INNOVATION Spring 2022: Industrial Design Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SPRING 2022

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE & IDSA Education Symposium

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SPRING 2022 ®

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INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW

54 Immersive Design: What the Metaverse Means for Industrial Design

by Paul Hatch, FIDSA

32 The Past, Present, and 58 Integrating Virtual Future of Industrial Reality into the Design Design Process

by Ravi Sawhney, FIDSA

by Ian Henshaw

34 Will the Real Product 60 Generative Design: A Designer Please Stand Tool for Collaborative Up? Automation

by Javier Verdura

by Alex Lobos, IDSA

36 The Need for Empathy: 64 Visualization & Designing for Product Storytelling Comfort

by Mohammed Imraan Jeelani

IN EVERY ISSUE 4

In This Issue

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Chair’s Report

by Jason P. Belaire, IDSA

8 From HQ

by Chris Livaudais, IDSA 10

Beautility

by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

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Design DNA

by Scott Henderson, IDSA

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ID Essay

by Steven R. Umbach, FIDSA

by Linda Bui and Tim Zarki

40 Less and More: A MuchNeeded Future for FEATURED Design 22 Tribute: Robert Blaich,

by Gianfranco Zaccai, FIDSA FIDSA 42 Mobile Ethnography: A

by Michael McCoy and Katherine New Methodology for McCoy, FIDSA New Times 24 Tribute: Cooper

by Jonathan Dalton, IDSA Woodring, FIDSA 46 You Want Progress?

by Kevin Shinn, FIDSA Here’s How 27 Recruiting Before the

by Lea Stewart, IDSA, and Internet the IDSA Women in Design

by RitaSue Siegel, FIDSA

Committee

50 Diversity Within the Industrial Design Profession

68 Creating the Fitbit Biologic Design Language

by Brian Paschke

by Claire Nelsen, IDSA

52 Designing Like da Vinci

by Chris Ference

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SPRING 2022

Cover: GOTCHU pad and tampon dispenser by Linda Bui designed to help period emergencies be as stress free as possible.

Opposite: The Sega Pocket Arcade by RKS Design enabled portable gaming. Silver IDEA winner, 1998.

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW

Innovation is the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the professional organization serving the needs of US industrial designers. Reproduction in whole or in part—in any form—without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. The opinions expressed in the bylined articles are those of the writers and not necessarily those of IDSA. IDSA reserves the right to decline any advertisement that is contrary to the mission, goals and guiding principles of the Society. The appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement by IDSA. All design and photo credits are listed as provided by the submitter. Innovation is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks. The use of IDSA and FIDSA after a name is a registered collective membership mark. Innovation (ISSN No. 0731-2334 and USPS No. 0016-067) is published quarterly by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/Innovation, 950 Herndon Pkwy, Suite 250 | Herndon, VA 20170. Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/Innovation, 950 Herndon Pkwy, Suite 250 | Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2022 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 41, No. 1, 2022; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

INNOVATION SPRING 2022

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I N T HI S I SSUE

UNDERSTAND THE PAST, ENVISION THE FUTURE

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core purpose of INNOVATION has always been to serve as a vehicle for the latest industrial design news, trends, and insights. In its early days, this publication was literally one of the only places to get that kind of content about our profession. Now, with the ubiquity of the internet, our access to information is nearly unlimited.

Yet, INNOVATION has endured as a centerpiece of the IDSA program portfolio and as a valued historical account, told by those who lived it, of an organization and profession simultaneously defining and redefining its own boundaries.

As the industrial design profession continuously shifts and evolves to keep pace with advancements in technology, cultural trends, and socioeconomic forces, once siloed disciplines, methodologies, and skill sets now overlap and blur into what is often called simply design. INNOVATION can be a space to celebrate these deep interconnections all while amplifying the unique and bold voices of industrial designers.

Industrial Design: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow is a compilation of articles that highlight various aspects of the industrial design practice across a spectrum of time and provide insight into how designers are working today to prepare for what’s ahead. We’ve asked authors to provide practical tips and action items about their selected topic along with vivid visuals, which supply additional value to each article. For example, don’t tell us why design research is important; tell us how to run a successful design research program and turn insights into industrial design success.

It’s only through knowledge exchange and the sharing of ideas that readers come away with a fresh perspective and

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actionable insights ready to be implemented into their work.

In keeping with the theme, INNOVATION has teamed up with Brian Paschke, creative lead at Google/Fitbit, for an exclusive four-part series to highlight the importance and impact of visual design language systems in industrial design. In this issue, Brian shares an in-depth look at the Fitbit design language system called “Biologic.” The system is inspired by and designed for the human body, providing the design team the flexibility to frame problems, explore forms, deliver wide-ranging concepts, develop packaging, select materials, and more. For the remaining issues of 2022, Brian will interview designers to learn more about how top global brands are building and implementing visual design language systems.

We are also excited to introduce what we hope will become a longstanding, recurring column titled “ID Essay.”

(Hint: Say it aloud; it sounds like I-D-S-A!) It will feature behind-the-scenes stories about products as told by the people who designed them. Steven Umbach, FIDSA, is curating this series, which will predominantly feature stories by members of IDSA’s Academy of Fellows. Steven has written the premier essay, sharing the details behind his design of the Kurxweil 250 electronic keyboard. With the ID Essay column, we hope to provide a glimpse into the designer’s frame of mind and uncover rare archival sketches, renderings, and prototype images of days gone by.

Enjoy.

—INNOVATION Editorial Team

May 18-19, 2022

Sustainable Leadership An opportunity for professionals to increase their knowledge at the intersection of earth-saving design practices and the value-driven role design plays in strategic decision-making for successful outcomes.

DIVE

DEEP

www.idsa.org/SLDD2022

PLANET PEOPLE PROFIT Virtual Event INNOVATION SPRING 2022

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CHA I R’S R E PO R T

LINGUISTICS: A STRATEGY FOR POST-COVID DISCOVERY, PART DEUX

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t’s somewhat absurd how we still must include COVID19, its variants, and many repercussions in our day-today personal and professional interactions. How many businesses initially suffered at the outbreak only to find that there were positive financial gains to be had toward the end? How has our way of thinking and talking been molded, temporarily and/or permanently, as a result? We sound like a broken record in our own minds and outwardly to others.

Yet we need to keep pushing beyond our comfort zone and embrace every difficulty until we resolve the conflicts between our own selves and the societal constructs that can still present confusing and exhaustive narratives for us to decipher. It is a risk worth taking so that we can move past what prohibits us from living in a state of harmony.

The Need to Question Part of the exhaustion we feel often comes into being by living life in a constant state of the unknown. We don’t know how to influence the stakeholders around us to include our voices in ways that can create positive change. Or we don’t

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have the confidence to have a direct cause and effect on the elevation and evolution of design processes and their outcomes.

The words I have chosen to use are meant to connect our current culture with the zeitgeist of preceding times; we mustn’t forget the lessons we learned through navigating these earlier times and experiences. We still must question those lessons and examine the possibilities that can come out of doing so, positively leading and modeling to the next generation of designers.

Often there is great reward when we take the time to reflect on why we think the way we do. Where did our cognitive processes, specifically those related to design and its use of language, originate? The thoughts and ideas that influence our thinking often come from past and current noteworthy influencers. As a result, it can conjure up immediate respect, causing us to adopt variations of their language into our own. Great! However, is enough importance given to how historically there always existed a need to contrast and redefine said language to show how

there can be a different way of thinking? Often, I reflect on what Massimo Vignelli once said, “A designer who does not know history knows nothing.” When we are not able to critically evaluate the reasoning behind the words we speak, we limit our imagination and the opportunities for discovery.

However, advocating for digging deep and challenging the system could lead to better design innovation by way of greater design thinking modalities, empowering the designer.

What happens when we are stuck in a bubble personally and industrywide? When did we become complacent? What does it look like when we need to take a fundamental stance that many might deride or shut down altogether?

What happens when we need to take a stance that requires higher levels of risk to stand up for the voiceless, those suffering under the yoke of inequality and those excluded, even if it hurts our paycheck? Do we formally commit to making every effort to ensure that our beloved profession always champions greener practices like the UN’s 17 transformational sustainable development goals and circular design?

We Are Listening The IDSA Board of Directors are unified in constantly listening to and advocating for our members. We know that capturing these collective voices will translate into greater benefits and added value for each stage of designers’ academic and professional development. We observe and discuss and try to mitigate the current design culture and its perpetuation of certain behaviors that can lead to potentially losing ourselves and our profession as we know it today. We are also focused on the growing concerns with how these topics have a direct cause and effect on conducting proper research and running our practices and businesses, all while producing award-winning innovation. And we are concerned with how academic systems adapt their training for students to recognize and problem-solve effectively during this rapidly shifting environment. Based on what we have learned, we recognize that there is a need for many high-level and pragmatic discussions with both our members and nonmembers around these topics, which will bring us closer together.

We know that for IDSA to continue striving to be best

in class, we will need to adopt short-term and midterm (two to three years) strategies to measure and assess what our members want and need to sustain them during every phase of their career. Included in this effort is listening to important narratives that are rooted in more traditional understandings and placing equal importance on the need to reconcile cultural design shifts that are occurring at uncontrollable speeds due to advancements in technology and other areas. By way of partnering with outside resources, we can offset some of this rapid advancement, giving us more of an edge for creating the best research initiatives and market intelligence for our high-priority touchpoints. These efforts will strengthen us to respond to the rise of competitors, leading IDSA into the next 50 years of relevancy.

Based on the collective efforts of the IDSA Board of Directors and staff, we hired an external auditing service that looked deep into our internal processes and culture and provided insights that led us to start to create and co-create better revenue-generating strategies outside of membership dues. “We Want Our Supporters to Succeed!” is a new focus for us to ensure that all stakeholders and partners are provided the ability to grow their ROI/ROE utilizing edutainment, communities, and humanization (diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as global impact).

We will be utilizing a less-traditional approach in capturing these new opportunities, building a more robust system to analyze data and create better customer relationship management, artificial intelligence, and marketing, communications, and sales integration. As a result of many of these important findings, we are positioning ourselves to build greater partnerships with sponsoring brands as thought leaders. We are exploring fundraising opportunities to grow our core competencies in a two-tothree-year approach. Combined, all these opportunities will enable us to develop new initiatives to strengthen the IDSA brand and other key portfolio pieces to implement proper profitability tracking, proper accountability measures, and realistic and predictable growth percentages that will align the entire organization and set up IDSA for greater success.

—Jason P. Belaire, IDSA, IDSA Board Chair belworld@me.com

INNOVATION SPRING 2022

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F RO M HQ

CENTERING OUR FOCUS

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always enjoy the start of a new year because of the optimism and excitement it brings. It’s a chance to reset and refocus on the goals, both personally and professionally, that will set the direction for the next 12 months. I’m very happy to report that despite the challenges of COVID-19 over the past two years, the organization has maintained its financial health and we have great momentum propelling us forward. While there is no denying the difficulties each of us have faced during the pandemic, I sincerely hope you too can feel energized for the endeavors ahead of you.

Establishing a north star is an important part of ensuring our discussions, decisions, and actions stay focused. At the start of each year, I collaborate with the Board of Directors and IDSA headquarters team to align our priorities and center our efforts around themes that will provide guidance for the work ahead of us. We identify and define goals based on a variety of factors, including the needs of the organization, industry trends, operational metrics, and more.

For 2022, we aim to be: data-centric, member-centric, and value-centric.

Data-Centric We have been actively working to improve our ability to collect and analyze data from all areas of our operations.

This effort to learn more about our wide spectrum of programmatic and membership experiential touchpoints is in turn helping us become more efficient and effective in providing a high-quality service to our community.

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The recent membership survey (conducted in 2021) is one such example of how we can proactively collect feedback and basic demographic information from those in our network. The insights gleaned from that survey have already influenced our plans and strategies for the year(s) ahead. You can visit idsa.org to see key takeaways and findings of the membership survey.

Let me be clear, being data-centric is not about nefariously exploiting trust or inappropriately using personal information. Instead, it’s about leveraging the tools and platforms available to facilitate sound decision making and ensuring that IDSA programming aligns with the true needs and desires of our community.

Member-Centric When visualized on a stakeholder map, the vast network of individuals, academic institutions, and organizations that make up the IDSA community is an intricate tapestry of interconnected players. At the center of our map is the IDSA member. Everything we do should first be at the service and needs of our members. I believe that providing for our membership first will help us improve retention and demonstrate our value to the industrial design profession.

Of course, we can’t outright ignore the larger ID community as we have an opportunity (and an obligation) to serve them as well. While certain benefits are exclusive to membership status, we strive to make as much of our programming as accessible as possible to anyone who is interested in participating. We steadfastly believe that being inclusive is

the best way to create space for diverse voices to be heard and worthwhile conversations to be had.

Being member-centric is about IDSA understanding the shifts of your career journey over time (for example, the needs of a student are hugely different from those of a seasoned professional) and mapping our programs to support you each step of the way. It’s about using the feedback we receive (see data-centric) to improve and adjust our offerings in ways that maximize their impact.

Value-Centric As I’ve previously written, I maintain that the IDSA value proposition is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The expectations of our members continue to grow and evolve over time (see member-centric), and how we respond to these shifts is paramount to IDSA being able to deliver clear value.

This means that our tangible benefits, like INNOVATION magazine or attending an event, are produced to a high quality and that our intangible benefits, like the growth of your personal network over time or taking a moment to give back to the community at a student portfolio review, are realized in such a way that makes a clear distinction: IDSA is always there to support your professional journey as an industrial designer.

Operationally, being value-centric is about focusing our efforts on programming that delivers the most ROI for those who participate. Practically, I also realize that times are tough and that participating in IDSA-related activities can sometimes mean sacrificing something else in your personal

or professional life. Our goal is to ensure that the time you do spend with us is a gateway to experiencing something uniquely meaningful to you as an individual.

Onward The strategies and investment areas described here are in place to serve dual purposes. First, they guide our plans for 2022 at a tactical level. Second, they lay the groundwork and align resources for future success. While on the surface they may not seem new or groundbreaking, I can assure you that our approach in 2022 builds upon our success over the past several years and represents a new chapter of existence for our association. As with any iterative process, we will adjust where needed along the way and refine the details as they become ingrained in our operational processes and realized through tangible improvements in the IDSA experience.

Whether you are new to IDSA or have been with us for decades, I want to thank you for being part of our organization and for the contributions you have made, large or small, to make IDSA what it is today. It is through our collective efforts that we demonstrate the value of our community and solidify the legacy of industrial design as a vital profession for years to come.

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

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B E A U TI L I T Y

VIRTUAL BEAUTILITY*

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hen Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Almost always the creative, dedicated minority has made the world better,” he could have also been referring to designers. Certainly, our small profession is one of those contributing to a better world, especially when everything needs to be redesigned due to climate change, for social justice, and into the exploding metaverse of crazy NFTs. Will Meta (Facebook/Instagram) set the standard for good cyber design? Or will designers create something totally new, instead of a simulacrum of the past?

Before I met sci-fi author Bruce Sterling at the Nagoya ICSID conference in 1985, I was worried about a future where everything would be made of code or designed by robots. He assured me that human designers would have even more work designing stuff on the wide-open virtual canvas wielding an augmented pallet! The term “metaverse” has its origins in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Like the Blob, the metaverse is growing, taking over all photonic light fields limited only by server farms. People can’t get enough, as UM’s global chief innovation officer Chad Stoller found out: “A whopping 86% of people use other devices while watching TV” (Global Web Index). Whether it’s TV or VR or AR or some XR sensorium

*Thanks to Jane Nisselson: Virtual Beauty, vbnyc.com

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extended reality, Microsoft’s HoloLens interactive layers or Magic Leap fidelity, or just a Zoom background screen, it’s digital design.

In the January issue of Metropolis, Liz Stinson asked, “How Will the Metaverse Be Designed?” It’s too late to ask; someone is already making the metaverse look worse than the regular verse. Why when you jacked into William Gibson’s Neuromancer did cyberspace need to look so grimy? Why did they work so hard creating a crumbling world for Grand Theft Auto? Why is the “real world” in the Matrix so post-apocalyptic? On the other hand, what’s so nice about Minecraft’s pixel land? Or that kiddie rainbowtwinkle-unicorn Teletubbyland?

Designers have a special opportunity in cyberspace now that software can make almost anything. AI teamed with computational graphics can paint reality better than reality. Everything is true in the metaverse—everything is hypothetical, artificial, synthetic simulations, and we can make it true since the laws of nature don’t need to apply. A friend of mine, Paul Coyne, challenged me to create a digital realm where luxury is determined by aesthetics and where beauty is all that matters. Let’s say we could start over and design the virtual world (at least) the way we want. How?

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What Does Good Cyber Design Look Like?

Cyberspace strips the age-old beauty debate to its bare bones. The classic discussion follows: In Metaphysics (another metaverse?) Aristotle states, “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness.” Plato loved basic platonic forms (not the same as platonic love). In his 1908 speech “Ornament and Crime,” German architect Adolf Loos said, with some kind of psychic Muji-AppleBraun premonition, “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects toward smooth and clear surfaces.”

Rowena Reed Kostellow, FIDSA, echoed, “If you can’t make it more beautiful, what’s the point?” We might not be able to totally agree on what beauty looks like, but professional designers do share methods to make things look better. She taught students how to manipulate basic elements: “The abstract relationships express the relation of the parts to the whole apart from any concrete or material embodiment. They reflect the direct visual experience of the thing, how forms and spaces and movements ‘speak’ to one another.”

When in the early 1990s the odd couple of graphic designer Tibor Kalman and architect Robert A.M. Stern were charged with creating design ordinances to revitalize Times Square (back then, 42nd Street was abandoned; there was not even any crime), they may have learned too much from Las Vegas! Their urban plan required more bright colors and lots of shiny objects with topsy-turvy unplanning guidelines for maximum diversity. Nothing matched or lined-up, laying the groundwork for contradiction and surprise. They turned up the noise and the neon. They made good design bad.

And they succeeded by redefining what cleaning up Times Square meant!

“I have never been forced to accept compromises,” Charles Eames said in a 1970 interview in Domus, “but I have willingly accepted constraints.” Conventional guardrails like ergonomics, material properties, and manufacturing implications help curate designers’ wildest wishes. When form doesn’t follow function or physics, we need to propose new artificial design constraints to enable a beautiful, virtual good-design oasis.

What laws of good design could we institute to make my friend Paul’s hypothetical place look good? Are they in the eye of the virtual beholder? Broader guidelines that embrace styles like 1950s Modern, Afrofuture, feng shui, wabi-sabi, or hygge. What are the good design game rules?

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Past showcases of good design like the Good Design competition founded in Chicago in 1950 by the former MoMA curator Edgar Kaufmann Jr., together with such pioneers in modern design as Charles and Ray Eames, Russel Wright, FIDSA, George Nelson, FIDSA, and Eero Saarinen, aimed to “honor the achievements of the best designers and for their pursuit of extraordinary design excellence.” Did they actually apply aesthetic criteria to choose the winners? Or were good design traits like order, elegance, and composition just assumed by the judges? Maybe for our purposes in the metaverse we should explicitly follow Mies van der Rohe’s dogma “Less is more” and simply apply three of Dieter Rams’ 10 design commandments: Good design is aesthetic, good design is understandable, and good design is honest. Let’s say ornament is a crime and God is in the details, and our design police will keep our metaverse clean.

Our Metaplace Only Has to Look Good!

Our good-design place is a mind-expanding new kind of design without gravity and no function. It is a new kind of playground where designers are free to play with all the dimensions, similar to designing a spaceship for a trip to Jupiter, except our environmental simulacrum doesn’t need to make astronauts feel at home. Given artistic license over a totally alien disconnected reality (think LSD) where we ask people to surrender their sense of reality, we are then obliged to find ways that connect with their biology without trite desktop-filing-cabinet icons on a cast-iron steampunk laptop. Stripped of everything, how can a new environment connect (communicate) when it is so far removed from normal reality? Is good design meaningless?

I’m trying to describe a place where pixels are less than skin deep and it is constrained only by aesthetic magnetism. A place that’s clean and complexly simple and is “characterized by a monochromatic color palette, clean lines, minimalism, natural materials, and natural light,” as Google describes modernism. A place in the spirit of Donald Judd, Adolf Loos, Anni Albers, the Eameses, the Quakers and Shakers, Muji, Braun, and even KAWS. A beautiful form that is calm yet expressive and harmonious. We could jack into a clean, organized 4D plaza, like David Byrne’s American Utopia obsessive/compulsive stage, with portals to other places, beautiful NFTs, and a wayfinding heaven designed by Massimo Vignelli and Lance Wyman. A place that mixes rational geometry with playful patterns, that is calm and dramatic beyond a theater stage. A home, a place

to live—a new Eden—where responsibility is measured by good looks. Argentinian digital artist Andrés Reisinger says, “We can use the metaverse as an exploration territory to apply successful outputs to our beloved physical world.”

The metaverse is a new marketplace, a place to spend cryptocurrency, an infinite virtual bazaar where NFTs and “real” estate merge. As usual, economics drives exploration and exploitation. “Nick Graham has embraced the metaverse—and the metaverse has embraced him back,” reports WWD. “The designer’s virtual gold bomber jacket, which was created to celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing, has been sold for 20,000 MANA [equivalent to $17,000], the cryptocurrency exclusive to Decentraland,” one of several virtual worlds. Surface magazine reported in January on “a real-world mansion that will come with its own virtual counterpart in The Sandbox.” The brick-andmortar mansion will be built in an exclusive neighborhood in Miami and is projected to sell for millions in an NFT auction.

According to WWD, “Buying virtual real estate may seem like an absurd idea, but it’s attracting significant investment.

Someone recently spent $450,000 on a parcel of land in the ‘Snoopverse,’ a virtual world that Snoop Dogg developed.”

The Tulip Bulb Bubble Again?

The metaverse is growing fast, and it seems like no one cares what it looks like. Why is Decentraland so wonky? Why do Bored Ape NFTs and cyberspace have to look so bad?

Does too much money drive people mad and push design toward bling and blong? The virtual universe is infinitely crazier than the real one! FCC chairman Newton Minow’s 1961 idea that “television is a vast wasteland” has been reframed: Cyberspace is a vast crypto goldmine. A virtual world created for virtual crypto money seems necessary since I learned that the NFT market is now worth more than $7 billion (recalculate: a month later a headline read, “$130 billion wiped off crypto markets as bitcoin, ether drop to multi-month lows”). Move the fast-moving money game out of the real world and give the rich kids the meta playing field to play with crypto; that will leave more of their paper currency to spread around the other 99%.

Does economics have to out-trump design even when sailing across oceans of endless cyber possibilities? I know it’s hard for a designer to make art, but I’m working on some funky NFTs that grew out of the classic abstract color exercises derived from Paul Klee’s Bauhaus exercise. The GIFs of painted wooden blocks (hackers think they look

“retro”) look like jellyfish larvae that have metamorphosed into non-fungible art. If successful, could I use some of my hypothetical wealth to fund our virtual good design oasis?

Beautility 4.0?

How to launch this design oasis? Like any new frontier, it should be open to all (including the indigenous inhabitants).

Invite open collaboration with a wiki where contributors post designs that are open for vetting and editing by the community, rather than by a single designer or director. Free speech and design lead to more and better contributions and best results. What are the mechanics that are both inclusive and exclusive and encourage excellence for both of design and society? Shouldn’t contributors and owners become members of the creative team designing, building, and maintaining the place? In this juicy world, software offers opportunities for encouragement and rewards, an economy based on tracking micro contributions instantly converted to cryptocurrency, all flowing in a digital pool of image, data, and ownership. In the metaverse world of fluid tokens, virtual money and virtual products are interchangeable. NFTs are currency. Author is credit. Art equals money. Like when the Dutch banknotes designed by Ootje Oxenaar were beautiful objects, now the NFT code will be the legal tender automatically cashed in or converted into another NFT that can be a place or an artwork or an experience. It’s as simple as bartering, but now the beads are keeping score on blockchain—a new way of thinking about ownership (essentially a virtual concept anyway!).

Real Is More It seems like an oxymoron: industrial designers grounded in real hands-on work now designing in a totally immaterial nonphysical place without factories, physical materials, or even physics and garbage! Everything here in the real world needs to be redesigned, so designers, don’t get distracted by the unbounded opportunities for goods and services out there in made-up land! Use the metaverse as a mind experiment, sketch pad, and stretch pad to expand our horizons for our work back here at home on Earth. The future is now. And keep in mind the Dalai Lama quote Brian Collins recently tweeted: “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.”

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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D E S I G N DNA

TO KNOW WITHOUT KNOWING: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROSS LOVEGROVE

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ndustrial design can be considered a niche proletariat discipline needed for certain aspects of the greater product development process, or it can be considered a manifestation of human creativity with enough explosive power to change perceptions and ignite inspiration that circles the globe instantly. Which w ould you choose? I recently sat down with Ross Lovegrove to discuss his creative futurism, which continues to shine with bright light.

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Scott Henderson: What are you working on now? Can you tell us about your latest projects?

Ross Lovegrove: I am involved with multiple layers of creative engagement, including ongoing projects from the past two years relating to advanced contemporary technologies that facilitate innovation across diverse life sectors. My main focus is related to the fact that I am beginning a new program for an electric vehicle this month for a 21st-century brand that is radically challenging the norm and accelerating us away from fossil fuels toward an intelligent electric future and circular economy.

Henderson: Do you believe that the human being is capable of true originality, or is the perception of true originality more of an unexpected reconfiguration of existing elements found somewhere in our universe?

Lovegrove: I think it’s important to accept that as the biodiversity of creativity is growing exponentially and the global sharing of all manner of innovation is so omnipresent that new ideas will emerge from the convergence of heightened awareness. The view of Earth from space, the beauty of the James Web Telescope, and the wonders that it will enable us to see are so magnificent that we cannot revert to a position of lesser dreams or diminished technological ambition. Scientific design or expression is the ultimate in that it’s profound, visceral, and absolute, devoid of anything extraneous, which places it at the heart of nature between Earth and the cosmos.

Henderson: Talk to me about your design DNA (design, nature, art). What is the intersection of design, nature, and art, and why is that intersection so critical to developing groundbreaking work in the field of industrial design?

Lovegrove: Industrial design can be formulaic, banal, and insignificant. It can supply a need as a tool and become useful in function but also be so uninspiring in its physical presence that nobody cares about it. Actual reality and the physical, the 3rd, 4th, and even 5th dimensional potential of form, or just the way light can fall upon an object—how it sits in space or just how important the reverence for material transformation is—can give rise to objects that move us so deeply into our subconscious, opening our minds and sense of being. This is what interests me.

The intersection and triangulation of the three core principles of DNA (design, nature, art) are profound individually,

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but when fused with shifting nuanced emphasis, they can create an intelligence whereby everything is accounted for: our relationship with the Earth, sustainability, technology, our understanding of its potential and deployment, and then the added expression of art as the overall salvation and primordial input taking us into the unknown.

Henderson: Do you believe it is possible to tap into your subconscious mind while you are designing? If so, what is in there that you want to gain access to or bring forward?

Lovegrove: Why is it that the first creative impulse often becomes the one that maintains inertia? After years of experience reacting to so many diverse scenarios and typologies in design, one’s mind develops a faster, more reflexive reactive position, a subconscious response that starts deep from within.

To call up one’s memory, one must have a primary reflex first to select the subject. This might be something not cerebral but a form of specific selective storage. I often wonder whether we are constantly absorbing and storing and then filtering information that conforms to our own creative DNA and beliefs.

You can tap me on the shoulder, and by the time I’ve looked around, I already have a strong feeling of what something should be, often without any doubts. That’s like a musician who can respond, often effortlessly, change, deviate, and modify a core melody at will or a painter making marks like Jackson Pollack with an utter conviction that might initially not make sense to someone else.

Henderson: I recently saw Wes Anderson’s new film, The French Dispatch. There were many unexpected ideas and thinking throughout this film that a design professional might recognize as hard-to-come-by leaps of creativity. Do you value and search for these unexpected leaps when you attack a design project?

Lovegrove: I like your questions and references. Humans lean forward into the future, and the more that’s fed into the mind, the more ideas can be combined to become explosions of creative energy from whatever their source.

I’m fascinated by first objects, uncontaminated by branding, marketing, or salesmanship.

This often takes me back to look at prehistory and archaeology to understand how first responses are so

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important: reactions to materials, survival, and the raw ingenuity I find so vital to be honest and real. Why? Because they are powerful confrontations or releases of energy without pretentious calculation, bringing to life physicalities that because of their directness have soul and associate with permanence, eternity, a space utterly failed by products as temporal artifacts. So my trigger mechanisms are preset because at base I’m willing to fail in what’s expected of me, emphasizing the radical and unexpected first before dilution occurs through rational impact.

Henderson: Some people buy themselves a Ferrari, but you buy yourself things like an exquisitely self-designed spiral staircase. What can you tell the audience of American industrial designers reading this piece about total immersion—living and breathing the role of the designer—as opposed to just showing up for work?

Lovegrove: When I read your question, I see Brancusi fully immersed in his studio, Noguchi, Picasso, and Corbusier or Wright. In design, I see Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, next to models of cars and trains. I also remember visiting Luigi Colani in his workshop in Bern, Switzerland as he modeled a full-size truck without computers surrounded by hundreds of forms and maquettes and images of such singular belief and commitment. Full immersion is the only way so that the references keep soaking back into your mind, never losing sight of who you are or of one’s emotional state and reasons for being. This is the position of an artist, less of a designer. One’s environment becomes a projection of one’s character so that it speaks for you outwardly to others but also inwardly in terms of self-understanding. In my case as a designer, one can see clearly a morphological evolution in my work over the years funded by technological shifts in the creative process from the analog to the digital, from hand to computational process, from 20th- to 21st-century industrial evolution.

Henderson: Nature boils away anything extraneous to arrive at the most minimalist solution. Dieter Rams is famously known for stripping away detail for the same goal, and yet his work does not look visually inspired by nature. Yours does. How do similar values and goals yield such dramatically different results?

Lovegrove: I have spent time with Dieter and admire his approach to design with reverence and respect. One time

in Tokyo together, he let me try on his spectacles, which were made by a maker in Venice who made the original Le Corbusier design. This did not divert my gaze away from my appreciation of organic form, but I did notice that his cane sported a fabulously anatomic ergonomic handle. Suddenly the respect was very mutual, and we both conceded.

Forcing form onto things that clearly do not merit it is pretentious. Remember that in the past, form was expensive and time-consuming to create. The turning point in my own process and aesthetic language came out of my Ty Nant water bottle project, resulting in the first digitally-generated commercial product using programs used in orthodontics and facial-reconstruction scanning software. Today, the digital process has also helped take the concept of organic essentialism much further as we can apply layers of intelligence and explore the incredible potential for complex forms. Their interlocution is best illustrated perhaps by my 3D-printed Ilabo shoes for United Nude.

So the core values of minimalism and restraint are actually very similar between Dieter’s approach and my own; it’s just that I look to follow the contemporary sincerity that technology and process can bring as I see my work as a contribution to the flora of the natural world, advocating a concerted transition from the mechanical to the biological in an industry that will ultimately be supported by material selection and appropriation at a cellular level and manufacture through four-dimensional growth deposition.

Henderson: What do you think of the Post-it note wall (a wall filled with colored sticky notes and a bunch of designers standing around it armed with sharpie markers)?

Lovegrove: I can see the merits of problem-solving this way to search for the best solution; however, this task is best undertaken by an algorithm. In my second TEDGlobal talk at Oxford University, I advocated for a new universal standard of designing that would bypass the idiosyncrasy of human calculation with an algorithm called Lovegrove Genesis. It would form the base code solution of anything by converging everything we know across all aspects of a design’s need from its draw down on its use of material resources, energy, sustainability, economics, transportation, weight, scale—in fact, everything we can possibly think of—so that the core principles of life and the biosphere are respected and reflected in its conception. Then to achieve

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biodiversity in a singular-platform universal object, we add a degree of contamination via art, color, and subtle changes in its make up, no different from the human face with its billions of nuances.

Henderson: “Standing in the Shower Thinking” is a famous song by the alternative rock band Jane’s Addiction. How important is solitude when striving to find a creative leap?

Lovegrove: Everything must start with an individual’s thought, which is then augmented and brought to life by support.

Industrial design is a complex process, and that’s why it takes a lifetime of unswerving commitment to understanding how it works and how to use instinctive, spontaneous crossreferencing to innovate and turn speculation into reality.

I’m living in a 500-year-old house that represents the ultimate upcycling. But I still get invited to work for SpaceX and the most progressive corporations in their field as I’m a committed innovator and futurist who also understands the evolution of design and how we got here. Looking at the Earth from space, it appears so alive, newborn, and modern, so my creative mind can run my fingers over the blade of a 1.8-million-year-old silex at the British Museum and be so lifted to be part of humanity’s journey of ingenuity and making things while shivering at the extreme beauty of holding a 3D-printed titanium connector with hybrid linear and organic geometry at SpaceX. Henderson: You mention your admiration of the sculptor Henry Moore. Why does something inherently abstract even need to look right? What makes something that is non-representational and void of any functional purpose look resolved and compelling to a wide and diverse audience in the same way?

Lovegrove: Great question. Does something abstract have to look right? How easily we forget or simply don’t realize the value of the three dimensionality of the objects that surround us. Great sculptors understood that objects displace space and form a permanent emotional presence in our psyche.

The introduction of a hole, for example, was a way of uniting the surface of a form to maintain a fluid continuum. When I realized this, I created my Eye Camera for Olympus inspired by a fusion of Hans Arp, Moore, Antony Bonalumi, and, in fact, Mario Bellini, whose Divisuma calculator for Olivetti and studies for Alpha Romeo dashboards using wireframe

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mapping and thermo-formed sculpting were instrumental in my process back in 1990.

I believe that when a trinity of material and form is achieved, an object can appeal to a universal consciousness that accepts the work as an icon of that particular era. Ideas emerge from within as visceral reactions to mass, form, space, and intent are released. This way of creating sees the object or product not as a disposal or replaceable piece of landfill but as an extension of the culture of its creator.

My home and studio are filled with extraordinary objects and artifacts, many of which look right even if there is no way to compare or measure them. They function as reminders of incredible craft, integrity, skill, or, indeed, flashes of brilliance by nature or human nature that would touch a wider audience. Because of the universal consciousness, I am sure that they would be considered extraordinary by many diverse cultures too.

Henderson: Do you believe there is such a thing as universal beauty in design? Can a design be configured where you as its creator literally feel that the design has power and impact and where you know with a high degree of certainty that the majority of others will feel this same power and impact as well?

Lovegrove: Yes, I do. But again, it would arrive from within, not from calculation. The reason I appreciate sculpture as an art form is that it rarely requires description. Its abstraction is often based on principles of which the form is just a host for a more abstract idea. It’s often not about the value or pristine qualities of the material, but more about the message that’s conveyed and the beauty that can be in that message; so if an industrially designed product can fuse wonderful aesthetics with its function, as we see with space instrument design, that is devoid of styling, then this forms its own very contemporary categorization of beauty that is incomparable.

Design that does not sell to you but which has a sort of unexpected authority of otherworldliness or a uniqueness, a sense of being rare or maybe newly discovered, will certainly soak into you and be loved for very personal reasons.

The new Olympic torch by my friend Tokujin Yoshioka is astonishingly beautiful and intelligent as its design is a consequence of such fabulous thinking and, of course, historical importance.

Henderson: Michelangelo trapped life, movement, and energy into his work, where it remains as vibrant and potent today as it did 520 years ago. Is that what a successful design can do as well?

Lovegrove: Products form part of life’s animation, and contemporary computational method allows us to look inside, rotate, and walk within, often with a high degree of realism. Often the renders are so perfect that the made product is disappointing. What I have practiced in my studio has been the need to make the actual reality better than the vision, something my DNA staircase retains.

Movement and form bring life to an inanimate object, so I feel that imbuing design with some form of life is respectful to its material sacrifice and entry into Earth’s space. These attributes can be very subtle or indeed simply optical in the way they use materials and surfaces, but equally when things feel grown in the way surfaces flow and blend; then another more anatomical quality appears that is closer to your reference to Michelangelo, who had the rare intuition of being able to see forms within a material.

Henderson: Molecular recycling is emerging as a new way to recycle plastic, where the process breaks down the polymers into monomers and then into pellets as pure as the original virgin materials for a true circulareconomic cycle. This is opposed to just grinding the stuff up. Perhaps there are solutions to our concerns for sustainability that are beyond the obvious fixes, such as replacing the use of plastics with glass, wood, corn, and hemp instead, which is not realistic for many applications. What is your view?

Lovegrove: Polymers are a byproduct of oil, and oil is a natural substance found on earth generated from decaying organic matter. Indirectly, it’s a natural legitimate material with an extraordinary range of states and properties on which humanity has become dependent. We cannot remove it from our chain, but we can start to treat it as an infinite resource that can have multiple lives because we can revert it to a molecular level and a closed-loop responsible system.

Biological substitutes are emerging in the field of food packaging and elsewhere, but we need a myriad of alternatives derived from scientific research into organic compounds as well as looking into composites and, indeed, also diminishing our hunger for the perfect or pristine, which along with the solvents, paints, and pigmentation used in

car manufacture, just as one example, are contaminating our environment and are a hangover from a 20th-century concept.

Polymers support sophisticated aspects of human life and can be very pure. It’s when they are used for cheap, badly made products in mass quantities, such as the detritus that pollutes our oceans, that we need immediate, radical reform from the top down to address what is a clearly reversible problem.

Henderson: What is your design philosophy in 40 words or less?

Lovegrove: Notes to self: Remain relevant to the times in which you live in the convergence of all things considered.

Be in the present moment. Remember that nothing is a failure, just part of the risk taking that’s vital to one’s progress. Cultivate one’s power of intuition and instinct from an early age. Remain true to self and be authentic. Establish core principles/beliefs and then spend your entire life until the end driving them home. Don’t waste your time on banal myopia, and don’t present anything to anyone you don’t believe in.

—Scott Henderson, IDSA scott@scotthendersoninc.com

I D E S S AY

THE KURZWEIL 250: MY FORREST GUMP DESIGN STORY

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o matter what your age or your musical preference, you have probably heard of Stevie Wonder or perhaps Lyle Mays of the Pat Metheny Group. Maybe you’re more of a techie or futurist, in which case perhaps you’ve heard of Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog Synthesizer, or the entrepreneur-inventor-futurist Raymond Kurzweil. OK, so what in the world do all these people have in common?

This behind-the-scenes tale is my own Forrest Gump story of how my industrial design touched the lives of all of these fascinating individuals.

which could finally, and truly, produce the sound of a grand piano. In fact, during development tests, musicians were unable to discern the difference between a grand piano and the Kurzweil K250!

You can imagine the industrial design challenge presented to LBA: design an enclosure for this paradigmshifting electronic keyboard that sounds like a grand piano.

Paul Brefka, co-founder of LBA, assigned fellow RISD-grad designer David Kmetz and me the task of developing the physical form factor for the enclosure.

Boston, Early 1980s From September 1982 through March 1985, I worked for a Boston-based design consultancy called Latham Brefka Associates (LBA). During that time, LBA was retained by Ray Kurzweil to design an enclosure for a radically new type of electronic keyboard. Kurzweil had been working with Stevie Wonder on the development of an optical-character multifont reading machine for the blind when Wonder pressed Kurzweil to develop a musical device that could close the gap in capability and sound quality between electronic synthesizers and traditional musical instruments, especially the piano. In 1982 Kurzweil Music Systems was founded.

Some of the key consultants included Stevie Wonder, Lyle Mays, and Robert Moog.

Prior to Kurzweil’s new portable electronic keyboard, which would debut in 1984 as the Kurzweil 250, pretty much all electronic keyboards sounded nothing like a real piano. They were only synthesizers that generated sound by utilizing various waveforms produced by oscillators or tape loops. Just listen to the ’60s rock band The Doors or the album that really brought the Moog Synthesizer to the attention of most people, Switched-On Bach, in 1968.

That’s what electronic keyboards sounded like until the new contoured sound modeling technology of the Kurzweil 250,

Behind the Design David and I concept-sketched for weeks—the old fashioned way—with markers and rolls of white butcher block paper.

Together we explored literally hundreds of design ideas, taking breaks after a few days to have a hang-’em-onthe-wall critique session with Paul and some of the other designers and engineers in the firm. For some of the more developed ideas, we generated color marker renderings that depicted the different materials and hinted at the method of assembly. We probably generated three to four dozen of those as well. However, nothing sparked; we hadn’t yet experienced that aha moment when we all agreed that we had found the right form factor to semantically express this new technology.

After many frustrating days, which turned into weeks, I finally realized that I needed a new way to think about how to develop the form factor, a new mental model for such a new product innovation. Up until this point, David and I were creating designs that were based on typical approaches for manufacturing and assembling such a large enclosure.

The concepts certainly reflected this way of thinking. Best described as an assembled-type enclosure, a large housing was achieved by affixing end caps, or sides, to the rear, top, and bottom sheet-metal and molded panels, all bolted or

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screwed together to form the total enclosure. Our sketches and renderings depicted that approach, some being pretty whacky! Perhaps we were overly influenced by the size and weight of the keyboard as the new Kurzweil would use an actual wooden 88-key piano keyboard—almost 5 feet wide—that incorporated sophisticated weight mechanisms to replicate the tactile feel of an actual piano when playing.

Imagine integrating the aesthetic, sound, and feel of an actual piano. That was nascent experience design, revolutionary for the music industry, and a daunting form factor development task for two young industrial designers!

And then it happened. By shifting my mental metaphor, I came up with an approach whereby I started thinking of a solid clay-like material in the shape of a 3D rectangle (think of an ice cream sandwich). As I pressed on one area of the solid mass, another area would have to bulge out in response—mental 3D modeling of sorts, long before 3D CAD and solid modeling. For some historical perspective, this was shortly before the Macintosh 128K debuted!

To free my thinking using this new approach (I wasn’t yet concerned with how to assemble or manufacture the enclosure), I thought about the overall exterior as the outside skin of a continuous, flowing, elegant, solid form. And soon thereafter, I mentally pressed down on the front edge (the wide side of a rectangle) and up popped an area that just naturally lent itself to be a music stand or, better yet, the control panel area above the keyboard, space for the various buttons and slide controls needed to operate the sophisticated instrument. I left some space on the sides to replicate the cheek blocks of a piano. I quickly made some sketches to capture the idea.

I then imagined that this beautiful wooden, ivory-clad piano keyboard extended outward from the downwardangled front of the form as if to proudly offer itself to the musician playing it. What an elegant metaphor that turned

out to be—and quite controversial. Not being a pianist myself, I wasn’t biased to know that pianos didn’t have any framework that extended out below and beyond the keyboard, the key slip area. As it turned out, after many famous musicians tried playing on the early prototypes, they found the forward area of the form was not in the way of their hands or wrists, as was debated and feared, but was a nice place to rest their palms, as reportedly Lyle Mays commented.

When I presented my sketches and further evolutions of this design approach at the critique session that day, everyone stopped and gasped and said, “That’s it!” It was easy to see how the refinements such as the classic gloss piano-black color and some type of gold Kurzweil logo (that I developed later) would complement the form factor perfectly to achieve visual synthesis between a traditional grand piano and this new type of electronic instrument.

Full Circle I recounted this story with a few more details 25 years later at a distinguished lecture series presented by the University of Houston where I was teaching. The speaker was, of course, Ray Kurzweil. After my quick behind-the-design story and my introduction of Ray, he came out on the stage and stood there for a few seconds looking at me and said, “That’s a great story, I wasn’t expecting that, and that was a beautiful instrument, that actually graces the lobby of my office. Industrial design is very important. … That really, I think, went a long way in introducing the Kurzweil 250 to our audiences, so, thanks for that design job. I didn’t actually know who to thank for that.”

—Steven R. Umbach, FIDSA steven@umbach-cg.com

Slide images of early development keyboard foam models.

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T R I B U TE

REMEMBERING ROBERT BLAICH, FIDSA

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e first met Robert I. Blaich (who we will refer to as Bob, as did his many friends and colleagues) in 1975 when we were co-chairs of design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and designing an exhibition for the Cranbrook Art Museum entitled Knoll/Herman Miller.

The exhibit presented the two companies’ parallel, but very different, groundbreaking design processes, philosophies, and forms. Bob, as Herman Miller’s director of corporate design and communications, was responsible for supplying us with Herman Miller furniture and information for the exhibit. This is when we first realized that although Bob was known as one of the top American design directors and managers, above all he was a design educator. He had a passion for teaching the public, corporate leaders, and his design staff the principles of design excellence, and this exhibit was part of that passion.

Herman Miller After joining Herman Miller in 1953, Bob became the connection between the company’s consulting designers, the company’s product development process, and the company’s executive leadership as Herman Miller ventured into educational furnishings, airport seating, healthcare equipment, and office landscape systems. Bob shepherded design classics like the Eames Aluminum Group Chairs by Charles and Ray Eames and designs by George Nelson, FIDSA, Alexander Girard, Don Chadwick, and Bruce Burdick into production. He also managed the company’s internal design activity, including projects by Bill Stumpf, Ray Wilkes, and Robert Probst.

Bob was involved in the transformation of the modern office landscape with innovative products like Action Office

by Probst and the Ergon Chair by Stumpf. Drawing on his architectural education at Syracuse University, he was able to communicate the functional benefits of interior planning with these revolutionary office furnishings to interior designers, architects, and their clients, coordinating the design of Herman Miller showrooms and design marketing, often working with the design writer and thinker Ralph Caplan, H/IDSA. At Herman Miller, Bob developed his belief in design as “a holistic activity that combines product, communications and environment design,” a position he advocated frequently in design conference presentations.

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Design Michigan Shortly after the Knoll/Herman Miller exhibit, Bob asked us to form a team of Cranbrook graduate design students under our direction to create the Design Michigan program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. This was part of the NEA’s Federal Design Improvement Program of the 1970s, dedicated to educating government leaders and citizens about the value of design. This included an exhibition of the best of Michigan design and educational materials, which were distributed through the Michigan state government.

Bob acted as the initiative’s executive director and our insightful client, steering the conceptual direction and forging essential connections throughout the state. Again, Bob’s approach was that of a design educator reaching out to the public, government, and industry.

Philips In 1980 Bob took on a major new challenge as the managing director of corporate industrial design for Philips Electronics in the Netherlands. He inherited a vast international design staff of hundreds that lacked a coherent design philosophy to unify the company’s 14 product divisions, including consumer electronics, small domestic appliances, personal care products, professional equipment, medical equipment, and lighting. At Philips’ Corporate Industrial Design Center, again Bob took the approach of a design teacher and organized a series of “Interdesign” seminars, lectures, and workshops for the company’s designers, which hosted designers and design thinkers like Bill Moggridge, FIDSA, John Rheinfranck, Klaus Krippendorf, Reinhart Butter, and us. Many workshops focused on human-centered design strategies to identify what people needed and wanted in their products and to develop more user-friendly product interfaces. Simultaneously, the design staff were encouraged to explore product semantics, designing expressive new product forms that proved to be resonant influencers in the emerging global consumer culture while also enhancing Philips’ bottom line.

Bob especially supported and mentored the corporation’s younger designers, who eventually rose to leadership positions in the company and designed a plethora of award-winning products. A major focus of Bob’s work was the development of close relationships

A group photo from Robert Blaich’s personal archive taken in 1975 at the Walker Art Museum’s Herman Miller exhibit. Front row, from left: Alexander Girard, George Nelson, FIDSA, Ray Eames. Back row, from left: Robert Propst, Robert Blaich, FIDSA, D.J. De Pree (founder of Herman Miller), Charles Eames.

with Philips’ corporate leadership, from the company’s CEO down to the myriad product managers around the world.

Design policy became corporate policy. And synergistically, Janet Blaich built a productive relationship with Philips’ CEO as she shaped corporate global policy through her insightful speech writing. Through these connections, Bob instilled a corporate culture that harnessed design and design thinking as a powerful competitive advantage and a key element of corporate strategy on the global stage. Under this multidimensional design leadership, Philips became known as an international design leader.

Teague After retiring from Philips in 1992, Bob and his wife Jan took up full-time residence in Aspen, Colorado, in their charming Victorian cottage near the Aspen Music Tent and the former site of the influential Aspen Design Conference.

But quiet retirement was not in Bob’s plans. In 1998 he joined Teague, formerly Walter Dorwin Teague Associates, and became chairman of the board, guiding its expansion beyond its longtime clients by supporting the wealth of talent within the group in the way he had done at Philips and sparking the dynamic renewal of one of the oldest industrial design firms in the US. At home, Bob served as the formidable chair of planning and zoning for the city of Aspen, while he pursued his goal of skiing his age in days each year as an Aspen Ski Ambassador.

Design Organizations and Educational Institutions Bob recognized the importance of design organizations, both in the US and internationally, to support design’s excellence and influence and to educate the public about

design. His leadership positions included IDSA Michigan chapter chair, IDSA national board member, and finally president of ICSID, the International Congress of Societies of Industrial Design.

In these roles, Bob developed programs that communicated the strategic value of good design and the importance of the new discipline of design management internationally to business and government leaders and the public, the consumers and users of design. His 1993 book with his wife, Product Design and Corporate Strategy, cites four spheres of design management: contributing to corporate strategic goals, managing design resources, managing the design process, and cultivating an information and idea network.

Bob generously contributed to design’s idea network in academia, bringing many resources to the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Graduate Design Program and joining the board of directors of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design in 1995 for many years of service. Other boards he served on included the College of Visual and Performing Art at Syracuse University, the Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and INDEX 2005 and 2007, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bob donated his extensive professional files from his long career and his design library to Syracuse University for the benefit of design scholarship and research.

“Connection” was a word that aptly characterizes Bob’s contributions, a word he appreciated, along with both Charles Eames and Ralph Caplan, who Bob retained to conceptualize Herman Miller’s distinctive late-1970s “Attention/Connection” posters and publications, designed

by Herman Miller’s longtime graphic design consultant John Massey. Bob’s vision evolved and expanded from his architectural and industrial design education at Syracuse University into architectural interiors and innovative furniture design development and from public design education to defining strategic product planning and design management for global corporate leaders. The connections between these major contributions and accomplishments were Bob’s commitment to design, his ability to articulate a design vision, and his talent for forging groundbreaking relationships across the boundaries of design, defining design management as an essential discipline for business.

Bob was the master of what he called “The Fertile Ground Factor,” the nurturing of cultural, technological, educational, and corporate awareness of design excellence.

—Michael McCoy and Katherine McCoy, FIDSA mdmccoy9@gmail.com; kjmccoy1945@gmail.com Katherine and Michael McCoy are the former heads of design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and senior lecturers at IIT’s Institute of Design. Their many awards include the first Smithsonian Design Minds National Design Award. Katherine is a past IDSA president and Michael chaired IDSA’s 1986 national design conference.

You can read more tributes to Robert Blaich on the IDSA website: www.idsa.org/news/passages/robert-i-blaich-fidsa-1930-2021.

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REMEMBERING COOPER WOODRING, FIDSA

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n 2021, the design world lost one of the greats, Cooper Woodring, FIDSA. He meant so much to so many, and his list of accomplishments and successes over the years is impressive, to say the least. Cooper’s contributions to our profession and to IDSA make him truly one of the great pioneers of design. But Cooper was so much more than that. He was a mentor, a confidant, and, most importantly, a thoughtful and unforgettable friend. The pages that follow could easily be filled with Cooper’s many notable and impressive accomplishments, but it seems more fitting to describe who Cooper was by capturing fond memories from just a few of his many close friends. We’re certain Cooper would approve!

Cooper was my dear friend and mentor and a solid voice of reason. I have so many fond memories of him, and I will miss being able to pick up the phone for honest advice and direction. Cooper was always willing to help and so generous with his time, especially when it came to IDSA or anything design related. I was always impressed by the level of enthusiasm and effort he gave no matter the cause.

In 2009, as a favor to me, he spoke at the IDSA Midwest District Conference. He treated it no differently than if he were getting ready to address Congress. His level of detail, care, and concern for the topic was more than impressive. His presentation was about the “7 Deadly Sins of Management.” I remember asking him what message he wanted the audience to walk away with. His response was, “It is easier to learn not to do something verses how difficult it is to learn to do something.” His words were profound.

That presentation will always hold significance to me, not only because of the content but also because of the jest that followed years later. Shortly after I became an IDSA Fellow in 2016, I received a package from Cooper. The

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package held a handwritten card congratulating me on my fellowship, and to my surprise, Cooper had gifted me the original notecards from his “7 Deadly Sins of Management” presentation. To this day, those notecards are proudly displayed in my home.

Cooper has shown us that there is no time stamp on people and as designers we can maintain our relevancy and creative edge long into our golden years. He knew how to communicate with all ages, and he had a special way of making you just a little bit better by being your friend. I am grateful to Cooper for so many things, and I will miss him dearly.

—Kevin Shinn, FIDSA An elegant and gracious gentleman, Cooper gave his full attention when listening to a person and would comment thoughtfully with wit and wisdom. Beloved for his laughter and storytelling, he drew lessons from every chance encounter and experience, whether it was serving as a volunteer firefighter in the 1970s or testifying in a high-stakes court case.

Unfailingly generous with his time and guidance, Cooper educated and helped me in many ways. Over the years, he surprised me with many gifts, such as a beautiful Art Deco appliance made in Chicago and historical material from his time at JCPenney. But the most treasured gift Cooper ever gave was his time. While attending the 2017 IDSA Conference in Atlanta, I was lucky enough to spend a precious afternoon with him as he reflected on his life.

During our conversation, Cooper mentioned a pivotal moment in his childhood. He said that he always felt different and was ridiculed by the popular kids at school. At 13, he said he rode his bike past the home of family friend and

neighbor, famed psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger, who was raking leaves in his front yard. Cooper ran to him to ask, “Dr. Karl, am I normal?” Menninger replied, “You are anything but normal, Cooper, you are extraordinary!” Those words, Cooper said, changed his life, freeing him to pursue his interests and choose his own paths.

Cooper also explained how appreciative he was of the lucky breaks and opportunities that became steppingstones in his life. While studying furniture design at the University of Kansas, his roommate, Wendell Castle, was studying industrial design. The two became interested in each other’s majors and eventually swapped paths.

Castle became an acclaimed designer of luxury art furniture, and Cooper joked that he designed for the “masses instead of the classes,” heading product development at retailer JCPenney. But life always has a way of coming full circle, Cooper noted, and at the age of 80, he was enjoying royalties from his patented topselling furniture design, the first injection molded nesting rocking chair.

Cooper was fortunate enough to study at Cranbrook where his teachers included George Nelson, FIDSA, and Charles Eames. He often said that he and his fellow classmates were in “design heaven.” “We all knew they were great designers, but we didn’t know they were gods,” he mused. As I reflect on these memories shared by my dear friend, I can’t help but to see him in design heaven right now with such luminaries sharing laughs and stories.

—Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA By some quirk of fate, I became Executive Vice President of IDSA under Cooper Woodring who was President. What was that again? Wooding/ Woodring. Are they brothers? Is that a mistake?

Cooper was well-known within IDSA, but I came out of nowhere; this was my first office of any kind within the organization. The real confusion came on IDSA-sponsored trips abroad to ICSID conferences and, particularly, a three-

week trip to three cities in the Soviet Union. Woodring/ Wooding? Which one is the president? To whom do we give the head seat at the table?

Beyond all the confusion and fun, I could not have been more fortunate to begin my tenure as an IDSA officer than to have Cooper as my mentor and coach. Cooper was the most generous, knowledgeable, and dedicated advocate for IDSA I have ever known. He had an incredibly fertile mind, and the additional designation of inventor to industrial designer is more than appropriate for Cooper.

He was also a lot of fun, full of stories, and always ready to talk away the night. He was as good and loyal a friend as anyone could wish. I consider myself a very lucky guy to have the honor of having Cooper as my friend. When I think of all the people who have influenced and enriched my life, Cooper is at the top of that list. I will never forget him.

—Peter Wooding, FIDSA Cooper’s resume spanned every aspect of our profession. He started his career in consulting offices, worked in and led corporate design departments, became an entrepreneur, was the author of a book on how to become an expert witness, led classes on the subject, and guided the profession to another level.

He was always the statesman rather than the politician, so it was no surprise that he was the go-to person when IDSA faced changes or when we needed a representative to speak on the profession’s behalf before Congress.

He was generous with his advice and instilled in others the mindset of “of course you can.” His diplomatic reserve always made challenging situations appear manageable.

One of the best experiences of my career involving Cooper was his invitation to join him and Darrell Staley, FIDSA, as the third American delegate to the 1989 Interdesign conference held in Toyama, Japan. He described it as the ultimate designers’ camp, a two-week exploration to develop concepts with the theme of “Living with Water.”

The international group of 36 designers enjoyed spectacular scenery and factory tours in the mountainous area of northern Japan, home to many of the country’s craft and manufacturing industries. The camaraderie was spectacular

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as well, organized through the leadership of Cooper, Dmitry Azrikan (USSR), and Yasutaka Suge (Japan).

He and I had much in common, having worked for mass-merchandise retailers, and often talked about those perspectives. To be successful in the many areas of the profession and to give of his time to us was Cooper’s path, one we can all choose. He was patenting devices until the end and never stopped solving problems. I can only hope to have some of his optimism, energy, and drive. Things won’t be the same without him, but we’ll always have his indelible example.

—Nancy J. Perkins, FIDSA Cooper was one of the most self-assured yet humble people I have ever known. In one of our many conversations in a shared office at the University of Kansas ID Department, he revealed that his father had served as governor of Kansas.

With some encouragement, he added that his father had also served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of war.

Cooper lived in DC during that period as a young boy and remembered FDR reading stories to him as he sat on the president’s lap. Perhaps because of FDR’s influence, storytelling was one of Cooper’s many talents and one which I enjoyed throughout our long friendship. Stories about his children, his boats, his service as the mayor of a small town in New York, and, of course, his many stories about his design career and his later career as an expert design witness.

One of my favorite Cooper stories concerned his first expert witness case. The case accused a competitor of copying a very successful and patented design. The legal issue was whether or not the accused design was derived from the patented design. At the conclusion of all the testimony, the judge asked Cooper to explain why he was convinced that the plaintiff had crossed that line. Quoting from the record, Cooper’s response was, “Well, your Honor, if my daughter, whom you have not met, were to enter this courtroom, one look at her and you would intuitively see, in a heartbeat, that in spite of our many visual differences—such as she is female and I am male, she is young and I am old, and she has a full head of hair and I have practically none— that she is derived from me.” The judge immediately ruled in favor of Cooper’s client. Cooper went on to become the

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foremost design expert witness for decades.

Cooper was a true friend to me and countless other people inside and outside of IDSA. I will also remember him as a mentor, a confidant, a great storyteller, and a hell of a designer. I’ll miss him. Rock Chalk, Cooper!

—Ronald B. Kemnitzer, FIDSA As a younger designer, I referred to Cooper as “that guy who always talks about design patents.” Little did I know how much influence “that guy” would have on my professional life.

As I matured and began receiving design patents, Cooper made more and more sense to me. I got to spend a great deal of time with Cooper at the 2003 IDSA National Conference, which was cut short by the northeast blackout.

That is where our friendship began to grow.

In 2010, a law firm asked me to be an expert witness, and I immediately called Cooper. He said that I should do it and not to worry as he would be available to mentor me. Feeling reassured by Cooper’s mentorship, I took the case. Two weeks later, I contacted Cooper for guidance. In Cooper’s typically humorous style, he told me that he would not be able to mentor me because he was now an expert witness for the opposition in the case. So now in my first expert witness case I was going up against Yoda. I learned a lot from that case, the hard way, of course.

Once it was over, Cooper took me under his wing and gave me invaluable advice and information about being an expert witness. I took his expert witness training class in 2015 and kept in constant contact with him regarding the world of design patents, trade dress, and copyright (features of useful articles). Of course, we would discuss other design and non-design topics as well. It was always a pleasure to speak with him, and we kept in constant contact until the end. He will be greatly missed by me and the industrial design world in general. They just don’t make people like Cooper anymore!

—Tim Fletcher, FIDSA You can read more tributes to Cooper Woodring on the IDSA website: www.idsa.org/ news/passages/cooper-woodring-fidsa-2021.

REFLEC TIO N

RECRUITING BEFORE THE INTERNET

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ow did recruiters get anything done before the internet? Recently I’ve been asked this question by people who can’t imagine how we did the basics of our job—meeting and engaging with people, getting clients, evaluating candidates, and so on—before the internet was a thing. Trust me, we figured it out, and in many ways, I liked it better because we had more skin in the game. We didn’t have an ever-increasing amount of software tools, cloudbased or otherwise, that promised to solve our problems or do our jobs. We were trusted, we had informed opinions, we knew what we were talking about, and we knew how to get ourselves and our messages out there.

I became involved in industrial design because at the end of our Foundation year at Pratt, we students had to select a major before our (next) sophomore year. The choices were fine arts, illustration, advertising, industrial design, and interior design. I couldn’t pick one. I liked them all. So I asked our teacher, who was also the dean of the Foundation Program, what the best department was. He hid his mouth with his hand and whispered, “Industrial design,” and then, “But please don’t tell anyone I told you that.” That was how one of the most important decisions in my life, after the decision to go to Pratt, was made.

Fast forward to my next lucky break. After working as a designer for a while, I became the assistant director of placement at Pratt. Very quickly thereafter, the director retired, and I was made acting director. Somehow, I figured out how to do the job (that’s what designers do).

After seven and a half years, I had to leave. It was a very sad story; I loved the job at Pratt. I was railroaded out in a scandalous way. The details are irrelevant here. After about four months I realized that other players had an agenda I was not privy to. Their machinations, however, didn’t stop me from wanting to help designers find jobs they could thrive

in and help organizations achieve their goals by introducing them to designers ready to do just that. I opened my own company to recruit and place designers. This was more than 20 years before the internet became publicly accessible in the early 1990s. I did not have much exposure to the business world in those earliest days, but I was a fast and motivated learner.

As a female, I was not allowed to enter a lease agreement without a male co-signer, like a husband or father. With the intervention of my father with his buildingowner client, I was able to rent an office for a 90-day trial. If I lasted that long, then I could qualify for a lease. If I lasted that long? I lasted in that office space for three years and ultimately was in business for 50.

Building a Network I wasn’t able to leave Pratt with any records. I filled a Rolodex (remember those?) from my memory with Pratt alumni who I had placed and the regular clients who would call the school or come to the school to interview. Those were my initial candidate and client prospect pools. To get the word out, I sent out postcards stamped with “RitaSue Siegel is Alive and Well” (after a popular Broadway show), my contact information, and a tagline about what my business did.

At that time, the demand for designers was nowhere near what it is today, except in automotive. How did I find candidates and clients without the internet? I began to advertise in the Sunday New York Times classified section.

I also placed a monthly ad in the second-most-important piece of media for ID at the time, Industrial Design magazine.

The ad had my photo in it, which turned out to be brilliant.

No matter where I went, people would come up to me and say, “I saw your picture in ID magazine, can we talk?”

My strategy was to get everyone to know who I was

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Early office tech: a landline phone, big fat Rolodexes, 5”x8” candidate records, and a bottle of Wite-Out.

and what I did so they would call me when they needed a designer and so designers would call me when they wanted to change jobs. I achieved this by going to every gathering of designers I could, including conferences and trade shows, at first in the US and then in Europe and Asia. Conferences had great lists of attendees, sponsors, and members to use in marketing our services and to find candidates. I got to meet many amazing people who became friends as well as business associates. I also became an active member of AIGA, IDSA, the Design Management Institute, and other relevant organizations.

I eventually realized that it was my job to be the interpreter between what the business world needed from design and how designers could and wanted to add value.

Folks, very few people knew what design was; to many, the word “design” evoked the word “fashion.” If I wanted to have a successful business, I was going to have to explain it, so I started giving talks about what a designer is.

In the beginning, especially when I was addressing designers at Q&A time, the first question from the audience was usually, “Are you married?” It wasn’t that the men in the audience were attracted to me; many of them could not understand how such a confident, pushy broad could possibly have a normal private life. Discrimination against and distrust of capable women was rampant. But I quickly learned how to avoid getting fatally wounded when it happened and would pick up where I left off and ask for other questions.

I made sure people in design schools knew I was available to give talks to students. Most design students had no idea of the scale and scope of opportunities they could develop for themselves. I talked to students about the

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importance of communicating what design could do, the value it could bring, and how they could position themselves in their resumes, portfolios, and interviews to be credible so that they would get hired. Also, how it was just as important for them to continue in the role of evangelist once they got hired into a fertile situation. Regardless of the organization type, designers might have to explain every day what they do and why design is important to colleagues who were not designers in a language that they could understand.

I met all the players—at first Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, Wally Olins, and Saul Bass. If I didn’t reach out to them, they reached out to me. Even Hartmut Esslinger visited my office when he first opened his office in California. Steve Jobs invited me to visit him when I was at a conference in San Francisco.

Dan Harden, IDSA, now CEO, founder, and principal designer of Whipsaw, came for an interview in 1983 after working as an intern for two companies. In addition to being very smart, he was talented, well-spoken, and personable.

I picked up the phone and called Niels Diffrient, FIDSA, a friend and a partner in the Dreyfuss office. I told Niels that he had to meet Dan. Niels agreed, they met, and Dan was asked to join them.

I had a good relationship with Renault. The company had purchased a significant interest in Nissan and wanted to find a vice president of design for Nissan to live and work in Japan. One of the first things I did was call a woman who used to write for an automobile magazine. After I explained what the position involved, she recommended Shiro Nakamura, then at Isuzu. He had graduated as a designer from a university in Japan, spent some time at ArtCenter College, and worked briefly at GM; he also spoke fluent English and French, was a wine connoisseur, and played the cello in an orchestra. What a charming, multitalented guy. The vice president of design from Renault and a trusted colleague (not a designer) came from Paris to New York to interview the three candidates we presented, including Shiro. As luck would have it, the client focused on Shiro right away. The other candidates were fine and very qualified, but Shiro was a tough act to follow. When he returned to Japan, he was interviewed by senior people in the Renault/Nissan hierarchy, and he met Carlos Ghosn, the Lebanese-born Nissan chief executive, who hired him. Shiro retired from Nissan in 2017 after 18 years as senior vice president and chief creative officer.

Color My World To manage my growing network of people in the days before databases, contact management systems, and

online profiles, I designed a system around 5” x 8” index cards printed on colored stock, one for each candidate. Pink was for graphics, blue was ID, green was architecture, yellow was interior design, and orange was a “general” category for important non-design positions in design organizations, like general management, salespeople, and client engagement/ account management. We had a numeric system as well and assigned a number to a candidate, which corresponded to their experience and compensation level. A P1 was an entry-level graphic designer, for example. Eventually, designers started to specialize more—in packaging graphics or toy design, for example—so we created categories. In addition to their contact info, when I interviewed a person, I would write on the card in my teeny tiny handwriting what they did best (in my opinion) and what they wanted to do.

I also recorded their location preferences, current salary, and salary wants; you wouldn’t believe the amount of information I was able to fit on the cards. I also designed a metal revolving structure—like a massive, multitiered Lazy Susan—to hold the cards. Much like reviewing online profiles today, I looked through these cards to match candidates to the job descriptions I received from clients. The difference?

I created the content, so it was burned in my mind, and because of that, I remembered everyone.

I became known as a very tough interviewer, tough because I kept my quality expectations as high as my clients’ and because I would tell candidates the sometimes cold, hard truth about how I evaluated them. If someone was great at research but wasn’t a great form developer, I let them know. In addition to a resume, which I would critique, I required candidates to provide me with 20 35-millimeter slides of their work with a typed list of what was on the slides. When I recommended a candidate to a client, I would provide the candidate’s resume, slides, and content sheet and my (in the beginning, handwritten) evaluation of the candidate in relation to the job description.

The client would return the slides and content sheet to us after interviewing the candidate, who would have brought their portfolio to the interview. There was no Zoom or Skype in those days; the candidates had to fly to interviews if they didn’t live nearby. One reason I invented the slide sheet procedure was to entice clients to pay the transportation and lodging expenses for the candidates.

By the 1990s, candidates were showcasing their work online. Our records started to be digitized in the late ’80s. The color-coding started to go away. The Internet and software improved other parts of the process, including sourcing candidates, sending out bulk messages, tracking our activities, and collecting and storing candidate

information. We could more quickly pull together data to show clients trends in compensation, for example.

A huge difference between then and now in recruiting was that I (and many other recruiters) could dial a phone number and reach the person we wanted. There were no voicemail or email inbox black holes. Truly. When was the last time you reached a person by phone on the first try and just made things happen?

—RitaSue Siegel, FIDSA RitaSue@ritasue.com RitaSue Siegel was a founder and partner of RitaSue Siegel Resources until 2019, a search and consulting firm that recruited senior design leaders in all design disciplines for clients worldwide.

Right: New York Times classified ad, where each character counted, hand delivered to a worldwide readership.

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To learn more about this competition, its awards, and to enroll, please visit: www.diecasting.zinc.org/zinc-challenge INNOVATION SPRING 2022

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Y E S T E RDAY , TODAY , T OMORROW

THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

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’ve been an industrial designer for over four decades. I graduated from college in the ’70s, and had been working in design while I was in school. During that period, and really until the early ’80s, the demand for design was limited to an elite population. Design itself was a “lower” profession in a world of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and business professionals. I felt like we were treated like draftsmen who drew in perspective and left the decision-making to others.

We would create multiple design concepts and then be instructed by, many times, non-designers on how and what to combine without regard to user needs or the designer’s point of view. Designers struggled to have a seat at the table with the C-suite.

American design at that time was also evolving. For the most part, Europeans and Americans both craved European design, and American design was struggling to have a voice.

The superstar designer of the middle part of the century, Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, was born in France and brought a European aesthetic to American design. The multitalented Charles and Ray Eames, who I was fortunate enough to see speak to at the Aspen Design Conference, were passionate, brilliant, and insightful. But they struggled to reach mass appeal. Of course, there were many others who forged our profession.

For me, and many others, Frog Design, led by Hartmut Esslinger, became the first real rock stars of American design. Drawing inspiration from the Bauhaus movement

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of the 1930s, their designs were clean, simple, and pure; they had very little ornamentation. They also designed many of the first Apple devices, one of the first examples of an American design-driven company.

In all this, it’s hard to overemphasize the influence of Japanese design on the developing American industrial design aesthetic. In the Japanese mindset, everything can be beautiful works of art, everything can be pure materials, and everything can be exquisite. Nothing is over-designed or under-designed, but just explicitly designed, an influence that continues strongly today.

Designers in the 1980s, especially in California, took the Japanese design influence to the blank canvas that was provided to them by the technological revolution happening around them. Companies like Frog, but also IDEO, led by Bill Moggridge, FIDSA, began designing for new technology companies like Apple. These companies were building the future and weren’t burdened by the design expectations of the legacy industries. At the same time, all of the sudden we had these incredible CAD devices that allowed us to do things in a virtual space that you couldn’t do before.

Out of this incredible mixture of freedom and technological advancement we created American industrial design as it is known now.

Today, many of the most successful American companies are design-first, or even design-led. Design has become a competitive advantage, and designers are

RKS’s 1990 concept for Alan Kay/Apple, predicting a future of connected learning technologies available to students of all ages.

given C-suite titles. American design is known throughout the world, and has reached billions of people, achieving tremendous mass appeal. The world looks very different than it did, and it continues to change.

In ways we could never have imagined even a few decades ago, our environments are now defined by industrial design. There was a documentary a few years ago that discussed the disappearing night sky. The sky of our ancestors has been replaced by our lights, our cars, our homes, and our satellites. And increasingly we are defining and designing everything about our lives and what we see and touch and smell. And increasingly people are looking to design as extensions of themselves.

Design sees no limits. And today’s designers help build businesses, fuel companies from within, create brands and

stories, and take all of us to places filled with self-affirmation.

Design went from being for the select few in advanced economies to having universal appeal and utility. And in doing so, it has forced all of us to create new levels of awareness, empathy, and insight into the needs of people.

We now are challenged to design, innovate, and create for a world of people different from ourselves; language, culture, age, and onward all come into play for us as the world gets smaller and design continues to get bigger.

—Ravi Sawhney, FIDSA Ravi Sawhney is the principal and founder of RKS Design.

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Y E S T E R DAY , TODAY , T OMORROW

WILL THE REAL PRODUCT DESIGNER PLEASE STAND UP?

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ast December I felt the need to post an observation on LinkedIn regarding the increasing confusion between product designer (ID) and product designer (digital).

The post generated a very healthy discussion with triple-digit comments and six-figure views. For that reason, I was asked to write an article about the subject as it seems that it is a hot-button topic not only for me but also for many of my industrial design colleagues.

Before I go on, a little bit about myself: I graduated from ArtCenter 30 years ago with a BS in product design.

Back then, the industrial design department at Art Center College of Design (as it was known) was divided into three very distinct but related disciplines: product design, transportation design, and environmental design. The curriculum was identical for all three groups until the end of the fourth term, at which point you had to choose which career path was best suited to your skills and interests.

in factories. These objects must also be designed to be ergonomic, meaning they must interact with human beings in a comfortable fashion. Whether it is a hand tool, a chair, or a mouse, the physical interaction between object and human must be carefully considered in the design process.

Now, to get to the reason I am writing this piece: The digital revolution has spawned a second type of product designer, one who designs digital products that are not 3D. They are not tangible in the sense that you can touch them or physically interact with them. They live in a virtual world, a world that is only possible because of the existence of actual products or hardware designed by the OG product designers (think laptops, phones, etc.). This product designer does not have to deal with the complications associated with manufacturing processes or ergonomics.

You get the picture. The former designs 3D things, the latter designs 2D experiences and services.

Some Definitions First, what is a product designer in the traditional sense? At its essence, a product designer creates tangible objects that human beings interact with. The keyword is tangible: things you can touch and feel that are three-dimensional, physical embodiments of an idea. How is this different than art?

Well, a product designer’s “art” must be able to be massproduced, industrialized, and commercialized. Here is where the term “industrial designer” comes from. The “industrial” part of this moniker does not have to do with designing factories; it is about designing objects that can be made

The Dilemma Why is this a problem, and why should we care that two very different disciplines share the same name? Well, as far as I am concerned, I typically do not care for titles or descriptors for people or groups. Anyone can call themselves whatever they want. However, in this case, and the reason this surfaced as an issue in my mind, is that the dual identity crisis affects my everyday job. It creates a frustrating situation that costs me time unnecessarily.

Here is why: I asked our in-house recruiting team to search for new members for my product design team at

IDSA.ORG

Above: The person who designed the center screen in the Tesla Model 3 is a very different designer from the one who designed the user interface contained within the screen. To be clear, no one is saying that one is better or has more value than the other, in fact they are very much complimentary, but each has very distinct skills that allow them to perform their job at the high level necessary to be successful.

Tesla. The job description was very clear: must have an industrial design degree, experience designing products, a keen sense of manufacturing processes and engineering, etc., etc. We all know the drill. The majority of the candidates who applied for the job were digital product designers, literally nothing to do with the job description. My sense is that potential candidates saw the “product designer at Tesla” title and, without digging deeper, submitted their resume. This in turn cost me and my recruiting team valuable time sifting through the noise to try to get to the few relevant candidates for the position. Conversely, those looking for a product design job as industrial designers also waste an inordinate amount of time filtering through nonrelevant postings.

How can we fix this? Clearly, there is no quick fix. The digital product design name has gained significant traction and will take a concerted effort by all parties to course correct. I think the first best step is to agree on a name for each discipline and stick to it. The name has to be simple but very descriptive to avoid confusion. Referencing back to the LinkedIn comments, I read many suggestions for distinguishing between an OG product designer and a “new” product designer: physical product designer versus digital product designer, digital designer, UI/UX designer, or virtual designer. Or 2D designer versus 3D designer. The point is that all the cross-functional disciplines affected by this phenomenon must agree to a descriptor, uphold it, and educate people when they use it incorrectly. Those who can make a difference are educators, recruiters, employers,

clients, marketers, leaders of trade associations (IDSA), and us, the designers.

We, as industrial designers who design physical products, are very proud of our training, legacy, and accomplishments.

We strive to uphold the tradition of innovation, functionality, elegance, inventiveness, craftsmanship, and style set forth by the founders of the profession. Subjectively, it doesn’t feel right to share the name of our profession with a profession that is much newer, is not steeped in tradition, and has a very different set of skills. Objectively, this namesharing issue is a source of wasted time and confusion by many. It’s time we take it back and set the record straight.

PS: After I finished writing this piece, I walked over to the UI/UX team in Tesla’s Design Studio. They were a bit surprised to see me since I don’t usually venture into their area. I asked them what they thought about this topic. All of them said they hate being called product designers, not because it has any bad connotation, but because of the confusion it creates when hiring or applying for a job.

They unanimously said they would prefer to stick to UI/UX designer or, if one must, digital product designer, but that is not their preference.

—Javier Verdura jverdura@tesla.com Mexico City-born Javier Verdura graduated from Art Center College of Design with a degree in product design in 1991.

He joined Tesla in 2012, where he is currently the global director of product design.

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Y E S T E RDAY , TODAY , T OMORROW

THE NEED FOR EMPATHY: DESIGNING FOR PRODUCT COMFORT

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omfort is an ever-changing construct with standards that are fluid over time and location. Our Neolithic ancestors, for example, created mattresses out of layered plant material. Ancient Egyptians later created

raised beds for better thermal comfort and headrests to help keep the upper body in alignment. Today we enjoy the luxury of modern plush innerspring, latex, and memory-foam mattresses and even adjustable mattresses equipped with physiological and pressure-point monitoring.

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While primitive grass mattresses improved sleep quality so much that it prompted an evolution in human cognitive functions, most of us would have a hard time sleeping on this type of bedding, even for a single night (ask anyone who has ever camped out in a sleeping bag on the ground during a chilly fall night). As mattress technology has progressed over the last 80,000 years, so have our standards for comfort.

With comfort being such a multifaceted construct that is continuously changing, how do we design products that promote physical comfort? With a goal post that is always moving, how do we establish design criteria and set targets that assure user comfort? In order to design products that promote comfort, we must understand what comfort is and use empathy to guide the design process.

Understanding Comfort Comfort is both a physical and mental state consisting of aspects of ease and satisfaction. Physical comfort can take many forms depending on the stimuli a person is exposed to. Thermal comfort, for example, refers to the body’s perception of thermal conditions, such as air temperature and humidity. Similarly, acoustic comfort refers to an individual’s state of well-being when exposed to the auditory conditions of an indoor environment. The body’s sensory receptors pick up various stimuli from the environment, and the brain processes this information to determine the proper response. Past experiences and conditioning play a role in establishing expectations for comfort and thresholds for discomfort.

We cannot fully understand comfort without also understanding discomfort. While many comfort-rating scales consider the two to be the same concept on opposite ends of a spectrum, prominent comfort researchers like Dr. Peter Vink are adopting the view that these are independent and distinct states. Comfort is not merely the absence of discomfort but rather a pleasurable experience in itself.

Discomfort, on the other hand, is its own unpleasant state.

We may tolerate some level of discomfort if we perceive the benefits of the interaction to justify experiencing the discomfort. We may also experience situations where the comfort perception in response to a stimulus is neutral or where comfort and discomfort are experienced simultaneously as they are neither mutually exclusive nor binary.

Product comfort does not refer to any particular product characteristic or feature but rather our reaction when interacting with a product. A product itself cannot be considered to be inherently comfortable; it only becomes comfortable when a person uses it for a specific purpose and experiences positive feelings as a result of the interaction.

As with any interaction in our environment, interacting

with a designed product produces various stimuli. For example, when we pick up a handheld electronic device, we immediately sense visual stimuli related to the product aesthetics and tactile stimuli related to the surface texture and product geometry. As we use the device, we may sense various sounds, haptic responses, tactile feedback, and heat being generated by the internal electronics of the device. As we hold onto the device and activate various input components, we may begin to sense the muscles in our hands and fingers straining and beginning to fatigue. Whether or not we perceive these sensations to be comfortable is highly dependent on our expectations and individual tolerances. In my current role conducting user research in the augmented reality space, I see users expecting a more seamless and intuitive experience when using extended reality hardware because they consider it to be more of an extension of the human body.

Product comfort is a result of interactions between the human element, use conditions, and product features. The product itself is only one part of the puzzle. Engaging in effective comfort-driven design requires us to understand all three of these perspectives as it relates to our specific product application.

Understanding Users Perception of physical comfort is very subjective and personal. We cannot design products that provide a comfortable experience without first understanding who our users are and their physical characteristics, abilities, behaviors, attitudes, motivations, and past experiences.

Creating personas and developing archetypes for users allow us to define who our users are and their behavioral perspectives. This can be challenging if we are unsure how the market will respond to a product, especially for emerging technologies, emphasizing the need for wellinformed targeting strategies. Empathy mapping deepens the understanding of our users by revealing what they say, think, feel, and do, giving us a first-hand view of their experiences.

As we all know, people come in all different shapes and sizes. These physical differences must be accounted for when designing products that involve physical interaction.

Many anthropometry databases are readily available to help us understand the distribution of body measurements.

However, we need to understand the specific anthropometry of our users, which requires deep market insight and possibly first-hand anthropometric research. While the common practice is to design products for use by the 5th percentile female and the 95th percentile male and everyone in between, the distribution of the users of a product is often skewed and many users may fall outside these boundaries.

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Past experiences and sociocultural factors also shape how we perceive comfort. As we interact with products that elicit feelings of comfort (or discomfort), our standards and expectations for comfort change. When we interact with a product with a physical resemblance or similar utility to products we may have interacted with in the past, we call on these past experiences to help establish our expectations for comfort. Insight on the past experiences of users, whether that is with our own legacy product models or similar competitor products, is essential for understanding what our users expect during product use.

Understanding users is critical for developing a product intended for multiple applications in a global market.

Anthropometric differences between people of different genders, ethnicities, and even different nationalities within the same ethnicities offer an intriguing challenge when designing a wearable product with a handheld input device that provides a comfortable experience for such a broad spectrum of users due to significant differences in facial features, head shape, and hand sizes. For example, when designing a handheld input device, we must ensure that the device is large enough to allow a user with a large hand to establish a grip with all fingers securely in contact with the device while also ensuring that users with smaller hands have convenient and comfortable access to all input components.

An effective strategy for designing for a variety of users is also to design for adjustability and adaptability, which allows users to experience a comfortable and pleasurable interaction when donning our wearable components.

Employing techniques such as anthropometric body segment measurement and 3D body scanning with user research subjects allows us to better understand the physical characteristics of our users and differences between key user populations.

Defining Use Conditions In addition to understanding users, we also need to understand how they will use the product and the environmental conditions during expected use. A variety of design thinking processes, such as fly-on-the-wall observations, walk-a-mile immersions, and contextual inquires, can be used to help us to better define product use conditions. Contextual insight is important because the perception of comfort when using a product can be vastly different between different use cases. We need to

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understand not only what users plan to accomplish with the product but also the distribution of movements and interactions they will perform during use and how the product’s use environment and utility objectives effect user behavior.

Understanding expected use cases is essential when designing a product that provides a comfortable and pleasurable experience. A surgeon, for example, will have a much different experience with the product due to task requirements, personal protective equipment, and sanitation requirements than a retail worker. Our approach of working with industry partners during product development has allowed us to define the needs and expectations of our users, making comfort requirements and product use conditions much clearer. Gaining an understanding of actual product use cases has also allowed us to establish conditions for user testing, and our industry partnerships have provided us with a unique opportunity for pursing design iterations after testing the product with real users in actual use environments.

Designing for Comfort Understanding users and their use conditions is a prerequisite for setting design targets for physical comfort.

For example, if we are positioning vehicle controls for easy reach, understanding the arm lengths of our users and their sitting behaviors allows us to establish functional reach zones, while having profiled use cases allows us to prioritize primary and secondary controls. If we are designing a handheld electronic device, understanding the hand sizes of users in our target market and which components users need to access frequently with minimal response time and hand repositioning helps us with positioning input affordances and for mapping interactions.

When setting product requirements, we need to objectively define product specifications. This requires translating subjective perceptions for comfort into objective product specifications, often in the form of key performance indicators. Although research literature written on comfort limits for similar products and product benchmarks may help to establish these product requirements, foundational research on comfort perception for the product under its expected use conditions is ideal for target setting. This generally requires collecting feedback from human subjects during product interaction under real or simulated use conditions and relating this feedback to measurable and

The second-generation augmented reality device from Magic Leap provides users in a global enterprise market with a comfortable and pleasurable experience.

definable characteristics of the product.

Along with setting product requirements, product validation is necessary for ensuring that we are meeting our comfort objectives, including the validation of prototype iterations and for commercial release. Several scientificallybased tools are available for validating products and equipment for human use, including biomechanical modeling, threshold limit values, and virtual simulation. While these methods provide a way for us to validate products without involving a tangible product or prototype, getting the product into the hands of users provides insight that is impossible to model or simulate. This can be in the form of user research studies, where human subjects interact with the product under defined use conditions, or customer clinics, where we can observe actual users interacting with the product and solicit their feedback. Early product access for key users with a planned follow-up is perhaps one of the most effective methods for validating product comfort before product release.

The Bottom Line When designing for physical comfort, we must design with a soft touch and empathize with our users, which requires

us to understand who they are, what their behavioral perspectives are, and how they will use the product. Relying on design guidelines, published literature, key performance indicators, regulatory standards, biomechanical modeling, and virtual simulation without understanding users and use conditions is unlikely to result in optimum comfort as these tools and resources lack context.

We must embrace the subjectivity of physical comfort if we intend to understand how real users are going to experience the products we design, and we must strive to inform design decisions through empathic research.

Comfort-driven design requires us to change our thinking from designing a product with certain physical characteristics to designing an experience.

—Mohammad Imraan Jeelani, MSIE, CPE mjeelani@magicleap.com Mohammad Jeelani is a senior human factors engineer for Magic Leap, the founder of HFactor, and a Radford University MFA in design thinking candidate.

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LESS AND MORE: A MUCH-NEEDED FUTURE FOR DESIGN

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n the past, industrial design talent and the design process were primarily focused on improving the appearance, usability, and manufacturability of products, service systems, and digital media. This process led to significant evolutionary improvements to the status quo but, with some notable exceptions, did not produce revolutionary human-centered innovation. This outcome was often the result of designers being asked to fulfill the requirements of a predetermined design brief often generated within siloed organizations seeking to produce more of what made sense in the past without understanding and responding to the unmet needs and desires of a changing world.

This approach may have worked from the time of the Great Depression until the 1980s, but it is no longer economically or morally justifiable at a time of wasteful global competitiveness and probable environmental Armageddon.

Time to Redefine As my old friend and design guru Dieter Rams has written, we need “Less but better.” But what does less mean? And what is better?

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I believe that another German adage “less is more” responds to Dieter’s challenge and now has even more relevance but with the following revision: “Less and more.”

Let me explain: “Less” now must mean less wasteful and toxic materials, less carbon-based nonrenewable energy, and much less of the resulting trivial products, services, and systems that are created and quickly discarded or that quickly become obsolete.

“More” now needs redefinition as well. More is no longer only about the elimination of visual and physical complexity but is also about creating more value in people’s lives through meaningful products, services, and experiences with less waste. Better familiar experiences, yes, but also uncovering, understanding, and meeting undiscovered or neglected human needs.

Lead the Way Design research has exploded in the past few decades, and I am proud to say that Continuum, the studio I co-founded in 1983, was and still is, as EPAM Continuum, at the forefront of this design revolution. Design research has become a

“In order to become a part of much-needed solutions, industrial design must become what I refer to as ‘the nose of the dog instead of just the tail’ by leading the way rather than following.”

strategic component of many leading organizations, public and private, but its focus now needs to be expanded.

This requires probing areas of the human experience that have too long been neglected—areas of urgent need, such as ecological sustainability, neurodiversity, homelessness, poverty, mental disorders, and even violence.

In order to become a part of much-needed solutions, industrial design must become what I refer to as “the nose of the dog instead of just the tail” by leading the way rather than following. I use this analogy because we now spend much of our time in Tuscany, the birthplace of the Renaissance, and my two dogs are valuable contributors to our quality of life there, not just by being visibly happy to see us but also by using their noses to find highly valuable and very delicious truffles for the dinner table. And a small truffle growing in harmony with its environment makes a big difference to a meal. We, as designers, also need to help find metaphorical truffles of humanistic innovation to improve the quality of life in a sustainable way!

My dogs are a metaphor for industrial design past and future. In the past, industrial design, at its best, made people happier in their everyday lives. In the future, industrial design must also help to uncover ways of creating a more sustainable, just, and inclusive future for all.

To make a meaningful contribution to addressing such issues requires sensibilities beyond the usual confines of siloed disciplines. Design research can be a key—and in some cases, the key—contributor to an interdisciplinary team by bringing a different sensibility to the innovation process as well understanding, conceptualizing, visualizing, modeling, testing, and refining possible solutions.

When applied with synergistic collaboration with other disciplines beyond the traditional engineering and marketing communities, such as psychology, special education, environmental science, and healthcare, design and design research can make a dramatic contribution to “doing well by doing good,” enhancing both the perceived value of design and the quality of life for all.

Do Well By Doing Good My family and I now have a personal focus on promoting the use of design research and interdisciplinary collaborative design development to uncover and leverage opportunities for meaningful innovation to help the neurodiverse community.

The Zaccai Foundation for Augmented Intelligence has been sponsoring an interdisciplinary program at Syracuse University called Intelligence++, led by Don Carr of the School of Industrial and Interaction Design, Beth Myers of the School of Education, and Linda Hartsock of the School of Management. Intelligence++ seeks to uncover opportunities to augment the capabilities and limitations of neurodiverse people, their families, and their communities.

In doing so, we also encourage the best and brightest students to see this domain as a fertile field to do well by doing good.

In parallel we are also in the process of restoring the Villa di Meleto (www.villameleto.org), a historic structure in Tuscany, to host neurodiverse young adults, educators, and researchers in a unique learning-by-doing environment in conjunction with leading US and Italian universities.

Through these initiatives and by combining collective insights and talents of educators, students, parents, design researchers, designers, and technologists, we are striving to make a meaningful difference in the quality of life of a broad spectrum of people in a sustainable way. Join us!

—Gianfranco Zaccai, FIDSA gianfrancozaccai@gmail.com Gianfranco Zaccai is an industrial designer and architect and co-founder of Continuum. In 2018 he launched the Foundation for Augmented Intelligence to promote innovations to assist people with intellectual disabilities, their families, educators, and society as a whole.

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MOBILE ETHNOGRAPHY: A NEW METHODOLOGY FOR NEW TIMES

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he COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything.

Its impact on global wellness and the economy has forced organizations in every industry—including our own—to rethink how we do things. It has acted as an emergency brake and an accelerator, ramping up the adoption of some trends and triggering the abandonment of others. It has severely disrupted how design-based research is being executed in our industry—limiting access to people’s homes and workplaces, shuttering research labs, and eroding the trust required to engage people through intimate participatory methods—leaving us to grapple with the challenge of creating intimacy at arm’s length.

As design researchers, the time we spend in the field with our research participants is precious; it is vital for us to be in the same shared spaces as them in context and in the moment. Going where life is lived, we explore their worlds in their homes and places of work, gathering the rich data we need to paint a nuanced picture of a population or cohort in these spaces.

The Great Acceleration COVID-19 obliterated this approach, forcing a transition within design research to be undertaken entirely remotely with both expected challenges and unexpected benefits.

The ground has shifted and with it a significant opportunity for design-based research. We see an increased demand

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for design research, with many clients requesting more mobile and digital approaches. The great acceleration in digital adoption is undoubtedly one of the most apparent trends to come from the pandemic. Necessity has now spurred new digital users and use cases, especially in e-commerce, and it’s only natural that these new habits are sticking around. People are more open than ever to remote digital interactions. As design researchers, we can now, through digital platforms, observe how respondents really behave in context and in the moment and at a speed and scale that was never previously achievable with traditional ethnography, in-depth interviews, and focus groups.

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of mobile ethnography (sometimes referred to as “digital ethnography”). Before everyone was walking around facedown in their smartphone, ethnography required researchers to spend hours with their subjects on a one-to-one basis observing behaviors, conducting interviews, and collecting context in the field. It was valuable work but also timeconsuming, costly, limited in scope, and, as a result, cumbersome to scale. Now mobile ethnography provides a portal to tens, twenties, even hundreds of people’s behaviors simultaneously. Smartphone users diarize their behaviors and feelings using videos, photos, or text, giving us a window into their world and enabling researchers to see what’s happening in each individual’s life. We’re now able

Mobile ethnography brings customers to life in a way that instantly resonates with both your colleagues and your clients.

to derive the kinds of powerful insights that you might only expect to see with an exhaustive broad-based longitudinal study but instead in a much more rapid and nimble format that yields a super-rich qualitative data set.

It’s a powerful tool that is used to unlock the views of the many with the work of just a few, but its value also lies in its ability to see beyond a linear narrative, putting the pieces of your respondents’ lives together in new and exciting ways that help you chart new pathways to growth.

New Methods Demand New Approaches As the early adoption of tech often goes, while some companies have taken the plunge into the world of mobile ethnography, many are simply applying new technology to old thinking. They are replicating the same studies they were doing in the field without giving much thought about how to best use the wide-open digital world now available to them.

It’s easy to get excited about the possibilities of mobile ethnography. The ability to peek into previously toughto-capture moments and gather media-rich responses to answer your most pressing research questions is enticing.

But there’s a lot of confusion about how to actually do

it well. Mobile ethnography is not a survey, nor is it pure ethnographic research. Mobile research is its own distinct methodology, requiring a much different and nuanced approach.

When you’re physically there with a participant in traditional ethnography, you can let their actions and environment guide your line of questioning, building empathy and capturing deep learning. When conducting a survey, you can rely on having a focused 15–20 minutes of participant attention where you can pose a battery of detailed questions, drilling into the breadth and scale of a potential opportunity.

But because mobile ethnography is neither in-person nor focused on a single focused point in time, it requires design researchers to think differently. When structuring for mobile, you must anticipate respondent behavior and carefully structure the tasks you want to capture and the questions you want to be answered ahead of time. And even then, it’s not always easy to gather both the quality and quantity of responses you need to form a robust qualitative data stream.

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Mobile ethnography’s superpower is its ability to place you directly in context with your customer and the moments where they experience your product or service.

5 Tips for Structuring a Mobile Ethnography Engagement To make the best use of mobile ethnography, you have to create not just studies but mobile engagements that prompt respondents to share openly, honestly, and frequently. The key is to learn how participants’ lives naturally unfold and then fit your study within their world. Here’s how.

1. Consider the delivery. You’re reaching people on their most personal device; stay colloquial—but not irreverent.

The power of a mobile device is that people use it for a variety of really personal reasons—for connection, for entertainment, for their livelihoods—and often, it’s never out of arms reach. If you set the tone of voice of your study to match the personal way your audience engages with their device, you’ll intrude less and learn more. Your responses will be more intimate, profound, and compelling because you’ll be proving right from the start that you get them.

Keep it fun and engaging and stay away from business or tech speak. Asking a question like “Tell me about the features and benefits of this product” may drive directly at your study objectives, but it’s awfully boring to answer. Plus,

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features and benefits might have a different meaning for the average participant than for you as a researcher. Instead, ask your respondents to show you what they can do with the product, then observe and record the value they derive from the interaction.

2. Build connections with your respondents. Don’t be afraid to get personal; help them feel like a human, not a research subject.

Know your audience. You can make that colloquialism work further for you by incorporating slang and conversational language that can help you better connect with participants (for example, questions for millennials should be phrased differently than those for baby boomers). You want to sound like someone they can relate to, someone they’d want to be friends with and tell things to.

Start by responding and prompting individuals by name to know they aren’t just sending responses off into the ether.

Then frame your questions in a way that reflects an interest in the person and genuine curiosity, just like you’d use when talking to a friend you care about. It should help you get

warmer, more unique, and genuine responses.

3. Capture responses with minimal intrusion. Consider if what you’re asking is easy to capture and document and if they’re comfortable capturing it in the location you’re asking about.

Remember that not everyone is a wannabe YouTube star interested in filming every moment of their day (nor do you want to have to review copious hours of footage).

Ask yourself: Will they feel comfortable capturing specific behaviors, especially if it’s being done in public? Is the moment short enough in duration to be documented in a few minutes, or do you need to be more specific?

From a practitioner’s perspective, it’s all about giving people the ability to quickly capture what’s happening and respond to questions without taking them out of the moment.

4. Create opportunities to discover connections among questions. Think about your lines of questioning synergistically—you may not need to capture the full answer all at once.

A lot of the language people typically use in market or design research does not work for mobile ethnography.

Research objectives reframed as inquiries, or the type of direct questioning often written for quantitative surveys (“How did you use the thing you were using?” “How do you feel when you do x?”) don’t leave room for exponential insights; they don’t get you to the tangents.

With mobile ethnography, it can serve you better to develop lines of indirect questioning and capture examples of behavior in the moment. These indirect questions, such as “Draw a character that represents x” or “Act out a breakup conversation with y,” can ultimately reveal more about what is important to the subject and allow for nuances in the answers. And because you’re capturing data over time, you can piece together insights from anywhere across your data stream.

5. Context, context, context. Save reflective or valuejudgment questions until the end so as to not bias your sample.

Indirect questions also help avoid any type of bias. If you’re doing a study on healthy eating habits, for example, you don’t want to start off by asking, “What’s your philosophy on healthy eating?” For the next three days, you’re going to see your subject leaning into that philosophy because now you’ve just anchored them on an ideal. Instead, start with more broad-based lifestyle questions, or you might ask them to show you what’s in their fridge or pantry. Then you can start to gather impartial evidence on consumption habits.

To better understand the relevant triggers and rewards that establish behavior patterns, dig into what’s going on before, after, and way after the information you are looking to capture.

One Last Tip When thinking about mobile ethnography, consider your study from two perspectives: the first is your respondent, and the second is you, the person who is analyzing the data. You want to keep it fun and engaging, for both your sakes! You also want your efforts and energy to pay off, so keep your questions simple and straightforward; don’t leave room for confusion, or you won’t get the data you need.

An excellent way to make sure your questions are easy to understand? Text them to a friend. See what you get back.

Their responses just might surprise you!

—Jonathan Dalton, IDSA j.dalton@thrivethinking.com Jonathan Dalton is the chief executive officer and co-founder of THRIVE. He helps clients achieve business objectives and redefine markets through user-centered products and strategic brand design.

Below: Mobile ethnography brings you the richness of context your respondents are experiencing.

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YOU WANT PROGRESS? HERE’S HOW. PERSPECTIVES FROM IDSA’S WOMEN IN DESIGN COMMITTEE

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n evolution of IDSA leadership that we, the Women in Design (WID) Committee, are excited about in 2022 is the expansion of Districts. Our group, now with six representatives, has over 125 years of professional experience collectively. We are studio owners, educators, researchers, designers, and people leaders, so we come with diverse perspectives about the profession.

One expectation of this committee is to represent the voices of the minority female designer demographic. So we collaborated to share our thoughts related to women in design in the context of this issue’s focus on the past, present, and future.

Past: Leadership In order to contemplate the past, the WID Committee considered how we had become successful design leaders.

A unifying theme in our responses is that we attribute success to our authentic character. Instead of pointing to what we have delivered, each woman’s answer was about how they acted to achieve success.

Successful leadership comes from having a “strong sense of who you are’’ and by bringing “your values and purpose to work,” says Kat Reiser, IDSA, Midwest District WID Representative and an instructor at Advanced Design’s Offsite. It also requires acting boldly on those values. “I ask for leadership opportunities, and continue moving forward when told ‘no.’ I just go for it, leaping into action,” she adds.

Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, IDSA, Northeast WID Representative, similarly attributes her leadership success to bringing her values to the workplace. As founder and principal of the Interwoven Design Group, she has created an environment of respect and transparency. “It is critically important to foster a collaborative workspace that doesn’t suppress anyone or their opinions,” says Pailes-Friedman.

To encourage others, she has practiced vulnerability. “I openly admit my mistakes and less-than-good ideas, and this sets a precedent for the team to experiment and not be afraid of failure. Working together as a team and promoting each other’s thoughts and ideas creates a workplace where we all succeed.”

This acting-your-values approach to leadership pays off because not separating who you are in life from who you are in design unlocks our best work, according to Lisa Marks, IDSA, South District WID Representative and assistant professor at Georgia Tech. She says, “My work began to soar when I allowed the rest of my life in and stopped compartmentalizing.”

Another impactful approach is to apply a design process to leadership challenges. Lea Stewart, IDSA, Central District Representative and senior manager at Newell Brands, attributes her success to the use of “strategic thinking to break down any tough problem.” She notes that challenges can range wildly. “How can design get better outcomes when working with an outside supplier? What capabilities will the team need to be relevant in 10 years? Every challenge is totally new, so to be successful, I have to trust that I know how to design the approach.”

The biggest takeaway when the WID representatives thought about success as a leader was not waiting for permission. Reiser points out that no one gives the go-ahead to be a leader because it is separate from authority or title.

Leadership is not exclusive to your job; it is also something you can bring to the design community. “I practice leadership in informal ways, such as by being the person to deliver challenging perspectives when the design community can handle it, and when they can’t, being someone who genuinely cares and supports them,” she says.

Present: Inequity Data from industry studies, such as the 2021 IDSA membership survey, tells us that there is inequity in the hiring and promotion of women and other underrepresented groups in design. When the WID Committee representatives reflected on what they feel is most critical to solving this inequity, each person had a different response. This not only shows that the path is multifaceted but also reinforces that no one voice can represent the collective. In other words, one woman in design’s thoughts does not represent all women in design, so it is highly important to get broad perspectives.

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In no particular order, here are the top recommendations for immediate action toward equity:

Hire designers who better reflect users.

“I would push design leaders to focus on hiring the designers whose identities reflect those of their end users,” says Reiser. “When taking on new work, you need to acknowledge who you are, and how you relate to a project’s end user, and be comfortable saying no to projects you don’t identify with, making space for the creatives who do.

For example, I personally have never been camping, so I will not design a tent for the advanced camper. I am more likely to accept a project designing a tent for novices.”

Improve retention through focus on worklife balance.

For example, Interwoven has a four-day workweek. “We work hard and efficiently for those four days so that everyone on the staff has more personal time to explore their other creative passions,” says Pailes-Friedman. “Being happy reduces burnout and improves retention.”

Take steps toward growing representation in design leadership.

State outwardly that your company seeks equity.

“Fixing the problem of diverse candidates not getting hired or progressing at an equal rate will require allies to recognize the need and invest in acting,” says Stewart. “Investing could look like setting, and making visible, diversity goals, and dedicating resources to advancement initiatives.”

“Hands down, the best way to have equity is to have more women and underrepresented people in leadership,” says Pailes-Friedman. “Making it known that your company stands for equality and creating a culture that supports it are first steps.”

Bring awareness to inequity.

Improve access and give support to the next generation of diverse designers.

For example, acknowledge that there are no unsupported design geniuses. “Along with many professions, design has a history of prioritizing ‘genius’,” says Marks. “It often ignores the people who contributed or allowed this to happen, usually a female partner, either in business or in life. It romanticizes someone in their studio all night while ignoring that there is someone else doing the emailing, running the business side, or at home taking care of cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc. who has likely sacrificed their own creative work. If we continue to glorify genius, we will continue to

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promote men without recognizing the women we look at as ‘hard workers’.” Reiser adds that “attempting to shift power away from oneself is difficult in a field that celebrates and focuses on authorship, but design needs to move past ego and embrace changing power structures.”

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“The pool of young people coming into design is lacking diversity. The slow-moving solution to equity is fixing accessibility to quality design education,” says Stewart.

“Having a more diverse pool of design moving from school into the workforce, and eventually to be leaders, will itself bring more equity to hiring and promotion decisions.”

“The most common thing I hear from women is that they love the field but don’t feel like

they belong. When I stop hearing women express these types of feelings, I’ll know that we

”

are beginning to make progress.

—Lisa Marks, IDSA

Future: Hope The final reflection is on the future for women in design. We see indicators that change is happening toward equity for those who identify as women. There are also signals we want to see become stronger, which can be done through activation of the aforementioned recommendations. Allies doing nothing, perhaps out of fear of getting it wrong, is the worst-case scenario.

Foresight tells us that there is potential for equity because we see an increase in women at all levels in design.

“I love seeing so many represented in the latest election cycle for IDSA, including the Board of Directors Chair-Elect position for Lindsey Maxwell,” says Stewart. She notes that we will know we are getting there when we see a “rising number of executive design leaders and a rising conversion rate from graduation to entry level.”

There is also a rise in the communities that empower women in design. Pailes-Friedman names IDSA, the Female Design Council, and Women Talk Design as just a few of the many groups encouraging female voices. “All these groups are women mentoring other women to speak out and up in our industry,” she says. “The more opportunities we create for each other, the more we all gain.” There are also a growing number of design conferences dedicated to sharing thoughts, practices, and support for women by women.

This growth in representation is great, but having a feeling of belonging would be better. Marks says that “the more important part is the intangible, the feeling like we belong here.” A sense of belonging will breed confidence, happiness, and a willingness to ask for higherlevel opportunities.

Allies, we are here as a resource and as partners beyond our role to represent women. Those who are already bringing awareness and engaging, we see you and thank you. Imagine this same conversation in the dream-state future when we won’t need a WID Committee and when teams of all kinds of designers feel they belong. We applaud the work being done to make that happen.

—Women in Design Committee This article was coordinated by Lea Stewart, IDSA, with contributions from Hina Shahid, IDSA, Lisa Marks, IDSA, Kat Reiser, IDSA, Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, IDSA, and Marcelle van Beusekom, IDSA.

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DIVERSITY WITHIN THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN DISCIPLINE

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iversity is a hot topic in our society today, and it is worthy of discussion from every angle: gender, race, ethnicity, and more. Diversity in the workplace is also at the forefront of business agendas. There seems to be a race to implement it. In today’s economy, we are more globally connected than ever before, and increasing our diversity allows us to bridge the gap between cultures and countries. This makes for broader spectrums of creativity and innovation, along with building a new foundation of empathy and understanding.

Diversity of Design Disciplines Within Teams and Organizations In addition to these areas of diversity, I propose that our industry should also consider the design discipline and the auxiliary pursuits of our craft in the diversity discussion.

There are several articles written on this topic on both sides of the aisle, advocating for clearer divides between the design disciplines and for embracing the overlap.

While there are many ways to define the role of a designer, hiring managers and companies, in their approach to hiring, often consider filling a position by looking at only a single discipline: industrial, graphic, or UX/UI, for example.

Design specialties have exploded in the last 20 years, and few designers rigidly fall into one discipline. I argue that designers’ peripheral interests that lie on the outskirts of our industrial design background bring an additional layer of diversity that builds value to all teams and businesses, but

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they often go overlooked or are seen as undesirable.

Let’s take, for instance, a recent industrial design graduate who includes their collection of photography on their portfolio website. Photography is not directly tied to industrial design (although handy when we have to shoot our own products). This creative hobby, or side passion, may largely be seen as just that, a hobby, by hiring managers. I see it as a window into their creativity and passions, which can be fostered and can strengthen their contributions to their team or company. If our team needs to collaborate with a photographer, source photography, or take photos, I know who I’m going to look to on my team.

As the world changes and the design industry progresses, the lines of design continue to be blurred. Most designers identify with more than one discipline. I have met industrial designers who shifted into engineering, graphic design, user interface design, and marketing. I have also met graphic designers who shifted toward industrial design, bringing a new way of viewing problems and creating world-class products. I myself have dabbled in product development and now find myself growing in a direction closer to a creative director or art director.

The point being, “industrial designer” may be the title on our resume and portfolio, but there are so many threads to an individual’s strengths, areas of concentration, personal passions, and career evolution that lead us in different directions. There is a unique individual element built into these threads that grows our empathy across disciplines

If you are in a hiring role, hire based on the team’s strengths and weaknesses in addition to the business needs, acknowledge your personal biases (we tend to hire people like us) and put those biases aside to make a clearer choice. If your team is a group of industrial design purists, consider asking a consultant to join you on a project for a week to give you a new perspective. If you are filling a role on your ID team that is split between industrial design and another type of work, consider candidates from both disciplines and look for diverse ways of thinking to fill gaps in your current team.

If you are a leader on the team in a non-hiring role, strive to foster a culture of sharing what you’ve learned or are learning within and outside of the field. If, for instance, you learned about a new camera setting in your personal photography work, share that at your team meetings. Ask others what creative interests they dabble in, listen, and learn. A culture of curiosity and interest will boost your team’s interaction and inclusiveness.

and creates a sense of inclusion that must accompany diversity for it to be successful.

I have had the privilege to work on design teams where industrial designers, graphic designers, creative writers, and visual designers all worked together, bringing their unique perspectives to the conversation. Design firms seemingly find their strength through discipline diversity, mastering the product development process by having multiple disciplines under one roof. Corporations largely still struggle with this.

Department silos are common, and this internal culture of siloed groups can spill over into teams, stifling all diversity.

My career has been based in corporate design, and I have worked in both scenarios. There are always exceptions to the rule.

We all know that the design industry is changing and that we must adapt to stay relevant. The best of us are continuously learning, stretching, and growing all through our career. If we don’t see the diversity of design outside of our industrial design backgrounds, we will very likely make ourselves obsolete or irrelevant in a short period.

What Can You Do to Influence Change?

To strengthen a traditional industrial design team, when hiring, consider designers from different design disciplines.

Diversifying your team provides team members a level of unique ownership of their interests, creates an environment of learning, and builds relationships that we know are critical to a team’s long-term success.

Anyone and Everyone Do not be afraid to learn something new, even if it’s not directly related to industrial design. If you have an interest in learning more about something (anything), it will likely bring value to your career in the long term because it is meaningful to you and will enrich your life. Increase your self-awareness and acknowledge your personal biases and then learn to put them aside. Ask questions of others, stay curious, and embrace those who see things differently from the way you do.

Some designers and organizations believe that the blur between design disciplines and the overlap of design tools lead to general or bland outputs. All parties seem to agree, though, that these discussions are in pursuit of creating and elevating good design. We can all get behind that! I look at the scenario as a jigsaw puzzle in which each member of the team brings their unique inputs and the whole team is completed through the joining of these unique shapes.

I love this quote from Sheryl Sanberg’s Lean In: “We cannot change what we are unaware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.” As we continue to move forward in a world that needs design more than ever, we need to see our design counterparts with new appreciation and be willing to grow in new directions.

—Claire Nelsen, IDSA mcrobertscb@gmail.com Claire Nelsen, IDSA, is an industrial designer for Boeing EnCore Interiors with a spiritedness for elevating corporate design, integrating design leadership, and teaching personal development.

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DESIGNING LIKE DA VINCI

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he design industry is changing quickly. Companies are becoming more demanding of the skills required for entry-level positions, new technologies are creating roles that industrial designers aren’t traditionally trained for, and remote work has pushed many to adopt unhealthy schedules. The mindset of industrial design students has also shifted in recent years. Sustainability is a core concern of their projects and many are switching to UI/UX because of the abundant number of roles in the field. In order to thrive in the future, I believe it is critical for the next generation of designers to be multidisciplinary and have skills outside of traditional industrial design. Doing this will not only help them succeed in the job market, but it will allow them to collaborate with others and develop meaningful work.

Forging a New Path At the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, I was one of the lucky students who was sent home on short notice in fear of what would come. The following six weeks of the semester were a bit hectic as professors and students alike adjusted to the remote environment. At the end of the school year, I realized how much I struggled with Zoom university and decided to take the following fall semester off in the hopes of finding work or other opportunities to supplement my education. Through remote work and online classes, I was able to participate in a global design community that would not have been possible before. After conversations with individuals at various stages in their careers, I discovered the unique path many took to discover the field of design. One of the most impactful conversations I had from this period came from a mentor questioning my path and encouraging me to explore fields outside of just industrial design. This confused me at first, but I decided to take their advice and follow my interests outside of work.

In the following months, I experimented with creative coding and creating generative artwork. This led me to self-publish a book titled Generated, along with developing a tool that allows designers to produce new product colorways based on visual inputs. After this brief detour from traditional industrial design work, I was reinspired to create and develop products with my new understanding of computer tools. Having this other skill of coding along

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with a foundation in design opened new doors for me and allowed me to collaborate with architects, engineers, creative technologists, and others to produce meaningful work. From my experience, sharing passion projects facilitates new opportunities with companies and clients who understand the value of your work.

Expanding into the Future Looking back at history, one of the most influential artists, inventors, engineers, and designers was Leonardo da Vinci.

He was not bound by any one of these titles, rather he was a generalist who pursued his many curiosities. There is something to be learned from this approach to design.

Specialization exists for a reason, but there is no need to limit ourselves to one discipline outside of work.

As technology continues to develop, industrial designers will be called on to do more than just create physical products. As we spend more of our lives online, designers and architects will be needed to 3D model objects and spaces for the virtual environments. As we interact more with smart-home speaker devices, the conversational designer will need to consider language to create more human interactions with technology. To prepare yourself for these roles, which have not been defined yet, education and experimentation will allow you to get ahead. Online courses, books, YouTube, and conferences provide designers with hours of content to learn new skills that may not seem helpful in their careers right away. These learnings can then be applied through experimental projects where storytelling is used to communicate your design journey.

I’d encourage others to take a page out of da Vinci’s sketchbook and explore a hobby or topic that interests you.

Being hypercurious without fear of failure could lead to a powerful breakthrough for your team or a pivotal moment in your career.

—Chris Ference chrisferenceid@gmail.com; IG: @chris.ference Chris Ference is a designer and creative technologist based in New York where he studies speculative design at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Top: Generated Sayl by Chris Ference explores how generative tools can be used to create new colorways for products. The Fuseproject-designed Herman Miller Sayl Chair is used as a canvas to demonstrate this technology. Bottom: Planters is a modular planter concept by Chris Ference, 2020.

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IMMERSIVE DESIGN: WHAT THE METAVERSE MEANS FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

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ehind the hype, the metaverse is surfacing a lot of new practices and opportunities that will be here to stay and will be highly meaningful for industrial design. On the surface, it appears to be just a three-dimensional version of the internet that combines many existing 3D experiences and services. But it actually affords some completely unique tools for industrial design by heightening our senses, shifting perceptions, and bending the laws of time and space. But first, let’s explore the metaverse.

The Expansion of the Metaverse The metaverse is essentially an umbrella term for digital applications and services that theoretically could come together to create a cohesive set of linked virtual locations and tools, just as the internet is. Currently, metaverserelated companies are seen as the cool kids in the stock market, meaning that big tech corporations and start-ups alike are being heavily funded to build virtual experiences, 3D videos, 3D avatars, NFTs, virtual clothing, and accessories and are finding new marketing and distribution methods.

Consumers are investing in virtual property and land, hiring (real) architects to design and build virtual homes and furnish them with designer furniture. It is impossible to truly predict what the metaverse will become, but the centrality of three dimensionality is already bringing some interesting opportunities to the table for industrial design.

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The metaverse’s three-dimensional tools and experiences are accessed chiefly through extended reality devices, a term that encompasses three main types of displays: augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality where AR and VR are combined.

Augmented reality adapts easily for our purposes in design as we can visually situate a CAD model in the real world to simulate its affective scale and presence, possibly in place of making physical models. AR can be viewed through a phone or tablet screen (think Pokémon) or through AR glasses. It can provide a way to evaluate the users’ visual perception of the designed object quicker and more iteratively than model making (albeit lacking ergonomics and tangibility), and its situatedness makes it less abstract than on-screen renderings.

Virtual reality, however, I see as having 10-fold the promise that AR has, chiefly due to its immersive capabilities where the user’s entire focus is captured by the designed virtual environment. While some forms of VR have existed for decades, the category only recently took off due to the availability of affordable VR headsets and the recent pandemic-driven need to work from home. This boosted the use of 3D art and sketching apps, virtual meeting rooms, shared social experiences, gaming, and virtual office spaces (gotta love having 5+ screens!). Many of our typical CAD platforms have already created seamless access into VR

The full body interactive experience of VR helps support both cognition and learning.

too, making it easier to either share builds directly or import them into VR environment engines like Unity.

Most importantly, VR’s immersive experience provides designers with an expansive set of creative tools. Whether sketching, experimenting, creating designs and experiences for the virtual world, or comparing competing designs for the real world, our industrial design skills come alive in this new medium. To get your design juices flowing, I’ll briefly review some unique affordances VR offers and outline some ways these can support our current and future design processes.

Feeling Three-Dimensional First, and most obviously, VR provides new ways to visualize and experience an object or environment. The latter point, experience, is important here as our senses quickly accept the virtual as real, and therefore, we get a feel for an object or space despite its relatively synthetic appearance. Even though some of our senses such as touch are deprived of sensory inputs, our brain compensates by heightening sensitivity from visual and aural inputs.

Particularly because of the ability of virtual environments to reduce visual clutter and noise, a designer can experience a heightened sensitivity toward form, potentially aiding evaluation and iteration cycles. Unlike the lack of a sense of scale in viewing objects in CAD programs, we intuitively sense our own body scale in VR from which to measure

the relative scale of objects. Therefore, we can evaluate the impression created by designs of different shapes and sizes (does the spherical design feel bulkier than the rectangular option?) or whether a form or layout feels inviting, approachable, etc. I can think of many occasions of seeing a physical model for the first time and being surprised by its size and the impression it makes, despite having been intimately involved with defining its shape and size through sketches and CAD. Of further note here is that this digitization of the design evaluation activity means that it can involve people in different locations, thereby allowing sensory-driven input from different team members or stakeholders.

VR allows us to be able to shift conceptual viewpoints and bend the laws of space and time. Imagine what these unique affordances can do to help creatively explore new ideas, whether for real-world or virtual products and experiences. Shifting conceptual viewpoints can allow the designer (or user) to attain an intimate sense of the object through the closer first-person viewpoint and also zoom out and understand the big picture. This is not too unlike our natural tendency to step back to view a sketch from a different perspective or zooming out in CAD, but here we do so with heightened senses to the form and experience. Even more interestingly for collaborative work is that other people can experience your first-person view, even during the

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The affordances of immersive virtual design really come alive in interactive co-design activities.

design or evaluation stages. This will not only enhance their understanding of the work, but they will inherently be more engaged in the process, quite literally sharing your vision.

Bending Space and Time A virtual environment can also give a sense of experimental freedom. Just as with standard digital-design generation, you can create multiple copies of a design or an underlay from which to create design derivatives. Your design options can be spread out around you, allowing you to easily compare and contrast options and borrow and merge ideas quite freely, just as you would in the design studio. This method is analogous to how we might review and build from sketch sheets or in CAD, but in VR, viewing, scaling, and adapting designs engages our motor cognition and spatial senses, leading to more spontaneous experimentation and idea generation.

A virtual design war room is also a great environment for collaborating: co-designing, discussing potential strategies, or even for walking clients or stakeholders through ongoing design development. Taking it one step further, your war room could be situated within a virtual construction site, kitchen, or healthcare center to give an underlying mental connection to a product’s eventual environment. Imagine the creative inspiration you get from being inside your mood board.

Another interesting affordance of VR is that as a designer you can (virtually) control time and space. By that I don’t just mean you can visit re-creations of places in the distant past. Given that a VR environment can easily track motions and actions, you can go back just a few seconds, minutes, or hours and review or relive your interactions in

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first or third person. For instance, while working on a design or problem you could go back to a previous stage of the design development to inspire new ideas and branch off in different directions.

This form of idea generation could also be interesting for collaborative design, where colleagues could jump into your shoes at any given time during development and create their own interpretations. Again, these processes are somewhat possible with traditional sketch and CAD work, but given the high visibility and easy access of the design work (through time) that VR affords, it removes certain barriers that may have hampered the creativity and sense of ownership needed for this type of co-design.

Challenges to Virtual Design The above-mentioned affordances of VR allow for greater collaboration, more spontaneous experimentation, and heightened emotional perception and could, therefore, provide an excellent extension to existing industrial design practices. However, VR still has a number of pragmatic barriers, such as the discomfort due to the weight of current headsets, dizziness and cognitive fatigue that some users experience, and limitations of processing power within such a small device. These are all recognized issues that are actively being worked on in this very young industry. VR also limits the senses. Haptic touch, feeling weight and heft, is an important attribute of human interaction with the world and is almost completely devoid in a virtual environment.

However, I consider these apparent limitations as attributes and believe we’ll discover more exciting uses by embracing these constraints. For instance, VR’s necessary simplification of visual noise helps our cognitive processing,

and as mentioned above, the reduction of certain sensory inputs such as touch can allow for other senses to be heightened. In fact, studies have shown how we cognitively fill in the gaps left by these missing attributes and can even experience weight, friction, and forces simply by being triggered by the combination of other sensory inputs such as sound, visual cues, and our own real-world schemas. For me, the future of design in VR lies not in replacing reality but in considering VR as a unique tool that can enhance and augment certain aspects of our human nature.

way that accentuates our senses and emotions. As industrial designers whose work revolves around understanding our feelings about what we create as we create to optimize the end users’ emotional connections to our work, the affordance of immersive experiences to fine-tune our perception is ideal for creative and productive exploration.

So I hope to see you there, immersed in the metaverse.

Getting Immersed While at TEAMS, I was fascinated and inspired by the range of experimentation available in VR. Now as a research scientist, I am currently building VR environments that explore the affordances of VR experimentation by allowing users to change the attributes of space and time to co-construct ideas and reveal new phenomena. Just as with a design approach, removing certain assumptions can often reveal hidden insights. Here, the users working on science-related problem-solving tasks can collaborate through investigating and constructing optional solutions, learn from each other by experiencing modeled behaviors in first and third perspectives, and riff off of each other’s ideas by jumping into their shoes at any given time in the past to create new directions of inquiry and experimental construction. It will be exciting to see what we discover on this journey.

We may view the metaverse as a three-dimensional version of the internet and VR simply as a way to access and experience it, but there is actually so much more in play here. VR taps into our instinctive and emotional psyche in a

Paul Hatch is the former CEO of TEAMS Design and a PhD candidate in the Learning Sciences program at the University of Illinois Chicago. His meta handle is Immersed_Again.

—Paul Hatch, FIDSA PaulHatch.chicago@gmail.com

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INTEGRATING VIRTUAL REALITY INTO THE DESIGN PROCESS

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t Formation Design Group, an Atlanta-based design and innovation firm, we’ve been implementing virtual reality (VR) as a tool in the design and development of various projects since 2017. That was a turning point in the VR industry when the modality became accessible to mass markets following the release of the original HTC Vive headset. Since then, the VR industry has been developing at breakneck speed. Headsets evolved to feature higherquality displays, improved ergonomics, and new tools such as built-in hand tracking. VR is a powerful rapid prototyping tool that allows designers and engineers to evaluate design iterations in 3D space without the time, labor, and expense of building complete prototypes in the shop.

Our Process Most VR projects start from the same place: parametric computer-aided design (CAD) files. These are the familiar CAD file formats used in software such as Solidworks, Fusion360, and Siemens NX. However, these files aren’t ready to simply be dropped into a virtual environment; first, they need to be made real-time ready.

Formation uses the 3D game engine Unity to develop VR experiences. Game engines rely on real-time rendering, meaning that CAD geometry needs to be imported as a performance-friendly polygonal model. We use 3ds Max to convert the parametric geometry into those polygonal

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models, though there is other 3D modeling software out there ready for the job.

The process is never perfect and requires some manual tweaking. That’s especially true when it comes to textures, which require UV unwrapping to achieve the correct direction and placement of textures on the model.

UV unwrapping is like peeling an orange and laying the peel flat. The flat image of the CAD geometry allows us to have precise control over the placement and resolution of materials on polygonal geometry.

After the files are imported into Unity, some projects may be nearing the finish line. They may only require static geometry and an immersive environment to effectively evaluate a design solution. However, for other projects, we can start taking advantage of the advancements made in VR in the last few years to push them to the next level.

A More In-Depth Approach During the planning stage of a VR project, it’s important to consider how the technology can be used to achieve specific end goals. There is a lot of potential functionality on the software side through Unity, and hardware is also a consideration, depending on the needs of the project.

For example, we’re working to leverage the hand tracking built into Valve’s Index head-mounted display (HMD) to add basic mechanical functionality to models. The

Index’s intuitive hand-tracking controllers allow users to reach out and manipulate non-static parts of the model with their hands, just as they would a real functioning prototype.

Some examples of this could include opening and closing hinged elements, interacting with a touchscreen, or pushing a cart across the room.

For even more interactivity and function, VR scenes can include user interface (UI) elements that allow for swapping materials, environments, and models without having to load new scenes. We develop these elements in Unity with C-Sharp code to achieve almost any function.

One thing we’ve noticed working with UI elements in VR is that VR necessitates a unique approach compared to traditional flat UI. Elements can’t be positioned on the edges of the HMD viewport because they become difficult to focus on, but elements in the center of the viewport are highly obtrusive. At Formation, we’ve tried to stay ahead of the curve, innovating new solutions like UI elements being placed in 3D environments and other intuitive ways to display centered UI elements only when they are needed.

Mixed-reality experiences are another great way to increase immersion and provide additional value to a VR project. At Formation, we’ve created several mixed-reality experiences by developing custom controllers that can provide input to Unity through an Arduino or Xbox adaptive controller. Bringing physical mockups and controls into the VR environment enables users to better evaluate control layouts.

VR can also be a fun and engaging element of a trade show booth. Recent advancements in wireless HMDs simplify the process of setting up a VR experience in a limited space. The Vive Focus Pro 3 is a good example of an HMD tailored to the trade show setting. It works without needing to be tethered to a PC or laptop and includes a kiosk mode that limits functionality to just what you want to show as a demo.

In some cases, photorealism may be a more valuable goal to strive for than full 3D space interactivity. For projects like these, VR can be an excellent tool for viewing static stereoscopic renders. While this approach limits the VR experience to one viewpoint, it allows for much greater fidelity and detail as the models and textures don’t need to be as performance friendly.

Where We’re Headed Recent advancements in VR have been exciting, and at

Formation, we’re looking forward to what’s to come. We know how designers can use VR to accomplish various goals, and we’re now working to leverage VR as an internal tool in the design process.

Specifically, we’re interested in finding ways to seamlessly integrate VR into our design workflow—even for projects that aren’t going to have VR as a deliverable. In the near future, we expect to be able to generate rudimentary VR scenes more efficiently, without the need to have designers send CAD files to a VR specialist for conversion.

Ultimately, Formation has found that VR is an excellent tool to support design work, both internally and with our clients. We’re excited for all that we’ll be able to create as developments continue to skyrocket in this space, and we’re thrilled to be on the front lines of incorporating VR into the industrial design and user interface development processes.

—Ian Henshaw ian@formationdesign.com Ian Henshaw is a VR developer and Mercer University graduate with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and a certificate in game development. He has experience in digital media, photography, and virtual and augmented reality development.

Above: Using mixed reality to combine physical and virtual assets creates a multiplying effect that allows designers to more efficiently develop more harmonious and integrated design solutions.

Opposite: Real controls can easily be integrated with VR to create a rich mixed-reality simulation of a future product experience. In this case, we are evaluating a dynamic driving experience in a lift truck demo.

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GENERATIVE DESIGN: A TOOL FOR COLLABORATIVE AUTOMATION

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ollaboration can be hard. Aligning mindsets, schedules, skill sets, and many other factors can be a daunting task. But when things do align, the results of teamwork always surpass those of people working alone. Imagine working with an ideal collaborator, someone who takes an insipid (although clear) project brief and turns it into innumerable exciting concepts that seamlessly combine intricate patterns, efficient structures, and nature-inspired forms. On top of that, the concepts presented follow the brief to a T, all within budget and manufacturability requirements.

Anyone interested in working with a collaborator like this should take a closer look at generative design.

Generative design is a process that uses automation to produce novel, efficient, and manufacturable designs through automated computing power. Everything begins with setting up goals and parameters, such as specific loads and forces to withstand spatial requirements, materials, manufacturing methods, and cost. Based on this information, generative design produces hundreds of iterations that meet the set criteria so that designers can identify and further refine the ones that are more appropriate for their needs. Generative design often presents solutions that designers hadn’t conceived of, providing inspiration, creativity, and innovation to the process.

Take for example the Fractal Table (see Figure 1) by German design studio Wertel Oberfell, which is based on a generative-design pattern called L-Systems. The designers describe how the table is “a result of studies into fractal growth patterns that can be found in nature, and which

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can be described with mathematical algorithms.” Oberfell explains that the “fascination that designers show towards this type of forms lies in their organic nature as well as in their mathematical quality.”

A stool I designed (see Figure 2) displays a peculiar structure based on a Voronoi pattern, a set of subdivisions applied to a plane or surface that sit at the same distance from a specific point. Voronoi patterns are popular in art and design due to their striking resemblance to natural cells.

They also provide high structural strength while also being lightweight.

From Execution to Creation In the two previous examples, designers had a preconceived idea of the shapes they wanted to obtain and used generative design to perform the complex calculations needed to achieve them. But it can also produce forms in a more autonomous way, becoming a collaborator and co-creator.

Generative design is not just a tool that saves time and effort; it becomes part of the creative process. Designers receive help from automation, but most importantly, they find inspiration within a new way of problem-solving that was previously unimaginable. They can be more creative and adventurous in their process, using the tool to create initial concepts as well as to optimize them along the way.

Most examples of generative design in the market are for functional parts. General Motors used it to improve an eight-part assembly into a single part that is 40% lighter and

Top: Figure 1: Fractal Table by Wertel Oberfell modeled with NURBS and polygons CAD software and 3D printed out of epoxy resin. Photo by Kippelboy [CC BY-SA 3.0] Bottom: Figure 2: A stool by Alex Lobos combining CAD modeling with a Voronoi-based mesh.

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Figure 3 Above: Elbo chairs, designed by Autodesk, made from CNC milled wood (left) and extruded metal filament. (right). Photo by Alex Lobos.

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20% stronger, while Airbus’ redesign for a cabin partition panel is 45% lighter than the original. A good example of how generative design can be used beyond functional improvements is the Elbo chair, designed by Arthur Harsuvanakit and Brittany Presten at Autodesk (see Figure 3). The team defined a basic set of rules for a chair in terms of dimensions, ergonomic points, and load capacities. From there, generative design produced hundreds of iterations of chairs that met the criteria. The team refined the model further with a combination of shape optimization simulations and traditional CAD modeling to achieve an attractive yet unusual chair.

There are strong similarities in the way generative design and the creative design process work. Being able to generate multiple alternatives that potentially solve a problem is a core design skill. The successful development of a design project relies heavily on ideation and iteration, where, according to IDEO in the Human Center Design Toolkit, “it may require generating 100 ideas (many of them mediocre) in order to come up with three truly inspirational solutions.”

An effective design process focuses first on the quantity of ideas before moving into the quality of a few concepts.

Additionally, the iterative, repetitive nature of the design process, where a concept is continually refined and improved upon, is reminiscent of automation and the process of repeating similar tasks over and over until a satisfactory solution is reached. Generative design works similarly: It starts with defining a set of goals without having a clear idea of if they will be met. From there, many potential solutions are developed and a few are selected for expanded design explorations. The key value of generative design is in combining the creativity of both designers and machines, which exponentially enhances problem-solving.

Will Automation Take Over Human Capacity?

Automation is often criticized for replacing human labor and leaving people without jobs. As generative design and other similar digital tools become more prevalent in industry, there is growing concern that they will diminish the value of designers in the marketplace. In reality, automation is simply a tool that performs monotonous, tedious, and mentally underchallenging tasks. For designers, the ability that automation delivers for transforming their process and output is undeniable.

With computers producing an unlimited number of creative solutions for a design problem, there is now access to infinite options that can result in effective, sustainable solutions. Generative design is a key tool for unlimited creative exploration that allows designers to expand their role from maker to enabler. This tool becomes part of interdisciplinary teams that converge multiple points of view in order to generate solutions that are complex, interconnected, resilient, and novel. This capacity of enabling the potential of other disciplines can be applied to enabling generative design into a powerful tool for problem-solving that is more aligned with natural processes.

As impressive as generative design is, it still needs to overcome several limitations. An important one is to make the tool more user friendly so it will be adopted more widely.

Another limitation is that many generative design shapes can be tricky to manufacture due to their complex shape. While it is possible to set rules for specific methods, from additive manufacturing to milling, machining, molding, and casting, some of the results still show a significant compromise for how shapes are generated and fabricated. One of the most exciting milestones for future development is generative design’s ability to produce shapes based on humanistic metrics, including contextual, cultural, aesthetic, and social aspects. Today, generative design creates outcomes with similar shapes, whether they are for a toy, a medical device, or a bridge.

Generative design that is context-aware will lead to new generations of products that are exponentially more effective at addressing the needs and wants of individual users as well as their communities and environments.

Whether today or tomorrow, designers can use generative design to enhance their creative process. Automation will never replace designers, but it will always provide them with more effective tools and solutions to elevate the impact of their work.

—Alex Lobos, IDSA aflfaa@rit.edu Alex Lobos is professor and graduate director of industrial design at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a research fellow emeritus at Autodesk.

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VISUALIZATION & STORYTELLING

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roduct visualization as a specialty within the broader industrial design industry is a relatively recent development, despite the fact that artists and photographers have needed to represent products in an appealing way for as long as advertisements for consumer products have existed. For many years, creating beautiful images of products was the sole domain of studio photographers, retouchers, and illustrators, with practitioners like photographer Peter Belanger going to great lengths to achieve the iconic Apple product photos that are etched into our collective memory. Simultaneously, as our favorite Pixar films are a testament to, 3D rendering was stuck in an awkward adolescence, making leaps and bounds in quality and capability year after year but failing to meet the levels of photorealism necessary for true believability.

That has all changed, however, as advancements in computer hardware and rendering software have made it possible to achieve a level of realism and believability on par with photography. Modern 3D tools have enabled new ways of telling visual stories that leverage animation and visual effects to bring to life new kinds of creative and compelling visual narratives around products. Entire agencies specializing in this kind of work have sprung up as a result of these changes, and now 3D rendering is commonplace in the advertising world, often taking the place of product photography altogether. Product visualization is now a viable specialization and career path. The artists who work in this space bridge the gap between industrial design and marketing to create beautiful product renders that honor and celebrate the industrial design intent of a product while making it appeal to its desired audience, fit within the narrative of the brand, and even educate consumers on how to use it in a visually engaging way.

Opportunities to Shape the Digital Future The future of product visualization is a bright one. Companies are investing in building in-house 3D rendering and visual

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storytelling capabilities. Many forward-thinking ones have their sights set on how new technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and real-time rendering can be leveraged to create new kinds of product experiences and opportunities to engage with their audiences in immersive and memorable ways. With the possibility of the metaverse looming on the horizon, there will be no shortage of opportunities for people with broad 3D skills and industrial design sensitivities to have a hand in shaping our digital future. To understand this niche and the talented creatives who work within it, it helps to break down the skills, tools, and thought processes that go into high-quality product visualization work and what differentiates it from other kinds of visualization that are commonplace in the industrial design process.

The first question an industrial designer unfamiliar with product visualization as a distinct career path might have is, What separates the work of a product visualization specialist from the renderings that industrial designers do every day as part of their work? The answer lies in the nature of industrial design and its divergence in priorities from marketing and advertising. The primary goal of industrial design visualization is to clearly communicate the design intent of a product concept to others in order to move the project forward, with the end goal being manufacturing and release. It is true that industrial designers may also create renderings that end up being used to market a product to potential consumers, and this is where the overlap occurs with product visualization.

The key difference with product visualization as a specialty is that the primary responsibility of the job is to create renderings of products for marketing or communication purposes. As such, the time available to focus on refining this craft goes way up, as does the bar for quality and photorealism. Product visualization specialists are also expected to consider storytelling, art direction, emotional tonality, branding, and marketing goals as part of their process. The visuals they create must generate excitement for a new product while also clearly communicating its

The Lapis low-profile keyboard was developed as part of a mechanical keyboard design challenge with Renderweekly on Instagram.

features. To do this well requires a diverse range of both hard and soft skills that take years to develop.

Despite industrial design and product visualization diverging from one another, there are significant benefits to having industrial design experience prior to entering a career in product visualization. To excel in visualization, it’s key to have a broader understanding of realism and how to create the perception of it, which can be learned through studying the psychology of how people perceive the world and their surroundings. Realism concerns the innate properties of an object, such as its formal characteristics and materiality, combined with relational properties that are derived from the context in which the object exists, such as lightness and heaviness. Our understanding of weight and density is informed through our experiences. Life has taught us that feathers are light and rocks are heavy, sponges are bouncy and metals are firm, and plastics are more durable than paper. Through an intimate knowledge of material properties, visualization specialists can accurately portray how the product would behave under various lighting conditions and control how grounded it looks. Additionally, visual relationships between the product and its environment influence how the viewer perceives its scale, which further helps the viewer imagine how the product would feel in their hands or exist within their home.

Creatives who have hands-on experience designing products are trained to deeply consider the functionality of a product, the visual hierarchy of its design, and the materials and manufacturing processes used to create it. They are also used to thinking about the context their products exist within and their relationship to people and to spaces. This

industrial design knowledge translates directly into being able to portray products with realistic materials and formal details, prioritizing the communication of product features in a way that honors the design intent, and understanding how to create a believable sense of place with the product’s context being carefully considered. Industrial designers also have a heightened intuition for translating abstract product qualities into tangible forms, which can also provide a relevant way of thinking when it comes to incorporating symbolic or thematic concepts into visuals to communicate abstract ideas.

Combining these industrial design sensitivities with a discerning eye and understanding of what goes into creating compelling visuals will help a designer be skilled at product visualization. The goal of the image must be considered carefully: Should the image demonstrate the product in use or be illustrated within an imagined environment? Is it meant to communicate the technical details of the product, such as its tactile interface and durable fabrics or to evoke an emotion from the viewer by engaging their senses? Will it be viewed on a website or within an in-person retail setting?

Addressing these types of questions will help the designer work with the right considerations to ensure that the visual’s intent will be efficiently and effectively communicated within its context.

How an image is perceived is also influenced by factors such as lighting, color, and composition. Manipulating photographic properties such as depth of field, exposure, and photographic imperfections further helps create a

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sense of realism and familiarity. Knowledge of focal length is especially important; a small product can be made to feel like the size of a car when captured with a short focal length. Whether the product is experienced closely or within a broader context will depend on how perceived depth is created between the viewer and product. It’s worth noting that due to the digital nature of product visualization, artistic freedom is often exercised, especially if it would be difficult to achieve certain contextual elements or compositions within the limitations of photography.

Overarching the technical execution of product visualization is storytelling. A captivating visual narrative elevates products to objects of desire when their imagery intrigues or inspires the viewer. One of the main ways to create an impactful visual narrative is through the use of art direction, which purposefully incorporates elements like color, lighting, props, or a specific environment to create a desired tone or mood. It can be used to build upon existing qualities of a product to emphasize and accentuate them, or it can imbue a product with qualities that it does not intrinsically possess to influence people’s perception of it in a certain direction.

For example, an outdoor watch is commonly designed with rugged forms and durable materials, and its visual story can be inspired by the adventurous traveler and the physical elements that they and their watch have to endure. Jewelry is visualized with a story that communicates aspirational qualities like luxury, timelessness, or femininity, to name a few. Furthermore, it often carries personal meaning or is worn to display social status. Higher-level elements, such as symbolism, metaphors, and cultural references, can be incorporated to further create a meaningfully relevant connection that resonates with the viewer. Establishing a sound narrative to drive the visual story around the product will ensure that each image lifts the product and brand as well as the next.

Within this field, while your imagination is limitless, you are physically limited by the tools at your disposal. Invest in hardware for higher processing power to minimize rendering times. Your software of preference can often be the deciding factor between whether or not you’re a strong candidate for certain visualization roles. Considering the wide range of software for modeling, rendering, visual effects, and postprocessing, if you specialize in any particular software, you become more experienced at it over time at the cost of working within its limitations.

For instance, KeyShot is intuitive to learn with its preset material library and lighting studios. Redshift does not provide this starter pack and thus has a steep learning curve, but enables the user greater control over scene creation through increased customization in materials and high accuracy in lighting and textural application, which leads to stronger The Bouquet Lamp is designed to be manufactured out of powder coated stainless steel and sandblasted glass. The level of care in refining the CMF of the lamp was also applied on the bouquets and the environment as well.

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realism and artistic control. While it may take more effort to get caught up with the software commonly used within the visualization industry, learning the fundamentals of one would be transferable to adjacent software. Understanding the basics of material creation, camera setup, and lighting falls in tandem with deconstructing your understanding of the real world in order to re-create it digitally with believability.

An Abundance of Career Options If you’re a 3D artist or industrial designer with a passion for rendering and are interested in pivoting your career into product visualization, the current landscape of the industry presents a few promising pathways to travel down.

For those who are entrepreneurial and self-motivated or are interested in trying out product visualization as a side gig, freelance product visualization work is abundant if you have an online portfolio of visualization work to give potential clients confidence in your abilities, especially if you don’t mind dealing with the client management, business development, and project planning side of the work.

An alternative to freelance that still requires a high level of independence and self-motivation is being a solo visualization specialist at an industrial design agency or small startup. Many small companies need product visualization skills as part of their arsenal, want the stability of having a specialist in-house, and can’t justify hiring an expensive agency to do the work for them. This presents a good transitional step for those looking to shift from doing full-time industrial design work to full-time 3D work as there may be opportunities to split time between industrial design and visualization tasks.

When it comes to visualization roles within teams of 3D artists, one of the most creatively fulfilling options is to be a product visualization specialist at a creative agency that produces exciting 3D motion design projects for large corporations or ad agencies. Often, the main subject of these films is a physical product, meaning that 3D artists with industrial design experience have deep expertise to offer. These jobs are typically the most demanding, both in terms of the technical knowledge required and the pacing of projects. The benefit is that they offer the opportunity to participate in the creation of some of the most creative commercial content being made today, to collaborate with artists at the top of their field, and to work on projects with a wide variety of subject matter.

If stability and benefits are among your top priorities, the other major pathway is to work on an in-house team at a large company that produces its own products.

Increasingly, companies that used to hire agencies for this purpose have shifted to establishing their own internal teams that focus on producing high-quality 3D stills and animations of the company’s products. Being an artist on

one of these in-house teams affords the opportunity to work directly with industrial designers and marketing creatives.

These roles involve focusing on a narrow scope of products for an extended period of time, which for some can get tiresome. They also involve having to navigate complex internal company politics and frequently shifting priorities.

Despite these drawbacks, these jobs often come with great compensation and benefits, which make them more appealing than some of the alternatives, depending on your priorities.

It’s an exciting time to be in product visualization. The field has become an artistic playground where you can potentially have a significant impact due to its newness, which has come about due to advances in technology, the creative field as a whole, and market demands. This means that within the field there is no preceding stylistic ideal or renowned historical figure that schools can suggest students be inspired by; instead, they reference influential works and figures from the present.

Products can vary broadly on how they are visualized digitally. They can be objective and hyperrealistic product shots on a product detail page, lifestyle product imagery that communicates an aspirational vibe, or incredibly stylized.

Artists often include abstract visual elements to open room for subjectivity, allowing viewers to have a more personal perception of the image and product. They also can take an unconventional direction of suspending the product from the confines of reality, which, if done well, results in unforgettable imagery that elevates the desirability and perceived value of the brand.

To further create immersive product experiences, companies are strategizing on how to prepare for the potential future of the metaverse. It truly does feel like the imagination is boundless here if you (and your marketing team) allow it to be, especially since everything is digital.

Visuals are fleeting, but the impressions are lasting.

—Linda Bui and Tim Zarki linda@linda-bui.com; tim@zarki.net Linda Bui is a multidisciplinary designer and 3D artist creating visual stories as a 3D visualization artist at Logitech.

Tim Zarki is a multidisciplinary designer and 3D artist and is currently a product visualization specialist at Meta Reality Labs.

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D E S I G N L ANG UAG E

CREATING THE FITBIT BIOLOGIC DESIGN LANGUAGE Inspired by and designed for the human body

H

ave you ever seen someone walk by and immediately recognize the brand of headphones or sunglasses they were wearing? Or seen a car turn the corner and instantly recognize it as your favorite make and model?

You didn’t see any branding and can’t quite put your finger on what makes it recognizable, but it’s unmistakable. The silhouette (outline of the product), form, colors, and details work together as a system to make it recognizable. This system is the design language.

Why is it valuable? How do you begin creating one?

Does it need to be fixed or flexible? When and how should it evolve?

The strategic value of language has many layers. From a brand perspective, it is an ambassador. From a design perspective, it can build up an identity and provide a set of tools so that every project is not starting from zero. For the user, it evokes emotion, creates consistency, and builds trust. We all have memories of brands that do this well.

Braun, Porsche, and Muji come to mind for me.

In this first article in a series, we explore the Fitbit design language, a topic near and dear to my heart as a leader on

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the Fitbit ID team since 2015. The Fitbit design language is a set of principles and a philosophy used to solve a given form problem in a unique, holistic, and consistent way across a family of products. Simply put, it is a system that communicates the brand in 3D. It also directly and indirectly influences product usability, manufacturing methods, material choice, sustainability, product photography, tone of voice, and the emotional reactions from users.

Form Merges with Meaning, Touching the Brand For teams looking to establish a language, the question is, Where to start? It is like a complex puzzle. For Fitbit, our goal was to identify a foundational single jigsaw piece and begin looking for connections.

Our starting puzzle pieces were words from the future aspirations of the founders. We listened to early stories of challenges and celebrations and asked them how they would describe the brand today and how they would want people to describe it in the future. Words like “friendly,” “advanced,” “healthy,” “intelligent,” “fluid,” “graphic,” and “organic” emerged from the conversations.

languages. As we iterated, we shared with a broader group to identify which directions were strong enough to survive the scrutiny. We kept coming back to one theme: the intelligence of the human body. With this early portfolio of models in hand, it felt like we were holding the future of Fitbit.

Early 3D studies exploring lightness and fluidity with digital tools.

From there, we looked at how people perceived Fitbit and the health space. Stakeholder interviews provided an inspiring set of perspectives of our brand, cultural, behavioral, and technology trends and what health means to people. We continued to add pieces to our puzzle.

From there, the design team began with a sort of visual jazz activity, clustering words from the interviews into small families of possible futures, some complementary, some contradictory. We filled foam core boards with Postit notes, reference images, and doodles. In the studio, we began sketching and translating these boards into threedimensional sculptures. This was a pivotal milestone— words and ideas became form!

Three-dimensional shapes communicate to us silently, but what do they say? Angular forms can be aggressive, authoritative, or protective, while other forms can be friendly, soft, and welcoming like an embrace. This communication is a mixture of human instinct and experiences stored in the brain, engaging cognitive and emotional states in a similar way as abstract art. With these form studies in hand, we could begin to touch a future potential for the brand. We discussed and debated. How did it make you feel? And did it instinctively feel like Fitbit? Did it quicken the pulse, signaling something exciting?

From there, we took a small selection of the 3D printed sculptures and themes and translated them into sets of unique fictional product portfolios as a test drive.

We narrowed it down to kernels of five potential design

The Biologic Design Language Framework We call the Fitbit industrial design language Biologic. It is inspired by and designed for the human body. To bring this design language to life, we created a set of flexible tools.

Some languages have strict guidance on proportions, radii sizes, and so forth. But rules can be rigid and, ultimately, hinder growth and change. This can limit the team and the possibilities for the final product and users. Therefore, we subscribe to a “tools, not rules” approach, which enables evolution and provides creative flexibility. The Biologic tools have many uses: to frame a problem, write a brief,

Lateral inspiration from the human body, creating an elegant volume transition between the wrist to the hand with the Fitbit Luxe.

co-develop the front end of a project, find the appropriate form, deliver a range of concepts, design packaging, select materials, and more. Three elements make up the Biologic language tools: Philosophy: The Inspiration Fitbit’s mission is to help everyone in the world become healthier. With Biologic, we find inspiration in the people who use our products and services by looking at the wonder and intelligence of the human body. The “Bio” element speaks to

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A life drawing session by the design team exploring the human form.

sensual and emotional qualities, while the “logic” part brings structure and rationale. Furthermore, we can extend the metaphor to think about technology integration. The battery, much like the human heart, brings life to the product. The microcontroller unit and memory, much like the human brain, processes information and connects with sensors that communicate with the world beyond the product’s skin, much like our nervous system does. With Biologic, there is a rational, yet elegant relationship between all elements, resulting in a seamless human intelligent system.

Principles: The Approach The three Biologic principles help us to frame a design problem before we put pen to paper: • Healthy world: Our goal is to help everyone in the world be healthy. Part of this is being considerate about manufacturing processes and materials that maintain a healthy planet for us all to live a healthy life within.

• Every body: Biologic is inspired by and designed for the human body. We think about solutions that support diversity, are accessible, are easy to use, and fit every body.

• Future forward: To believe in the future is to be optimistic. We think about modern, seamless, and clever solutions to problems by keeping the familiarity of the past while pushing ahead into the future.

Form Library: Sculpting Technology We have a digital and physical library that we are constantly updating called the Biologic Visual Glossary. It’s as much a toolbox as it is a process for all designers to explore new forms and gestures. Product details, materiality, and core gestures draw from this resource.

Curiosity and Long-Term Engagement The creation and implementation of a design language takes time to develop and execute across a product roadmap.

The more a coherent design language is used to design a product, the more memorable the product will be for users.

Once a language is established, however, teams are often tempted to start over making a new language. So how do you stay inspired with the constraints added by a new design language? How do you keep things fresh? A tool we use to help with creativity is to host life-drawing sessions for lateral inspiration. We observe how the body connects volumes, strengthens connections, and moves with elegance. When reviewing concepts, designers articulate how their work incorporates the design language. Visualizing how concepts fit within the portfolio helps with alignment, but also ensures each product concept can play its own unique role in the greater family composition.

It’s important to adapt to social, economic, and technological changes. Therefore, each design sprint stays true to the Biologic inspiration and principles but also uncovers new ways the language can evolve and influence the next generation. Design languages are meant to go beyond the roadmap. Your design language can extend to any product type in your brand. Embrace new tools and technologies, stick to your principles, ask questions, and stay curious and inspired.

—Brian Paschke bpaschke@google.com Brian Paschke is the creative lead of an innovation team within Google/Fitbit. In his former role as creative director of industrial design at Fitbit, he led the design language of the portfolio, new technology integration, materials and processes, and special projects.

The author would like to extend his thanks to the Fitbit industrial design team.

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EXAMPLES FROM THE FITBIT BIOLOGIC VISUAL GLOSSARY

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EXAMPLES OF BIOLOGIC IN PRACTICE

The iconic squircle of Fitbit Versa 3 reinforcing the friendly silhouette in

The Fitbit Charge 5 skeletal frame leveraging organic symmetry.

harmony with the technology.

Friendly Silhouettes First-read silhouettes are the face of the Fitbit products, a strong part of the brand and identity. They bring a friendly character and provide comfort to the user (both visually and physically) while embracing new digital technologies.

They use softened and slightly inflated geometric forms such as triangles, squares, and rectangles. They are never arbitrary and always tie back to the logic of how the product is used.

Organic Symmetry Organic symmetry focuses on creating a harmonious unity instead of perfect symmetry, much like the human body.

This provides a visual balance and comfort that makes the product feel alive.

A detail of a molded paper packaging tray inspired by the transition between

An early Biologic integration with the organic Fitbit Flex 2 Bangle made from

the head and the torso. This sculptural single material form can be recycled

forged steel with linier openings to allow for RF transmission.

at home.

Interstitial Form The skin that connects major volumes in an expressive and organic way to create form with purpose and elegance.

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Intelligent Skin We see objects, such as the watch case, as a living skin that will evolve over time to be more intelligent and seamless. This means sensors will no longer be limited to a component on the product but will be the product itself. Much like how the human body itself works, the product will react and respond to both internal and external conditions. The unnecessary is erased and edges become highlights as forms become more fluid and advanced.

IDTECHNIQUE An event built for industrial designers to upskill and explore the fascinating stages of the ID process where ideas come to life through drawings, renderings, and modeling. www.idsa.org/IDTDD2022

Virtual Event

DIVE

DEEP

November 2-3, 2022

LET’S CELEBRATE! IDEA 2022 Ceremony & Gala September 12, 2022 Seattle, Washington