Design Sojourn

Image by Plindberg

I would like to take a moment from my daily grind to share something that I have been considering for a long time now. I seem to be doing a lot of that lately eh?

Fellow designers, we need to start getting back to basics. Forget the all that design thinking fluffy mumbo jumbo and embrace the fundamentals of designing; in particular, elements that give rise to good design or clever products.

This call to action is, in part, a reaction to the recent backlash that design thinking is not doing what it supposed to do. However I think it is more accurate to say this call was instead due to a number of life changing events. Events that gave me a lot of clarity on what design should be and what it meant to me. It is not quite the time to reveal the details of these events, but do stay tuned to Design Sojourn as I will get into the gory details in time to come.

Disillusioned with design? No. Focused and reinvigorated, hell yeah!

After spending a number of years circulating through the different levels of the design process (from execution activities to management and strategy), I find it almost always boils down to one thing: good design trumps everything else.

And how do we go about creating these good designs? Making sure that we are armed with a solid foundation of strong design skills and fundamentals.

In the beginning, more accurately Nov 2005, Design Sojourn was about “How to do Good Design and Create Clever Products”. This site contained, and still does, tons of tips and tricks on how a designer can do his/her job better.

In 2007, I added a third focus called “Mastering the Business of Design” to the end of this original blog description. The description now reads “How to do Good Design, Create Clever Products and Master the Business of Design”. Even though it’s pretty wordy, this new description reflected my personal focus on entrepreneurship, as well as a reflection of the commercial aspects of my design job.

In early 2009, my blog evolved in conjunction with my passion and career move into strategic design. The blog’s Version 4 description became “How to master the business of strategic industrial design.” It made a lot of sense as I have always been a very strategic thinker, and this description brought a lot of clarity to this site and also a reflection to what I do in real life.

By middle 2009, I decided to refine the description to a more succinct and simpler: “The Business of Strategic Industrial Design”. Also at this time, I reformatted all the blog’s categories and made it easier and more logical for readers to find things.

So its now early 2010 and I’m putting myself out there to tell all of you that we have made the discipline of design overly complicated. As a result, I often feel designers get detached from design doing when they get caught up too much in the design process.

To live out this call to action, Design Sojourn goes back to its roots by bringing back its original description and blog theme with a little twist: “Creating Good Designs and Clever Products”!

The reality is that designers with commercial sensitivity, a multi-disciplinary approach and a strategic design process are well equipped with the tools to create what we would call Good Design. As they say, a good strategy is all about getting out there and just doing.

I hope what I’m saying makes sense, and if it does not please do let me know? Regardless, I really hope you have been enjoying my journey in design as much as I have sharing it with you. Looking forward to an awesome golden decade of design with you, dear reader!

The world is all in a frenzy with the launch of the iPad. Even I could not help but get caught up in the madness. I have been reading a whole host of articles covering the iPad launch, ranging from New York Times tech columnist David Pogue’s schizophrenic review, marketing linchpin Seth Godin’s marketing angle, and blogging actor Stephen Fry’s heart felt “why buy” (loved him in V for Vendetta) and Fastcompany’s “don’t buy” reality check. And these are just a small snap shot of all the articles I’ve been tracking!

However, one article that did stuck home was beautifully written by Stephen Fry for Time Magazine online. In that article he goes to Apple HQ Cupertino, and poses the hard questions to Apple executives like Phil Schiller (VP of Worldwide Marketing), Eddy Cue (VP of Internet Services), Jonathan Ive (VP of Design) and the man himself, Steve Jobs. In particular was this question to Jonathan Ive:

I put to designer Ive the matter of all the features that are missing from the iPad. “In many ways, it’s the things that are not there that we are most proud of,” he tells me. “For us, it is all about refining and refining until it seems like there’s nothing between the user and the content they are interacting with.”

That’s not what he’s supposed to say. Tech journalists are obsessed with spec lists and functions. Does it do this? Does it do that? They often look at devices as the sum of their features. But that kind of thinking isn’t in Apple’s DNA. The iPad does perform tasks — it runs apps and has the calendar, e-mail, Web browsing, office productivity, audio, video and gaming capabilities you would expect of any such device — yet when I eventually got my hands on one, I discovered that one doesn’t relate to it as a “tool”; the experience is closer to one’s relationship with a person or an animal.

I know how weird that sounds. But consider for a moment. We are human beings; our first responses to anything are dominated not by calculations but by feelings. What Ive and his team understand is that if you have an object in your pocket or hand for hours every day, then your relationship with it is profound, human and emotional. Apple’s success has been founded on consumer products that address this side of us: their products make users smile as they reach forward to manipulate, touch, fondle, slide, tweak, pinch, prod and stroke.

(snip…)

“It’s not for us to predict what others will do,” Ive says. “We have to concentrate on what we think is right and offer it up.” Ive’s focus and perfectionism are legendary. Any conversation with him is about hours of work, about refusing to be satisfied until the tiniest things are absolutely right. He’s most pleased with what consumers will never notice. He wants them to use the iPad without considering the thousands of decisions and innovations that have gone into what seems a natural and unmediated interaction. “If it works beautifully, it should also work robustly,” he says. “It’s made for people to chuck onto the car seat and thrust into luggage without thinking. It’s not to be delicate with.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Apple executives have balls of STEEL. They have the guts and/or maturity to able to risk resisting the call of the market, where it’s all about making sure you beat the competition with quantifiable means such as price or specification. What’s worst is that design, often seen and relegated as form giving, becomes another tick on the specification list.

Apple has continued to buck this trend. Ever since the launch of the iPod, Apple has been consistently delivering propositions that come below the competition in spec but above the competition on price. And they still beat the market! If you ever needed a better case study in how design plays a major role in shaping and differentiating a product through its use experience, Apple would be an ideal candidate.

Less is, indeed, more.

And they have every reason to be proud. Removing unnecessary elements (a big one was Adobe Flash) and focusing on the strategy behind a product’s core experience is probably one of the hardest things any commercially weighted executive could do.

Therefore, such sensitive pruning does not happen as often as it should.

I’ve been in many similar pruning discussions before and have heard all manner of excuses (ranging from competitive positioning, brand equity and awareness, sales commitments, retail requirements, user tests results, budgets etc.) on why things should continue to be the way it is.

You see, this pruning discussion really only gets difficult when the view is limited to a commercial one. If you focus on designing and creating the best and most engaging product experience there is, this pruning process becomes much easier.

The strange irony is that when companies focus on the user’s experience first, the profits just seem to roll right in.

Check out the full article The iPad Launch: Can Steve Jobs Do It Again? at Time Magazine online.

As Roberto points out, this is because people, are not sustainable in their DNA make up, especially when the harsh reality of the world (budgets, health, wellness etc.) gets in the way. This is also probably because it is human nature for people to look out for themselves first rather than their neighbor.

Therefore Roberto Verganti’s post User-Centered Innovation Is Not Sustainable really highlights two issues and is summed up in the quote below.

Only forward-looking executives, designers, and, of course, policy makers may introduce sustainable innovation into the economic picture. They need to step back from current dominant needs and behaviors and envision new scenarios. They need to propose new unsolicited products and services that are both attractive, sustainable, and profitable.

It is only within the framework of a vision-centered process that users can provide precious insights. There are indeed some people who are already adopting sustainable behaviors. However, they are rare exceptions. Only leaders and designers who are driven by a vision and who explicitly search a priori for those sustainable behaviors can tune out the unsustainable needs of 99% of users and focus on the few exceptions.

Roberto’s first point is very similar to my view on our environmental and sustainability problems. I really do believe sustainable behaviors will be Sustainability 2.0. Only when we change our consumption behaviors can we look towards a more sustainable future. Designers, who focus on the interface between man and machine, can play a big part in creating solutions to influence or foster sustainable behaviors. It is all about changing our current behaviors and the way we are used to doing thing. That is a difficult task indeed.

His other point goes back to our previous discussion that Innovation is Dead. As we pointed out in the beginning of this post people have a hard time projecting the future when they are caught up in their own personal priorities. However in my view, the real issue here is how can the world change when marketers and business people are motivated to continue to deliver what people want and do not have the courage and go against the grain (or market research statistics) and deliver solutions that people need?

Check out the rest of Roberto’s excellent post at HBR.

The last time we mentioned A Fine Line was when we took a look a Hartmut Esslinger’s interview by Guy Kawasaki.

This time I have a little treat to share with you. The founder of Frog Design himself sharing a few words of wisdom probably extracted from his book: A Fine Line (there it is again!).

I like his opening line:

Business must understand what they will achieve with designers. And Designers have to understand they have to deliver substantial change, going to the root to deliver something else. (edited!)

The next one is also a keeper:

Design is not a democracy, design is about quality.

Check out the rest of Hartmut’s thoughts in the video after the jump.

A few wonderful points at the end on managing designers, and how organizations need to adjust to designers not the other way around, especially if you are serious in treating talents like talents.

Via: swissmiss

Post-it Jaguar by Scott Ableman

Legendary 3M inventor of the Post-it Note, Art Fry, shares his words of wisdom on innovation, creativity and getting disruptive products into the market. A wonderful read for all innovators, designers and entrepreneurs.

Q – Fact or fiction: Post-it® notes were an accident?

Art – A lot of people would like to think that you get something for nothing. A discovery might be an accident. But an innovation requires so much work. I use the analogy that we’re all working under a street light. We’re acquainted with what we see and work with day in and day out. But out there in the darkness there is so much stuff that we don’t know about that if we send somebody out and they feel around and find something and bring it back, we all have something we can work on. But sending those people out to look is not an accident.

Here are a few more notable quotes which showed how a disruptive innovation, something people do not understand, is made acceptable to consumers by going through a process of design thinking anchored by critical insight, observation and user centered research.

Q – The design of the Post-it® notes begs several questions. Why was canary yellow the original color?

Art – …the distributors and dealers said, “We don’t believe that stuff is going to sell. We’re not going to give you all that shelf space. We’re going to give you just enough shelf space for one color and two sizes.” So what size? We didn’t want it to be pink or blue and step on anybody’s toes as far as male and female preferences. Yellow seemed to be a very natural one because it was cheerful and the eye can see black on yellow with very low distortion.

Q – When they were introduced in 1980, Post-it® notes came in two sizes – three inches by five inches and one-and-a-half inch by two inches. What was the thinking behind these sizes?

Art – We wanted a small note that didn’t take a lot of space for people that just wanted them for a bookmark or a flag to get people’s attention. And, then, for those who wanted to write a little bit more, something bigger – a 3×5. Now there was a lot of pressure in the beginning to make them in 4×6. That was the size of scratch paper folders that were on the desks of most executives. But you couldn’t stick a 4×6 note in your pocket. The 3×5 would go in. So we wanted the large one and a small one. After we’d been selling the product a few years and the sales had built up to the point where now we could have more sizes in our line, we added a 3×3. It’s one of the most popular sizes.

Q –So the size can be traced back to convenience?

Art –Again, it’s designing it for a customer need. In the beginning there also was a lot of pressure on me to make it in roll form. Because nobody knew how to make sticky sheets in a pad. Can you imagine how inconvenient it would be to have a roll of notes in your pocket? For the customer, we clearly needed a pad. No one knew how to do it. But that’s the direction we took and we learned how to do it.

Q – You’ve said that most everybody in 3M management, marketing and sales initially thought “sticky notes” was a dumb idea that was too expensive and wouldn’t sell. What kept you going in the face of strong opposition?

Art – That’s part of the game. I was in new product development for 20 years previous to that. I knew that when you have something that’s new to the world, it takes a lot of convincing. People don’t see it right away. That’s almost a good thing. If it were easy, somebody else would be doing it. So the challenge is something that keeps people like me going. And, then, I just knew better. I knew that folks that were using the pads were using between seven and 20 pads per year around 3M. Well, that was enormous compared to the Magic™ tape that was the cash cow for our division. They were using one roll of Magic™ tape per year. So when I said this was going to be seven to 20 times bigger than Magic™ tape, people were incredulous. They wouldn’t believe it. They thought, “Go back to the lab; you don’t know anything about marketing.” But I knew people’s addictions to the sticky note when I gave them samples.

This proves that having a great idea is only a small fraction of the entire process. And if we look at what Art had to go through, it was a long and laborious process indeed!

Q – In reading the history of Post-it® notes, it’s clear that the Marketing department was boring some of those holes?

Art – Because they were measuring according to what their reaction was and also according to market research that was done that said there were only three-quarters of a million dollars total sales. Now, market research for products that have been in the market for awhile – where you are just making a small tweak or change in the product – is very accurate. Market research for pioneering products is never found to be accurate. Because there’s no market. And if you just ask a group of people how much they would use of a product that they have never used and don’t even understand yet, you can’t get good data. So Marketing believed that. And our office supply dealers that would be selling it for us didn’t think it would sell. They thought it was too expensive. I had access to the research that 3M was doing – new technologies that nobody else had. And so I looked at customers and what they were doing and asked, “How can we do those things in ways that they would never ask for?”

This interview really reminds me of our earlier discussion that User Centered Innovation is Dead. What a really interesting set of real life examples of when User Centered processes should come in and when it was a mistake or a hindrance.

Art made a lot more interesting and notable points, especially on the work culture at 3M and allowing their employees to spend 15% of their work time on free play, in the full interview at Eastman Innovation Lab. Enjoy it with a cup of coffee as it is a quite a long read!

Looks like China is getting it when it comes to design.

In a recent interview on the local Chinese CCTV, Chen Dongliang, Director of the Beijing Industrial Design Center, has highlighted the tremendous economic value of Industrial Design to China’s economy.

The output value of industrial design in Beijing reached 80 billion yuan in 2008. Now around 250-thousand employees are working for nearly 20-thousand design companies in the city. Beijing is also expanding technology service and high-end manufacturing industries, both of them can help boost the industrial design sector.

That’s just in 2008! While the job definition of an Industrial Designer in China is pretty broad, even if we discount their statistics, it is still a lot of people and money.

What is more interesting is their next set of statistics.

The global financial crisis has made more and more companies realize that it’s not sustainable to depend on cheap and low-end products. They must think more about added value. The central government has also called for more attention on industrial design, pledging to change “Made in China” to “Invented in China”.

Chen said, “Industrial design is the key point of the value chain. Figures show that in Britain, 100 pounds of investment in design can yield 225 pounds of output. According to our survey, in China, one yuan investment could bring 13 yuan of output. This is on average. The contribution rates are different in different industries.”

Those are some impressive numbers! If we consider these statistics as ratios, we can get a good insight on the amount of value-add a design investment can give to a product.

In detail we have:

In the UK, Design’s output is $1 invested is to $2.25 British Pounds.

In China it is $1 to $13 Yuan.

Of cause these are averages and possibly skewed, and I believe when we start bringing in buying power and exchange rates the numbers start to change. Regardless, this is something to ponder about when you next have to convince a client if he or she should invest in design.

Anyone else have some good statistics on the how much ROI you can get from investing in design?

Unless you have been living under a rock recently, I’m sure you would have heard of the Apple iPad. Pretty much everyone has. So much so that there has been a lot said about this product, both good and bad. Do a search on Google and you get 23 Million plus hits. Crazily enough, some people even claimed that it was hotter than the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

As such I was not sure if I even wanted to write this post, or if what I am about to say has already been covered by someone else in one way or another. One thing, this post is not a rant, but I hope I can make a few educated guesses to provide some strategic clarity on Apple’s business motives.

Surprise, Surprise!

Firstly I was quite surprised that Apple went ahead with this product. I shared my thoughts in an earlier post: “Why there will be no Apple Mac tablet“. So when they did launch it, I did some further thinking on why Apple do such a thing?

I honestly don’t have a clear answer. However, I did conclude that I really should not have been surprised.

Apple is actually not a technology company in the true sense of the word. In fact I would rate them as technology followers, or someone that builds products with existing or matured technology. What Apple actually does is that they are in a habit of doing the hard job of turning technology into something people can use. They are in the business of making tech mainstream.

They did it with the iMacs, iPod, and the iPhone. So is there any difference with what they are doing with the iPad? I don’t think so. They sense that the ever-evolving digital medium is moving into books and as a result, are leveraging on their existing platform to make a ebook reader more mainstream and accessible than their competitors.

Will it be a success?

I honestly don’t know and I’ll bet that Apple is also not 100% sure. That is also why I believe the iPad has not evolved in terms of a design language, and has its user interface build around something many people are already familiar with, the iPhone’s UI. They are mitigating the risk of a new platform by using familiar elements to encourage a faster user adoption rate.

But, wait there’s more!

I think there is a lot more to the story. In Apple’s case its almost always true. In many ways the iPhone was more than a phone. Many people have even said that the iPhone was Apple’s answer to the Netbook. In other words Apple probably felt they never needed to create a Netbook because of the iPhone and iTouch. Besides the margins are razor thin, and Apple is not in the low margin game.

If I can extrapolate, I would say that the iPhone/iTouch was more than a phone. It is even more than a Netbook. The 2 devices has actually brought thin client computing into the mainstream. Thin client computing was made popular when IBM was big on server systems. The idea is that the majority of the software or data resides on the Server and then shared or pulled by wired LAN on to many thin clients or lightweight computers for use.

With the advancement of technology miniaturization, 3G Internet bandwidth, and cloud computing, thin client computing now sits comfortably in your pocket.

So then why the iPad proposition?

Here we have to again look back to look forward.

Image of the Audrey via Wikipedia.

We can now see that the iPhone is pretty much a perfect thin client computer, but there are inherent problems with the platform. Screen size and processing power are some examples. If we now look at examples of what we used thin clients for in the late 90’s (at the height of the dot com boom), Internet appliances, like the Audrey, were very logical applications of the technology. We dreamt of a world filled with nice little kitchen displays that allows us to jump on the Internet to download recipes for our next big cook out or perhaps even turn the TV and lights on. Sounds like something an iPad could do?

Moving forward

I think there is a lot of potential for the iPad, and Apple has a really good track record in launching radical products that everyone “poo pooed” in the beginning, and then ended up changing the entire industry. Once again Apple has taken a risk to launch a radical product people did not ask for, and is likely waiting to see how the market will respond before they take the next step.

Will it be an iPhone or an Apple TV? Only time will tell.

I like to close this post with a bonus thought. You know that thick bezel around the iPad’s screen that everyone hates? It is a perfectly acceptable and understandable design element when you consider where you would put your thumbs when you are holding the iPad’s super thin body.

I have been thinking about T-Shaped Designers for a long time now. How to be one, what does being one really mean and how effective can one be. Made popular sometime in 2005 by IDEO’s Tim Brown, T-Shape Designers are defined as:

…people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T — they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. ~ Fast Company

I touch on this topic again in 2007, by calling these T-Shape Designers “Renaissance Designers” in my blog series: 7 Habits of Highly Effective Designers.

However after almost 5 years contemplating the existence of such T-Shaped designers and observing the many designers I know, I have to admit that such a personality trait is a myth. Honestly, to date I have never seen or met any designer that I would truly qualify as T-shaped, including myself.

I actually spoke to Chris Bangle about this and tried to tap into his vast experience as someone who hires talent. He agrees that while it was big in 2005, on one talks about this anymore probably because it was never true.

I postulated that such a personality trait is impossible simply because humans are just not wired to multi-task well, or to wear different hats for that matter. Even if a designer has the capability, he or she will lack the time or opportunity.

Therefore the reality is, instead of being a big “T”, you will find designers that are either a little “t” or a “T” with a short vertical stick.

Little “t-shape” designers are essentially most of who we are. Despite many of us feeling that we are “Jacks of all trades and masters of none” after our 4 years of design school. We eventually settle into a specialty of design and designing.

Stunted “T-Shaped” designers are often the senior creatives, the design managers, team leaders and entrepreneurs. Many deal with all the different touch points in the design development cycle, but do not have the opportunity to dive into detail. Some, like the entrepreneurs, may be in the position to do it all, but often will have to either accept work of lesser quality or learn to delegate and outsource.

———-

So at the end of the day, being a T-Shaped is just a nice story for designers to aspire to. While the value of a T-Shaped team is undeniable, it is probably more realistic to build a multi-disciplinary team of experts to work on complex (or wicked?) problems. Now that is something that has withstood the test of time.

What do you think? I’m looking forward to hearing your comments.

With a cheeky little link to Tom Kelly’s The Art of Innovation, Roberto Verganti (author of Design Driven Innovation) suggests in not so many words that User Centered Innovation, IDEO’s claim to fame, is dead.

While tech experts were busy commenting on the qualities of the iPad, what struck me was the level of excitement that the event created. On Tuesday, the day before the product was unveiled, a Web search for “Apple tablet” produced more than 17 million links! On Wednesday, hordes of people attended the news conference remotely. Everyone was anxiously waiting for Apple’s interpretation of what a tablet is.

This was validation of Apple’s peculiar innovation process: Insights do not move from users to Apple but the other way around. More than Apple listening to us, it’s us who listen to Apple.

This contradicts the conventional management wisdom about innovation. In fact, one of the mantras of the past decade has been user-centered innovation (cheeky link here!): Companies should start their innovation process by getting close to users and observe them using existing products to understand their needs.

I disagree with this approach for these kinds of efforts. User-centered innovation is perfect to drive incremental innovation, but hardly generates breakthroughs. In fact, it does not question existing needs, but rather reinforces them, thanks to its powerful methods.

With the iPad Apple has not provided an answer to market needs. It has made a proposal about what could fit us and what we could love. It’s now up to us to answer whether we agree.

I fully agree with Robert’s analysis. As I always say, consumers are horrible in telling you what they like. Listening to them gets you as far as optimizing your design, true innovation requires critical insight and a leap of faith. Apple is just so good at doing that.

Astute readers would remember a similar discussion on this issue. In my previous post, “Don Norman believes Technology comes first, User Needs Last. What?“, I concluded with:

So yes, Technology first, but if you put needs last or if technology does not collaborate or “handshake” with consumer needs, what is the point of being first?

So how is this different from this discussion?

Basically, in that earlier discussion, I indicated that Design should be used as a means to link innovation primers, in this case technology, to users. This makes technology meaningful, and a likely success. In this discussion and in Tom Kelly’s book, the idea of going to users to look for these innovation primers, which I’m sure you are convinced, is not always the right way to go if you want to challenge paradigms.

The game is changing; it is no longer enough to make things better. We have to rethink products to really make a difference.

Via: HBR

Ever wondered what design thinking is all about? The Stanford d.school has shared, with the world, the basics of design thinking as taught in their introductory class called the “design thinking bootcamp”.

This “bootcamp bootleg” is a nice little pdf file that contains a bunch of great methodologies for observation, data collection, brainstorming, prototyping, and concept generation.

After going through this pdf, I’m further convinced that design thinking is just about shaping the design process in a way that non-designers are able to understand and apply it in their problem solving activities. What do you guys think of my hypothesis?

via d.school blog