Innovation Spring 2014: Design/Art/Craft

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Design/Art/Craft EMOTION

n

GREAT CLIENTS

n

ID+ME

SPRING 2014

Where are you going to be this spring?

DENVER April 5 | GRAND RAPIDS April 5 | SAVANNAH April 12 | CHICAGO April 26 | NEW YORK CITY May 15

2014

DISTRICT

DESIGN CONFERENCES

For more information on this year’s conferences, their themes and to register visit - www.idsa.org/save-date-2014-district-design-conferences or scan the QR Code.

Membership has its benefits.

IDSA members receive discounts on District Design Conferences, the International Conference, IDEA, INNOVATION and more. Get all the details at http://idsa.org/membership-overview.

KeyShot Amazing renderings and animations. In minutes.

The best products. Visualized using KeyShot.

Companies around the world rely on KeyShot to deliver the most stunning images possible. With the speed to turn 3D data into visuals within a matter of minutes, there is no better choice for designers, engineers and 3D professionals.

See your idea take shape, in real time, with more power than ever before.

This is KeyShot.

Model by Simon Williamson

Find out more at: keyshot.com/innovate

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

SPRING 2014

Fort Standard’s Crest Bottle Openers. See p. 49.

Publisher IDSA 555 Grove St., Suite 200 Herndon, VA 20170 P: 703.707.6000 F: 703.787.8501 www.innovationjournal.org www.idsa.org

Executive Editor Mark Dziersk, FIDSA Managing Director LUNAR | Chicago mark@lunar.com

Sr. Creative Director Karen Berube IDSA 703.707.6000 x102 karenb@idsa.org

Advisory Council Gregg Davis, IDSA Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Contributing Editor Jennifer Evans Yankopolus jennifer@wordcollaborative.com

Advertising Teresa Algie 703.273.6211 teresa.algie@verizon.net

Annual Subscriptions Within the US $70 Canada & Mexico $85 International $125

Subscriptions/Copies Jill Richardson 703.707.6000 x118 jillr@idsa.org

Single Copies Fall/Yearbook All others

404.478.6433 ®

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

$40+ S&H $20+ S&H

Brian Ferry

®

PATRONS OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EXCELLENCE

DESIGN/ART/CRAFT

FEATURES

20 Our Expanding Field

by Scott Klinker, IDSA,

by Magnus Feil, IDSA

INVESTOR

52 How Designers Infuse Emotion

IDEO, Palo Alto, CA; Shanghai, China;

Guest Editor

23 Reimagining Authenticity: Design + Craft

by Mark Moskovitz 28 New Habitats for Design

by Louise Schouwenberg 32 A Hand Built Life: An Interview with Abigail Anne Newbold

by Kristina Gerig

18 Push. Pull. Twist.

by Brian Heidsiek

55 Great Designers Deserve Half the Credit for Their Great Designs

by Cooper C. Woodring, FIDSA

39 Process Remix

by Peter Beaugard, Christopher Schanck with Mycal Elliott

42 The Evolution of Design Culture: An Interview with Andrea Branzi

by Scott Klinker, IDSA 44 Tools for Thinking: Discursive Design

by Bruce M. Tharp, IDSA and Stephanie M. Tharp

Munich, Germany; Chicago; New York Newell Rubbermaid, Atlanta, GA Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, OH Webb deVlam Chicago, Chicago, IL CULTIVATOR

IN EVERY ISSUE

Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL

4 IDSA HQ 6 From the Editor

Dell, Round Rock, TX

36 The Push Forward:

by Mark Dziersk, FIDSA A Contemporary Design 8 Business Concepts Gallery

by Sam Vinz

Cambridge, MA; London, UK; San Francisco;

Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN Jerome Caruso Design Inc., Lake Forest, IL Lunar Design Inc., Palo Alto, CA

by Scott Simpson

Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO

11 Book Review

by Scott Stropkay, IDSA 12 Design Defined

Smart Design, New York; San Francisco;

by Scott Henderson, IDSA

Teague, Seattle, WA

14 A Look Back

by Carroll Gantz, FIDSA

16 Beautility

by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA 58 Showcase 64 ID+ME: Donald Genaro, L/IDSA

Tupperware, Worldwide

Barcelona, Spain Stanley Black & Decker, New Britain, CT

Charter Patrons indicated by color.

For more information about becoming a Patron and supporting IDSA’s communication and education outreach, please contact Katrina Kona at 703.707.6000 x100.

49 From One to One Million: A Guide to Scaling Up

by Lisa Cheng Smith

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA INNOVATION DESIGN/ART/CRAFT

Design/Art/Craft EMOTION

n

GREAT CLIENTS

n

ID & ME

SPRING 2014

Cover photo: Boom Boom Burst photo by Joseph De Leo; see p. 20.

SPRING 2014

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, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170.

Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2014 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 33, No. 1, 2014; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

Advertisers’ Index c2 2014 IDSA District Design Conferences c3 2014 IDSA International Conference 10 IDSA Bookshelf 1 Luxion c4 LUNAR 5 Stratasys 9 Proto Labs

I D S A HQ

POSITIONING FOR IDSA’S NEXT 50 YEARS

A

s IDSA prepares to mark its 50th anniversary in 2015, it’s important that we celebrate our past as well as envision our future. What will (or should) we look like in 2065? How can we remain relevant and meaningful in a world that is constantly evolving and changing?

The answer is that we must evolve and change at an equally constant pace.

Like most other professional membership societies, IDSA is redesigning itself to embrace and meet the challenges and opportunities of the digital age. This process involves looking internally within our membership to determine the unique needs and expectations of industrial designers and looking externally at the characteristics and trends of successful membership organizations that seem to have it right.

Consider the fact that the majority of IDSA members will retire in the next decade. In the past, a steady stream of new industrial designers could be counted on to replenish and grow membership within IDSA. Not so anymore.

According to a new book entitled The End of Membership as We Know It by Sarah Sladek, many younger professionals balk at paying for information and services they can often access for free. New technology and changing demographics are rendering traditional associations irrelevant. The news is not dire for associations. It is, however, a wake-up call that conducting business as usual will not suffice.

At IDSA’s February Board of Directors meeting, leadership and staff grappled with this emerging membership paradigm. Several key factors surfaced:

n

We must approach these challenges with a fresh perspective. We simply cannot solve today’s issues with yesterday’s solutions.

n

There’s no place for sacred cows. Everything must be scrutinized.

n

We need to bring more people into the conversation.

Rising up the leadership ladder takes time and is welldeserved, but we must embrace those whose voices we don’t hear as often and we must be open to new and different viewpoints.

n

Change is risky and there’s no guarantee that the direction we choose will be 100 percent accurate. To be successful we must be flexible and nimble and we must realize that taking no action is much more risky than moving forward.

n

The new membership model will be more about community and less about boundaries. We must remove barriers that strengthen our community while recognizing that “membership does have its privileges,” to quote American Express. It’s a delicate balance, but one that many other associations are intentionally navigating.

One thing is certain among all the uncertainty: IDSA’s next 50 years can be equally or more impressive as our last 50 years. I’m enthusiastic about moving forward. We want to hear your thoughts on the changing membership equation.

Ideas for IDSA’s 50th are also welcome. Thanks!

—Daniel Martinage, CAE, IDSA Executive Director danielm@idsa.org

4

W W W. I D S A . O R G

So many combinationsit might blow your mind.

[COLOR + RUBBER + TRANSPARENT + RIGID] Introducing the Objet500 Connex3 from Stratasys, the world’s only full-color and multi-material 3D printer. Select from incomparably brilliant and consistent colors, plus a full palette of transparent colors — the only 3D printer to offer such a wide array. And it’s the only 3D printer that prints flexible materials in a broad range of shore values. All with ultra-fine detail creating the most true-to-life modeling possible. Stratasys is the proven leader in multi-material 3D printing. For whatever your mi nd ca n i ma g i n e, vi si t st ra t a sys . co m/O bj et 5 0 0 Co n n ex3 . © 2014 Stratasys, Ltd.

F RO M T HE E DI TOR

A WORK OF DESIGN R ecently I was asked to give the Penny W. Stamps lecture at the University of Michigan, the college where I received my BFA; my talk was centered around industrial design. The event is open to the general public and is also attended by the entire art school. Based on the responses I received afterward, I am pretty sure I connected with the designers and the public, but I am not so certain about the art majors. There can be a pretty big difference in perception of value between artistic expression and design for industry.

The iconic industrial designer Charles Eames once said about design that “it may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art.” Is it fair to suggest that done exceptionally well, there is no difference between the two, art and design?

First, some definitions (from Webster’s): Art: something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.

Design: the way something has been made; the way the parts of something (such as a building, machine, book, etc.) are formed and arranged for a particular use, effect, etc.

I think a really amazing design is something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings evident in the way it has been made—the way the parts are formed and arranged for a particular use or effect.

What distinguishes art from design? According to the above definition of art, one could easily argue that any industrial designer, architect, fashion designer, etc. adhering to best practices is creating art. So what is the key difference between the two? What is their relationship? Is it intention?

Is it commerce? When does art become design and design become art?

Perhaps the answer lies in an examination of constraints. If art is an endeavor completely free of constraints, what is a mural? Most murals have a size constraint, and some may have other constraints as well, such as subject matter or medium. Is this art? If murals are art, where does one draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable constraints in order for it to be considered art? Sometimes great sculpture is created within constraints, such as those intended for a specific locale. “The Chicago Picasso,” as it

6

W W W. I D S A . O R G

is commonly called, is an untitled commissioned sculpture created specifically for the Daley Plaza in the Loop. Is it art?

Or do the constraints imposed on the artist not fit within the definition of what constitutes art? It seems that constraints do not clearly separate art from design.

Does duplication or production provide a clear distinction between art and design? Is a one-of-a-kind concept car art and the production version design? Both the concept car and the production vehicle are created for an intended consumer. There does seem to be general agreement that items created for a specific customer and for production are design and not art.

While a definitive distinction that defines the difference between art and design may not exist, what is important is the relationship between the ideals of art and good design.

Ideals, such as a freedom from constraints, reflecting and interpreting culture, evoking emotions, provoking thought for change and embracing the future, inspire both artist and designers, allowing our imaginations to push the boundaries of what we know as possible. A great design should always be influenced by a desire to create art.

The Dutch firm Droog puts it succinctly: “We believe that utility does not have to come at the expense of fantasy.” Their work demonstrates a thirst for dreamy innovative solutions that redefine the practical. The Droog soft washbowl is a sink made of polyurethane that can be manipulated and reshaped for specific tasks or body types. It expresses both imagination and practicality while providing a vehicle for cultural change. This small sink promotes all kinds of new humansink interactions and expands our view of small wash spaces.

Designers can find art anywhere if they are open to all the possibilities. Ingo Maurer has taken his obsession with the simple beauty of the incandescent light bulb and has created light fixtures that celebrate the bulb by engaging fantasy. His work evokes powerful emotions for an oftenignored object. Maurer’s Birdie chandelier is a work of design. Believing that incandescent bulbs represent flight, he imagined the bulbs as objects in flight, literally. Each bulb is given bird’s wings. The bare bulbs seem both modern in their simplicity and antique in our memories. The attention that he brought to the bulb influenced a subsequent trend for incorporating bare incandescents as a focal point of the interiors of hip bars and restaurants, then everywhere else.

These kinds of haute couture designs exert great influence and many times define culture.

“[T]hat blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry.”

Chris Moore/Catwalking/Getty Images

—Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada)

The character of Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep in the film The Devil Wears Prada, explains how the art of fashion, such as haute couture, influences design as she dresses down Anne Hathaway’s character for laughing about an argument over the right color of blue: “But what you don’t know is that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise.

It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.”

Interestingly, this sequence also serves to point out some of the problems that face designers who are interested in creating art—issues of mass production and low cost that get in the way of retaining the art in imaginative and innovative solutions. Artistic inspiration cannot be separated from the object no matter how removed from the original influence.

The effect a work of design can have on culture is huge, and great design has always been inspired and influenced by art. Today, infusing art into design is becoming more a necessity, a way to exceed user expectations and touch emotions. Art and design can be the same thing. It is a challenge that all industrial designers should embrace. Today designers who are not inspired by art and the ideals of the artist risk failure tomorrow.

This is the inspiration for this issue of INNOVATION. It was Scott Klinker, IDSA, a dedicated artist, educator and director of design at Cranbrook, who brought this topic forward. He, along with an amazing collection of authors, invested a considerable amount of grace and energy to the task of exploring this topic here in these pages, even while faced with the constraints of time and a publication schedule. I hope you will agree with me that Scott and his team have created something very special.

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

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

7

BU S I NE SS CO NCE PTS

CHANGE IS IN THE HEIR

T

he “new normal” means fully embracing design technology, having a laser-like focus on cost control and clearly articulating the value proposition of design. Of necessity, more is being done with less, and “change management” has become the phrase du jour. This is something of an oxymoron in that it assumes that while change is pervasive, inevitable and unpredictable, it can still be managed effectively. While we may not be able to control change in the macro sense, it is certainly possible to exert some influence in pursuit of desirable outcomes. A good analogy is the sailor, who cannot command the winds, currents or tides but does have charge of the sails, rigging and rudder. With the right equipment and a little skill, an experienced sailor can reach the desired destination despite the surprises encountered along the way.

Everyone knows that trying to predict the future is a fool’s errand, but that does not stop us from trying. Herewith, a few simple rules of the road that should come in handy when contemplating change-making in your organization:

1. You’re not as smart as you think you are. No plan will be executed flawlessly, and even the most noble goals experience unintended consequences.

10. Demographics is destiny. Each generation gets a turn at the bat. An effective leader will prepare successors to make the most of their circumstances.

2. Status quo is a myth. No object or system is completely static. Whether you know it or not, change is happening all around you all the time.

11. Success looks different to each generation. New leaders will face different circumstances and be subject to different influences.

3. Beware of the tyranny of the rear view mirror.

It can only show you what’s familiar. Great ideas hide in unfamiliar territory.

12. When choosing new leaders, attitude is more important than aptitude. New skills can be learned; it’s much harder to change core values like integrity, collaboration and devotion to client service.

4. Beware of success ruts. Success is a self-reinforcing loop, and the familiar can be the enemy of innovation.

5. Of the two basic drivers of change, fear and opportunity, fear is more pervasive. Don’t let your fear of failure prevent you from trying something new and different.

6. Change is generally top down or bottom up.

Quick change generally comes from the top, whereas long-lasting change tends to come from the bottom.

Organizations need both kinds.

7. Act as if you cannot fail. Hedging your bet is hardly a convincing rallying cry. Sometimes “burning your boats” is the fastest road to success.

8. Listen, learn and lead. People in organizations need leadership, but it has to be the right kind. People perform best when they are fully plugged in, and without buy-in, you’ll go nowhere fast.

9. Make sure your plan is a framework, not a box. All plans are subjected to unanticipated consequences; learn to adjust to changing winds and tides.

13. Caterpillars become butterflies whether they like it or not. Although change can be scary, humans are wired to be successful.

14. You’re not as smart as you think you are. This one bears repeating. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room to be successful; you just have to figure out how to take full advantage of all the talent at your disposal.

At the end of the day, the most important and difficult change that firms face is how to handle leadership transition. It helps to remember that the future will not look like the past and that yesterday’s successes may hold the seeds to tomorrow’s failures. History gives us many examples of smart people who made dumb decisions, but also many examples of how learning from abject failure led to spectacular success. Bottom line: it’s reasonable to be afraid of change, but also useless. Get your people ready for what’s coming next. You’ll know you’ve done a good job when they outshine you.

—Scott Simpson is a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council and a member of its executive board.

Scott.Simpson@jacobs.com Reprinted with permission from DesignIntelligence, Vol. 20, No. 250.

8

W W W. I D S A . O R G

The Nature of Innovation.

Titanaboa Robotic Snake

Proto Labs helps brilliant ideas take shape by making prototype parts for product developers around the world. We manufacture real parts within days so designers and engineers can continue to create inspiring products that change the way we see things.

ISO 9001:2008 Certified | ITAR Registered Š 2014 Proto Labs, Inc. | protolabs.com | 877.479.3680

Discover what’s possible at protolabs.com/design.

HUNDREDS OF

DESIGN

BOOKS R E A DY & WA I T I N G

FOR YOU

It will be hard to find a greater collection of design books for and by designers, in one place. idsa.org/idsa-bookshelf

BOOK REVIE W

Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation

COMMUNICATING THE NEW

H

ave you ever wondered why some we truly understand what the receiving 1 people just don’t understand the party needs, we can introduce new thinking power of your vision? Why some through shared experiences and build tools 2 of your best ideas weren’t embraced or to engage delivery partners.

KIM ERWIN 3 developed? Why some people just don’t But more than the title suggests, this 4 get it? Kim Erwin does, and she believes book also shows us the power of comthe way we think about communication is munication in critical thinking practices. the problem.

Take prototyping, for instance. We all know Most of us have been taught to think what it means to prototype an idea, but of communication as an information transmost of us overlook the power of writing Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation fer process in which we’re supposed to as a form of prototyping. Erwin reminds us simplify our thoughts to elevator-pitch-like that language is truly powerful, but not just analogies and package our ideas to sell. in expressing our ideas. Language molds It’s all about the pitch, right? That’s what how we think, opening or closing us to we read in almost every article or book opportunity, so when we experiment with about “The New” thing: An individual creator sees an opporlanguage we change our ideas. In her words: “Writing is not tunity, pitches it as an “X meets Y” story to investors, it’s just prototyping our expression of thought, it is prototyping developed overnight and big New things happen. our very thoughts themselves.”

Creation myths like those may encourage us to develop Erwin is credible because she is both a practitioner and and pitch a New idea, but we soon realize that it’s hard to an academic. She worked as a research integrator at Doblin get our New idea adopted. And if our New idea is the least Group, she’s studied innovation practices, she’s built innovabit complex, we learn that we are going to need help—lots tion strategies herself, and she teaches those practices at of it—and from many different people. That’s one theme in the IIT Institute of Design. Citing over 30 innovation process Erwin’s refreshingly straightforward book Communicating thinkers and practitioners across the country, Erwin does a The New. We need to reconceive our project-based comwonderful job of collecting and codifying methods we can munication methods as a design process in itself. We need use to become more effective thinkers and communicators. to create all-in, not buy-in. We need to move away from Written as a set of tools to frame and control the complexipersuasion (that requires proof) toward shared experiences ties surrounding the creation of any complex change, Erwin that predict opportunity. We need to think of our work as uses vivid illustrations and case studies to create an essenbuilding belief and conviction. We need to design ways for tial catalog of communication best practices. our ideas to take hold inside organizations. And we need to Much like Alex Osborn described new methods for build interpersonal relationships with various stakeholders to innovation in his 1953 Applied Imagination, codifying the build trust and preempt critics. “rules” for a new practice called brainstorming, Erwin orgaErwin frames process options for different kinds of New nizes the big ideas at the end of each chapter. Erwin, like contexts. New ideas that are complex are different from New Osborn, has created a way to empower innovators who ideas that are unfamiliar. New ideas that are fuzzy because of work on complex problems that require new thinking to unknown variables or changing trends are yet another type drive The New into practice. Designers are uniquely suited of New. Erwin proposes that if we understand the innovation to this innovation task partly because we are trained to be context more clearly and if we understand our constituencies empathetic and reflective. But we must also recognize that better, we’ll structure our processes more effectively. If we we only see our work through the lenses we have. Kim Erwin can find and describe the conceptual center of the team’s gives us a more complete kit of lenses. With these new mission, we’ll gain focus. If we can choose the right frame, tools, I think we can be better visionaries, communicators our audience is far more likely to understand the vision. If and craftspeople.

Communicating

THE NEW

—Scott Stropkay, IDSA scott@essential-design.com I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

11

D E S I G N DE F I NE D

DESIGN THINKING VS.DESIGN DOING T

he term “design thinking” implies that a new process is in place in our industry that trumps the roll-up-your-sleeves, slug-it-out-in-the-trenches process of yesteryear know as “design doing.” It suggests that the value a designer brings to the table nowadays has graduated to a higher intellectual level—fitting in well with the popular idea that the design of the object is dead and that we now design experiences. To me, though, the process used to create a great design, experience, solution, product or whatever you want to call it is still grounded in design doing.

12

W W W. I D S A . O R G

Bigstock

Remember your design instructors back in the old days (before design thinking) and how they would tell you not to over-think at the risk of creating a contrived solution?

Having your solution come across as contrived—defined as “deliberately created rather than arising naturally or spontaneously”—was a death knell for your design—a loathsome word of failure I feared most. Yes, too much design thinking before the age of design thinking could actually produce bad design. Design instructors would rely on the tried and tested mantra of making sure you remembered to “keep it simple, stupid,” the KISS rule. We merrily laughed along, accepting stupidity as a formula for success. How far we have come now that we are design thinkers.

You also wanted to avoid the critique that you were trying too hard. Design may be the only profession in which trying too hard produces crap. Other common design advice in the studio would include notions like “Anyone can have an idea; it’s how you execute it that matters,” or “You can’t patent an idea, only the execution of it,” suggesting that just thinking about design is not even close to being enough.

To the outside world the term, “design thinking” might also imply that we designers can sit down and think up a great solution cold. I like the idea of design discovery as a better success formula—exploring and discovering are the primary activities that you do while you are busy design doing.

Awesome design is not created by a process of intellectual alchemy, as the term “design thinking” might imply.

It is discovered by observing the world. The more input you accumulate while walking the earth, the greater the chance of producing a design that has meaning to at least one other person besides yourself. Doing so involves spontaneity— repurposing and reconfiguring ingredients from a Periodic Table of Design Elements consisting of form, culture, color and information in their purest of states. The design elements we draw upon are finite, although limitless in their potential combinations.

To be able to see these elements that are all around us requires the designer to be consciously and proactively looking for the solution in order to be at the right place at the right time when that missing piece of the puzzle presents itself—and it always will. The solutions are invisible unless there is a need to see them.

When the origin of an idea can be identified and then harnessed by a designer, a positive message is transmitted to the design’s owners, creating a sense of enlightenment.

The users feel smart that they can see and hear this subliminally pinging them from deep within the plastic shell or user interface; the design then transcends utility and enters the elusive realm of desire. It’s important to remember that the idea came from somewhere—existing in a form yet unrefined by design—waiting to be discovered.

Accidental design used to be something designers actually hoped might happen to their projects: the happy accident. If taken in the literal sense, one might think of accidental design as the opposite of design thinking, because if

it was just an accident, it’s bad. Therefore, in the context of design thinking as an industry buzz word or marketing spin, accidental design also has no value.

I have experienced happy accidents: the mock-up model literally fell off the drawing table and broke, and when I looked down at it in despair as it lay smashed and sullied on the floor, complete with a new footprint from my shoe, I shouted, “Eureka”—my frustration turning to elation as the epiphany reached out from the tangled web of hot glue strands and melted foam. Or better yet, instead of smashing your mock-up, try turning it upside down and looking at it—Voila.

Sounds comical, but consider how Jimi Hendrix could vary from his prewritten notes and spontaneously unleash an open-ended explosion from his imagination—a result people found far more interesting than an otherwise carefully planned approach. Allowing for stream-of-consciousness flow will produce the new territory we want—the groundbreaking result, the shock and awe of newness. How can we suggest awesomeness can be exclusively precalculated?

Some of the most beautiful things in the world occur out of chaotic randomness: sand dunes, water-carved rocks, patterns within leaves. Designers attempt to mimic it all, and not just in the plastic shells of a telephone. Having something flow—as if instinctual and emulating nature, reflective somehow of the human condition—is a dominant goal of good design and a proven success formula whether it’s for a product, a user interface, transportation or whatever.

There is often a point in a project when the ideas are not flowing—and anxiety prevails. Fellow designers have described this phase of the process as being in hell. Step away from the computer, people—just step away.The anxiety you feel is an empty, cold and dark void in a cobwebfilled corner of your brain; the information you seek is not in there, and no miracle will cause it to magically arrive—no matter how many pencils you break, wads of paper you crush or keyboards you destroy. You must go out and get the knowledge you need. You have to pry yourself away from your workstation (you can bring your phone, it’s OK).

People do not climb a mountain in search of a view—they want answers!

Henry Hudson discovered New York Harbor, the body of water outside my window. The important thing to remember is that it was there already. He simply found it.

Design thinking may just be a rebranding term for our industry in the age of the experience and the outsourcing of the object. The term implies thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness is good. However, you can only think about things that exist inside your head; it is impossible to think about things that do not (think about it). Whatever you want to call it (or brand it), good design is generated the same way now as it always has been and probably always will be: not in the vacuum of a design-thinking tank, but through exploration, discovery and design doing.

—Scott Henderson, IDSA, Principal, Scott Henderson, Inc. scott@scotthendersoninc.com

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

13

A L O O K B ACK

DÉJÀ VU, YET AGAIN

14

W W W. I D S A . O R G

IDSA Archives

M

ark Twain, when reports of the serious illness of his cousin, James Ross Clemens, in London, were misconstrued as his own, he clarified the matter to the press: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” So it is with reports of the death of industrial design over the last 50 years.

Industrial designers were blamed for planned obsolescence in 1957 by Vance Packard in his book Hidden Persuaders. He accused us of forcing unnecessary changes on the public (Oh, the horror!) and the idea that only functionally needed products should be designed and produced. Designers somewhat lamely defended the practice by pointing out that consumers have emotional wants, not just functional needs. They could have also pointed out that obsolescence makes secondhand products available for people who otherwise can not afford the new, and that it was just such planned obsolescence that helped pull the country out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. About 10 years later, in February 1968, Fortune magazine published an article entitled “The Decline of Industrial Designers,” which claimed that “radical innovation in design is now the exception rather than the rule.” In other words, all designs looked the same now that the “great designers” of the 1940s and 1950s were all gone or in retirement.

In 1972, at the same time leading industrial designers were bemoaning the death of the profession, because there were no more Loewys, Teagues or Dreyfusses who were celebrated in the press as national heroes, many young, impressionable industrial designers and students became enthralled by design educator Victor Papanek’s book Design for the Real World, which accused industrial designers of “criminal negligence,” “littering the planet with ugly, unnecessary gadgets very few can afford,” “serving as pimps for big business interests,” and “putting murder on a mass production basis.” Papanek (right) had a “final solution” (shades of the Holocaust!) for this criminal profession. He grandly pronounced that “industrial design … should cease to exist.”

Papanek’s alternative to mainstream industrial design consisted primarily of his own students’ designs of packages made of pea pods and radio receivers made of juice cans for the third world, along with vitriolic, socially

responsible, environmentally friendly and antiestablishment rhetoric. Students of this baby boomer era took this all to heart, and even some mainstream designers responded by suggesting that the offending word “industrial” should be deleted from our professional title. But life went on. Within a few years, IDSA initiated the IDEA national competitions and doubled its membership and chapters. Rebelling students of the 1960s and 1970s, to their credit, grew up to help IDSA, and industrial design, to expand and prosper in the 1980s.

In 1980, Alvin Toffler’s book, The Third Wave, declared that the industrial age (the second wave) had ended, and we were now in the third wave: the information age (the first wave was agricultural). At the time, the computer industry was in its infancy. To this day, millions upon millions of computer-related products have been mass-produced and designed by industrial designers in this new information age. So the antiquated industrial age, in fact, apparently continues and coexists with the new information age.

By 1984, some designers declared that the era of 1950s Good Design standards of MoMA, based on Bauhaus ideals of simplicity and geometry, and absent of decoration and ornamentation, was over. That style was characterized as bland, characterless and hostile to the environment and humanity. What replaced it was what was called postmodern design, which was more playful, colorful and nostalgic of historic design styles. Black boxes disappeared, and design styles of the 1930s reappeared.

This shift happened to have occurred during an economic recession when intense competition from abroad put industry, and designers, on the defensive. I would also add that this event, 30 years ago, preceded the birth of most young industrial designers around today.

Because of industrial design’s historic and close association with business and industry (some might say the very reason for industrial design’s founding, purpose and success), some in this era of heightened social, ecological and environmental consciousness have been inclined to disassociate design from industry in general, which, rightly so, has been blamed for oil spills, water and air pollution, and global warming, among other things. Thus, some have an aversion to the use of the “industrial” part of our name. For example, Industrial Design magazine, published since 1954, in 1988 changed its name to International Design, and in 2007, IDSA changed the title of its Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), initiated in 1980, to the International Design Excellence Awards.

Further, promotional product features, which once were touted by manufacturers and designers alike as exciting, improved, modern, new, affordable or user-friendly, are often today replaced with renewable, green, sustainable, energy-saving or eco-friendly because consumers may like to feel that they are participating in these popularly supported, worthy causes. This is fine, of course. It simply recognizes what sells products in today’s markets and promotes designers who embrace and support these important contributions to society and the environment.

Recently, when I received notification, along with other potential authors, of the theme of this issue of INNOVATION, Design/Art/Craft: Our Expanding Field, I noticed that its premise was based on an assumption that “Thirty years ago, the field of design was primarily about mass production. ... If the industrial era gave us industrial design, then our current postindustrial era [presumably after 1984] has given us an expanded ‘design culture’ that offers a wide range of perspectives on the man-made world.”

Oddly enough, this sounds like yet another, perhaps unintended, obituary for industrial design (mass production, bad; design, good). The premise implies that the field of design is no longer primarily about mass production, as it was in 1984, but that we have now advanced to a higher and more sophisticated “design culture,” which apparently has something to do with design/art/craft. Sounds a bit like the arts and crafts movement in the 1870s–1910, before

mass production even existed. Those designs, of course, were often great, but only the wealthy could afford them.

I would only make a few modest observations: Mass production is still the essential reality of global life today.

It provides more goods at ever-lower costs to consumers than ever before, enabling not just the middle class, but many at the poverty level, to afford and enjoy the latest technological products and services, which enhance lifestyles, educate, entertain and save valuable personal time and resources for leisure, social, political, entrepreneurial and environmental activities.

America’s global industry, despite its occasional environmental stumbles over the years, not only provides us all with the highest standard of living in the world and well-paying jobs to countless millions, but enables the United States to be a financial superpower that can afford to contribute billions of resources to world hunger, diseases, natural disasters and human suffering, and provide military aid and protection to the victims of dictatorships and murderous regimes. US financial might and mass production defeated Hitler and communism. It provided economic freedom to millions of people in former states of the Soviet Union who now flourish. Industry is also at the forefront of research, development and implementation of processes that reduce harmful emissions, provide new energy resources and build a safer environment. Why would designers want to disassociate themselves from such influential and beneficial global accomplishments? If a designer wanted to save the world, collaboration with industry might be a good place to begin.

Since the 1930s, industrial design has been, and continues to be, an essential and integral service to industry and mass production by increasing sales competitively through innovation, product presentation, form and ergonomics, all to make products safer, more efficient, less expensive, more attractive and more satisfying to people. It is a rare industrial product today that has not been designed or enhanced by an industrial designer. Without such industrial sales, national depressions and recessions ensue, jobs are lost, and America’s ability to provide foreign and domestic aid suffers.

It is consumer spending that keeps the economy strong; people can’t spend or pay taxes if they don’t have jobs.

Industrial designers can be proud of their essential, ongoing contribution of design skills to America’s economic health and standard of living. They can be proud that they founded and organized a new profession that was initially coveted by architects in the 1920s and 1930s, and proud of their unique role in inventing and defining a new American art form.

Yes, there are constraints in industrial design, but as INNOVATION executive editor Mark Dziersk, FIDSA eloquently stated in the Winter issue, “It is constraint that sparks the genius of the designer.” The word “industrial” in our title is the only distinction from an infinite number of art- and design-related fields that have little or nothing to do with mass production or industry. Why would we want to abandon or conceal our unique distinction?

—Carroll Gantz, FIDSA carrgantz@bellsouth.net

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

15

BE A U T I LI TY

INNOVATION WITHOUT BORDERS

D

esigning is what distinguishes humans from the rest of living things, but what defines us professional designers these days? What distinguishes us from those other creatives or innovators? The theme of this issue is not some academic topic for me—it has concrete consequences. I just got nominated for the CooperHewitt National Design Awards in the product design category, so as I write this article I am also trying to figure out how to make a compelling case for why they should honor me. How am I supposed to win when I don’t really design products anymore? Aren’t most industrial designers in the same boat?

Product design is the category I fit best. But when was the last time I designed a regular product? Maybe that’s why I call myself the “last industrial designer”—meaning what Scott Klinker, IDSA is talking about when he said in the brief for this issue, “Our current post-industrial era has given us an expanded field of ‘design culture’ that offers a wide range of perspectives on the manmade world.” Yea! That’s it: I offer another perspective.

Let’s face it: industrial design is not about (as Peter Stathis calls it) squirting plastic anymore—it’s not about industrial mass production, really. As technology becomes more sophisticated, huge factories are giving way to huge data clouds. Do I work in Klinker’s “hybrid spaces of design/art/craft?” I don’t know about you, but I’m not hanging out in the studio painting canvases of nudes (art) or sanding the surfaces of some fine piece of ebony on a settee (craft).

But art and craft are evident in David Rockwell’s new barbeque grill (above), the last regular product I worked on. He wanted a magic design. And big for big American backyard parties. There are lots of interesting social issues that play out around a barbeque, and he wanted to create a social spectacle with fire and cooking at the center. Typical barbeques are oriented so the chef’s back is to the guests with a huge hood separating the people. So our design magically makes the hood disappear when you don’t need it. And instead of some kind of stainless steel contraption inappropriate in the landscape, we made our design feel

16

W W W. I D S A . O R G

homey and hospitable; it looks like a big wooden table with a tablecloth. It’s being manufactured by Caliber and launched at the AD Home Show in March. The barbeque is a social tool, not simply a product in the distribution stream.

Its point is to facilitate social connections, like Bill Buxton says: “Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have.”

But the rest of what I’m working on is not really physical: a strategy for the Henry Ford Museum, software for a system to help you decide what to eat and then how to get it or cook it, and a different interface to track what’s happening on your defibrillator (for both you and your doctor). And working with JCDecaux developing the proposal for the LAX Terminal Media Operator (including illustrations, text, charts and graphs with circles and arrows, 8-by-10 glossy photographs (just like Alice’s Restaurant’s police documents— only designed so well we won the contract)).

Since my work is about blurring boundaries, I work near the edges and encounter them more. It feels like the boundaries between design, art and craft are not being redrawn. In fact, in January the Architectural League organized “A Conversation on the Museum of Modern Art’s Plan for Expansion.” To a crowd of 650, architect Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro presented the firm’s plan to demolish the American Folk Art Museum. Critic and writer Nicolai Ouroussoff sees the lack of public participation in the conversation as “the dark cloud hanging over this.” The panel discussion with architects, critics and journalists was lively up to the end when the director of MoMA, Glenn D. Lowry, said that although the museum treats architecture just as seriously as it treats art, “architecture is not art.” Architecture, unlike art, is entirely linked to function: “You don’t collect buildings and there’s a reason for that.”

My travels in Brazil to promote the IDEA competition with Joice Joppert Leal and Objeto Brasil showed me that the Brazilians have a more inclusive culture than even the good old USA. Instead of our melting pot where we hope that everyone will merge into the one American stew, the

“Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.”

Scott Klinker

—Louis Kahn

This design by Cranbrook student Kyle Fleet, in collaboration with Herman Miller, is a rocking chair made of warm materials—wood, leather and wool fabric. It affords visual and acoustic privacy for a variety of restful postures. An ottoman supports easy reclining.

Brazilians like diversity, they love differences, they have fun mixing it up at Carnival. Their Portuguese language incorporates words originating all over the world. That multicultural appetite applies to the different professional design categories too. Their IDEA program embraces the whole spectrum with plenty of interiors and transportation projects entered.

They include a jewelry category, and I’m sure fashion designers would love to compete. Brazilians celebrate the different design classifications, but with collaboration and cooperation across the borders.

When I called myself the “last industrial designer,” I wasn’t thinking that we were running out of things for industrial designers to work on—it was because the field is expanding beyond the normal definition, first to exhibits and wayfinding, now to interactive experiences. The universe is limitless, the complexity unbound. Instead of designing static products, as my Lab buddies Josh Walton and James Tichenor say, we can think of ourselves as gardeners growing an ecosystem. I never really liked boundaries anyway—and that is one of the values I bring to projects.

I’m boundary-blind. Industrial designers are not limited to solutions that fit a field—we address the whole countryside.

Like Arlo Guthrie says, “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.”

There are a lot of historical precedents for people who work in multiple fields: Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, David Byrne, Deborah Sussman, Kanye West, James Franco. Elizabeth Diller’s “architecture” is being measured for what it says in the social dialogue of urban life. Blurring the boundaries leads to better work. Sitting in the same office with gerontologist Patricia Moore, FIDSA while we worked with entrepreneur Sam Farber not only led to OXO Good Grips but also opened the door to the idea of universal design.

But still, the question remains: How am I supposed to position myself to get selected in the product category for the National Design Award? Lots of us are embracing design’s plurality in a world that prefers clear categories.

But mixing categories is usually what leads to innovation.

Maybe I’ll just throw myself on the mercy of someone like Louis Kahn who mused, “Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.”

Basically, I’ve turned flexibility into an art and a conundrum into an article.

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

17

By Magnus Feil, IDSA mfeil@uw.edu Magnus Feil is an assistant professor of industrial design at the University of Washington Division of Design, School of Art. He received his MFA in industrial design from The Ohio State University and a Diplom (FH) from Fachhochschule für Gestaltung, Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany. His research interests are product design in aviation and medicine; product interaction; control of views, vehicles and robotic platforms; and aspects that guide form in industrial and interaction design.

PUSH. PULL. TWIST.

I

strongly believe in the foundations of design: the traditional visual and conceptual skills that are the building blocks of all design disciplines. Historically, the classical elements of design foundations are the abstract components that structure a visual language—color, texture, shape, volume, space and

line. These elements are still valid and of critical importance for novices to study in great detail.

Photography and sketches: Luke Springer, Frances Tung.

18

W W W. I D S A . O R G

However, industrial designers are increasingly being asked to design products and systems that incorporate interactivity. This means that the traditional design foundations must enlarge to also include a related exploration of behavior. That is, students must learn, early in their development, to consider the users of their designs and to understand products as a bridge that enables dialogue between users and a service or function.

As an instructor, I seek to address this important issue through the adaption of a classic industrial design exercise (from Professor Klaus Lehmann at the Art Academy in Stuttgart) entitled “design semantics”—semantics being the study of meaning, and the goal of the project being to create forms that embody meaning for a user. During this short exercise (lasting only three to four weeks), students are asked to create a family of three control elements—forms that communicate to a user to either push, pull or twist. It is a deceptively simple project; students soon discover that it is not an easy task to create forms that can suggest their function to the user through shape alone, bare of typography.

We begin by examining control elements that have existed in both the past and the present. I often demonstrate key issues by discussing the typical automobile seat adjustment levers—control elements that are hidden from view, and whose forms offer no cue for the initial engagement or the subsequent need for user self-propulsion. I also draw attention to the natural signs in the world around us.

Using photography, the students start by creating a large visual inventory of controls. Their taxonomy typically includes switches that are commonplace (light cords, elevator buttons, doorbells, home appliances), but also more unique derivations that are spotted in car interiors or electronic devices. The students consider which forms might be

multifunctional—there are forms with affordances that can suggest two kinds of interaction (for example, pushing and sliding simultaneously).

Once this visual research has been completed, students move to the process of abstraction. They need to find the quintessential shapes that tell the user what to do. They use drawings and computer renderings to begin to define their own forms, exploring the articulation of both 2D and 3D space. They move between the drawings/renderings and physical modeling, often using clay to test their forms. Like much of design, it is a kind of serious play activity—it can be very amusing to see the students enter the critique with their plastic containers filled with control elements.

Certain issues are common with the project. Students often find that creating a family of three similar looking control elements is more difficult than anticipated; two of the elements will likely share more formal cues, while the third one often tends to be an outlier in shape. Additionally, the refinement of the form presents new challenges. Students suddenly realize that details are more important than they initially thought—that details are critical to both avoiding ambiguity with the user and to achieving a high level of visual sophistication.

Finally, as they move to the final wooden display form, they learn how to use a mechanical lathe and how to sand, paint and finish the wood model. (Note: All students agree on a single color of white paint for the entire class; one additional color may be used if it aids in communicating meaning.)

Given the short time period for the project, it’s not always possible to conduct formal user testing on the final control devices. However, students do, of course, show their friends and look for them to respond. (Sadly, some final models have been broken in the user’s enthusiasm to perform a push, pull or twist, as not all models are fully functional. This occasional accidental damage can be seen as a complement to the achieved realism of the model.)

I assign this project because it balances formal and conceptual issues while emphasizing research, the design process and the skillful execution of ideas. Like all good foundations projects, it teaches students how to see, think and develop an idea, and it encourages them to refine their understanding of what a design problem can be. Most importantly, the students experience, in a compact unit, the combination of rational, intuitive and critical thinking, and they learn to construct meaning using visual form. n Editor’s note: This article first appeared in ARCADE.

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

19

Elliott Earls

By Scott Klinker, IDSA, Guest Editor sklinker@cranbrook.edu Scott Klinker is principal of Scott Klinker Product Design and 3D designer-in-residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, where he has worked with design-driven companies such as Alessi, Herman Miller, Steelcase and Burton Snowboards. He is an alumnus of Cranbrook and IDEO.

Our Expanding Field

DESIGN/ART/CRAFT

T

hirty years ago the field of design was primarily about mass production. Since then, we’ve seen design discourse expand to include significant areas of overlap with the fine arts, crafts, architecture and fashion. If the industrial era gave us industrial design, then our current postindustrial era has

given us an expanded field of design culture that offers a wide range of perspectives on the man-made world.

Who are the thinkers and makers who work in the hybrid spaces of design/art/craft and point to ways that a more artistic design culture can build the American scene? How have the boundaries between design, art and craft been redrawn? To what extent do the boundaries still matter? Is it a case of anything goes? And if not, what are the limits?

Where is design culture? Is it an American, European, Asian or transnational phenomenon? How does it operate at different scales? And is anyone driving it?

A recent survey asked “How can we make IDSA better?” In a field that is so widely defined—bridging everything from engineering to social science—a consensus response to that question would be difficult. From my perspective, however, the answer is obvious: IDSA, and American design for that matter, needs art!

As our young profession has matured, designers not only look outward to industry, but also to other artistic disciplines and sometimes inward to design itself—to test and stretch the limits of our field. This expanded design culture has fostered a wave of innovative energy throughout the world, seen especially in places like Milan’s annual furniture fair where countless young design collectives host popup shows throughout the city alongside the bigger, more established brands. In places like these, design not only serves the industry, design is the industry. While this energy is beginning to bridge the Atlantic—in places like New York City’s Design Week and Design Miami—the American scene

seems to have expanded mostly by looking to the fields of business and technology. These influences have produced a unique set of strengths, but the result rarely seems to match the artful experimentation seen throughout much of international design culture. It would seem useful then to ask, What feeds a healthy design culture? Do we have one?

What’s missing?

Why is art important to designers? The world of art is a space for us to study the evolution of aesthetics and language and the connections between ideas and forms. Art speaks in a small, individual voice as a counterpoint to big industry. At its best, it asks us to pause and reflect on who we are as a human race. Art reframes the function of things.

While the boundaries of art and design are usually drawn at the line between metaphor and use, who would deny that many of our contemporary uses are largely metaphorical?

Art attempts to disrupt our normal everyday perceptions with strange signals that can reveal how alternately perplexing or static our normal has become. This disruptive quality is useful for design. While the design profession has learned to translate problem-solving processes into a repeatable service, we often forget that real, disruptive change is propositional—instead of solving for existing behaviors, designers can propose new behaviors that ask, What if we live like this? Like art, disruptive innovation provokes us to look at the contemporary world in a new way. For example, five years ago who needed an iPad?

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

21

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T

R H Hensleigh and Tim Thayer

In my 12 years at Cranbrook Academy of Art, I’ve come to see that many younger designers are looking for a new diversity in the field of design, where in addition to being a service to industry we can also be an autonomous space for intellectual, artistic and cultural research. Design culture, at its best, is a discursive space that embraces artistic experimentation. If IDSA became more focused on global design culture, what would that look like? What if IDSA’s website and this magazine had content more like the websites for Dezeen, Designboom, Domus or Core77? Would you find it more inspiring? More useful? If IDSA made a focused effort to include and promote America in global design culture, how would that change what we teach, what we talk about, how we present ourselves internationally and what we dream about for our profession?

When Mark Dziersk, FIDSA and Karen Berube at IDSA offered me an opportunity to guest edit this issue of INNOVATION, I visualized an IDSA that is hot for design culture. I called on some of my brightest colleagues (and former students) to report to you about new ideas by looking at areas where design overlaps with art, craft, fashion and architecture. Nearly all of these contributors are designers themselves, reporting on what inspires them. We’ve also enlisted some extra design support from Elliott Earls, one of the most artful graphic designers I know, to add editorial artwork exploring the theme of this issue. I’m so thankful to all of the contributors here; I hope you find their reports as inspiring as I do. I invite you, your company and your community to help us build a more artful American design culture. n As a student at Cranbrook, Robert Turek integrated his interests in music, furniture and architecture to create these Microstages, which elevate the performers within a crowded audience.

22

W W W. I D S A . O R G

By Mark Moskovitz mark@fiftytwothousand.com Mark Moskovitz is a designer, maker and writer whose objects have been displayed in such venues as the Museum of Art and Design in New York and The Mint Museum of Art and Design, as well as in the pages of Dwell, Wallpaper*, Fast Company, The New York Times, and other leading art and design publications. Having previously worked in technology and carpentry, he began a career in design at age 30 after studying at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Design + Craft

REIMAGINING AUTHENTICITY

I

f William Morris, spiritual leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, were around today, he’d be in awe of Etsy. He might hope for better curation (for which he could turn to Tumblr), but he’d delight in how the platform helps level the playing field for artisans and captains of industry. With eBay having recently

taken a collector’s approach, à la Pinterest, it’s increasingly apparent that lifestyle-oriented platforms are shaping consumption. Add social media and crowdfunding to the mix and you get a powerful trifecta through which craftspeople can bootstrap their visions. The most interesting of today’s makers are design driven, reframing authenticity through a fantastical interpretation of modern life.

Adelman’s studio appears to be something of an incubator for entrepreneurial designers as well, with several of her staffers moonlighting in their own ateliers. From successes like studio alumna Bec Brittain to other rising journeymen—Brendan Kiem, Karl Zahn and Mary Wallis—Adelman knows how to surround herself with motivated talent. And she’s equally aware of the challenges in retention. On a recent phone call, punctuated with polite interruptions from her buzzing operation, she pointed out how hiring and training a promising supporting cast creates liability in the form of future competitors, but it’s a risk she’s confident taking, even soon to offer the eponymous product lines of select members of her own staff as part of her growing empire.

Also thriving in the city is designer/craftsman Doug Johnston. In 2008 as the economy teetered, Johnston, still fresh with his graduate degree from the year before, lost his job in architecture. He bounced around a bit before turning a nascent interest in traditional basket weaving (yes, sitcom dads, basket weaving) into a hot commodity. Johnston credits his success to his days as a scrappy punk growing up in Tulsa. It was that DIY culture that laid the groundwork for him to operate a thriving business from a 200-squarefoot production facility in Brooklyn.

Joseph De Leo

Stocking Up on Lifestyle Early on, when craft leapfrogged necessity into luxury, so began its true calling in culture.

Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman, points to the gifting of Cellini’s ornate salt cellar in 1543 as a liminal moment when the designer’s stamp began to outshine the agency of his craft, perhaps the origins of personal branding. As handmade artifacts became increasingly covetous, so did the lifestyle of their makers. Medieval families bought into the techne and ars the guild promised, shelling out for the potential and privilege of letting their sons apprentice with master craftsmen.

Although the guild system of old has largely vanished, its influence survives in workshops like that of New York-based Lindsey Adelman.

Her hard-earned success has necessitated many hands on deck for the construction of her intricate lighting. Adelman’s forms have a marine influence that has evolved within the metaphor. Initially, her pieces seemed to be lit versions of jetsam that might dot the shore of a fishing village. As her style and craft has matured, the work has become highly refined—still evoking nautical life (in some cases astronautical)—with materials that reference deep-sea diving, tentacles and space travel.

Above: Knotty Bubbles Chandelier C by Lindsey Adelman

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

23

Michael Popp

Family by Doug Johnston

His protean forms, minimal yet soulful, evoke equal parts indigenous craft, subterranean colonies and a less psychedelic Ferne Jacobs. Using zigzag stitching and miles of cotton rope, Johnston, his wife, Tomoe, and two part-time employees spend hours each day trying to meet the strong demand from Johnston’s fans and retailers. The pieces are alternately functional and sculpturally irreverent, becoming a must-have craft item in the past few years.

The aforementioned Jacobs was an important figure in the American studio craft movement of the 1970s. She was part of a group, which included people like ceramicist Peter Voulkos and woodworker Art Carpenter, who’d turned toward craft in search of soul. Although the path had already been blazed when Morris, and his contemporaries embraced it more than a century earlier, it was still financially dubious. Peter Korn, another woodworker of this era, frames it in his new book, Why We Make Things and Why it Matters, like this: “Contemporary craft, being economically marginal, is created primarily to address the spiritual needs of its maker.”

24

W W W. I D S A . O R G

Artisanal Insourcing Forty-odd years later, makers are still addressing their spiritual needs, yet the economy of craft has showed increased solvency. Some of that can be explained through the digital marketplace and titillating voyeur portals that interminably fetishize product and lifestyle. Additional evidence can be found in how craft has spread across all sectors: food/ drink, bikes, music, pet toys, to name a few. If you can “put a bird on it,” as they sing on the television satire Portlandia, it will sell.

Perhaps best of all, there are signs of a developing resistance to the collective infection with cheapness and its enabler, outsourcing. After decades of growing increasingly detached from the sources of our products, with only the most abstract sense of their creation, young educated consumers are growing to understand the true cost of their food, products and lifestyle choices as their new-found relationships with farmers and artisans at weekend markets unpack once-mysterious cost structures and supply channels.

As Matthew Crawford describes the phenomenon in his 2008 book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, “We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. ...

People are trying to recover a vision that is basically human in scale and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.” Crawford’s humanscaled vision translates to an increased sense of community, something long integral to craft-based economies.

I’ve never visited the studio of Fredericks & Mae, named after the respective middle names of Gabriel Cohen and Jolie Signorile, although it already feels welcoming. For starters, Cohen’s email valediction of “Go Team!” paints an inclusive, peppy picture. The work has a Montessori flavor, childlike in spirit, yet sophisticated and laboriously crafted.

Their horsehair tassels, for example, wrapped in colorful thread, are like talismans used to ward off the frustrations of modern life, if just for a moment. They also make kites, bocce sets, bows and arrows, and other “war games.”

It’s apparent that their palette, iconography and even marketing language are well-thought-out. So too is their insight regarding their own work, as Cohen explained via email, “Our versions [of mass produced objects] approach functionality—recede from use, and become symbols of

giant Alessi (a minimal chrome banana holder called Dear Charlie). With multiple irons in the fire, it’s clear he excels at problem-solving. Truex explained his work: “The challenge/opportunity that I find most exciting is finding a space in-between industrial mass production and handcraft.

Most of my time is spent designing the production process rather than on product design. By building my own pseudoindustrial equipment I can capture some fraction of the efficiencies of mass production while keeping a hands-on connection to the product.”

Although vibrant urban centers are playing a greater role than they did in days when artisans split for the hills, craft is also coming from struggling cities with appealingly low rent, like Detroit and Cleveland. Designer Joseph Ribic of Objeti left a cushy job in Los Angeles to return to his native Cleveland to both launch a furniture studio and work in his family’s machine shop. Trained as an architect, but a second-generation machinist by birth, Ribic creates toolpaths

Darroch Putnam

sorts.” Cohen goes on, “As objects of desire in this way, they are luxurious—but hold emotional charge because of their utilitarian histories and the loss of their necessity.” In other words, the stuff of design collectors as opposed to say, Katniss Everdeen.

A few hundred miles northwest, craftsman/designer John Truex, a soft-spoken Tennessee transplant, runs Borough Furnace, a foundry he Kickstarted in 2011. By day he teaches design at nearby Syracuse University.

Having spent a few years squatting on swampland with his girlfriend in a yurt found on Craigslist, Truex fits the profile of the American studio craftsman whose work and Whole Earth Catalog mores are interwoven. His beautiful cast iron cookware is made of scrap iron on furnaces burning waste vegetable oil. By the time I finish this sentence, someone will have certainly purchased the movie rights.

Truex is as far from Hollywood as they come, yet he doesn’t perfectly fit the hippie picture painted above either.

His design interests are equally difficult to classify. In addition to spending long hours in a foundry, Truex designed and built high-end furnishings for years down in the city, having even sold a piece to the Italian

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

25

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T

Neo-craft

A

glimpse at the output of three design studios that are pushing materials, process and the very definition of craft even further.

Chen Chen and Kai Williams together form ChenWilliams, where they explore the dynamic property of materials (above). Their self-described “lean” approach seeks to “strike a balance between the hand of the designer and chance.” The often extraordinary results can facilitate those a-ha moments as the makers themselves frequently “have no sense of the outcome until the final moment.” www.chen-williams.com Jack Craig’s “Pressed Tables” series of PVC water mains (left) that are heated and pressured onto stone (and wood) are an inspiring material transformation. Using cast-off marble from fabricators near his studio, Craig developed a process for heating and shrink-wrapping massive industrialsized tubing to create these beautiful tables. www.jackpcraig.com Christopher Schanck makes grandiose multilayered furniture capped with aluminum foil and resin (below). Perhaps most noteworthy about his studio is how he solicits the help of his impoverished neighbors as studio hands, building a community of those often neglected by society and excluded from its cultural output. www.christopherschanck.com

on the computer by day in his father’s busy 12,000-squarefoot shop. At night he gets back on the same mills used to produce aerospace parts to fashion objects from bottle openers and rings to intricate components for his lighting and seating products. Ribic said of his work, “I’m inspired by the often beautiful, completely functional nature of the parts I make during the day. I strive to make objects with forms that capture that same utilitarian beauty.”

Working double-duty has paid off for Ribic, who in 2010, just a few months after building his first piece of furniture, was named the International Contemporary Furniture Fair’s best new designer. Although living in the heartland has presented its share of obstacles to Ribic’s growth, he’s also been able to maintain an independent aesthetic by dodging the zeitgeist of design hotbeds like Brooklyn or his former home of Los Angeles. (Full disclosure: Ribic and I are occasional collaborators and frequent commiserators.)

The latest craft renaissance has thoroughly permeated contemporary culture. Aside from a few tacky yarn bombs, it’s hard to find much objection with a trend that humanizes consumerism, promotes transparency and a healthy planet, and advocates for more critical thinking, all while gently serving itself. What the most exciting of today’s designers/craftspeople reveal through their studios, experiments and historical interpretation is a respect for tradition, with the caveat that it would be an imaginative failure not to take stabs at reinterpreting authenticity. They seem to view their work as part of a continuum, adding to a fluid definition of craft that rejects fixity. It appears as if Korn agrees in his chapter entitled “The Seductive Ideology of Craft”: “When it comes to definition, craft is a moving target. Like its cousins art and design, craft is a cultural construct that evolves in response to changing mindsets and conditions of society.” For as long as designers and craftsmen have skillfully plied their trade, they’ve had just as much success at capturing imaginations. The latest crop has determined that there’s nothing more authentic than reimagining a world for oneself. n To learn about more contemporary American designer/craftspeople, check out the following studios: Abigail Newbold, Brook & Lyn, Christopher Specce, Commonwealth, Jay Sae Jung Oh, Meg Callahan, Paul Loebach and Real OK Design.

26

W W W. I D S A . O R G

Elliott Earls

By Louise Schouwenberg www.linkedin.com/pub/louise-schouwenberg/51/651/763 Louise Schouwenberg studied sculpture and philosophy. Since 2000 her focus has been on art and design theory and education. She has contributed to a range of books, including a monograph on artist Robert Zandvliet and a monograph on designer Hella Jongerius. She is course director of the master department Contextual Design, at Design Academy Eindhoven (MDes), and course director of the master program Material Utopias, at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam (MFA/MDes).

NEW HABITATS

FOR DESIGN

COSMETIC SURGERY KINGDOM, 2013 Designer: Bora Hong

Femke Rijerman

Bora Hong investigated the striking number of aesthetic surgery procedures in South Korea and linked the apparent longing for perfection to the aims of contemporary design. Like surgeons, designers create and modify everyday items to meet criteria of ideal beauty. To visualize this phenomenon, she transformed a range of discarded chairs after the ideal of a well-known design icon, the Eames LCW. Here the story did not end yet. One day an Eames chair got fed-up with its appearance and wanted to become a Maarten Baas clay chair; the design-surgeon fullfilled its wishes.

28 28

WW WW. W.IID DS SA A..O OR RG G W

E

very few years a persistent debate flares up within the design world on the assumed essence of the design profession. While one side believes the designer’s essential task lies in finding pragmatic solutions to problems, debaters on the other side point out design qualities that reach

beyond functionality, or that precede it, including the deeper meanings a design can carry.

The remarkable thing about this battle is that the hard-core functionalists and their advocates are venomously targeting those examples of, for instance, Dutch design (a field I am very familiar with), that have caused a furor internationally. The faultfinders state that many of these renowned Dutch design products are insufficiently subjected to the usual reality check: instead of proving their worth in the real world as usable products, they remain undeveloped prototypes that prove themselves foremost in the realm of visual art, where their lack of functionality is masked by a striking visual appearance and accompanied by inflated rhetoric on their supposed layers of meaning.

The criticism is fair. Many of these products owe their fame to things other than their user-friendliness or their problem-solving capacities. But are these strict requirements? Should a design meet every precondition for use and every production requirement from the industry before it can reveal its potential to the public? Is it really necessary for a design to prove itself fully as a usable product before we can speculate on its possible consequences of a more symbolic nature? This line of thinking would mean there is only one reality in which design can prove itself: the reality of the mass consumer market. And as long as this market fails to see the benefit of producing a design in large quantities, the design hasn’t proved its worth.

Which products would survive such a test? Doesn’t this mean that every innovative design would end up being binned before its time? Would the initial designs by Jurgen Bey, Hella Jongerius, Piet Hein Eek, Bertjan Pot, Maarten Baas, Christien Meindertsma and many, many other designers ever have seen the light? The tree trunk as a seat (Bey), the dinner service full of misfits (Jongerius), furniture made from discarded materials (Eek)—they did not rise

to fame because of their user comfort.

What they did, most of all, was yield some striking photogenic images that appealed to the imagination when they were launched and that were at odds with conventions within the design world.

As a consequence, they were picked up quickly by the international media and the museum exhibition circuit. Only slowly did the public at large begin to see the extent to which these very designs were the signs of a change in mentality in the way we feel about consumerism, globalization, locality, the importance of context and industrial mass production versus skilled craftsmanship—a change in mentality that was beginning to become more manifest in other fields as well.

Multilayered Meanings of the Everyday Innovators in design who are able to address the bigger social and cultural issues are rare among the more functionalist designers who respond directly to the demands from the market and who seek to innovate primarily in marketing and efficiency. Curiously, the same dynamic applies to designers who are engaged in the concept of social relevance, which, in these times of multiple crises, is gaining in popularity among designers and possibly even more so among design critics. Strictly speaking, social relevance is equally bound to the old maxim of problem-solving functionality. Yes, we should praise designers who extend the scope of their profession and who tackle, much more than before, social issues in the world. But it remains to be seen if real innovation is possible when the morally correct answers are already a given with the questions.

The designers who have offered new insights into our environment, who have changed our perspectives on the objects with which we surround ourselves every day (Gerrit Rietveld: “to sit is a verb”), who have made us aware

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

29

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T

ENGINEERING TEMPORALITY, 2012 Designer: Tuomas Markunpoika Tolvanen Tolvanen covered pieces of existing furniture with a fine web of rings made from steel pipes. After welding the rings he set fire to the original wooden items. The resulting objects resemble the fuzzy fading memories of the originals. At the same time they represent a striking mix of old and new, industry and handcraft, steel and lace.

In our caring relationship with the material world around us, we define who we are. Why then are design objects usually perfect and bare no relationship to our human nature, asks Tolvanen. For his remarkable answer he took inspiration from his grandmother’s disintegrating memories as she struggled with Alzheimer’s disease.

of the sculptural value of the everyday objects that fill our private and public spaces and the subtle shades of meaning they hold—none of these designers allowed their imaginations to be bound by a limited and limiting definition of their profession. Among them we can situate the Dutch designers of the 1980s who were at the forefront of introducing a probing, critical attitude to the profession and attained international fame with it. They were the socalled author-designers who adopted a method that until then was known primarily from visual arts.

Author-designers take their own fascinations as a starting point because they see design as a reflective practice, which contributes to a deepening of our insight into the relationships between man and the world. From this sense of being unbound, they formulate their research themes, involving every expert and domain that is necessary. Their approach to everyday reality—the domain where design is at home—can be a sociologist’s, keen on studying humans interacting with their surroundings, or a psychologist’s, with an eye for humble human needs, or the philosopher’s, tackling the implications of new technology and new media for our views of mankind. Or they may choose the artistic perspective of the sculptor, the painter, or the all-encompassing perspective of the architect or the urban planner. While the market instigates a one-dimensional notion of the essence of design, a liberated profession will feel the responsibility to address the multilayered meanings of everyday existence.

It is the only way in which designers can do justice to the different meanings of the term “functionality.”

Practical use is only one of design’s guises. Design is not only capable of solving everyday problems; like art, it is also capable of causing them and being aggravating, or confrontational, in a different sense. Design is a reflection of the way people wish to live and what kind of image they want for themselves. Design is able to make our lives more comfortable, and it is equally able to discipline our behavior, or inhibit it; just think of the rules of behavior implied in street furniture. The products around us are reflections of the era; the cultural, technological and social contexts from which they stem; and the contexts in which they function.

Expanding Domains However, this awareness that design is a reflective practice bordering on other disciplines does not mean that the differences between the disciplines no longer exist. They are different practices with different rules, conventions and boundaries and each with different critical assessments in social and artistic spaces. In any design practice it’s not helpful to deny the differences nor to imagine that the fields of design, art and craft can merge in all respects, as it would mean a denial of those elements of a discipline that contribute to its meaning and value, those elements that the French philosopher Derrida described as the parerga, the hors d’oeuvre, the outsides of a work. The parerga in art are different from the parerga in design, which are different from the parerga in craft.

To formulate this somewhat differently: the contexts of design, art and craft are that much different that forgetting about them turns the venture of all these professions into a mere play of visual likenesses in which styling and preconceived assumptions take the lead. Whoever aims to create crossovers, to cross borders, needs to know the

Note: Some of the content of this article was previously published in other articles by the author.

30

W W W. I D S A . O R G

THE IDEA OF A TREE, 2008 Designers: Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler (Studio mischer’traxler)

mischer’traxler

In this project Mischer and Traxler have abandoned part of their usual role of designers. They have created the machine, but leave the outcome of the production to a natural phenomenon like solar energy. The mechanical process translates the intensity of the sun through a clever apparatus into one object a day. Each result reflects the various sunshine conditions that occurred during a specific day in a specific spot. Like a tree, the object becomes a three-dimensional recording of its process and time of creation.

their changing roles as designers of products or designers of the tools with which users can create their own products. Some address wider social solutions, while others explore the relationship between humble human shortcomings and design interventions. Their research and their experiments open a new set of perspectives on the world that could only have developed within this profession, even though their scope reaches into other professions. Therefore, there no longer is such a thing as a natural habitat for design products (nor is there a natural habitat for art or craft), and there is certainly no natural habitat for experimental prototypes or presentation models that may possess an independent value because they represent a new way of thinking or have a potential that fires the imagination. And therefore it is only just since the late 1980s that the avant-garde in design also features on those stages that once seemed reserved for visual arts, stages which are more inclined than the market to embrace experiments and visionary views and to open up a debate at an early stage. n mischer’traxler

borders. The word “crossover” already points to this. In order to create, for instance, multidisciplinary cooperations in a sensible and effective way, one must know what we may view as the essence of each discipline and what we may view as the aspects that are inevitably linked to them. The frame and the pedestal, as well as the white cube of the museum, are linked to painting and sculpture. If one decides to take a functional object, a design, out of its usual context and put it on a pedestal, this has a meaningful consequence, which adds new meaning to the design and new meaning to the content of an exhibition. Both the designer and the curator can consciously play with these notions. Only then are meaningful innovations set in motion, as well as meaningful collaborations with experts from various disciplines.

Either alone or in collaboration with scientists and specialists from other professions, many members of the latest generation of designers are dealing with the implications of new production means, such as the effects of new media on

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

31

By Kristina Gerig kristina.gerig@gmail.com

n

www.kristinagerig.com

Kristina Gerig is a designer located in Portland, OR. After receiving her MFA in 3D design from Cranbrook Academy of Art, she began working as a material designer for Nike. Prior to her graduate studies, she designed for companies including Marcel Wanders, DEKA Research, Whipsaw Inc., Eleven LLC, K-Swiss, Target Corporation and Fisher-Price. She received her bachelor’s in industrial design from the University of Cincinnati.

An Interview with Abigail Anne Newbold

©CarolynBates.com

A HAND BUILT LIFE

W

alking into an Abigail Anne Newbold installation would be what you might expect from a dream in which Survivorman teams up with Hella Jongerius. The first thing you notice is color, a beautiful and specific palette that walks a line between technical and domestic.

Objects are hung in arrangements that hint at their intended use, as tools would be hung above a carpenter’s workbench. As you get closer you see that these are tools for survival and for living. There are structures that appear to be mobile or nomadic, uniforms for unnamed endeavors, hand-sewn quilts—a distinct use of material and decoration that emphasizes the technical and the romantic. It’s difficult to distinguish where each of Newbold’s degrees—fiber, industrial design and an MFA—begin and end.

Above: Workshop, one of the vignettes in the 2013 Crafting Settlement exhibit at the Currier Museum of Art.

32

W W W. I D S A . O R G

Corine Vermeulen

Above: Wagon from the Homemaker series, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2011.

Below: Tent detail from the Homemaker series.

Newbold’s dialogue is one of form and function, survival and comfort. With enlightened curatorial restraint, the palette of product, color and material hits a strong visual chord for both the industrial designer and the artist. She combines elements of high tech with that of handcraft in a way that makes it very difficult to separate, as though it was and is and always should be that way.

Abigail Anne Newbold: These categories help us understand our world better socially, economically and physically.

I see their lineage as interrelated; design, art and craft are all processes with which we refine, embellish and develop our man-made world.

In my practice I visually pair a lot of seeming opposites; one example is an intentional conflation of gender expectations. In my vignette Hopechest I am looking at what an industrial dowry might consist of. A refined set of basic tools for survival passed on for generations: a chainsaw, a lobster trap, a matching gun case and seed spreader of couture quality—not your average female inheritance. I use color to conflate socioeconomic status or an object’s functional context: a fluorescent green-lined shearling vest and a herringbone linen monogrammed jumpsuit, for instance. These unexpected dichotomies show how I reference art, design and craft. I use them as tools to flatten our sense of boundaries around these categories.

KG: I see it in the quilts, some of the hand tools you use, the combination of a pioneer-inspired wagon covered with a high-tech tent. You mentioned wanting to actually work in the way you are presenting your work—as selfsufficient. Are these the areas where craft is focused in your work? Or how do you think about craft?

AAN: In my work craft becomes synonymous with lifestyle.

Craft is not simply a means to an end product; for me it is the reason for making the objects, be it tool or domestic item, which support the daily activities of life. I am presenting a version of a handmade life, proposing that there are a core set of skills with which an individual could make virtually anything. This is empowering, not only for the ability to custom tailor objects to your own needs, but in presenting a model

PD Rearick

Kristina Gerig: Your work seems to intentionally blur the lines between design, art and craft. Why?

of economic security and freedom. If I can fell a tree (or use a discarded utility pole) and process it into a set of posts to create my own post-and-beam home, I have started the foundation for a life dictated by my own needs and satisfied by my own hands.

KG: Your work appears to be functional art. Do you agree?

Where does the boundary of art exist in your work?

AAN: I would describe my work as art that talks about functionality. My primary objective is the conversation generated by my work about both making and functionality.

If I wanted to produce a practical product for a marketable purpose I would be a designer. If I wanted to fabricate a unique functional item and take excessive care with the material processes I would be a craftswoman. I utilize both practices as aspects of a larger dialogue on the perpetuation of skill-based knowledge and how it can be applied to our lives.

In this sense art serves as a forum with a broad audience.

I have an upcoming project that will utilize fully functional original objects to carry out fieldwork that engages students’ understanding and exploration of the possibilities in a handmade life. I am uncomfortable aligning myself with most of the terms currently used to describe a hybrid practice like this: “social activism,” “craftivism,” “third-wave craft,” along with the DIY movement. The art in my work is in the generation of ideas, presentation of lifestyle and provocation of dialogue on the subject of making.

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

33

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T Above: Making Home Again, on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2013.

Below: Shaker Rocker, 2012.

place as an independent product, I like the idea that these things have their own integrity outside the larger dialogue they support, and in a way represent my brand of thinking.

Courtesy of the artist

KG: So where does the boundary of design exist in your work?

KG: I find it interesting that on your website (www.abigailanne. com) you have pieces listed under the title of “product.” What does that word mean to you?

34

W W W. I D S A . O R G

KG: How do you go about creating an installation? How do you know when the installation has all the necessary elements?

Courtesy of the artist

AAN: I am interested in the unselfconscious products coming out of the type of small-town community that would rally around a family in need, creating homemade quilts both as functional and symbolic means of support in times of crisis. I appreciate their honesty, their stories. Working with a kind of anti-design-star mentality, the majority of the dialogue in my installation work deals with functional objects that humbly provide a practical lifestyle rather than objects designed with pedigree in mind.

The products on my website are items that are functional and made soundly of durable materials as standalone objects, each embodying the functional, aesthetic and conceptual imperatives I’m addressing. Chairs, quilts, the occasional bag. Though the line remains thin for me between an object’s life in my installations and taking its

AAN: The framework and concept of my work is pretty rigid, with the installation period leaving room for a more organic process to unfold. I typically amass a collection of objects and materials that I plan to use to furnish the spaces I’ve constructed, but I will often not have a clear design for how those objects will be arranged or installed until I’m on-site. My process of installation is akin to visual merchandising, and I often work in a grid or off a horizon line to hold the composition of the wall. I like the notion of using the tenets of design on more organic and everyday items; it makes design accessible through the use of the mundane and glorifies the everyday into something vitally important, even glamorous.

AAN: I do a tremendous amount of research to start.

For instance, for my exhibit Crafting Settlement with the Currier Museum of Art, I was asked to respond to works in its collection. The Museum has one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian homes. I was taken by the design principles he used—the incremental geometry—and his holistic approach to design, which reinforced the value of a custom, handmade life that I was addressing in that body of work.

I map out and define elements of space, time and function, avoiding any direct expression of time period, instead creating a future-hopeful amalgam of past, present and future. I often will work with regional references.

So much of the Currier project referenced the vernacular style of New England: farmhouse construction, colonial influences as well as aspects of utopian communes. As I developed the premise, the structures and the format, the rest of the content fell into place, and it became like paintby-numbers process for me to articulate all the issues I was addressing.

I make it sound like there is a definitive end point, but there is fluidity between my installations, and I often utilize objects from older installations in newer versions. These objects really become like an arsenal of references and materials—almost like its own language.

KG: Are you trying to create utopian scenarios? What is the role and importance of utopian ideals?

AAN: I don’t use the word “utopia” lightly—it’s very loaded.

I think about the groups who immigrated early on to this continent seeking asylum from religious oppression: the Shakers, for instance. Here they found the freedom to create the kind of social structures, moral codes and economic systems that suited them. I think democracy itself is a kind of utopian fantasy—that such a large, diverse body of individuals can remain cohesive, agreeing to disagree.

My utopian ideals center around economy and a relationship to our skills. These ideals appear aesthetically in my work, going back to the retail influence, There is a lot of romanticizing in merchandising. It’s not just about making the product desirable; it’s about that thing being the perfect one and about a life spent attaining that standard. This isn’t so far off from the purity of philosophical and religious ideals that drove some of the experimental utopian communities in early America.

AAN: I’m a sucker for sentimentality and that gets messy.

Some people dream about walk-in closets with clothes neatly organized. I dream about a warehouse attached to my home filled with neatly lined shelves of domestic items: chairs, tables lamps, fur rugs. And my home would be a plain space that I could perpetually reinvent without having to let go of anything. But philosophically I would prefer to have few things—sturdy, utilitarian things that I would have for the rest of my life. n

Courtesy of the artist

KG: As designers and artists, we are constantly putting stuff into the world. But I’ll visit Marfa or A-Z West, take an MCM tour or step into a DWR showroom and utopian, modernist ideals force me to reconsider my domestic landscape. How do you think about the products you bring into your domestic space? Is it the same as in your installations?

Quilt detail from Making Home Again.

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

35

By Sam Vinz sam@wvvolumes.com

n

www.wvvolumes.com

Sam Vinz graduated with a bachelor’s in art history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with an emphasis in 20th century European architecture. He completed his master’s in art business from Sotheby’s Institute in London, writing his dissertation on an analysis of the contemporary design market. He is the co-founder of Volume Gallery located in Chicago.

A Contemporary Design Gallery

THE PUSH FORWARD

V

olume Gallery was formed as a direct response to a keen observation: Unlike their contemporaries in Europe, young American designers had few platforms, aside from the pursuit of a career within the industrial design field, to continue their development beyond academia. Such a circumstance

rarely lends itself to the development of a designer’s individual practice, and without that, the individual and

Wright

society lack the impetus to push contemporary design forward.

36

W W W. I D S A . O R G

What Is Contemporary Design?

For contemporary design to be taken seriously, each piece should challenge its very existence with urgency. The question has always been, do we need another chair? The real concern should instead be, does this chair express something that hasn’t been expressed before?

Finding it difficult to discuss the meaning of a moment without reflection, we utilize the lens of truth and reason in order to better provide a snapshot of contemporary objects. With the idea that designed objects and art are the visual representation of progress, contemporary objects are meant to continue asking questions over time and provide a glimpse of where we are.

We call this approach truth in form/reason for being. The idea examines the two components of creation: the concept and the realization of that concept. Truth in form is an elusive, rarely accomplished solution, an intangible utopian ideal, whereas reason for being is comprised of qualities that are rational, definable, of the moment and, indeed, tangible.

The first component, truth in form, is related to the intention of form and the likeness of that form to the concept of the author. In this regard, nothing is accidental or appropriated; each object is purposeful and concise in measure. The Italian furniture designer Enzo Mari stated this best: “Form is what is there—not what seems to be there; therefore we must speak in terms of the work that brings it into being. The original power of design to create a utopia must be recovered. If this is the allegory of the potential transformation, the message must reach as many people as possible.”

In an effort to create an honest form, truth is integral to the object. Truth in form does not dictate or prescribe style or adornment, nor is it a Brutalist thought or a Victorian ideal. Rather, truth is the unending endeavor to create an ultimately unattainable piece of utopian quality.

With Stool T (left), Sung Jang is working in the reductive school of Brancusi and Noguchi—not just with form, but with material and function as well. By tying these threads together, the designer distills the essence of the piece, which is to simplify and remove any extraneous elements. Doing so leaves both the viewer and user with a form that is striving for honesty.

The second component, reason for being, connects to the needs, forms, materials and technologies utilized today.

With this information one can dissect what it means to be truly of the moment. These bits of information are the elements that make up the arguments for choices, decisions and processes that reconcile the idea of the artist or designer versus the piece that the world sees—the experiential evidence of an idea.

As the state of technology rapidly increases, the development of new materials nearly eclipses our ability to explore their uses to the fullest potential before a new material is thrust upon us. Contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil has suggested that within 40 years “the pace of change is going to be so astonishingly quick, [that we] won’t be able to follow it—unless [we] enhance [our] own intelligence by merging with the intelligent technology we are creating.”

With new technologies and materials inevitably comes the creation of new needs and desires as a culture. In after u.r. (a magnetic superbox) (far left) ROLU, a design studio, took a different turn. ROLU explains its approach to technology, “These cabinets represent a continuation of ROLU’s exploration of the way that forms emerge from photos and images encountered on the Internet. The generally fleeting experience of jumping from aggregator site to blog to tumblr, experiencing image after image of art, architecture, design and fashion.” ROLU dissects how it consumes and encounters inspirations and how the abundance of information commingles and blurs together without context regarding scale or place.

Wright

Volume Gallery allows young designers the opportunity to create new work without the limitations often associated with the field, such as mass-production constraints. The designers are encouraged to consider and push design theory, methodology, material use and other areas. We attempt to eliminate the uncertainty often felt by young designers.

We provide them with the tools and space and time necessary to realize something new, something now. In turn, we hope this autonomy is felt by the audience and that contemporary American design can again thrive and prosper.

Left: after u.r. (a magnetic superbox) (2011) by ROLU in stained OSB Above: Stool T (2011) by Sung Jang in ceramic and oak

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

37

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T

n n n n

n

Volume Gallery

Stabilizer (2013) by Jonathan Muecke in carbon fiber

New forms can include new typologies or new appropriations and metaphors representing paradigm shifts.

Jonathan Muecke’s Stabilizer (above) is an interior horizon.

Just as we understand the phenomenology of experiencing daylight, we are also affected by our orientation to the horizon. Therefore, if there are numerous examples of lights replicating daylight, there should be examples of the horizon as well. Muecke states, “It’s a real horizon. I don’t think it is artificial. The shape was developed in a way that it’s shifting constantly and you can’t exactly align yourself to it. You may second-guess yourself because there’s been nothing like it in an interior before, but I think you’ll understand it immediately.”

What Is a Design Gallery?

Numerous facets make up the landscape of American design. Volume Gallery shows contemporary design, oftentimes limited-edition pieces, sometimes unique pieces and serial editions (numbered, but not limited)—the intention being to expand our notion of what a functional object is or can be. This can be hard to explain because to define a moment usually requires context. So to create a context it might be easier to unpack a few of the things that we aren’t or don’t do.

38

W W W. I D S A . O R G

We are not an art gallery.

We are not a sculpture gallery.

We are not a “design art” gallery.

We do not work with designers who are trying to produce a commercial piece.

We do not work with designers who are not willing to experiment and move design thought forward.

To further clarify, if a design gallery is not an art gallery and not a sculpture gallery, why isn’t it a design art gallery?

First, we have to consider the term itself. “Design art” was coined in 1999 by Alexander Payne, an auctioneer at Phillip de Pury. This designation was correct when applied to pieces in the auctions he was conducting in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Payne, at the time, was attempting to convey through language that, in essence, those pieces of design were to be considered as important as works of art.

Unfortunately, eventually the term “design art” was applied to pieces that were simply taking advantage of the boom in the market for contemporary design that occurred in the early 2000s, leading to Payne’s dismissal of the term in 2008.

Muecke makes the distinction between art and design even clearer when talking about his contemporary design practice. He has stated that if art and design are next to each other, he is working on the side of design moving away from art. His stance suggests that perhaps something akin to a post-design-art era is upon us.

Volume works with designers who continue to push forward. The titans of 20th century design, whether in the US or Europe, loom large in a culturally accepted and a manufacturing sense, allowing little room for new designers and their designs to gain a market share. The designers and work we are interested in have no cause to look back other than to stand on the shoulders of previous designers and push the practice forward.

These are some of the parameters we use to assist in understanding now or contemporary. By gathering visual cues and analyzing them, we can begin to reflect on a moment in a society where a century of technological developments are compressed into a decade. Truth in form/reason for being illuminates a brief portion of time, a microcosm, in a sociological context that informs what we define as contemporary design. n

PROCESS REMIX

N

early a decade ago, we arrived as students in the 3D Design Program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, located in suburban Detroit. We were artists looking to infuse the methods of industrial design into the way we made art. Design, with its emphasis on process and logic

through constraints, audience definition, commitment to fit and finish, material experimentation, functionality and affordances, provided us a tool set for consistent, conceptual clarity.

Many of us were attracted to Cranbrook for its rich and well-established history. We were looking to stand on the shoulders of giants, from Harry Bertoia to Ray and Charles Eames to Eero Saarinen. But as time passed, we often found ourselves in opposition to our midcentury heroes.

The designers before us had participated in a different economic climate and contributed to a different cultural legacy.

The Time Is Now Over the past 60 years, industrial design has transitioned from designing products to designing experiences. America has transformed from a manufacturing society with an industrial base into a globally networked one. Old hierar-

chies and power structures of the industrial age have been reworked by digital technology, which has created new modes of work and social organization. We have seen huge industries dissolve, governments topple and established economies collapse while new ones emerge.

This new networked society has fundamentally shifted the context and contents of our designed environment.

Intentionally or not, the work of our design forefathers set in motion a drive toward the “-ers�: cheaper, faster, smaller, bigger, better, smarter. Finely tuned machines adept at replicating products with speed, scale and economy are sprouting up in more and more locales and mass-producing everyday products with ever increasing efficiency.

Above: Object Orange

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

39

By Peter Beaugard and Christopher Schanck in collaboration with Mycal Elliott pbeaugard@ltu.edu n chris@christopherschanck.com Peter Beaugard is currently chair of the Art and Design Department at Lawrence Technological University. Previously, he was an innovation consultant with Fahrenheit 212. n Christopher Schanck is a Detroit-based furniture designer whose work has been featured in PIN-UP, Surface, and Sight Unseen’s Top 25 American Design Hot List. n Mycal Elliott is a consumer research and innovation specialist at Undertone. His focus is on delivering standout experiences for brands across personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

Complex Movements

This new era has propelled businesses to develop and produce products without consideration for basic design principles. Consequently, we’ve allowed business schools to co-opt the language of design and design thinking. They teach students to quickly churn out rapid sketches, prototypes, ideas and iterations without giving sufficient attention to design process. As a result, our discipline has been commoditized, along with the manufacturing ingenuity and efficiencies we pioneered.

Applying Design Methods to Art Practices In the same way that Cranbrook acted as a pivot point for us and our colleagues to explore design methodologies in the art-making processes nearly 10 years ago, now is the time to borrow from artists and use emerging art methodologies in the design process. Just as industrial design has evolved from creating products to crafting experiences, art too has evolved from creating artifacts to organizing social movements. Art has outgrown its midcentury fascination with material specificity and craft into a much more substantive practice. The artist is now seen as an agent of social change, proposing new futures, connecting with marginalized populations and cultivating interest on the fringe.

Detroit, a city that epitomized the industrial age, has become the canary in the coalmine for the unanticipated effects of shifting from a manufacturing economy to an experience economy. In 1914, Henry Ford started an

40

W W W. I D S A . O R G

industrial revolution by more than doubling the wages, to $5 a day, of the average American blue-collar worker, a move that helped build the US middle class and the modern industrial economy. Over the next 45 years, Detroit evolved from a small port town on the Great Lakes to a thriving metropolis. In the 1940s, it was America’s fourth largest city by population, and in the late 1950s, it took the title of the country’s wealthiest. But by 2010, the city represented a broken American promise. Its population had declined by more than 60 percent since 1950, with more than 78,000 vacant properties and more than 30 percent of its population living below the poverty line. Its decline was not the result of bad governance; it was a victim of shifting market forces.

The silver lining: Detroit has become a beacon for the rising creative class. Civic leaders and local government placed a big bet on the creative class while the East and West coasts of the United States sought to attract the young technorati and their deep pockets. Detroit’s rich history in industrial design and material culture and its availability of mom-and-pop manufacturing paired with its low threshold of risk created the perfect landscape for artists to shake up the scientific methods of design.

From Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry to the Heidelberg Project, Detroit has helped shape and define the modern definition of the artist as cultural contributor and agent of social change. The work of three local artists and creative groups—Complex Movements, Kate Daughdrill and Object Orange—provide three themes that are up for grabs for designers.

1. Work in themes, not disciplines. Complex Movements, a five-person, Detroit-based, multidisciplinary artist collective, shifts art from artifact to an ever-changing process of collective coding, decoding and recoding messages. Its most recent work, Beware of the Dandelions, is an immersive environment built on the aesthetics of hip-hop and designed to embody the communal lessons found within complex sciences. Through interactive performance, handcrafted songs, video projection mapping and large-scale installations, the group explores the relationship between art, music, science and social justice movements.

Inspired by activist Grace Lee Boggs and decentralized community-led social justice movements, the project provokes audience members to participate through physical

Detroit Soup

and vocal responses, feeding their own concepts into improvised sections that support the premise that change occurs through critical connections, rather than critical mass. In the words of Wesley Taylor, an artist in the collective, “It’s bigger than one individual and an individual skill set,” and we “grow as we discover community needs. I respect the group, and we have to be pliable and learn as a group.”

Complex Movements’ process is built with room to adapt and change mid-performance. In one moment it may seem like a dance party, and in the next, it’s a community forum. The artists put their viewpoint on it, but the piece only fully develops when taken into communities. Through each performance, they’re testing and scaling the piece and developing one-off experiences. They flip people’s expectations of architecture and design. Their audience members are not users, but they are invited to be co-creators and part of the experience. Beware of the Dandelions happens in real time. You only experience the work if you are there.

2. Be obsessed with the impact of your work. Kate Daughdrill, a Detroit-based artist, questions the feedback loop in design. We understand that the products we design have an impact, but we don’t always stop and think about a product’s afterlife. We’re obsessed with the deadline and not the connection with or impact on the end user.

Daughdrill’s DetroitSOUP, a monthly dinner hosted in backyard garages, churches and community centers that funds microgrants for creative projects in Detroit, puts accountability back on the maker. As authenticity has become a commodity in consumer messaging, Daughdrill teaches us to focus on the community market, not the mass market. She approaches her work with an intense focus on a project’s initial premise and its impact and afterlife. The results are transparent: her projects either work or they don’t.

She doesn’t have the ability to hide behind a gallery door.

In Daughdrill’s words, “It’s about needing to get the right ingredients together: the space, the people, the time and the communication. All of those things are the ingredients in the soup. Or like how a seed grows, you need the soil and the sun. It’s pretty simple, but you don’t actually grow the seed.” Just as you can’t fake a plant growing, she can’t fake a community dinner and the lasting impact of conversations and community collaborations that result from the microgrants. She puts everything on the line for outcomes, and in doing so, her life and her work become inseparable.

3. Work with contexts as they actually exist. As designers, we often focus on style and form over scenario.

As much as we acknowledge that we craft experiences, we are guilty of making work with a perfect resting place in mind. We might design a chair not for its ergonomics and performance but for its silhouette. But our built environment is a messy and wonderfully imperfect place.

Object Orange, an artistic project in Detroit, used 16 of the nearly 80,000 abandoned structures of Detroit as a critical lens through which to consider rapid industrialization. Five artists, who used only their first names for the project, worked together to paint the houses orange, thus transforming Detroit’s vacant housing stock into a visual statement about underlying socioeconomic tensions in the city. The project sought to expose the shortsightedness of the American dream and lay bare the effects of globalization on the middle class.

The painting of the 16 Object Orange houses, eight of which have subsequently been torn down by the city, was the result of intense research into Detroit’s built environment. The targeted houses were strategically selected in relationship to Detroit’s major freeway system. Not only did each house make people aware of the collapse of our physical environment, it made them aware of the history that shaped it.

Object Orange approaches the messiness of the world as it is. It forgoes designers’ desire to propose utopian futures and forces us to acknowledge the frictions of our past and present to better focus us on our future. Design should improve the lives of those it affects, but in order to do so accurately, we need to start with the contexts that actually exist, even if only to imagine our way beyond them more honestly.

Draw the Arrow Back In order for the arrow to be shot forward, it must first be drawn back. Artists teach us to abandon our intense focus on fetish forms, the problem definition and the “ship it and forget it” routine of design. Their processes encourage us to stop and take stock of the pre-histories and the afterlives generated by a creative artifact. They motivate us to shift from creating experiences to creating agency. Now is the time for us to pivot from designers to agents of social change. n

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

41

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T

An Interview with Andrea Branzi

THE EVOLUTION OF DESIGN CULTURE Rafael Herman

F

ew people have had a greater impact on the evolution of design culture than the Italian architect, designer and theorist Andrea Branzi. As a brilliant and experimental young designer in the 1960s, he became a spokesman for

the radical architecture movement, shifting the focus of design from strict functionalism

Riccardo Bianchi

Aldo Balloph

toward conceptual cultural criticism.

Above: Genetic Tales vases designed by Andrea Branzi for Alessi.

Right: Branzi’s Mama O kettle for Alessi.

Translation by Paolo Cravedi

42

W W W. I D S A . O R G

Branzi’s experimental work with collectives like Archizoom and studio Alchymia in the ’60s and ’70s eventually led to the Memphis group in the ’80s, in which he was a central figure along with design greats Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini and others. Memphis announced the beginning of a new era for design culture, which was largely articulated through Branzi’s seminal books The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design (1984) and Learning from Milan: Design and the Second Modernity (1988).

In addition to his writing and teaching, Branzi has been something of a Renaissance man; his prolific body of work ranges in scale, literally, from the city to the spoon. His latest book, Weak and Diffuse Modernity (2006), demonstrates this range with sharp critical writing alongside tabletop objects for Alessi and urban plans for the city of Eindhoven, all with his historically insightful, humorous and poetic signature. Via email from Milan, he answered questions about the past, present and future of design culture.

Scott Klinker: Is “theoretical design” another way of saying “design about design”? Has design culture evolved into a space where designers mostly speak to other designers?

Andrea Branzi: Designers talk to each other and also to industry, the arts and culture. Design is not a self-engrossed practice that is closed in on itself, but rather is an integral part of society and history. The function of theoretical design is to reflect upon the transformations of the world and of society, upon what new technologies can offer and upon the influence of new cultural trends—similar to the way theoretical physics develops theorems that will find a practical translation in applied physics.

SK: Memphis was mostly a collection of prototypes.

What was the final impact on industry?

AB: Memphis did not work for the industry, but instead for the anticipated changes in the market and society. At first, the industry did not understand the underlying reasons for our work, but during the ’90s it had to accept that the market demanded new languages and new ways of using the living spaces.

SK: What companies really benefited from this?

AB: Only a few companies understood right away that a revolution was happening; among them was certainly Alessi, which deeply transformed its philosophy by morphing into a manufacturer of aesthetic objects which were still conceived for domestic use but also to be given as gifts and to make your environment alive and vibrant.

SK: Avant-garde design in the ’60s, similar to other arts, seemed to be driven by a spirit of opposition—to the limits of society. Is design culture partly about opposition?

AB: Our ideas from the radical movement of the New Italian Design (where Memphis was born) have never been against the industry; on the contrary, we marked the delay of the industry in relation to its own possibilities.

SK: In the ’70s you formed the Global Tools group with the political goal of enabling “mass creativity.” Has the creative revolution you imagined materialized? Is today’s network society similar to your vision of mass creativity?

AB: Global Tools never went beyond the conceptual stage.

Courtesy of Friedman Benda and the artist. Photography: Jon Lam

SK: Memphis argued for design’s inevitable need to embrace pop culture and fashion. Since then, has the line between design and art been sufficiently redrawn?

AB: Memphis was born in a moment in which the massmarket was beginning to break up into fragments; new products had to have the ability to attract their specific user by means of a new language. Since then, design has radically changed, rationalism has fallen into a crisis, and the international style has disappeared. The relationship with art, therefore, was not the only reason design changed; from that moment on, design ceased to be just an industrial product and became part of social culture just like music, fashion and cinema.

Tree 9 by Andrea Branzi

It never became a real organization. Some of our goals shifted to Domus Academy instead, which subsequently was able to attract students from all over the world. Those students proved that the concept of a creative society was not a utopian dream but rather a prophetic intuition.

SK: In your latest book Weak and Diffuse Modernity you have described an “economy of innovation” where free-agent “researchers” practice like artists. Has design culture finally expanded beyond the designers?

AB: Today everything that is produced is design, because the aesthetic and emotional components are a fundamental requirement to enter the market; nobody buys products that have no emotion, no personality, no charm. Society keeps evolving, and design needs to be experimental and to pursue new cultural dimensions.

SK: What conditions of the network society are especially empowering for building design culture?

AB: The freedom to search for new products, new technologies, new music, new narratives, new fashion, new services, demonstrating that our society is expressed through a continuous innovation.

—Scott Klinker, IDSA, INNOVATION guest editor sklinker@cranbrook.edu I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

43

By Bruce M. Tharp, IDSA and Stephanie M. Tharp bruce.tharp@gmail.com n stephanie.tharp@gmail.com Bruce and Stephanie Tharp are professors of industrial design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They also run a design studio, materious, that licenses product ideas, creates commissioned work for corporations and institutions, and self-produces commercial design work as well as non-commercial discursive projects. They are currently writing a book on discursive design.

Discursive Design

TOOLS FOR THINKING

I

magine that anyone in the world who wanted a gun—for whatever reason—could just download a file and print one out. No criminal background checks, no mandatory training, no mental health scrutiny, no delays, no oversight, no records, no government—just the desire and access

to a rapid prototyping machine. Oh, and the guns are plastic, so they evade metal detection, and they are small enough to be concealed in a jacket pocket or purse. Imagine the truly unencumbered right to bear arms for you and for your friends—as well as your enemies.

Carin Krasner

Epidermits by Karten Design.

Genetically engineered toys. Just because we can, should we?

44

W W W. I D S A . O R G

Defense Distributed

The Liberator by Cody Wilson. Said to be the world’s first 3D-printed gun, created to make a point about liberalism and freedom of information.

This is the world made possible (at least for a few days in May 2013 before the US government intervened) by Cody Wilson, the then 25-year-old amateur co-designer and trigger-puller of the world’s first 3D-printed gun, the Liberator. Later deemed by Wired magazine as one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world, Wilson did not go through a year’s worth of design thinking, prototyping and testing because he needed a (poorly performing) gun, but because, as a radical libertarian, he wanted to say something: “The big reason that I thought that this project was worth pushing is because it was such a sensational way of unpacking some of this ideology. Maybe even mainstreaming it in a way that it had not been done in a long time. … It is a philosophy about self-liberation and self-management. … I am interested in having this fight—we are having this fight—about what information control means.”

So there you have it—some say for better, others for worse—a product is designed in order to make a statement, to provoke and to open up debate. While Wilson is busy raising questions about liberty, others (ourselves included) question whether doing so by enabling a more violent gun-filled world is morally justifiable. Certainly there is the argument that technology is value-free (“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!”), but this takes us to the core position of discursive design. Products are never ideologically neutral—they are directed by a particular set of social values. Discursive design tries to make these values visible and asks its audience to reflect upon them. This is designing for discourse. Far more than a plastic weapon, the Liberator is a bold tool for thinking.

Bigger Can Be Better Design is getting bigger. Bigger in terms of the number of practicing designers, as well as the number of corporations that recognize its value to the bottom line. Bigger in the sense of the public’s awareness and appetite. Bigger in the size and number of design schools and programs. But it is the expansion of the different kinds of work designers are doing that we are interested in—at least one in particular.

Discursive design opens up the possibility for a greater, albeit somewhat different, contribution to society.

The expansion of design practice is often discussed more in terms of how, who and where: using new technologies, employing craft production (how); by the DIY amateur, involving co-designers (who); and inside the gallery, within developing countries (where). But discursive design calls into question the fundamental rationale of why we design.

For well over a century, product design has made incredible contributions to the efficiency, effectiveness and enjoyment of everyday life. It importantly and distinctly impacts what people do and how they do it. Design, however, has contributed less to what and how people think.

The profession is shaped to be more practical than intellectual. Of course there is nothing inherently wrong with this—it’s worked quite well and will continue to do so. But taking “practical,” in this sense, as a generally exclusive stance limits the profession’s potential contribution—we can do more (and should).

We have stepped into a wondrous new frontier— employing our design thinking to promote, and potentially affect, social thought. While good design is often professed to be unobtrusive, intuitive, invisible and something that does not make the user think too much, discursive design instead targets the intellect. The primary goal is to prompt self-reflection, ignite the imagination and foment contemplation—to deliberately make the user think (deeply).

This, of course, demands a purposeful shift—the designed object’s primary role is no longer utilitarian, aesthetic or commercial. Instead it is mostly (though not exclusively) a thought catalyst. The product is given form and function so that it can communicate ideas—this is the goal and the measure of success. Rather than tools for living and doing, these are tools for thinking. While different, this is only a shift in orientation; it is not a radical departure. This is still product design, but with slightly different product affordances.

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

45

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T

Where It Comes From While this type of design is often referred to as critical design, there are certain limitations to this term, and that explanation is beyond the scope of this essay. We prefer discursive design. “Discursive” relates to the word “discourse.” Although it has strong academic interpretations, we take it more colloquially as the expression or treatment of a topic—part of a discussion or debate. A discursive design is an object that has been intentionally (and abstractly) embedded with a discourse. Rather than writing an essay or creating a slogan, the designer conceives of a product that is capable of communicating ideas. But not just any ideas, those with psychological, sociological or ideological weight; the topic is substantive enough to support a complex of competing perspectives and values.

Discursive design has been gaining steam in the 21st century. The academy is increasingly embracing this mode of design, incorporating courses and even distinct programs and departments, especially in the UK and Scandinavia. It is being written about in both academic and popular design media. It is being encouraged and acknowledged in design competitions (under different headings) like the Core77 International Design Award’s speculative category. In addition to frequent gallery showings, there have been major design exhibitions like MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind (2009) and, to an extent, its Talk to Me (2011), as well as more recently in London with Dunne and Raby’s United Micro Kingdoms (UMK): A Design Fiction (2013) at the Design Museum.

For the most part, discursive design originated in the last few decades of the 20th century. While somewhat isolated examples can be found earlier, historians point to the Italian Radicals of the 1960s and 1970s as the primary progenitors. In the early 1980s the Memphis group carried the mantle, which was by the end of the decade passed on to Droog Design of the Netherlands. But it was Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby who in the late 1990s really galvanized the approach with their articulation of critical design. Undoubtedly their work and that of their students at London’s Royal College of Art have done more to grow the field than any other influence.

46

W W W. I D S A . O R G

Although designing for discourse is a relatively new approach for product designers, our creative brethren are old hats at it. Graphic designers are perhaps the most accomplished at using their craft not just for practice (for example, wayfinding, graphical user interface and corporate identity products), but for communicating social messages and big ideas. They not only design more effective voting ballots, they create political posters as well. These employ the same basic skill set and medium—letters and shapes on pieces of paper—but one helps people do, the other makes people think.

Architects too have famously used buildings and structures primarily as social and political statements. In the 1960s and 1970s groups like Archizoom (founded by Andrea Branzi) as well as Gruppo 9999, Gruppo Strum and Studio Alchymia produced provocative “anti-design,” like Superstudio’s simultaneously utopian and dystopian megastructure that soars above New York City. Of course this is just paper architecture, but if architecture were as feasible as product design, more would undoubtedly be built (and indeed the Italian Radicals fabricated smaller provocative interior objects). “Critical architecture” was coined and had a following at least 15 years prior to Dunne and Raby’s critical design. There is a well-established and important distinction between the discipline and the practice of architecture—between the thinking and the doing—that has largely eluded product design.

Examples of sociocultural commentary and provocation abound in fashion design, furniture design, humancomputer interface design and jewelry design, for example.

And perhaps every subdomain of literature, music, dance, theater and film has long done it to some extent too. Simply put, there are service-based models of design as well as expanded models in which design practice is predominantly a means to express distinct ideas and opinions about the world to the world. This is what happens as fields mature.

What It Looks Like Discursive designers have expressed, for any number of reasons, an incredible range of ideas with varying degrees of intensity or provocation—and instantiated to differing

Revital Cohen

Life Support by Revital Cohen. Questioning society’s treatment of healthy animals and sick humans.

degrees. It is important to emphasize that design is a planning activity rather than necessarily an implementing activity.

Just because a client rejects a product design or drops a project before it ever makes it to the factory floor does not mean it was not designed. And because something was only fabricated or manufactured as a one-off or small batch also does not mean that it is not a design—how about those Detroit concept cars or that Mars rover? And just because something is never intended for manufacture at all, or that it is a “horizon three” product dependent upon the hopeful advancement of other technologies does not mean that it does not qualify as design, or that it is inherently art.

There are many legitimate forms of product design—to think that it is only something that you can buy in the store or is produced in mass quantities or that comes out of a factory is simply simple-mindedness.

Just as there are many forms of product design, so too with discursive design. There are more pure forms of discursive design that are solely about the communication of an idea and have essentially no practical relationship to the marketplace.

Revital Cohen’s Life Support project questions not only humane relationships with medical technology, but also our use of animals as products. Her Respiratory Dog

employs retired racing greyhounds to power crucial breathing machines for suffering patients. Among other questions, it asks that since animals are already being bred (produced) for their blood and tissue, “could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts?” and could this offer “an alternative to inhumane medical therapies?” What would this mean for individuals and society? Her product design exists as a mixture of works-like and looks-like prototyping; while feasible, it is not seriously intended for manufacture. Instead, it is a product proposition that pushes for the viewer to reflect upon the cultural desires and values that would be necessary to support its existence. Should we produce this design?

As mentioned, a key measure of success of discursive design is the extent to which it generates awareness, reflection and debate. Discursive designers often engage in a balancing act between being provocative enough to effectively make their point, but not to the extent that they alienate. The right balance of strangely familiar can engage many channels of dissemination, and with greater exposure comes better chances of increasing the overall impact. Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project (2009) is a prime example of this as it gained international exposure when published as a book, exhibited in major museum exhibitions, presented as

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

47

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T

Daniel Alexander

The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites. The quest to make a toaster from scratch in order to address concerns about highly industrialized society.

a TED talk, described in countless print and online publications, and even broadcast on The Colbert Report.

Thwaites set out to “make a toaster from scratch” and extracted raw materials such as iron, copper and mica and then processed these along with melted-down Canadian nickels and waste plastic. The result was an admittedly ugly toaster that only functioned for a few seconds before the heating elements burned out. The toaster itself, of course, is not where the power of the project lies—it is in his journey and the story. The discursive object itself is the entrée into the more-important process of its becoming; seeing and hearing this described engages viewers in the question about how all the many objects that surround us and that we take for granted come about. It is a story that reminds or enlightens us about the complex interdependency and (detrimental) efficiency of industrial organization that is the basis for our consumer society. It reveals that which a century of increased manufacturing competency conceals.

Similar to these pure forms of discursive design, there are those that intend similarly to communicate weighty ideas outside of the marketplace but are created by commercial entities. While they may be just as powerful thoughtprovokers, the designers’ intentions are not as uniform, as there is likely a marketing message that comes along.

This is perfectly fine, and indeed it can help attract the sponsorship of important work by corporations. While the idealist might see capitalist involvement as an unacceptable compromise, the realist understands this as a way to increase involvement. Complex initiatives can benefit from many types of “soldiers”—just as the environmental movement needs activists outside of corporations, so too does it greatly benefit from advocates within.

Karten Design, an established California consultancy, created its exploratory Cautionary Visions project as a series of “disturbing concepts that beg the question, just because we can, does it mean we should?” As a way of communicating thought leadership to its high-tech clients, the firm pushed speculative projects to (and beyond) the

48

W W W. I D S A . O R G

limits of social acceptability. Its most provocative product, Epidermits, are kids’ toys/pets that are designed to be fullyfunctioning organisms born out of “advanced tissue engineering and the latest fuel cell and electronic technology … and are customizable with different body, skin, and hair selections and through tanning, tattooing, and piercing.”

While this project was at least partially justified as a marketing/branding expenditure, its important social question has reached hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals. Social activists should not throw the baby toys out with the bathwater; corporations too can be vital, proactive players in social discourse.

Why It’s Important Our profession is deeply rooted and incredibly influential in so much of what supports, if not constitutes, everyday life. Through a purposeful shift, we can use our talents and authority to serve society in a different way and usefully participate in other aspects of culture. We can be better, more involved citizens.

Products have certain strengths as communicative devices—a more personal and human scale, a substantiveness and tangibility, great cultural acceptance and ubiquity, and efficient means of mass dissemination. Other disciplines do not necessarily have these; they have their own strengths to engage. Just as literature, music and theater are powerful cultural forces for reflecting on our past and present, as well as helping us think about possible futures, so too is product design. Our challenge—and we would claim responsibility—is to become adept at leveraging our emotional and intellectual assets toward a different type of service. As our profession matures, we can grow our influence and utility beyond our current comfort zone. Even though discursive design will no doubt always be on the periphery, adding it to our already meaningful offerings to what and how people do will allow us to also contribute to what and how people think.

While product design has been slower than other forms of design, probably due to our specific entanglement with the practical and commercial, we can use our beloved medium of product to voice our concerns, hopes and desires. We can initiate and participate in social discourse.

Surely we are not merely profit-seeking professionals.

Surely we care deeply about other aspects of life that affect ourselves, our families, our communities, our nation and our planet—now, and into the future. Surely as we get bigger, we can be better. n

By Lisa Cheng Smith lcsmith@gmail.com Lisa Smith is co-founder of the small-batch design brand ODLCO and an adjunct assistant professor of designed objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been featured in Domus, The Atlantic, Architect’s Newspaper and Elle Decor Italia. Her areas of interest are designer-led manufacturing and distribution and the design of social settings and events.

A Guide to Scaling Up

FROM ONE TO ONE MILLION

A

debate unfolded on Twitter during the 2011 Milan Design Week (#milanuncut) revealing some of the obvious problems with the royalty-based fee structure offered by Cappellini, Alessi and other manufacturers for contract designers. Royalties are very low, and there is no guarantee

that a product will go to market, meaning that designers may never see a penny for all their hard work. It’s clear from the discussion, summarized by Justin McGuirk for the Guardian,1 that this model is on the way out. Tim Parsons on his blog Object Thinking2 made the point that designers should be held accountable for accepting these bad deals and passing losses on to unpaid interns.

Brian Ferry

D2C It seems that many new-generation designers agree, as they develop alternative models for making and selling their work. They are no longer providing uncompensated talent to powerhouse design brands on the chance that they might hit it big. Instead, they are coordinating the manufacturing and production themselves, controlling the implementation of a design idea more tightly and, if successful, keeping the profit. At the same time, they also take on the financial risk and must provide exceptional production, project and marketing management. Not an easy task, but well-worth the rewards.

The direct-to-consumer (D2C) business model3 has been cited as one important way these young American designers are finding commercial viability and success.

However in many studios, this functions more like an atelier model than a contemporary supply chain. Products are not only designed and manufactured within the design studios, but are also often warehoused, processed and shipped by the studios themselves. Though this suffices at small volumes, it may handicap these self-contained design studios, keeping them from competing with their more efficient, large market-share-holding cousins. Without the benefits of economies of scale and corporate muscle, how can independent design studios overcome this hurdle and compete in the general marketplace with a strong ability to meet an increase in demand while also managing risk?

Fort Standard’s Brooklyn Studio 1 www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/18/designs-milan-furniture-fair?CMP=twt_gu 2 objectthinking.com/2011/04/22/milanuncut/ 3 www.domusweb.it/en/design/2012/12/17/d2c-generation.html I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

49

D E S I G N/AR T /CR AF T

New services created by a postindustrial society may be one way. These provide access to a decentralized network of manufacturing and distribution facilities. They also help streamline the production process, in some cases assisting with RFQs or offering enterprise-level shipping logistics. This allows design businesses to take advantage of economies of scale without committing to a large amount of product, enabling them to react quickly to market changes even while catering to niche audiences. These resources may become the connective tissue of the new American design industry: highly decentralized, highly diverse, but competitive.

This essay shares insights from successful designerowned businesses and suggests a few services that can help new entrepreneurs start off on the right foot, positioning themselves to make a significant dent in the competitive marketplace, even with a small core-team and minimal infrastructure.

Current Players Many small designer-owned furniture and home furnishings companies that were founded in the last three to ten years in the United States have recently hit their stride. Examples include Rich Brilliant Willing, Fort Standard, Field Design, and Chen and Kai from the East Coast; Winter Session and materious from the Midwest; and Grain Design, Ladies and Gentlemen Studio (L&G) and Iacoli and McAlister from the West Coast. They have all found different routes to success, but they have a few important characteristics in common: they all maintain online storefronts that sell directly to the public, are designer-owned and led, and are responsible for the production and distribution of their products. I asked a few of these companies for insight into their own experiences concerning growth.

Seattle-based Ladies and Gentlemen Studio was founded by Dylan Davis and Jean Lee in 2010 “as a boot-

Pointers for the New Design Entrepreneur

L

uckily for new design business owners, our postindustrial service economy is inventing new ways of engaging with the manufacturing industry that also provide safeguards. Venture-funded business have emerged from the idea that small studios will increasingly need to fulfill large amounts of product in a short amount of time. Below are pointers on how to take advantage of these services and set your business up for success.

Planning The most important part of running a business is to have a plan, no matter how excited you are to get started. Put simply: Design your business for maximum profit margins and lowest operating costs. Be outcome-driven in your planning, even if your business is design-driven.

Funding Kickstarter is the most visible choice, but its high fees, all-or-nothing campaign structure and tiered reward levels may not be right for your business. Other crowdfunding sites offer alternative models. Crowdyhouse focuses only on preorders of furnishings, lighting and accessories. With Fundable, Bolstr and Early Shares, instead of rewards backers get equity in the company or a share of its profits. Of course, you can always bootstrap and not be accountable to anyone before you’re ready.

Sourcing Before funding begins, sourcing should be complete and cost estimates nailed down. Otherwise, you risk losing money or being unable to deliver. Beyond the familiar (and

50

W W W. I D S A . O R G

befuddling) overseas manufacturing site Alibaba, services like Maker’s Row and Elihuu have made mass production accessible. They are designed to make new entrepreneurs feel comfortable, and vendors know they may be contacted by folks who don’t have experience with B2B marketplaces.

Selling and Marketing Countless out-of-the-box e-commerce options are available, such as Shopify, Big Cartel and Squarespace. Before choosing, evaluate them on what is best for growth; many are easy to use, but don’t scale well. If you work on a preorder model, try Celery, which allows you to take orders and credit card information without charging until you ship. For selling in person, Square, Leaf and PayPal Here provide inexpensive card swipers with low processing fees. For email marketing, MailChimp is free and easy to use, and Facebook ads are an inexpensive way to teach a targeted audience.

Accounting QuickBooks.

Warehousing and Shipping Shipping is time intensive, low-level work. If you can, outsource it to fulfillment houses, such as Amazon Fulfillment Services. If you want to brand your packaging, which Amazon doesn’t offer, check out Fulfillrite and Shipwire. If you don’t expect your inventory to sell quickly, find a fulfillment house that will store and ship for a flat fee per package to avoid large storage fees. One recommendation: SWF in Schaumburg, IL (847-557-2302). n

Brian Ferry

strapped company in the depths of the recession.” They make small runs of home and personal accessories, including lighting, utensils, furniture and jewelry. According to L&G, “volume, cost, and quality are all very difficult things to control when you’re making things in the hundreds and not in the tens of thousands.” As their business grew, it was “shaped around this creative challenge.” Even with more resources, a higher demand, and a strong base of stockists, L&G still designs for “off-the-shelf components and up-cycled materials.” They keep a “lean inventory, and produce most of the products to order.” This approach allows them to scale without large amounts of capital and gives them flexibility to design new products rather than offloading unsold inventory.

Bruce and Stephanie Tharp founded materious in Chicago in 2005 and produce furniture and furnishings that explore meaning, humor and behavior. They are familiar with all the troubles of overseas manufacturing: “communication and time delays, production run quality [that is] not as good as the samples, paying in full up-front, increased pricing on re-orders, and customs problems.” Currently, they are trying to produce more products domestically because they like “manufacturers that are open to discussion, visits, and collaboration.” But these kinds of partners are hard to find, and it’s costly to enlist them because the expense of tooling is much higher here. They point out that crowdfunding provides a way into US-based manufacturing. With preorders and a payment in hand, the risk of the expensive tooling is mitigated, with the added benefit that revisions can be made much more efficiently because of the proximity of the manufacturing partner.

Fort Standard, founded by Gregory Buntain and Ian Collings in New York in 2011, makes tabletop products and high-end furniture. As their product line has expanded over the past three years, they have switched from doing all the fabrication in-house to outsourcing some production to other facilities within the US. This way they can design for capabilities they don’t have in the studio, but it also means they must “place large quantity orders of these products, which costs a lot of money up front.” Key to growth is “having existing retail accounts that are always looking for the latest and greatest.” This allows them to expand their product line without a high level of risk, as it’s likely that their existing accounts will purchase their new goods. For them, real estate is the limiting factor: “Being based in New York, space is not cheap, so we are constantly trying to maximize the way we use our space.”

Jonah Takagi and Daniel Thomas founded Field in 2012. They make beautifully crafted objects geared toward men: heavy desk sets, leather mouse pads, brass desk magnifiers and stainless steel bottle openers. According to Thomas, a big challenge when scaling up production is quality control. They’ve “had experiences where [the] fabrication partner creates a perfect sample, or even a small run of ... 50 units, but when we jump to 500 units the consistency takes a dive.” This is especially difficult when one product passes through the hands of different vendors. Thomas points out that it’s important to solve this at the source, before you’ve paid for perfect finishing on 500

Gregory Buntain of Fort Standard

faulty products. As a preventative measure, Field “always develops a relationship with a project manager or supervisor at [the] manufacturing partners.” By working directly with someone on the shop floor rather than in the sales department, they find that communication is smoother, the commitment of the manufacturer is higher and doing a rerun when the products don’t meet standards is easier.

Chen Chen and Kai Williams started their studio in New York City in 2011 and have become known for their esoteric approach to craft and humorous sense of realism. Though they self-produce many of their designs, they are also aware that this can be a problem. Chen said, “I think a big problem for scaling production for most design start-ups is that we can make it ourselves to a certain extent. It’s hard to come up with the capital and to source a manufacturer.

It’s much easier to do a small run in-house. Once you’re entrenched in working as the manufacturer, it can be hard to switch out of that mode.” Chen suggests that one way out of this is to willingly restrict what you can do in-house.

Instead of buying a new tool to solve a problem, recognize that this is also a way of procrastinating and avoiding the challenge of finding a competent manufacturer.

Running a successful business is a moving target, and will require every ounce of dedication and work you can give. But with the right tools, careful planning and building on the wisdom of others, your sweat, blood and tears can contribute effectively to growth rather than to losing potency as the demands on your business increase. Designers have an exceptional dedication to craft, quality and representation, but great results can be achieved without babysitting every detail. Learn to delegate, learn to negotiate, learn to evaluate and, most importantly, learn to direct. Think of making products like making a movie. Disparate parts are orchestrated into a cohesive whole, but no director would grip the dolly themselves, and neither should you. As designers, we’ve been indoctrinated into the cult of the individual artist and the machismo of the all-nighter. Don’t make this your business downfall. Be visionary, and let the experts do the rest. n

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

51

By Brian Heidsiek brianh@sandboxid.com Brian Heidsiek has been generating new opportunities and innovation for more than 20 years. His strength lies in delving into the unknown and synthesizing new products and services in health care, medical and consumer product markets. He founded Sandbox Innovation Studio to help companies realize sustainable organic growth through human-centered design. He is driven to satisfy meaningful needs of people.

HOW DESIGNERS INFUSE EMOTION

E

motion sells. Emotional advertising outperforms informational advertising, according to the World Advertising Research Center. People are driven to feel good, safe and fulfilled. And they make decisions, including buying decisions, based on how they feel. If you disagree, just ask yourself

how you chose your best friend or spouse.

Why, for example, despite financial planners telling us to cut out the $5 cups of coffee in order to be more fiscally responsible, do we indulge anyway? Because we like the ritual and the feeling we get from the coffee more than we like saving money. Instinct, not rationality, drives us to desire things, including sex. Which, as they say, sells. If Apple didn’t offer emotionally appealing products, it wouldn’t be in business.

Artistically creative people infuse emotional content into works of art. But who is uniquely qualified to infuse emotional content into products and services? Designers.

How do we do this? Some of us are inspired by our own emotions. Some use specialized tools, including ethnography and empathic design. So what specific set of mental, emotional and psychological characteristics enables us to do this? And equally important, how do we get more people to understand the value of what we do? To find out, keep reading. Because knowing what it is that’s special about us, and understanding how we add value to products, can boost our confidence, increase our influence and enhance our value to business.

What Makes Designers Special Sandra Walker Russ is a psychology professor and researcher who has worked extensively with creativity. She has also studied affect, cognition and personality traits and how they function together to produce creative output. In the process she starts to reveal, at a new level, why designers can do what they do.

52

W W W. I D S A . O R G

Russ uses the term “affect” instead of “emotion.” While they are very similar, Russ believes that affect encompasses emotion, feeling states and instinctual drives. Cognition is the process by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated on, stored, recovered and used. Her model also includes personality traits of creative people because our behavioral characteristics help determine cognitive and affective processing.

I’ve used elements from one of her frameworks and related them to basic human-centered design steps (right).

Russ’ model starts with personality traits that she suggests influence cognition. Next to those are the affective processes related to those traits, followed by the specific cognitive processes that result. I added typical and current design steps and tools to the last column to explore the relationship between the Russ model and the design profession—and, in the process, shed some light on the actual mechanics of why and how designers can translate emotional content into goods and services that deliver emotional value.

I think the most noteworthy elements of the framework are the affective processes because they delineate why designers as creative people may be well-suited to translate emotional content into goods and services. Russ has identified several affective processes, which are listed in column 2: n Affective pleasure in challenge is the internal excitement and tension a person experiences in identifying problems and working on the task. n Access to affect-laden thoughts is the ability to recall emotional content.

HOW DESIGNERS INFUSE EMOTION

· Affective pleasure in challenge

· Sensitivity to problems · Problem identification · Problem finding

· Tolerance of ambiguity · Openness to experience

· Access to affectladen thoughts; primary process thinking · Openness to affect states

ETHNOGRAPHY

EMPATHY FUEL

· Divergent thinking · Transformation activities

Tolerance to failure Curiosity Intrinsic motivation Risk-taking Curiosity

· Intrinsic motivation

· Affective pleasure in problem solving · Passionate involvement in task

· Tendency to practice with alternative solutions · Wide breadth of knowledge · Insight abilities

· Cognitive integration of affect

· Evaluative ability

PROBLEM FINDING

PROBLEM DEFINITION INSIGHT SYNTHESIS

PERSONAS

· · · · ·

CONTEXTUAL EXPLORATION

IDEA GENERATION STORYTELLING CONCEPT VISUALIZATION PROTOTYPE EVALUATE REVISE

CON T EN T IN T ERPRE T ED FROM SANDR A WALK ER RUSS’ MODEL ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HER BOOK AFFEC T AND CRE ATIVIT Y

n

Openness to affect states is the ability to experience different emotional states. n Affective pleasure in problem-solving is the passion and excitement for solving the problem and perfecting the solution. n Cognitive integration and modulation of affective material is a cognitive-affective process crucial in adaptive creative functioning. It reflects both cognition and affect. This is important in the design process because it allows evaluation and tradeoffs when refining an idea.

LEARNING

· Tolerance of ambiguity · Independence of judgement · Unconventional values · Curiosity

HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN

FRAMEWORKS

COGNITIVE ABILITIES INVOLVED IN CREATIVIT Y

IDEATION

AFFECTIVE PROCESSES

ITERATION

GLOBAL PERSONALIT Y TR AITS

ADDIT ION OF HUMAN-CEN T ERED DESIGN S TAGES T O RUSS’ MODEL

A Secret Sauce That’s Too Spicy for Others So what does access to affect-laden thought have to do with laughing when that expensive ergo chair in the next cube is graffitied with green slime? Your answer will be based on a form of mental processing called primary process thinking. It’s the cognitive component of access to affect-laden thoughts. The classic Freudian definition of primary processing is based on the id. It dominates early mental development and can be illogical, fantastical and dreamlike. It also involves basic human instinctual drives and attention to

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

53

I NF U S E E MOT I O N

bodily functions, aggression, sex and hedonistic pleasure.

Fortunately, the ego and superego take over as our brains develop and allow us to effectively manage these drives, keeping us from putting green slime on the CEO’s chair.

What’s unique about creative people is that they retain the ability to use primary processing to access emotional content and can do so without losing higher mental processing. Usually. This helps designers generate ideas that push the boundaries of logic and reason and then use them for innovative products loaded with emotional value.

Let’s look at the framework based on the stages of human-centered design, starting with personality traits and moving right through the chart.

Learning: Personality traits like tolerance of ambiguity and curiosity allow designers to embrace new territory in the learning and discovery stage of design. Affective pleasure in challenge allows them to stick with tasks that contain conflicting and ambiguous elements and to remain patient while waiting for problems to fully emerge. The associated cognitive abilities Russ presents correspond closely to problem finding in design when it’s important to wait for problems to emerge. Sensitivity to problems helps designers notice issues that others might miss and then define those problems before jumping to formal ideation. A curious personality also helps us see and find what others miss. Design activities that will serve as empathy fuel, like ethnography and the gathering of user information, align here. Project briefs with well-defined problems fit here too.

Frameworks and Ideation: In these phases, personality traits like openness to new experience, ambiguity tolerance and tolerance of failure work together. For example, the confidence that comes with tolerance of failure enables designers to comfortably access affect-laden thoughts with primary process thinking that is often seen by others as uncomfortable and silly. These features combine with a designer’s ability to think divergently, embrace alternate solutions as valid, and transform and shift elements as a means to create lots of new ideas. This is why designers are exceptional lateral thinkers.

Openness to affect states allows designers to feel the varied emotions of different users to generate a deeper, more potent empathetic response to their needs.

This is how empathy in the design process works, and it explains why designers are so good at it. The process

54

W W W. I D S A . O R G

allows designers to embed the new emotional fuel required for reflection back to the marketplace in the form of relevant and desirable goods and services. It enables us to create user personas and segmentations, tell effective stories and meaningfully synthesize information into insight frameworks.

Openness to affective states, highlighted in much literature on creativity, is the ability of creative people to access emotions and emotional content. These new ingredients can be synthesized in new ways through the cognitive ability of divergent thinking, resulting in new solutions. This is another reason designers are great innovative thinkers.

Tolerance of ambiguity here is important. To really have a free flow of associations, one must be comfortable with logical contradictions and the tension that develops when conflicting ideas are thought about simultaneously. Roger Martin calls this opposable thinking. F. Scott Fitzgerald called it first-rate intelligence.

Iteration: In the big picture, many of us know that the concept is often the easy part. Getting it refined and producible requires grit: a combination of stubbornness and persistence. I interpret Russ’ personality trait of intrinsic motivation as grit: the thrill of creating that keeps designers going when things get tough. Russ lists the affective process that relates to grit as cognitive integration and modulation of affective material with its associated cognitive activity as evaluation. It takes grit to keep going, but if proper evaluation doesn’t happen, neither will progress. I relate this cognitive process to a designer’s ability to rationally evaluate results and to balance tradeoffs while still maintaining the appropriate level of emotional content. This happens as prototypes are built, tried, tested and rebuilt until the solution meets the established criteria and market requirements.

So what does it all mean? It means that you, as designers, and the way your mind, emotions and personality work play a valuable role in creating and improving the emotional value and desirability of products and services. Of course, psychologists, anthropologists, leaders, managers, marketers and others can embrace and synthesize emotional content. But, unlike you, they are not trained to visualize and create, leaving design as the profession uniquely qualified to translate emotional content into value. Understanding this, and knowing how we are different from others in business, can increase our value, boost our confidence and increase our influence. n

By Cooper C. Woodring, FIDSA ccwoodring@cox.net Cooper Woodring earned a bachelor’s in industrial design from the University of Kansas (go Jayhawks) and a master’s in design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. His design work is represented in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Washington’s Smithsonian Museum.

GREAT DESIGNERS DESERVE HALF THE CREDIT FOR THEIR GREAT DESIGNS

A

ll grass may be green, but not all that is green is grass. So it is with great designs. Great designs require great designers, but not all great designers produce great designs. In fact, much of the work of many great designers often results in good, but not great, designs.

The missing half of the formula for design greatness lies not with the great designer, but with the client. As we shall see, clients have five “must” responsibilities for design greatness.

These five musts are as difficult for clients to achieve, as it is for great designers to meet their responsibilities. The client is defined as the owner of the yet-to-be design, and ownership is defined as the authority to implement the design.

Never should we forget that many have achieved great success, fame and fortune with but one design—executed with excellence. So why is it that a great designer was able to produce only a good design for their next client? The difference lies with the client and their understanding, or lack of understanding, of their responsibilities in the design relationship or partnership.

Let’s examine the five client musts. As we go through them, ask yourself if your last client met these responsibilities, for if they did and the results were less than great, the fault lies with you—the not-so-great designer. If, however, your client fell down on one or more of the five musts, give them a copy of this article to help them better understand their obligations to the outcome you both want and both deserve: great designs.

1. Problem (or Opportunity) Recognition The first responsibility of the client is to become aware that they have a problem, or, stated in a more positive vein, an opportunity.

Upon recognizing the problem, or opportunity, the company will seek to attribute a cause. This is a well-defined process generally referred to, at least in the military, as “situational analysis.” It is important during this phase not to look for easy answers. In fact, one should not seek answers at all. The situation analysis states what the problem is, how or why it occurred, how long it has existed, and that a resolution is required. That’s all, nothing more.

2. Design Awareness The client’s second responsibility is to be aware that design may be a solution to the stated problem. This is the most difficult aspect of the problem for the client to comprehend.

If the reason the problem exists is a lack of prior focus on design, then it is inconceivable that design will be identified as a potential solution, for the obvious reason that the design point of view has no champion. Or if it does, it is not at a level to be seriously considered. Today, design is the most influential success factor of a business from the consumer’s point of view, as I will clarify later with the results of a research study.

Following the situational analysis, the CEO will probably call a meeting with all of the vice presidents (read: top management) to offer solutions to the stated problem. Design will not be considered if there is no design vice president to attend the meeting. Even if there is a design vice president, this is a strategic planning session of top management to

Author’s note: This article has been updated from the version that originally appeared in the Fall 1983 issue of INNOVATION.

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

55

G RE AT CL I E NT S

direct the company’s future in an increasingly competitive industry. They need hard stuff—like statistics and solutions, no-risk answers that they know will work.

I can see it now, bright businesspeople dedicated to solving the company’s problem but not considering their most competitive weapon, the only quality consumers won’t take for granted: the design of the product. The CEO would be well-served by someone in the meeting standing up and saying, “You think the company pays your salary? Well, think again. The company just handles the money. The product pays your salary and the product needs serious redesigning.”

Let’s remove some myths about consumers. First of all, consumers are not them; they’re us—people like you and me. They like what we like. When we shop for a product we expect it to be available, to work, even to be warranted to work and to be affordable. These are the givens, and the product meets these criteria or you wouldn’t still be in business. The primary product variable today is design— simply the creativity and integrity with which the materials and processes have been combined to affect performance, cost, function, appearance, etc. The way consumers judge this major variable is simply to look the product over. Visual acuity is not a quality we trust in others, but we certainly trust it in ourselves.

A number of years ago I conducted an expensive and extensive consumer research project with a major retailer to determine if consumers felt that the quality and value of a product could be determined only by looking at it. The results were surprising—at least until we came to understand the results. The question asked was, “Do you think consumers, in general, can accurately judge the quality and value of a product using only their eyes?” The study included more than 300 ordinary observers, and we quit only after gaining such consistency in responses that questioning more people was not changing the results.

About 90 percent of the participants expressed a clear consensus: “No, the general public cannot accurately judge product quality and value using only their eyes.” But then came the surprise. In exit interviews, about 90 percent of that 90 percent, or about 81 percent of the total, confided in us that while they had answered the question truthfully, they wanted us to understand that they were visually gifted, and that they, unlike others, could accurately judge quality and value using only their eyes. So there you have it; it is not a quality consumers attribute to others, but almost without

56

W W W. I D S A . O R G

exception, consumers all trust themselves to have special visual expertise not shared by the general public. So the appearance of the product is not simply a style statement, it’s how 81 percent of the public evaluates a product’s quality and value.

Consumers judge product quality and at least perceived value with their eyes. Psychologists teach us that about 70 percent of all of people’s percepts are visual. We do judge books by their covers, and a picture is worth a thousand words. Inventions and patents require drawings so that others can understand them. Eyewitnessing an event is universally held as decisive evidence; it is admissible in court and highly relied upon by juries. Seeing is believing.

What you see is what you get. Yet, in that company meeting no one championed the visual issue, which is somewhat understandable as the attendees’ education taught them that art school graduates were painters, ceramicists, sculptors, metalsmiths, weavers and glassblowers, but not great designers like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo.

3. Problem Definition The third responsibility of any client is to accurately state the problem to the designer without suggesting a solution.

This is a delicate responsibility, and sensitivity is required to accurately define the problem, or opportunity, with the necessary history and background, but without inadvertently predicting a preconceived solution that may preclude design greatness. A great designer once said, “Don’t ask me to design a bridge, tell me you want to cross the river.”

This process is not unlike the medical profession where the greatest risk lies with the diagnosis. If the diagnosis is not accurate, the medicine won’t make you well.

Think for a moment about that process. The patient (think: client) goes to the doctor (think: designer) and describes their symptoms to the best of their ability. Then the doctor takes over and starts asking questions. We often wonder why doctors ask some of the questions they do, but we trust their need to know, so we respond as accurately as we can in an effort to get well. So it is with the designer and the client. The designer must diagnose the client’s case and arrive at their own diagnosis for the client’s design wellness.

We observe this critical analysis occurring in many situations from the medical profession to NPR’s Car Talk when Click and Clack, the Tappet brothers, ask questions of the

car owner after the owner’s explanation of the problem. But to many clients, this analysis is still foreign in their relationship with an industrial designer.

The designer must diagnose their client’s case and prescribe their own cure if they are to achieve the design greatness that both desire and deserve, and the client must not only allow the designer to diagnose the case, they should insist on it.

One simple, yet useful, tool in problem definition is to not use the common or generic name of the existing product. For example, instead of referring to the product as a toaster, call it an appliance for caramelizing the surface of bread. That eliminates the preconceived notion that it is a somewhat rectangular box with two slots in the top.

4. Execution Obligation The client has an obligation to faithfully and accurately execute the accepted design—without unnecessary comprises. Don’t allow the design to be watered down for the convenience of the moment, or to save a small amount of money or time. No one ever said great things would be easy.

The best way to assure that the design will be faithfully executed is to keep the designer involved in the preproduction and rollout processes. The designer created it, but many others can destroy it. Only the designer can predicate the right degree of gloss or the opacity of the color or the proper draft angle. Such singularly may not seem important but collectively can become the unidentified visual clues to the consumer that the design lacks the authenticity necessary to achieve greatness. The consumer won’t be able to identify or articulate specifically what about the design is not right, nor will the client—probably because it’s not one big identifiable thing; it’s a collection of little visual things.

It’s also dangerous to rely on consumer research to ferret out consumer’s specific opinions, unless it is done with great care and double- or triple-checked, and then an exit interviewed is conducted, preferably one-on-one by a clinical psychologist. As an example, I just paid about $40,000 for a Volkswagen Tiguan. When filling out VW’s post-sale survey, I checked the box that said I bought it because of its “safety in crash tests” because there was no box titled “appearance,” and I was in too big a hurry to check the “other reason” box and write in my explanation.

In retrospect, I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to tell VW how important the car’s design was to me.

“Companies get the designer they deserve.”

—Massimo Vignelli

5. Infiltrate Peripherals The last must for great design is for the client to allow the industrial designer to infiltrate all the peripherals that accompany the product. The catalog sheets, packages, displays, hang tags, rating labels, warranties, advertisements, master shipping cartons, etc. are all part of the product’s total image and must be designed with the same care, consistency and design philosophy as the product. They are not simply necessary afterthoughts but are often treated as such. The total will then exceed the sum of the parts.

Conclusions Massimo Vignelli, a well-regarded, talented designer once said, “Companies get the designers they deserve.” I might add, designers get the companies they deserve. Either way, their mutual compatibility produces fitting results and fitting rewards.

Our competitors to the East and West—in Europe and Asia—appear to be increasingly producing more great designs than we are here in the US, based on IDSA’s International Design Excellence Awards competition. Is that because they have better design schools and better-educated designers? No. In fact, many of their better designers were educated in the US. Is it because their designers are more talented? No. It’s simply because more of their clients recognize the extraordinary influence of design on their businesses and are willing to do whatever is necessary, such as adhering to the five must obligations, to achieve design greatness. A number of Asia’s and Europe’s top companies, in fact, have Americans as heads of design, and at a significantly higher level of corporate authority than is common in the US. If you have a client who is not aware of their responsibilities to great design, or who does not practice all five musts, give them a copy of this article. You will be doing a lot for yourself, your client and for America, but remember to then give them half the credit for the ensuing great design.

I’m always enamored each year to witness the designer and the client standing together on the stage at the IDEA ceremony while the Gold is handed out. Both thanking the other and almost without exception remarking something akin to “I couldn’t have done it without you.” How true! n

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

57

S H O W CASE

DESIGN THAT INSPIRES “Game-changing aerodynamic

”

hydration system for triathletes.

Nathan Sports AP Pro designed by Anvil Studios, Inc. for Nathan Sports; www.anvil-studios.com; www.nathansports.com

58

W W W. I D S A . O R G

“The world’s first completely gas-free, dual-speed framing nailer.”

DEWALT Cordless 20V MAX* XR Lithium Ion Brushless Dual Speed Framing Nailer designed by DEWALT Industrial Tool Co.; www.DEWALT.com

“The first purpose-built electric vehicle of its kind to perform infrastructure maintenance and provide supplemental off-grid power.

”

MPS designed by Sundberg+Ferar | Product Innovation Studio for Dannar; www.SundbergFerar.com

The submitters pay for the publishing to this unjuried showcase.

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

59

S H O W CASE

“Paper, pen, pixels.”

Livescribe 3 Smart pen designed by Whipsaw Inc. for Livescribe Inc., www.whipsaw.com

[$]

“Designed with university students and urban commuters in mind, GenZe has developed a City Transport Cycle aimed at the new urban commuter.

”

GenZe designed by GenZe team with Sundberg+Ferar | Product Innovation Studio; www.SundbergFerar.com

“Touch-free sensor technology means no germs are passed on.”

Compact Sensor Soap Pump designed by LDA + simplehuman for simplehuman; www.LDALLC.com

[$]

[$] 60

Items shown with this symbol are available for purchase.

W W W. I D S A . O R G

“The world’s most advanced garage door opener with built-in myQ technology and a battery backup.

”

LiftMaster® 8550 Garage Door Opener designed

by The Chamberlain Group/Advanced Development and Eleven for LiftMaster; LiftMaster.com

[$]

“The number lock portable hard drive can provide additional physical security for personal data.”

Smart Portable Hard Drive designed by the Department of Mechanical, Materials & Manufacturing Engineering, The University of Nottingham (UNNC); Yi-Teng.Shih@nottingham.edu.cn

“Iconic visual branding for the next-generation line of intelligent gate openers.”

Liftmaster Residential & Commercial Gate Opener Lines

by The Chamberlain Group/Advanced Development for Liftmaster; www.liftmaster.com

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

61

S H O W CASE

“Smoke alarms are too

important to be annoying.

They should be smart, connected and beautiful.

”

Nest Protect, Smoke and CO Alarm designed by Bould Design for Nest Labs; www.nest.com

“Helping seniors live independently and stay connected confidently.”

Lively, Activity Sensing System designed by Bould Design for Lively, Inc; www.mylively.com

“The little black box that’s not a little black box. Stream on!”

Roku, Media Streamer designed by Bould Design for Roku, Inc.; www.roku.com

[$] 62

Items shown with this symbol are available for purchase.

W W W. I D S A . O R G

[$]

“Cinema euphoria.”

Cinema One Movie Server designed by Whipsaw Inc. for Kaleidescape Inc., www.whipsaw.com

[$]

“All-terrain thump.”

Rukus Xtreme Solar Powered Music Player designed by Whipsaw Inc. for Eton Corp., www.whipsaw.com

[$]

I N N O V AT I O N S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

63

ID+ME

DONALD GENARO, L/IDSA

D

onald Genaro, L/IDSA began his design career at Henry Dreyfuss Associates following his graduation from Pratt. He worked alongside Dreyfuss himself and eventually rose to become the senior partner. Among other products, he worked on Singer sewing machines, John Deere tractors, Polaroid cameras, American Standard fixtures, and facility and aircraft interiors for American Airlines. He may be most famous for his work on AT&T’s compact 1965 Trimline phone where he moved the dial from the base to the handset.

Why did you choose to enter the design profession? I didn’t really choose so much as I was enticed. I apprenticed with an architect, F.W. Fisher, and along came the Korean War. While I was on leave getting ready to be discharged, I visited Pratt to arrange continuation of my architectural studies. While there I stopped by the ID department because I had an active curiosity about industrial design.

So I asked to see the department’s head, Alexander Kostellow, and I was told he wasn’t available. But I was in uniform, and maybe that made a difference because in a few minutes I found myself in his office. What I thought would be a little bit of Q&A turned out to be over an hour of conversation with this very impassioned, intense fellow who convinced me I should pursue a career in industrial design.

He had a wall full of form studies in his office. Coming from the straight-line world of architecture, that amorphous world intrigued me.

That was a long time ago. I never looked back. That meeting was serendipity for me.

How has the design profession changed since your first day on the job? The design profession has changed remarkably. Frankly, it had to in order to stay ahead of the technology curve, which accelerated beyond everyone’s wildest expectations. Now every time the Apple CEO comes on stage you know the world’s going to change.

There’ll be new design services to meet the needs imposed by new systems, and therefore the paths a designer can take are now incredibly diverse.

When I first started, industrial design’s scope was narrow by comparison. You dealt with physical entities and you designed things. Now designers can involve themselves in

myriad areas that go well beyond physical entities. That’s really exciting for a young person wanting to enter the field. I think students nowadays should get the old Alvin Toffler book of the 1970s, Future Shock, which gives a pretty good prediction as to the galloping charge of change and how we have to run to keep up with it.

Apart from reading Future Shock, if you had the ear of someone just discovering industrial design, what would you say to them? A career in design holds the promise of being one of the most beneficial and exciting influences on society going forward. All one has to do is look at what an industrial design education covers, and that should light a fire under anybody who has thoughts of entering the field.

It’s too bad we haven’t found a way to better help poorer nations through design. Maybe the generation coming up now can find a way to do it other than just helping them weave a better basket. It would be nice if the government saw the benefit of that and could find some backing for it—something like a Peace Corps for industrial design.

How does design inform the parts of your life that aren’t billable hours? I’m 82 years old. I retired in 1994. So there’s been a lengthy hiatus in my billable hours! But design continues to influence my everyday life in subtle ways. As a designer, you can’t help looking at everything through the design prism. It’s an occupational hazard. No matter how trivial the purchase, experience or whatever, it’s measured against a design standard.

What to some people would be an ordinary purchase can be a chore for me. I just bought a runner to put down by the front door. For a simple item like that, somebody would go to a carpet store and come back in 20 minutes with what they need. It took me about two weeks to find the one I wanted!

It can be a chore finding that right thing and not settling for a not-so-right thing. It goes into just about everything I acquire, everything I investigate, the places I want to go, the environments I want to be in. It’s hard to explain, but it’s in our blood, I guess.

—Tim Adkins, IDSA Director of Content Development tima@idsa.org

64

W W W. I D S A . O R G

EYE SCREAM Belle-V Ice Cream Scoop