Innovation Summer 2013: Design as Strategy

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

summer 2013 速

Unsung Resources, see page 30.

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

Advertising Karen Berube K.Designs 3511 Broadrun Dr. Fairfax, VA 22033 P: 703.860.4411 k.designs@cox.net innovationads@idsa.org

Contributing Editor Jennifer Evans Yankopolus

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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

Patrons of Industrial Design Excellence investor

design as strategy 26 Introduction

by Mark Capper, IDSA, Guest Editor 28 Using Culture & Trend Research to Develop Design Strategies for Global Markets: Unsung Resources

by Michael Trump 32 Expanding Design Research Beyond Ethnography: Teaching Strategic Design

by Frank M. Grunwald, L/IDSA 36 How Much Does Your Organization Weigh?

by John R. Latham

IDEO, Palo Alto, CA; Shanghai, China;

features 16 San Jose State University’s Design Entrepreneurship Class: D-SHIP

by Gerard Furbershaw, IDSA and Scot Herbst, IDSA

22 Industrial Designers in the 21st Century: Masters of the Experience

by Fernd van Engelen

53 Defining and Measuring Creativity in Product Design: Searching for a Yardstick

by Susan Besemer and Philip Thompson

40 Problem Finding or In every issue Problem Framing?

by Katherine Bennett, IDSA 4 From the Editor 43 Strategies for Bridging Business and Design

by Søren Petersen 46 The Collaboration of Design and Research: Blue-Ocean Innovation

by Mark Capper, IDSA

Iain Crockart

50 What’s Your Design Strategy? It’s Your Story.

by Paul Earle

QuARteRly OF the iNDuStRiAl DeSigNeRS SOCiety OF AMeRiCA INNOVATION DeSIgN AS STrATegy

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by Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

6 Design Defined

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 Cultivator Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL Continuum, Boston; Los Angeles; Milan, Italy; Seoul, South Korea; Shanghai, China Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH Dell, Round Rock, TX 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

by Richard Beien

Stanley Black & Decker, New Britain, CT

7 Book Review

by Scott Stropkay, IDSA 8 Business Concepts

Teague, Seattle, WA

by Michael Westcott, IDSA

10 A Look Back

by Carroll Gantz, FIDSA

14 Beautility

by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA 58 Showcase 64 Signposts

by Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Cover photo: © TongRo Images/Corbis

Summer 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. 2, 2013; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

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.

Advertisers’ Index c3 2013 IDSA International Conference 1 Fiberlok c4 Lunar 15 MIT Press c2 Samsung 9 Stratasys

from the editor

Head before hands.

That’s how I define strategy.

J

ust in case that’s too simple: Strategy is a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim; the art of planning and directing overall operations and resource expenditures.

Still I always say that when it comes to design, or design strategy, you can never be too simple. That’s not to say that strategy isn’t sometimes prescriptive. Here’s part of the strategy we use to publish this journal: No later than Nov. 1 of each year, develop three themes for the following year’s spring, summer and winter issues.

(The fall issue is always dedicated to awards.) Themes should be explored with the input of the Advisory Council (AC), Publisher (PUB) and Managing Editor (ME). Relevant topics should be considered that are of current interest to industrial designers and have not been covered in the past two years. The Executive Editor (EE) is responsible for writing a paragraph on each topic that will be used to solicit authors and interest advertisers, and will be published in the annual editorial calendar.

To me strategy is the idea that we center where we are now, create the goals and dreams we see in the future and then plan how to get there. That said, strategy also needs to be flexible enough to take advantage of those unforeseeable opportunities and unpredictable changes in conditions that require, to use a football term, calling an audible. That’s when a quarterback sees something amiss with the play that’s phoned into his helmet and in the moment calls a new play out loud, an audible—responding appropriately to what the circumstances dictate.

I never expected that a strategy issue of Innovation would be guest edited by the talented design strategist Mark Capper, IDSA, an accomplished research expert, author and founder and CEO of Kompas Strategy. When he and I

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reconnected after working together almost a decade ago, I jumped at the chance to work with him again and called an audible on the theme and timing for the summer issue. We at Innovation are very grateful for his contributions; Mark is a terrific combination of design and strategy, which is also the definition for competitive advantage in the future.

Today we live in a world where the previous advantages of a marketing or distribution strategy have been effectively neutered. The Internet informs and reveals empty promises and charlatans. Products can no longer be pushed at people. And products that do not consider the user first can no longer be pushed to a shelf or store because addressing user needs defines success or failure. So in effect the idea of a marketing or distribution strategy (marketing strategy statements, strategic roadmaps, corporate strategies, product launch strategies, innovation strategies, etc.) is bumping headlong into the idea of design strategy: strategy that is simple, sometimes prescriptive but always flexible and which addresses, foremost, the user need. For as Charles Eames once famously said, “Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”

From the Harvard Business Review on strategy: Today’s dynamic markets and technologies have called into question the sustainability of competitive advantage.

Under pressure to improve productivity, quality, and speed, managers have embraced tools such as TQM, benchmarking, and reengineering. Dramatic operational improvements have resulted, but rarely have these gains translated into sustainable profitability.

It goes on to argue that: Gradually, in the last two decades, tools have taken the place of strategy. As managers push to improve operations on all fronts, they move further away from viable competitive

© 2013 Eames Office, LLC (eamesoffice.com)

Charles Eames’ Venn diagram of the design process, made for the exhibition What is Design?, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris 1969.

positions. Michael Porter argues that operational effectiveness, although necessary to superior performance, is not sufficient, because its techniques are easy to imitate. In contrast, the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match.

Since design can be one of the most difficult tools to imitate and quantify, it makes sense that in turn it becomes the enabler of truly effective strategies.

By the way, it looks like I’ll be able to employ more design strategy in thinking about this journal in the next two years. From the executive editor’s job description: “The

executive editor of Innovation serves a two-year term and is appointed by IDSA’s chairman. The chairman may appoint the executive editor to serve an additional two-year term if desired by both parties.”

It worked out that this is the case, and I am privileged to stay on. I am looking forward to two more years of working with Innovation’s exceptional team refining, progressing and following the strategy we have developed for the journal.

By the way, here is the last part of Innovation’s strategy: “For each issue, including the fall, write a brief (750–1,000 words) introduction to the theme.”

Please enjoy this issue.

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

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design defined

DEsign = Passion H ow can we adequately define design? It means different things to different people.

Assigning a definition to something can, limit its potential, but I will not limit the potential of design. Instead, I want to strip down to its root: passion. Passion is something I have seen during my time in school as well as in my exposure to the greater design world.

Passion is what unites design and takes it to the next level. Passion is a game changer.

I am a 26 year old who just graduated from Purdue with a degree in industrial design. I’m four years older than my fellow graduates because while attending college for the first time I sensed that my life lacked something: I wasn’t creating. From the first moment I became involved with design, however, I knew something was different. Design gave me the opportunity to develop ideas, and everyone I talked to related to that—not just designers. Everyone feels this need to innovate. When I discovered design, it felt as if a missing puzzle piece had dropped into place. Being surrounded by both the people and the tools of this community has shown me the overwhelming potential of design.

Living without passion, before I discovered design, helped me to truly recognize it.

Passion is what ultimately changes your life; it is a driving force. Every soul needs it; the body craves it. Passion is desire, the forbidden feeling. It’s seeing something and knowing you can’t live without it. You experience emotions you can’t explain; all you know is something inside of you feels fulfilled. This is passion. This is what fuels you, what keeps you going when there is nothing else. There are no tangible thoughts; there are no rational feelings; there is nothing to break down or understand. Passion is the force behind design, and my four years at Purdue have shown me that successful design cannot exist without it.

Design is a journey guided by passion. It’s clear from the first moment if the journey has been faked. While many industries may focus solely on the outcome, design values each step of the process. This attention to every step is what keeps designers in the moment, allowing a product to develop naturally. In school we are taught to embrace the story that becomes evident in the final product. There will always be final deliverables, but the journey is so important that we dedicate books, websites and entire years to developing and exploring it.

How do we know the journey will pan out? How do we know we can trust ourselves to end up in the right direction? We don’t know, we can’t know; that’s the beauty of design.

We can, however, tap into our incredible wealth of passion to give us strength and courage.

Passion fuels the most basic instinct we need as designers: the instinct to push forward.

When we have nothing else to move forward with, passion is there to pick us up and carry us until we have the strength to carry ourselves. And even then, passion waits as a safety net to catch us if we fall.

Where do I see design going? What is the outcome of a life dedicated to this potentially limitless field? The reward is the greatest there can be: the opportunity to change people’s lives. Design has a way of enticing even the most hidden emotions and creating a feeling that is more powerful than words can describe. All the greatest products evoke an intense emotional response that creates a unique bond between product and consumer. It’s this emotional response that can be used to connect with and drastically change people. What other industry has the opportunity to change so many lives? Design is the game changer. It is the part of the equation that has the potential to change everything. This is how I see design.

iStockphoto

—Richard Beien, industrial design student, Purdue University, rvbeien@gmail.com

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book review

Quiet P

ay attention to the quiet people in your life. They are the ones most likely to have unique insights and make creative breakthroughs. Why? Because they prefer to spend their time thinking deeply about subjects they find truly important. Their self-worth and self-esteem are tied to the value they create by solving problems that matter. Do you know what our culture calls these people? Introverts.

In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain writes about the one-third to one-half of the population whose biological and social makeup contrasts with the extroverted character traits our culture celebrates. By studying this (until now) unheralded population, she reveals the secret power of introverts and makes those of us who wish we were more extroverted feel better about our aversions, our roles and our contributions.

Cain begins the book by describing a shift in our national identity away from the 19th-century culture of character, where the ideal self was serious, disciplined and honorable, to the 20th-century culture of personality, where because we moved from communities of people who know us to workplaces staffed with strangers, we began to focus on how other people perceive us. Our pursuit of inner virtue was replaced by a focus on outer charm. We became a society of people who value those who demonstrate fluency and power in social settings.

Exploring temperament from both nature (evolution, genetics, neuroscience) and nurture (experiences, behaviors, culture) perspectives, Cain makes compelling arguments that until now our survival depended on collaboration between extroverts and introverts, and that our modern preference for extroverted behavioral traits and the relative anxiety we exhibit around introverted behaviors have consequences on personal, business and societal scales.

Although Cain did not write this book with a business or design objective in mind, her extensive exploration of learning and working styles exposes a range of popular business myths that we designers contend with every

“Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it.

”

—Susan Cain

day. For instance, she debunks widely held truths about creativity. She provides scientific evidence that disproves the value of group brainstorming as the best way to produce the most (and the most creative) ideas. She challenges the value we place on teamwork, and, perhaps surprisingly to some, she cites evidence that suggests charismatic leadership is less valuable than quiet leadership styles when working with proactive colleagues.

Of course, all good or bad relationships are built on either intended or unintended interpretations of interpersonal interactions. Cain describes the range of extrovert to introvert relationships from both perspectives and in doing so she helps you gain insights into the relationships you are a part of. The empathy she demonstrates for all parties is especially evident in her descriptions of the behaviors, communication needs and coping strategies of quiet kids. Her perspectives on our interactions with these children, including ways to offer support and guidance, is particularly powerful.

Cain also addresses how introverts struggle with themselves, in particular the pressure to mask introverted behaviors, the need to be true to one’s nature and the desire to be effective in one’s pursuits. Here, too, she assembles expert theory and scientific evidence to discuss subjects like integrity, authenticity and conscience, and the theory of fixed character traits and free traits that enable introverts to act like extroverts in service to important work or people they love.

Quiet is illuminating, inspiring and comforting all at the same time. If as a creative community with more than our fair share of introverts we are to achieve our full potential, we should understand ourselves better than we do, and we should increase our ability to help others find their voice.

Quiet is a good way to start.

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

I N N O V A T I O N summer 2 0 1 3

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B usiness Concepts

Designing Education T he silos and conventions of college, secondary and primary education have not evolved fundamentally in hundreds of years. It is no secret that the education system is under great pressure to change. A recent McKinsey paper points out that “only six in ten students at four-year institutions are graduating within six years today.

Most employers say graduates lack the skills they need and tuition has risen far faster than inflation or household earnings for two decades.” (A painful truth I am experiencing firsthand.) This is leaving many with tremendous debt and even more questions about the value of a college education in the 21st century.

It’s time for a redesign.

MOOCs & The Design Challenge: New Business Models The recent excitement around Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has yielded little beyond hype presently, with a few notable exceptions like Salman Khan’s Khan Academy, which has turned classroom learning upside down by delivering video lectures at home and using the classroom for interactive coaching and workshop-style applied learning that makes teachers more valuable and the peer-to-peer learning connection more personal. (That sounds a lot like a recipe for design education as well.)

Underneath his thousands of online lectures is a beautiful software platform that school systems are now using to track progress and improve learning performance. A perfect combination of the promise of high-tech, high-touch experiences we have always heard about.

The opportunity for design and design thinkers is to help create and facilitate new business and delivery models for education. There are interesting experiments going on globally in graduate design education. I had the enjoyable opportunity to share some thoughts and facilitate a workshop at a recent Harvard Business School (HBS) conference on design. Yes, you heard right. HBS just hosted its first design thinking conference called Harvard By Design, and it was organized by students.

Students Driving Change: Redesigning the MBA Another conference in New York City, called the MBA Innovation Summit, was also designed and hosted by the design clubs from Yale, Columbia and Wharton, which

brought together business leaders, students and faculty from across the country.

There are many progressive academics all around the world who have been studying and prototyping next-generation MBA curriculum. From Cambridge to Copenhagen, to Cincinnati to China, design thinking is rapidly becoming a part of MBA education to help generate more creative leaders who are comfortable using both sides of their brain to drive business. And in this time of disruption and rapid change, what the world needs is more creative leadership across the board, especially in Washington, DC. Let the future happen to you or take the opportunity to create it.

The role of employers in redesigning professional education is already attracting huge investments by global corporations, and the need for schools to rethink their business models has become urgent. To quote André Dua from McKinsey & Company, “The cost–value equation will shift so rapidly in the years ahead, and employers will develop so great a stake in the new system they help design, that millions of students will probably flourish without ever setting foot on traditional campuses.”

Educating Design Thinkers for the Next Economy It is this very challenge that has driven Design Management Institute to embark upon a research program to map the needs of design management, and design thinking and graduate design education in the future through a series of conversations with students and thought leaders from business and education. These conversations have started this month, and we invite you to join or host a conversation by emailing me at mwestcott@dmi.org. I will share a discussion guide and an overview of the program to date.

We also invite you to join us for our first DMI: FutureED Summit in conjunction with IDSA’s International Conference in Chicago on Aug. 20, 2013. There, together, we will paint the landscape of graduate design education and document the hiring needs that businesses have for more creative leaders in the future.

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

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

Pioneer Design Educators from the ’Burgh

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uring World War II many design firms contributed to military or government war-related projects rather than consumer goods, which were, in most cases, no longer in production. With many men in the armed services, industrial designers entering the field were greatly diminished. Corporations were hard pressed to find recent graduates as design school enrollment in universities fell precipitously. At Carnegie Tech in 1943, for example, there was only one industrial design graduate, a female.

Graduation levels did not return to normal until 1947.

Part 2 Strengthened financially by years of huge military contracts, industry began planning for the anticipated postwar consumer boom. In 1943 Donald Dohner established a product and package design office, Dohner and Lippincott, in New York with J. Gordon Lippincott, a fellow faculty member at Pratt. Alexander Kostellow (right), who had dominated the industrial design program at Pratt since his arrival, replaced Dohner as supervisor of the program, while Dohner remained a professor.

Dohner, in his new firm, conceived, initiated and edited a regular section in Interiors magazine called “Industrial Design,” promoting the new field. By 1954 the articles would evolve into Industrial Design magazine. Sadly, Dohner would not witness this. He died in a tragic accident on Christmas Eve 1943; his partner continued the articles.

In 1943 Peter Müller-Munk, FIDSA was working with Dow Chemicals promoting new uses of plastics and the modernization of the kitchen. His office soon became so busy that he resigned his position at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) in 1944. Robert Lepper could have become head, but he hated administrative duties and the pragmatic aspects of design. So Richard I. Felver, a Pittsburgh industrial designer, was hired to head the program and handle the nuts and bolts of design, while Wilfred Readio led the foundation program of basic design principles, and Lepper continued his role in the theoretical and philosophical aspects.

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That year the American Designers Institute (ADI) introduced an “Educational Program for Industrial Design,” which set forth a four-year curriculum guide that became a model for many post-war programs. As an ADI committee in 1943, Kostellow, László Moholy-Nagy and Dohner had developed it, soliciting the advice of John Vassos, FIDSA, Ben Nash and George Kosmak, FIDSA. After the war in 1946, industry returned to consumer manufacturing, and demand for industrial designers skyrocketed. Under the G.I. Bill, returning veterans filled campuses to overflowing. By 1949, there were 30 programs in industrial design, many using the ADI curriculum, but CIT and Pratt were still the best known. That year, I began my study at CIT. Four of the original faculty of 1934’s “Option 3” industrial design program were still there. Felver continued Dohner’s practice of taking students to visit manufacturing plants and requiring designs based on production methods.

Fred Clayter was still the shop instructor for models.

Lepper, a tall, thin and gangly man with a trimmed mustache, was the most enigmatic, and a bit egocentric.

He described his own analytical method in an interview with Jim Lesko, L/IDSA (published in the 1997 article “Industrial Design at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1934–1967” in the Journal of Design History, http://jdh.oxfordjournals. org/content/10/3/269): “I would say [to students] go out … and buy an object from Sears or wherever… start from scratch. The cigarette lighter was a great favorite… it was a case of starting with definitions. See, well everyone knows a cigarette lighter is made to light cigarettes. Like hell it is! It is a hand-sized object made to ignite and maintain a flame. … My point is, you don’t understand it unless you convert it into a definition. If you define it like that, you really understand it.”

All Lepper’s students remember how he would always conclude his description of their assignments. Lighting a cigarette, lowering his head, peering directly at them over his glasses and through his eyebrows, and smiling broadly showing his teeth, he slowly and deliberately spoke in his low bass voice: “Are…there…an…y…quest…ions?”

Courtesy of Pratt

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a look back

In 1952 Mary Wallis (Vredenburgh) Gutmann entered Pratt as a freshman. She told how she encountered Kostellow in her 2012 unpublished essay “The Foundation Year at Pratt”: He was a short, plump man with keenly peering eyes under seriously bushy eyebrows. He had a shock of wavy salt and pepper (mostly pepper) hair with one thick curly fore-lock that often fell down over his brow. Kostellow was always impeccably attired in suit, vest, classic shirt and tie.

Known for his short temper, he often exploded with, “Hell, dammit,” an expression that was rather shocking in 1952.

The Foundation Year was demanding—the classes were demanding, and Mr. Kostellow’s course was one of the most demanding, but to me it was the clearest. You could say he really got his point across, and it was often an abstract or philosophical point.

He gave his lecture course in Memorial Hall, the main auditorium, and he was always alone on the stage.

Behind him were arrayed a series of tackboard panels with sketches on large sheets of newsprint. These pages were firmly affixed to the panels by means of push pins with long shanks, one in each upper corner. This setup was more than important, it was crucial to the production. The sketches had to stay in place, no matter how they were pulled on and yanked down.

The sketches were our attempts to meet the assignment from the previous week. They were turned in before the class and a student monitor checked off our names. As I remember, no more than ten each were submitted. The monitor pinned them up on the panels, exactly as specified.

When Mr. Kostellow decided that he was ready to crit the work, he began at the left side of the stage making comments as he went along. After discussing the first sketch, he would rip it down, revealing the one underneath, until all the sheets were on the floor. Then he would go on to the next panel and so forth until he reached the other

side of the stage and had looked at hundreds of sketches and was scuffling through a sea of crumpled papers.

Once in a while he would pick one up and crumple it further into a wad and throw it down again. At other moments, he would pick up and smooth a page flat and say something complimentary about it. This was one of the lessons—a valuable one for inexperienced, would-be artists—“Don’t fall in love with your work,” he would say, trampling everything underfoot, stamping his shiny shoes. “Mean, I hear you say under your breath? No, mean is not to criticize. There is too much competition out there for softness.” Alexander Kostellow loved students and he loved their success.

Another day Mr. Kostellow spent hours describing a gangster and his girlfriend. He went on and on about their clothes; the gangster’s stance in his pinstripe suit with wide, glossy lapels, his shiny, pointy-toed shoes, his extra-broad shoulders and narrow waist and watch chain and hat. A vision of George Raft emerged after a while. The girlfriend’s clothing and hairdo were also dissected in great detail.

Then, when one would think he had exhausted the subject and the listeners were beginning to wonder what this could have to do with design after all, he swung into a graphic and clear description of the gangster’s car—a Chrysler, perhaps, or a Cadillac, with amazing fins and paint job.

The students I called the “car boys” sat up. Any kind of car interested them.

Suddenly Mr. Kostellow stopped—in mid-flight.

Throwing his hands wide he said something like, “Do you know what the gangster and his moll thought about themselves and their car?” (A pause while he looked around the silent room…) “They thought they were beautiful—beautiful, fashionable, and enviable. They might have used the term ‘high style’ had they known it. The style we see as garish and cheap they would see as gorgeous. That is their aesthetic. So, are they wrong? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Is their idea of beauty valid?”

Corrections: The image on pages 12–13 in the spring issue was misidentified as “Crankshaft.” The mural, created by Robert Lepper in 1940–42 for the Mining Industries Building at West Virginia University, is untitled.

In Part 1 of this series, credit for much of the information about the history of the Carnegie Institute of Technology was based on a 1997 article by Jim Lesko, L/IDSA, “Industrial Design at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1934–1967,” published in the Journal of Design History (http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/3/269).

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After the Foundation Year, we declared a major. Few women went into Industrial Design—there were three in my year—but Mr. Kostellow encouraged us to do so. He wanted women in the department and I was accepted even though my grades were not the top. It was said that Pratt accepted nearly one-third more freshmen students than it intended to keep and certainly many dropped out at the end of that first year.

Gutmann also described the faculty at Pratt, which included Rowena Reed, FIDSA, Kostellow’s wife, teaching 3D design, and Robert Kölli, a designer: That first year was wonderful to me. And so was the second, when I became a student in the Industrial Design major. The faculty were outstanding, the work was difficult— I was by no means at the top of the class—but the reward in knowledge was thrilling. My classmates were a mixture of mature people, some of whom had BA, BS, even MA degrees already; some were engineers, others artists. There were two other women in ID, I assume that all of us were recruited by Mr. Kostellow, as I was.

I left for a summer job (1954) with a stack of books Mr. Kostellow had assigned for vacation reading. In September I walked back on campus, rested and ready, having read all but Anatole France. The first person I met told me that Alexander Kostellow was dead. That was it. Dead. A heart attack, a light switched off. He was gone. The balloon exploded. I went back to my apartment, stunned. It took a while to get used to the idea. I had looked forward to the year with such intensity. There was a memorial service but I couldn’t go. It was too much.

“Adhocism is not only an informative and witty book, but an ultimately humane one.”  JOHN HOLLANDER, POET

In Part 3 of this series, Gutmann describes what happened at Pratt after Kostellow’s death, as the story continues to follow the careers of Reed, Müller-Munk and Lepper, the remaining pioneer educators from Pittsburgh.

—Carroll Gantz, FIDSA carrgantz@bellsouth.net

The MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu

INNOVATION summer 2013

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beautility

What Matters:

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n the continuing pursuit of what matters, I made up the word “beautility” to encourage more beauty by giving people a new way to think about beauty’s value. We are designers, so if more consumers demand beauty, it improves our status—besides making a more beautiful world. But now I realize that this may be the wrong strategy. (Ask Larry Keeley what happened to “innovation” and “design thinking.”)

Designers can corner the market. We are the kings and queens of beauty. We have the secret formula; it’s our intellectual capital. I’m reading this book from the 1980s called Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, who created a “ground breaking body of research on the ethical business applications of the science of influence.”

He describes procedures and attributes that “work unconsciously to produce their effects on us, making it unlikely that we could muster a timely protection against them.” The book has a lot of sales tricks, such as giving small gifts (like a cup of coffee) improves the chance of selling (like a car). It’s easier to sell a $200 sweater to a guy after you sold him a $900 suit than the other way around. It’s easier to sell something that’s associated with something good (like a celebrity like Ed McMahon) or connected to what we are already familiar with (like Mickey Mouse). But the most apparent attribute is physical attractiveness. Cialdini points out the obvious: If something looks good, we want it. Conversely, if something is ugly, we don’t want it, and if we really need it, then it has to have other really compelling attributes to overcome our repulsion (like price, function or a whiny kid).

We don’t like to be tricked into buying more than we want, but being associated with attractive things is good.

Beautiful things make our lives nicer. Beauty strokes our

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ugly physical senses, emotions and intellect. Aesthetics is physical as well as intellectual. Aesthetics is a “branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty.” It is scientifically defined as “the study of sensory or sensory-emotional values.” Philosophers discuss it—but designers make it!

Beauty may be only skin deep, but it is what makes the biggest impression on us. We buy a book from its cover. It may be only visual—but sight is 80 percent of a human’s perception. It’s not hard to see if someone is beautiful or if it’s a beautiful car (our notions may not be universal—the highway is pretty dull). We usually do agree when it’s a beautiful day. And although we might have variable criteria for what is beautiful, the components are widely accepted: the combination of form, color and materials that sing together. It may smell good, too, but beauty is “in the eye of the beholder.” The ideal handsome man and beautiful woman have evolved through the ages faster than Moore’s Law. Beauty seems to be fashionable, therefore not really founded in some kind of objective biological scientific basis (i.e., an economic measure). Just because the ideal is in flux doesn’t mean that the quest is not essential. Circumstances change the equation. A couple of juicy worms taste really good to a starving person.

So humans may not point to the same beautiful things, but everyone sure knows what’s ugly! Ugly seems easier to define. It’s an unpleasant or unsightly appearance; it’s repulsive, objectionable, menacing or bad-tempered. It’s bad. It stinks. There seems to be a biological source, a survival-based need—poop stinks because it can make you sick. Wounds are disgusting because they are lifethreatening. Ugly wallpaper can make a room uninhabitable.

Classic Edsel at the Henry Ford Museum

“Beauty and folly are old companions.”

—Benjamin Franklin But ugly is important. Ugly makes beauty look better. Spring in England is the most fabulous time: flowers blooming, warm sunny days. But really it seems so glorious because all the other rainy cold days are so horrible.

Contrast. We need ugly to make beauty. Can we have good without bad? So the fastest route to more beauty may be more ugly. Maybe that’s folly. Benjamin Franklin said, “Beauty and folly are old companions.”

The Beauty and the Beast maybe relative—but beauty is eternal. Plato told his pupils, “When he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen—only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of

virtue, but to true virtue (because he is in touch with true Beauty).” Then with a little tip of his toga to us designers: “The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.”

What if everything was beautiful? Does more beauty only dilute the effect? Flood the market? Lower the price?

It’s complicated. Ugly can be beautiful. Look at Barbara Streisand and Johnny Depp. Punk rockers, grunge and the 1958 Buick or 1957 Edsel (OK! Not the ’58). It’s not as easy to find an illustration of something ugly as I thought! What about the ugly duckling? Is cute a subset of beauty? Where does the kitsch monkey wrench fit in?

Maybe using the word “beautility” to raise the value of beauty or making more ugly things so the good stuff will look better are clunky strategies. The easiest way is for us designers to just get to work making more beautiful stuff.

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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By Gerard Furbershaw, IDSA and Scot Herbst, IDSA gerard@lunar.com n scot@herbstprodukt.com

San Jose State University’s Design Entrepreneurship Class

D-SHIP

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ost industrial design students are aware of only two career paths.

They envision themselves becom-

ing either consultant or corporate designers.

Although these traditional career paths can be highly rewarding, we believe it is important for students to also consider using their design skills to become entrepreneurs—design entrepreneurs.

This page: The funding goal for the Vers 1Q Bluetooth Sound System was $10,000. David Laituri, the founder of Vers and designer of the 1Q, raised $196,000 on Kickstarter in 30 days.

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Right: Daniel Ash of Bauhaus playing an RKS guitar. Rock ‘n’ roll artists, such as Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, Daniel Ash of

Bauhaus and Don Felder of the Eagles, quickly adopted the RKS guitar for its extreme playability, fresh look, ergonomic controls, tone and sustain.

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Gerard Furbershaw is one of LUNAR’s founders and its vice president of licensing and investments. He launched and chaired the Association of Professional Design Firms’ Royalty and Licensing Summit series and he has taught design entrepreneurship at the USC School of Architecture’s XED executive education program and San Jose State University’s industrial design program. n Scot Herbst is the creative director and partner at Herbst Produkt. In addition to collaborating with a broad list of partners, including Crate & Barrel, CB2, Home Depot, Clorox, Facebook, and numerous small brands and startups, Herbst is a faculty member at San Jose State University’s School of Art & Design, and is a member of the advisory board at Olive Inc.

In the past, starting a product manufacturing business was difficult and painful. Raising money, getting publicity, protecting intellectual property, lining up manufacturing and fulfilling orders were formidable challenges. Due to a confluence of six factors, it is now a lot easier to become an entrepreneur. Rapid prototyping services enable budding entrepreneurs to inexpensively prototype their ideas. Crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, provide quick feedback on the feasibility of a product concept, access to funding, the ability to develop a customer base and critiques of the product design. Product reviews from a myriad of specialized blogs and Web magazines, like Gizmodo and Engadget, can generate invaluable publicity for a new venture. The US Patent and Trademark Office’s provisional patent gives entrepreneurs a quick and economical way to protect the functional intellectual property they have developed. China Inc. makes it possible to cost-effectively manufacture almost anything and within a fairly rapid timeframe. Lastly, turnkey e-commerce solutions, such as Amazon’s Webstore, offer stand-alone platforms that integrate payment processing and shipping. These factors enable a design entrepreneur to more easily transform a compelling product concept into a viable business.

The Pros Speak at D-SHIP The D-SHIP class at San Jose State University (SJSU) is structured to expose students to the possibility of design entrepreneurship by teaching them the prerequisite skills and introducing them to design entrepreneurs who have experienced success in a wide variety of product categories and on a continuum ranging from royalty-based entrepreneurship to company acquisitions. A number of designentrepreneur guest lecturers, which vary by semester, share their war stories with the class. They are powerful role models for the students, letting them see that a

designer can succeed as an entrepreneur. A handful of guest speakers are also invited to talk about complementary topics that are essential to the creation of a successful product company.

Although the design entrepreneur has a great deal of sophistication in the use of design, learning about other business-related areas from brand to manufacturing strategies is critical to ensuring the success of a new venture. The essence of a company is its brand. Just as design is the soul of a product, brand is the soul of a company. Melanie Robinson, the founder of the Los Angeles-based brand consultancy Fluid Figment, has spoken about the key aspects of brand. She informed the students that it was essential for entrepreneurs to identify their core values and beliefs, create connections with people who care about the same things they do and tell their stories. Robinson explained that the core components of brand strategy are what we believe, why we exist, where we are going, how we will get there and what we will do. She also talked about brand promise, a stated or implied pledge that creates customer expectations and employee responsibilities.

In addition to envisioning the brand, the entrepreneur must also envision the business model. Gary Cantu, a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Brightline Medical, has taught the class about business plans. He explained that the key components of a business plan are market size, distribution channels, competitors, risks and the company’s team. He also talked about the different types of company stock, the concept of dilution and the use of bootstrapping to retain as much company value for as long as possible.

With the brand defined and the business plan roughed out, the entrepreneur needs to create an organization that can deliver the brand promise. Jeff Smith, co-founder and CEO of LUNAR, has presented a holistic view of business, proposing that there are six Cs an entrepreneur needs to

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Clockwise, starting top left: Smart Design’s idea of sliding a bicycle handlebar grip over a conventional potato peeler became the catalyst for launching the hugely successful OXO brand.

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Jim Gentes, founder of Giro, talks about his strategy of giving helmets to professional cyclists and triathletes.

Greg LeMond’s use of a Giro aerodynamic helmet in the winning of the 1989 Tour de France by a mere 8 seconds helped put Giro on the map. n

Its premium design-centric brand plus multiple utility patents positioned Astro Gaming as an attractive candidate for Skullcandy’s first acquisition.

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Herman Miller Capelli stool. The original goal of designer Carol Catalano was to create a piece of furniture she could fabricate in her garage workshop.

address: who the customers and competition are, what differentiated capabilities a company possesses, how to implement a competitive cost structure, and what social consciousness and culture need to be instilled within the company.

Because laws create the framework companies must work within, an understanding of the legal environment is critical to an entrepreneur. Joe Hustein, an industrial design graduate, electrical engineer and attorney, has discussed what intellectual property is, the ownership of intellectual property and the different categories, such as provisional and utility patents, design patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. He also covered the liabilities design entrepreneurs face, particularly intellectual property infringement and product liability, and the use of legal entities to avoid personal liability.

At the center of a product company is its manufacturing capability. Alan Cook, CEO of Lucky Litter, has shared his recommendations regarding offshore manufacturing

strategies. He suggested that the right manufacturer can be found through one’s network or sourcing agents or Alibaba (like Google for manufacturing in China). He chose to go to China in search of a manufacturer himself. He found that by working with a small manufacturer, he had its top people available to him. Although manufacturing costs are much lower in China, he warned the students that many earlymorning and late-night calls and emails are required to keep the project on track.

Learning about aspects of the creation of a company provides the students with a strong theoretical business foundation, but hearing nine industrial designers who have become design entrepreneurs tell their war stories puts everything into context. Two SJSU alumni, Jim Gentes and Jim Blackburn, founders of Giro and Blackburn Design, have shared their experiences in the bicycle helmet and accessories markets and talked about their acquisitions by Easton Bell Sports. Brett Lovelady, IDSA, founder of Astro Studios, has recounted another acquisition story. He spoke of the design and development of Astro Gaming’s professional-grade video gaming products and the company’s eventual sale to Skullcandy.

Tom Dair, IDSA, co-founder of Smart Design, and Carol Catalano, IDSA, founder of Catalano Design, have shared their learnings from the royalties’ domain. Smart Design was involved in launching the hugely successful OXO brand, and Catalano with the iconic Herman Miller Capelli stool.

Dave Laituri, founder of Vers, has discussed his company’s sustainability orientation and the Kickstarter campaign for his 1Q Bluetooth Sound System. Like Vers, RKS Guitars found a niche in the music industry. Paul Janowski, the former director of operations at RKS Design and RKS Guitars, has spoken about the impact their design had on high-profile rock ‘n’ roll artists.

Although the need to create value and profits are a universal theme from the design entrepreneurs, broader societal implications of social entrepreneurship are also addressed. Surfer and former head of design for O’Neill in Santa Cruz, CA, Eli Marmar has taken the class on an

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The D-SHIP Curriculum Referred to as “The Roadmap for the Design Entrepreneur,” the D-SHIP curriculum creates a toolkit for anticipating and managing the progression of events that a typical venture will encounter. The process evolves each week, building to a crescendo with the culmination of a final emotionally charged sales pitch using the Kickstarter platform with a mock campaign and video. The topics discussed during these lectures cover activities almost any design entrepreneur would need to engage in to successfully launch a product in the market.

The Discovery Phase n Preliminary product definition n Qualitative research methods n Survey Monkey analysis n The value of research and engagement Marketing Principles n Customer identification and segmentation n Ethnography and market definition Making It n Sourcing and vendor selection n Manufacturing, supply chain, logistics and coordination The Retail Jungle n Selecting and working through retail channels,

margin structure and sales Pack It Up n Retail packaging and presentation (the less-is-more approach) Pricing n Product costs, retail pricing and margin requirements Selling n Traditional methodologies along with the new sales

frontier: leveraging social media The Big Pitch n The product launch n Simplifying the message n The art of storytelling n Leveraging new media and video in creating an

emotional connection

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emotional deep dive with his clean water initiatives through startup footwear company Freewaters. The company just reached a milestone of topping $1 million in annual sales, proof that good design + good karma = good business.

Possessing limitless amounts of talent and a variety of skills, the design entrepreneur has no codified blueprint. However, one common thread does exist that binds every successful design venture: passion. With his boundless energy and consummate business creativity, Dario Antonioni, founder of the Los Angeles studio Orange 22, has immersed the students in a world of opportunity from furniture manufacturing to intellectual-property licensing with an undeniable passion for the entrepreneurial journey.

With a diverse cross section of contributors, stories and paths to market, D-SHIP is predicated on the basic thesis of nimble creativity: That is, rather than a singular linear approach to launching a product, the design entrepreneur should express as much creativity in the product development process as in the physical design of the object. Each venture is unique to the circumstances, the design entrepreneur’s skills and variables that exist in an unpredictable and constantly changing environment.

Staying flexible, bootstrapping the startup costs, revisiting the design attributes, exploiting creative sales and social media outlets—all of these strategies provide a degree of freedom and problem solving that each venture will encounter on very different terms. And yet with the absence of a formal playbook, a vibrant science does underpin the various disciplines needed to better ensure product success. We developed a 16-week curriculum that reveals the process from napkin sketch to store shelf (see sidebar).

Kicking Off a Kickstarter Campaign With the rapid emergence of crowdfunding as an alternative form of fundraising, understanding how to best use it has become essential. For the midterm, students present their research on what makes a Kickstarter campaign successful. They then select a product to design and prototype based on their passions or the market opportunities they have discovered. For the final, they mock up a Kickstarter project page to reflect their product pitch and create an accompanying video. At that point, the students have a Kickstarter-ready project.

A number of students have developed projects with commercial feasibility. They have kept these projects under wraps until they will have the time to cultivate them. One team has launched its project on Indiegogo.

The Future of Design Entrepreneurship Most industrial designers have fantasized about designing their own products and getting them to the market. The confluence of rapid prototyping, crowdfunding, blog product reviews, provisional patents, China Inc. and e-commerce have provided the infrastructure to easily turn these fantasies into reality. In addition, successful design entrepreneurs have become role models. The combination of this new infrastructure and role models is fueling the interest in and passion for design entrepreneurship within our profession. Classes like D-SHIP are essential to providing students with an understanding of the tremendous opportunities to be found, the skills to transact in this arena and the confidence that an industrial designer can succeed as an entrepreneur. n

Top: Pursuing a triple bottom-line (people, planet, profit) model, Freewaters donates a portion of its time and profits to digging and maintaining clean wells in Africa and beyond.

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As a result of the D-SHIP

class, classmates Jozy Klupar and Susi Matsuoka launched Peruvian Artisan Exchange (PAX) on Indiegogo and created a website. They worked with the Chijnayan artisans to create a range of handwoven Alpaca products to give the impoverished women of the Altiplano region of Peru an opportunity to become financially stable.

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By Fernd van Engelen Fernd@artefactgroup.com

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@artefactgroup

Soccer enthusiast Fernd van Engelen heads industrial design for the award- winning technology product design firm Artefact. His work has been honored with more than 30 design awards, including IDEA, ID magazine, Red Dot and iF.

Industrial Designers in the 21st Century

Masters of the Experience

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joined Artefact three years ago to help add an industrial design practice to a growing and successful research and user-experience practice. We shared the belief that we could no longer separate what a product physically looks like from the way it behaves and how people interact with it. Where

traditionally the user interface had been confined to a small portion of the real estate on a smart, beautiful object, increasingly it was becoming the hero experience of the product while the hardware simply provided a stage for that magic. Neither extreme felt right to us, and we set out to forge a more integrated approach.

This approach has proven very successful as clients have embraced the integrated design thinking we deliver. But as technology and the way people interact with it evolves, we are starting to see some shifts that demand a new set of skills on the part of designers.

or simplify people’s lives without ever distracting them from the present, and to communicate those important or interesting bits of information without ever getting in the way. That is the promise that makes these technologies so exciting and the challenge that has the potential to ruin them.

Beyond the Screen One problem with today’s smartphone is that we have transplanted inherently immersive experiences (surfing the Web, connecting through social media, watching video) onto a mobile device that wasn’t intended for such experiences. Having access to anything from anywhere on a device that is always within reach means that people are always on it, whether the content they consume is designed for a smartphone or not. The desire to bring people back into the present has led to a move away from information on a screen and, arguably, away from the screen itself. For example, the Google Glass approach will superimpose a digital layer on top of our now; Siri and similar apps offer voice to take people’s eyes off their screens.

As soon as information is pushed by a smart device rather than pulled by the user, it becomes all about contextual awareness: about sending the right bit of information at just the right time. The key design challenge is to find those moments where technology can enhance Move Wearable Concept

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i n n ovative tech nology Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens system

For the designer, regardless of how awesome the hardware is, these are the more interesting and more important questions. It is also new territory for many traditional designers. But whether we are comfortable with it or not, it’s where we’re heading.

Initially, we were thrilled by a phone that was also an MP3 player, a compass and a flashlight. We boldly proclaimed that “there’s an app for that.” While the smartphone is undeniably an extremely versatile jack-of-all-trades, it is also increasingly a master of none. As we add more and more functionality, it becomes a nuisance for people to locate the right app from the several dozen on their phones. As a result, we are likely to see an emergence of new types of dedicated devices. The question you need to answer as a designer is whether a particular need is best filled by an app on a multipurpose device, a task-specific accessory to a multipurpose device or a standalone device. Being conversant and comfortable with both the software and hardware will help designers navigate and find the right balance.

Nano As technology gets smaller and new materials become available, the palette we have at our disposal as designers explodes with possibilities. Shrinking technology can become increasingly discrete, enabling us to conceive new devices or make previously “dumb” products smart—just take a look at the universe of wearable products and concepts. But as devices get smaller and the screen disappears, we also need to reimagine how to interact with them.

The first generation of wearables offers discrete bits of useful information and a simplified way to view that on the

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device—think the Nike+ bracelet with its activity tracking.

Yet, despite this simplicity, today’s wearable technology still comes off as geeky, and the information we get from these new devices is still disconnected from the actions we need to take. The next generation of wearable devices will smartly incorporate technology into fabrics and garments rather than build another injection-molded plastic enclosure, and people will interact with these objects in new ways. This presents great challenges and opportunities for the designer who can embrace the new medium and can think more broadly about interaction. It is encouraging to see designers like Jennifer Darmour exploring wearables with a new sensitivity to fashion and a desire to make the experience not only beautiful but meaningful.

Interestingly, stylist has been a derogatory term in the industrial design world, but as wearables arrive, style becomes an important aspect of our talents. The things people wear and put on their bodies are highly emotional and highly personal, and the Apple one-size-fits-all approach may not work for wearables. Offering wearables in many shapes and forms to fit people’s personality, style and mood will likely be what the market demands.

Lastly, while wearables are an obvious example of the nano trend, it is certainly not the only opportunity. Many other previously dumb devices can be made smart as we embed sensors in them. The challenge for us as 21st-century designers is to decide when it makes sense to do so.

It’s the Brand, Stupid Let’s face it, the consumer electronics world essentially moves in unison. Most consumer electronics manufacturers have access to the same technology at the same time. In addition, access is no longer limited to the established players in any field: skilled and capable original design manufacturers enable non-consumer-electronics or non-hardware companies to enter the space. Just look at this year’s Consumers Electronics Show, for example. In this environment, it is extremely difficult to differentiate on the basis of technology. Even when you have the first-mover’s advantage, the rate of competition has accelerated. Take Lytro: A year ago its technology, which enables you to refocus your pictures after you have taken them, was revolutionary.Today it is facing competition from apps like FocusTwist.

When everyone has access to the same technology, the differences come down to the brand. It’s all about getting to the core of “Why brand X?” The work we do must be authentic to what the company stands for, and the more crowded the market, the more important that is. One way

to get there is to ask and answer the question: What is it about this product that could only come from company X? When you approach a product from that perspective, you can reach very different solutions. Case in point: Looking broadly at innovation in the camera market resulted in our Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens concept, WVIL, when we were imagining a brand associated with helping photographers become better at their art. But when the brand attributes were about making taking pictures fun, exciting and social, the result was the playful wearable Meme camera.

Ironically, it often feels that the in-house team is more focused on the value proposition to the user, while we as consultants (perhaps by virtue of being exposed to multiple clients) are often more in tune with the importance of brand.

Ultimately, design needs to support and build both product and brand.

Affordances and Platform As technologies advance and products become more sophisticated, our ability to predict and prescribe how people will use the product becomes much more difficult. The more functionality you pile onto a product, the harder you need to work to make sure you have accounted for all users and all use cases, and the greater the likelihood that you

will miss. Instead of trying to predict and accommodate all users in all scenarios and build a solution that fits all, a better route might be to build affordances and enable people to figure out for themselves what combination of tools best serves their needs and purpose. GoPro is a great example of this approach; what started as a wearable camera for extreme sports is now used by hobbyists and moviemakers. Similarly this was the thinking behind Darmour’s and Johanna Schoemaker’s Modwells concept, whose wearable sensors are designed to help people improve their physical and emotional health: Create a platform for health and wellness that is flexible enough to let the user decide what its best use would be.

In the past we thought about how people use a product. Today we should also think about new ways people can make the product their own or designing to facilitate collaborative consumption rather than individual ownership.

At a time when it feels like we are driving toward specialization, what the design profession needs more than anything is people who move easily and fearlessly across boundaries. Designers must be able to connect to, collaborate with and be inspired by different disciplines: fashion, architecture, material science, business, marketing, ethnography and more. Only then we will be able to create the great user experiences we aim for. n

Modwells: Personal Modules for Wellness

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Design as Strategy

“Design: to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan.

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Strategy: a careful plan or method; a clever stratagem.

—Merriam-Webster

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By Mark Capper, IDSA mark@kompasstrategy.com Mark Capper is a design, brand and innovation strategist and the president of Kompas Strategy.

Prior to Kompas Strategy, he held positions at Added Value, Herbst LaZar Bell, Herman Miller and Hauser Design. He has an MBA from the University of Southern California, a master’s in engineering from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s in natural science from Michigan State University.

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here has always been interplay between design and strategy, whether in the mind of a single designer, the collective mind of a team or the strategic plan of the organization. Traditionally, strategy has preceded design. It was delivered to the designer in a brief or in an initial project

© 2013 Eames Office, LLC (eamesoffice.com)

meeting. Today, design has become an integral part of the process through which strategy is defined.

Design and strategy have become intertwined through successive elements of creation, research, thought and evaluation involving many disciplines as well as the ultimate user.

The design process has now become the basis of design thinking and is being applied in many applications, including the design of products, environments, user experiences and systems. Design thinking is even being used to design organizations and align organizational structures in harmony with purpose, values, systems and culture.

For some organizations, design is the strategy. These organizations have realized the power of design in creating desire, developing a loyal following, enhancing the user experience and innovating. These organizations have made design their key differentiator and are being rewarded with strong consumer demand, higher margins and customer loyalty.

Design has become synonymous with innovation, and many organizations look to the designer or the design consultancy when they are seeking innovation. In these cases,

design is defining the strategy through the creative process and the development of new ideas.

This issue of Innovation delves into the interrelationship between design and strategy. The theme, design as strategy, implies that strategy is no longer simply the creation of the plan that is executed through design—rather, design has become more integrated and is now a part of the strategy. This issue takes both a broad and deep look at design and strategy. We explore the interplay between design and strategy from several perspectives from the boardroom to the project level. We look at the role of design in blue-ocean innovation and in defining design strategy through understanding the local culture. We delve into how to frame inquiry in design research and the pitfall of design convergence.

I want to thank all of the authors who contributed their thoughts and ideas. My hope is that this issue opens new perspectives and deepens the understanding of design as strategy. n

Charles Eames with the Solar Do-Nothing Machine, made for Alcoa in 1957.

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By Michael Trump mtrump@gmail.com Michael Trump is a senior designer practicing design and design strategy in BMW Group DesignworksUSA’s California studio. He holds bachelor’s degrees from the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University and from Art Center College of Design’s transportation design program.

Using Culture & Trend Research to Develop Design Strategies for Global Markets

unsung resources

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t used to be that when your plane landed after a long flight it was relatively obvious where you were.

Nowadays it seems like there’s a Zara, H&M or even a Louis Vuitton store within minutes of most major international airports. The streets of many of the world’s megacities are filled with seemingly

identical cars and motorbikes. Even cities that only a few years ago were distinguishable by their historical characters are now increasingly difficult to describe or differentiate.

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Whether in Delhi, São Paulo, Shanghai or Seoul, these unconventional side streets and people exist. Even though they aren’t on the map, they are worth the effort to find.

They’re often where you’ll discover an important element of the creative scene, and maybe even get a glimpse into what is meaningful to the people who are striving to define the future.

So how do you discover what people really need and want, and what makes markets around the world different from one another on a deeper level?

A Well-Defined Process The most effective way of uncovering these differences is to have both a well-thought-out process and an open mind to new discovery. It’s all too easy to get caught up in process and deliverables and miss the great stuff along the way.

When in a country doing research, it is important to talk to the right people—especially the young progressives who have a good understanding of their generation, are looking to make their own contributions to the future and don’t mind challenging the status quo. Where you find these people is part science, part art and part luck. Smart planning, combined with curiosity and an open mind, will put you in front of the science, closer to the art and on the right side of luck.

The science should start with specific hypotheses to test, which are best developed before the trip. The hypoth-

All photos Michael Trump

Because of this growing uniformity, uncovering and describing the real differences between important global markets isn’t as straightforward as it once was, and yet the competition in these markets is stronger than ever. Discovering these differences involves talking to the right people and visiting the most inspiring places. Sometimes these people and places are well-known names in polished design studios and high-rise buildings, and other times they are unknown and out of the way. Despite the extra work required to locate unsung resources, they can be just as valuable in helping you to derive real insights and find opportunities.

On a trip to India last summer, a local designer friend took me to some remote streets in Old Delhi, a part of the city that isn’t on every itinerary but offers a glimpse into a diverse and unfiltered side of the city. It was overcrowded, chaotic and unbearably hot that day, yet it offered some of my most memorable experiences. I saw transportation taking on a new meaning as entire families were pulled in rickshaws by straining, but never complaining, bicyclists and goods were moved around not on trucks but using any methods that came in handy: carts, cows, backs and heads. The textures and colors worn by the people, and for sale in the local shops, were unlike anything available in the mass shopping areas; I bought some of the trip’s more unique, inspiring items there. This was the gritty, raw and seriously memorable side of Delhi. It helped to paint a more complete picture of the city and its culture.

Old Delhi streets

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A Rio de Janeiro artist’s palette

eses most likely originate in the reasons for the trip itself.

The team should first decide what it wants to uncover and then come up with a series of compelling and provocative hypotheses that are realistic to test. They shouldn’t be so broad or overly ambitious that only a team of ethnographers studying the culture for months could hope to solve. They also shouldn’t be too granular that the team only needs to check a box to figure them out. The better the hypotheses, the deeper the insights will be.

The team should then generate a series of sharp questions and discussion points to use during the trip. These questions should inspire team members to think and should facilitate their interactions with others during their research.

Immersing themselves in the material beforehand will enable a faster transfer to meaningful solutions.

Now it is time to plan the actual immersion. Deciding who might be interesting to speak with and what cities or areas to visit should naturally fall in line if the hypotheses and questions are well thought out. At this point, it helps to have a local partner who knows the area and the people and who can open doors and opportunities. The team should try to meet the professionals and creatives who are pushing their crafts in new directions and find out what drives them. The team also needs to experience enough of the must-see destinations to understand the public face of a city or society.

Discovery and Luck The art aspect of culture and trend research is to allow for discovery: to find the unique places and people off the beaten path and to tap into that deeper curiosity within all of us to uncover the other side of the story. This is not

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to say that every contextual research trip is going to be an Anthony Bourdain episode, nor does it need to be in order to be valuable. What it should be is open enough to find the people who are creating something new or selling something that isn’t mainstream or who have a different perspective on art, design or trends.

What you hope to have, through a combination of planning and luck, is an inspiring and open dialogue: people who can tell you why their art looks the way it does or what their generation is feeling, or who can provide a meaningful and candid exchange of ideas.

On a recent visit to Rio de Janeiro, an informal meeting with a young street artist left me thinking more about youth culture, aesthetics and cultural change than any guidebook could relay. This artist was crossing over into the mainstream art scene but was still committed to his cause and to expressing the aesthetics of youth, emotions and the future feelings of a generation.

In cities like Rio, where a visitor needs to be extra cautious, a well-connected local can help you safely find the right people to meet and can suggest places that are happening but aren’t yet a big scene. Take an afternoon and ask a taxi driver to drop you off in such an area. Look for places to wander that are away from the main shopping district and be open to finding that dusty storefront down the alley where you might just find an artist or furniture maker. The key is to not limit your exploration to only the areas and people you “should” see.

More often than not, a smart and well-connected local will know someone who knows someone who does something worth learning about. Depending on the city, this approach can also be safer and more relaxing. Many cities in Asia offer almost endless possibilities for this type of discovery. Such opportunities are everywhere if you look hard enough and allow yourself to be unsure where the day will end.

Why We Do Culture and Trend Research Immersive culture and trend research should inspire designers to think in new ways and open up new possibilities. If done right, our designs will have a richer story, be more relevant in global markets and change lives for the better.

If we don’t spend the time and effort to understand the places, cultures and trends we’re designing for, we’re really expressing more of a personal artistic vision and hoping the world takes notice. The designer’s artistic vision and creativity are still critical to the ideas that challenge us and push design into the future, yet this vision and creativity are more relevant if we’re first informed by understanding who, where and what is behind the need to create a product. Given both the cost of developing products and global competition, companies can no longer afford to just try an idea and hope it sells. Landfills are overflowing with these “great” ideas.

Mumbai contrasts

In so many of these global markets, the pace of change is incredible and can be felt at all levels of the creative scene. Young generations in all of these rapidly changing markets are looking to define what their futures will look like and make decisions about what brands make genuine, meaningful statements about themselves.

Megacities are oversaturated with brands, and consumers there don’t mind changing brands very quickly. For younger generations, brand loyalty is mostly a concept of the past. Therefore, products and brands have to be that much sharper, relevant and inspired. To find what’s next, we need to study youth culture and determine what is meaningful to this generation. Engaging all types of young people, wherever we find them, will help us to see into the future. Understanding their attitudes, hopes and dreams will help us design products and services that matter to them.

Through both experiencing the must-see names and places and exploring the lesser-known but progressive

young creatives and off-beat locations, we get to see many sides of the creative scene; we get to talk to young and old, aspiring and successful. We can then begin to separate trends from true cultural shifts and to assess our findings for what the future in these markets might look like.

Looking at only certain aspects of a culture’s creative scene runs the risk of designing only for trends. It’s easier to do, and it keeps the process contained and controlled, but we’d only be getting part of the picture. Experiencing both the planned structured research and discovering the unplanned creativity and energy of forward-thinking young people affords us a much better opportunity to answer our original hypotheses in fresh and insightful ways.

The most effective and inspiring culture and trend research comes from looking at the many sides of a culture, and by encouraging designers to be open to discovery down the side streets. Getting lost isn’t always a bad thing; we still have our smartphones to guide us home, after all. n

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By Frank M. Grunwald, L/IDSA grunwaldfb@prodigy.net Frank Grunwald is a graduate of Pratt Institute’s Department of Industrial Design and has spent more than 45 years in the design profession. He worked for General Electric, Ford and Thomson Multimedia in both design management and product planning management. He also lectures on strategic design and design development at various colleges and universities and has been a visiting lecturer on strategic design at Purdue University.

Expanding Design Research Beyond Ethnography

Teaching Strategic Design

Student collaborators Erik Pfannentstiel, Adriana McNinch, Aaron Gray and Sasha Mahan-Rudolph.

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n the 1950s, the notable MIT educator John Arnold challenged his engineering students to design human life-support systems for extremely unfriendly environments, such as survival on Mars. These were tough exercises in creativity. However, they offered an advantage: the students were not influ-

enced or swayed by their previous experiences; everything was new. When students take on the task of researching an existing environment, such as a Starbucks coffee shop or an Apple store, they need to be dispassionate and critical. They need to question everything. The motto should be that everything is mediocre until proven good.

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Teaching strategic design to develop new user-driven products and services can be a daunting task. Fortunately, the academic environment has many great advantages: It is not subject to corporate policy or culture. It can be free-thinking, bold and courageous. In addition, no one gets fired or demoted because their ideas failed in the marketplace. Neither do we need to be concerned about funding or tight developmental schedules. We as educators need to concentrate on developing a teaching methodology that stimulates creativity and problem solving—all driven by consumer needs and wants. We know that more than 70 percent of new product ventures fail mainly because the people in charge compromised (or failed to understand) the real needs of the user. User demands and needs must be the ultimate driver behind all decisions.

How can we best stimulate the creative process that generates new solutions to user needs and wants?

Observational research (ethnography) has been used with some success in the past, but it has limits. Expanding the research landscape beyond ethnography has proven extremely effective. The two areas of research that we have added are technology and business. This triad of ethnography, technology and business has shown to be productive in stimulating new ideas and answers to user needs.

Ethnography User-centered research seems to generate the most effective ideas when it is done the traditional way: in situ and when all individuals, including employees and nonusers, are observed. But don’t count on getting new product ideas from the target you are observing. Unfortunately, observational research requires a lot of skill, and most students are not experienced enough to observe the subject with the type of acuity that would uncover frustration, dissatisfaction or confusion. Nevertheless, it provides students with an experience that is invaluable and will (hopefully) come to more use with additional training in the future.

Observational research is better at focusing on refinements and improvements to existing products or environments than on generating new product ideas. No consumer (that I know of) went to Sony in the 1950s and suggested the development of a compact pocket radio. That idea was triggered by transistor technology developed by Bell

Student images courtesy of Sarah Streitwieser, George Kovach, Brandon Trostrud and Liz Quick.

Laboratories in the US. Sony designers picked up on it and designed a bunch of attractive pocket-sized radios. Neither did any prospective customer approach Steve Jobs and suggest the design of an iPad! Personal research can also be effective in the discovery of user problems or frustrations. In a recent strategic design class, the students were asked to develop usercentered scenarios and storyboards. I was surprised that several of them used their own experiences in developing the scenarios. They were so passionate about injecting their own observations and feelings that I immediately embraced the idea of including their personal research into the creative process.

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Technology New and evolving technologies constitute an important database when it comes to strategic design. As the old saying goes: More knowledge is the basis for better and more robust creativity.

We categorize technologies into native (in use in certain industries for years), imported (from other industries) and new. New technologies can evolve over a long period of time, thus allowing for gradual acceptance, or they can be disruptive by maturing rapidly, thus displacing other less effective technologies in a relatively short time. The consumer is usually the judge of how rapidly a technology will expand. For instance, flat-screen displays were embraced by consumers very rapidly, thus making the technology disruptive.

A large database of new and emerging technologies becomes invaluable when the students begin to strategize new products and services. Often, these new technologies become the key drivers behind the improved user experience and are described in the scenarios and storyboards.

Business Just as ethnographers have found that there can be a huge gap between what people say and what people do, the same can be often said about businesses. Thus, the students are encouraged to study corporate strategies and mantras and compare them to perceived views of the

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corporation from the consumer’s viewpoint. For example, Subway’s advertising slogan “Eat Fresh” seems rather paradoxical considering that much of the food is heavily processed and sits under a glass cover or in the refrigerator for many days or weeks.

Business research involves such areas as marketing strategies, product strategy, company size, income and loss, competitive positioning, the use of traditional or new technologies and perceived image. The perceived image includes such things as is the company environmentally sensitive, consumer oriented, an innovator or a follower, or oriented to price, volume or quality? Competitors are also heavily researched to establish a comparative assessment between the design target and its key competitors.

Scenarios Scenario development is another tool that can enhance creativity and help to organize and refine the experiences that the user might be looking for. Most of the unique experiences emerge from ethnography and new technologies, which will most likely mature within the foreseeable future. The students are asked to develop multiple scenarios based on different customer archetypes and personality characteristics. All scenarios are visualized from the customer’s viewpoint using storyboards. Students are encouraged to narrate the scenarios in first person to be more emphatic and sensitive.

Ideally, the customer should move through each scenario from one positive or rewarding experience to another.

The elements that are the most unique and rewarding for users in each scenario are included in the final design proposal.

The understanding of what engages and excites users combined with an aggressive corporate product and marketing strategy, including the harnessing of the most up-to-date and appropriate technologies, can (and often will) result in new robust design solutions that focus on the future. This is what makes the research triad so effective.

Our strategic design concepts are targeted toward a seven to eight year time frame. It is not too far in the future to stop the students from using new and evolving technologies—and not too close, which might be unrealistic from the standpoint of harnessing new or disruptive technologies.

It’s been said that inquiry is one of the key responsibilities of academia. Here is where we have the opportunity

to question and challenge existing precepts and beliefs.

Perhaps it’s good to rock the boat once in a while and test the validity of some of these long-established ideas.

Two major factors seem to support creative thinking: external inputs (which come from observational research) and internal inputs (which come from the designer). How much of that observation is filtered by the designer’s emotions? How much of user-centered design comes from the heart? Is emphatic design as important as I think it is? Can it be taught? Are all designers capable of the same level of empathy? If not, can they be good designers? Should technology be one of the primary sources of creative inspiration, or should it only exist when empathy chooses it? We know that new technology is not always the best answer for solving users’ needs. Whom would you choose to bring coffee or tea to your table at Barnes & Noble, a robotic device or a human being? Hold on to the mast—I think I feel the boat rocking. n

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How Much Does Your Organization Weigh?

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ost organizations are like VCRs blinking 12:00. They are poorly designed, out of date and ill-

prepared to survive, let alone thrive, in the modern environment. Organizations today face increasing pressure from multiple stakeholders and relentless global competition, forcing them to become more innovative in everything they do and produce. Similar to a house that is composed of numerous poorly designed add-ons, most organizations are kludges of ill-fitting pieces and parts that were added over time with little consideration

iStockPhoto

for the overall design.

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john@johnlatham.info

By John R. Latham www.johnlatham.info

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John Latham, Ph.D., is director of the Monfort Institute, a research, executive-education and applications lab at the University of Northern Colorado. As a social scientist and designer, he enjoys a variety of activities from research and teaching to consulting and writing.

Too often each time a problem occurs in an organization, a counter-productive structure is added in the form of new policies, rules or procedures, which weigh the employees down and reduce innovation and agility. This bureaucracy creep is like adding rocks to the employees’ backpacks as they try to climb the mountain thus dooming them to a working life of Sisyphean tasks.

To meet these challenges and create organizations where the employees are free to innovate and do what is best for the customers and stakeholders, leaders will have to redesign and align their organizational systems, including the overall enterprise, strategic management, operations and workforce development systems, to name just a few.

This begs the question, What can designers of organizational systems learn from industrial design?

Learning to Create Better Organizations Humans make poor machines, yet many to most organizations were designed using a machine metaphor with people as cogs that conform to procedures and produce predictable results. These machines were designed to extract the most productivity out of the workforce to benefit a small group of stakeholders, primarily the investors and management. Originally, the concept of bureaucracy was intended as a good thing. Who could argue with the notion of a rational and efficient organization? The wide variety of human stakeholders who have to work in and interact with the organization—that is who. The thinking about organizations has evolved to include other metaphors, such as biological systems, brains, political systems and so forth; however, the actual application of such ideas to organization design lags.

While developing new theories, paradigms and metaphors to help us think about organization design is important, there is a gap between our thinking about organization design and the actual process of designing organizations and their systems.

Historically, as with organizations, many products and services were designed focusing on features and functions, or technical requirements, with little regard for the user experience. Consequently, we ended up buying VCRs with many more features and functions than any normal human would or could ever use. However, unlike organization design, industrial design has evolved to include human-centered design approaches and methods that create product and service experiences.

Organization designers can learn much from the contemporary industrial design approaches to design organizations that create experiences and sustainable value for multiple stakeholders: customers, investors, the workforce, suppliers and partners, the community and the natural environment. While some organizations, such as IDEO and the Monfort Institute, are already applying design thinking and systems thinking to a variety of organizational systems and processes, for these efforts to continue to grow, the leaders of the modern organization will need to become chief organization designers and lead the design of their organizations to achieve and sustain high performance.

Leader as Designer Unfortunately, most business schools do not prepare leaders to design organizations and their complex systems. With few exceptions, most business schools teach future leaders and managers how to apply existing tools, techniques and technologies to run a business in a way that maximizes the return on investment. Consequently, most executives spend their careers trying to optimize the systems they inherited.

As Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The corollary in the modern organization might be, “Most leaders spend their careers desperately trying to optimize poorly designed systems.” What does a leader need to do to become an organization designer?

Leaders must learn to think differently about their organizations and how they operate. Specifically, they need to learn to apply the concepts of design thinking and systems thinking to the design of the organizational systems. Design thinking applied to organization design includes a deeper understanding of, and empathy for, the human experiences of the multiple internal and external stakeholders who interact with the organization. A deeper understanding of what it is like to experience the organization informs a creative process that asks the question, What could be?

Leaders as designers of sustainable high performance have a low need to be solely responsible for innovation or organizational success, are respectful of others regardless of their positions and are highly collaborative. Collaboration is a key aspect of IDEO’s philosophy, which is based in part on the collective creativity of the group versus the creativity of a lone genius. Collaboration helps improve the design and the deployment of new organizational systems

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Adapted from Latham (2012) | John Latham©2007 – 2013. All Rights Reserved.

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by involving multiple stakeholders and perspectives in the process. Design thinking goes beyond simply reallocating scarce resources to achieve organizational goals—a zerosum game—to designing new systems that create value for multiple stakeholders.

Leaders as designers are systems thinkers who are motivated to work with systems, manage large amounts of information and learn from the past to help inform better designs in the future. Many of the issues we face today are created by individual system components that were designed based on little understanding or consideration

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of the other related components, processes and systems.

This often results in unintended consequences that are separated in both time and space, making it difficult to understand the cause-and-effect relationships and thus to learn from experience what works and what doesn’t work.

To design organizational systems that are aligned and congruent and create the desired near- and long-term results, the leader needs a deeper understanding of systems thinking. To actually apply design and systems-thinking concepts to organization design requires a method that integrates design thinking and systems thinking.

Organizational System Design While leaders typically prefer an algorithm they can apply to predictably fix a problem, in the case of organization design, a framework with flexible tools, techniques and principles is more appropriate (see figure). This requires some level of comfort with the ambiguity of creative design. Similar to contemporary product design, organizational system design consists of an expanded discovery process (steps 1–8) to fully understand the key aspects of the organization, individuals, culture, and the internal and external complex systems before designing, developing and deploying the new design. While presented in sequence, the use of the eight discovery components is an iterative exploration of the various dimensions. Once the discovery process is complete, a conceptual ideal design is developed considering few (if any) constraints followed by a doable design that addresses the known constraints. Eventually, a detailed design is developed through an iterative prototyping process where the design team learns by doing. Too often systems-design efforts fail because the team attempts to get every detail just right before it reveals the new design to the stakeholders.

Learning quickly and cheaply requires the design team to present its ideas to multiple stakeholders before they are fully developed. This requires a safe environment that encourages testing of partially developed systems, tools, techniques and technologies. In other words, what is needed is an environment where it is OK to fail early and often.

Once developed, the system is deployed and continuously iterated to fit the new system to the organization and maximize the stakeholder experiences.

Ideal system designs are characterized by eight design principles (see sidebar) and are aligned with the overall organization strategy, scorecard and stakeholders.

Organizational systems that create the greatest value for the multiple stakeholders are closely aligned with the strategy of the organization and work seamlessly with the other systems. High-performance systems are designed for the whole person and facilitate work, encourage learning and help humans reach their full potential. However, high performance is fleeting without continuous innovation. Only the most resilient and stubborn of employees will continue to innovate when the system makes it difficult.

Buckminster Fuller once asked architect Norman Foster how much his building weighed. The corollary for the modern leader/designer is, How much does your organization weigh? Systems that include just enough structure—and

no more—encourage and facilitate innovation and agility.

Ultimately, the quality of the design is judged based on the value it creates for the multiple stakeholders. The good news is that the right kind of leadership combined with design can create high-performing organizations that attract and enable top talent (internal and external) who create memorable experiences for customers who come back and spend more money (repeat business) and bring their friends with them (referral business). In other words, leadership + design = sustainable excellence. n

Organizational System Design Principles Balance

Creates value for multiple stakeholders.

Congruence System components are aligned and consistent with each other.

Convenience User friendly and respects the value of stakeholders’ time.

Coordination System components are integrated and work together.

Elegance

Least amount of complexity and structure for the greatest benefit.

Human

Participants are able to find joy, purpose and meaning in their work.

Learning

Opportunities for reflection and learning are built into the system.

Sustainability Meets the needs of current stakeholders without sacrificing the ability of future generations of stakeholders to meet their needs.

Adapted from “Management System Design for Sustainable Excellence: Framework, Practices and Considerations” published in the Quality Management Journal, can be read in its entirety at www.johnlatham. info/resources/2012_QMJ_Latham_Design.pdf ©John Latham, 2012. All Rights Reserved.

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Problem Finding or

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tepping beyond problem finding to problem framing and the need to eliminate bias on the part of designers and clients—these are big topics in the world of research. But are they in industry?

While techniques on their own won’t eliminate bias and properly frame the problem, it is neces-

sary to address these issues.

Validating vs. Generating Hypotheses In my advanced design research classes, we discuss eliminating bias; students are rightly concerned. In industry, however, we see many examples of what I call “research in name only”: research done to prove a previously conceived idea or to bolster someone’s hunch, research done not to find the truth about consumers, but to confirm preexisting ideas. This is useful if you’re validating a concept midway through a design process that starts with good up-front research, is unbiased and is looking to understand customer needs. But we see enough examples of research done for the sake of saying one’s done research to suspect that there can be a wide gap between optimal practice and actual industry practice.

To be effective, design research needs to step out of the personal biases held by the client, the customer, the designer and the researcher. It’s human nature to try to cherry-pick observations and insights to validate a favored hypothesis. On the participant side, it’s quite common for respondents to suss out what it is that the researchers want to hear and, in an effort to be helpful, provide it.

In my practice and with my students, our methodology contains a number of techniques to mitigate these biases. At the start, we map out everything we know about the topic, seeking to identify the terra incognita that might need examination and, at the same time, make plain our personal biases. As we choose generative tools for use in the research sessions, we stay mindful of these preconcep-

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tions. There is no way to eliminate bias; we’ve found that the best strategy is to acknowledge it.

We also work in teams composed of members with different mindsets. Not only does this diversity help keep one another honest, it also enables us to see the results from unique viewpoints. Research, especially analysis of the findings, is similar to brainstorming, and we find that the same rules apply. We put in place this practice of vigilance and also employ a set of analytical techniques designed to assess the data through a variety of lenses.

Techniques on their own won’t eliminate bias and, more importantly, won’t lead to a useful statement of the problem. Finding problems is merely the first step. Framing those problems with regard to customer and client needs is essential.

In our practice, we strive to turn insights gained in research into promising design opportunities and to frame these opportunities, so they are clearly understood by the client. The client should see the connection between the research and the design direction. Observations in the field lead to the insight that suggests a feasible opportunity, which results, after the ideation phase explores all options resident in that opportunity, in a valid idea for a design.

The vision for the eventual design should be kept true to what was learned in the research so that the problem is always framed by the needs of all stakeholders: the customer, the enterprise and society. The insight remains the design’s compass throughout the project.

By Katherine Bennett, IDSA kbennett@artcenter.edu Katherine Bennett teaches advanced research in graduate and undergraduate industrial design at Art Center College of Design and pioneered the integration of professional-level design research into the product design curriculum. She specializes in teaching in-depth contextual inquiry using generative tools. She has served IDSA as education vice president, Western District education representative and LA chapter chair.

Problem Framing? responds to disasters: It takes immediate action. Several of our students suggested microdonation solutions to increase the revenue stream, based on Muhammad Yunus’ microfinancing idea. During the next major disaster, the Haitian earthquake, we saw the Red Cross’ introduction of its Text Donations program in which texting to a designated number would instantly donate $10.

The third term of our collaboration resulted in graduate industrial design and undergraduate transportation design students producing concepts for the next-generation ERV. The ERV’s most common use is to dispense food during disasters and emergencies. Two of these designs stand out: Ethan Yeh’s lighthearted ERV-With-a-Spoon-On-Top and Pengtao Yu’s U-Haul Conversion Kit.

Ethan Yeh

Case in Point: Design for Disaster In 2009 Art Center started a three-term collaboration with the American Red Cross resulting in a number of insights that led to possible designs. The Red Cross approached us with a number of issues, but the group’s immediate concern was a need for a redesign of its Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV) used to dispense food and supplies at disaster sites. The vehicle platform it had been using was soon to be discontinued. New York designer and Art Center alumnus Sean Hart, a seasoned Red Cross volunteer and the initiator of our collaboration, had long wished he could turn Art Center students loose on this and many other problems he’d encountered during his years of service. Most of what the Red Cross uses are off-the-shelf products—from emergency supplies to the ERVs themselves—designed for other purposes and inadequate for Red Cross needs. The ERVs, for example, use an ambulance platform that has a number of human-factors and usability problems.

Our first step was one term of in-context research. Art Center graduate industrial design students visited the New York Chapter, riding along with disaster response teams to aid people turned out of their homes due to fire (the chapter responds to an average of eight of these situations per day), interviewing key staff and volunteers, touring the headquarters, and examining equipment and vehicles. We also attended a number of classes given to new volunteers to understand that experience firsthand. We conducted similar research with the Los Angeles Chapter as well. Insights from this research identified opportunities in five key areas: branding and messaging, organization, volunteer recruitment and retention, disaster and emergency response, and the revenue/resource stream.

During the second term, the same students used our strategic innovation process to develop designs framed by each of the five areas. We learned that the Red Cross responds to concepts in much the same way that it

Ethan Yeh’s ERV-With-a-Spoon-On-Top

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Pengtao Yu

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Pengtao Yu’s U-Haul Conversion Kit

Yeh’s design responds to the need for visibility and messaging: The arrival of this ERV at a disaster location says “help is here” and broadcasts friendly reassurance. It also addresses a key enterprise need: to engender out-ofbox thinking as the Red Cross set out to create the actual next-generation ERV. Yu’s U-Haul Conversion Kit was framed by the need to address ERV inventory and response times. Currently the Red Cross has 340 ERVs, which cost over $90,000 each, distributed across the country. When a disaster strikes, some ERVs might be driven from distant locations taking over a week to arrive, while the need for food and water is immediate. In addition, the ERVs mostly sit idle. Yu solved both of these problems with a pallet-sized kit that converts a standard U-Haul box truck into an ERV. Everything is included: signage, lighting, work surfaces, food-service and storage equipment, and a power source.

While these converted U-Hauls wouldn’t replace the entire inventory of ERVs, they could cut the need for a large, expensive fleet and offer solutions close at hand for immediate deployment. U-Haul is already partnering with the Red Cross; kits could be staged around the country at dealerships or air-lifted into place as needed.

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The Red Cross has implemented designs inspired by many of the Art Center student concepts. It experimented with Yu’s kit idea in recent disasters and found the converted U-Hauls quite useful. This past year, many student ideas were put to use in the redesign of the next-generation ERV, which has been touring Red Cross chapters across the country and recently was revealed to the public at Art Center.

Lauren Twohig, a leader in the creation of the new vehicle, said that when the Red Cross was considering the new design, its thoughts were limited to a few minor revisions to the existing design, but the out-of-box ideas like Yeh’s made possible greater leaps in thinking that gave birth to the next-generation ERV we see today.

Problem Found or Problem Framed?

Finding problems isn’t enough. Framing the issues surrounding the problems and maintaining vigilance against all forms of bias ensure that the vision gained through research is sustained throughout the project and that the project stays on track. n

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By Søren Petersen www.huffingtonpost.com/soren-petersen

Søren Petersen founded ingomar&ingomar consulting in 1993 and has worked with many international organizations, including Rambøll Group and BMW Group DesignworksUSA. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in design research and has published 23 scientific papers, as well as authored Profit from Design, a definitive book on design quantification. He publishes weekly in The Huffington Post on the creative economy.

Strategies for Bridging Business and Design

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ranslating business objectives into design criteria that are useful for executing design is fraught with challenges. A Danish national study of design-oriented firms found that integrating design in the product development process increases revenue by nine percent on average. However,

integrating design with business and innovation provides a meager one percent, on average, in extra revenue. Studies of design briefs conducted at Stanford’s Center for Design Research, however, show that this represents a tremendous opportunity. Applying the group’s Inspirational Design Briefing method based on objective design quality criteria improves the alignment of business strategy and design; it alone results in performance increases of up to 30 percent.

How do you ensure stronger integration of business and design? Design must be included in the business strategy and the business model development. Doing so provides five critical advantages: n Including design up front in the business stage brings designers’ wealth of knowledge about, and experience with, users and customers into the mix and can help formulate a sustainable value proposition. n Designers’ visual communication style, cross-pollinating skills and lateral design thinking make designers perfect facilitators of business strategy and model experimentation. Designers can create cohesive concepts from scattered information for team discussions and communication. n Design at the center of product development ensures that all stakeholders’ interests are considered throughout the process. Including design from business strategy and model experimentation to final delivery will secure a cohesiveness design deliverable. n Product positioning and communication of brand values are areas in which designers have extensive knowledge, skill and experience. Design can ensure that all brand touchpoints are included in the business strategy and model, so the brand can be communicated coherently to all users.

Designers’ experience with design execution is key to creating actionable business plans with realistic budgets, schedules and quality of deliverables.

Finally, when unexpected concepts emerge in the ideation phase, designers will now understand the business thinking behind the design brief. This enables them to better examine new questions that arise in relationship to the underlying business assumptions. They can then help refine the business objectives for an optimum fit between the objectives and the concept. n

How to Include Design in the Business Phases The Design & Business Experimentation method (see page 44) bridges business and design by including design up front. The four-step method, which is iterated five times, consists of the formulation of a business strategy, business model experimentation, the formulation of the business plan and design brief, and the kick off of the conceptualization.

The first iteration focuses on conceptualization. The second addresses design detailing and refinement. The third resolves engineering, feasibility and prototyping challenges.

The fourth simulates the functionality of the design, and the fifth examines the user experience. With each iteration, the assumptions of the four steps are reexamined, thereby moving the project from an abstract plan to a concrete offering.

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A B Business Plan

Phase I: Business Strategy Vision, capability, impact, proof, cost & risk, VP, profit formula, resources and process

Phase II: Business Model Canvas Iterating between concrete and abstract

Phase III: Design Brief (co-created) Balanced brief increases performance by up to 30%

C Phase IV: Value Proposition Meaningful, make sense, motivate and fit business strategy (70% of cost fixed)

Iteration(1-5)

Figure 1. Design & Business Experimentation method

Phase I: Formulation of a Business Strategy A business strategy describes how value can be created and captured by aligning external opportunities with internal capabilities. A business strategy is customarily informed by a SWOT analysis, a Porter’s Five Forces analysis, an environmental strategy analysis and a blue-ocean analysis.

It contains a vision, a description of required capabilities and the expected impact of the strategy. It also contains a description of the value proposition together with proof of cost, a risk assessment, a profit formula and the required resources and process for the stated goals.

Phase II: Design and Business Model Experimentation In this phase the business strategy informs the initial experimentation with various business model canvases, providing a range from low- to medium- and high-risk models.

The canvas maps out the four front-end customer-facing business elements (value proposition, customer relations, delivery channel and customers) and the supporting five back-end facilitating elements (key activities, key resources, partners, revenue generation and cost structure). In crossdisciplinary brainstorming sessions, the current and alternative business models from inside and outside the business area provide the starting point for experimentation. When a promising model seems to have been identified, it is examined for four factors: 1. Linking drivers and enablers: A business model is only as good as the organization’s ability to execute it. Therefore, establishing connections between business model elements (drivers) and design quality criteria (enablers) is essential for success. Since early experimentation is conducted in this phase, initial linking of drivers and enablers is done by an experience-based and intuitive evaluation and is then refined based on a more rigorous analysis in the subsequent iterations. Pareto’s 80/20 Rule is applied, and the

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top most important and the bottom least important connections are indicated in the Business Canvas Driver – Design Quality Criteria enabler matrix to guide the prioritization of implementation. See Figure 2.

2. Benchmarking drivers–enablers: Organizations do not exist in a vacuum, and the business model canvas does not address competition per se. Therefore, this step compares the business model translation of the plan into implementation and the driver–enabler connection with that of the most important competitor. An estimation of the competitor’s vital connection, top 20 percent (Pareto 80/20 Rule) is added to the matrix. This provides a visual overview of the competitive situation and supports the formulation of strategies for mitigating the risk of destructive competition.

See Figure 2.

3. Coordinating the front end with the back end: Comparing the corporation’s most important driver– enabler connections to those of the competitor forms the basis for eliminating, reducing, increasing or creating new connections for first the front-end elements relevant to the customer’s experience with the value proposition, followed by establishing the supporting back end, the initiative required by the firm to deliver the value proposition.

See Figure 2.

4. Aligning business model execution: When three or more business model experimentations are conducted, a map is created linking the enablers to the organization’s supporting competencies within assets, routines, organizational architecture and culture. This works as a first evaluation of the risk, real and perceived, associated with the organization–driver–enabler alignment and the level of imitability, hence long-term sustainability. See Figure 3.

Phase III: Business Plan and Design Brief Formulation Following the experimentation with various business models and alignment of these with execution and organizational capabilities, the selected business model is formulated as a business plan targeted at management and as a design brief intended for the design team. For a design brief to be useful, it is important that the underlying strategy is relayed along with all information regarding functionality and expression of the product to be designed.

Phase IV: Initiating Conceptualization As a final point, the core design quality criteria for the most important drivers–enablers form the basis for con-

Delivery Channel Value Proposition

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Figure 2. Business Canvas Driver – Design Quality Criteria enabler matrix. Connections of the top (black dots) and bottom (white dots) 20 percent importance are mapped first, followed by mapping the main competitors’ top 20 percent most important connections (gray). Eliminating, reducing, increasing or creating connections first along the front end and then the back end canvas elements creates competitive advantage.

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Figure 3. Organization - Design Quality Criteria enabler matrix

Figure 4. Key Design Quality Criteria solution space

ceptualization, such as the creation of new features and expression (aesthetics), as shown in the example used in Figure 2, which aided the designers in prioritizing their initial inspirational parameters. See Figure 4. The prime importance of the design concept is to capture and communicate the value proposition. All participants in the framing, design and assessment of the model, in this example, stressed the importance of a strong value proposition for any successful business opportunity. Also, there was agreement that a value proposition could only be effectively evaluated when conceptualized into an artifact for the development team and the users to interact with and evaluate.

Take Away The Design & Business Experimentation method bridges the gap between business strategy and design conceptualization by outlining a four-step process that includes design in the strategy formulation, business model experimentation and the translation of business model drivers into actionable design quality criteria enablers. Including business strategy, organizational capability and design considerations in the business model experimentation increases actionability. The multiloop iterative nature of the process facilitates the alignment of the business strategy, model, plan, brief and design execution as these are being defined in parallel, adding to the effectiveness of the execution. n

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By Mark Capper, IDSA mark@kompasstrategy.com Mark Capper is a design, brand and innovation strategist and the president of Kompas Strategy. Prior to Kompas Strategy, he held positions at Added Value, Herbst LaZar Bell, Herman Miller and Hauser Design. He has an MBA from the University of Southern California, a master’s in engineering from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s in natural science from Michigan State University.

The Collaboration of Design and Research

Blue-Ocean Innovation

Yamaha Motor Corp.

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any organizations are taking a blue-ocean approach to innovation. Blue ocean is all about finding new opportunities for demand in uncontested market space. The opposite of blue ocean is red ocean, or those market spaces filled with competition. Thus, the promise

of blue-ocean innovation is that an organization can define a new category, bring in new customers and reap financial gain.

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Starting in 2004, Yamaha Motor Corp. initiated a blue-ocean project to identify new innovative products to expand its customer base. The project lasted more than a year and was managed by an internal team devoted to innovation. The internal team hired several consulting firms, including a quantitative marketing research agency, a qualitative marketing research agency and several design firms. The project resulted in identifying several blue-ocean opportunities, developing product concepts to satisfy these opportunities and implementing quantitative marketing analytics to substantiate the business opportunity.

Yamaha management integrated research and design in a multiphase project plan. In the initial phase, research identified new customers who did not currently own a product in any of Yamaha’s existing categories: motorcycles, snowmobiles, ATVs, personal watercraft or boats. Once the target market was defined, design and research were used together to create and bring to life new product ideas to appeal to these consumers.

Uncovering Opportunity The first step in the Yamaha process was to identify potential blue-ocean territories, which the project team defined as a sufficiently large group of customers who did not own a product in any of the Yamaha categories but were seeking benefits that the company, technology and brand could deliver. Qualitative and quantitative research were used to segment nonowners based on the benefits they sought that were not available in the existing products and the barriers that were keeping them from owning the current offerings.

The marketing research identified and profiled more than 20 clusters of new potential customers. Yamaha decided to focus on three segments, each diverse in the benefits they offered and the barriers they overcame as well as other characteristics, such as demographics.

Three projects were launched. Each project was focused on a specific market segment with the knowledge that if a truly aspirational product was conceived, the market for that product would reach far beyond the number of consumers within the target segment. The Nissan Xterra was such a product; originally targeted to extreme sports enthusiasts, it appealed to a much broader market of consumers who bought into the image the vehicle represented.

One of the three projects focused on consumers who were seeking a motorized product that would enable them to do tricks similar to skateboarding and skating. They wanted a product that had some difficulty in its use and would take a long time to master. They desired to use the product with friends in places where they could watch and be watched.

They were also seeking a product that was low in cost, easy to store and convenient to transport.

Yamaha selected a design firm and briefed it on the research findings. The designers began to develop concepts for products that would use Yamaha technologies and meet the unique needs of the specific targeted consumer.

Hundreds of product ideas were developed and grouped into categories that represented platforms of ideas. Several idea platforms were also developed, ranging from water products, products to be used in the backyard, off-road products and even products that could fly.

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At this phase, the concepts were depicted in line drawings that brought to life the experience of using the product. Styling was not an important consideration at this point because the focus was to understand which platform of ideas would be perceived as delivering the sought-after experience, best meet the customer needs and overcome the key barriers related to the category. The concepts were carefully crafted so each were equivalent in format, scale and rendering style (all were rendered by the same designer).

Once numerous platforms of ideas were developed, the project team selected up to eight platforms to be evaluated in qualitative research. The research was conducted with participants who were carefully recruited to represent the target segment.

The goal of the research phase was to understand consumer perceptions of the concepts. The researcher refrained from asking the participants if they would buy the product and instead inquired about their enthusiasm over participating in the experience depicted in the concepts. A key objective was to understand, as they were interacting with the product, which concepts delivered the experience they were seeking, what needs the concepts were perceived to deliver on and what barriers the concepts overcame. Questions related to purchase were thought to be premature since the concepts were not yet optimized to either the experience they delivered or their style.

The qualitative research provided insights that enabled the team both to narrow the number of concept platforms and to refine and develop more effective ideas. It was determined that the most compelling concept platforms

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were those that involved exhilarating tricks, maneuvers and speed on snow. Many participants stated that the existing offering of products for snow, mainly snowmobiles, did not appeal to them. They believed existing snowmobiles to be old-fashioned, not offering an experience they sought, and too large and heavy to store and transport.

Narrowing the Focus Once the decision was made to focus on the snow concepts, the design team went to work to create as many alternative ideas as possible. The team focused on delivering the user experience and the benefits the target customer was seeking in a snow product and on overcoming the key barriers associated with existing snow products.

As the ideation progressed, eight different expressions of snow concepts emerged. The design team crafted linedrawing concepts, similar to those used in the prior research phase, that depicted the user experience they delivered. The ideas were also depicted based on the type of terrain they were most suited to: natural snowfields, frozen lakes or other natural environments. Other concepts required a new type of terrain: the snow park. The snow park is similar to a skate park only covered by snow. The users of products intended for this environment could do tricks in the park or could use the products in a natural environment. Eight product concepts were developed for evaluation in the next phase.

Both quantitative and qualitative research were used to evaluate the concepts. Quantitative research evaluated the concepts against the benefits sought by the target segment and the barriers that kept these consumers from using

existing products in the category. In addition, the concepts were evaluated by a broader audience. A winning concept emerged that had strong appeal both to the target audience and to a broader audience.

Qualitative research was used to understand the underlying reason for the appeal of the product. As hypothesized, riders liked the concepts that could be ridden in the snow park. They wanted to do tricks, including jumps and other maneuvers. The snow park enabled them to socialize with their friends. Qualitative research also revealed specific product features. The participants believed that a small seat was important to providing cushioning during maneuvers but also enabled them to sit when resting. Motorcycle-style foot pegs were preferred over a snowboard- or skateboard-style deck.

Having identified the core underlying concept, the design team began working on style and design executions for the core concept. Several executions were developed, each depicting differences in image and refinement directions in the user experience. The concepts were evaluated through a clinic-style research methodology. Consumers from the target segment and a larger sample were recruited. They viewed full-scale drawings of the concepts while completing a quantitative questionnaire. A smaller portion of the respondents participated in group discussions after completing the questionnaire.

The final concept scored highly in the clinic. Yamaha developed several prototypes of the product and conducted on-the-snow research events where professionals and amateurs could actually ride the prototypes and provide feedback.

Balancing the Outcome Of the three projects that were initiated, it is likely that only one will come to market. Although considerable time and effort had been invested in all three projects, the most significant costs and impact were yet to come. Considerable investment was necessary to develop production tooling for the products and to scale up for manufacturing. The two products that will not come to market were seen as not a good fit for the overall portfolio strategy or the current market conditions. One product (not shown here) is likely to come to market because of the strong synergies with an existing product line in both manufacturing and distribution.

While many companies believe that blue-ocean innovation is exciting and represents high-growth potential, in some cases it may not be the best fit for the organization.

In this case, considerations that were not seen early on in the innovation process arose late in the project just prior to committing to product costs.

Before embarking on a blue-ocean innovation effort, it is critical to consider the entire development and launch process to determine constraints and considerations in manufacturing, product-line strategy and distribution strategy. By understanding these needs and gaining buy-in early in the innovation process, there is a higher probability that the ideas developed will make it to market. n

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By Paul Earle paul@farmhouseLB.com Paul Earle is executive director of Farmhouse, a Chicago-based innovation and new venture center.

What’s Your Design Strategy?

it’s Your Story.

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esigners, along with their clients on the marketing side, seek inspiration for the next big and beautiful thing from lots of places. The spark could come from any variety of research, competitive products, nature, cultural trends, or, heck, even tea leaves and a Ouija board.

There is, however, another framework designers might want to consider as inspiration for their next project. It is fairly new as applied to design, even though its roots can be traced back to the beginning of time: the story.

Nick Kokonas, co-founder of Alinea, the spectacular celebration of the senses that was recently named the greatest restaurant in the world by Elite Traveler and Laurent-Perrier, speaks often about the playbook that led to this success. Sure, he was already a highly accomplished businessperson, and his partner, renowned chef Grant Achatz, was already famous in culinary circles. A competent team, to say the least. The magic, however, began when they wrote a story—literally—about what they imagined the experience of their restaurant to be.

That exercise in creative writing informed everything they went on to design, from the menu, interior decoration and architecture to the name and every other feature and detail of the experience, including the tablecloths, fixtures and protocols for the greeters. The hallmark of Alinea is its ability to evoke emotion, which not coincidentally is a hallmark of good storytelling.

The fact is, story is a critical part of the design mix; story is what imbues objects with the ability to connect with people emotionally. A design that cannot connect emotionally most likely will not have commercial success and will fall short of the standard that defines innovation.

Ultimately, aren’t we all trying to innovate? So why is story so often the last part of the process?

If you want to see an ad guy get cranky, tell him to try to manufacture sizzle for a product that is fully finished yet devoid of purpose and life. It happens all the time and is hard to do with any honesty. The time for the storytellers to engage in product design is at the beginning, not the end.

Farmhouse is a relatively new innovation and design outfit that happens to be embedded inside the Leo Burnett Co., a global marketing firm best known for creating emotionally resonant advertising. We are prototyping a provocative approach to product and experience design: Start with the story.

Can story precede design strategy? Or even be the strategy itself? Perhaps.

My colleague, Craig Sampson, an engineer and product designer by trade, works in lockstep with Dan Chodrow, a classically trained writer and creative director. At the very outset of an assignment, Sampson often asks Chodrow and his team to imagine the ad they wish they could write.

Chodrow and his team will then aim to recognize people’s deeper needs, tap into their dreams and make them believe that something better is possible through prose as well as accompanying graphic design elements. We might even see the first vestiges of advertising ideas (yes, an ad before the product itself even exists).

From there, our design brief is simple: What can we create that will fulfill the promise of that story? This doesn’t mean that we can create an antigravity suit (“I can’t change the laws of physics,” Star Trek’s Scotty would proclaim). But it does mean that when we design, we should be serving the story.

Creative collaborations between strategists, storytellers and product people are exhilarating experiences. A product concept inspires an ad idea that informs product features that drive promotional concepts that yield graphic design treatments that prompt taglines that drive adjacent product concepts, and so on. The outcome is work that is not just fun and interesting; it is hardwired from the outset for the critical go-to-market stage to follow.

Alinea photos Christian Seel.

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Consider, if you will, a design challenge informed by classic plots from the beginning. What forms would be inspired by a tale of romance and pursuit? What features might be inspired by the classic story of ascension (colloquially known as rags to riches)? Giving the product wings might be a bit too literal—or is it? If you have to design an object or experience to a story brief of forbidden love, where does that take you?

Leading with story can yield designs that appeal to the heart, not just the mind. Both are nice, but if I had to pick one, it would be the former.

Our team recently led a redesign of an iconic object.

Our researchers uncovered an insight that this product was often used during periods of transition. This led to a rather moving story of metamorphosis, where our protagonist seeks change. You can imagine how this story impacted the design of the product’s form, as well as its graphic identity and, ultimately, marketing communications.

Designers aspire for their work to contain elements that withstand the test of time. The best stories already do that.

This is because humans are essentially narrative creatures and have been forever. Consider prehistoric humans, whose ancient rock carvings tell stories of survival, love and other components of the human condition that are as compelling today as they were eons ago.

In a world of breakneck change, with Moore’s law presiding, the winning designs of the future might not necessarily be the best technologies—which can be copied or made obsolete relatively easily—but the best stories. Back to the basics.

Jonah Sachs’ Winning the Story Wars talks to the importance of narrative in modern marketing, introducing the notion of the hero’s journey. This seminal work is a riff on Rolf Jensen’s Dream Society, which over a decade ago predicted that imagination, not information or product features, will define the products of tomorrow. Jensen, a futurist, is being proven right today.

So, the next time you begin a design project, don’t just research the unmet needs. Think about how people feel about these needs, and how they’d talk about it. Make friends with a few writers, and bring the same level of creativity and talent of the written and spoken word that you do to form giving and visual aesthetics. Then start your journey by designing the story. n

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Defining and Measuring Creativity in Product Design

Searching for a Yardstick

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ow to tell if something is actually creative, the classic criterion problem applied to product design, has been discussed and debated in the creativity research and design communities for decades. The topic is also of interest in the popular news media. Recently on National Public

Radio’s All Things Considered, host Elizabeth Blair interviewed James Catterall, a psychologist and director of the Centers for Research on Creativity in Los Angeles, asking him why we should try to measure creativity.

He replied that if we demand creativity or want it, as a society, a business community or an educational community, we need to know when it’s happening. He added that measuring creativity is an important aspect of knowing where our investments pay off.

While many agree that creativity is important, and that measuring it is desirable, there are still differing points of view on how to objectively evaluate products. This is especially true when thinking about the ability of products to connect emotionally with consumers and how design teams can deploy and embed the ideas of form follows function and useful, useable and desirable.

Early research about creativity in products made use of such criteria as newness, value and appropriateness; transformation and condensation (a sense of the rightness of the solution); durability; and, of course, marketability. But what was lacking was a way to characterize these terms against the emotional connection the user has with the product.

A useful framework for understanding product creativity is called the Creative Product Analysis Model. It describes the three factors of creative products—their novelty, their resolution and their style—in a way that can turn theory into an insightful and practical tool for industrial designers and product development teams. A metric based on this model, called the Creative Product Semantic Scale (CPSS), develops the theory into a tangible and actionable scorecard.

A metric-based approach to the evaluation of products can bring clarity to the subjective realm of creativity. The CPSS enables project teams to collect feedback on how consumers perceive important physical characteristics of a product. This tool used alongside other new product development research methods, like

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usability testing and market research, helps gather feedback about consumer acceptance boundaries and ensures the consistent character of the brand within its portfolio of products. Organizations looking to strengthen their evaluation tools to benchmark success criteria throughout the product development process can add this yardstick to their toolkits. It can also help designers quantify their aesthetic decisions and articulate design values to the rest of the design team.

To complement other research tools that help uncover connections between the physical design and the user’s perceptions, the CPSS metric tool considers nine facets of creativity within the three dimensions of novelty, resolution and style, testing either a single product or a competitive set of products with consumers. This scorecard can be used throughout: from early benchmarking assessments to final concept selection and optimization through commercialization of the product. An outstanding product design example for each of the nine facets illustrates and details the three dimensions of the Creative Product Analysis Model: Novelty The first dimension of the model is novelty, which has two facets: surprise and originality. The most frequently mentioned characteristic of a creative product is that it brings something new or previously unseen to the world. However, most new products are improvements or variations on existing products. By understanding what makes a product novel (surprise and originality), another layer of context can be assessed in research.

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In the realm of what is acceptable when being novel, remember Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. It is rare that designs perceived by consumers as shockingly new will be readily accepted, although exceptions can prove the rule.

The subjective attributes that a designer infuses into the design go beyond merely delivering an appropriate product for the market.

The Dyson Air Multiplier (left) surprises people with its bladeless design and technology that produces a soundless movement of air. Its unexpected design changes the user experience often associated with fans, both through its function and aesthetics.

All designers want to express originality in their work and not deliver a variation on last year’s model. Often, the constraints of the business demand just that. However, there are true inspirations that embody an original form factor, like Philippe Starck’s 1990 Alessi Salif Juicer. Starck said, “It was meant to start conversations.”

Resolution The second dimension of the Creative Product Analysis Model, resolution, has four facets: logical, useful, understandable and valuable. These core criteria are expected but often not articulated or easily understood. The most creative products deliver this experience with little or no need for a user manual.

A perhaps surprising example of a logical product comes from the Steve Jobs era at Apple. The first iPhone knocked the socks off the competition by solving an important problem very logically. Then (not so long ago) cellphones had lengthy menus that required scrolling through

Susan Besemer has a doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of Bergen, Norway. With more than 30 years in creativity research, she has published many articles and two books: Creating Products in the Age of Design and From Museums, Galleries, and Studios. Her company, ideafusion, helps organizations assess, strengthen and develop new product concepts. n Philip Thompson is vice president of design at Newell Rubbermaid. Before his current role he held senior design leadership positions at Masco, Whirlpool and Electrolux and worked extensively in Europe and the US. He holds a master’s in industrial design from the Royal College of Art in London.

lists to find the function, name or category you wanted.

The first iPhone, above all its other creative aspects, let you make calls logically. Apple creatively solved a problem that the competition couldn’t.

OXO, a company well-known for creating highly ergonomic and user-friendly products, delivered another useful tool with its Good Grips Angled Measuring Cup (left). The product solves the age-old problem of needing to raise the cup to eye level to get an accurate reading. The creativity of the angled cup easily allows users to look down at the markings. It is a great example of reevaluating a product that has remained fundamentally unchanged by adding useful while taking away awkward.

Who doesn’t understand how to use a broom? But why can’t the broom understand how to be more handy?

The OXO Good Grips Any Angle Broom (right) creatively answers that question with a product design feature that enables the broom head to snap securely into any angle to get into tight places. This is another example of a product going beyond its traditional function in the minds of consumers who might think, Why do I need another broom?

This product communicates that it understands the task better and offers a higher level of functionality.

For everyone who thinks that you have to pay a lot to get something valuable, think about the Method cleaning products. Why is the 48-ounce refill for its All-Purpose Cleaner (below) perceived as valuable? Because it reflects the values and priorities of users.

For people for whom an effective, safe and environmentally benign product is important, finding a product that isn’t overpackaged or overhyped is to find something of value.

Not everyone has the same values. Some may prefer products that demonstrate their wealth, while others may prefer products that are highly aesthetic. No matter what the value, products that are perceived as being valuable have an added advantage.

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Style The third dimension of the Creative Product Analysis Model is style and has three facets: organic, well–crafted and elegant. The style or aesthetic of a product is the first element that many customers consider, an evaluation that people make subconsciously. To ensure that the product design resonates with users, it should convey a sense of balance and integrity. The subjective believability a user assigns to a product’s looks translates into how consumers believe it will perform. Being able to quantify these snap judgments early in the development of the product can ensure that aesthetic details are not compromised or lost as trade-offs later in manufacturing.

An organic product is perceived as being harmonious and originating from natural elements. This design aesthetic looks balanced to the consumer on a subconscious level. The sense of order that is found in nature translates into products that are well-proportioned and flow seamlessly. Both inside and out, the BMW’s redesigned MINI Cooper (far right) shows flowing curves that suggest balanced and harmonious relationships among the parts.

When consumers hear the term “well-crafted” they often associate it with fine wooden furniture or labor-intensive handwork. New materials and modern manufacturing processes can also produce products that are seen as well-crafted without being one-of-a-kind handcrafted works. A great example of translating wellcrafted into a contemporary office chair is Herman Miller’s Aeron Chair (below). The same meticulous detail in the construction and finish is evident in the first read of this chair in the eyes of the consumer. It appears well-made and well-thought-out, signaling its attention to the user’s experience. For many brands, hitting on this facet of well-crafted

Courtesy Herman Miller

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is critical in conveying trust. Using the CPSS tool to understand this facet can add value in the aesthetic trade-offs product development teams face.

Elegant is not often a term used in design critiques, but consumers know an elegant solution when they see one. The term “elegant” is sometimes considered to be a synonym for “fancy,” but it refers to designs without frills or furbelows, designs that express a restrained and economical solution. The Grohe Rainshower® Next Generation Icon Shower Head (left), with its pure halo form and simple switch to adjust water pressure, is a perfect demonstration of creatively delivering elegance that users can visually and physically appreciate.

The Yardstick Using the CPSS with either consumers or in-house product development teams will quantify and define a product’s average rating against each of these nine facets. The tool enables the product development team to set target values for the scales relevant to its brand values and business needs.

The need to establish targeted values is evident when you think of, for example, the different levels of novelty that would be accepted in home décor products as opposed to those for medical equipment. Likewise, companies will set target values appropriate to their needs, even to the level of varying the targeted scores of individual brands.

The CPSS tool does not replace the creativity and intuition of designers but helps team members to apply and communicate their assessments throughout the design process from inception to commercialization. It gives the product development team a way to check the designers’ intuition as it navigates and translates the product’s features and aesthetics.

There will always be an active debate about how we know if a product is creative. For now there is a yardstick that can help us find out. n

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showcase

“Progressive Rock.”

Portable WiFi Device designed by Whipsaw Inc. for TP-Link; www.whipsaw.com

design comes home

“An elegant consumer product line, as durable as any commercial cookware.

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Stainless steel at its best.

Royal INNOVE™ Cooking System designed by Cesaroni Design for Hy Cite Enterprises LLC; www.cesaroni.com Prestige®

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The submitters pay for the publishing to this unjuried showcase.

“If looks could grill...”

Martini Grill designed by M Industrial Design for Original Ideas; idbym.com

“An iconic design that leverages Budweiser’s heritage, fosters camaraderie and commands attention.”

Budweiser Bowtie-Shaped Beer Can designed by Metaphase Design Group Inc. (structural design, not graphics) for Anheuser-Busch Companies LLC; www.metaphase.com

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showcase

“The future now. A powerful, smart and nimble friend in the backyard.”

Aquabot, Robotic Pool Cleaner designed by ECCO Design for Aqua Products; www.eccoid.com

“Good things come in small packages.”

Kickstand High Performance Portable Projector designed by Morrow Design for bem wireless; www.morrowdesign.net

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“A clean compact design, as pure as the water it filters.”

Royal Prestige® FP 6000 Water Filtration System designed by Cesaroni Design for Hy Cite Enterprises LLC; www.cesaroni.com

“Research and design helped Vessix sell its revolutionary hypertension therapy to Boston Scientific for $425M.

”

Vessix V2 Renal Denervation System designed by Karten Design for Vessix Vascular; www.kartendesign.com

“Automated French press brewing experience that demands an audience.”

BUNN trifecta® MB designed by Design Concepts Inc. for BUNN; www.design-concepts.com

I N N O V A T I O N summer 2 0 1 3

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showcase

“An eye-catching pocket-sized game controller providing a full console

experience for Android smartphones and tablets.”

PowerA MOGA Pocket designed by Anvil Studios Inc. for BDA Inc. for the PowerA brand; www.anvil-studios.com; www.powera.com

“Merely 780 grams, the new Legend is the lightest,

”

stiffest frame ever produced by Kestrel.

Kestrel Legend SL designed by Anvil Studios Inc. for ASI for the Kestrel brand; www.anvil-studios.com; www.kestrelbicycles.com

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“A more intelligent approach to cataract surgery—ergonomically designed for patient comfort and surgical precision.”

LENSAR Laser System designed by Bleck Design Group for LENSAR Inc.; www.bleckdesigngroup.com

“Redefining the mouse.

”

Transforming sophisticated technology into a simple, elegant user experience.

RollerMouse Re:d®, designed by Contour Design Inc. and Bleck Design Group; www.bleckdesigngroup.com

I N N O V A T I O N summer 2 0 1 3

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sig nposts

The Data Suggest That I Am Right Again...

A

nyone with a basic knowledge of investing understands the concept of balancing risk in a portfolio.

You want to put some money where there are safe and predictable returns, some in mixed funds and perhaps a bit in speculative growth stocks. You can go online and answer a few questions from your banker and readily get a measure of your risk tolerance—and based on that, get guidance on building a portfolio.

A company can manage its product development in a similar way. A product portfolio should have a balance of mature profitable products as well as some that are breaking new ground and taking risks to uncover new markets and new customers. Consciously defining and tracking the right balance of innovation risk is a challenge.

Companies may do it by tracking development spending across next-generation product evolution, innovative new features and new research into disruptive technologies or game-changing ideas.

It can also be managed by balancing people on a team and keeping the right number of risk-seeking innovators around to push into new spaces. These people—designers commonly among them—are generally the optimists and idealists who are fuelled by finding the next new thing and are never satisfied with how things are. If you think of them in terms of a risk index or scale, they are way off to the right: comfortable with uncertainty and often frustrated by conservatism.

So, just as with our finances and product portfolios, there is a risk portfolio of people as well: the risk takers balanced by those wired to seek more predictable, reliable outcomes.

At the team level, it is a source of fascination how decisions get made among this diverse mix of personalities. In product development research, we have all been on one side or the other of the debate between following intuition and listening to data. Smart people on opposing ends of the risk scale can easily poke holes in either of these approaches.

Considering this led me to the research of Tali Sharot, whose work has uncovered what she calls an “optimism bias.” Her research reveals that we are wired to hear data

“At the team level, it is a source of fascination how decisions get made among this diverse

”

mix of personalities.

that points to a positive outcome for ourselves. In other words, we react more to new information that we perceive as good news rather than bad news. These findings seem to correlate with the idea of confirmation bias, which suggests that we tend to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs and to ignore or diminish the things that do not.

This all suggests that we are vulnerable when trying to accurately interpret design research involving innovation and risk options because we all have our own position on that scale. We will be more influenced by the research that reinforces our existing tendencies or beliefs.

But what if we first turn the research on ourselves? We may be able to identify our own risk biases before revealing the actual data and results. If we can identify our position on the risk scale and also identify the design option’s position on that scale, then we can predict what would be good news versus bad news and then correct against that before we interpret the results. This could help us to be more honest with ourselves and understand why we might be hoarding the data and anecdotes that support our position. We just may learn a bit about our counterparts and call them on their own biases as well.

Big decisions have to be made with sloppy information and all kinds of biases all the time, which can create a lot of dissonance on a team. Assuming, optimistically, that we all want to make good decisions that reflect the input we collect from our research, we should watch for the factors that appear to conspire against good decisions.

Trying to understand the risk we want to take, putting together the portfolio of people who reflect that risk and then being aware of the biases we bring to the table seems like a way to get behind research and drive decisions we can believe in.

—Alistair Hamilton, IDSA arh@designpost.com

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