Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

Early this year I wrote about the Top 5 consumer trends to watch for 2007 and how it relates to Industrial Design. Following tradition, here we go again for 2008, and this time it is a little earlier and hopefully will help all of us be a better prepared in our never ending push to identify, synthesize and create a product that could become the next big thing.

Once again I am tapping in and responding to the large body of research by Trendwatching.com who graciously shares it with the world in their annual report for 2008. The consumer trends that were identified are very wide ranging and have applications in many areas, but the astute designer will realise a lot of it can be applied in your design programs. In particular if you start your design programs with a scenario base strategy as most of what was discussed is about our culture and habits of tomorrow. Even if you don’t, its just great information to keep for your lateral thoughts.

Here are my thoughts and comments, from an industrial design or product design stand point:

1. Status Spheres

“Here’s something trend watchers, CMOs and other business professionals should be able to agree on: in the end, when dealing with (and selling to) people, everything always comes back to status. In a traditional consumer society, he or she who consumes the most, the best, the coolest, the most expensive, the scarcest or the most popular goods, will typically also gain the most status.”

Selling products as Status has always been big business, and with the polarization of the market place and manufacturers or consumers moving up market, this trend to status will continue to feed each other in a vicious cycle. However designers will need to realise that this does not work with all products as:

As we’ve pointed out many times before, one mistake both trend watchers and brands make all the time, is to assume or pretend that a certain ‘trend’ will affect or be embraced by ALL consumers. No. Remember, in life and in trends: beauty (or ugliness) is in the eye of the beholder.

I believe tt is all about experiences and what is important to your target market. I have always said your consumer may eat premium pasta, drink expensive wine, but drive a Toyota, or worst still buy a $20,000 Home Entertainment system just to watch his pirated DVDs. In-depth study and understanding of your target market’s motivations is the key to unlocking what they find important to their status.

In terms of a consumer group, the status seekers will not only include the Rich. The “Nouveau Rich” (the growing rich middle class in developing countries like China, Russia and Eastern Europe) together with the Baby Boomers and Female market will be important considerations as they now have the money for self-actualization.

Interestingly enough status does not only have to do with money. Trendwatching also identifies other Status Spheres that Industrial Designers can think about.

a) The Transient Sphere: people who strive and seek as many different experiences as possible. Travel, trying new products, I see such consumers fluttering around everything like butterflies.

b) The Online Sphere: People craving an online status or in other words how many Facebook friends or visitors they have to their blog. I expect the internet to continue to be the place for new product launches and limited edition (Internet only?) launches.

c) The Eco Sphere: The Green movement will continue to gain momentum, and making sure your products are green will be a given.

d) The Giving Sphere: Gaining status by giving back to society.

e) The Participative Sphere: Customer made and interaction with your best customers can be a key to great market research and designs. Just don’t let this hinder your innovation.

2. Premiumization

Basically, with more wealth burning holes in (saturated and experienced) consumers’ pockets than ever before, quick status fixes derived from premium products and premium experiences will continue in full force next year.

This is something we started to see in 2007, Leather laptops, scarce electronics (planned scarcity?), limited edition water bottles, limited run toys, First Class Suites etc. I think this will continue to be big in 2008. As they say every product and service will soon have a “premium version”.

How about 2008 being about the PREMIUMIZATION of everything and anything. In other words, no industry, no sector, no product will escape a premium version in the next 12 months.

From the design side, expect modular platforms with “pimped” materials or features, and perhaps an “elite” range product runs. Mass market manufacturers will be struggling to look for differentiation but still maintain their bottom line as their volume calculations are hit. Luxury product manufacturers will also struggle as they pull no stops in locating the best and most unique features for their status conscious customers and hopefully redefining what is luxury at the same time.

3. Snack Culture

SNACK CULTURE thus embodies the phenomenon of products, services and experiences becoming more temporary and transient; products that are being deconstructed in easier to digest, easier to afford bits, making it possible to collect even more experiences, as often as possible, in an even shorter time frame.

Trendwatching calls it the Transient Sphere on steroids, however to me I think it is more that just about accumulating experiences. Our hyper-consumers are so overloaded with information that there is so much they can mentally process at anyone time. From over styled products visually fighting each other to easy to use products, this Snack Culture will have a huge impact on Design. What “bite-size” products will essentially do is impact in your product’s use experience. Consumers will likely throw your product in to the bin if they can’t figure it out in the first 2mins. As a result try-before-you-buy will be big, and just like Toys, your product better demo well.

4. Online Oxygen

…control-craving consumers needing online access as much as they need oxygen.

I think the effect is pretty clear as I had written in my Amazon Kindle post, products will need some kind of on-line strategy to vastly grow its use experience. It could be about accessing online information like internet radios, or uses the internet as a means to sell the product like limited edition prints or T-shirts. What ever you pick, on line information of your product and using blogs to generate buzz will be the norm for 2008.

5. Eco-Iconic

Over the past few years, the ECO trend has moved from ECO-UGLY (ugly, over-priced, low performance alternatives to shiny ‘traditional sphere’ products and services) to ECO-CHIC (eco-friendly stuff that actually looks as nice and cool as the less responsible version) to ECO-ICONIC in 2008: “Eco-friendly goods and services sporting bold, iconic design and markers, that help their eco-conscious owners to visibly tout their eco-credentials to peers.”

As mention earlier, the Green movement will continuing to gain momentum, influence and thus power, will be something to watch in 2008. Eco design should be something manufacturers can seriously consider as strategic competitive advantage. Furthermore, as going green will be a given, designers should take the next step to be not only aware of the environmental impact of your designs, but to build systems and products that foster sustainable behaviours in consumers.

6. Brand Butlers
This is an interesting idea where brands engage customers by getting involved in their day to day lives. This builds brand loyalty and love that encourages the customer to spread the good news! Designers might like to see how advertisers will position their products together with their customers. I probably won’t say too much more as this is really more of a marketing, advertising or PR strategy.

7. MIY | Make It Yourself

It’s a mainstream trend now, one that keeps giving, with millions of consumers uploading their creative endeavors online, and tens of millions of others enjoying the fruits of their creativity. User-generated content, at least in the online world, has grown from a teenage hobby to an almost equal contender to established entities in news, media, entertainment and craft….the next frontier will be digitally designing products from scratch, then having them turned into real physical goods as well. In fact, expect MIY | MAKE IT YOURSELF (and then SIY | SELL IT YOURSELF) ventures to become increasingly sophisticated in the next 12 months:

Of all the trends we are discussing today, this perhaps has the greatest impact to Industrial Designers. While this trend speaks about the current online MIY trends, and soon to be available physical facilities for customers to make their own, the next step is pretty obvious. Basically if people are making their own products to a specification of what they want, then what is the role of Designers and Design? This is something that should force Industrial Designers to sit up and think about, as it has a huge impact on our future.

While I have touched on this topic in the past with “Fabbing: A primer for Guerilla Design Strategies” and “The future relationship of IP and Industrial Design“, I will soon be exploring this topic in greater depth here as part of my in-depth research paper on this issue. So do stay tuned!

8. Crowd Mining

CROWD MINING: when co-creating, co-funding, co-buying, co-designing, co-managing *anything* with ‘crowds’, the emphasis in 2008 will move from just getting the masses in, to mining those crowds for the rough and polished diamonds. How to do that? Shower them with love, respect and heaps of money, of course.

This is an interesting as it will impact how we do our Market Research for our design programs. Now with communities of people with common interests coming together, it will be interesting to see how companies or people managing such websites take advantage of the “power of the people”.

While it is tempting to create a product that a group of people may want, it may not be entirely correct or successful all the time. We still need to be prudent with our costings and due diligence.

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I hope you enjoyed that run down and I wish you a great year of product development success!

Image: Colador 2 by Josep Altarriba

Fellow designer blogger csven has written a great article on his observations on the state of Intellectual property and its future impact on Design and of cause Industrial Design as well.

Here is an excerpt:

At some point, p2p networks won’t have just mp3 files, they’ll have CAD files. When they do, the first thing that will happen is factories in distant corners of the manufacturing world will start churning out bootleg product at a pace that will make current infringement look like pre-Napster music “sharing”. After that people will start using locally-based fabbing services to rapid manufacture parts the way people used to photocopy stuff at the local copy shop. Eventually, home-based 3D printers (or, possibly in the more distant future, nano-factories) will allow people to fab something as easily as they currently print their digital photos.

That’s the future. It’s all up for grabs. Creatives can either try to fight it or they can figure out new business models.

This is a multi-fold discussions with many considerations.

The Intellectual Property Protection Myth

Personally for me I have long given up on this IP nonsense. If your entire business plan is backed by an IP you got a problem. It takes only about a 10% modification of a design to over come an IP protection. Put it this way if you really wanted to take the effort to copy something its not really that difficult.

The reality is an IP only has specific coverage, and if your technology has value and multiple applications then by all means protect it and sell it. IP is a sink hole of funds, but if you can farm it out for royalties then go for it!

The real rules of the Game

The reality of things are a successful content (music, product, object etc.) is more than IP. It is a well oiled engine of branding, design language, technology, manufacturing, and marketing. All added together makes it a hard act to follow.

Just look at Apple? Their products not only push the edge of design minimalism, but their part construction is flawless and extremely difficult to replicate without specific technology. Furthermore any vendor that steps out of line with Apple will never survive due to their brand equity walking out of the door.

At the end of the day, my view is copy all you want, but you ain’t getting into the infrastructure I have created.

The IP point of it All?

On the other end, I find the extent by which IP is often enforced is just plain ridiculous! As csven laments it has just went overboard and stink of corruption and dirty politics.

While copying in any form is always bad, but claiming a loss of business that forces obscene settlements particularly in the music industry? It’s just not logical unless if you can prove if that person would have bought your product in the first place should such MP3 downloads are not available.

A cease and desist punishable by the law or fines is good enough. What point is there to bankrupt a poor struggling housewife when her young naive son downloads?

IP and Creatives

At the end of the day we are fast approaching a creativity cusp. A melting pot of fast internet, digital media, and miniaturization of manufacturing (fabbing). When you can download CAD files off the net and “print it” on your desktop, my inclination is to give the files away for free!

And why not? It takes a big change in mind set, but the reality of trying to protect digital media is like carrying water in a sieve.

From a designer’s stand point, content creation NOT content protection will becomes even more and more important. It will also become a discussion of the difference between amateur and professionals. I coined the term Hyper-creative in my previous post “Fabbing: A primer for Guerilla Design Strategies” and that will be what design professionals need to become in this new product development era ruled by digital media and the Internet.

One of the great things I love about blogging, is you get to meet so many great people through your blog. One of them, whom I now consider a friend, is William Lehman from the Artist Hideout. Not only is he a talented Artist, he is a passionate blogger and a pastor (cool!). Discussions with him and reading his blog were ways for me to keep in touch on the more “raw and emotional” aspect of my design profession.

During one of our on-line chats on the confluence of design and art and the relationship between the two, he had invited me to write a guest article on his site discussing, from my point of view as a designer, this relationship between Design and Art. I was more than honored to. So here it is. It’s a little late, as we let it go up on his site first, but as our blog audiences are different I wanted it posted at Design Sojourn as well.

Is Good Design Art?

Taking a position as a designer and moving from the discipline of Design to Art, I like to ask can good Design be considered as Art? This is one of those perpetual debates and discussions topics that really have no right or wrong answer. The way I see it, it always seems to be in essence boils down to how you define what design or art is?

If I take a stab at this relationship between Art and Design, I always find that the issue is not only about the definition of Design or art, but about the amount of “constraints” a discipline has to deal with.

Just to clarify, I believe creativity cannot exist in vacuum, there must be boundaries. For example even creating Art has its own constraints that must be dealt with such as the properties of clay and even paint on canvas. But my point is Art has a lot less constraints to work with than say Industrial Design or Mechanical Design.

In many ways, I always consider Art to be pure expression, in other words a tangible form born from emotion and/or inspiration. This if taken from a Designer’s stand point could be very difficult to reproduce in industrial design. Often Industrial designers have to make compromises simply because the mechanical and manufacturing processes do not allow a certain form or detail. Product shapes are often be dictated by what manufacturing machines or processes can or cannot do.

Therefore logically for a product to be considered Art, or an expression, it has to conquer the different mechanical constraints, raise above AND maintain the original inspirational intent. In many cases the more complex a product is in terms of specifications, manufacturing or usage requirements, the more difficult it is to turn it into Art. I do take my hat off to the few designers that has been successful and possibly the reason why many products in MoMa’s Architecture and Design collection are often very low technology products, although Apple has shown that they can buck the trend. Kudos to them.

Now lets get back into what was brought up originally in the beginning of this Article. And that is when Designers try to create a product that could become Art, how we define design rears its ugly head again. To explore this further, we need to look at the title of this post from another angle; can good Art be good Design? Let’s take a look at Philip Starck’s infamous Jucy Salif.

The more artistic inclined love this and most Designers I know hate it, I myself sit on the fence on this one. Why? Many designer dislike this orange or lemon juicer as it does not do its job at all. The only think it does is make an artistic statement. So the Jucy Salif, if considered as a product that has to solve a problem (ie juicing oranges), it outright fails. Is it then bad design? Perhaps. However, if you consider it as a form of expression and its only purpose of it existing is to make a statement, then it does the job well.

To further expand on this point lets look at how the dictionary considers the words Design and Art. Firstly Design is often used as verb. We design, you design or I design. You see “Design” is an action and something you do. Art for example is a noun, a description of perhaps even a classification of genera. You don’t really say we art or I art, instead you say we paint or I sculpt.

So you see Design has intent and often has a functional purpose and that is to solve a problem. Many good designs are great solutions to problems as well as able to maintain in their form outlook the other “deeper meanings”. It’s not to say that art has neither purpose nor meaning. No, it’s just that good Art is defined under a different set of parameters. In many ways Art and Design are 2 sides of the same coin.

So therefore at the end of the day, can good Design equate to Art? Yes and no. As good design can also NOT be art.

Fortunately this divide caused by constraints and definition will get smaller. The advances in computing and manufacturing technology will bridge this gap. We can soon create beautiful forms, based purely on emotion, without much of the current manufacturing constraints we now have. We can soon be only constraint by the basic laws of physics and rejoice that the manufacturing requirements we have are basically now gone.

As a great example, do take a look at some of the cutting edge “design” work by the Studio Commonwealth in collaboration with Joshua Davis at their exhibition. They build their very unique products by pushing the edge of rapid-prototyping machines. Currently though only featuring low-technology products, the potential of this process is very huge.

Some of their other great work.

Image Source

As you can see the time will soon come, when the limits or making thing will be only our imagination. I hope you enjoyed this article and I would love any feedback you might as well as your thoughts or examples you might have on the relationship between Art and Design.

I have been nursing this article since June 01, 2007. It was originally called “Who stole my design? A Primer for a Guerilla Design Strategy”, I felt the context just did not seem to be comprehensive enough as it covered only the creation aspect of the story. However but after many months of discussions with csven from reBang, (including a “date” for a chat in Second Life) I’ve decided to re-title this article as this more appropriately sets it down a path of an entire new and different way of thinking about design as well as hopefully be a new way of thinking for us designers in time to come.

Actually many designers know something about Fabbing but not in that context of a “Fab Lab”?. Most of us know it to be more as rapid prototyping. However it’s a lot more than that. Once in the realm of engineers and scientist, with the help of the pervasive nature of the web and miniaturization technology, it will completely turn upside down the practices and processes of how people will design/purchase/consume/manufacture things in time to come.

So what exactly is Fabbing all about? I won’t go too much into detail here as there have been many articles written about it and its strengths and weaknesses. A good written example is by Moroz over at his Fabbing focused Industrial Design Sandbox, he writes:

Eventually, it is predicted one will be able to fabricate a product in the home, just as one can print out a color document today. It’s called personal fabrication or desktop manufacturing.

Do check out his series on Personal Fabrication as its a good summary of the “Fabbing” situation to date.

Fabbing, or what I like to call the future of rapid prototyping, is the same extrapolation of how the PC you reading this article on used to be as large as an entire room or bigger! However it’s a lot more than a manufacturing machine on your desk top. It’s not just about the ease of firing up your CAD program and hitting print, it could mean that designers now have the instant flexibility to design what the customer wants with very little or no lead time. Or even better, the consumers themselves could design their own stuff as and when they require it.

So I think the all important question rolling around in your mind at this time is: if it’s predicted that it’s going to be that easy and flexible for people to make things, then how would people value and see the role of design and designers?

As I mentioned earlier, there is a good chance that Fabbing is going to turn our entire manufacturing process and chain management completely upside down. Furthermore as industrial design is implicitly linked to manufacturing I believe our design process will be affected and we should be prepared to adapt to it as well.

So therefore with the background picture clearly painted, I like to welcome you to the world of the “Guerrilla Designer”?.

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