INNOVATION Spring 2019: A New Era

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA  SPRING 2019

May 3, 2019

San Francisco, CA

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SPRING 2019

INNOVATION

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

Executive Editor Mark Dziersk, FIDSA Managing Director LUNAR | Chicago mark@lunar.com Advisory Council Gregg Davis, IDSA Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Creative Director Jill Brown 415.521.9029 jill.brown.creative@gmail.com

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

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FEATURES

A NEW ERA

37 Artificial Intelligence, 24 A New Era for Industrial Design Thinking and Design the Future of Designers

By Max Burton, IDSA, Guest Editor as Programmers 28 The Entrepreneurial Journey

By Austen Angell, FIDSA

By Ti Chang, IDSA

IDSA AMBASSADORS 3M Design, St. Paul, MN Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL; Santa Barbara, CA Covestro, LLC North America, Pittsburgh, PA Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN

29 Embrace the Ambiguity

IN EVERY ISSUE

Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH

By Helen Maria Nugent

4 Chair’s Report

McAndrews, Held & Malloy, Ltd., Chicago, IL

30 People Are at the Center of Good Design

By Qin Li, IDSA

Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO

5 IDSA HQ

Samsung Design America, San Francisco, CA

By Richard Whitehall

Chris Livaudais, IDSA

TEAGUE, Seattle, WA

31 Cohesion

8 From the Editor

THRIVE, Atlanta, GA

By Mieko Kusano

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

32 The Future Is Circular

10 Book Review

By Leif Huff

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

33 Design for the Collective

12 Design Defined

By Albert Shum

34 The Value of Design Doing

By Gina Reimann

35 Learn Your Collaborators’ Jobs

By Brett Lovelady, IDSA

36 Flipping the “T”

Charter supporters indicated in bold.

For more information about becoming an Ambassador, please contact IDSA at 703.707.6000.

Patricia Moore, FIDSA

13 Beautility

By Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

16 Design DNA

By Scott Henderson

19 A Look Back

By Allen Samuels, L/IDSA

By Alastair Curtis

Left: Playing In the Innovation Garage. See p. 8.

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SPRING 2019

INNOVATION

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. ©2019 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 38, No. 1, 2019; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

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C H A I R ’ S R E PO R T

THE HUB TO CONNECT ALL CREATIVE MINDS

W

e experienced an unstable year in 2018, socially, economically and politically. For IDSA, though, it was an excellent year full of positive changes and organizational developments. We welcomed our new passionate Executive Director, Chris Livaudais, IDSA. We saw the new brand and trophy for IDEA come to life, and we hit the highest record for IDEA entries to date, resulting in a successful and inspiring International Design Conference led by two amazing emcees, John Maeda and Debbie Millman. John and Debbie shared a novel inclusive design approach that extends beyond traditional industrial design. The Board of Directors under the lead of Megan Neese, IDSA, worked very hard together to support the organization and grow its capabilities to better serve our community. As the new Chair this year, I am looking forward to working with the Board of the Directors in supporting a more significant progression in 2019.

IDSA is an organization for all industrial designers in the United States, and because of that we want to truly be the foundational hub of our community, connect the creative minds of designers of all ages and industries, inspire each individual and provide mentorship for professional growth. Our main focus this year will be to foster a stronger connection with our community. To do that, we want to create a better experience for our members, from the digital to physical space, from the educational realms to the professional worlds, from the individual to the team, and, in each case, with complete inclusivity. The Board will focus on supporting Chris and the IDSA team to strengthen our brand and content, to share our passion with the community and to initiate actionable near- and long-term plans to bring value to our members and to close the gap between the organization and each individual designer.

We have all experienced the evolution of the design industry over the past few years. The boundaries of industrial design have been extended further than ever.

We worked on technology that’s hidden and blended into our lives, robots that have artificial intelligence and deep learning capabilities, sustainable materials that reduce

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complexity for manufacturing and recycling, and interfaces that can sit on any surface. Human-centric experience design has led us from the drawing board and 3D CAD to interpersonal collaboration with other disciplines and categories: brand, digital, fashion, environment, material science, psychology. Industrial design as we know it today is no longer a traditional linear method of working from engineering to production.

With this progression, our organization is evolving to support the growth of and serve as leaders in the industry. You can see this in the new IDEA categories created between 2017 and 2019. There is more cross-disciplinary discussion on our IDC, and much more is happening in the way of local events under the direction of our chapter leaders and volunteers. With the fast-changing industry, self-learning has become a required new skill for designers.

We want to bring in knowledge and expertise that support the growth of our members from each professional level in the areas of business, new technology, leadership and professional development. We also aim to bring more to our community in 2019 in the form of digital content and physical events.

Furthermore, in 2019 we will continue to focus on diversity and inclusivity. The second Women In Design conference will be held in San Francisco in May with amazing speakers from Google and Lyft. We are also very honored to have Maaike Evers, IDSA, serve as the Jury Chair of IDEA 2019. Along with her, we have a diverse team with deep professional experiences in every design category.

It’s also worth mentioning that our Board of Directors is 50 percent female and male of color. This diversity will bring an authentic and unique perspective to IDSA’s brand and voice.

Like I said, 2019 will be an exciting year. We look forward to bringing you more new experiences and opportunities to grow your profession. Hope to see you all at our conference and events.

—Qin Li, IDSA, IDSA Board Chair qin@fuseproject.com

IDSA H Q

RIDING THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE

Since January, the team at IDSA headquarters has been hard at work preparing for what we expect to be a wonderful and exciting 2019. These efforts are building on our positive performance in 2018 and combined with strategic adjustments are designed to reinvigorate the experience members have with our organization. I, along with the Board of Directors, would like to provide you with the following in the hopes that it will strengthen our collective understanding as to the current and future plans of the Society.

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I D S A HQ

A Quick Look at the Current Landscape I think we can all agree that the speed at which things evolve has been rapidly increasing year over year. Some of the most successful products, services and businesses today (think iPad, Spotify, Instagram) did not exist 10 years ago. These have fundamentally redefined how people connect, create and consume. Yes, everything around IDSA has been changing, yet we have maintained a relatively quiet and constant pace.

As a result, the needs of our membership have progressed outside of what our current offerings could provide. A rift was slowly becoming wider and wider. As an organization, IDSA is not alone here. Even the most laudable professional associations are undergoing massive transformations due to pervasive macro trends that have slowly been undermining everything about the traditional association model.

Together they pose a formidable opposition to our growth.

These include: Battle for time and attention: Split seconds elapse between someone’s decision to invest, participate or engage. People are bombarded with messaging from all sides and across multiple channels each and every day.

Heightened expectations: People have come to expect hyper-me, hyper-now, hyper-contextual experiences no matter what the context or who is providing it.

Fragmentation and specialization: A one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t work anymore. In trying to be everything to everyone, it’s easier to become not much to anyone.

Generational gaps: Our audience spans the entire arc of a professional career—from student through retirement. Subsets within that arc have vastly different experiences, value structures and mental systems that impact how they view even the concept of what being a member of something means.

Competition: Every single offering IDSA produces has competition now that wasn’t there before. This means that people have many options and will choose to invest their time and money where they think they’ll see the most return.

Shifting technology: Digital services and rapidly accessible technology has fundamentally changed how people connect, access information and expect to interact.

None of these are unsurmountable, but how we respond to these trends today is different than what we might have done in years prior. Transition is always difficult; however, I hope the details below provide insight into our plans to position the Society for the next 50 years of success.

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IDSA’s Future Vision Plans Throughout 2018, as Interim Executive Director, I worked with the Board and IDSA staff collectively to develop an actionable vision and strategic plan. This effort took inspiration from and builds on the momentum, conversations and recommendations of previous Board cohorts from many years prior. I shared our future vision with the membership in New Orleans during the annual business meeting / year in review at the International Design Conference in September 2018.

We are excited to carry this vision into 2019 and beyond. At its core, the future of IDSA is built around a renewed focus on strengthened communities and quality content to return lasting health to the Society and an improved membership value. More specifically: Community means creating connections over followers and create engaging environments and opportunities that allow members to enrich their lives and careers as industrial designers. These are facilitated (primarily) through in-person networking and knowledge-exchange encounters.

Content means quality over quantity. We need to work toward developing and delivering meaningful subject matter that (1) is relevant to industrial designers, (2) aides in career advancement and professional development, (3) provides an educated opinion on the current state of industrial design as a profession, a business tool and an impact agent, and (4) uniquely highlights the talent and successes of our community members.

Value means experiences over transactions. Value is an individually held calculation that adapts throughout the stages of an industrial designer’s career. Value must be experienced in order to take hold at a deeper level.

Put in even simpler terms: Community + Content = Value

“Our pursuit of meaningful one-on-one connections will always remain.”

Looking Ahead Our history must not define or impair what we do in the future. Yes, we need to be mindful of our tremendous legacy, but we must simultaneously maintain the ability to sustain the speed of our surroundings, and we should be in a continuous search for more opportunities for awareness, inclusion, progression and success.

Our Society is a community of designers who support one another and the industrial design profession at the same time. Our composition and value are strengthened by voices from diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives— this must be reflected in every aspect of what we do.

IDSA is part of a global dialog of designers to whom we can contribute a unique viewpoint, that of industrial design.

We are a champion for industrial design within this design ecosystem, and our voice needs to remain steady, true and trusted. We have always excelled at bringing people together in shared discourse. These connections are likely what most of you reflect on when communicating why the organization is so important. Our pursuit of meaningful one-on-one connections will always remain.

Change is never easy, but I look forward to this tremendous opportunity ahead of us. I encourage you all to keep IDSA’s local and national leadership teams connected to the conversation so that we can work through this transition together. We are all designers here, and I would hope that we can view this as a pivotal moment to rethink, from the ground up, how IDSA supports its members and the design community as a whole. We are on the crest of a mighty wave. It is powerful. It is important. It is necessary.

And it is so very exciting.

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

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F RO M T HE E DI TOR

PLAYING IN THE INNOVATION GARAGE I’ve been working in a garage quite a lot lately. Not on cars or home improvement projects, but rather on design-led initiatives, I call these initiatives “innovation garages.” It’s a play on the idea that Apple, Disney and HP, to name a few, actually started in garages. You see, garages are a place where you can experiment, take some chances on ideas and learn from prototyping. So why is this important? Well, a garage is also a method of working. I think of an innovation garage as a pop-up design studio employing an inclusive and agile way of designing. By inclusive I mean with the clients.

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In the old method of designer and client interaction, once you were done designing you would take the answers to the client and show them the result. In the innovation garage, the client participates in creating the results. The innovation garage is a compression of cross-discipline professionals and the client, who together can get to better answers faster.

I’ll stop here as I mean not to explain the method in detail but rather only to demonstrate a change that is upon us or, at least for me as a professional designer, a new model for design in the future. A couple of months ago Max Burton, the Global Lead at Fjord, the Design and Innovation unit of Accenture Interactive, posed the idea of writing for INNOVATION on the topic of this change. I immediately took him up on the offer and made a proposition: What if that was the theme of an entire issue? Would you guest edit? To my great happiness he agreed.

So in this issue of INNOVATION you’ll see this idea of a fundamental change occurring in our profession—of designers serving more disciplines, of new methods of working and interaction—explained by nine amazing authors Max invited to share their perspectives. It’s an issue that is extremely timely.

In the future there will still be a lot written about the traditional role of the industrial designer. My own view is that it’s a fundamental profession whose contributions will always be valid. It’s just that the rapid growth in design is occurring elsewhere. For example, let’s face it, everyone needs to up their game in the digital space and not everyone needs a new line of products. So design in digital gets the rocket fuel. While we’ve hinted at and touched on these topics in previous issues, here we’re devoting an entire issue to it.

Finally, double entendre intended, some news. This will be my last issue as Executive Editor of INNOVATION. I’ve done it twice now, both for five-year periods. It was never intended to be more than a two-year appointment.

So I think it’s time to pass the baton, so to speak. It has been an amazing honor and a privilege beyond what words can express. The privilege of interacting with the great IDSA colleagues and thought leaders who have contributed during my time and of my personal growth and development, for example, acquiring the discipline of writing a 1000–1200 word editorial for each issue, not to mention reading some truly inspiring books and writing another 800 words when I did double duty as book reviewer the last few years. It’s absolutely true that I got more out of it than I put into it. Which is also true of my time with all things IDSA. It’s been a personal pleasure, so it’s a little tricky writing this last one. The topic fits the moment.

Thank you to Max for guest editing this amazing issue. Thank you to IDSA and all the amazing guest editors, writers and contributors over my 10-year run as Executive Editor. I have to single out two incredible people in particular: First, Karen Berube, who was right there with me for all 10 years and whose spot-on art direction, editorial support and partnership has been invaluable. And to Jennifer Yankopolus for her amazing editing and partnership in making me appear to be a better writer than I am. My final thank you is to all of you who have engaged with and read INNOVATION. It’s your continued support that make this journal the key piece of membership benefit that it is.

So in closing, time for me to get back to the garage and work on new challenges. Looking forward to seeing what happens next. My best wishes to all of you.

—Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, INNOVATION Executive Editor mark@lunar.com

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B O O K RE V I E W

STREAMLINER: RAYMOND LOEWY AND IMAGE-MAKING IN THE AGE OF AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

A

s this issue of INNOVATION is dedicated to the new happenings in design, I thought it fitting to juxtapose the topic with a bit of old school. And who is a more fitting master of the old school to feature than Raymond Loewy, FIDSA. In fact, as luck would have it, Allen Samuels, L/IDSA, who I had the distinct privilege to study under at the University of Michigan, has written this issue’s design history column mentioning Loewy extensively. In addition, Pattie Moore, FIDSA, one of industrial design’s most respected and able practitioners and a close personal friend, had included Loewy in her Design Defined column, which she generously agreed to contribute. Both of these articles plus this book review allow Loewy to become the counterweight to the provocative and exciting content found elsewhere in these pages.

Onto the book! With Streamliner, let me just tell you, you are not going to find a better single read about Loewy the man, his office, his influence, his contributions and his imperfections. John Wall, a gifted author, journalist, former media relations specialist at Penn State and a researcher with apparently mountains of Loewy data, writes an engaging and, dare I say, surprisingly pageturning book. From Loewy’s early iconic breakthrough (i.e., the Gerstner duplicating machine) to the classic story that opens the book: The then 78-year-old Loewy travels to NASA in an air-conditioned limousine only to stop just short of arrival in order to don a space suit. He then jumps into his Studebaker Avanti for the last few miles, proclaiming aloud to anyone who would listen, “I did it for the troops,” or something to that affect. Ever the salesman, the Loewy profiled in this book, who masterfully navigates the early and midcentury and basically survives the later decades in the ’70s especially, is brought to life as a carefully detailed and empathetic character.

In addition to portraying Loewy the man, the book contains numerous tales, facts, history and insights that reflect the state of the art that industrial design finds itself in today.

You see, it turns out that Loewy’s office even 50 years ago was cross functional, was global and was engaged in experience design, service design and new ways of thinking about comprehensive design thinking and doing. Like globalism,

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which comes and goes, one is struck by the idea that ideas like design thinking tend to cycle. Again, in many ways, reading this book will help you to better understand the content in this issue of INNOVATION and the changes happening to industrial design today.

That said, the book also does a nice job of explaining the what and why of how industrial design became a thing in the first place. And by thing, I mean a profession. In the beginning chapters we have references to the Bauhaus and its origins from the early 1930s and the creation of a philosophy around ID as a recognition of the need to tame the Industrial Revolution.

Where the book really starts to explain the beginnings of ID is in chapter 3, where Loewy and his contemporaries—and they are all there, Walter Dorwin Teague, FIDSA, Henry Dreyfus, FIDSA, Norman Bel Geddes, FIDSA, etc.—are prominently featured and referenced. Chapter 4 contains an inspiring story of how the young Loewy paid his dues to achieve his first locomotive commission. And chapter 5, well you get the idea… Streamliner, like many of the locomotives Loewy designed, picks up steam as you go along. It’s a terrific read and I highly recommend it. While perhaps not perfect, it is the perfect book if you are interested in Raymond Loewy, the birth of the profession of industrial design and a terrific juxtaposition to the ideas in these pages.

A final footnote, along with the editorial in the front of this issue, this will in fact be my last book review for INNOVATION, for now at least. I have tried to present a balanced review of each book I read for you, but, to be honest, most of them have been terrific. So again, it was something I got more out of than I put into. Thank you to IDSA and INNOVATION for this unique, thoroughly cherished and enjoyable opportunity.

Please let me close by saying what a privilege it has been to write these reviews, to be part of this great journal and to give back to IDSA just this little bit.

Best always, Mark —Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, INNOVATION Executive Editor mark@lunar.com

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D E S I G N DE F I NE D

DESIGN+LOVE “I never expected that one could fall so completely in love with a nation and a people. Every time I see the Stars and Stripes in the breeze, I get the same emotional feeling. Aesthetically speaking, it is perfect. One of the outstanding “designs” of all times. It may be that a nation gets the flag it deserves.”

—Raymond Loewy, FIDSA

F

orty years ago, I sat silently in the privacy of Mr. Loewy’s inner sanctum, a dramatically lit corner office that featured one of his favorite works, a painting of an Apollo lunar landing. Of all of the exemplary accomplishments of Raymond Loewy and his global staff, it was the habitability design concepts for NASA and Sky Lab, the first space station, that brought him the most pride.

Loewy was focused on a single piece of paper, which I recognized as a proposal I had prepared for his approval.

For over a year, I had been researching how Raymond Loewy International could and should be engaged in the creation of solutions for the challenges faced by forgotten consumers, elders and people of all abilities. Today, design inclusivity is considered a norm, but in the 1970s it was a rare criterion.

After exhausting any possible collaborations with government agencies and current clients, we were faced with failure to achieve the vision of design for all. But a serendipitous meeting with an SNL makeup artist and the haunting memory of journalist John Griffin’s 1959 immersive research disguised as a black man in the Deep South had provided an inspiration that I hoped would be a reprieve for our dream.

As his gaze lifted from his desktop to me, I was surprised to see him make his way to the chair next to mine.

“Why do you want to do this thing, Pat?” he asked softly.

Blinking back tears, I answered, “I love my GrandFather.”

For the next hour I described how my GrandFather’s quality of life had slowly shifted from one of autonomy and independence, of caring for his family and home, to being one of inability to accomplish the tasks of everyday living.

As he aged, he lost the capacity to enjoy cooking, fishing and his avocation of woodworking. He could no longer walk his dog or manage the rigors of flight to his beloved Ireland.

One night, when I came home for an unexpected visit, I found him sitting alone in the darkness. When I flipped

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the wall switch in his bedroom I saw the tears on his cheek. My proud patriarch was unable to turn the rotary switch on the table lamp at his Raymond Loewy sitting in the full-scale mock-up side. Design had of the Moskvitch redesign under the USA–USSR failed him.

Design Agreement. The photo was taken in Loewy’s New York office in 1976.

And so, Mr. Loewy approved my immersion into life as an elder. Like my GrandFather, he worried and waited as I traveled throughout North America disguised as women in their 80s, experiencing the array of betrayal of design, the inadequacies and indignities of design’s failure to recognize the needs of every individual as deserving of our passion. When I re-emerged nearly four years later, these two extraordinary men whom I loved were delighted with the universality in design philosophy and responsibility the empathic research inspired.

Every design exemplar is a labor of love. Our endeavors to encompass the needs of all people as equal is an effort of love for the lifespan of each consumer’s wants and wishes, desires and dreams.

Visionary Steven Holt, FIDSA, was the embodiment of Design+Love. His prolific life of creativity was haunted with extreme health challenges, and yet he exemplified love in every lecture, every publication, every design. He left us with his beloved spouse and creative partner, Mara, by his side. His final proclamation: Love, love, love, love; LOVE. Amen.

—Patricia Moore, FIDSA, President, MooreDesign Associates, designmoore@cox.net

BEAUTILI TY

WHAT IS INDUSTRIAL DESIGN? The first article published about industrial design in a major American magazine, the February 1934 issue of Fortune, was attributed to George Nelson, FIDSA. He was 26 and just finishing his Prix de Rome when he ghostwrote “Both Fish and Fowl … is the depression-weaned vocation of Industrial Design. Its three dimensions have confused the issue as much as its feats and failures.” Describing the broad scope of the new profession, he foresaw issues we are still grappling with: “Thus in every instance one returns to the three dimensions of industrial design: appearance, cost and use … confusion attends the varying emphasis put on each of these factors. … But the varying methods by which similar products are being designed raises the question of how this designing is being done.”

In my last column I tried to peel the onion to reveal the layers of how industrial design is done. Now for another experience, let’s take a walk through history to see how design’s horizons have broadened. I see three paradigm shifts from (1) practical function to (2) meaning, abstract symbolic artifact and now (3) experience design. For example, an assignment like a first-aid kit would have been focused on (1) the box and then the (2) the Band-Aid to (3) considering that the whole healthcare system is on the table! Experience design born in the digital revolution—when 2D information could move, react, link—was more than simply graphic design, so they called it experience design. The concept was live and kept growing. Razorfish’s Craig Kanarick told me that Razorfish should “design what’s on the screen and what the screen is on.” The product has always been the key physical touchstone: 3D products, processes, activities,

social interaction, emotion and business, services, healthcare events, 4D omnichannel journeys. Nowadays, everything is a designable experience—food, biology, nanotechnology, and macro-political and virtual environments, even framing up the question of what experience to make!

Prehistoric people didn’t have that luxury. They made things by transforming raw materials (like chipping rocks) or cooking stuff (firing pots) to make tools and decorations.

Materials and processes and the physical demands of the craft or machine are the same problems engineers and designers solve today. Creating form and function defined the profession. In 1945 one of the first teachers in Pratt’s new ID department, J. Gordon Lippincott, wrote an article in College Art Journal titled “Industrial Design Is a Profession” saying that “essential to the styling of a product are four basic elements: 1. Art, 2. Engineering, 3. Economics, and

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4. Humanities.” Pratt is an art school, so it used artistic methodologies to teach us how to master the practical requirements of industry. When I was a student, the focus was on form. We concentrated on learning how to make beautiful, elegant things. We practiced all the exercises given to us by Rowena Reed Kostellow, FIDSA: curved wire, massaging plasticine clay, filing salt blocks, smoothing Bondo, sanding primer so that with final spray-paint it would have a beautiful highlight flowing across the form. We also learned the various properties of metals and plastic, injection molding and draft angles, and other production methods so that we could go out into the world to design cars or toasters that could actually be produced and that looked good. We were all about sensual design: the look and feel good. Designers didn’t need to talk or read; all they needed was artistic talent. Our archrival—ArtCenter— was on a similar course, but focused on making beautiful renderings, which we poopooed because they were only two-dimensional! Skin deep.

“Form is a diagram of force,” D’Arcy Thompson wrote in On Growth and Form (1917), which could have been describing industrial designers deep in the function stage: ergonomics and workflow analysis, cycle times, nuts and bolts pushing the boundaries of new inventions, and styling to satisfy our clients and consumers. Like Raymond Loewy’s MAYA: “Most advance, yet acceptable.” Dieter Rams plainly stated that good design is honest and “only well-executed objects can be beautiful.” We didn’t think all those Braun products said anything except “Look! I’m beautiful good design!”

We didn’t think about products having meaning or social consequences beyond practical use or good looks.

Design competitions promoted design with a simple rule: look good. We really didn’t care about any subtext of modernist privilege and elitist capitalism. Until Michael McCoy, IDSA, and Reinhart Butter (who is credited with coining the term “product semantics”) showed us that products mean more than just their utility. Cranbrook’s grad program was researching ideas and pushed the boundaries of what products could say from metaphors to jokes.

Ettore Sottsass’ anti-style Memphis declared, according to design writer Vera Graaf, that “good taste was the bad thing.” How could Memphis products function “with saw-toothed edges; some resemble slices of lemon, toothbrushes and imaginary animals”? At the time when the Berlin Wall fell and communist economics collapsed, Modernism crumbled. It also dawned on us that our profession’s manifesto was really only a style, not a blueprint for utopia. The field split into two extremes: too much

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theory or too little theory. Designers were either soldiers in commercial consumerism or they rebelled, claiming a higher cultural value in ideas like Memphis or product semantics.

It didn’t matter which side you were on; the products spoke for themselves as artifacts with cultural significance or brand ambassadors—it was apparent to all that our work functioned in a more complex field than just sitting on a shelf. In his teacup assignment, Bruce Hannah, IDSA, told his students to not just design a lonely teacup but to create a teapot for brewing, sugar cubes, tablecloth, chairs, the room and also the whole tea ceremony since all that is part of the experience. He called it the ritual, and his students were the priests! Designers are authors of stories where products are not just tools but ceremonial characters of cultural consequence.

I met anthropologist Beth Mosher, IDSA, when she came to work at Smart Design. She had a BA in anthropology and worked on archaeological digs, intending to do that for a PhD, but instead of digging up artifacts to understand ancient people, she became an industrial designer to create things that make modern civilizations. In a similar vein, beginning in March, Snarkitecture co-founder Daniel Arsham is staging an exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum of fictional archaeological relics of the future, casting iconic objects of late-20th-century American life in sand, selenite crystal and volcanic ash.

From “form follows meaning,” as Steven Holt, IDSA, said, the page was turning to designing experiences. As the digital era was dawning, Bill Moggridge, FIDSA, envisioned the field of interaction design. Stripping away emotion and subjectivity, he saw that everything people do is an interaction—not just digital clicks and swipes. A GoodGrips handle is an interface for the peeling interaction, and the little rubber fins make it a good experience. When Bill died, IDEO’s other founder David Kelly said of him on NPR, “He changed the professional design completely from thinking of it as we’re going to design these objects, we’re going to make these things beautiful, to we’re going to design the way these things fit into people’s lives, we’re going to care about the people.”

Graphic designers became communication designers, and like exhibition designers who want to say they create more than displays, we needed a new way to describe our field, a blanket that covers all the senses, not just the visual and physical interface, but the haptic and illusions, rational and emotional feelings, service design—open ended and virtual, which can only be described as experiences!

Destination dreamland! If the cup is the interface in an activity, the scope of industrial design expanded by an

order of magnitude to include the holistic user interaction and emotional connections with the users. Although the emotional–mental part of the experience is playing in your head, the physical part is more genuine, it has real consequences—it’s live!

The geeks may have hijacked experience design with the digital revolution, but the IoT is bringing it home! All products are getting smarter, and eventually everything will be connected with data as well as biology. Everything in the network will affect everything. As Howard Beale explains in Network, “Functionality is spread through the network.”

Networks and AI are connected as, Albert-László Barabási said in his book Linked, “The rapidly unfolding science of networks is uncovering phenomena that are far more exciting and revealing than the casual use of the word network could ever convey … the interconnected world around us … will dominate the new century to a much greater degree than most people are yet ready to acknowledge. They will drive the fundamental questions that form our view of the world.”

“When the touchstones are more beautiful, the experience will be too.”

Florida State University, with its own Venn diagram, says that its experience design program is about “rethinking relations between people, objects and the environments.”

Why do people go to museums instead of reading a book or watching YouTubes? Because designers create the whole (better) experience. Designing the exhibits for the new planetarium in Shanghai, we not only were able to make the theories of astrophysics come alive in front of the visitors’ eyes, but they can actually touch them! Products are literally the touchstone of ideas and brands—they communicate with their users with the loudest voice: reality!

The things we create affect the whole ecology of things, their use, the environment and the behavior they induce.

The vice president of design at Grohe, Michael Seum, says, “The industrial designers’ super power is changing human behavior for the better!”

Science is making us aware of large implications of ecology and systems that impact communities, public health, the environment and our own microbiomes living inside us all. What’s more total than cradle to cradle? Business realities and social consequences are squeezing the training that students get in college. Professionals used to complain to the schools that the requirement for new computer skills was eating up all the students’ time. Faced with the fire hose of wicked problems, design students are now taught the same skills business students get: design methods and research, systems thinking, interdisciplinary, sustainability and social innovation. Of course, everyone needs strategy and critical thinking skills, but industrial designers need two more special skills: the ability to make it real and the talent to make it look good. NY Times columnist David Brooks says, “Curiosity, excitement, frustration, confusion, dread, delight, worry and, hopefully, perseverance and joy. You’ve got to have an educated emotional vocabulary to maneuver through all those stages.” And a design vocabulary— learning to appreciate and create beauty—is a life-long quest! Remember what Gordon Lippincott wrote back in 1944: “Of all basic qualities, the industrial designer must have art—without this, he is not a designer.”

Designing everything carries responsibilities. How are we going to cope with the growth of our scope? Band-Aids?

If we are going to make the world better, we need to use our core competency: making things better! Let’s not forget that we can design bad experiences too! We can’t lose sight of industrial design’s traditional skill set in contributing to making things beautiful. When the touchstones are more beautiful, the experience will be too. Beautility.

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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THE PERILS OF DESIGN THINKING “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.

Imagination encircles the world.” —Albert Einstein, 1929

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s it a good idea to empathize with the user? Sure. Define problems based on their needs? Why not. Target design concepts toward solutions for them? Yep. Prototype and test? Obviously. Will this process guarantee innovation? No. Can it rob your design of soul? Yes! Design thinking attempts to explain a design process to non-designers before their attention span runs out. It takes too long to include an explanation of the other influences that make a great design, and designers—let alone anyone—have a hard time articulating such nuances, especially before the audience is lost. We look at a good design and say it has that certain je ne sais quoi (translated from French as “I don’t know what”). We just can’t put our finger on why we like it, meaning the attributes that give the product its deeper meaning, its inner world, its soul are nontangible and our inability to define them is notorious.

Design thinking’s virtues have been heralded by all walks of the industry from the Harvard Business Review to Core 77. As a defined process though, is design thinking all that innovative? Or in fact even original? Hearken back to the sixth grade and your first lesson on the scientific method. In the 1500s, Sir Francis Bacon pushed for an empirical process that coincidentally starts with five oddly familiar steps. The first is to observe nature (akin to interviewing/observing users).

Secondly, you define statements called hypotheses (just like creating a problem statement in design thinking). Next you conduct experiments and track results (like prototyping and testing in design thinking), and then you form conclusions.

Repeat as necessary. Sound familiar? Uncanny.

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The hype around design thinking’s new clothes now allows anyone to become a crackerjack designer through online crash courses—and starting at $199 they certainly are a bargain. After clicking the “Learn More” buttons for these courses on my Instagram, the algorithms of Big Brother flooded my feed with similar promises of achieving design prowess fast, unleashing my creativity! “Become a Designer in 24 Weeks!” one of many said. Selling design education on the cheap is big business these days—to our peril. I have to wonder how the holder of a Master in Design degree from Cranbrook or Domus Academy feels about this new competition.

The War on Art and Beauty Designers don’t like being called artists. It makes their hair stand up on end. Your friend who might be a banker, doctor or insurance salesperson—who doesn’t know anything about the design profession—says to you at a cocktail party, “I hear you are very artistic.” “Sound the trumpets—I am not an artist!” you say.

What is it about being called an artist that designers hate so much? Is it because we have spent decades honing a process that we like to think is based more in science than in art, because we think science has more value than art? Is it because to do design well not only do you have to understand the markets, the user’s habits and needs, and the relevant materials, manufacturing and engineering but you also must possess a serious skill set reserved only for black-bag operations?

All of this must come together in perfect synchronization to deliver world-class results—factors and knowledge that go far beyond an individual’s selfish need for artistic expression. Is this why?

In parallel, have a look at the music industry. A life dedicated to mastering a musical instrument, or many instruments, a deep understanding of culture in the now, the ability to read music and an understanding of musical theory—all coming together in an end result that can generate billions of dollars and cross any international border.

These masters of their craft actually prefer to be called artists. They also never refer to their process because their customers don’t care—it’s assumed they have command over their instruments. These artists only refer to their statement—the end result—which will either work or not, break new ground or not.

In the 1970s, American automakers found that it was too expensive to holistically redesign completely unique cars for every model in their lineups, so they used the same chassis, wheels and engines over and over—changing only the body to differentiate between models. The designers responsible for these superfluous exteriors were not even called designers; they were called stylists. The design profession as a whole didn’t like this. The grand stage of the auto industry was setting a bad example that was permeating other areas of design—and causing designers to be thought of as pretty-picture drawers or, worse, artists.

Creating style for style’s sake ran against the principles of form following function, and a pile of sketches, especially when the gauge of their value is based on je ne sais quoi, is hard to invoice for.

So, what do you do in the 1970s when you are frustrated by being labeled a product stylist? You turn to science! One ’70s car specifically stands out as contrary to the period’s boxy boats as an early example of usercentered design. A team of

designers in 1971 set out to design a car for the human— a car with an interior as spacious as any full-size car but with an exterior as small, easy to park and fuel efficient as a compact car. A car with 37 percent glass on its exterior for maximum visibility. A car with asymmetrical doors—the passenger side door four-inches longer than the driver’s to help passengers get in and out of the back seat. Road & Track magazine heralded the design as “fresh, bold and functional looking.” Car and Driver magazine praised the car as the first ever to be designed “from the inside out”— the first “Cab-Forward” design.

The AMC Pacer now holds the esteemed ranking of being first on many of the top-10 lists of the ugliest cars ever made—and one of the most catastrophic business failures in automotive history to boot. How could such a serious effort to produce a design that would benefit the end user’s unspoken needs fall so short on soul? Was there something more missing from the design process that was undervalued and dismissed by the designers as fluff, and is still being dismissed as unnecessary even today?

Devaluing Soul Design thinking explains how design is so much more than styling, and how it adds value to the bottom line because it yields innovation. It can, but perhaps the real cash ship is sailing away because we have devalued what design thinking leaves out.

Design thinking talks a lot about selfless design— jettisoning your ego and dumping your assumptions.

Abandoning your preconceived notions and opening your mind to groundbreaking observations you never expected to see in your user interviews. Doing so literally strips away the value inherent to a designer’s life—one dedicated to observing the human condition, sensitizing yourself to the visual, honing your ability to see what others overlook, appreciating art and design history, understand-

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ing cultural change and knowing where the industry’s bar is set. Dismissing these influences is to guarantee mediocrity.

I recently watched a CNN special called The Nineties. The artist Alanis Morissette said she struggled for years with her songwriting, always attempting to write about other people’s experiences. She attributes her shining moment of success to the minute she started writing about her own personal experiences. Suddenly everyone started listening. We are all starving to feel the human experience expressed authentically.

Writers also often channel what is called episodic memory (an account of their own personal life experiences) in their prose over semantic memory (common knowledge), because primary-source human information is universally relatable and all human beings are hard-wired the same way.

Writers use one of two basic processes. There are the outliners, those who carefully plan plot lines before writing a single word, and pantsers, those who write by the seat of their pants. James Joyce, a famous pantser, said, “A book should form itself, subject to the constant emotional promptings of one’s personality.” Mark Twain, another famous pantser, said, “The minute that the book tries to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, I put it away.” Pantser extraordinaire Ernest Hemmingway believed in simply pouring out what was within, stopping each day before he was completely empty and resuming the next. Stephen King, one of the most successful contemporary pantsers who has written over 50 New York Times best-sellers, goes as far as to say it is “dishonest” to predetermine a plot. Stanislaw Lem likened his writing process to “dipping a thread into a liquid solution of sugar.” What starts out as thin begins to settle and thicken.

How do they do this? How does the subconscious mind produce unplanned words on a page? How do writers surprise even themselves as their own sentences appear, as if their subconscious mind has possessed them? Science studies the sleep-wake cycle as a possible link. Our brain’s prefrontal cortex is responsible for outlandish creative notions while we sleep. While we are awake, however, it is coupled with other areas of the brain responsible for logic and reasoning. Is it possible that as writers allow their own dormant experiences to drive an unplanned work, they are able to uncouple their brain’s default mode network while they are awake? Is it possible designers can too, explain-

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ing leaps of creativity and moments of brilliance? The many examples of best-selling and famously influential works by pantser-style writers suggests that an individual’s mind, especially if they are a designer who has chosen to exist as a creative practitioner and collector of observations, is not something to dismiss as selfish and vain, but rather something to celebrate as miraculous.

Trust Your Brain I find the idea of pantser-style writing akin to the design process we now disavow in favor of a hypothetically more valuable pseudoscientific process involving thousands of Post-it notes. I refer to the idea of starting a design project by sketching as a first step.

Designers have come to believe that starting a project cold by immediately sketching is bad because no research has yet been conducted. Again, this devalues the designer’s dedication to observing potential design influences as an engrained part of their 24-7 daily habits. Just as text emerges on the writer’s page in unfiltered and unplanned spontaneity from tapping long-stored information in the far reaches of the mind, sketching provides the same stimulus to bring forth subconsciously recorded information. The act of placing ink on a page may spark the idea of using a metaphor that is universally familiar and can strip away complexity from new technology. Sketching can inspire a fresh spin on a stayed tradition that can bridge from the unfamiliar and difficult to the delightful and easy. Sketching can conjure references to the earth’s geometry and elegant new ways to configure it.

Designers don’t start out being able to see, record and then wield information like this, even after a crash $199 online course in design thinking. It takes years of practice and experience to become good at it. Why modify the 500-year-old scientific method and rename it design thinking to quantify design and then be ashamed of any ties to art and beauty when a large chunk of the value might lie precisely there? Instead of saying that anyone can be a designer by using a process dangerously accepted as uncontested gospel, perhaps we should be saying that design has tremendous value because it’s so hard to do well.

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

A LOOK BA C K

MY DESIGN HEROES I have worked as an industrial designer for 52 years, and I plan on designing products for some time to come.

I was a member of a student chapter of what was, I think, the American Society of Industrial Designers in 1964 at the University of Illinois at Champaign–Urbana where I graduated in 1966. All of these years I have been a member of what is now the IDSA. I am not boasting, just acknowledging my investment in and memories of this profession that I care so much about.

As I thought about all of those years, a few memorable experiences come to mind that younger designers may appreciate knowing about.

Lessons of Style and Purpose For example, I remember Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, one of the first pioneers of industrial design who was famous for his designs, his persona and very successful mainstream products. Lay people actually knew of him and that he had designed so many well-known and popular products of the time: the Lucky Strike cigarette package with its bullseye design, the Greyhound double-decker bus, Singer sewing machines, and refrigerators and other appliances for Sears Roebuck and Company, to name a few.

I actually got to see and hear him in person at a meeting of designers early on in my career. I found him charming and effective. People in his famous industrial design office said that he would turn his French accent on and off as needed for effect. He had spent decades in the US having been born in France, and the accent was a tool he used, they said, to enhance a presentation or talk as needed.

Much later, a senior member in his office told me of how Loewy and his design colleagues were preparing for a presentation of a new refrigerator design for Sears, typically, a large white box with rounded corners and a long handle for opening the large front door. A designer on the team presented a great new concept to divide the big white door into two doors, one large door providing access to the cold area and a smaller bottom drawer for the freezer

compartment. The full-scale clay model had a dividing line cut horizontally toward the bottom to indicate where the two drawers met. Loewy was impressed and thought the concept was brilliant. However, he had his model maker fill in the parting line where the two doors met. He had a plan.

As the story goes, Loewy presented the full one-door design to the Sears executives, and as they observed the sleek and modern design, he jumped up and with great enthusiasm declared that he had a great new idea right there on the spot. He took out a pocket knife and made a careful horizontal cut about three quarters of the way down the door and described how the refrigerator could now have two doors, one providing access to the cold area and a lower drawer for the freezer. What a concept!

What drama!

Thus, the two-door refrigerator was born as a result of a spontaneous flash of genius on the part of Raymond Loewy. I can only hope the story is true. He is one of my design heroes because of his early work in a new and emerging field and for his panache.

I also remember Jay Doblin, FIDSA, who was in charge of the Design Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Doblin gave a presentation, also at one of our industrial design gatherings, where he held up a Kodak camera and spoke about useless decorative elements that made products ugly and that wasted materials and added unnecessary costs. As he spoke, he used a screwdriver to snap off useless bright metal and chromed decorative elements that did nothing to make a camera function as a camera. Snap went the bright metal logo, the chrome bezel ring and numerous other bright metal exterior parts that now laid at his feet on the stage.

Finally, he got to what was left: a minimal, black plastic box.

In fact, the camera was now, as he had suggested, simple, understandable and elegant in design. The lesson, I never forgot. For my entire career I have tried to design products with only those components needed to make it function and express in simple, visual, nonverbal terms the object’s purpose, place and value.

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A L O O K B ACK

A Wholistic Approach My first industrial design position, right after earning a BFA, was with Corning Glass Works in New York in 1966. My first assignment was to design a replacement for the classic Pyrex glass measuring cups, the ones with the awkward glass handle and red graphics indicating ounces and cups.

Every kitchen in the country had at least one. I worked to produce a better more updated design. I finally came up with a six-piece glass set that consisted of a 16-ounce measuring cup, an 8-ounce measuring cup and four smaller nesting 4-, 3-, 2- and 1-ounce measuring cups, all in glass.

The nesting set fit into the 8-ounce cup and they were joined to the larger 16-ounce cup via a two-sided plastic snap-on-cover forming a self-contained measuring set.

I presented my design to a room full of executives, engineers, designers, marketing and sales people, and others at a monthly new-product review meeting. I described my self-contained stacking measuring set and finished with something like, “With this design I can satisfy every need of a women in her kitchen.” There was great laughter and applause, actually, more laughter than applause. I was only 21 or so. I learned then that words matter and that even I could not satisfy every need of a women in her kitchen or anywhere else.

I learned of the Westinghouse Corporate Design Center the 1970s when I applied for a position there. The president of Westinghouse, who came from the automobile industry, knew some about the role of design. He had initiated what was an extraordinary experiment among large American corporations at the time: establishing a Corporate Design Center, which was located a few floors below his executive office in the Westinghouse building in downtown Pittsburgh. The center consisted of industrial designers, graphic designers, interior designers, architects and other research-oriented people who functioned in multidisciplinary teams and served all the company’s divisions.

Westinghouse, at that time, had a hundred or more divisions producing various products from office furniture to home appliances and medical equipment and from atomic power plants to heavy industrial equipment, transportation vehicles and more.

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The primary idea was to form appropriate teams that would engage a particular division and assist them in designing their physical sites, their architectural facilities, literally all visual communications—company identity, fleet signage, products, packaging, advertising—and more in a wholistic way. This was opposed to one project at a time that can result in uncoordinated, unrelated individual designs that confuse and dilute what could be a consistent corporate identity.

The Corporate Design Center was a noble experiment in corporate design implementation and management.

The idea of considering the whole and then establishing a wholistic design strategy made perfect sense, and it worked in a number of cases. It also did not work in a number of cases due to a number of issues. Division executives often resented a top-down approach where corporate headquarters was going to tell them how to manage their divisions. Design teams sometimes approached a division with a we-know-more arrogance that did not sit well with in-house designers and managers.

Sometimes a division’s challenges were not always easily solved by design. Things were more complicated and required expertise beyond that of a typical designer.

Still, the Corporate Design Center was a wonderful idea and provided many of us an extraordinary opportunity to design and learn.

I remember when Charles Eames would visit the Westinghouse Corporate Design Center. He would show films he had made, including The Powers of Ten and one he created for IBM. Just being in the same room with Charles Eames was thrilling and special.

Later, at yet another design meeting, I spoke with Ray Eames, who had given a talk. It was after Charles had passed away. I told her how much I admired her work and I asked her to sign my program. She smiled, blushed and reluctantly agreed to give me her autograph. I reached for my pen and handed it to her. As she went to sign her name, the pen ran out of ink. I scrambled to find another one from a passerby. I still have that program with her signature in two different colors of ink.

Getting Approval While at the Corporate Design Center at Westinghouse, on occasion, designers would travel to Paul Rand’s studio in Connecticut to have their work in progress critiqued by him.

He was one of the consultants who helped guide design at Westinghouse. On one such trip I gathered the courage to request a copy of the Minuteman poster he had just designed for the U.S. Park Service to advertise the national park of the same name. Paul was always pleasant and business like but not overly warm or reassuring. Coming home from one of these trips was always less stressful that going there. He scared many of us and he knew it. After all, having your work critiqued by one of America’s premier designers was not stress free.

Paul reluctantly agreed to give me a copy of the poster.

Somehow I then got up the courage to ask him to sign it. He paused, searched for a pen and grumbled as he signed it. “When I die this will be worth money,” he said. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing and rolled up my treasure for the trip home.

After some years, I realized that he signed the poster with a red ballpoint pen. The signature is now all but invisible. I think he knew what he was doing.

Many, many years later, I was dean of the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. I invited Paul Rand to give a talk. He agreed. The auditorium at the Rackham Graduate School was filled with people from the Art and Design School and many others on campus who knew of Rand. As part of my introduction, I told the poster story and reminded Paul of his comment that when he died my poster would be worth money. I ended my comments by saying that I was happy that he was still alive but that my poster had not appreciated much at all. He laughed and proceeded to give his presentation. I did not include the red ink part.

The other Westinghouse design consultant was Eliot Noyes, FIDSA, who was once a curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and who had a successful industrial design firm in New Canaan, CT. When I passed the initial interview for the Westinghouse Corporate Design Center, I was told that I would need to have a final

interview with Eliot Noyes and if that went well, I would have the job.

When I returned to Pittsburgh for the final interview, I was escorted to a large auditorium in the Westinghouse building. I was positioned with the ID design manager at the rear of a large theater-like auditorium. Eliot Noyes was seated at the very front in a row all by himself. Only the three of us and a projectionist were in the room. Eliot was so far away from me that he looked to be an inch tall. I was told to proceed with my slide presentation featuring my work and was handed a microphone. There on the screen were my slides at a scale I had never seen them before or since. That threw me for a minute. I described my projects one after the other, emphasizing what I had designed and why.

I soon realized that Eliot was slumped over in his seat.

I actually thought he was dead. I asked the design manager if we shouldn’t call an ambulance. He assured me that Eliot was fine and that he had fallen asleep, meaning that he had no problems or questions and I had earned the position.

A Bright Star One day at the Westinghouse Corporate Design Center a message was sent around seeking those interested in staying after hours to meet with a young upcoming architect who was visiting Pittsburgh and who was interested in seeing the center to learn more about how it worked. Only two of us stayed that evening and greeted this fellow, who had just been recognized for his innovative new furniture line made of corrugated paperboard. I had seen the furniture and was impressed with its concept, innovative use of common materials and form. We toured the facility and had a brief and pleasant discussion and then all went our separate ways. That young architect was Frank Gehry.

I have many more memorable experiences as a result of my years as an industrial designer. I was fortunate to be of the age when so many of my design heroes were still working and one could meet them and get to see that heroes or not, they were simply really good designers.

—Allen Samuels, L/IDSA, Emeritus Professor and Dean, University of Michigan allenall@umich.edu

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Max Burton, IDSA max.burton@fjordnet.com Max Burton is the global lead for connected products at Fjord, design and innovation from Accenture Interactive.

A NEW ERA FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGN You could say design has finally arrived. It’s now taken seriously by big business, leading companies have included designers at their executive levels, and design has become the driving force for innovation behind some of the leading companies in existence today. For those of us in the design field, there is much to look forward to, because the profession is booming. Unfortunately, not everyone is feeling the love. Those who think of themselves as traditional industrial designers have reason to be concerned.

According to a report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which Core77 reported on last summer, 1,800 new ID jobs will be created in the US by 2026. That’s a growth rate of only 4 percent, whereas the average job growth rate for other designers is 7 percent (https://www. core77.com/posts/78749/The-Occupational-Outlook-forIndustrial-Designers-According-to-the-Bureau-of-LaborStatistics). Also, when you compare the earning power of an industrial designer versus a UX designer, you will find that on average UX designers earn 40 percent more.

Clearly, the industrial design profession is experiencing headwinds. In my 30 years working as a designer in both the US and Europe, and in the consultancy and the corporate worlds, I’ve seen how significantly the job of the industrial designer has changed, and I can tell you that what’s happening now is neither a fluke nor a temporary shift. The industry isn’t the same as it used to be. In order to succeed in the future, you’ll have to change how you think about the job of industrial designer. The good news is that once you do, you’ll be able to take advantage of all the positive trends we’re seeing.

Below are my top 10 key learnings and takeaways that I hope you can use to evolve your career and contribute to the profession in a meaningful way.

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1. Learn to love business.

Design thinking has now been embraced at the executive levels of corporations around the world, and with that, designers have been elevated to more strategic positions within companies. While this is great for the profession and our influence, we are now also expected to take on board the working methodologies of big business. Unfortunately, industrial designers have not and do not get trained in business management, leadership or administration. This has to change.

Key question: Can you be a success in business without losing your creative soul?

2. Consulting vs. corporate?

Once, industrial design consultancies were the first option for aspiring young professionals, offering a breadth of projects and creative opportunities. Today, the trend is for corporations to build their own internal multidisciplinary design teams that work closely alongside technologists, engineers and strategists to develop advanced product systems. Apple led the way, and now other corporations have followed suit. Interestingly, though, we’re also seeing management consultancies like Accenture, Deloitte and McKinsey building design teams, often through acquisitions. In 2015 McKinsey bought LUNAR, a product design consulting agency. In 2013 Accenture bought Fjord. These large business consultancies combine traditional management consulting with design and delivery. The growth of design in management consulting and corporations reinforces how central design is to business today.

Key question: What offers the greatest opportunity to design the most exciting products and have a fulfilling career?

3. Industrial design is now experience design.

Instead of designing the form and function of things, we are increasingly being asked to design the experience of products and services. That’s because experience-driven design is more important than ever to business success.

According to Forbes, “Every dollar invested in UX brings 100 in return” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/01/23/how-ux-is-transforming-businesswhether-you-want-it-to-or-not/). That’s a gigantic ROI of 9,900 percent. The adage “form follows function” could easily evolve to “form follows experience.” It’s no longer enough to look at design challenges through the narrow lens of aesthetics and functionality. Instead, all designers need to consider the entire experience of a product and service where the relationship between company and customer is extended over time and space.

Key question: Are you thinking about the experience of a product when you design?

4. Stop worrying about how things look and start thinking about what things do.

Before the digital age, industrial designers were in charge of design groups. Now, most innovative products are driven by software. In that shift, industrial designers have often lost their leadership role to UX designers. To keep up, industrial designers must recognize the new digital reality and be concerned less about how things look and more about what things do. In practical terms, this means having a passion for blending physical design with digital design.

Key question: What would be more strategic for you: to understand and contribute to the creation of digital products and systems or to stick with physical only?

5. Promote and embrace diversity.

It’s alarming that industrial design is still mostly filled with white middle-class males. The world is a diverse place, and people come in all shapes, sizes, colors and genders. So it makes no sense that a small subsection of society should decide what other people like and buy.

Key question: Are you actively seeking to broaden your thinking about design by inviting diversity into your design teams?

6. Skill vs. creativity.

With all the changes in our profession and with UX design taking the lead, many industrial designers have begun to question their purpose and direction. I have witnessed a retraction from leadership and creative direction and a focus on skills and expertise. At its core, industrial design is about creativity and problem-solving. I have seen many industrial designers who become perplexed at the new world of digital or have fallen into believing their profession is a mish mash of skills and knowledge. Yes, a good designer can sketch like a pro, make stunning renderings and know manufacturing like an engineer, but a great designer is one who can imagine and create something completely new that people love.

Key question: What inspires you to think differently and truly innovate?

7. Consider making fewer products.

As the economy shifts from private ownership to a sharing economy, we’re starting to see a more efficient use of resources and hopefully less impact on the planet. But designers still make products through the old lens, leading with styling as opposed to function and use. How do we design a bike or car for multiple users, or a smartphone that you only hold onto for a year? Solve that very real problem and we will be on our way to a greener planet.

Key question: Can you help save our planet by reshaping consumer perceptions and values?

8. Product development is getting faster than you think.

It used to take two to three years to bring an innovative product to market, so a company and its design team were essentially placing a bet on the future. Today, manufacturing processes have become fast and flexible. It’s now possible to put a product into the market, see how it does and then adjust. Physical products are following the agile software methodology. As physical and digital worlds blend, we are seeing a new process that integrates hardware/waterfall with software/agile methodologies.

Key question: What processes are you using to move more swiftly and with flexibility?

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9. We are moving from mass-market solutions to a new era of personalization.

Industrial designers are trained to design products for the mass market, which means a lot of the same things for everyone. Data and advanced recommendation engines are now enabling increased levels of personalization in software, and we are beginning to see personalization in the physical world. Flexible manufacturing processes and advanced algorithms permit far greater variety and individualized fit and function. How will industrial designers fare in this new model? In the old model, we were the purveyors of good taste, and we dictated what the world would look like. What happens to designers when consumers are able to contribute to the design of their own products and experiences?

Key question: How will your role shift as a creative when the end user gets involved in the creative process?

10. Promote sustainability.

Capitalism is based on consumers buying new products every year. We now know from a scientific basis that this addiction to the new is damaging our planet and all living species. It’s time to rethink the economic model and how people consume. Designers can play a role.

Key question: Do you consider sustainability as core to your creative process?

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Industrial designers can continue to have a significant impact, but to do so, we can’t stand still, and we can’t look at the future through the rearview mirror. We have to constantly reinvent ourselves and the profession. The bottom line is that opportunity will always lie in the complicated, difficult spaces. There’s no longer value in just making an object look pretty. The new challenge is being able to design meaningful human-centered experiences out of very complex problems.

The future industrial designer will be fluent in traversing from physical to digital and back. They will be exceptionally creative with deep craftsmanship, but they will also be able to speak the language of MBAs and the C-suite. The industrial designer of tomorrow will not look like you and me.

To round out the debate on the future of the industrial design profession, I have invited a group of designers from diverse backgrounds to comment on the below question: In your career, what major change or impact have you noticed being a designer? Based on that, what advice would you give to a young designer embarking on their career or a seasoned professional seeking a way to progress?

I hope you enjoy the opinions expressed here and can find inspiration to develop your career and make a positive impact to our society and our planet.

“

In your career, what major change or impact have you noticed being a designer?

Based on that, what advice would you give to a young designer embarking on their career or a seasoned professional seeking a way to progress?

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THE ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY I am seeing more designers using their training in creating objects and experiences to explore authentic career paths that align with their core values. Although working as a designer in-house or in a corporate, consulting or agency setting or in a freelance role are great ways to gain technical skills and discover personal strengths, designers are increasingly breaking free of the traditional ways of working to find more fulfillment in their work and daring to pursue entrepreneurship, particularly women. The rise of crowdfunding has helped democratize design and lowered the barrier to entry to secure initial capital for many consumer products.

After working for others for most of my early career, I felt it was time to focus on a product area that was most meaningful to me and would be of help to others.

For me, that area was in personal pleasure for women, but, in general, opportunities are ripe, particularly in taboo industries, or formerly taboo areas, such as cannabis, adult toys, feminine products, death, and money.

If you are interested in entrepreneurship, keep in mind that Design + Market = Business.

Just because your design is awesome does not necessarily mean you have a business. You need enough people who are willing to pay for your service or goods to build a business; otherwise, you just kind of have a hobby. Products that have more depth than aesthetic will be more sought after and have a greater chance of success in the marketplace—if you are enhancing people’s everyday lives.

While entrepreneurship can be glorified and romanticized, truthfully, it is not for everyone. Having an idea is only part of the equation, and 90 percent of the journey is the pursuit of realizing the idea and building a sustainable business. Most importantly, keep in mind that the entrepreneurial journey has a lot of ups and downs, and if you’re just looking for fame, fortune or a founder title, it may be very hard to handle the roller-coaster ride.

—Ti Chang, IDSA, ti@lovecrave.com Chang is an industrial designer / entrepreneur passionate about designing products for women. She is the co-founder and VP of design of CRAVE, specializing in modern sex toys.

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EMBRACE THE AMBIGUITY The range of products, systems and relationships we endeavor to reimagine through thoughtful design is more varied and complex than ever. Therefore, design practice, in parallel with design education, has been under constant pressure to continuously evolve in order to stay relevant. The good news is that design, however it is defined, is receiving unprecedented interest, not just in the outcomes of our efforts but in how our community thinks and works. Numerous articles in print and online appear almost daily about how design thinking can be successfully applied to everything from social justice to increased profitability. After taking this all in, I can’t think of another time when designers have had as many opportunities to define for themselves how they wish to participate in our world.

My advice for emerging professionals is to embrace the broad applicability of your design talents. Understand the value in applying your analytical skills to framing open-ended, ambiguous and tough problems. Help others synthesize disparate sources of information, opposing objectives and conflicting narratives. Make use of your communication skills to create compelling visualizations and iterative tests that propel us to engage in conversations about challenging subjects and lead us toward good decisions. And be thankful that your design training gives you the foresight to focus on understanding the whys before you go about designing the whats.

As technology continues to break down boundaries between disciplines, the fluidity of our profession has given birth to forms of practice that didn’t exist less than a generation ago. For many of us, interaction design, systems design, design strategy, futures design, speculative design and social design were not part of the vocabulary when we began our careers. Finding one’s niche in this dynamic landscape isn’t easy and can be daunting. My own experience has shown me the possibilities that arise when we focus on our values and embrace the ambiguity that comes with working in a constantly expanding field.

—Helen Maria Nugent, helenmarianugent@cca.edu Professor Nugent is dean of the Design Division at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and a founding partner of Haelo Design.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Bruno / CCA

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PEOPLE ARE AT THE CENTER OF GOOD DESIGN When I was starting out, users were seen as subjects and designers saw themselves as the experts. Now the lines have blurred in a beautiful way. Today’s best designers, young and young at heart, have to understand how to include everyday people in the design process and work with them creatively to identify new opportunities and solutions.

Bringing simplicity and beauty to today’s highly complex products requires closer teamwork than ever. The boundaries between consultants, clients and other partners have also blurred, and our physical and digital spaces are much better tuned for working together more fluidly.

The designer’s toolbox has evolved vastly during my career, and I have found it important to constantly experiment with new tools and methods, not necessarily to master every tool but at least to understand the benefits and drawbacks and to appreciate the expertise of others.

Despite the significant change I have seen in the design industry, the understanding of people and what makes for good collaboration has—and will always be—at the center of good design.

—Richard Whitehall, Richard.Whitehall@SmartDesignWorldWide.com Whitehall is a designer and partner at Smart Design where he leads the firm’s direction and is constantly looking for new ways that design and technology can make a difference to organizations and everyday people.

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COHESION I was schooled as an industrial designer with a Dutch / Japanese background.

When I graduated, I was intrigued to work on projects that entailed designing new experiences. This meant that I worked my whole career on products that included hardware, software and services. Looking back, I have noticed that most disruption in the past 25 years has come from areas converting from analog to digital, transitioning from products being born with predefined functionality to products becoming ever-evolving experiences. These disruptions create opportunity. Opportunity for designers to impact the end product even more. Why? No product can be made by one discipline. No experience can be made without the fusion of hardware, software and services. The most successful designers keep abreast and excel in their area of competence, but also lift themselves up to a conceptual level where they are able to bridge and impact other disciplines.

Because, in the end, any product is only successful when there is cohesion.

To achieve cohesion between so many disciplines, a product needs a clear point of view of its purpose and differentiation. Who comes up with this point of view? Turns out, often it’s the designer.

I have been most impactful as a designer or design leader when being involved in the product or even company vision overall. In my mind, the lines are often blurred between product management and design. I have founded disciplines in both areas and always aimed for more cohesion.

Where convention tells us that product management is about defining product requirements and designing is about coming up with a solution that best meets these requirements, the reality is that this often leads to unsuccessful experiences, especially when you are trying to come up with something new.

Product managers are trained to find and assess data. If they do this well, they take in an enormous amount of data looking at user intelligence, market intelligence and technology opportunity. This alone is a Herculean task. Then to take all this data and find the unique point of view and opportunity is incredible hard. It requires creativity. This is where you come in. Designers are trained to take that data and come up with new ideas. Of course, there is also the dirty secret that new experiences don’t come with data in the first place. You need to design first and create a unique point of view before you can test and determine if it is a good idea.

All this needs to happen before product requirements are locked. So don’t wait.

Swim upstream and make it known you are interested in collaborating from the outset of a new initiative. Creativity in product definition is crucial.

In my latest project, I co-designed the company strategy for Sonos. No surprise: it is heavily experience driven. And perhaps is an example that as a designer you can impact a company far beyond the limits of the look of a product.

—Mieko Kusano, Mieko.Kusano@sonos.com Kusano is senior director of experience strategy at Sonos.

She founded Design & Product Management at Sonos, leading Sonos experiences from its first product introduction all the way to becoming a billion dollar business.

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THE FUTURE IS CIRCULAR The future of design is circular. If we continue to contribute to the linear designproduce-use-dispose progression of the status quo, then we are jeopardizing the very foundation of our economy—the resources that sustain us. The circular economy suggests a new way forward: to couple economic growth with responsible consumption and regeneration. This type of transition presents an incredible opportunity for design.

In a circular future, we will design products that are never completely disposed of but instead get better with every iteration. We will design services and experiences that will be relevant to people’s needs without being harmful to our planet. We will design with data in new ways that will continuously teach us how the systems we design should evolve. We will design networked companies to collaborate across industry silos and innovate together in service of outcomes that benefit all.

Designers have a unique role to play in this future, not least because it asks us to rethink how we design and to what end. Successful innovation and design is grounded in a balance of desirability, viability and feasibility; yet in the future state where circularity is commonplace, we know that the balance will need to shift. If the goal is circularity and regeneration, we can no longer start with desirability alone.

Instead, we’ll need to put new emphasis on how things are made (feasibility) and how we can make economic sense of our designs within this new context (viability).

The circular economy asks designers and innovators to be advocates for the entire system, not just for the needs of the people within it.

Many companies have stated publicly that they intend to join forces on the challenges and opportunities that a circular economy offers to them, and many are looking to designers to help them do so. Designers are uniquely equipped to make the circular economy a reality: We have a particular ability to frame questions to get ourselves and our collaborators into an opportunity mindset. We think and work holistically, and we create networks between collaborators. We move from research to design to production and back, and we constantly alternate between divergence and convergence. Most importantly: designers make ideas experiential and tangible, and prototyping and iterating are our tools for understanding and learning. All these qualities will play a significant role in our ability to move toward a circular economy and to design products, services, experiences and conditions for a circular future.

Designing for a circular economy should be top of mind for every designer because it’s the way of the future, it’s exciting to design on the edge of innovation, and it’s the right thing to do.

—Leif Huff, www.ideo.com Leif Huff is an IDEO partner and executive design director at IDEO New York. He is passionate about making ideas tangible to help clients address the most complex challenges in a human-centered way.

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DESIGN FOR THE COLLECTIVE Consider the icons of modern design. Loewy, Eames, Rams. The names speak for themselves, synonymous with groundbreaking work that carries legacy and weight in our world today. These are individuals who had a vision to reshape our world.

But then there’s that word—individual. For me, design has been less about my individual view. Design is about our ability to solve problems in service to a greater world. Design is a verb: the act of inventing, collaborating, learning, and creating.

This revelation came to me at the Stanford d.school, where it finally clicked that the art of design is equally as affecting as its usability. The emotional with the rational.

Art is that great individualism. But innovation takes a village.

As our lives are increasingly digitally connected, the way we design has evolved from the lone creator. We now have the responsibility to create products that scale and connect to millions of people across infinite applications and services. No single designer can solve for those complexities. A designer is still a visionary, but it’s imperative that our visions contribute to the collective. To design the future, we need to be more open in our approach.

I understand on a personal level that this is easier said than done. I consider myself an introvert with a preference for listening over speaking, responding over reacting, looking inward over reaching outward. To ask a designer to be open is to ask them to leave the comforts of creative thinking. But this is exactly my challenge to designers everywhere: to see creativity as a more inclusive venture. By opening yourself up to new perspectives, new feedback, new ways of thinking and creating, you’re becoming more of a visionary than you could be on your own.

As the creator, you are a conduit for ideas, helping bring diverse perspectives into products and making everyone’s voices heard. Technology is a reflection of ourselves as humans, and design holds up that mirror. Your greatest strengths are in transparency and humility—creating possibilities rather than solutions. This is how we design a more open, inclusive world.

—Albert Shum, @microsoftdesign Shum leads a collaborative team creating the future of experience design at Microsoft, driven by a human-centered philosophy for more inclusive technology.

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THE VALUE OF DESIGN DOING Throughout my career I have seen a tectonic shift in the role of industrial designer as well as the role of design in the industry as a whole. Designers and design have become much more valued, in part thanks to design-led companies that have demonstrated time and time again the value design can add to products, both in terms of delight through elevated user experiences as well as tangible value to the profit line.

I believe this has led to an academic search to unlock the magic of design so that other companies and industries can apply it as a winning formula. This has spawned a boom in Post-it-notes-driven, step-by-step formulaic approaches to innovation under the brand of design thinking, bringing together designers and nondesigners alike. It has made our industry more approachable and understandable, and has opened up valuable seats for designers at decision-making tables.

While I appreciate the things design thinking has done for our industry, the takeaway I have had from experiencing this shift firsthand (and consuming my fair share of Post-it notes) is that no amount of processes or consumer insights can substitute for the key core skill industrial designers bring to the table—Design Doing (yes, the capitalization is intentional!). We should never undervalue the core skills, and we should celebrate the soft skills of aesthetics and gut instinct. The materiality and the form of objects are what ultimately give them undeniable and undefinable appeal, and this is something that can’t necessarily be taught or discovered; it is innate.

My advice to young designers is to focus on the design part first, to hone your eye and your instincts, learn the tools of your trade—you will be able to rationalize your process later. Get your hands dirty—no amount of design thinking will ever replicate the magic of picking up a pencil and beginning to sketch, or will teach you more than cutting some foam on a bandsaw and holding the idea in your hands. Use design thinking as a tool, just like any other in a workshop, and in equal measure.

—Gina Reimann, gina.reimann@gmail.com Reimann, a wearables industrial design lead at Google, is focused on designing wearables that bring together the best of AI and software in approachable human ways.

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LEARN YOUR COLLABORATORS’ JOBS In the late ’80s when I joined the design community, it seemed modern industrial design had just confidently emerged from the shadow of engineering- and manufacturing-based disciplines or craft-based industries like furniture, fixtures, equipment and packaging into mass markets. At this time, it was the dawn of the internet and the profession of industrial design was becoming more strategic, more market savvy and less of a pure applied art.

Immediately during my first job post college, I received some great advice from Silicon Valley design legend John Guenther (HP/Compaq/Tandem/Design-Four/ FMC/Rand). He advised me to not only deeply learn (and never stop) the craft of industrial design but to also learn my collaborators’ jobs. In other words, learn as much about the interdependent disciplines around product design as possible: marketing, research, business planning, finance, manufacturing, material science, bio-science, engineering, advertising, etc. He said that this would give me the empathy and the understanding to successfully commercialize my design work into reality and ultimately help produce better results. This advice is even more important and relevant today.

Industrial design in 2019 is as relevant as ever, but, in many cases, it is even more segmented, dependent and empowered by diverse disciplines, collaborations and development tools. For example, I believe that designers are the human advocate throughout the design process; therefore, designers today should strive to understand people even more intimately, what drives them and what impacts them as individuals, groups and communities. In parallel, designers should increase their understanding of technologies that affect industrial designed products. This might mean learning more about all things digital, software, sensors, new materials, processes and tools, sustainability, crypto, UI, UX, AI, AR, VR, IoT, and so on.

That said, a word of caution. As important as it is to continuously learn about surrounding disciplines that affect design, some categories of design may not feel the pressure to expand beyond their craft, and I believe this too is absolutely needed. At the risk of contradicting myself, we need deep-diving specialist craftfocused designers.

Today, the more diverse design becomes, it seems that more designers are distracted from perfecting the craft of industrial design, often becoming too dependent on modern tools and technologies, often committing to directions before their work has fully matured and realized its potential. The craft I reference is understanding the history, influences and market factors before you begin your design work and then marinating ideas within a deep, iterative refinement process of form and detail development. Experienced product designers and developers should not deliver their worked too early but should strive to follow their visions into full development and manufacturing experiences when possible, including supporting their work into the market and eventually into people’s lives.

—Brett Lovelady, IDSA, brett@astrostudios.com Lovelady is the founder and chief instigator of ASTRO Studios.

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FLIPPING THE “T” For me, the foundation of why I became a designer is built on the need to constantly search for new solutions that improve how people live their lives as individuals and as communities within a global society. Although this has not changed, I have a hypothesis that we need to reconsider how we teach design and develop as designers.

Instead of spending three to four years at college learning a specific design skill (i.e., industrial design), graduating, honing our craft professionally and then growing our “T” to become more rounded, I think we need to flip the “T” and spend the first three to four years being as broad as possible with a focus on the following foundational attributes: ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙

Amplified emotional intelligence and awareness Highly collaborative (virtually and physically) teamwork and leadership Creative thinking and nimbleness Commercial street smarts Communication and storytelling Experimenting and learning to design / create using new techniques and tools

I believe this new breed of creatives will have the creative confidence and ability to specialize and constantly retool, to learn and apply new skills in the world of design—or in any other profession.

I also believe this approach will help unlock designers from being a seen as having a specialist service-based skill to commanding a creative capability and voice that naturally drives and leads in boardrooms around the world.

—Alastair Curtis, acurtis@logitech.com Curtis is chief design officer at Logitech, where he is responsible for innovation in design across all brands and businesses for the company.

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Charles Austen Angell, FIDSA a.angell@modernedge.com Austen Angell is the CEO of ModernEdge.com, a research and design firm focused on UX / UI, connected tech, transportation and healthcare. He is also a managing partner of the Health Technology Collaborative, a 501c3 and works as an expert witness in patent cases. He was the director of User Research + Innovation at Intel and CDO at Logic Technologies. Angell is an IDSA Fellow and trustee of the Design Foundation.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, DESIGN THINKING AND THE FUTURE OF DESIGNERS AS PROGRAMMERS I was sitting in a meeting—a large meeting in a large conference room with a nice view out the window. Around me were respected colleagues and acquaintances. A PhD in neurology a few seats to my left, a master’s in biomechanics a few seats to my right, an expert in machine learning toward the end of the table. As the meeting went into the second hour, I couldn’t help but think to myself that we were not covering much new ground.

For some of us, the meeting was a buy-in session, for others it served as a norming of the processes we would follow on the project, and for yet others, it was the cross-translation of different terms from different fields to define rules we could all agree on to give the project purpose. Given that the focus was on the application of AI to synchronize inputs for problem-solving within the medical field, the human approach to the meeting struck me as ironic.

And yet here we were, a room full of highly competent individuals participating in a ritual of creativity while covering a lot of old territory. I want to point out that this is not a criticism of the group—this meeting simply inspired me to rethink the human activities involved in collaborative creativity.

What were we doing that AI couldn’t currently accomplish on its own?

Can AI Do Design Thinking?

In these situations, designers often refer to their contributions, or their organizing activities, as “design thinking.” Design thinking is a tricky term in that it does not refer to a highly codified set of rules like calculus or specific programming languages such as Lisp. It actually refers to a loose grouping of thinking strategies and creative activities used by design professionals for solving problems. Oftentimes these are problems for which the solutions are not linearly derived from the original problem statement. Commonly, these problems are complicated by the inherent inconsistency of humans and their related social behaviors and human constructs.

Design thinking methodologies allow the team to redefine and explore the problem in a nonlinear way that optimizes a positive human outcome.

Design thinking is often applied to wicked problems, and the caveat is that the efficacy of the process relies in part on the thin-slicing analysis and proficiency of the practitioners. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell defines thin-slicing as “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.” These thin-slicing “insights” are implicit inputs to the design process. We rely on them because when human beings are added to the data set, a seemingly infinite set of variables is introduced in the form of emotion, perception and social interaction. Thinslicing, while natural to all humans, is a skill that can be developed through practice.

This begs the question of whether AI could learn to thinslice, and would this allow AI to practice design thinking?

A Little Bit about Data and Decisions Computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” in the 1950s. He believed that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” Writing in Forbes recently, Bernard Marr defined machine learning as “a current application of AI based around the idea that we should really just be able to give machines access to data and let them learn for themselves.” Imagine a program that writes programs. This type of machine learning is what experts believe will lead to “General AI,” like what we see in movies like Terminator and I, Robot, as opposed to “Narrow AI,” like Siri and Alexa.

As humans, we take for granted the sheer mass of data we take in, sort, classify and discard to make even the simplest of decisions. Regardless of whether we are talking about Narrow AI or General AI, all intelligent decisions are based on working with data.

We currently generate data at a far greater pace than

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we can imagine. It is streaming from our phones, our cameras, our programs, our computer systems, traffic cams, health devices, photo uploads, medical records, tax records and connected sensors of every type. We are sharing our interests, hobbies, likes, dating profiles, purchases, hotel reservations, Uber rides, shopping patterns, credit ratings and so forth. We are assured that our data is anonymous and de-identified. But data is potentially useless unless we know something about it.

The utility of data comes through classification, analysis and translation into knowledge, which is metadata.

Metadata is data about data. Consider a book; the cover and the table of contents are metadata about the “data” inside the book. A library of books further builds on this concept by creating metadata about the books in the library, and a list of libraries would contain metadata about libraries. And so forth. Terrence Parr, professor of computer science and data science at the University of San Francisco once said, “I am physically incapable of writing a talk about a library without making another library.”

We are amassing huge libraries of data in the hopes of solving challenges that previously were unapproachable.

Because of these data libraries, advances in genetics and medicine are being made at an unprecedented rate, and transportation and logistics efficiencies are at unprecedented levels. The promise and the reality are that big problems can be solved with big data. In a very real sense, AI is already thin-slicing through the way it uses decision trees to drive outcomes. But is this design thinking?

For Generalized AI to be most effective, it requires as much specific non-anonymized data as possible. This explains why the valuation of new data-rich companies like Uber and Facebook have surpassed long-established product companies like GM. Data brokers collect huge amounts of data from your inputs to the digital world and buy and sell them.

When the Federal Trade Commission studied data brokers in 2014, it found that the billions of dollars being generated by data brokers were coming from collecting billions of data elements about virtually every American consumer—largely without the consumers’ knowledge. This data was combined and analyzed to make potentially sensitive inferences ranging from age and ethnicity classifications to pregnancy and disease assessments.

Additionally, de-identified data can be relatively easily re-identified to individuals by simply overlaying

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the metadata from data sets purchased from different sources. AI can take writing samples and time or photo location tags in anonymized data and match it to data from other anonymized sources and quickly reconstruct the most specific of information about specific individuals.

In reaction to these issues of privacy, states and advocacy groups are pushing new legislation through to protect the consumer. In Oregon, a bill called the Health Information Act is currently being pushed through the legislature. This legislation will change the law so that your de-identified health data is treated as personal property and cannot be sold without your permission. As it stands now in every state, your anonymized health data is being sold without your, or even your doctor’s, knowledge. And because property law is governed at the state level, this approach is a fundamental shift away from the national privacy laws currently dominating the discussions of personal data. At the end of the day, no current national standards for data privacy or personal data ownership are in place; what does exist is a jumble of laws and guidelines varying wildly from industry to industry.

This is all terrifying and overwhelming, but what does it mean to designers? The trajectory of data and AI development seems cast. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but during the meeting, I still had the suspicion that something else was going on in the dynamic of our team that superseded this growing concern.

Designing a Smart Device In a sense, any design team behaves like a group of programmers. We take data that is explicit and quantitative, such as the height distribution of the anticipated users, or implicit and qualitative, such as attitudes toward healthy eating within a particular group, and then solve for a given use case. Although much of what you currently read about how “AI Will Change XYZ Industry” is based on AI collecting lots of data about the consumer and then selling those same consumers more stuff through a superior interaction with more tailored or personal offerings. This is somewhat unimaginative in that it views people simply as consumers, and to some it seems like manipulation.

Our team was looking to use AI to refine and synchronize user input data to create a new preferred set of outcomes potentially altering the function of the device as needed to account for the variance of the input data.

The goal was to make the user more effective in their task.

An example of this type of challenge would be autocorrect on your phone. The original problem definition might have been “users are misspelling words.” The desired outcome would be correctly spelled words. The input sets might be typed words and dictated words.

The variance of the input data might include mistyping, misspeaking, mispronunciation, background noise and so forth. Yet we have all experienced sometimes hilarious and sometimes embarrassing outcomes from the application of AI where the words are correctly spelled yet the meaning is misconstrued because the words are not the words intended.

Clearly, the solution to this problem is beyond simply correcting the spelling of the words typed into or heard by the device. The actual problem is accurately expressing the user’s intent. The irony in this type of problem is that sometimes the original misspelled message can more accurately portray the user’s intent than the corrected message. This is because the full solution space for intent includes both the sender and the receiver of the message.

The solution must have empathy for the connection between the users and their patterns of speech and context.

We recently worked through some similar challenges for our client Curadite, a developer of medicationadherence systems. Using cloud-based AI, the Curadite medication-adherence system analyzes the medication manifest assigned to a specific user against the user’s behavior and interactions with their medications. We designed the system to accurately track, analyze and monitor the chain of custody for medications after the user leaves the pharmacy. But it was empathy for the user in a user-centric design process that led to a successful solution. Even the physical design of the product reinforced the interaction and the program logic. The implications for better adherence, support and mentoring of medication were profound, and for dangerous medications such as opioids, the impact of the system is a game changer.

This notion of empathy as a core factor in design thinking is often discussed. We’ve seen excellent examples of design from companies like Philips and GE where empathy for the patient experience is elevated in priority within the problem set with profoundly positive results. Bringing AI into the toolbox allows for designers to create a “skill multiplier,” something that enhances the abilities of the user beyond their actual experience level.

On another program, we were designing a next-

Credit: Sonivate Medical

The SonicEye® Dual-Plane Wearable System and patented dual-position probe was developed with Sonivate Medical and Modern Edge Inc.

Credit: Sonivate Medical and Modern Edge Inc.

Inputs to Sonivate’s SonicEye® Dual-Plane Wearable System interact with the UI to guide the user through the exam.

generation portable sonogram for Sonivate Inc., a longtime client. This product uses a patented combination of computing and design to guide novice technicians through an E-fast exam in the battlefield mimicking the operational efficacy of an expert user. The device also offers a simple toggle into expert mode to leverage a higher level of user expertise in special situations. Thus the device can take randomized user input and “bucket” it into correct actions and decisions. In this case, AI is helping our team design experiences where a novice can provide expert-level care, increasing the available technicians during emergency battlefield situations.

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In both these examples, AI was combined within a userfocused design strategy. I began to think of our meeting in terms of design thinking and this notion of empathy as the yet missing ingredient in automated problem-solving.

Beyond Intelligent Products Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted, “Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.”

The real question is how do the programmers set the templates for learning. What does it mean to learn, and what is the purpose? Do programmers think the way designers do, and should designers think more like programmers?

Our traditional measures of IQ, while predictive of success in a generalized sense, have rightly come under criticism for ignoring cultural differences and civic priorities.

We have codified these shortcomings by programming them into our systems, and the privileging of IQ has manifested in our AI-curated news and AI “personalized” information, further stratifying our culture and diminishing our social cohesion.

What is missing from our mechanical definitions of human intelligence is that all human intelligence operates with a default value to preserve the species (with the obvious caveat that due to our baser instincts we sometimes turn on each other). However in the aggregate, this “prime directive” supersedes any other premise in how we amass and value the output of human intelligence. Missing from this context, machine learning along the strict lines of a mechanical view of intelligence could be profoundly dangerous. Stephen Hawking notably predicted that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. … It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Perhaps the answer is in how we program our machines to emulate intelligence. Perhaps there are better ways of thinking about inputs for machine learning by including non-traditional ways of thinking about intelligence.

These perspectives on intelligence might incorporate creative endeavors, social bonds and empathy in a way that traditional views of intelligence do not. What this might mean is that while IQ might measure an individual’s likely contributions or success within society, it may be a poor

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way of measuring our social efficacy or even collective intelligence.

This brings me back to the team assembled in the meeting. What was the real purpose of our meeting and our project?

Complex Adaptive Systems Survival as a species has been the fundamental problem underlying the evolution of our brain and the current status of our intelligence. In 2009, Rolf W. Frohlich wrote in Evolutionary Intelligence: The Anatomy of Human Survival, “Nature gave us a unique brain. Other species are bigger, stronger or faster. … In fact, the enlarged [human] brain makes it possible to manipulate and change the environment. The evolution of other species concentrated primarily on the formation of body and anatomy. The demands of our survival were different. Relative size and lack of relative features required additional capabilities. This made a revolutionary difference from that of other species.

Human survival depended foremost on the evolution of the brain rather than that of the body. Our specific survival advantage as a species lies, therefore, in our behavior and psychology—the human psyche.”

As we develop AI, or more likely as AI develops itself, the possibility for deviance from this “primary directive” of human survival becomes not only a possibility but a high potentiality.

Elon Musk wrote, “The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to “narrow AI”) is incredibly fast.

Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeframe. 10 years at most.”

As our meeting came to a close, it struck me that our team was doing more than solving for data sets. The back and forth, the comparison of experiences and the systematic analysis of our approaches—this was about synchronizing our solutions with our value systems. These values are inextricably tied to that underlying prime directive of species survival and positive social evolution. We may be on the threshold of giant breakthroughs from artificial intelligence; however, we are a long ways off from understanding and codifying compassion, empathy and emotion—concepts that are central to design thinking. Keeping these concepts central to all our endeavors may be both our opportunity and our responsibility.