and paramedic and resident training programs.

What a Playground!

Just looking around within emergency medicine, it is obvious that nearly every tool was designed for a different environment within the hospital, but for lack of better alternatives, the emergency physicians and nurses have had to adapt these tools for the chaotic, uncontrolled rapid-pace environment of the health crisis. Just take a laryngoscope. It is used to help place a tube in a patient’s throat to keep the airway open and oxygen flowing into the lungs. The current laryngoscope was designed in the 1940s to be used by an anesthesiologist in a sterile, well-lit operating room with a compliant, anesthetized patient. Do you think it works as well in the back of a helicopter flying at night with a drunk, vomiting and combative patient?

This is just one of hundreds (thousands?) of examples.

No one has been designing specifically for emergency medicine, and there are no devices to address the needs of every patient. Nearly every single physician has been jury-rigging their own medical devices for years. It’s called off-label use.

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Because designers like to clean up messy problems, the University of Cincinnati Medical Center (UCMC) has become my design nirvana. Moreover, the reality is that emergency medicine is a gateway to nearly every other area of acute care from the prehospital ambulance ride to admissions for inpatient services. Even when scheduled services go awry or a chronic disease takes a turn for the worse, emergency medicine is often left holding the pieces. It makes too much sense not to entrench design in this space.

So in collaboration with UCMC, the University’s Department of Emergency Medicine has created the Medical Device Engine and the first Medical Device Fellowship Program specifically for design graduate students.

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We built the Medical Device Engine with the explicit aim of helping a variety of organizations achieve their diverse goals, both internally within the university and externally with industry partnerships. We work with established medical-device firms to maintain or grow their markets by exploring product refinements, assessing new-product development initiatives or evaluating acquisition opportunities through advanced design research. We work with design and engineering firms, bringing them into UCMC to explore their use environments and to work with our designers, as needed, to serve their clients. We work with startup medical-device firms to help them take novel technologies through the development life-cycle process,

engaging anywhere in the process from conception to clinical trials. We have the capacity to enroll patients in clinical trials 24/7 and to conduct multicenter design research (contextual inquiry and usability studies) in the areas of therapeutic, diagnostic and discovery programs in addition to interventional and diagnostic devices.

We publish over 70 papers annually, and our physicians are leaders in the UC Neuroscience Institute and the Stroke Team. Quarterly we run device studios bringing together multiple specialties around a given problem, such as obesity, vascular surgery or women’s health. This primes our internal pump with great clinical problems worthy of solving and builds strong ties between partners in the colleges of design, engineering, medicine and beyond. Going the other way, we also bring new technologies developed by our partners in engineering, computer science and design to the attention of clinicians to explore technology-driven design opportunities.

One of our guiding philosophies is to focus on the patient, not the user. We do not practice user-centered design. That can seem a little odd at first—surely the user must be at the center of the product design? Our experience fundamentally challenges that notion; by focusing on the patient the best decisions are always made. While we care passionately about usability, we believe clinical impact is key. Because the physicians, nurses and clinical specialists who have a seat at the design table are trained in the design process, they keep us focused on treating the patient. Case reports and use scenarios are a norm in learning to practice medicine; when we use scenarios and procedure maps in our process, we focus on how the overall system might affect the care delivered and communicate in a language similar to this learning model.

Patient-centered design means that the entire design team has to listen to the debate within clinical decision making to define a design. Those discussions can be complex, and I find myself looking up a lot of medical jargon. I am also able to follow a patient’s course through the hospital and understand downstream implications of using devices in the early phase of care. (Imagine a patient with a heart attack lying close to death in the back of a helicopter trying to get to a hospital for surgery, but the helicopter can’t take

off simply because the flight physician has to switch over all of the IV drips.) Tracking clinical decision making and the patient’s journey to and throughout the hospital, and how a device impacts these, helps us ask the most important question: If a well-designed device was available, how would it improve clinical decisions and improve patient outcomes?

Living and breathing in a clinical department provides access to this kind of information. Additionally, having clinical staff sensitized to communicating the needs (both clinical and user) of a device helps bridge the divide between the design of the device itself and the clinical environment while offering a new tool in the design toolbox.

The Medical Device Engine could not exist without blending multiple disciplines. Virtually every patient encounter in the hospital is a cross-disciplinary effort. Understanding how the physicians, nurses and allied health professionals work together, their process and how they make decisions is the difference between incorporating those elements in a product design that truly makes a user satisfied and developing a tool that is pretty but useless. Just like in the process of design, in the process of care there is always debate. The reality is that decisions made by one discipline affect another. Recognizing tacit knowledge and simply paying attention are extraordinarily powerful. Discussion often evolves highly technical medical and scientific content, and a designer simply doesn’t have the background knowledge to participate; yet a design decision is in process.

The mutual respect we have created in emergency medicine for the cross-disciplinary process is provocative.

We encourage dumb questions. Most designers do not know how to practice medicine, and likewise most clinicians have no idea how to design and develop a medical device.

Working together and learning from one another creates an

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environment that benefits from everyone’s perspectives. If you’ll allow me leeway, most designers perpetually look for multiple answers (perhaps not settling on one); engineers almost always seek an answer (even if it is not the optimal one); and physicians look for the right answer (where sometimes “the opposite of good is better,” says Dr. Jordan Bonomo). The disciplinary appreciation we’ve built balances the design teams and promotes good decision making.

Having everyone working together under one roof with a common mission simply makes too much sense.

Unintended Consequence My evolution to conducting design research in a crossdisciplinary space does not come without consequences.

Sometimes my job is to make my colleagues and friends look bad, so we can design a new device. There are always implications, and despite our best efforts to conduct observational design research while pretending to be a fly on the wall, we simply can’t. We have had to come up with multiple ways of starting the conversation that does not

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insult someone’s knowledge, skills or efforts. We have to ask questions and point out areas of weakness in design and manage the impressions made to improve both device design and patient care. Fortunately, within the practice of medicine, there is considerable effort to improve outcomes, and my colleagues accept this as a necessary consequence of trying to make things better.

The most frustrating consequence, however, is not unintentionally insulting my colleagues. It is deciding what to wear in the morning. I work in what sometimes are three different worlds all on the same campus at a very collaborative university. I have two offices, a medical device war room located in the hospital, a design cave on the main campus, a little lab dedicated to making things that are really tiny and full access to the medical center. The amount of collaboration in my world continues to grow, both in-house and with our industry partners and across the design, engineering and medical colleges. Every day I appreciate the knowledge and talents of those around me who I am fortunate enough to work with and learn from. n

By Drew Smith dsmith@lextant.com Drew Smith is a director of insight translation at Lextant, an ideal experience firm. He works with the industry’s leading companies helping to uncover and communicate user insights to foster a deep understanding of the customers’ desired experiences and provide a strategic vision for the business.

Avoiding Communication Breakdowns

Bridging the Gaps in Innovation UserCentered Design

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am always fascinated to watch people explain what they do. You’d expect it to be an easy task since we spend such a significant portion of our lives working. And yet when someone asks “What do you do?” the facial expressions of those listening reveal how effective our response is, from the furrowed brow of

confusion to the dulled eyes of boredom. Such looks are signals that there is a breakdown in understanding.

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These moments are not unique to conversations about what we do; they can occur anytime knowledge is being shared: when a doctor discusses a prognosis with a patient, when an IT support tech explains a computer issue to an employee or when a sociologist explains a behavioral theory to a designer. Communication breakdowns can have significant consequences, such as emotional turmoil in the case of the patient, utter embarrassment in the case of the employee or a flawed solution in the case of the designer.

These breakdowns are occurring too often in the business world as well, especially when it comes to innovation.

Designers, with our ability to abstract complex ideas and navigate ambiguity, can have just as much impact facilitating communication and understanding during the development process as we can fueling the conversation with ideas.

Breakdowns during Innovation These breakdowns during the development process are often caused by the gaps that exist between people, be it with their knowledge and expertise, the experiences they’ve had, the perspectives they bring to the discussion or the language they use to communicate. There are many moments when these breakdowns can disrupt the development process and cause unneeded tension between the various stakeholders. A familiar instance of this can occur between the user and the development team. A less commonly acknowledged, yet equally consequential breakdown, can occur between the members of the development team itself. Both types of breakdowns present unique opportunities for designers to serve as translators and facilitators.

There is no denying that users are playing a larger role in the development process these days. They are helping ensure that more meaningful products are brought to market that address their needs and expectations. However,

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as users are introduced into this process they bring with them different languages and styles of communication. The challenge is that they don’t necessarily speak the language of design or in a format that directly translates to design criteria or product opportunities, but rather through stories of experiences. Buried within these stories are rich insights that are often concealed within seemingly irrelevant tangents and unreasonable ideas that are not readily accessible to the average observer.

When properly understood and identified, these insights can provide the necessary understanding and inspiration that can lead to breakthrough innovations. However, when these insights are misunderstood or misinterpreted, they can cause the development team to question the value of the user’s perspective or lead them down the wrong path—a path that may not only cost them time, effort and resources, but may also prevent them from arriving at a successful solution.

Imagine the following account from a user: “So just about every day as I’m about to leave for work, I am frantically scouring my house trying to find my car keys. It stresses me out. I waste so much time looking for them, and I end up being late for work. People are starting to get the impression that I don’t want to be there. It’s embarrassing.

I know I should just put them in the same place everyday, but I can’t seem to do it. I’m just not that disciplined. I would love it if I had some sort of alarm that I could put on my keychain that could help me find them. That would be amazing. I could focus on getting ready and just walk out the door each morning without even having to think about where they are or spend the time looking for them.”

In this story there are a lot of things going on, and it is easy to get caught up in the fact that this person wants a keychain alarm. The obvious solution is to develop some sort of alarm, or maybe one variation better: a GPS tracking device that can lead the user to the keys in the event that the

alarm is inaudible. However, it’s not how this person solved the problem (envisioning an alarm) that’s the true insight, it is why they want one in the first place. As a designer, I used to find it difficult to not immediately start trying to solve the problem. This often caused me to lose the bigger picture. In this case, the experience that this individual wants to have is to walk out the door each morning without having to think about where their keys are or spend time looking for them.

An alarm will not help them achieve this. Sure, it will help them locate the keys a bit more quickly, but an alarm will still require extra time and thought.

When communicating with a user, it is critical for anyone on the development team to take off their problemsolving hat for a moment. Once this happens, it enables us to identify the drivers behind what users want or dislike, so we can begin to develop solutions that are more meaningful and more innovative.

A second type of breakdown in communication and knowledge sharing occurs when there is a gap in the knowledge, expertise and perspectives among the individuals who make up the development team. This is becoming more common as more organizations begin to leverage cross-functional teams to solve complex problems. These cross-functional teams provide immense value to the process of innovation, but with each new discipline introduced to the team comes a nuanced language, varying domains of expertise and unique perspectives—the quantity and complexity of which can disrupt communication.

Just a few months ago, some colleagues and I were conducting a workshop with a large cross-functional team consisting of engineers, designers, marketers, product planners, managers and executives. During this workshop, an engineer explained a technology that could be leveraged and how it might improve the overall customer experience.

After a few minutes of explanation, you could glance around the room and see the confused looks. The only ones who

fully comprehended and nodded along in agreement were the other engineers. It wasn’t that this individual wasn’t concise or articulate—quite the contrary. The problem was that he was speaking as an expert to a room full of nonexperts.

It was as if he was speaking a foreign language.

As he finished, I found myself trying to deconstruct what had been explained and began throwing out abstract metaphors that might foster understanding. At first there was some resistance to what I was trying to do, as if I was oversimplifying something that in its nature is complex and therefore should remain complex. However, when complex concepts or ideas arise, it is important to create a common understanding or foundation before layering on complexity or detailed terminology.

So there I stood fumbling around for potential metaphors amid some puzzled looks. But once we identified one that worked, you could see the light bulbs turning on for people. Everyone began to understand—certainly not at a technical level, but at a conceptual level. From then on, people began using the metaphor as a vehicle to expand upon the idea or challenge it. This conversation prompted a strategic discussion that has led to some significant internal changes within the organization. Looking back, I hate to think that we may have not arrived at the place we did simply because of a challenge sharing knowledge between disciplines.

Knowledge is a basic necessity for innovation to occur and is often the foundation that helps it succeed. Whether we find ourselves communicating expert knowledge within a cross-functional team or knowledge about the users for which we are designing for, large gaps can often disrupt or derail the development process. It is important to ensure that knowledge is communicated in a way that is accessible to anyone and understood by everyone, so we can benefit from the diversity of knowledge and perspectives being brought to the table.

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Building Bridges Over the years I have found that the mindset of the designer is well-suited to bridge these gaps and foster understanding.

Designers have a knack for navigating ambiguity, relating to multiple points of view, simplifying and abstracting complexity and communicating both visually and verbally.

Designers often have the ability to deconstruct and abstract information in ways that resonate for individuals with varying knowledge, expertise and perspectives. It is similar to how a parent might explain a complex social construct to a young child, such as how money works. The vast gap in experience and knowledge between a parent and child might suggest a higher likelihood of confusion; however, parents often have an innate ability to recognize this gap and reframe the conversation in a way that’s very different from how they might communicate with another adult. In these explanations, you will notice the absence of conversation shortcuts (such as acronyms and expert terminology) and the use of abstract metaphors. It’s no surprise that we find designers using these same techniques. We are trained to bring to life ideas and concepts that exist only in our imagination. We have learned to communicate them in a way that anyone can understand, because if we are

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unable to do so even our best ideas will go no further than the sketchbooks in which they were envisioned.

This ability to communicate knowledge that designers possess, although often overlooked, is as important to innovation, business and society as the creative ideas designers are more commonly known for. There is so much more to innovation than simply developing ideas, and innovation is not limited to the development of products and services.

There is a great need for individuals to help facilitate these processes, foster communication and help identify the meaningful connections that are essential to any form of design and development. Designers can and should fill this role; after all, who is better suited to promote and institutionalize design thinking than designers themselves? n

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By Tony Golsby-Smith www.secondroad.com.au

Tony Golsby-Smith is the founder and CEO of 2nd Road Australia, a strategic innovation consultancy that pioneers the use of design thinking in solving complex organizational problems. His firm specializes in third- and fourth-order design—which is the application of design thinking to services, strategy, game-changing innovation, business models and industries.

The New Horizons of Design

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he boundaries of design are being stretched beyond the traditional. Once design occupied a small territory that was reserved for aesthetics and the cosmetic beautifying of products; now it has broken out into foreign lands once dominated by accountancy and commerce, and design

thinking has become the cool new art of prestigious management schools. One example of how design thinking penetrated the unlikely territory of a large organization over a decade or more demonstrates that it is design thinking, not design practice, that is being stretched to new horizons.

Shaping a New Social System The client was the Australian Tax Office (ATO), and the events took place during an extended consulting relationship 2nd Road Australia had with the organization between the early 1990s and the early 2000s.

Importantly, our clients were senior management, not middle or functional management. We worked with the commissioner (the head of the ATO) and the top three levels of management below him. We were not designing graphics on the annual plans or designing a website. We were applying design to an organization’s major directions and reshaping not only the organization itself but also the entire national taxation system.

Two questions arise here. First, why was a major economic organization like the ATO interested in such extensive change, and second, what attracted it to design thinking?

During the late 1980s, the ATO’s business model began to collapse.

For half a century it had been the centralized processing house for all Australia’s taxation returns; while this offered apparent control over the tax system, it condemned the organization to an unsustainable model of in-house processing and controls.

Thankfully, its leaders confronted this challenge and decided to reshape the business around self-assessment. In essence, they committed the organization to becoming market-facing, not technocentric.

This would prove to be a decision with far-reaching consequences. Within this new paradigm, the ATO realized that it faced a world of wicked problems and that external stakeholders (i.e., the taxpaying community) would determine its success or otherwise—not just its technical competence. In this mindset, senior management was open to new thinking

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and problem-solving methodologies. First, they embraced the learning-organization methods popularized by Peter Senge and then design thinking. Both methodologies were attractive, but design seemed more practical and relevant.

Leaders Experience Design Thinking Following the early move to a market-based logic, the ATO decided to reshape its structure around markets rather than around functions. We worked with the senior leader to design and set up the first major part of the organization called Withholding Taxes—in effect, business taxes—which was responsible for collecting 70 percent of Australia’s tax revenues. This undertaking was clearly not an exercise in industrial design or any other area of traditional professional design— rather it was a design thinking task. It involved inventing a new structure, not analyzing an old one. It was a case not of improvement but of innovation.

So we had to turn these leaders into designers. We did this by a process called strategic conversations—in essence, a fast-tracked design workshop that enables senior leaders to apply high-level design thinking to strategic problems. Most approaches to strategy are highly analytic, but we believe that real strategy is much closer to design than analytics, an idea first argued by Jeanne Liedtka. Leaders have to conceive and shape a new thing—and only they can judge how good it is. This task is closer to design than quantitative analytics. We run these workshops with design facilitators who take the leaders on a journey of Socratic dialogue. The facilitators ask critical questions that guide the inquiry of the group, but the group actually has to make the argument and the outcome through dialogue. As they discuss, they are exploring, speculating and synthesizing—in effect, using language to make new worlds. Our designers then collect this dialogue and fill the walls with visualizations that capture the emerging ideas and arguments.

This experience created a strong body of senior managers at the ATO who had tasted the art and the joy of shaping a new social system—in fact, of being designers. Thus they had discovered a creative side to their managerial selves, and they had learned that there was no right answer to how they should organize their people. Most pertinently, they had

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learned two things that are intrinsic to design thinking: comfort with ambiguity and designing the logic of the organization from the customer backward.

Around the same time, the government instituted a Tax Law Improvement Project (TLIP). The tax law is the main product platform of any taxation administration. It defines the conditions of the market and the obligations of taxpayers. But this product had become complex and unapproachable by ordinary people; hence, it had become the domain of legal experts, not the human beings it was governing. This technical arrogance threatened the usability and the credibility of the tax system. We worked with the lawyers who were redrafting the legislation to design a human-centered model for the revised legislation. This pushed design beyond graphics into high-end information design, which was fed by plain-language principles and people trained in English literature. Importantly, we introduced the user into the process. This was a breakthrough.

In association with a team from Carnegie Mellon University led by Richard Buchanan (who is now a professor of design, management and information systems at Case Western), we introduced protocol analysis as a way to map the cognitive pathway of a reader trying to understand this complex information. We designed alternative drafts that expressed provisions in different ways so that we could test our design hypotheses. The changes were dramatic; we redesigned legislation around people and their comprehension processes.

Comprehension is a complex process—especially when the information is complex and covers a specialist field like tax law. Hence, we designed the information at several layers; we began at the sentence level, with grammatical rules for simplicity, and we embellished this with scenarios and examples.

However, comprehending a major body of information requires more than grasping sentences—the real cognitive experience occurs at the level of architecture (what is the overall structure of the information?), navigation (where do I find what I want?) and conceptual acquisition (what are the meanings of the categories in this system?).

To design this level of the information, we ventured into diagrams and other large-scale innovations, such as introducing purpose clauses at the start of each provision.

TLIP was restricted to a communication scope, but later the government initiated changes to the substance of the law in A New Tax System (ANTS). This was the largest change to the tax system in Australia’s history. It left the ATO with the task of designing the administrative systems that would make the new laws work. The organization seized the opportunity to reshape many key features of the taxation system to bring it into the 21st century. With the commissioner, we created a Corporate Design Forum where about 20 major changes (e.g., new tax file numbering systems) were debated and designed in one-day workshops by the senior people in the organization over a two-year period. These Corporate Design Forums were open, facilitated workshops where ambiguous matters were visualized and prototyped. Here the objects of design were not posters or toasters but large-scale administrative systems. The task was a design task, not an analytic

one, because there were no pre-existing subject matters for us to work on; we were not trying to uncover a problem that lacked definition. The subject was indeterminate and could take any shape that we forged.

A System That Human Beings Can Use Despite these advances, not all leaders in the ATO advocated design thinking or believed in its central importance. The needs of the user were still subordinated to the technical mastery of the organization—until the biggest aspect of the new tax laws hit a major roadblock that caused outcry among the public. The key feature of the new tax system was a shift to a goods and services tax. This was a politically significant move and a very controversial one, so the government wanted its implementation to go well. The ATO was faced with a huge task to manage the change and had to perform under tight

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time pressures to get the system working for the new financial year. It involved layers of administration ranging from law to administrative arrangements to computer systems and new forms. All seemed to go well until the public actually tried to complete the forms. It proved confusing and difficult—and many small-business people made big mistakes in their returns and found themselves to be noncomplying taxpayers facing significant penalties. Like a bushfire, the public reaction was swift and deadly; radio talk shows and newspapers were full of complaining taxpayers who saw the new system and its form—the Business Activity Statement—as a symbol of Big Brother and an unsympathetic government. If this was a minor system, this reaction may not have mattered, but it was not. This was the public face of the biggest change to the tax system in decades. The leaders of the ATO and Treasury found themselves at the center of a public storm—and their political masters did not like this.

The commissioner asked us to diagnose the customer experience, and then also to diagnose what the organization had done wrong. He specifically wanted an external consultancy to conduct the review since he felt that his people would be too defensive. His department had spent over a million dollars on market research in the form of focus groups as part of the development process, but clearly this had led them nowhere. We explained that this was not the same as design research, where we would investigate the customer’s experience, not just their opinions—and in particular, we would use observation-based research to find out what a day in the lives of the taxpayers was like. Most importantly, the commissioner gave us a full day to conduct a workshop with his top 20 people and himself.

We chose to do this by immersing the leaders in two personas and their pathways through the system. The climax of the day was an exercise in which we had the participants try to fill in the Business Activity Statement for one of our

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personas (with her permission, of course). The result was cathartic; not one of the top leaders could complete her form!

This confronted them with a dreadful truth; they were developing systems that human beings could not use— and that were threatening the public’s confidence in the whole system. From that day, the organization’s leaders saw the customer experience and design as key strategic elements, not just as tactical expedients.

This sea change was then institutionalized into the practices of the organization. We set up a Design Centre, and the ATO began to develop a design capability that was led from the top of the organization. Since that day, the ATO has invested tens of millions of dollars in building this capability.

So over a decade, design thinking penetrated this huge government agency. During that time, we convinced them that design was a core capability of the ATO—they were designing huge administrative systems, not just managing them. The object of their design was not artifacts or communications but experiences mediated by large systems and informed by significant political intent. Importantly, no design school on the planet taught anyone how to design tax systems, and thus there were no readymade design consultancies or practices to fall back on. Unlike Apple, the ATO could not turn to an IDEO or a frog design for cool design. The only approach was for us to bring them design thinking that could be applied to large intangible systems that only they as tax experts could design. This meant a large-scale education and dialogue program that educated people about design—but more importantly, that positioned design thinking at the top of the organization, not as a functionary role of middle management.

Buchanan calls this area of stretched design third- and fourth-order design. These new horizons of third- and fourthorder design map out a broad landscape where design thinking offers a new art of problem solving that complements the analytic approaches that dominate problem solving today, and where the objects of design move beyond graphics and physical products to include such intangibles as information and knowledge, systems and interactions, experiences and identity, and communities and cultures. n

By Jan Moorman jan.moorman@projekt202.com As a principal UX design researcher at projekt202, Jan Moorman works with clients to understand their business goals and product requirements. She is responsible for generating research-based insights to inform and guide design as well as conducting studies to measure and track progress toward achieving established design goals.

Leveraging the Kano Model for Optimal Results

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ou are looking at a list of 18 proposed features for your product. Flat out, 18 features are too many to include in the first release of your product. You need to identify an optimal subset. Your gut instinct is none of the 18 features are game changers, and you’re getting push back on

investing in up-front generative research. What do you do? You might try what many Agile teams and userexperience professionals are doing: Apply a method that first emerged in Japan during the 1980s called the Kano Model, which is used to measure customers’ emotional reactions to individual features.

We uncovered the Kano Model while researching ways to measure delight. The more we looked at how this 30-yearold approach was being applied in market research and by Agile teams today, we sensed a lack of rigor. We went back to the original publications, including translating Kano’s original paper from Japanese, to ensure we were applying the method correctly. We also evaluated the different statistical analysis methods proposed in a 1993 publication from the Center for Quality Management. Net result: We are confident in our approach to using this method.

Kano identified five different types of emotional reactions to features: attractive, one-dimensional, must-have, unimportant, undesired.

Kano Basics In 1984 Noriaki Kano disagreed with the then-accepted theories on retaining customer loyalty by removing defects and embellishing popular features. Kano theorized that loyalty was far more complicated and devised a study to support this idea. Kano’s work was adopted and extended by quality-management (Six Sigma) experts in the US. Then he tested his theories in two studies that each surveyed 900 participants. (This doesn’t mean you need to have such a large sample size in your studies). His results substantiated his hypotheses. So what were his theories?

2. One-dimensional features result in satisfaction if fulfilled and dissatisfaction when they are not. This linear relationship between feature sophistication and emotional response is primarily true for product qualities, for example, ease of use, cost, entertainment value and security.

1. Attractive features trigger feelings of satisfaction and delight when present, but users are not dissatisfied if the feature are not included. Attractive features are unexpected, address previously unmet needs and are key to generating positive buzz about products. The best way to discover these types of features is through generative research.

3. Must-have features are ones that customers expect the product to contain; leaving out must-have features causes dissatisfaction. However, there is a limit to the emotional benefit gained by embellishing must-have features; the ROI tapers off.

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4. Users are ambivalent about unimportant features; they simply do not care if they are included or not. The ROI for these features is low.

5. Including undesired features negates the positive impact of attractive and one-dimensional features, and including them yields dissatisfaction.

The Kano Model’s five emotional responses to features

Determining the response type from the Kano question pairs

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He visualized these as curves on a graph as shown on the upper left, where the y-axis is the emotional response and the x-axis is the level of sophistication of a feature. The intensity of the emotional response is driven by how fully present and sophisticated the feature is.

Kano theorized that customers’ perceptions of satisfaction change over time. Features that trigger delight today will, over time, come to be what all customers expect and request. Of the five emotional responses, the attractive feature curve morphs into the must-have curve. In addition, the definition of “best of breed” is constantly changing, impacting where a given feature falls on the x-axis.

Measuring Users’ Reactions We were eager to try out Kano’s ideas on our projects.

The basics are straightforward: explain or demonstrate a feature, ask the users how they would feel if the feature was present and ask them how they would feel if the feature was not provided or not as fully present. These positive/negative question pairs are related to two different points on the graph that determine what emotional reaction the user is experiencing for a given feature. The responses—I like it, I expect it, I’m neutral, I can tolerate it, I dislike it—are not designed to offer a simple rating along the emotional response scale but to elicit users’ expectations.

Kano also provides an evaluation table, as shown on the lower left, where the response to the first question selects the row in that table, and the response to the second selects the column. The intersection of the row and the column contains the emotional response the individual is feeling for the feature.

Quantitative results coupled with qualitative insights trigger powerful conversations with clients. But what if there is significant diversity in the responses? Simple answer: Filter by persona groups.

Not everyone reacts the same way to different features. In several studies we found that users’ reactions to the software’s core feature are a fairly accurate predictor of their reactions to other features. We also found that results of the litmus test aligned with the persona. For example, on one project we hypothesized that both the users who felt that the software concept was what they expected (must-have) and the users whose response to how much they liked it was directly proportional to how well it was designed/implemented (one-dimensional) were the users who would be the most likely to adopt the software. We called them first adopters. We also hypothesized that individuals who found the concept to be attractive, while interested in the software, would most likely delay purchasing until the concept was more mainstream. We labeled them late adopters. Finally, we believed that individuals who found the concept to be unimportant would not use this software in the foreseeable future. We labeled these users nonadopters.

When we filtered the results for the rest of the features by these three persona groups, we noticed differences in how the groups responded to some features. For instance, the first-adopter persona group was not interested in one of the features, which triggered negative reactions. This quantitative data grabbed the client’s attention. Since the first-adopter group was critical to ensuring the product’s adoption at launch, the client decided not to pursue the feature this group disliked.

To answer our initial question about which features to include, we constructed visualizations that enabled us to compare and rank user responses for all features.

To accomplish this task, we turned to the methods first reported in 1993 by the Center for Quality Management.

The report on the Kano Method (www.walden-family.com/ public/cqm-journal/2-4-Whole-Issue.pdf) compiled experiences and advances from a variety of practitioners.

Of the various methods reported, we recommend three. The first is a supplement to the Kano questionnaire itself (a downloadable questionnaire is available at www. businessmeccanica.blogspot.com/p/downloads.html). In addition to the two questions asked per feature, the user is also asked to indicate how important the feature is. This ranking is a nine-point Likert scale ranging from not at all important to extremely important. This additional measure,

Identifying persona groups based on response to key product features

Visualizing how persona groups vary in their responses to features

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suggested by John Hauser, helps focus attention on the most important results from the Kano study. The second method is a statistical analysis of Kano results that facilitates comparison of the results across different features.

Suggested by Bill DuMouchel, it enables calculation of the standard deviation and therefore perceptions of what differences are significant. Finally, none of the methods we read about provided a compelling visualization to grasp the Kano results for the feature set as a whole. We experimented and devised a visualization of the DuMouchel analysis. In this visualization, shown on the right, the stack ranking shows the set of features, with the potential for dissatisfaction on the left and the potential for satisfaction on the right. The ordering shows the features at the top that have the greatest potential for dissatisfaction if not included.

Many features have similar potentials for satisfaction on the Center for Quality Management analysis and delight in the Kano results. The conversation with the client includes tradeoffs, such as complexity and dependencies. In this manner, the results inform the decisions.

Making Decisions In relation to Kano’s graphs, the two categories that can trigger satisfaction and delight are the attractive features and one-dimensional qualities. Think about the most successful products on the market today—they emphasize these types of features. Apple has captured the hearts and minds of customers by investing in features that delight users. For example, laptop power cords with magnetic connections easily break away to prevent damage to equipment. This feature is definitely not a must-have functionality. In addition, Apple invests heavily in one-dimensional qualities of elegant design and ease of use. The question is, how are these game-changing features discovered? In a word: research.

One of the most exciting uses for Kano is supporting a dialogue with clients about the primary role of generative research in product success. In generative research we identify unmet needs and learn about potential user beliefs, goals and aspirations that are opportunities to make a difference and delight users. Investing only in the design of expected features limits the ability to win the hearts and minds of users.

As we learned by reading the translation of his original research publication, Kano set out to prove that customer loyalty cannot be earned and retained by simply improving existing features customers have come to expect.

The Kano graphs not only demonstrate why this is true,

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Ranking features based on satisfaction potentials

they can also be used to evaluate the ROI (in terms of user satisfaction) of improving existing features.

A current feature exists as a point on one of the reaction graphs. Increasing feature sophistication moves the point along this curve. The change in emotional response depends on the reaction graph this feature sits on. For example, enhancements to must-have features may pay off by reducing customer dissatisfaction, but the ROI for continued improvement tapers off dramatically. Knowing where a feature sits as a point on one of the five graphs enables analysis of the ROI for improving the feature.

The popular Net Promoter Score, a customer loyalty metric developed by Fred Reichheld, is the average number of users who promote a product minus the average number who discourage others from using the product. While useful in predicting the success of a product or service when compared to competitors, this measurement does not provide guidance on how to improve. Kano results, however, provide a method for understanding the contribution of individual features to the Net Promoter Score. Why? Customers promote products that trigger feelings of delight and satisfaction and discourage other potential customers from using products that are dissatisfying. Understanding how features contribute to these feelings of delight and dissatisfaction enables product managers to make smart choices to increase their Net Promoter Scores.

We recommend the following best practices when administering a Kano study: Recruit criteria to ensure that users truly represent the target end user; alternatively, group results into different persona groups based on the response to key product features. Perform statistical analysis, so decisions are based on confidence levels of significant differences. (We have used as few as 12 users and as many as 24.) Provide meaningful opportunities for users to experience—rather than simply read about features—and measure users’ reactions immediately after they experience a given feature. n

showcase

drama objectified The submitters pay for the publishing to this unjuried showcase.

“Environmentally friendly, online subscription-based, iconic water filter system.�

Soma Water Pitcher designed by Radius for Miko; www.radiuspd.com

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“Quality and functionality—truly the spirit of the Weber gas grill line.”

Spirit S-210 designed by CHOi Design for Weber Stephen Products; www.choidesign.com

“Turn up the heat in your neighborhood and grill like a pro!”

Hamilton Beach Professional – 2013 Outdoor Series designed by Metaphase Design Group Inc. for Hamilton Beach Brands; www.hboutdoorgrills.com

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“Decorating cookies just got more fun.”

Crafty Cookie Kit designed by Progressive International; progressiveintl.com

“From storage and preparation to cleanup, this cutter enhances the whole cooking process.”

Royal Prestige Food Cutter designed by CHOi Design for Hycite Corp.; www.choidesign.com

“The multifunction Transformation Chair can change into a child’s dining chair by reassembling its parts.”

Transformation Chair designed by Jeff Yi-Teng Shih, student at the School of Architecture and Built Environment, The University of Newcastle, Australia; yiteng.shih@uon.edu.au I N N O V A T I O N spring 2 0 1 3

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“Dominican-inspired ergonomic cookware

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designed to strike out poverty and empower women globally.

Pujols Kitchen Cookware designed by Metaphase Design Group Inc. for Pujols Kitchen; www.pujolskitchen.com

“Everything but the kitchen sink!”

Get-A-Grip Sink Tools designed by Scott Henderson Inc. for Casabella; www.scotthendersoninc.com

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“Mormedi has unveiled the key insights to develop an outstanding business-class seat experience.”

Business Class Seat Experience designed by Mormedi for IBERIA; www.mormedi.com

“EV’s redesigned pro-audio VBL conveys

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angular strength at an entry-level price point.

ZLX Portable Powered Loudspeakers designed by TEAMS Design for Electro-Voice; www.teamsdesign.com I N N O V A T I O N spring 2 0 1 3

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showcase

“Finally, a solution designed around the needs of the MVP—the athletic trainer.”

Medic XL designed by Tekna for Impact Athletic; www.teknalink.com

“Reveal your hidden nature.”

Flux Router designed by Whipsaw; whipsaw.com

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“Power is in the hands of the people.”

BoostTurbine designed by Whipsaw for Eton Corp.; whipsaw.com

“Bionic. Muscular. Helical. A monitor support arm bringing beauty to function.”

Monitor Support Arm designed by Worrell Design Inc. for Chief; www.worrell.com

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sig nposts

You Should Know Me by Now Adapt to my active behavior. I clicked on an ad or redeemed a coupon. Give me more. Propose other brands that yield that kind of savings profile. But please don’t bury me in 10-cent coupons for the house brand of soup that I have never bought and never will.

Adapt to my passive behavior. Have I ever redeemed one of those point-of-sale coupons that your grocery store dispenses? Do I ever open the emails you send? Figure that out and adapt.

Use the information you have. Don’t fill my inbox just because you have my email address. I took the time to open and consider this correspondence only to see that you are offering me a 20 percent discount to become a member when I already am one—thanks for nothing! Or worse, suggesting I buy a product that I already purchased from you.

Don’t try to be smarter than you are. My favorite and frequent online retailer processed a burst of orders for My Little Pony characters in the 2011 holiday season.

Despite my other activity throughout the year, my top recommendations for new purchases are still many variations of My Little Ponies! I can only conclude that my friend the e-tailer thinks I’m a part of a band of awkward rainbowloving men nicknamed “Bronies” who share an infatuation with the pursuits of these inspired little pink creatures.

Use free and widely known information. Like the calendar and the weather. What do I do at this time each year that is unique (like buy little-girl gifts at Christmas)? The Pony Castle (which I never bought) at the right time is a very valuable recommendation that I will thank you for.

Be a good listener. Instead of acting like a spy, act like you want a relationship. A good listener asks the right questions at the right time. But be careful, don’t ask me questions that you should already know the answer to. Do ask me about things I never do, like: “Hey, you never use those point-of-sale coupons; should I stop giving them to you? What would you like instead? Maybe a nutritional summary of everything you just bought? A comparison to how other people are shopping?”

The value of understanding consumers may not be measurable in short-term dollars and cents but will be over the life of a relationship filled with great experiences.

I will let you know if I don’t feel like talking.

—Alistair Hamilton, IDSA arh@designpost.com

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iStockPhoto

S

everal years ago I learned the inside world of retail customer intelligence and some of the methods stores use to gather information from shoppers, how they use the data and, even more interesting, how they would like to use it. What started as a salesperson’s good practice of knowing the customers, what they like, their kids’ names and anecdotes has turned into a marketing industry fueled by massive data warehouses and growing attempts to harvest as much information as possible. Marketers call this, almost euphemistically, customer relationship management, or CRM, and it has a huge impact on the design and user experience of many services and brands.

From a consumer standpoint, the visceral response to this attempt to have a “relationship” has been defensive: Don’t track me, respect my privacy, I have my rights, etc.

But similar to family, friends, coworkers and enemies, we do form relationships with our brands. Some brands we just love, and they get the spoils of that relationship: our loyalty.

Many, however, especially in retail, maintain a dull businesslike association. And some we don’t really want to be friends with at all—but have felt forced to, proving that we have a price. If you have handed over a loyalty card at the grocery store, you’ve agreed to sell your shopping history, combined with some personal information, in exchange for a “member price.” How does that make you feel?

The days of these businesslike relationships are changing. Consumers are starting to understand how smart software can be—and with that are developing a savvy set of expectations. They want real value for their data. They want to be known once again.

Unfortunately, most marketers seem unable to deliver the value you would expect given their access to almost unlimited computing power, open channels of direct communication with consumers and seemingly boundless knowledge about consumer behavior. This should lead to a more bountiful relationship for all.

To leverage the abundance of data, here is a set of principles that is very achievable using contemporary computing power, data mining and communication tools. These should not be considered magical. In fact, if you find them obvious, you are already expecting more of the software that pervades (or invades) our lives.

LEVERAGING THE POWER OF IMAGINATION

If you are holding in your head the next big idea for a new product but you’re struggling to get it off the ground, then you need the IdXtractor3000! Riding off the success of our original, the 3000 brings an improved, non invasive approach to virtual mind reading technology. With over 25 years of continuing results, we’re confident that the IdX process can take your concept from fantasy to reality just as you imagined. Define – Discover – Design – Develop – Deploy.

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