INNOVATION Summer 2021: How Will Designers Return To The Studio?

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SUMMER 2021

How will designers return to the studio?

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

SUMMER 2021 ®

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Above: Bryce Rutter, IDSA, conducts a pilot study for formative testing of a graphical user interface design for a surgical system.

Image provided by Metaphase Design Group, Stephen Kennedy © 2020.

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$50+ S&H $25+ S&H

(RE)WORK 28

What’s Next for the Design Studio?

by Maureen Carroll, IDSA David Patton, IDSA Graham Sadtler Cori Rowley, IDSA Yves Béhar, IDSA Jordan Nollman, IDSA Dr. Bryce G Rutter, IDSA Erika Avery, IDSA Michael McAghon Bret Recor Casper Asmussen Stuart Karten, IDSA Chrissy Livaudais Ben Azzam, IDSA Tor Alden, FIDSA Yariv Sade Dan Grossman Dan Harden, IDSA Brian Black Russell Kroll Aaron Pierce Justin Coble Jonathan Thai, IDSA Bill Webb, IDSA Astro Studios Mark Prommel

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Living Ecosystems

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Remote Work: Toward a More Accessible Future

by Caterina Rizzoni, IDSA

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Action Plan for a Safe Office

IDSA AMBASSADORS

Supporting Black Designers: IDSA Sponsors the Visibility X Dsgn Event

Covestro, Pittsburgh, PA

Not a Job, Not Just a Profession. It’s Being an Industrial Designer

TEAGUE, Seattle, WA

by Allen Samuels, IDSA

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Charter supporters indicated in bold.

Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO

Techmer PM, Clinton, TN For more information about becoming an

It’s a Matter of Choice

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Academia 360°

by Aziza Cyamani, IDSA, and Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness, IDSA

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A Peek at IDC 2021

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Is Design the Problem?

by Gabriel Ruegg, IDSA

IN EVERY ISSUE 4

In This Issue

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From HQ

by Chris Livaudais, IDSA

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SUMMER 2021

Beautility

by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

by Jacklyn Ady, IDSA

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Concept ⟶ Production ⟶ Market: Getting It Made Deep Dive 2021

A Final Thought

by Judith Anderson, IDSA

How will designers return to the studio?

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 recycled paper with soy-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, 950 Herndon Pkwy, Suite 250 | Herndon, VA 20170. Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/Innovation, 950 Herndon Pkwy, Suite 250 | Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2021 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 40, No. 2, 2021; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 07312334; USPS 0016-067.

Cover: The HS Design headquarters in New Jersey.

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I N T HI S I SSUE

PREPARING FOR A NEW NORMAL

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e, like many of you, are eager to get back to having in-person interactions with our work colleagues (and, of course, our friends and family). At the same time, we too have grown used to a simplified morning routine, responding to emails from the couch, and, yes, sometimes wearing sweatpants during Zoom meetings. Shh, don’t tell! We also realize that the work environment won’t simply go back to “normal” by the simple wave of a wand. How could it? It’s actually much more complicated. Given that many teams around the world have successfully navigated a switch to remote work, what leverage do managers and corporate decision-makers have to entice their employees out of their home offices and back to the “real” office?

Some large companies (Atlassian, Coinbase, Dropbox, Facebook, Slack, and Twitter, to name a few) have already announced plans to allow most or all of their employees to work entirely remote forevermore. Even after the pandemic ends. Yet there is a big difference between the type of work these employees perform and that of industrial designers. The industrial design process is frequently reliant on in-person interactions and physical activities related to bringing ideas into reality: making things, testing things, seeing and feeling real materials, collaborative brainstorming, user testing, and so on. Yes, the companies mentioned above all have design teams, but their workflows and output are largely digital and service oriented, which can be adapted to distributed collaboration much easier than the craft of creating something physical.

Now more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve already seen the novel ways in which industrial designers have adapted to a virtual setting: from shipping samples and prototypes to home addresses to scheduling rotating timeslots for individuals to be at the studio to access tools and machinery. But with vaccines currently in distribution and a light at the end of the tunnel now visible, many big questions have started to emerge: • Do design studios need to adopt a more fluid or virtual setting?

• Will creative collaboration return to pre-COVID standards, or will we adopt something new?

• What methodologies from virtual can we learn from and apply to an in-person setting?

• What will change from a team leadership perspective in the future?

• How will operational processes and project management techniques change?

• What can be done to ensure our team members are mentally and emotionally prepared to return to in-person work?

In March 2021, we synthesized these big questions and asked members of our design community “How is your design team/studio/office planning to return to work postCOVID?” Their responses, some lightly edited for clarity, are collected here as the main focus of this issue. It’s important for us to share our experiences, learnings, expectations, and strategies with one another so that we might emerge from the pandemic in a position to begin our “new normal” with efficiency, momentum, and success.

—INNOVATION Editorial Team

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FROM HQ

THE ACT OF KINDNESS

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rom a young age we are taught the importance of being kind to one another and to treat everyone with the respect you would hope they might return to you.

Some of the most meaningful moments in a lifetime can come from the connections made with people who share admiration for one another, even through difference of opinion.

IDSA’s Code of Ethics is an important, yet not frequently talked about, part of the IDSA membership experience. It establishes a benchmark of honesty, fairness, and accountability for each of us to individually strive for in our work as industrial designers and as members of a community. Every member of IDSA agrees to adhere to this Code as a part of their membership. During a recent assessment of our operational and governance practices, IDSA’s Board of Directors initiated a review of our existing membership Code of Ethics in 2020.

This work dovetailed with IDSA’s ongoing efforts to improve the experiences attendees have at virtual, local, and national IDSA events. It is absolutely vital that our organization consistently creates safe spaces and welcoming environments for our community, no matter the scale or format. We want everyone who wishes to be a part of the IDSA community to feel that they can be appreciated for their contributions to our success. We also want everyone to feel that they belong and are valued for their participation.

A small team led by Jerry Layne, CAE, IDSA’s Chief Operating Officer and resident association governance expert, researched best-in-class examples of membership ethics statements and collaborated with IDSA’s legal counsel to develop a revised collection of ethics. The goal of this review phase was to draft revised statements,

which would provide a greater level of detail and guidance designed to advance the quality of our profession as well as our interactions with one another.

To that end, we are pleased to present IDSA’s updated Ethical Principles and Code of Ethics (found at www.idsa.org/ code-ethics), which was ratified by IDSA’s Board of Directors in early 2021. This expanded collection of principles and articles now includes more direct expectations of memberto-member interactions, as well as revised statements of accountability, to help each of us maintain high standards in the professional service of industrial design. Articles 7–12 in the updated Code are all additions that provide this focus.

Another addition is a new Complaint and Review Process.

While this is a component we hope we never have to use, it is important nonetheless to have a written protocol in place from an association governance perspective and to ensure that members have an established process for voicing their concerns.

This collection of revised and new statements helps ensure that our members are held to a high standard in their business and community interactions. We hope that our community will find these revised Ethical Principles and Code of Ethics to be a powerful, yet humble, reminder of the impact our actions can have on others every day. We intend that these statements empower you to serve each other as IDSA members with honesty, respect, and integrity befitting the great responsibility we have as professional industrial designers.

Visit www.idsa.org/code-ethics.

—Chris Livaudais, IDSA, Executive Director chrisl@idsa.org

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B E A U TI L I T Y

MAKE GOOD CHOICES

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ometimes you don’t need to decide—sometimes that’s a good choice. But it may be a better choice to make a bad choice. Every mistake is a teaching opportunity. Indecision and doubt weaken the process, while problems can force us to be creative and make something better for the next choice.

How does this relate to design? Creating, making, and managing choices is essentially what design is about.

Designers, by definition, must literally make a lot of bad choices. Working through bad ideas, getting lost, and hitting dead ends is testing the limits. How else can we arrive at the good ones? For the designer, choices have two aspects: On a personal level, designing is choosing. On a team level, the designer manages the development process of choosing the choices. The design process is a conversation between people and between needs and reality. Designers need to hear all the voices to navigate the rough interpersonal waters innovation generates. Like Meat Loaf sang, designers are constantly asking, “What’s it going to be?”

Right now, bad choices are stacking up like dirty dishes in the sink. Disapproval hurts. The world feels overwhelmed with deep systemic problems on every level, all with an abundance of hard choices.

How do designers help manage the change they are creating? Lao Tzu says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Like a funky drum beat that keeps the music moving, the design process keeps development moving, and designers’ soft skills manage each step.

Steering the options and guiding the process takes just as much talent and creativity as creating new designs—and is just as necessary for success.

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Real Choices When I showed some sketches to a client the other day, she was surprised that I was sharing a bunch of concepts. I was surprised when she told me that designers usually just give her one final design. They don’t show any choices?

How could that work? Starchitects think they already have the answer. They bestow THE design, leaving the client only one choice: Take it or leave it. Maybe they think options confuse clients. Sometimes they also use a long explanation to squelch discussions. By running down the clock, there is less time for arguments. Makes it easier for the designer, but not necessarily a better design.

Another trick is the three-way: Offer the client three possibilities: a bad design, a good design, and a reach design. These seemingly three choices are more than only one, but coercive, not truly inclusive, pressing the client toward the preselected “good” design.

Working with the client by offering real choices is what builds toward the best option that everyone wants.

That practice has always been integral to design thinking.

The application of a more inclusive collaborative process may have originated with industrial designers, who must satisfy manufacturing needs combined with the users’ and client’s desires. Designers must engage all players and users because they all have a stake in achieving success.

Offering choices rather than solutions, like in therapy, makes people feel important and fundamentally empowered. Plus encouraging anyone to contribute is a great way to find diverse voices and create the best solutions!

There are many ways to make decisions: comparing the options, weighing pluses and minuses, listing pros and cons, prioritizing, doing a SWOT analysis (strength,

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weakness, opportunities, and threats), conducting cost/ benefit analyses, measuring against the goal or the brand values. There are good democratic voting methods and bad dogmatic rules that enforce bias. Then there are the less effective second guessing, wishing, eliminating by sudden death, and asking the guy in the hall. Also not recommended: rolling dice, rock-paper-scissors, and consulting a dog.

Choices are what propel design. Showing options, offering choices, and even making mistakes are good ways to open up discussion and move projects forward. After years of trying to broker communication between colleagues and clients at IDEO, Fred Dust used design thinking to design the conversation itself with “intention and purpose, but still artful and playful,” he says in Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication.

“We don’t have to just be participants in, or victims of, conversations. We can be the makers of the conversations.”

How can we structure the discussion without bias?

Jamer Hunt, vice provost for transdisciplinary initiatives at The New School, asks in his new book about scale, How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible, “Who is doing the designing? It can’t be just experts, and it must be all of us.

Here again is where scaffolding plays a role: We must all be fully engaged in a well-designed process that encourages our participation, draws upon our local wisdom, and defies the distant experts. When autonomy, agency, and the capacity to change systems is handed back to those who use the systems we’ve created, we will finally start to see a more nuanced and responsive set of behaviors.” Designers expect to choreograph and tailor a journey that can be co-authored by the stakeholders.

All presentation media is inherently biased, and we all know how to exploit spotlights, pedestals, and frames. The pandemic is laying bare the weaknesses of the virtual world.

Linear presentations (PowerPoints or movies) are great for telling stories that lead to (happy) endings, but the format, like Twitter is proven to cloud analysis because it is difficult to scan options at once on a screen. Although in Miro you can zoom in on one option, it’s not the same as shuffling papers and actually pressing your nose to the sketch! It’s hard to compare and organize options in any kind of tunnel.

An open development conversation begins by presenting

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everything, literally putting everything “on the table” and keeping the “door open” to unforeseen opportunities. (P.S. those are not virtual “air quotes”). It’s good to remember the physical advantages of things like pin-up displays where the options are up for all to see, inviting everyone to look and compare. Organize, reorganize, and cull out the weak ones.

Dutch graphic designer Gert Dunbar loved spreading out his design options on the floor for presentations. Everyone could see all the work. He said he knew a client was really engaged when they began crawling around on the floor too!

Design Thinking to the Rescue Right now politics is not working well. Politicians are acting like professional wrestlers playing to the crowd. Does that mean democracy is broken? It’s hard to think of a better way to govern. The problem with our polarized politics is that every issue is defined by stereotypes that, like PowerPoint presentations, mask the underlying commonalities. Robert’s Rules of Order may keep the parliamentary procedure civil, but it is the wrong procedure for a collaborative, progressive, and successful working through of the issues. No one wins when the development process turns into a battle between sides. We need to convert politicians into designers who want to solve our problems by looking for teleological and probably nonbinary solutions. Now more than ever we need the most creative and practical leadership to crack the pandemic, the climate crisis, and social equity.

Side-by-side comparisons, like presidential debates, work by revealing differences. A/B testing is the simplest form of a controlled experiment. Two versions of the same thing are matched against each other while a single variable is changed. The 19th century monk Gregor Mendel unraveled the basic principles of heredity with just a handful of peas and a couple of pots. He observed that natural selection builds on the previous generations’ traits, just like March Madness seedings lead to the best team. With A/B tests it’s easy to measure which variation works best. They are great for isolating the critical factors and distilling them into rocket fuel. What makes A/B testing controversial?

It works too well! For instance, researchers at Facebook once experimented on 689,003 unsuspecting users to see if showing more positive or negative news impacted sales— and it did! The problem was that people thought Facebook

was manipulating viewers’ emotions for profit. (What if Facebook only focused on good news? Would business boom and hate wither?)

Since industrial designers focus on satisfying the user, the design process has incorporated multiple methods of accessing user responses: psychological tests, interviews, physical measurements, and, of course, observation— always tested with prototypes. Truth comes from listening to the real users who have real things. As John-Michael Ekeblad says, “Your butt decides if the chair is working!” But the most fruitful approach is to engage users in a process that leads to deeper empathy and success. That’s why industrial designers always share options—not just because we are trying to please people (well, we are), but because working through options together is very gratifying.

Today we are faced with a kind of crisis of imagination that requires crisis intervention and de-escalation training.

Everyone is getting excited. Choices may help define and contrast the options, but everything is not either white or black. We need to search the infinite continuum of possibilities. Reversing a bad choice is a welcome choice.

Now how do we manage an iterative process that can spin wheels or jump to conclusions? Of course, we all have to work within the circumstances we are given. Design thinking is the best approach to making incremental choices and coping with a complex matrix of fluid needs and desires.

We’re in an era when design methods and education pedagogy have merged and are now the dominant methodology of big business—everyone is “earning by doing”!

A Better Way Everyone wants to make the world better. The question is how? And for whom? All the interlocking and interacting systems are squeezing us tighter and tighter. Everyone is getting intimate with everybody’s business: their viruses, floods, forest fires, and social issues. Choices and wicked problems seem overwhelming. The consumer is confronted by the choices they made, and the ones industrial designers made for them. We are stuck between rocks and hard places, where each step has many moral choices—and anyone’s actions can be magnified by a Tweet or a semiautomatic rifle.

What if there was a pill that would make everything better?

At the beginning of The Matrix, Neo can pick either the red pill or the blue pill. Red to reveal the truth and blue to continue with things the way they are. We need to take a better pill: a green pill that reveals the vision of sustainable design. That exposes how to make renewable energy more effective, make human power more fun, and organic tomatoes taste even better. That pill is going to be epic. As Jonas Milder told me, “We need some serious leapfrogging!”

Don’t stack the dirty dishes! Write your prescription for the beautility pill. We can turn spinach into candy. We must make all options green.

Reach for the Beautility pill.

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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E V E N T R E CAP

CONCEPT ⟶ PRODUCTION ⟶ MARKET

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DSA’s inaugural Getting It Made Deep Dive, held March 17–18, zeroed in on the crucial steps and top tips from experts on how to take a product design from concept through production and into the marketplace.

More than 450 attendees from 17 countries—Puerto Rico, Brazil, Spain, Canada, the Netherlands, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, Sweden, India, Ecuador, Italy, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and the United States—joined in for two days of practical, entertaining, and industrial design-focused content. Sixteen design students were able to attend this event for free as a result of donations to the Design Foundation’s DEI Event Access Program.

The event was co-emceed by Michael DiTullo, IDSA, founder and chief creative of Michael DiTullo, LLC, and Moni Wolf, principal designer of ODSP, Project Cortex at Microsoft. Together with IDSA staff and the event content planning team, they assembled a roster of presenters representing multiple sectors, from the design of furniture and electric vehicles to toys and home goods and much more, with expertise ranging from CMF designers to in-house product developers to start-up founders.

“When we started putting together the speaker list for this event, we talked about having a broad range of experiences, from corporate to consultant to independent, from high-volume mass production to low-volume craft to one-offs,” DiTullo shared on social media when the event commenced. “I’m so proud to see it all come together.”

For nearly four hours each day, the attendees engaged in a mix of comprehensive keynote presentations, breakout sessions, and opportunities to network, with a virtual happy hour on Wednesday and a Deep Dive Cafe on Thursday.

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The sponsors, Designcraft Prototypes and Stratasys, were present throughout on the Event Hub. Designcraft shared a video of its work, and Stratasys offered attendees a link to request a free J55 PolyJet sample. One lucky attendee on each day of the Deep Dive received a $500 gift voucher from Stratasys to print a 3D model.

Day 1: Exploring Diverse Processes The day began with three keynote presentations. The first was “Designing for Non-Humans” by Katie Lim, the director of industrial design for the Super Chewer brand at BARK. With some adorable examples of dogs testing out her designs, Lim shared the stages of her process, along with factory insights and manufacturing considerations for hard and soft goods used in the toy industry. The second keynote was “Straw Connections” from Kirk Morris, IDSA, design manager at Bradshaw Home. With fascinating insights, Morris explored different stages of the industrial design process through his extensive experience in developing home goods and by drawing parallels to notable trends in drinking straws over the past decade. The third keynote was “Everything Is Connected” from Beatrice Santiccioli, founder of Beatrice Santiccioli Design Inc. Having worked on iconic campaigns for Apple and Herman Miller throughout her career as a CMF, graphic design, and color branding expert, Santiccioli showed how her unique design methodology grows within a rich and connected process that encompasses vision, design, and production.

The breakout sessions included the workshop “Getting Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World” by Craighton Berman, founder and creative director of the Chicagobased startup Manual; a discussion on “Techno-Craft” with

co-presenters Bradley Bowers, design director at Bradley L. Bowers, and Evan Stolatis, a fabricator at Evan Stolatis Fabrication, LLC; and the how-to session “From Render to Reality,” a Stratasys-sponsored breakout with Barry Diener, Yariv Sade, and Colton Mehlhoff.

Before the 5 p.m. happy hour, a compendious keynote from Y Studios founder and CEO Wai-Loong Lim titled “It Takes a Global Village: Bringing Hardware to Life” transitioned into a lively roundtable discussion and Q&A with the day’s presenters.

Day 2: Innovating for Impact Sue Magnusson, creative director of CMF at Lucid Motors, launched the second day with her keynote, “Marrying Tradition and Innovation in CMF.” Magnusson revealed how she and the Lucid design team started from a CMF perspective to build a minimalist electric vehicle with a human-centered heart-and-mind philosophy. The keynote from Gavin Rea, a product designer at Kiwico, dove into the nuts and bolts involved in working on an in-house design team, creating and producing toy kits for kids. In “Zero to Woah, Awesome,” Gavin walked through the process step by step, showing the problems he’s encountered, offering tips and tricks along the way. Then Nichole Rouillac, IDSA, creative director and founder of level design sf, presented on “Shipping Success: Designing Start-ups from Vision to Impact.” She shared the behind-the-scenes story of making Tempo, an award-winning home gym design, with an inside look at how the design intent was translated through manufacturing.

In addition to the Cafe networking breakout room, the day’s breakout sessions were “Technical Soft Goods:

Design through Refine” with Greg Bass, co-founder of Telegraph Studio, and “999 Ways to Kill a Good Idea” with Tom Keegan, IDSA, program manager at Tact Product Development.

Before the rousing Day 2 speakers and Q&A, the “Paths to Production” keynote from contract furniture designers Alyssa Coletti and Kevin Stark, dove into the revision, review, and rework processes that occur during development to refine and optimize a product for release. Among many other questions posed and answered throughout the event, Coletti and Stark asked, “What groundwork should be done to convince a manufacturer to choose and embrace your work?”

Attendees really enjoyed the experience. Heather Blaikie said, “IDSA’s Getting It Made Deep Dive was more than time well spent! I appreciated how much real world, behind the scenes, nitty-gritty was shared. Not just shiny end products. It was a great way to connect with fellow designers, while picking up some tips, tricks, and expert advice.” Kim Depole also enjoyed the camaraderie with like-minded professionals: “So inspirational to connect to this special community for two days.” Regarding the format, John Lai, IDSA, said, “Great sessions and great format for accessibility to the content. Nice to have breakouts and a happy hour for networking.” And Monica Welcker shared, “One of the most relevant conferences I’ve been to! Thank you, Industrial Designers Society of America!”

Purchase a ticket to all the GIMDD 2021 recordings, starting at just $25 for full access, at IDSA.org/GIMDD-2021-recap.

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November 2-3, 2021

DIVE

DEEP

The Business of Design Design has long proven itself as a vital component of corporate culture, service offerings, bottom line growth, and exceptional customer experiences.

This 2-day event highlights the important role industrial design plays in business successes and promotes the value designers can bring to strategic decision-making, both in the creative studio and in the board room. idsa.org/BODDD2021

Virtual Event

Sponsored by

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EVEN T REC A P

SUPPORTING BLACK DESIGNERS IDSA SPONSORS VISIBILITY X DSGN

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DSA was proud to be one of the sponsors of the inaugural Visibility X Dsgn virtual event from the Designer’s Workshop. Held on February 18, 2021, the gathering provided a virtual-reality-like space for Black makers to meet up as avatars, share their experiences, and connect with one another.

Tracy Llewellyn, IDSA, and Raja Schaar, IDSA, leaders on IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council (DEIC), served as moderators for the event, as did Bradley L. Bowers, a presenter for IDSA’s Getting It Made Deep Dive 2021. Sponsoring this event is just one way in which IDSA has committed to financially supporting initiatives with the DEIC that are centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in industrial design and related design disciplines.

Co-hosted by the Designer’s Workshop founder Kamille Glenn and strategic planning lead Felema Yemaneberhan, Visibility X Dsgn used the MootUp platform to “create a space of refuge, allowing makers to feel seen.” Through MootUp, guests were invited to create avatars of themselves to move about the digital “Dsgnr’s Campus.” Each avatar included options for gender, hair color and style, skin shade, eye color, face shape, and apparel. The 32 event moderators also showed up as avatars.

In keeping with the event’s concept of “blurring the lines of hierarchy,” this mix of design professionals and journalists with various titles, positions, and cultural backgrounds were responsible for holding event discussions via thoughtprovoking questions and moderating the interview segment “The Sit Downs,” which streamed over the event’s duration.

In the virtual campus, different design fields were grouped into “camps” to promote interdisciplinary conversations.

These included the Built Camp (architecture, exhibition, experiential, interior, scenic), Tactile Camp (industrial, surface, textile, packaging), and Wear Camp (accessory, fashion, footwear, jewelry). Attendees could also join the Inneract Camp for networking and meeting with vendors.

Of the approximately 150 event participants, most were between the ages of 25 and 35. The majority were

professionals working in fashion, footwear, architecture, and experiential design, with smaller portions in industrial, exhibition, and packaging design, among other fields.

Popular event discussions included “Breaking Toxic Tolerances,” “Paying It Forward: The Makers Role in Mentorship,” and “Breaking the Mindset: In What Ways Is Your Field Archaic?” The Dsgn.Edu Sit Down, moderated by Raja Schaar, IDSA (program director and assistant professor of product design at Drexel University), with Marlon Davis (designer at DE-YAN) and Cory Henry (Atelier Cory Henry), also drew strong attendance for a conversation focused on the design education experience for Black designers.

As the organizers wrote in their event summary, Visibility X Dsgn was built “with the intention of healing the Black maker in design by amplifying our voices and businesses through interdisciplinary conversation.” Because of their success in achieving this goal, they also announced that this event will be held yearly moving forward.

Learn more about the Designer’s Workshop at dsgnrswrkshp.com.

Learn more about IDSA’s DEIC at IDSA.org/DEI.

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P E R S P E CTI V E

NOT A JOB, NOT JUST A PROFESSION. IT’S BEING AN INDUSTRIAL DESIGNER.

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hen I was a student of industrial design at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in the mid-1960s, I and most of my fellow ID students really believed that we could change the world by design, one project at a time. We were design zealots in that we were passionate and saw industrial design as an opportunity to do good and then some. It was almost like being religious, except our gods were talented people with magic markers.

Now after 50 years as an industrial designer, I still believe that we can do good and, if not change the world, at least we can enable and serve people one project and one product at a time. My point here is that by design we are doing more than mechanical work as we create original concepts, designs, and products. When we are designing, we are attempting to advance what it means to be human as well as enabling individuals to carry out daily tasks that make life easier, safer, more interesting, more efficient, more economical, more ecologically responsible, and more beautiful.

As we consider all the issues that inform our work and our designs, we incorporate what we learn into our problem statements, concepts, and, ultimately, into our designs.

This greater purpose beyond being simply practical doesn’t make us heroes or supernatural; it simply means that this work called industrial design requires an informed, broad point of view and an open mind. Our considerations include responsible and comprehensive sets of parameters that inform our processes and products. This means that our work goes far beyond simply meeting technical requirements of mechanics, materials, and manufacturing processes and understanding human psychology, ergonomics, and fit. This, to my way of thinking, makes our profession somewhat unique.

In addition to the practical issues and challenges required of invention, innovation, and product design, if we do our work well, we also give in-depth considerations to the consequences of our designs in both societal and individual terms. We start and end by considering how our designs will inform and improve daily life in general. Lofty perhaps, but true. Our work both challenges and demonstrates our ability to make insightful observations about the world we live in, to formulate unique and extraordinary problem statements, to conceptualize, to imagine, to visualize, model, test, assess,

refine, and, ultimately, to resolve problems of significance and produce useful, safe, functional, understandable, and beautiful mass-produced products.

We as industrial designers, unlike in some other professions, make sure that when we design for people we consider all the people. In my work, I make sure that when I consider my audience, I include the varieties of people and work to enable all of them, as best I can, by design. That includes those of all ages, races, genders, nationalities, etc.— another example of how our work requires a broader point of view not always found in other professions.

All of this to say that I believe industrial design is more than simply a job. And it is not just a profession. Industrial design is a way of life. It is about having a rather unique and broad point of view and being able to understand what was, being aware of what is, and being preoccupied with what can be.

—Allen Samuels, IDSA allenall@umich.edu Allen Samuels is the emeritus professor and dean at the University of Michigan.

Left: Michael DiTullo, IDSA working on a digital sketch. Image provided by Michael DiTullo, LLC.

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IT’S A MATTER OF CHOICE

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ith every product idea destined for production comes choice. Selecting the design direction, features, appearance, colors, price points, and other vital signs of product viability can be a rather complicated procedure. Many disciplines, preconceived notions, and even an ego or two can push a project in a questionable direction, and sometimes even scuttle what was supposed to be a production-ready product. Decisions can and will be made if people are given a well-directed chance to be a part of the process.

I was employed for my entire career by corporations that manufactured products, which I helped design, for consumer purchase and safe use. In their presentations to us, many consultants would plaster the wall with drawings and renderings. Perhaps they thought the display of volume would justify their fee. It certainly did not put anyone at ease or on the road to a reasoned, confident decision. Based on my decades of experience, trial, error, and success, I offer two approaches for leading a group of stakeholders through design development decisions.

More with Less This is a technique I used for guiding a group toward meaningful decisions with very few meetings. When an idea for a product comes up and is ready to be designed, engineered, and produced, you know several departments and disciplines will be anxious to review and contribute to the success of the new idea. If you can, conduct one-onone interviews with the decision-makers in marketing, sales, engineering, production, purchasing, and whoever might be

participating in the development process and be giving the go-ahead. The point is to capture their ideas and concerns about the product.

During these interviews, my advantage was in being able to sketch their suggestions upside down so they could see and comment on what they thought about the product.

Designers seem to be intuitively equipped with the ability to talk and draw at the same time. But non-designers often find it difficult to visualize an idea in their head, particularly with any detail. Take advantage of your drawing skills and sketch out what they are putting into words. This skill always impresses, and it will make the interview more fruitful. Your sketching skills might even lead them toward a direction for the appearance.

When it comes time for the stakeholders to select a final design for production, try to limit the models and/ or presentation illustrations to about five ideas. The more choices, the longer it takes to make decisions. When there are fewer choices, a decision is usually reached by the end of the meeting. If you are faced with a wall full of drawings or a table loaded with models, you can see how bogged down the decision process can be. Your role as a designer is to facilitate, not prolong, the process. After all, many other projects should be following the one at hand !

Since decisions in so many aspects of our lives are made by rejecting one or more things, people, or ideas, why not use the same approach in this meeting? Of the five practical ideas you present to the group, make one of them a bit more radical than they might expect (but still producible).

It also helps to incorporate the ideas you gleaned from the

Right: The Wear-Ever Super Shooter was sold with nine dough extrusion discs to create cookies in different shapes; during testing, the designer hand cut the discs. It sold 1.4 million units in its first year.

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interviews into your ideas as this will demonstrate that you listened to and respected their input. Doing this will always get someone’s attention and put them on your side in the decision discussion. The process of interviewing team members and offering one radical design helps the team reach a timely decision without having to wade through dozens of sketch ideas and models.

The radical idea is almost always rejected at the get-go.

Of course, I would protest when that happened, although many times one or more of its features would appear in the final design. Case in point: In 1964, a consultant firm and I were given the challenge to create a stand-out color scheme for a line of portable construction-grade DeWalt

tools. One color scheme I proposed was rejected for looking like Halloween. I was pleasantly surprised about eight years later, when I was an Alcoa employee in Pittsburgh, to see the new DeWalt products for sale in those rejected yellow and black Halloween colors !

Once the radical idea is out of the way, everyone can look a bit more rationally at the remaining ideas. Now you and decision-makers can focus on evaluating the remaining four designs, consolidating your thoughts and ideas and determining the next step toward achieving a productionready product design. Does this really work? Based on more than 35 years of using this approach to getting a decision, I offer a very positive yes !

GOOD

BETTER

BEST

Hand-powered by a planetary gear drive cap. Fits on a stock barrel.

Powered by a plug-in transformer. 2 speeds: high and low.

Powered by a plug-in transformer. 3 speeds: high, low, and reverse (for cake decorating).

Uses all stock discs and accessories

Uses all stock discs and accessories

Uses all stock discs and accessories

6 aluminum disks

9 aluminum discs

15 aluminum discs plus discs for noodles, pretzels, and cereal

2 plastic decorative tips

3 plastic decorative tips

3 plastic decorative tips

A cake decorating tip and additional discs sold separately

This model is not adaptable for cake decorating

A cake decorating tip adapter with 6 tips and a coupon to purchase additional decorating accessories.

Use and care folder with info about other appliances and accessories available for purchase. Hardbound cookbook sold separately.

Use and care booklet with info about other appliances and accessories available for purchase. Hardbound cookbook sold separately.

Use and care booklet and info about other appliances and accessories available for purchase. Hardbound cookbook included.

Barrel loader

Barrel loader

Barrel loader

Plastic storage tray

Soft-sided, washable storage case Nonslip grip and trigger 1 extra barrel, piston, and screw rod Barrel cleaning brush and 2 snap-on caps for the barrel

Suggested retail price: $12.98

Suggested retail price: $32.98

Suggested retail price: $52.98

The good, better, and best models developed for the Super Shooter. They share many parts and features, which would have made manufacturing all three more feasible. Wear-Ever chose to develop only the better variation. (Note: The sales figures are 1976 prices.)

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Bumps in the Road When production nears, it never failed that sales and marketing would balk when I gave them the supplier’s delivery date for their part of the project. “That can’t work,” they’d say. “Get at least three weeks knocked off their schedule.” Oh, in case you had not thought of this, you do and will get involved in production details !

One way to resolve this problem is to gather all the outside vendors in a meeting with the corporate people responsible for marketing, sales, production, and purchasing. That way everyone can hear the hows and whys of delivery dates and prices at the same time and from the people who can negotiate and supply the necessary revisions right there on the spot. If you can, make some meetings “no chair, no refreshments” gatherings. Ultimately, a meeting is to facilitate the timely exchange of information, not to brag about golf scores or which bagel goes best with which cream cheese spread. A stand-up gathering is another way to extract more information in a much shorter time.

There can also be an opportunity in product design and development to assist the purchasing department.

When I was at Wear-Ever, we used a system where the purchasing agent was the bad cop and I played the role of the good cop. Purchasing would set the hardball price goal, and then I’d counsel the vendor to suggest that a further reduction would really help seal the deal. This required a lot of communication, but since I had shifted from design to project control, it was an enjoyable exchange of information.

Once when we used this approach with a stubborn vendor, we were able to reduce the first quote we received for a DC motor from almost $3.00 to 97 cents ! That 97-cent motor had better quality and performance than the $3.00 unit.

Paying attention to the people, processes, and purchased parts is rarely the responsibility of a designer, but if you have the opportunity, take advantage of the chance to be involved.

Three in One Another way to ease the decision-making process is to design three variations of the product at the same time. For every product or service you are working on, create three levels of features: a good, better, and best choice. Not only will this make the decision easier, it will also accelerate the design process by allowing you to develop three products

The Super Shooter received a mechanical patent for the barrel design, which eliminated air pockets in the dough.

in the same time it takes you to develop one. Once you establish the better product and its features, remove features from it to imagine the good product and add features to it to develop the best version. All three levels would share the same basic functionality but would not have an identical level of features and conveniences. The chart (right) showing the three levels of the Wear-Ever Super Shooter cookie press demonstrates this approach.

In mid 1970s, Wear-Ever, an aluminum cookware company, wanted to design and manufacture a powered cookie press that would be more efficient than the caulking gun-based product they had sold for years. This was the company’s first motorized electric appliance. Wear-Ever had no engineering department, so this function was hired

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A hand-built test model was used to photograph the brochure.

out. Ninety percent of the product’s parts would be injection molded plastic, although the company had no plastic molding machinery. Every part had to be sourced except one steel backing plate for the gears and the nine aluminum cookie discs. Nonetheless, the Super Shooter went from a blank sheet of paper and a pencil to production and delivery to retail in about 16 months.

Wear-Ever produced only the better version, but it could have developed all three models because many of the parts were able to be used in all three product variations.

The cake decorating feature on the best level would have

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prevented a lot of awkward hand manipulation when making designs with icing and relieved potential carpel tunnel symptoms. I wonder why in the 44 years since the Super Shooter entered the market in 1976 a company that produces and sells products to cake decorators hasn’t put an electric powered cake decorator into production. It would certainly relieve a lot of the hand and wrist pressure used in decorating a cake with a cake decorating bag! You can view the development details, production drawings, and experimental and production units in the Marshall Johnson Archives at the Hagley Library and Museum in Wilmington, DE. Wear-Ever sold 1.4 million Super Shooters that first year from January through November and over a million for the next three years. It also developed interest and was used in such diverse areas as veterinary medicine and dental labs. The dental lab at the University of Pittsburgh used the Super Shooter to fill dental molds, and three large animal veterinarians used it with the soft plastic nozzle to inject antibiotics into the mouths of their bovine patients! It was also presented as a functional developmental model to producers of caulking and paint companies; they liked the concept but did not wish to pursue it as a retail product. Thinking about other uses during the design and development process helps expand the potential usefulness of the product or service to as many potential customers as possible. Isn’t this common-sense approach to product development called universal design?

I offer these suggestions as proven, straightforward ways to ramp up product development and simplify design decisions. If they worked all those generations ago, they can certainly could work today. Try them. See what success you can and will have with them.

After all, some ideas from history and experience are worth repeating.

—Marshall Johnson, L/IDSA mjoh105055@aol.com Marshall Johnson is a retired industrial designer who designed many popular products for some of the most well-known small appliance companies, like Wear-Ever, Proctor Silex, and Hamilton Beach, as well as Black & Decker.

IDSA Awards is a collection of awards presented in recognition of significant contribution to the Society, the industrial design profession, excellence in academic advancement, or personal achievement. Nominations for the 2021 IDSA Awards program are now being accepted through June 30.

Recipients will be announced during a virtual awards ceremony on Tuesday, September 21, 2021.

More at idsa.org/awards INNOVATION SUMMER 2021

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REFRAMING INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EDUCATION FOR THE POST-PANDEMIC WORLD

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eflecting on the experiences of learning and teaching industrial design over the past year, now is the time to rethink and reframe the educational environment with new perspectives. To help us gather a broad range of insights, we asked a diverse group of academia stakeholders

ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to teaching practitioners and full-time educators about their experiences and their vision for design education in the post-pandemic era.

What teaching practices (including modalities) did you find important in advancing design education during this past year of the pandemic? How will you build upon them as schools move forward into the post-pandemic era?

“So how did we get through 2020 and still teach, learn, and practice design? First, we didn’t forget to play and have fun. We looked at the virtual format as a new tool or toy to figure out and explore. Students helped to create creative ways to engage with the class, the project, and the world beyond the screen. Did online teaching and learning have its limitations? Several. Were there mistakes and failures? YES! (What design process doesn’t?) Yet, the studio delivered some surprisingly good projects. It always amazes me, if you trust in the next generations and let their creativity and curiosity be the moving force, there will never be limitations to what we can accomplish. We even developed ways to create a virtual Rube Goldberg machine just to prove that people restrict themselves with their own closed mindsets.

With all of that being said, is this the new normal? I would ask what is normal. We will build on our experiences during this time of isolation to master another tool to integrate into our toolboxes. Just imagine using the tools of the future mixed with being fluent in ‘human’ to create better people for the world through design.

Isn’t that why we are in design and design education?”

—Owen Foster, co-founder/director of SHiFT and Aether Global Education

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“As we move into academic life after the pandemic, we will emerge into a different space in the teaching studio, ¬one more closely aligned with the 21st century design industry. Our students will have to navigate as design ninjas in an environment that is both IRL (in real life) and URL, constantly and effortlessly evolving and shifting—which needs to be integrated into course learning objectives so that our institutions can support this shift with resources. We have learned that our students can thrive as they work at home with simple hand tools, easy-to-find materials, a laptop, a tablet, and an inexpensive 3D filament printer. Is this perhaps the mobile ‘shop’ of the future? Could students own an institution-provided mobile personal ‘design and build’ kit that supports creative thinking and making? Did we outgrow the costly and inefficient static shop and studio space on campus?

There are more evolved ways to do kinesthetic learning!

By integrating mobile flexibility into all aspects of students’ education, we will truly prepare them for their future life in a rapidly changing creative world. Exposing students to fabrication workflows with exterior services will better prepare them for the reality of working in a design studio. We as educators need to push our institutions to shift the flow of funding toward flexible technology solutions that are placed in the hands of students. This will support a new teaching/learning paradigm, which we can continue to evolve and create and support moving forward.”

—Leslie Speer, IDSA, founding chair, product design, MICA

ID students, educators, and practitioners. What do you anticipate will be important skills in ID education as we move into the postpandemic education environment?

“COVID-19 has greatly influenced the way people communicate in both work and life. Within the field of industrial design, it has redefined the way designers conduct user interviews. Consequently, post-pandemic ID education needs to reemphasize and reflect on the importance of one fundamental skill, communication, which has greatly evolved in the context of the virtual world. Addressing questions such as: How can we effectively attract and keep interviewees’ attention by redesigning the key touchpoints of the interview process? How can we facilitate highly engaging conversations through modified discussion guides and suitable interactive online platforms/software? How can we build trust with the interviewees through virtual ice-breaking exercises and purposefully capture both qualitative and quantitative data from virtual interviews?

More consideration needs to be added into the virtual interaction process, and the same is true for post-pandemic ID education. We need to not only be more empathetic, respectful, and patient with our students (and interviewees) but also add an extra humanity-centered layer to consider their current situations. It is going to take more effort, more commitment, and more time to understand people and focus on humanity-centeredness to adapt to the postpandemic environment with heart.”

—Sheng-Hung Lee, IDSA, researcher at MIT AgeLab, designer at MIT xPRO, and vice chair at IDSA Boston

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“I hope the days of boring line-ups of people with similar background, race, and sex are gone. Minority students deserve representation during their education, and now that mostly everyone is connected through the internet, designers are only a message away. More than that, we have all seen proof that leading with compassion rather than competition creates more resilient programs and people. This upcoming generation of students will no longer be motivated to go to schools solely based on a high ranking or to tolerate a competitive studio culture. As students, when the pandemic moved our studio spaces online, we did not wish for a low retention rate to motivate us; we wished for supplies and support. The universities that provided Wi-Fi, laptops, licenses and more were the ones many of us wished we went to. We have all learned that it is not about who is the best but who can show their best, not through hot sketches on the wall but through the supportive environment we all crave as humans.”

—Dasha Florov, S/IDSA, 2021 ID graduate

What opportunities do we have to address diversity in ID education building on what you learned this past year? What would you like to see in the future post-pandemic?

“The pandemic magnified problems in ID education, such as the lack of diversity. This comes as no surprise since ID education feels like a pay-to-win system. As an incoming freshman, I remember spending nearly $3,000 on the required Wacoms and supplies in the first week.

This turned away many minority students. I cannot imagine what being a new ID student is like in 2021. The same expensive supplies I bought three years ago likely seem a whole lot more expensive due to the current economy. Due to the unnecessarily high opportunity cost to step foot into an ID program, classrooms are often made up of students from very affluent backgrounds—those not much affected by the economic downturn or at all. Going forward, I hope that universities make the tools required to access a design education within reach for students of any background.”

—Diego Almaraz, S/IDSA, 2021 ID graduate, San José State University

What are the takeaways? The truth is, no one knows yet the full extent to which the pandemic has changed ID education. We recognize that we do need to pay attention to the questions being raised, listen to each other, and work together. After all, this past year has proven that how we learn and teach can be done quite differently in ways we never dared envision (namely, teaching an industrial design studio online). We shouldn’t ignore that the needs of institutions, educators, and students have shifted and holes in the system have been magnified. As we move forward, we must strive to create solutions that will make ID education more inclusive, more diverse, more responsive to the

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humans design serves, restoring the avant-garde of radical thinking, teaching, and doing that used to characterize it.

Action item: In this spirit, please pick a question and share your response with us on Twitter or send us an email. Follow us on Twitter @academia360_ID and join the conversation using the hashtag #ACADEMIA360_ID. —Aziza Cyamani, IDSA and Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness, IDSA with contributions from industrial design students, educators, and teaching professionals. aziza@ksu.edu; verena@iastate.edu

You’re invited

IDEA 2021 Virtual Ceremony IDEA set the benchmark for what a design award represents and has endured to become a career-defining catalyst for those who win. Join us September 21 as we present Gold, Silver and Bronze trophies to our deserving 2021 winners from around the world.

idsa.org/IDEA

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I D C 2 021

LET’S GO ’ROUND THE CLOCK AGAIN

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central and enduring component of the IDSA experience is the opportunity to bring together our global network of designers and top creative minds each year at events. These are critical moments in our development as professionals. A chance to connect with one another and explore the very latest design trends, insights, and future thinking. The International Design Conference, our marquee event each year, is our biggest expression of design celebration. It routinely draws large audiences to experience insightful presentations and community-building opportunities.

From its inception, IDSA’s rebranded and retooled International Design Conference was meant to be a different kind of conference experience. Our conferences in New Orleans (2018) and Chicago (2019, which reached sellout capacity) demonstrated that a highly sensorial agenda mixed with a wide range of talks delivered by prominent industry thought leaders and provocateurs was a recipe for success.

Yet, in 2020 we had to put that momentum aside and return to the drawing board to devise a conference that could be delivered virtually in the middle of a pandemic.

Knowing that we couldn’t completely replicate an in-person format in a digital environment, we endeavored to leverage the best of what a virtual experience can provide in order to create an entirely new attendee experience. We tried something new: a continuous 24-hour live stream of design content. This format had not previously been attempted by any other large design conference, to our knowledge, and helped to separate us from other virtual events while allowing us to engage with a truly global audience.

With the uncertainties of COVID-19 still remaining and our ongoing commitment to the health and safety of participants, IDSA’s Board of Directors decided early on that all our events and conferences will be held virtually in 2021. This means that IDC 2021 will continue as a virtual program, set to begin at 12:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, September 22 and wrapping up a full 24 hours later at 12:00 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, September 23.

IDC 2021 invites creatives from all disciplines to convene and inspire one another with your passions and imaginations. Now more than ever, it is critical that designers use their unique talents to create a world that will be better in every way for future generations.

Join us from the comfort of your home to experience a knowledge-packed agenda featuring an expansive collection of presentations, breakout sessions, workshops, panel discussions, and side-bar social interactions, all happening in a carefully choreographed progression. And don’t worry about missing anything if you can’t stay awake all night or need to step away. All sessions will be recorded and made available exclusively for IDC 2021 ticketholders soon after the live event.

A 24 HOUR GLOBAL VIRTUAL EVENT September 22-23, 2021 internationaldesignconference.com

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WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE DESIGN STUDIO?

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recent Future Forum survey conducted by Slack and analysized by Fortune.com (tinyurl.com/5x5jnm25) found that 48% of workers expect their employer to make permanent policy changes to expand remote working post-pandemic. The same study found that “workers are split on returning to the office. Around 3 in 10 workers would never or rarely want to return to the office, while 4 in 10 would like to go back to the old normal. We should expect a mixed approach from employers, tailoring new work policies based on how their staff works best. Simply put: The future of work won’t look like fully packed offices nor a wasteland of empty buildings.”

After a year of working mostly in a remote setting, dress codes have become more casual, there’s been an increased acceptance of asynchronous work patterns, and we’ve learned that our operational processes were perhaps more flexible than we once believed. Yet fundamental necessities like the power of good team communication are more important than ever. Bret Recor, IDSA, founder and director of Box Clever writes, “There is one key area over the past year we’ve been able to innovate in ways that wouldn’t have happened otherwise: communication. The pandemic has forced us to take a step back and look at the rituals and the tools we’ve developed around how we communicate:

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With ourselves as a team trying to maintain a sense of camaraderie and connection. In terms of the communication tools we’ve developed to maintain our spirit of innovation and commitment to great design while being socially distant.

And in how we communicate with clients in the absence of in-person workshops and meetings.”

Physical hands-on work in the creation of artifacts is a hallmark of the industrial design process and a unique factor that makes it quite challenging to compare ourselves to other professions that don’t rely on making things in three dimensions. It turns out that much of the creative process can, in fact, be facilitated digitally. However, we heard time and time again that industrial design teams still needed to return to the studio during the pandemic so that making could happen. Erika Avery, IDSA, industrial designer on the GE Appliances Industrial Design Operations team, writes, “Working remotely has given reassurance about what can be achieved even when we are not physically in the office.

However, there are some important elements of being in the office that we have missed during the pandemic: face-to-face discussions, brainstorming, workshops, rapid prototyping, and the convenience of accessing information instantaneously, which can be lost through scheduled calls and emails.”

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We are indeed about to embark on a new era for the design studio. It will be vital for team leaders, studio operations teams, and design managers to put in place new protocols that maintain proven processes from the past but also embrace the learnings and efficiencies gained through distanced design. It’s safe to say that a hybrid model as a concept for how offices, businesses, events, and other operations will exist is likely in our near future. Justin Coble, senior experience strategist at Guardian Life, writes, “We must trust our employees to do their work and give them space to live their lives. Studio space and collaboration are very important, and I would hope studios will not go away.

We will always have a need to come together, prototype, iterate, and build together. My hope is that the studio becomes just that, a destination for collaboration and creation.”

There is also the emotional toll, which cannot be underestimated and has been levied across every person in the world, sometimes with considerable inequity for certain populations. It’s important to remind ourselves that even though we’ve experienced the pandemic “together,” it has ultimately affected us individually in different ways. Those of us with the privilege of being able to work from home have gotten into routines that will likely be difficult to break in the transition back to office life. It’s common to hear accounts describing a sense of dread and anxiety about the thought of returning to time-consuming commutes, expensive lunches, and mundane small talk at the water cooler.

According to a story in the New York Times (“Returning to the Office Sparks Anxiety and Dread for Some,” April 5, 2021), a Germany-based company recently “let employees work remotely three weeks of the month and then spend one week in the office. The office weeks were designed for collaboration and were treated like celebrations, with balloons hanging from the ceilings and employees plied with coffee and muffins.” Unfortunately, the experiment failed.

The article explained, “We saw that many of the people only came back for two or three days during the week because it felt unnatural, all of the social interactions. They felt like they couldn’t get their work done and that it was disorienting.”

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Moreover, there is the ongoing global humanitarian impact, which can be difficult to comprehend. As of this writing, there are more than 3.47 million deaths worldwide and more than 590,000 lives lost due to COVID-19 in the United States alone. Those numbers grow each day and will likely continue to do so for months to come. Even as some countries begin to find normalcy through widespread vaccine distribution and an easing of lockdown measures, there are others with minimal infrastructure to provide healthcare services to their populations or others still, such as India, currently in the midst of a crippling national outbreak of a massive scale.

How ever your office returns and however decisionmakers at your organization implement their new policies, it will be imperative to center on empathy for your employees and co-workers in a way that is more profound than what might have been done in the past. The employee experience is a critical component of a positive work culture, and it also has direct ties to the bottom-line success of the business.

Yves Béhar, IDSA, designer and founder of fuseproject, writes, “Organizations that put people first see more positive day-to-day experiences and better employee productivity and, as a result, increased business value. Our places of business have an opportunity to provide respite and reprieve for our employees: a space that supports well-being, a leadership team that is engaged and responsive, and a healthy minded culture that understands the value of its design professionals.”

There won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution, but we hope the following responses (collected from designers online) provide some insight, inspiration, and guidance on how you might make the transition back to your studio.

It is special that we, as industrial designers, have the incredibly privileged opportunity to create products that can improve lives, uplift the downtrodden, and enable people to accomplish amazing things. Now, let’s get to work and be sure to take care of one another!

“ HOW IS YOUR DESIGN TEAM PLANNING TO RETURN TO THE STUDIO AFTER COVID? ” INNOVATION SUMMER 2021

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THE STUDIO AS A SOCIAL HUB

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erhaps the one upside of this pandemic is that it fast-forwarded us all into the much talkedabout future of remote work. We’ve reclaimed a portion of our day from the car and enjoyed more flexible hours—though sometimes too many hours. We’ve become adept at Miro/Mural brainstorming sessions and Zoom design reviews and learned to stomach seeing our image onscreen as others see us (ugh).

Since we’ve squeezed desks into the corners of our dining rooms, bedrooms, and dens, we’ve become more intimate with our co-workers and their houses, their hobbies, their children’s voices, the idiosyncrasies of their pets. The introverts among us got a much-needed break while recognizing that our extroverted coworkers might need some support. And we’ve learned we can encourage the team to go super remote: Work from a mountain cabin for a week or travel to visit parents without having to use up 100% vacation time.

There was no better way to prove that we didn’t have to be chained to the office in order to be productive. We have discipline and drive even when out from under the watchful eye of the overlord.

We have learned much, and we intend to keep these new ways of working even after the pandemic.

Still, we won’t be giving up our lease. Ours is a business of physical artifacts and collaboration.

We examine competitive products, build prototypes, and explore ideas by making mockups. This part of the creative process can’t be outsourced; a maker space is no substitute. Throughout COVID-19, the one thing that brought us into the office was the model shop and the need to test, debate, and collaborate over these artifacts together. While this can be done remotely, in-person allows an easy, frequent, and impromptu flow that can be powerful.

Post-pandemic, we envision two to three coordinated in-office days per week to facilitate these spontaneous collaborations. Since our intent is to be in the office simultaneously, we won’t be able to hot-swap desks. However, our mobile desks are regularly rearranged to form ad hoc team spaces as needed. New purchases will be required. Some equipment that we simply took to our homes, like ergonomic chairs and Cintiq displays, will now need to be duplicated in both places, a worthwhile expense. Our office is also not a huge expense. It’s not a vast showroom; it is relatively modest and highly functional for our team of 10 to 12.

Aaron Taylor Harvey, partner and creative director at the Original Reality Group, asserts that “the modern office needs to be a destination, not an obligation.” When we aren’t required to be in the office, how do we make it a place we want to be? The office can’t be merely a place to show up or the dumping ground for the physical artifacts of our work (a battle we’re already fighting). It needs to be appealing, stimulating, and performance-oriented. We need to recognize its role as a social hub and intentionally design it to foster connections between one another.

—Maureen Carroll, IDSA mcarroll@creaturellc.com Carroll is an industrial designer and principal of Creature, LLC a product development firm she founded in 2003.

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QUESTIONS RIPE FOR DESIGN SOLUTIONS

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reative teams have always struggled to reconcile in-person collaboration with remote working.

Before the pandemic, this was a problem but, most often, just for the person who couldn’t make the meeting or the one team member working at a satellite office struggling to keep up.

Even so, the typical problems that can occur—a sense of disconnect, not feeling heard, or diminishing trust—were largely manageable.

The pandemic taught us many lessons. Not lost on me and the rest of the world is that working from home is not only possible but beneficial. However, that comes with caveats. For some activities, like focused work, working from home improved productivity while for other activities it decreased.

The jury is still out on this, but many recent comprehensive studies conclude that collaborative work suffers the most. Discussion with my team and our customer surveys validate a lot of other studies in this regard.

Getting designers back in the studio wasn’t hard for us. The willingness was there. But we did have to be very strategic on how people returned and the protocols to allow for a safe collaborative work environment. In the studio space, we had to open things up. We went from one large central table to four tables spaced out for safe distancing. This setup allowed us to be in one space capable of group mapping, sketching, and prototyping while at least 6 feet apart. It took work to break old habits of proximity in group sessions, but we adapted, and results followed.

Looking beyond the pandemic, I believe the studio and other collaboration environments will return to normal. If there is a “new normal,” it’s that remote work is here for good. Collaboration will happen in the office, and individual work can be wherever you want it to be. For many designers, the old world of being tethered to the office will end. This new idea of flexible work will become table stakes for attracting and retaining talent. However, a company’s culture and business model may dictate the degree to which flexible work is employed. It certainly doesn’t make sense for every business.

Workspace planning groups are already studying ways of supporting the trend. The shift from individual workspaces to group spaces opens up many new design possibilities and renews the need for functional outdoor spaces. Old concepts are finding further traction, like hotdesking and the need for technology to manage reservations for unassigned spaces.

I recently spoke with a friend who is currently leading his organization’s efforts to prepare for the future. It became clear that his company and many others are already wrestling with the ramifications of what this means for company culture long term. How do you keep the brand experience solidly in focus? What does this mean for a company’s real estate portfolio?

It seems to me that all of these questions are perfect for a team of designers to approach. You just need to get them back in the studio and answer them.

—David Patton, IDSA david.patton@vari.com Patton is the vice president of product design at Vari, creator and co-inventor of the original VARIDESK, and Chair of the IDSA Section for Furniture.

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THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

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ur in-house design team and most of our company has been working remotely for over a year. I have found it to be a great forced experiment to make us figure out how to work more virtually.

Now that the genie is out of the bottle, we will not go back to working full time in the office.

For many of our teams, we are looking at a 50/50 model of working 50% from anywhere and 50% in the office. For projects that already have some requirements and design direction, we found that remote collaboration works pretty well. But we miss the spontaneous conversations and team bonding and feel the need to be together for big brainstorms at the start of new projects. Therefore, the 50/50 model is aimed at finding a way to get the best of both worlds.

Now that we in Southern California have experienced working without long commute times, I can’t imagine going back to the office full time in the old way. And as major employers like Google and Amazon will incorporate remote work models, I believe all companies and design studios will have to consider this as an attractive benefit for recruiting talent.

As a design leader, I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to have deep conversations virtually with my team, which I didn’t think would be easy to do before. It also made me focus less on input (hours worked) with my team and more on output and outcomes, such as the quality of design proposals and what were the business results of a launched product. We have also started to use Miro and other tools, which are great for global virtual collaboration. And virtual work has made things like town halls and big strategy meetings more accessible and open to more people in that everyone is virtual and can attend from anywhere, rather than only a few leaders or team members traveling for a similar meeting in the past.

Before the pandemic, we had plans to remodel our office. We have stopped this project and will instead focus on tools for virtual work as well as video telepresence equipment to have a better experience when some of the team are in the office and some are virtual.

—Graham Sadtler graham.sadtler@bshg.com Sadtler is the head of industrial design and UX/UI at Bosch Home Appliances, North America.

NEW BOUNDARIES

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ur studio went back fairly quickly in May 2020. We do tons of hands-on maker-style prototyping. I’ve managed to stay at home a lot simply because I have the luxury of having a woodshop and a studio space at my home. It’s been helpful for me to have that access as I’ve also got two little kiddos to worry about who are out of school at the moment and doing online learning.

The future? I honestly see the future having fewer studios and more individual contractors. I think a lot of folks have been empowered to explore their own breadth during this time.

—Cori Rowley, IDSA c.rowley@designcentral.com Rowley is a senior designer at Design Central.

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A NEW ERA OF WORK

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ast year was a true litmus test for the resilience of our community. The process of acclimating to the ever-changing pandemic restrictions catalyzed much of what were emerging work trends in recent years. I also see opportunities for some welcome changes. Our expectations and behaviors were completely reprogrammed in response to the pandemic. But with mass vaccinations rolling out and more talk of reentry and reopening, we must also take care of our own studio cultures and environments.

As design professionals, we operate from a position of service, always seeking and striving for the best outcome for our clients and end users. Right now, it’s also time for us to put a magnifying glass on how we can proactively return with a redefined purpose and intention. This brings us back to the imperative question: What is the purpose of design?

At fuseproject, we see six ways design studios can transition into a new era of work: 1. Use the office as a culture catalyst. The trust between employees and company has changed in the last year for the better. The notion that the office is about attendance from 9 to 5 is being relegated to the past. A hybrid model is emerging where simply the best place to do the work—the home or the office—is based on what needs to be done. The office then becomes the manifestation of a company’s mission and the place where it is expressed through its culture.

2. Put your people first. Organizations that put people first see more positive day-to-day experiences and better employee productivity and, as a result, increased business value. Our places of business have an opportunity to provide respite and reprieve for our employees: a space that supports well-being, a leadership team that is engaged and responsive, and a healthy minded culture that understands the value of its design professionals.

3. Diversify to stay resilient. Resiliency depends on our ability to think, develop, build and distribute solutions quickly by collecting new, diverse ideas. Designed resilience, therefore, must be built into every product and experience we make by building it into the creative process itself. The collaboration will catalyze our energy to work on meaningful solutions, ultimately determining how we negotiate, survive, and reemerge from crises.

4. Keep betting on tech. We’ve never before seen a time when humans relied entirely on digital tools to meet all their human connection needs. The new ways in which we value technology enable studios to rethink where we embed it in our workspace and how to best leverage it for business.

5. Make your clients your innovation partners. Our clients are also undergoing transformations.

They are keepers of valuable information about their respective industries. Leveraging and collaborating with clients more often than just when we can meet in person means being closer together and more collaborative. In this way, it gives all studios an opportunity to capture additional insights that can translate to better design as well as to new service offerings.

6. Embrace change. The changes we’ve undertaken to cope with the past year have had rapid multiplying effects, and much of the new world order is here to stay. We have discovered new ways of working that will likely continue to evolve. We should embrace these changes and let them flourish.

After all, being agile and ready to pivot are the cornerstones of a strong design practice.

—Yves Béhar, IDSA Béhar is the founder and CEO of fuseproject.

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PROS, CONS, & POTENTIALS

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s a high-energy multidisciplinary design studio, we are in our sweet spot when working shoulder-to-shoulder to build brands, products, and experiences for our clients. Which is why COVID-19 could have been our studio culture’s kryptonite. But I am stoked to report that we’ve made it to vaccination season with our team intact, healthy, and ready to pick up the pace on new ideas we incubated in our downtime.

In looking back over the year, I sorted my thoughts using the PMI method: the pluses, minuses, and interestings that stood out.

First the pluses: With our foot off the accelerator at times, we were able to dial in our operations, IP, and remote tools for managing studio design processes and strategies. This included a more robust onboarding protocol for kicking off new work that accommodated more client voices and captured more explicit inputs. Love it.

We also used our slower pace to dial up the marketing and business development models for Sprout Studios, introducing a new service offering: Sprout Viz. This had been gathering momentum, awaiting the right moment to go live. When the pandemic amplified the challenges of traditional photography, preparation met opportunity. Bam. COVID-19 has helped us calibrate the perfect mix of in-person and work-from-home. This new cadence has led to an even more solid studio culture and healthier work-life balance. Peace and freedom.

And a minus: We are people persons who miss face-to-face and are powering through Zoom-toZoom fatigue. When the vibe of day-to-day hands-on interaction is the chemistry of what you do, it’s like the band isn’t touring anymore. While our studio albums are fun, we thrive live.

Then the interestings: Walking through an empty, silent studio where all the screens are lit up and crushing CAD remotely is a weird Zombieland experience. Finding that extended client team members were meeting each other for the first time in our Zoom project workshops. (And then building stronger client relationships when client teams became more vested in the project.)

Plus a few questions. Will the spirit of co-opetition that flourished—as entire industries leaned in together to solve hard problems through full-contact design thinking—persist? How much staying power will the low-touch economy have on retail? Will the requirements of click-and-buy shopping become sticky conveniences that don’t reset? Will the gig economy gain even more traction as knowledge workers find that former naysayers are now woke to the promise of work from anywhere realities?

And a takeaway. At its core, design is a problem-solving enterprise that loves to take on hard questions. To that end, COVID-19 wasn’t kryptonite. It was an X-ray that revealed the opportunities for problem-solving and value creation in every domain it passed through.

It was also a form of design calisthenics where everyone, us included, was asked to question assumptions and think differently about familiar things. That reality can actually strengthen a team’s creative muscles. It did ours.

Put us in, Coach. We’re ready to play.

—Jordan Nollman, IDSA jordan@sprout.cc Nollman is CEO and principal of Sprout Studios and the internal design incubator Sprout Labs.

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RETHINKING FACILITY NEEDS

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020 was a transformational year for Metaphase. We all witnessed the world change and its impact on how we will work and collaborate moving forward. Client teams became fragmented, remote working created workflow bottlenecks, and many experienced communication nightmares.

Our internal team was also stress-tested. We needed new office policies for remote working and best practices for conducting videoconferences with clients, and we sought out new collaborative tools to replace traditional face-to-face meetings. It was also important to create a safe work environment that considered the emotional stress the pandemic placed on our team members, all in different ways. As schools went virtual, some of our staff immediately became teachers in their own homes, while others took on caregiver roles for older family members. Everything was disrupted. These needs resulted in developing a policy providing COVID-related PTO to manage adjustments to a “new normal” no one imagined would persist into 2021.

These change agents will persist in some fashion for the foreseeable future, effectively reshaping how we work and creating immediate demand for remote teamwork and research. In response to this need, in early 2020 we started to rethink our facility needs and began the design of M-Lab, a state-ofthe-art custom facility designed for remote collaboration and conducting research safely in a pandemic environment.

M-Lab provides clients with five research venues for conducting simulated clinical use, one-on-one formative and summative usability testing, and studying user behavior and testing designs in bathroom, kitchen, and outdoor-living scenarios. All labs are equipped with multiple video feeds and livestreaming capabilities that have allowed us to deliver research in real-time into the homes and offices of our client team members, regardless of their location.

The pandemic also reinforced the need for thinking through all aspects of health and safety on a facility level, how we collaborate internally and with our clients, and how to conduct safe research.

M-Lab’s floor plan was developed to provide controlled traffic patterns between staff and research participants. A three-zone HVAC system and interior and exterior garage doors allow us to control building airflow and temperature more effectively than what can be accomplished in traditional offices.

In parallel, we developed internal guidelines limiting the number of building occupants at any one time, establishing rules of engagement with our suppliers, and outlining new COVID research protocols drawing on best practices recommended by the CDC and WHO. 2020 will always remind me just how much freedom technology affords and how adaptive and creative we can be when a “new normal” is thrust upon us. Until the pandemic, few could envision our officemates kicked back on their couch with their Wacom, laptop, and VPN connection to the office server, knocking out a week’s work without the hassle and cost of the daily commute and lunches out.

But as a company, we were also reminded just how important human interaction is to maintaining our own sanity.

—Dr. Bryce G Rutter, IDSA bryce@metaphase.com Rutter is an expert in the research and design of ergonomic products and a worldwide specialist in high-touch products.

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TRUST-INFUSED FLEXIBILITY

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ince working remotely has become the new norm, it will be harder for employees to return to the office 100% of the time. The pandemic has shifted day-to-day life and impacted regular business operations. COVID-19 has taught many of us how to deal with adversity and change, which has connected people through these shared struggles.

With a shift in design operations to a predominantly digital environment, we learned the importance of effective communication to keep things running smoothly. Working as a virtual studio has proven just how vital efficient communication is and why it is important to capitalize on all accessible resources. For many design studios, physical collaboration is a valuable part of the design process as it pulls together diverse perspectives, business functions, and skill sets that work together to develop successful products.

Many of our designers were quick to adapt to the changing work environment and continue to exemplify high productivity standards. Working remotely has given reassurance about what can be achieved even when we are not physically in the office. However, there are some important elements of being in the office that we have missed during the pandemic: face-to-face discussions, brainstorming, workshops, rapid prototyping, and the convenience of accessing information instantaneously, which can be lost through scheduled calls and emails.

The Industrial Design Operations team at GE Appliances specifically will return to the studio post-COVID as there is great value when working among peers versus working independently.

What may be different from expectations pre-COVID is that there will be more flexibility and freedom for designers to determine where they should work given specific project needs. Trust and open communication will be key to adopting a flexible and hybrid work environment. It is an approach that will best accommodate the needs and well-being of all.

The lessons and discoveries made from working remotely will benefit work in the future. Those travelling abroad to visit with suppliers or customers will be able to stay better connected since we are able to work more efficiently virtually. The flexibility for groups like working mothers opens versatile possibilities since a newfound trust has been established throughout the business.

—Erika Avery, IDSA erika.avery@geappliances.com Avery is an industrial designer on the GE Appliances Industrial Design Operations team.

A NEW MODEL

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year into the pandemic, we have no immediate plans to return to our studios. Although we had a short period of figuring out the sudden transition to the virtual work model, everyone being at home has excelled the connectivity and strength of our design studios.

Later this year, I look forward to reopening the studios and utilizing them in a new way. I see them being a collaboration hub, spaces for teams to use for workshops and team-building sessions.

They’ll also serve as an option for those who would like to get out of their home from time to time. As far as everyone coming back every day, I think we’ve evolved beyond that model.

—Michael McAghon michael.mcaghon@ey.com McAghon leads the design discipline in the Philadelphia EY Design Studio.

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DEEPENED RELATIONSHIPS

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hile we at Box Clever—like many designers and creatives—will hold limited nostalgia for this time, there is one key area over the past year we’ve been able to innovate in ways that wouldn’t have happened otherwise: communication.

The pandemic has forced us to take a step back and look at the rituals and the tools we’ve developed around how we communicate: With ourselves as a team trying to maintain a sense of camaraderie and connection. In terms of the communication tools we’ve developed to maintain our spirit of innovation and commitment to great design while being socially distant. And in how we communicate with clients in the absence of in-person workshops and meetings.

For our internal team, we’ve introduced a new gathering at the start of every day where we do a mental well-being check-in, having authentic and meaningful conversations to regularly gauge how everyone has been doing. It creates a safe space for team members to voice their concerns, struggles, and anxieties to management for support. And because we check in with each other daily, we are becoming incredibly attuned to each other’s moods and energy levels.

This commitment has led to new companywide initiatives increasing our health benefits to support mental health, including counseling and encouraging mental-health and hourlong lunch breaks every day.

This period has also improved our communication with ourselves, with considerable time for selfreflection. This moment has allowed us to pause and take a step back from the travel and the excessive busyness, which has helped us to get quiet and to amplify our mission to take on more impactful design challenges. And this candidness in turn has built our trust as a team, allowing team members at all levels to be more vocal and less inhibited in our ideas and creativity, carving out creative safe spaces through programs like our Box Clever Lab for new ideas.

Like every design studio, we’ve had to explore new tools and platforms (digital whiteboards, video brainstorming) during this time, which have forced us to establish new ways of working. I’m convinced that this period has made us far better designers by having to be more deliberate in our communication.

In many ways, these tools have made our design work more relatable to our clients and has allowed for greater creative input and co-ownership with them. As we return to the office and in-person work, we’ll have to find the right balance between the analog and digital.

Our entire team is anxious to get back to the studio and to the magic of in-person creation and collaboration. But we don’t want to lose the extra attention we’ve paid to thoughtful, attentive, and undistracted communication with ourselves and with our clients. Since our founding in 2012, we’ve considered ourselves to be a relationship-based creative studio. And while this year has been the biggest challenge to that approach, it has actually deepened our relationships in a way that we hope to translate back into the busyness and pace of the real world. We firmly believe now more than ever that great design can only happen when we bring our whole selves to our teams and to the work.

—Bret Recor bret@bxclvr.com Recor is the founder and director of Box Clever, which is renowned for creating products and experiences that delight consumers and build category-leading brands.

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A DYNAMIC PLAYGROUND FOR DESIGN

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t Above, we’re quite excited to open our studios again and discover our “new normal.” With clients across the globe, we were technically already well equipped to handle a full remote setup. However, there is something special about physical spaces and the social interactions that come with them. They fuel a type of progress and creativity that is difficult to fully replicate in virtual spaces, for now at least. Our studios are our playgrounds where the unplanned, organic, social in-between moments bring new ideas and perspectives to the table beyond Zoom calls, two-way monologues, and formal reviews.

The greatest impact for us has been our clients’ rapid digital transformation of the design and development process. The wide adoption of digital collaborative tools such as Miro and Figma also allows for a more inviting, democratic, and integrated process with our clients, elevating transparency and co-creation beyond anything possible before. As these new tools and technologies become even more powerful and immersive, they will likely make most of our travel for business redundant.

The adoption of the remote process has also brought the world closer. Where there was some caution before around geographical distance, we now see a strong shift and preference toward a great cultural, personal, and capability fit instead. This is something that has definitely worked in our favor and continues to further expand our global reach, both for clients and talent. We now work more than ever across multiple time zones and capabilities, and are making it work really well.

This year has also proven the positive effects of not only allowing but endorsing a balanced life, at least for most of us in Sweden. Go outside, go for a run, take an afternoon off, sleep in—all activities that if well-balanced and with practice compose a healthy and inspired life. This transparent flexibility powered by trust and responsibility will definitely be the winning formula at any workplace in the future.

We’ve also learned so much about ourselves and how, where, and when we do our best work. On an individual level, the remote setup gave everyone a real sense of responsibility and ownership, which has translated to personal growth. These insights and learnings will likely lead us to better planning our weeks, balancing remote-focused tasks with creative studio sessions, teamwork, and prototyping.

We don’t, however, expect our physical spaces to be reduced, but rather transformed to further accommodate and inspire creative collaborative work and exploration, building even better workshops, physical reference libraries, VR studios, and other spaces for play and discovery. We also expect our playgrounds to be more connected to accommodate virtual immersion, enabling mixed local and remote teams to create together.

All in all, I’m excited to explore this much more dynamic and inspiring way of working.

—Casper Asmussen casper@above.se Asmussen is the co-founder and design director of the Scandinavian innovation agency Above.

His approach is holistic and UX-driven with a twist of Scandinavian minimalism on top.

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A TRANSFORMATION IN HOW WE WORK

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e don’t believe the post-COVID world will go back to normal. How people work will forever be changed. Karten Design is an industrial design firm specializing in medical devices and equipment. We are known for designs that look and work like consumer devices. Since the start of the pandemic, companies and innovators have come to us to create testing and other equipment to help address COVID-19. So we weren’t just working during the pandemic; we were working on products to end the pandemic.

While our principles remain the same, our firm has experienced a transition in how we work with our clients. We believe the pandemic will help our industry in profound ways. From regulators to medical device companies, there has been a shift that will set the stage for more and better medical device products and a different type of designer-client relationship post-COVID. At our studio, we are typically tasked with designing medical devices that won’t be released for two to three years, but COVID compressed our time frame into much shorter product cycles.

In pre-COVID projects, we would have been sensitive to our client teams’ workloads, scheduled weekly progress reports, and planned a formal design review process with project stakeholders.

We then mostly worked autonomously on problems until we were ready to confidently present wellconsidered, well-executed ideas.

But COVID has changed client expectations and workflows. Idea sharing was facilitated by cloudbased tools, and we made design decisions together with our clients on the fly. This real-time design process was new to the design and engineering teams. Process rigor is important when we accept responsibility for making new regulated devices. But 2020 required proceeding with limited feedback, envisioning new workflows never attempted before, and then releasing data for tooling without the typical insurance provided by months of prototyping and refinement. It didn’t take any convincing that our teams needed to be integrated and agile, so experienced team members sprinted ahead, trusting their collective experience and training. The high success rate of ideas and the great spirit of the teams have both been a pleasant surprise.

For medical device designers, iteration is the most significant industrial design trend coming out of the pandemic. Unlike consumer product design, medical device design doesn’t always encourage iteration. Typically, a company gets one chance to get its product right. That’s changing. It became economically viable to iterate quickly and introduce products quickly. These factors allowed more startups to jump into healthcare. At Karten Design, we believe more medical device startups will create a new era of innovation. Instead of entering the markets with a $50–$200 million investment, smaller companies can jump into the marketplace for under $25 million.

During the pandemic, we never stopped working, and post-COVID we will return to the studio. But where we work has become much less important than how we work.

—Stuart Karten, IDSA stuart@kartendesign.com Karten is the president of the award-winning Los Angeles-based product design and innovation consultancy Karten Design.

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MIXED-USE MOMENTS

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ur office has decided on a hybrid model, where all employees will maintain remote working days in their schedule while folding in a few office visits per week as needed. Studio-style collaboration is becoming the mainstream activity in our workspace planning, creating spaces that foster creativity. With this in mind, we are reprioritizing office space to support cross functional activities and minimizing the number of individual workstations.

What does this look like? I’m imagining mixed-use moments styled with notes of well-being.

Moments of well-being can be as simple as drinking your tea out of a ceramic mug rather than a disposable cup or surrounding collaborative areas with thriving plants and blossoms. We are taking cues from the hospitality industry to rebuild our workforce community with moments of dignity that drive connection.

Lastly, we are dedicating energy into creating an entryway spectacular—something to remind employees that the company cares about them. This will be an epic homecoming, so let’s celebrate it.

—Chrissy Livaudais chrissy.livaudais@gmail.com Livaudais is a product experience designer at Dolby Laboratories with an affinity for creating meaningful interactions and building design capability.

FOSTER COMMUNITY

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s we move forward post-COVID, we will be working back at the studio for the most part. The ability to have impromptu design reviews and brainstorms and calls with clients is something that allows us to greatly improve our work product and pace. And we enjoy the company of our colleagues.

I think the biggest difference COVID has made will be our willingness to allow employees to work from home more often as needed. Maybe they just want a day to be 100% heads down on a particular project, or they have something personal for which they need some time for away from the office. We’ve never been clock punchers, but now we’re more comfortable allowing more flexibility in work location as it is needed.

The other big change will be a focus on community within our company and our city. After we can comfortably socialize again, we plan to make the most out of our existing relationships and forge some new ones by planning fun activities for the Lexicon team and for the larger Pittsburgh ID community.

—Ben Azzam, IDSA ben@lexicon-design.com Azzam is a partner at Lexicon Design in Pittsburgh, PA, and Chair of the Pittsburgh IDSA Chapter.

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FUNDAMENTALS: CULTURE + RELATIONSHIPS

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esigners, like most people, value safety and health in their workplace. COVID confirms this. The pandemic has shown that we can remain resourceful while working remotely, but it comes with a cost. That cost is interactive teamwork. This important exchange of design ideas, creative solutions, and form exploration is at the heart of design. As both safety and interactivity are priorities, successful firms are going to need to remain adaptable and flexible to manage the uncertainty of the post-pandemic world. We remain optimistic that our team will be returning to the office post-COVID. In our practice, the design team needs to collaborate at a high pace with a wide range of subjectmatter experts and manage multiple constraints and often moving targets. That is medical device development. The success of any design team is highly dependent on the environment, collaboration, and culture. That said, if you’re a sole designer working on a solo project, then more power to you.

You can set your own environment.

The bottom line is that the environment you choose to work in matters. Creative teams work better in collaborative and open arrangements. To this end, HSD has dedicated resources to managing our programs to enable flexibility for our staff and adaptability for immediate health concerns.

Our team thrives on dedicated collaboration. Over the past year, we have made strides in remote collaboration. This was true before the pandemic as HSD has relied on remote work for clients located around the globe. Remote collaboration works best when coupled with commitment, trust, and cultural understanding of individual priorities. For example, our research, design, and engineering teams have a past working knowledge of each other’s capabilities and personalities. Over time, as new people are added, the need to (re-)connect personally is a fundamental element toward building a trusting relationship.

Scheduled-by-conference-call has taken its toll on all of us. This makes company culture much more difficult without having the impromptu experiential relationships. With Zoom meetings, sure, you get facial expressions, even innovative whiteboarding modules. However, on an emotional level the exchange is sterile. Short-term sprints or even smaller, specialized remotely located staff can work in isolation, but only temporarily. This emphasizes the need for creating close cultural-bonding opportunities designed to improve company culture as an ongoing effort.

For our longer-term remote staff, we require a period of working in the office with the larger team in order to immerse themselves in the culture and develop trusting relationships. This requirement encourages distant working relationships that can be maintained, ideally through continued social and business meetings. However, no matter how sophisticated you are in remote teaming, nothing beats in-person creativity and interactions.

For these reasons, and maybe because I’m old school, I feel it’s essential to bring back the staff.

To date, approximately 60% of the team has returned with a modified pre-COVID routine. I remain optimistic that by keeping the environment adaptable, flexible, and collaborative, we will see the entire team return by the end of summer.

—Tor Alden, FIDSA tor@hs-design.com As principal of HSD, Alden brings his 25-year experience in user centric design, user research, strategic thinking and innovative product development to all HSD programs.

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A MODEL FOR HYBRID WORK

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hey say that every crisis is also an opportunity. What opportunities does COVID-19 bring to product design studios? Over the last year, most of us have had to move away from many work habits that seemed eternal and adopt some new working styles.

A key factor of creativity and innovation is duality, the ability to incorporate different or even contradictory solutions to the same problem. The COVID-19 pandemic allowed us the opportunity to move into a hybrid model of working—from the rigid approach of “this is how we do it” to a flexible one that allows for combining both alternatives.

We are seeking to implement hybrid working models to enhance design creativity, project efficiency, and employee satisfaction: • Hybrid workplace: Employees will be able to choose when to work in the office and when to work at home, depending on their schedule, tasks, and preferences.

• Hybrid design team: We will broaden the design team by adding individuals from diverse backgrounds and expertise to enrich our perspectives and working methods.

• Hybrid innovation: Our innovation process will incorporate a counterintuitive solution-development methodology as a complementary tool to the straightforward problem-solving way of working.

• Hybrid modeling: We will combine virtual and physical models in the design process to improve the design communication based on the outstanding performance of CMF models and the ease of rendering.

• Hybrid design evaluation: We will make our design decisions based on experts’ expertise and intuitive judgment combined with data-driven design. Neither option alone is sufficient to establish a rigorous process for design evaluation.

• Hybrid product attributes: The product’s hard and soft attributes will be considered equally, as opposed to the traditional practice of dealing with the CMF design after and on top of the geometry design.

We believe that a hybrid approach applies to almost any aspect of our professional and personal lives. It does not necessarily have to include major change or extensive implementation. It could simply be allowing a different viewpoint alongside the existing one.

—Yariv Sade yariv.sade@stratasys.com Yariv Sade is a senior product design manager and entrepreneur, the co-founder of Igloo Design, the former dean of the School of Design & Innovation at the College of Management, and the director of product application engineering at Stratasys.

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A HYPOTHESES-FUELED STUDIO

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ike many other companies, Smart Design has spent the last year adapting to the changing world and weighing the pros and cons of physical and remote work as we plan for the future. Ultimately, we landed on one side of the fence: We are investing in a new 20,000-square-foot studio space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

But one thing is for certain, our new studio won’t have the same cadence it did in the prepandemic world. We believe that in order to move forward as an innovative design company, it is important to not just repeat the same habits. We view this opportunity as white space to design a truly hybrid office that fuses the best elements of in-person and remote work. We believe that our studio must be a work in progress where we test, learn, adapt, and, ultimately, build new solutions—just like we do with our clients.

While we have seen other companies downsize, we believe retaining a physical space that is collaborative, functional, and inspiring is ultimately part of the magic that allows Smart Design to do its best work. Organizing complex information in a space helps us make connections and immerse ourselves in the subject matter. There is also more chance for serendipity and cross-fertilization of ideas. The ability to build and test physical prototypes is crucial for us as the physical act of making uncovers new possibilities. We also strongly believe in building a culture beyond work where we get to know each other and have fun.

At the same time, there are many benefits of a remote digital space we don’t want to lose. We can collaborate across geographies faster, more cheaply, and more sustainably. We have the ability to conduct remote research quickly without travel. It can be easier to find quiet time to focus, and shared tools means everything is accessible to everyone all the time. Personal life and work life can blend harmoniously, creating happier employees with well-rounded lives. We are looking to blend these worlds in our new space, allowing people to flexibly work between home and the office.

But there are still questions to be answered. What is the best way to facilitate activities with some collaborators together in a room and others remote? When are the moments in the design process where physical presence is required? The truth is, we don’t know yet, but we have some hypotheses, and we can build to learn.

Housed within an expansive building where Navy ships were once constructed, our new studio will consist of a variety of small structures and outdoor spaces for different activities, such as prototyping, working together, socializing, and alone time. The open space gives us the flexibility to pilot and iterate different technology setups and spatial configurations as we see new working patterns emerge.

This will mimic the software development process in that we will push out updates as we learn from user behavior.

To create exceptional output, our hybrid studio must inspire creativity, build community, empower experimentation, provide focus, and produce quality work. We are excited for where this journey will take us when we open in summer 2021.

—Dan Grossman Grossman is the director of industrial design at Smart Design where he oversees physical product development, pushing the team to make products as beautiful as they are functional.

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ICONIC DESTINATIONS

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f you had told me a year ago that everyone at Whipsaw would be working from home for the next year, I would have said, “Impossible. Our creativity-based business requires in-person togetherness to work.” Well, work-from-home became a reality, and I was wrong. Not only did we survive, but we grew from it.

We looked at the pandemic as a big design problem. During this time, our San Francisco and San José studios remained shuttered. The spaces are only used for special in-person meetings or big assembly projects. By necessity, we adopted new communication methods and tweaked our processes. We began holding biweekly Zoom staff meetings and spiced them up with viewpoints about personal inspiration. We made a bad situation tenable, and even fun at times. People that normally didn’t socialize ironically became closer virtually.

Our studios feel like places of design worship because they’re easy to get inspired in. One is an old foundry with original ceiling gantry, rusty chains hanging from beams, and church-like windows.

The other is a horse stable from 1880. We have “jam rooms” where we get into creative flow states like jazz musicians. We have “design hootenannys” where people jump in to solve an immediate design problem, like on-call firefighters. Designers, UXers, and engineers commingle in big open spaces, which ignite conversation and spontaneous innovation. That all came to a screeching halt a year ago.

As we near the end of this dreadful pandemic, we are determining how to return to our studios while asking, Do they still make sense? If so, how should they be modified?

Creative people are highly influenced by their surroundings. They are inspired by light, materials, finishes, and architectural style. It helps to be surrounded by good design to produce good design.

Furthermore, design is a social endeavor. We feed off one another. Walk by someone’s monitor and an idea suddenly sparks. State a viewpoint and others will instantly build on it. Doodle a sketch and run to the shop to hog it out. That doesn’t happen at home. Designers and design firms still need studios.

However, we’ll have to make adjustments. For one, we are addicted to video … because it’s awesome. We’ll need to add conference rooms to allow for more video calls. Video software will need to improve to give creatives more tools. (“Annotate” doesn’t cut it.)

Since work-from-home will be an option, desks must be more public, modular, and cleanable to accommodate a more transient workforce. We’ll make the studios better resource centers so folks coming in a few days a week can access information more readily. The studios don’t need to be as big, but their quality needs to be amped up. They should showcase who we are and act as clubhouses for the in-and-out staff. Studios should also act as sales tools for potential clients and look amazing over video, since many clients will be reticent to travel for the foreseeable future.

We’re still in uncharted territory when it comes to returning to the workspace, but I think design studios remain as relevant and necessary as always, albeit with changes. They facilitate our best work, bring us together, and serve as iconic destinations that symbolize what you believe in.

—Dan Harden, IDSA Harden is the founder, CEO, and principal designer of Whipsaw Inc., an industrial design firm in San José and San Francisco, CA.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE

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ommunity and collaboration are some of the most important aspects of working in design, both on a personal level and when it comes to the resulting work. I do not think we will realize the full impact a remote working environment has had on us all until things approach normal again. Whether that is the lost personal equity with your colleagues after only communicating through scheduled video calls or chats for over a year. Or the reduced creative quality of ideas because you no longer have that spontaneous feedback and back-and-forth exchange of ideas, or the face-to-face conversation around an object, which was the norm and an integral part of the design process before.

Of course, the type of design you participate in will be affected in different amounts by remote work. For instance, a digital UX designer’s workflow may not be especially different than it was before in contrast to that of a car or physical product designer. But I would like to raise the argument that both digital and physical designers are affected equally by the change in social interaction. Oftentimes, it’s the social element that helps you form a view on a topic, change it, or reach that compromise and sweet spot.

Flexibility is great, of course. Pre-COVID it was known that organizations that place trust in their employees to manage work and life and find a mutually beneficial balance staff happier people and produce higher quality work. But I do worry we will see a repeat of the open-office movement in a way.

In theory, an open-office plan was meant to increase collaboration and improve the social ingredients at work, but when done poorly, it turns into a distracting, negative mess because oftentimes it is being used as a way for employers to reduce real estate costs and pack higher head counts into the same space. I can see some firms doing the same thing post-COVID, claiming freedom and flexibility but really just paying attention to their overhead.

My hope is that firms recognize the importance of their culture and community and its impact on the quality of the product they wish to ship, and don’t opt to save a bit of cash by reducing facilities and generally creating a less welcoming place to be. This means that if groups do want to promote more flexible work environments, they will need to properly invest in the software, hardware, spaces, and process structures that support this new remote vision.

—Brian Black briandblack@gmail.com Black is an American-born multidisciplinary designer focused on brand, strategic design, and innovation in the automotive sector in Gothenburg, Sweden.

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ONE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL

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s I start my workday with its now ubiquitous virtual meetings, I try to remind myself that the pandemic has affected people in different ways. Some have lost cherished colleagues, friends, and family while others have had minimal disruption. There are simply no rules for this moment and no roadmap for how to proceed. Perhaps we can begin with charity and offer others an extra measure of patience and consideration.

Will things return to how they were? Probably not. As designers, and barring the onset of another dark age, we know that nothing ever stays the same, pandemic or not. Prior to COVID, the trend toward a more flexible, distributed workforce was well underway. Last year merely accelerated it. As we emerge from the pandemic, the vital questions should be: What have we learned? What worked?

What didn’t?

Our firm’s transition to remote work was relatively seamless. With multiple locations and many colleagues already working remotely, the necessary IT infrastructure and collaboration tools were already in place. Therefore, transitioning the rest of our team to remote work was relatively simple. With only essential people visiting our studio, we were able to prioritize access to less mobile resources, such as our prototype and digital fabrication labs. Our airy open-plan space made social distancing comfortable and stress-free. Everyone worked together on scheduling, contact tracing, maintaining a strict mask policy, and enhancing sanitization protocols. Not surprisingly, stronger, more independent collaborators transitioned easily and, in many cases, excelled during the lockdown.

In contrast, some younger designers and those whose work styles favor close personal interaction have struggled. During stressful times with acute challenges, big-picture ideals like mentorship and personal exchange often suffer. Fortunately, we were able to sustain our practice and even add new people to our team. However, when new colleagues joined, we found previously simple things like introductions and onboarding to be unexpectedly challenging. Major ongoing frustrations include a lack of creative spontaneity and the difficulty of orchestrating remote creative sessions. Even with all the latest digital collaboration tools, remote brainstorming sessions just aren’t as effective as their in-person counterparts. Items like these presented unexpected challenges.

The transition back to the studio will likely be more measured than our abrupt jump to remote work.

With the exception of tasks requiring a high degree of focus, it’s unlikely that most designers perform better remotely. Ours is a highly collaborative profession using many specialized tools, so there are logical reasons designers have historically come together in shared studios. This type of collaboration is central to our process and creating consistent, high-quality results. Our work is and has always been about creativity, innovation, and the quality of new ideas. We need to learn from the past year, understand that one size won’t fit all, and balance what’s best for the projects, the individuals, and our practice. We plan to build on what worked during the pandemic and are very optimistic about the creative potential in the coming year!

—Russell Kroll russk@formationdesign.com Kroll is a founding partner of Formation where he directs innovation programs for a broad range of client companies.

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GREATER BALANCE

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eturn to work? I doubt the 9-5 office will return. A more balanced work life will be established.

Business casual will likely replace business professional over time. Designers’ work is what sells, not necessarily that your cufflinks match the details in the portfolio, because the work is your word.

I’ve been hard at it, designing toys and cordless and consumer electronics, and now I consult full-time—all remotely. I’ve met designers along the way and made more network connections than I would have if I had kept my normal 8-5. I am 100% remote. Although I would rather be in the same city as the main source of the work and be able to present, prototype, and demonstrate in person with a team.

—Aaron Pierce aaron.h.pierce@gmail.com Pierce most recently worked with the team at Nautique Boat Company, completing a transportation design program for 2021, and has recently started his own design consultancy.

A DESTINATION FOR CREATION

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feel that the future of work is flexibility and trust in employees. We must trust our employees to do their work and give them space to live their lives. Studio space and collaboration are very important, and I would hope studios will not go away. We will always have a need to come together, prototype, iterate, and build together. My hope is that the studio becomes just that, a destination for collaboration and creation. The days of being in a studio to build CAD, answer emails, take calls, or other headsdown focus work may go away and be done at home. I fear that we have started to lose sight of this need over the past year, and I think we will definitely see the effects on the profession.

—Justin Coble justincoble80@gmail.com Coble is the senior experience strategist at Guardian Life.

REMOTE COLLABORATION

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urprisingly, we already worked remotely pre-COVID with a small studio space for prototyping as needed. We will likely continue this workflow with the exception of needed in-person collaboration on sprints and prototyping. We utilize Slack, Miro, and Zoom frequently and don’t see this changing in terms of remote collaboration. Especially with Bay Area commuting, our team would much rather spend time designing than sitting in traffic or on transit.

—Jonathan Thai, IDSA jon@hatchduo.com Thai is the co-founder of Hatch Duo, Aggregate, and Design Bros.

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RETURN TO BETTER

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uge Design has a clear goal to get the entire team back to in-person collaboration as soon as it is safe to do so. Reflecting on the past year of work-from-home, we have been pleasantly surprised by the team’s ability to overcome the obvious challenges associated with remote work, particularly given the creative and collaborative nature of design consulting. A core value of our studio has always been the dynamic, fast-paced office culture we have created. We have spent the past 11 years fostering an environment built on free-flowing ideas, friendly competition, brutally honest design critiques, and light-hearted downtime. Yes, these things can all be accomplished remotely in one form or another, but never as effortlessly or completely as being in one room.

Our plan to get back in the office has already started with about half the team coming in on a regular basis. Given the unpredictability of this entire COVID situation, we are, of course, taking things slowly, one week at a time.

The tools and upgrades we have put in place to optimize our workflow during the work-from-home situation will also help us in this transition. One of the first things we did early on in the pandemic was seriously upgrade our internet connectivity and cloud server infrastructure and purchase lightweight notebooks for all. This allowed designers to leave their powerful workstations in the studio and remotein via a virtual desktop from anywhere without a performance lag. Going forward, we plan to keep this setup.

While the ultimate goal is to be back in the studio, we also acknowledge that this level of flexibility will be necessary and beneficial from time to time as we feel our way forward into the “new normal.”

The past year has also prompted us to invest further in online collaboration software. The benefit of these tools is undeniable in terms of efficiency and visibility across multiple projects and workstreams.

The collaboration software and remote communication methods we have perfected over the past year will certainly continue post-COVID and allow each of us greater flexibility in terms of how, when, and where we collaborate on projects both in and out of the studio.

On a personal level, the pandemic has forced us all to flex our communication muscles to a greater degree than ever before. It has made us all appreciate the need for quality communication and the value of micro check-ins without filling our day with back-to-back Zoom calls. These remote communication skills will undoubtedly serve us well as we look to return to the immediacy of face-to-face interaction on a more regular basis.

—Bill Webb, IDSA bill@huge-design.com Webb is the co-founder of Huge Design, which has grown into one of the top Bay Area ID studios.

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WFH ⟶ WITF

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FH. Work from home. WFO. Work from the office. WAD. Work at … a distance? Wait, no one uses that. At Astro, we’ve embraced WFS, or work from space. Here are musings about the current and future of work in design spaces from our satellite offices … in space.

Our top 5 WFH learnings: 1. We can still create great work together, even when we’re physically apart. Online collaboration tools have surpassed our expectations (and have probably saved tons of Post-its).

2. We miss the physical: products, experiences, colors, samples, textures, spontaneity, laughter, music choices, street stories, snarky sidebars, birthday goodies, and general office distractions.

3. Balance and autonomy help improve creativity and teamwork, and some of our colleagues are wayyyyy more pleasant without a 1.5-hour commute.

4. Time and space are merged and blurred. However, with different schedules, we’ve learned to trust each other more. Our communication has improved, our project assignments have become more defined, and people have stepped up.

5. It’s reinforced how different we all are. Looking beyond the varying levels of mess tolerance and questionable décor, we’ve gotten a peek into our colleagues’ personal lives—making the work all the more exciting and human.

So how can we preserve this as designers return to the office?

Our top 5 WITF (work in the future) needs: 1. Future studios should be adaptive, organic, migratory, and collaborative, creating spaces for experimentation with new design tools. Autonomous RV offices may just become a thing.

2. We should embrace fluidity and create space for our differences in work style, personal adventures, and evolving project needs.

3. HR teams should create a new role to build company culture and identity into hybrid work models.

Please meet our Ambassador of Time Management & Entertainment!

4. Creative options for compensation and perks—like swapping commute allowances for home gyms and virtual coaches—should be explored.

5. Or we may just return to the way it was and negotiate for more vacation allowance to make up for lost time!

—Astro Studios Astro Studios of San Francisco is a designer’s habitat, fueled by people that believe designing purposeful brands and products will create a better world.

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BE AGILE AND READY TO ADAPT

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t PENSA we focus on creating product solutions that make people’s lives better. We accomplish that through the collaborations that occur within the diverse mixture of the incredible talent of our team. It is hard to overstate the energy, excitement, and serendipity that occurs on a daily basis between people in our studio spaces. One thing is for sure, over the past year we have greatly missed having that team together in person, creating, laughing, working hard, and envisioning the future together.

That said, design has always been a process that happens everywhere. We immerse ourselves in the real world. We move throughout our built and natural environments to gather inspiration through understanding cultural trends. In this way, the concept of a design studio has always needed to be a flexible space that evolves and grows, living within the bounds of the walls of our studio and also extending beyond.

The great positive of our experiences in running PENSA during the pandemic has been in experimenting with and gaining expertise in more flexible tools and methods of collaboration. We have mastered new tools for virtual project spaces, and we now have the opportunity to integrate those with our physical project spaces.

We have also been able to see the potential for and some of the limits of remote work. We do have a fundamental belief that the culture of our design studio is a shared experience. There is a momentum and an excitement in working together in person, creating solutions to the challenges we take on. We also often work on tangible products that need to be prototyped and built in the real world. We are hands-on problem-solvers. This cannot be replaced with virtual meetings.

At the same time, there is power in our newfound confidence in more flexible ways of working.

Projects can more easily and seamlessly extend beyond the bounds of our physical project spaces, and our team members can more easily work where they need to be on a given day.

What does PENSA look like as we return to a “new normal” over the next months? In many ways, it will look similar to our pre-pandemic company. Our design studio spaces in Brooklyn are integral to the way we work and to the culture and identity of the company. But PENSA will also be different, and better. Our biggest learning over the last year has actually reinforced something we already knew: Be agile and ready to adapt. We will use our shared experiences over the past year to be better designers, engineers, team members, and collaborators, offering our team better tools and more flexibility in the ways we work to make people’s lives better.

—Mark Prommel mprommel@pensanyc.com Prommel is a partner and the design lead at PENSA, where he works alongside and mentors a diverse group of multifaceted designers working at the crossroads of design, invention, and brand.

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July 28-29, 2021

DIVE

DEEP

WOMEN IN DESIGN A gathering built to recognize the unique talents, initiatives and challenges of women in the industrial design industry. Join us for dialogue and fellowship with some of the leading designers who are making an impact. Hear from designers representing all stages of a career across a broad spectrum of related practice areas including industrial design, UX, service design, and more. idsa.org/WIDDD2021

Virtual Event

Sponsored by

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LIVING ECOSYSTEMS

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hat’s next for our collaborative spaces: the office, the classroom, our own workspaces, the design studio? I can’t help but ponder the future of the

communal environments we once considered a constant—and even took for granted at times. Now, after a year of working and learning from home, the inquiry into how should we return is in overdrive. Many companies are devising plans to return to the office safely, and schools are balancing remote learning and in-person education. But there is a bigger idea for us to investigate: Why return?

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Time to Reflect The question I keep asking my peers seems to be the universal question of the pandemic: Were work and learning environments really working for us before?

In this abnormal moment in time, we have the freedom to design those environments differently. What should we be demanding now? For all the challenges and frustrations the pandemic has uncovered, we are now presented with an opportunity to rethink collaborative environments entirely.

As designers, how do we want to design this new era of environments? Beyond the physical spaces, how do we want to design systems that support work and learning climates from critical lessons learned during the pandemic?

Why return? The answer is simply human nature: community, connectivity, and the collective fuel from our sense of purpose and belonging. As designers, we know there is no replacement for serendipitous moments and creative collaboration. It can be mimicked virtually, but not replicated. The energy shared between coworkers and classmates in real time leads to new ideas, creative solutions, and ingenuity. We may have found ways to cope in the short term by brainstorming online, but innovation builds on the collaborative efforts of a cohort. Sometimes modernization is found at the water cooler discussing shared passions and exploring probing questions informally between meetings. As we return from our virtual worlds, we will need to find balance, which can be found in communal spaces that adapt to a flexible workspace model with a hybrid approach to work.

A New Model Even for designers and employees working in manufacturing roles, I see the possibilities for a hybrid work style that would reflect a hub-and-spoke model. A centralized hub would serve as the tangible heart of the company, the principal headquarters, and its cultural epicenter. This would be facilitated by regional spokes—satellite offices—based across cities, suburbs, the country, or the entire globe. This distributed workforce would also accommodate flexible options like working from home and third places.

Third places are social settings distinct from the typical environments we know as home (the “first place”) and work (the “second place”). They include spaces like public libraries, bookstores, Starbucks, and coworking arrangements. Postpandemic, these environments will return with a vengeance with added amenities to boost a more diversified workforce.

Emerging third places will include traditional hospitality settings modified as uniquely designed coworking spaces utilizing existing square footage with a resimercial (residential commercial) atmosphere. This will offer the comfort of home paired with all the contemporary conveniences of the office.

One recent example, a personal favorite of mine, is a country club that constructed a Zoom conference room so players

could schedule important meetings between an afternoon on the back nine.

This hub-and-spoke model will not only attract talent but increase employee connectivity and stimulate the opportunity for innovation. Users will be exposed to different people at different times, stimulating different ideas on a regular basis. Employees will be empowered by the ability to choose what best supports their activities depending on their workload. Work will become an activity rather than a place.

An Opportunity for Design A secondary outcome of advanced flexibility is heightened user expectation. Designers, like many other workers, will be more demanding of products and spaces, requiring exceptional productivity, and they will expect the ability to easily connect and customize dynamic workspaces.

As designers, we will need to bridge the gap between physical and virtual participation through products, services, and systems that provide a seamless experience that harmonizes both worlds as one. Post-COVID-worthy products will no longer be able to serve a single function, but rather will have to support a multitude of work modes and custom configurations. If met, the demand for productive environments will provide the opportunity for workplaces to become communities and destination-worthy environments for employees that offer work-life balance while ensuring businesses greater workforce satisfaction and talent retention.

Through the pandemic, we’ve found many improvements and areas of opportunity because we were forced to think differently. Now that we have the ability and mindset to see those applications from a new perspective, we can design more optimal practices. As we move forward, intentional fluidity and adaptability of space will be the amenities in demand.

The future of our shared spaces look exceptionally flexible and responsive to each organization’s cultural values and tactical work activities. We have a monumental opportunity in front of us to design differently—to design elastic systems that empower community and performance in a truly inspiring way.

We should consider offices, studios, and classrooms as living, breathing ecosystems. These environments should support individualized needs and bring teams together through hybrid access across virtual and physical settings.

These hybrid spaces should not only galvanize and bolster our innate human need for connection and collaboration but also shape what is possible for employees, students, and designers in the future.

—Jacklyn Ady, IDSA adyjacklyn@gmail.com Ady is a product manager at Escalade Sports.

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REMOTE WORK: TOWARD A MORE ACCESSIBLE FUTURE

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ver the years, the tangible design workplace has faded into one that is rather less physical. Drafting tables and hand-carved foam models have been widely replaced by digital drawing tablets and 3D CAD software, though many standbys of the classic design studio remain. There were constants, we thought, in the drawings pinned to foam core boards to the ubiquity of in-person collaborative sessions. We didn’t think of them as “in-person”—they just were. But when the world shifted on its axis in March 2020, so many of the assumptions we made about the workplace were upended.

The Limitations of the Status Quo We found that we had been working within a framework that, when we peeled it away, revealed a system built on physical barriers that were unintentionally denying access to some. Industrial design jobs tend to be found in urban environments; the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2019 geographic distribution of industrial designers shows swathes of empty country punctuated by a high density of jobs near urban centers. The isolated nature of many areas of the United States has led to design workplaces being clustered in just a few high-cost-of-living cities. Designers who can’t afford to live in these cities are kept out of the largest job markets. This is only compounded by the slim number of available jobs due to the small size of the industry.

While the financial barriers to the geographic centers of design keeps people from participating, designers who experience demographic wage gaps and the lack of access to resources and opportunities afforded to those from affluent backgrounds are doubly impacted.

In order to access workplace opportunities in highcost-of-living cities, many designers choose to live with

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roommates into their late 20s and 30s. But this option is not available to all, and certainly does not solve the root of the problem.

To many, losing a job can mean facing either relocation or unemployment. The truth of the matter is that relocation is a privilege and a luxury to many, particularly for those who are parents and caregivers, for working couples, and for anyone who is forced to make the impossible choice between access to employment and the myriad other responsibilities that weigh upon them. According to the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, the majority of adult caregivers are women, compounding many of the gendered disparities already found in the industry. Hispanic and Black caregivers also experience a disproportionately high burden in both cost and time spent caregiving. In many cases, this kind of unpaid care work or other mitigating circumstances can make it difficult if not impossible to relocate and find work in industrial design.

These are just a few of the many ways that the structures that make up both industry and society can hurt some and benefit others. An industry in which designers do not have financial access to varied workplace opportunities has consequences for everyone. When design teams are more diverse and more accessible to people from a broader spectrum of backgrounds and experiences, we all benefit— both as designers and users.

The Value of a Permanent Paradigm Shift Over the course of the past year, workplaces adjusted largely without issue to a new paradigm of remote work that they had long insisted was impossible. Suddenly, widespread accommodations were being made by necessity, and an industry that has long embraced uncertainty found a

Employment 30 - 40

50 - 70

80 - 180

190 - 2,400

Blank areas indicate data not available.

Employment of commercial and industrial designers, by area, May 2020. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook, Commerical and Industrial Designers, May 2020. www.bls.gov/ooh/arts-and-design/industrial-designers

surprising opportunity to flourish despite the chaos. As it became clear that remote work was becoming an integral part of the way we collaborate, the geographic barriers that had been keeping designers separate began to dissolve.

When every meeting is virtual, it doesn’t matter if your collaborator is five miles away or five hundred.

Remote work and flexible schedules benefit precisely those designers who the previously established system disenfranchised. By removing the requirement for physical presence from a role or opportunity, employers suddenly gain access to an incredible pool of talent and experience across the country. Likewise, designers who were once limited by the need to flex their schedules around childcare, caretaking, or working in a different city are able to access opportunities that they may have had to turn down in the past.

Instead of returning to the status quo because it is what we know best, I would encourage design leaders to consider the benefits of retaining flexible and remote work options. Engage your employees from a place of trust.

The last year has served as proof enough that we can

collaborate successfully in circumstances that we had never before considered reasonable or even possible.

By increasing workplace flexibility, we can empower designers to reach beyond their geographic boundaries to access opportunities that were not previously accessible.

Retaining these practices can improve employee happiness, empowering them to engage more fully with their work while enfranchising those who may not have been able to participate in the industry due to caregiving responsibilities or financial burdens. I hope that the industry as a whole recognizes the incredible value presented by the new remote paradigm and embraces a more accessible future in design.

—Caterina Rizzoni, IDSA crizzoni@kascope.com Caterina Rizzoni designs within the med-tech space at Kaleidoscope Innovation. She is also the co-founder of Design Allyship and a passionate advocate for equity in design.

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ACTION PLAN FOR A SAFE OFFICE

Hygiene Expect there to be a heightened sensitivity from employees about in-office cleaning protocols and hygiene practices. Office managers may set up more frequent cleaning cycles for community-use areas, surfaces, handles, chairs, bathrooms, and kitchens. At a minimum, hand sanitizers and disinfectants are likely to become a much more visible fixture in offices around the world. Additionally, some speculate that employee healthcare and well-being may start to become more central to a company’s values than prior to the pandemic.

Working while sick?

Don’t go into the office. Period. Stay home and get better. See a doctor if you need to. If you can work while under the weather, being remote won’t be an issue since the infrastructure is already in place and your projects can carry on as planned. Temperature checks at the front door or a clean bill of health from a doctor could become routine tollgates for office reentry.

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Adaptable workspaces Consider the creation of different work environments within your office. That could range from assigned office spaces or personal cubicles to project-based offices and community areas where team members can spread out as needed while working individually or in small groups. The point being that a flexible space will allow team members who are tepid about returning to the office to ease into working in that setting again.

Zero touch Think about areas or objects in your office that could be converted to minimize or altogether remove the need for hands to get involved. Adding foot pulls for doors, eliminating saltshakers in the kitchen, assigning whiteboards, and offering touchless connectivity (think Apple Airplay) for screen shares and presentations could all help reduce the spread of germs from surface to surface.

Phased approach Many companies have implemented a phased plan for asking employees to return to work. This is in part because of the evolving nature of the pandemic, but also because it allows for varying degrees of experimentation while mitigating risk as much as possible.

Phases typically evolve from a full office closure to allowing a small number of team members in the office at specified times based on need. The phases continue to permit more employees into the office as national, state, and local government guidance permits and/or COVID cases decline.

Visitors Similar to the phased approach for the return of employees, we’re expecting that office visitations will also be limited or altogether prohibited for the foreseeable future. COVID’s impact on business travel as a whole is also forecasted to endure for years to come.

We’ve proven to ourselves that we can accomplish a lot with a screen and the internet.

Businesses are very likely to hold back on sending team members on a four-hour flight so they can have a one-hour meeting in a city on the other side of the country. The economics just don’t add up.

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D E S I G N E T HI CS

IS DESIGN THE PROBLEM?

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nce upon a time, design was a thing that took place in shared spaces with physical materials, sometimes late at night. Surely you remember spending hours in the studio with your peers executing skillful but tedious—yet somehow soothing—tasks, like sanding prototypes. Your eyes and hands are occupied, but the conversation flows freely and tends toward the big, unanswerable questions, like: What is design?

Imagine one such evening you pose a question to your dear friends Mona and John: What type of relationship do you want users to have with the products you design?

Mona replies that her intention is to design products analogous to an exquisitely dressed, gorgeous person you meet at the club with whom you have irresistible chemistry and perhaps have an amazing night with—but neither of you expect it to last much beyond morning coffee.

John says he wants to design trustworthy, reliable products that gain character with use and the user will go to great lengths to maintain and repair rather than discard— and might even hang onto once it is beyond repair.

You suggest that John’s take probably aligns pretty well with aspirations for more sustainable products. But let’s face it, like Mona said, sometimes we’re not in the market for what’s safe and responsible. We get caught up in the moment, we choose ease and convenience or irresistible allure over our own, or others’, longer-term interests. Why can’t we have both, you ask, thinking that infatuation to commitment encompasses the full spectrum of designs.

But just then Mona points out that Le Corbusier also weighed in on what he thought was the proper productuser relationship. Products are, he said, “slaves, menials, servants. Do you want them as your soul-mates? We sit on them, work on them, use them up. When used up, we replace them.”* You all agree that Le Corbusier sounds like a rather inconsiderate lover.

Mona is just needling old Corbu, of course, but the more you talk, the more toxic his approach to products starts to sound. Too many products, even today, seem to exploit power imbalances and disregard negative externalities.

How About Consensual?

John piped up to say that his generation has a pretty solid model for avoiding (or at least reducing) this kind of toxicity and that it is possible to have respectful, mutually beneficial relationships with the products we use everywhere along the spectrum from tonight to forever. The model is known as consent.

Possible? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still sometimes awkward. For example, finding the right balance between aloof and needy can be a challenge; you want to look good on that first date, but not like you’re trying too hard. Or sometimes the awkwardness doesn’t come until after you’ve sealed the deal. Ever been annoyed by a survey asking “Was it good for you?” when you’ve barely gotten the product out of its package? Or when those shoes that looked so good on the dance floor make a weird squeaking sound on the floor of your apartment? Or when that sexy new device has to be turned upside down to plug in the charging cable, thus rendering it inoperable?

Most of us can look past these quirks for the right product, but then there are the dealbreakers, some more blatant than others.

Let’s say you’ve enjoyed that new product a little while when you find out that the company that makes it employs slave labor or that it’s normal practice to dump their trash into the ocean and then pay an advertising firm to come up with a campaign, “The solution to pollution is dilution!” or write massive loopholes into the Clean Water Act. But the toxicity is usually more insidious.

Maybe the one you’ve chosen to spend time with holds your attention by offering intermittent rewards that seem unpredictable, but which are actually based on an algorithm carefully crafted to always keep you coming back, never quite satisfied. You never know if or when he’s going to text you back, so you keep checking your phone. Maybe it’s low-level anxiety, or FOMO, but he establishes power in the relationship by withholding attention until a time that suits him. Or he isolates you socially; if you stop paying attention to him for even a few minutes when you’re with your other friends, he’ll send you incessant notifications of what’s going

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on in his world and insist on knowing what’s going on in yours. Eventually you realize he doesn’t really want you to see your other friends at all.

Or, you have to admit, she’s really comfortable to be with, and you like being seen with her, but when you start to have doubts about your long-term future together, you realize that she has installed software on your phone that tracks your location, purchases, and contacts. If you figure out what she’s doing and ask her to stop, she’ll say you made the choice to be with her and if you don’t like it, you can leave. But then if you try to leave, you find out that she bought up and dismantled or assimilated all the competition so that you don’t really have any other options.

These tactics, so often found in toxic, abusive interpersonal relationships, are intended to make their victims more pliable. Perhaps there’s some poetic justice in the fact that the chemicals used to make all kinds of materials pliable or slippery are the ones that are also lowering sperm counts and shrinking penises (https://tinyurl. com/anj6pezd).

Is It the Product, or Is It the Designer?

Maybe the relationship analogy would be more fruitfully applied to designer and user. We’ve always aimed to create products that users love by making them work well, look great, and send the right messages. In the last few decades, concern about the unintended impacts of the products we design on people and the planet has been growing. Perhaps we can expand and reframe our efforts to cause less harm as efforts to build rewarding, rather than toxic, relationships.

To merely strive to do less harm is to follow the logic of the bean counters. Sure, your hill of beans is probably bigger than mine, but I’d rather eat a really excellent bowl of red beans and rice. That is to say, quality over quantity.

Quantity is a zero-sum game, but quality, like love, is not diminished by additional quality. Does your love of Fila GH2s diminish your love for Yanagi’s Butterfly Stool? Design for abundance—or the related idea translated into the joyless, emaciated language of economics as circular economy—is the idea that, like natural living systems, there should be no such thing as waste. That is, every seemingly wasteful extravagance becomes someone else’s, or some other living creature’s, bounty. Like cherry trees in their springtime bloom, we revel in the intensity and riotous excess of their beauty, all the more so knowing that those pleasures are fleeting. But then the fallen blossoms are quickly reincorporated into the life-giving soil below. This can, and perhaps must be an aspect of our new model for design,

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and also, it’s a lot more fun to think of our work as creating guiltless delight, instead of products that reduce their carbon footprint by 5% (impact measurement is still critical, though).

While many aspects of the toxic relationships users have with products and brands described above are beyond the control of the designers who work on the projects, we are in a unique position to see how the andouille gets made. It’s part of our job to know exactly what goes into the sausage.

As such, we can advocate for products that do a better job of holding up their end of the relationship with users, regardless of how long the relationship will last. IDSA’s Code of Ethics essentially says we should act ethically, but it doesn’t really spell out what that means beyond not discriminating based on identity and not screwing over our clients or employees. While I enthusiastically support these ideals, I think we can set the bar a bit higher.

Many of you are familiar with the various excellent frameworks for sustainable and socially responsible design, but perhaps another way we might frame our long-standing desire to make the world a better place through our work is to approach our code of ethics as an effort to create a healthy relationship between us and the people who use them via the products we design.

A New Code of Ethics What does it mean for a designer to have a healthy relationship with the person who uses their design? Based on the consent model, it means that all parties have all the information they need to make informed choices free of emotional manipulation or economic desperation, no shortor long-term remediation will be required, and no direct or indirect harm comes to bystanders.

What does that look like?

Transparency: Be upfront about the materials, production processes, labor conditions, and ecosystem and societal impacts so that people can make informed choices.

If a product’s maker or seller doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or claims the contents are proprietary, that should be a major red flag. You’ve gone to great lengths to make sure there’s no BPA in your baby’s bottle, so when you ask if your potential lover has been tested for sexually transmitted infections, “That information is a trade secret” should surely not be an acceptable answer.

Competency to give consent: Just as an intoxicated or unconscious person is not competent to give consent, it’s unreasonable to expect the average user to draw their own conclusions based on academic research about the effects of phthalates on the endocrine system. And to a person

sleeping outside involuntarily, $6 polyester long underwear versus a $100 silk pair is not really a meaningful choice.

Verbalize desires and boundaries: Don’t assume you know what the user wants; ask them and take their answers seriously. When done properly, far from killing the mood, it makes the whole thing more fun. Like so many wellintended products designed for users in the “developing world,” ignorance of, or contempt for, users often results in products that condescend, or at least that make wrong assumptions. As the late Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainina wrote about one such product, “The enthusiasts of the windup radio suffer not from poverty or lack of information, but from wealth, vague guilt, and too much information.

They are the only people who can find nobility in a product that communicates to its intended owner: You are fucked.” (https://tinyurl.com/9uhvrcec).

Follow the campsite rule: If you’re not going to be staying long, it’s easy to ignore the impacts of your actions on a campsite. What’s one small piece of aluminum foil left in the ashes of the fire pit? Or one twig broken off a healthy tree for kindling? But what if every camper did the same?

Instead, bring your own fuel and pack out your trash so you can leave the place in even better shape than you found it.

We can no longer afford to hope that some clever people in the future (our children, most likely) will figure out how to clean up our messes. There are over 50,000 EPA superfund sites in the United States, many the result of manufacturing products we had a hand in designing.

Respect skill and expertise: Does the design respect the user? There are many clever products that save labor and increase convenience, but in some cases, the knowledge or skills that were once held by the user get transferred to the device. Many kitchen gadgets require no expertise on the part of the user to accomplish tasks that were previously accomplished efficiently with just a decent knife and a little bit of technique. For example, if you grew up in a household that always used a garlic press, you may be at a total loss as to how to peel and mince garlic when you stay in an Airbnb without one. Sometimes well-designed specialized tools truly are a boon to users, and even experts will adopt them, but sometimes they can cause a sort of atrophy of useful skills that can lead to a feeling of helplessness. Designers can ask if their designs respect the skills and agency of users, or if they compromise them.

We all lie in the bed of our own making: There’s no denying that most of us like to look at beautiful people.

We swipe right on the physically attractive. You know what we don’t do? Look at team photos of 50 beautiful people

together. In design, we celebrate individual designs that are striking, audacious, and visually dynamic. But we don’t put them all in our living room together. A parking lot full of 1963 Ferrari 250 GTOs is not more beautiful than a single, flawless, cherry-red specimen. For that matter, in spite of the admiration we might have for individual car designs, traffic still sucks and parking lots are still ugly. The products we design don’t exist alone in the seamless abyss of a photo studio; instead they comprise our built environment. The relationships users have with the products we design affects everyone else around them, and if it’s a toxic relationship, chances are, it’s also stressing out everyone in the vicinity.

As designers, we could all stand to keep these more indirect, but often larger, consequences in mind.

Individualism: So-called developed nations suffer from an epidemic of what are known as deaths of despair, the idea that recent increases in deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism are indicators of epidemic levels of loneliness and economic hopelessness. Designers can ask, Does this product bring people together or does it isolate them? Does the product succeed by getting the individual user’s needs met at the expense of real-world relationships?

Or does it encourage interdependence or unstructured socialization?

If you fondly remember times in your life when you have been occupied with sometimes tedious but unstressful tasks in the company of your community, you know what I’m talking about. Maybe it was in the studio with John and Mona, maybe it was waiting to have your hair treatment set, maybe it was in your kitchen prepping Thanksgiving dinner with your daughter, maybe it was with your buddies waiting for a bite in your ice-fishing shelter. Too often the products we design alleviate the tedium without realizing they also alleviate the community.

Good industrial designers have always been concerned with the relationship between the products we design and the people who use them. Let’s do a better job making sure those relationships are healthy, rather than toxic.

—Gabriel Ruegg, IDSA gabriel.ruegg@gmail.com Gabriel Ruegg is an associate professor of product design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and vice-chair of the Northern Lakes IDSA chapter. * L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (The Decorative Art of Today), Translations by James I. Dunnett, The Architectural Press, London, 1925

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A F I N A L THO UG HT

EDUCATING THE WHOLE STUDENT

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s the population of vaccinated individuals increases, design educators are reexamining what it means to engage with students. The protocols colleges and universities developed last year in response to the pandemic have challenged the notion of engagement in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. In our undergraduate courses, we experimented to identify effective and inclusive approaches for delivering course content, demonstrating craft, mentoring students, and running team projects, to name a few. Faculty and school administrators morphed into pit crew members, changing the race car tires while the engine was still running.

There were some gems that emerged, like using MURAL to enhance remote teamwork. However, we discovered that some of our students suffered tremendously from the lack of access to the environment and resources our college provides. Our experiences reminded us of the value of providing an inclusive and reliable learning environment to practice making physical objects to think through ideas. We are, therefore, eager to reimagine the in-person exchange and studio spaces for our students. As educators, we face an opportunity: How might we leverage our physical environment to teach and nurture an effective studio practice for all? We paused to gain consensus for what an effective studio practice looks like.

This pandemic protocol has also provided faculty and students opportunities to understand their social selves.

Some students noticed that their motivation weaned without the proximity of their classmates. The in-person dialogues with like-minded individuals invigorates them in ways a virtual platform hasn’t. Other students and faculty are thriving in the work-from-home spaces they’ve designed to nurture their creative selves. For both these personas, building rapport between classmates and faculty remains a common goal.

We deployed Discord as a venue to replace the social engagement that spontaneously occurs in the studio environment. We ramped up our Slack consumption to hold those now impossible in-office faculty chats. We invited professionals into our classrooms to reenforce the delivered curriculum and offer student mentorship throughout the semester. We created Hyflex teaching spaces to stream studio classes that consist of not only lectures but also demos and critiques. The Hyflex spaces support both online and in-person engagement and minimize location biases.

These changes generated another opportunity: How might we infuse social-emotional learning opportunities in our curriculum and pedagogy to support our discipline’s learning goals? We paused to examine our own expectations for student and faculty engagement so 64

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that we could listen to what our students want. We couldn’t have orchestrated a better backdrop to provoke a review of the curriculum and studio practice from a student-centric perspective, and yet it is arduous to do this in pit crew mode.

In solving problems and innovating better experiences, we know it starts with understanding the user. The humancentered design process as well as a design thinking mindset remind us that we need to be empathic—because sympathy is not enough to propel us to think differently about supporting our students’ needs. We’ve dug deep to exercise empathy and have been more vulnerable than we thought we needed to be. Our weekly (virtual) visits to students’, faculties’, and administrators’ homes have made us the accidental guests who haven’t left. Consequently, it has fueled more connected conversations.

As we reexamine what it means to engage with our students, we have an obligation to incorporate our pandemic-protocol experiences. Leveraging our in-person teaching environment to address the needs of the whole student could generate salient shifts in engagement even while masked. We know that students want more in-person time. The spontaneous conversations, the random moments to witness craft, and the rapid confirmation that an idea is moving in the right direction are omnipresent in-studio.

We also know, however, that reclaiming the physical space is not enough. I fear this pandemic protocol has eroded our confidence level. Could improvisation be incorporated in teaching the human-centered design process? Practicing improv could spark individualized ways to deal with the inherent ambiguity of the design process. It could also help students develop confidence for research interviews and teamwork engagement. We need to nurture confidence in our students for them to fully immerse in their educational experience. We also need to provide students opportunities for insightful query of their future selves. Could an ethics workshop launch the fourth year of design education?

Providing an introduction to ethics could offer students a framework for understanding themselves and directing their actions as they complete their final year.

I challenge us all to capitalize on our pandemic-protocol experiences to iterate toward a learning environment that is empathic of the whole student and that instills agency in the students to learn to become their best selves as designers.

I welcome the dialogue.

—Judith Anderson, IDSA janderson@massart.edu

VIDEOS AVA I L A B L E

Design for Democracy

Transportation Design

Beauty in Design

Intersections: Design and the Queer Mind!

Perspectives on Race & Design

How Industrial Design Can Save Fashion

More at idsa.org/design-voices

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