Innovation Summer 2015: Then & Now

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Then&Now

BRIGHT IDEA

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PATH FORWARD

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SHOWCASE

SUMMER 2015

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

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Advisory Council Gregg Davis, IDSA Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

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

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THEN & NOW 18 The Alarm/Clock/Radio Case 12:30

By Budd Steinhilber, FIDSA 20 Anatomy of a Design Patent

By Terry M. Gernstein

24 Design & Environmental Action

FEATURES 54 Continuous Visual Conjoint Discovering Novel Design Directions that Align with User Preferences

IDSA AMBASSADORS Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH Dell, Round Rock, TX Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN

By Victor Papanek, IDSA, FSIAD Reflection by Philip White, IDSA, LCACP

By Seth Orsborn, PhD, IDSA; Jonathan Cagan, PhD, PE, IDSA; Peter Boatwright, PhD

IDEO, Palo Alto, CA; Shanghai, China;

30 A Focus on ‘What If?’ How Design Is Changing Organizations

57 Designing Within the Four Corners of the Law

Jerome Caruso Design Inc., Lake Forest, IL

By Michael Prince

Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO

By Michael Westcott, IDSA Reflection by Carole Bilson, IDSA

32 The Dynamics of Interdisciplinary Design A Research Project

Cambridge, MA; London, UK; San Francisco; Munich, Germany; Chicago; New York Lunar Design Inc., Palo Alto, CA Newell Rubbermaid, Atlanta, GA

IN EVERY ISSUE

Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, OH

4 Chair’s Report

Smart Design, New York; San Francisco;

By John Barratt, IDSA

By Allen Samuels, IDSA

6 IDSA HQ

38 Contexts of Achievement

By Nancy J. Perkins, FIDSA

By Daniel Martinage, CAE

6 Letter to the Editor

41 Market Value Innovation Designing the Experience

8 From the Editor

By Ronald J. Sears, PhD, IDSA

10 Design Defined

49 Designing With Corporate Goals in Mind

By Barry M. Katz

By Cooper Woodring, FIDSA

By Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

Barcelona, Spain Teague, Seattle, WA Tupperware, Worldwide Charter supporters indicated by color.

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12 Beautility

15 A Look Back

By Carroll Gantz, FIDSA

60 Showcase

Cover: First INNOVATION, January 1982 INNOVATION is the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the professional organization serving the needs of US industrial designers. Reproduction in whole or in part—in any form—without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. The opinions expressed in the bylined articles are those of the writers and not necessarily those of IDSA. IDSA reserves the right to decline any advertisement that is contrary to the mission, goals and guiding principles of the Society. The appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement by IDSA. All design and photo credits are listed as provided by the submitter. INNOVATION is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks. The use of IDSA and FIDSA after a name is a registered collective membership mark. INNOVATION (ISSN No. 0731-2334 and USPS No. 0016-067) is published quarterly by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170.

Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/INNOVATION, 555 Grove St., Suite 200, Herndon, VA 20170, USA. ©2015 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 34, No. 2, 2015; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

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CHA I R’ S R E PO R T

A PATH FORWARD A

neling the myriad talents and s IDSA marks its 50th visions of experts in the profesanniversary, it is a time sion, we can create a robust to celebrate the orgaand cohesive path forward that nization’s remarkable leadertakes into account many pership up through the present. spectives and issues relevant But it’s also a time to look to our field. I also intend to use ahead and consider how the that same principle to guide organization needs to evolve IDSA to embrace the broader to maintain its position as an community that encompasses industry leader in a landscape the profession as a whole. If shaped by fast-changing we are going to be the stantechnologies and consumer dard bearers of the industry, we demands. It is a great honor to need to recognize and support have been elected to this posiIDSA Board (not shown Ayse Birsel, IDSA, and Megan Neese, IDSA) the many other experts who tion at such a momentous time. support designers’ efforts. As a proponent of action over I also recognize that it is an important responsibility, and one philosophy, I want IDSA to embrace this broader, more that I assure you I take very seriously. collaborative definition of industrial design through its core In my role at the helm of one of the world’s leading activities, including the International Design Excellence design consultancies, I have witnessed—and participated Awards (IDEA) and the annual International Conference. in—the many ways that the industry has changed in recent The second value is one of remaining true to IDSA’s years. With the advent of new technologies taking us to core vision. Regardless of what new frontier we’re facing places we have never been before faster than we ever or what technologies we’re implementing, at TEAGUE we thought possible, the world needs a thoughtful, cohesive believe in the value and power of design to enhance the vision and a core philosophy more than ever before. It’s a human experience and create a better world. IDSA too tricky balance to evolve with the times while also adhering should remain true to its core mission as the leading voice to one’s core values, but I’m convinced that finding that baland leading advocate of the industrial design profession and ance is more crucial than ever in the modern age.

IDSA members. Even as the tools and look of the industry My vision for IDSA will be shaped by two core values. change, the spirit of support, education and advocacy The first is that collaboration—real sharing of ideas, genushould remain steadfast. ine appreciation of others’ strengths and talents, and an Industrial design has always been an exciting field, but understanding that the whole is often more than the sum as technology continues to shape our industry in new—and of its parts—is essential to success. To thrive in this new wildly unprecedented—ways, this is a distinctive time in the landscape, today’s industrial designers need to be master history of our profession. The world looked quite different 50 collaborators and vision holders capable of creating meanyears ago—and will undoubtedly look strikingly different 50 ingful experiences that span both the physical and digital years from now. But I’m confident that with the right leadworlds. Today, it takes a community of specialists working ership and strategy, we can create a strong foundation for together to build the future.

IDSA that will enable it to continue to lead the industry on a I intend to apply that principle to my leadership of IDSA. steady course toward a better future.

By harnessing the various strengths of our Board and chan—John Barratt, IDSA, President and CEO, TEAGUE, and 2015 IDSA Chair; jbarratt@teague.com

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I D S A HQ

A BRIGHT IDEA T

his is a big year for IDSA marking both the 50th anniversary of the Society and the 35th year for our flagship program, the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA). Over the years, IDEA has continued to evolve while remaining solidly aligned with its mission of raising public awareness about the contributions that industrial design makes to the quality of people’s lives and to the economy. IDEA has been a major workhorse for IDSA, growing to be one of our most profitable and influential programs.

This anniversary year offered a perfect opportunity to evaluate and reinvest in the program to ensure its future growth and relevance. IDSA Chair, John Barratt, appointed a task force headed by Director-at-Large Mieko Kusano, IDSA, to “develop strategies for making IDEA the world’s premier design competition.” The task force will make its recommendations to the Board of Directors in the fall.

Internal improvements to the program were implemented during the application and judging process earlier this year. The call for entries moved out of the December holidays to the beginning of the year, and the application processes were updated and streamlined. The on-site judging process at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, MI, received new enhancements that allowed for easier and more comprehensive online product reviews while strengthening standards for comparing and rating finalists.

Under the careful eye of IDEA Jury Chair Matthew Marzynski, IDSA, (shown above surrounded by the on-site jurying team for this year’s IDEA competition), this year’s judging went extremely well, generating 164 winners. Winners will be recognized and celebrated at the IDEA Gala sponsored by Samsung on August 22 in Seattle.

As we move forward, look for continued growth and prominence as we celebrate an even brighter IDEA. —Daniel Martinage, CAE, IDSA Executive Director danielm@idsa.org

L E T T E R T O T HE E DI TOR

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hank you for the Spring 2015 issue about the hand, the first edition in recent memory that actually serves as a professional journal for IDSA. Oftentimes there are a few good articles and a collection of eye-candy—pandering at best. You and your editorial team have struck upon something. The printed word is not competitive with Core 77 or Behance, nor should it be. Rather, this edition stands as, reference to inform professionals and students alike—an actual transference of knowledge and wisdom pertinent to design.

Please do continue to elevate and inform the profession with more of these comprehensive exhibitions and less of the frenetic vapidity we ingest every time we look at our phones or turn on our computers.

—Samuel Petre, IDSA, Senior Industrial Designer, Brooks Stevens samuel.petre@brooksstevens.com

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F RO M T HE E DI TOR

OUR CONSTANT SELVES

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had the great good fortune to revisit my college art school a few weeks ago and to be reunited with my first design professor and a number of students from my class and the class before me. It was a reunion honoring our professor and all the lessons he taught us and all that we learned from him. For me it was extremely interesting to see that even though we had all progressed dramatically in our careers since college, as people, we all remained our constant selves.

As we learn, we embrace concepts and ideas, and are formed by them. As designers, we are very fortunate to be formed by the truths that reflect our mission—to improve the world and people’s lives through our work. Much of this learning comes from doing, but much also comes through reading and accessing thought leadership. Words have meaning. Words teach us and build the foundation of who we are. In this way the words we read help us become our constant selves.

It is the mission of INNOVATION to provide thought leadership through words and imagery to help form the collective conversation in the design world. In this issue acknowledging IDSA’s 50-year anniversary, we travel back in time to look at some of the words that have been shared by numerous talented authors. These words reflect on at least eight timeless truths and the impact they have had on the profession that has helped to form our collective constant selves.

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The articles and topics we have selected are varied and meaningful. Each represents an important area of design concern, and taken together they create a roadmap of constant truths for design’s future. We also asked the authors to reflect on their original articles from the vantage point of today. Looking back often illuminates the path forward.

So here are eight principles laid out in previous INNOVATION articles for your contemplation:

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Designer as the orchestra leader, a mix of respect and leadership. The idea of design as respectful of other disciplines while serving the user and using talents outside of drawing and modeling to include interdisciplinary partners to achieve goals. “The Dynamics of Interdisciplinary Design” by Allen Samuels, IDSA

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The immense impact of good or bad design, which is often found in the very simplest of things. Said another way, ordinary objects have great power to frustrate people or make them happy every day as a reflection of the success or failure of a designer to make it right. “Design Crimes, Case 12:30: The Alarm/Clock/ Radio” by Budd Steinhilber, FIDSA

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward;

you can only connect them looking backward.”

—Steve Jobs

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Questioning the status quo in the idea of a product or a service or even an organization or purpose. The understanding of design thinking’s ability to influence the way people interact with the world and the way that companies interact with people. “How Design Is Changing Organizations” by Michael Westcott, IDSA, with a reflection by Carole Bilson

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The expanding diversity and reach of design and designers. The idea of new tools and education encouraging designers to be as diverse and interesting as the topic they are addressing and the ability of design to reach across borders, cultures, cliques and tribes with products and experiences that matter.

“Contexts of Achievement” by Nancy J. Perkins, FIDSA

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Design as a steward of the enterprise. Today corporations are changing dramatically. Issues like sustainability and altruism are driving millennials to want to be part of new enterprises. Design will play a big role in a company’s ability to achieve this new perspective, just as design has always played a huge role in achieving its own objectives. “Designing with Corporate Goals in Mind” by Cooper Woodring, FIDSA

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Design’s responsibility to our environment. The impact of considered sustainability in the initial design of a product, after which products are by definition duplicated en masse, providing great positive or negative impact for everybody. “Design & Environmental Action”

by Victor Papanek, IDSA, FSIAD, with a reflection by Philip White, IDSA

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Design’s power to influence beyond the object.

Service design touchpoints—think of the “geniuses” at Apple reading from a playbook that is designed to deliver the very best experience every time, which is made possible in the first place by the products being superior. While other stores have copied its model, they are frequently empty with lots of service people standing around, while the Apple store is elbow to elbow with people every day. “Market Value Innovation: Designing the Experience” by Ron Sears, IDSA

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Design creating ownership rights. A look at the intellectual property boundaries that define the practice and the rights of inventors and companies to make and manufacture products and services. “Anatomy of a Design Patent” by Terry M. Gernstein

Thank you once again to all the contributing authors— past and present. We hope you enjoy taking this step back to read about what came before and contemplate what lies ahead as IDSA and INNOVATION celebrate together with you 50 years of our collective constant selves.

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

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HOW TO THINK

LIKE A

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Getty Images; Bernard Hoffman / Contributor

he most far-reaching product of today’s design culture is not a mobile device, a medical instrument or even an app. In fact, it is not a product at all.

Design thinking—the idea that the tools of the designer can be applied to the totality of life—has nonetheless taken root and, like a tweet or a like, spread rapidly across the globe.

In his Compton Lectures of 1968, Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon famously stated, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Simon’s intention was to open up to scientific inquiry a domain that had been claimed by artisans, craftsmen and a motley assortment of specialized, professional practices. The object of this scienza nuova followed from Simon’s generous definition: In contrast to the natural scientist, whose subject matter is the fixed and immutable universe, the domain of the designer is the “artificial” world of human creation. “The natural sciences,” he concluded, “are concerned with how things are. Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be.”

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DESIGNER

Simon proposed a radical expansion of the perimeter around “design”: No longer can it be construed as the practice of fashioning technically efficient functions into aesthetically pleasing forms (“stuffing five pounds of shit into a two-pound box,” as one veteran designer put it), but rather a comprehensive approach to the entire field of human experience. As exhilarating as this program might be, it leaves us with an obvious quandary: How shall we define the limits to this new “science of the artificial”? How are we to think of a discipline that encompasses every manner of art and artifice? What common logic might connect an $80,000 electric sedan and an $80 prosthetic knee? The bottomup populism of the maker’s movement and the top-down expertise of contract manufacturing firms? The design of a consumer appliance, a professional service, a pharmaceutical trial and an educational curriculum? Under the banner of design thinking, designers today have laid claim to the entire field of the thought.

Further complicating the picture is the complexity and heterogeneity of the design process itself, which involves a continuum of practices that may operate independently, sequentially or simultaneously. Its practitioners may have been trained as engineers, in PhD programs in the social sciences, in art schools or not at all. They may work in corporate laboratories, independent consultancies, boutique studios or at home, virtually. The attention of the user-experience designer of a Bluetooth headset may be trained on the aspirational lifestyle of the end user, whereas the industrial designer may have an unhealthful fixation on the intertragic notch in the lower concha of her ear. They may despise MBAs, or be MBAs, or both. A definition that embraces them all is unlikely to be of much help.

In bygone times, designers in New York and Milan boldly promoted themselves as masters of an art that could be applied to everything “from lipsticks to locomotives” (Raymond Loewy, shown left, in 1951) and at scales extending “from a teaspoon to a city” (Ernesto Rogers in the following year). In comparison with the ambitious programs of today’s designers—income inequality, urban violence, environmental justice, political reform—their bravado seems timid and parochial.

There is no shortage of observers who have concluded that design thinking heralds the end of a golden age: The skilled professional has yielded to the T-shaped generalist with a limitless appetite and an excess of confidence in the power of design to affect large-scale change. For others, however, it is the disruption that the design profession has been waiting for and the fulfillment of a century-old dream.

Designers are being asked to design not only objects, but systems. They are invited into the inner sancta of corporations and NGOs, and are being called upon by the governments of Iceland, Singapore and Colombia to apply their creative methodologies to whole nations. Designers who have been clamoring for an invitation to the party are now asked to organize it, to orchestrate it, and they not infrequently end up being the guests of honor. Having resigned themselves to being at best a link in a chain, they find themselves functioning as the hub of a wheel.

This returns us, in conclusion, to our starting point: Herbert Simon’s provocative, infuriating, inspiring suggestion that the province of design is “how things ought to be.” Over the course of their history, designers have moved from a loading dock at the back of a mid-century factory building to the bayfront campuses of some of the world’s

most powerful companies. They have expanded their field of practice from discrete electromechanical devices to integrated socioeconomic systems, and calved off a host of new disciplines to tackle them. Designers have brought their methods to middle-school playgrounds, executive boardrooms and Navajo reservations, and watched as their products are launched into space and inserted into the most intimate recesses of personal experience. Their work may be constrained by schedules, budgets and technology, but these are mere details. The only remaining constraint is the power of the design imagination.

How then, to define design? Probably the wisest approach is to return to its etymological neighbors: sign, signal, signature, insignia. All refer to ways of placing an identifying mark on the world, giving it meaning, imparting significance to the objects, environments and experiences that frame our very existence.

—Barry M. Katz, Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University and Fellow at IDEO. This article is adapted from Barry Katz’s recent book, Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design (MIT Press, 2015); bkatz@stanford.edu

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B E A U T I LI TY

Advocates for Design

LOOKIN’ COOL B

y abdicating their duty to beauty, designers have become unwitting soldiers of ugly. Everyone knows the shift in American cuisine from overcooked TV dinners and McDonald’s of the ’50s to now: artisanal cooking, fragrant cheeses and wine tastings—culinary delights.

How did this happen? Chefs like Julia Child and Jamie Oliver showed us on TV and in their restaurants that tasty food is really good. In the beginning of our profession, designers worked that strategy promoting modern design: organizing museum exhibitions and photo shoots in magazines, speaking out, creating competitions, awarding themselves. But today, many of us are dropping our beauty ball.

In On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea, Umberto Eco writes that “over the centuries it was artists, poets, and novelists who told us about the things they considered beautiful and they were the ones who left us examples.” Conversely, designers who actually make many beautiful things don’t talk about it enough! Pratt Institute’s motto, “Be true to your work and your work will be true to you,” has inspired generations of designers who think they don’t need to explain why their work is so good. My dad thought that self-promoting designers, like Raymond Loewy, FIDSA and Philippe Starck, were kind of obnoxious. But I say, they are just doing their duty—blowing the horn for beauty.

Creating the appearance of things is our job. Designers are supposed to make things attractive: balancing all the parameters—function, features and cost—to make them desirable so that people will buy them. Rowena Reed Kostellow, FIDSA declared to her students at Pratt: “If you can’t make it more beautiful, what’s the point?” No other profession—strategists, engineers, accountants and lawyers— has this mandate (and usually not the ability either) to make things look better. Designers are the only advocates for smart beauty—not businesspeople, not government bureaucrats, not engineers, not religious leaders, not even architects!

What separates designers from other knowledge workers? Answer: critical making. We not only come to the

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table with good ideas—we come with real objects, physical expressions, concrete examples, hard facts. In the final analysis, the touchstones of services, systems and experiences are artifacts (they are not called “stones” for nothing).

As Adrian Forty wrote in Objects of Desire, “Unlike the more or less ephemeral media, design has the capacity to cast myths into an enduring, solid and tangible form.” Not only do designers tell stories, we make them come true. Our task is to make things work for people, be economical to produce and, of course, have appropriate aesthetics. Balancing these often-conflicting complexities is how we make things really beautiful. Artists, sculptors, poets, composers, singers and dancers often create beautiful works of art—they are our allies. But it’s not their job to make things look good—their focus is on expressing themselves. Designers are the only profession trained to make things look good for our clients, users and ourselves.

When did design schools stop teaching students how to create beautiful forms? Obviously they have a lot of new tools to teach their students these days—but form giving has always been the essence of design. For example, during my external assessment of the industrial design program at Kendall College, I saw some of great student presentations that covered user needs and testing, user experience, cradle-to-cradle ecological solutions, production cost analysis, marketing strategy, but then the resulting product design was awkward or adorned with gratuitous decorations. Don’t worry, they are going to get jobs in a world that values money over beauty. Evidence: a “so-so Picasso, from his just-O.K. later period,” (as reported in the New Yorker) sold for $179 million (a record bid).

I graduated from Pratt when there was basically one other design school that mattered: Art Center. It was our nemesis. They were all about the surface, seduction and only skin deep, while Pratt was advancing form giving and deep beauty. Pratt’s first industrial design department chair, Donald Dohner, created the blueprint in 1934 for almost every other

© Corbis: “Big Ben” Alarm Clock Advertisement

Big Ben alarm clock ad campaign’s slogan was: “Your mellow chimes awaken men to start the day ‘on time.’”

industrial design program in the US and for many around the world, establishing Pratt’s leadership in merging user empathy, manufacturing knowledge and form giving. Steve Diskin, former chair of the department, wrote: “Understanding the classical principles of form has been a cornerstone of Pratt ID since its inception, and continues to be a core value of the department, based on the notion that industrial design and production is a matter of aesthetic beauty as well as function, material and marketing.” The system of abstraction, removing artificial bias, teaching how to see and how projects work is timeless. It applies to any philosophy or movement. It’s not easy to teach. It takes time and teachers working within a curriculum of exercises and hours of practice. It’s like learning to play the piano—you can tell someone how to do it, you can show them how to play, but they need to learn and practice in order to get good at it.

We thought that Pratt (form) and Art Center (sparkle) occupied the two poles of design (both coasts, so to speak).

Now I see that both institutions are on the same side— teaching their students how to make things look cool. Turns

out, the other pole is programs focused on ideas, innovation, services or architects doing polemical work. In the ’80s, Cranbrook staked out theoretical, critical design—its product semantic demonstrations were based on ideas and looked great. Then IIT and Stanford championed strategic design, and now every business school teaches design thinking. But they don’t teach their graduates how to create beautiful products and services—they can only think, not make. Today, there are millions of schools with every variation of industrial design with more sprouting up in Asia every day, but it seems like there are fewer graduates with the skills to make things look good.

Of course, our IDEA competition celebrates “visual appeal and appropriate aesthetics,” but looks are not the main measure for the Gold. It’s only one of five equally scored criteria alonng with: innovation, user benefits, social and environmental responsibility and client needs. But shouldn’t aesthetics be the first hurdle? How could an IDEA winner not be beautiful? Why should we award some ugly innovation that was dreamed up by some inventor in his

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B E A U T I LI TY Beautiful Pre-Columbian stone age tomahawk or ax tool

basement? Why should we celebrate some ugly recyclable bench created by some scientist in a lab? We’re here to celebrate the Designer who transformed that invention into something people want. The Designer who translated some business move into a beautiful experience. I do believe that “everyone is a designer” and I love funky barbecue joints and beautifully engineered machines—but we are the professionals! Let’s award the designers who make the hospital room feel healthy. We need to connect all the dots and then draw the line from the designer to the aesthetic appeal we create.

Since no one else (except Apple, Omhu and MoMA) is standing up for beauty, the public is becoming less and less knowledgeable about aesthetics. Italy, Denmark and Finland have cultures of good design—they appreciate its intrinsic importance to a good life. Even the Puritans thought beauty was valuable (the Shakers proved that). The Finns put their money where their mouth is by putting a modern designer (Alvaro Aalto) on their money.

Our grandparents’ search for aesthetic pleasure is being erased by a lack of public interest. Maybe it was Memphis? Or the bad economy? Maybe it was ergonomics? Or computer-aided design that pushed the industrial designers’ forgiving efforts out of the spotlight.

The goal of IDSA is to popularize our good work, create demand and celebrate the designers. Designer jeans and designer homes have corrupted the meaning of the word “designer”—just like George Orwell foresaw in 1984: “Don’t you see,” Syme explains to Winston, “that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” That’s what’s happening to us. The distinction between “beauty” and “ugly” is being forgotten and substituted with “dope,” “bad” and “bling.”

The concept of beauty is being erased or at least replaced by practical considerations like costs or resale value. People can’t decipher and don’t care about the subtleties of beauty—a smooth surface or a harmonious intersection. The

dream of a designer McMansion is really a nightmare.

Beauty is not easy to talk about or to create, but people can learn about why a composition works, how to make different curves sing, how to play with proportion and hierarchy, and how to activate the negative space between things. Creating beauty is the best. Beautiful things play an important role in our lives. They give people a good feeling, sublime harmony and balance—merging physical senses and cerebral thoughts makes you happy. Humans’ most important sense is sight (the optic nerve goes straight from the eyeballs into the brain), so making things attractive is an important ingredient for success. Science is proving it. Researchers Vicki Ritts, Miles L. Patterson and Mark E. Tubbs at the University of Missouri–St. Louis found that “good looking students get higher grades from their teachers than students with an ordinary appearance.” It may not be a beauty contest, but it works.

Biomimicry is no accident. Just as butterflies like flowers, it’s natural for humans to seek beauty.

“Simplicity is the glory of expression,” Walt Whitman wrote. Sure styles go in and out of fashion—there are beautiful Art Nouveau tables from the 1890s, Impressionist water lilies from the 1920s, Art Deco radios from the 1930s, Formula 1 Ferrari and Ford tractors, even that Memphis book shelf. Fashion and interior designers may be arbitrators of taste, and artists work in their own world, but we are the ones showing the world how universal design doesn’t need to be frumpy and how recycled benches can look great.

Beauty makes life better. Beauty is functional: beautility.

Designers work really hard fulfilling user needs, giving form to products and figuring out how to make them economical and ecological to manufacture and use. But we forget that, as Plato said, “Virtue aims at the beautiful.”

Rowena Reed Kostellow put it another way: “Pure unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization.” Beauty is enlightened and sophisticated. Beauty is essentially the capstone of both Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of intellectual behavior and Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.

Beauty contests are the ultimate grand prize.

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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A L O O K BACK

Industrial Design

A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

“Industrial Design is destined to become a universal language. ...

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It is, indeed, the medium between thought and execution.

—Practical Draughtsman’s Book of Industrial Design: Forming a Complete Course of Mechanical, Engineering, and Architectural Drawing

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lthough this quotation may sound like a recent optimistic prediction from IDSA, it is not. As a matter of fact, it is the leading sentence in the preface of an impressive book published in London by Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans 162 years ago, in 1853. The book, titled Practical Draughtsman’s Book of Industrial Design: Forming a Complete Course of Mechanical, Engineering, and Architectural Drawing, can be reviewed online at https://archive.org/stream/practicaldraught00arme#page/ n3/mode/2up.

The book’s 196 pages and hundreds of illustrations include not only drawings of decorative patterns, the shading of solids, isometric and perspective drawings, but also complex mathematical calculations for steam engines and illustrations for drawing helixes and screw threads. The book was originally written in French by M. Armengaud, a professor of design in the Conservátoire des Arts et Metiérs, Paris, and MM Armengaud, Jeune, and Amouroux, civil engineers.

The book is of interest for several reasons. In the first place, as far as is known, it appears to be among the earliest uses of the term “industrial design.” How cool is that?

The term’s original meaning, as expressed in the book title, clearly was synonymous with industrial drawing or industrial art, the unique artistic skill required in the industrial age to transform ideas into concrete reality. Clearly this skill included a wide range of practical applications, including patent, engineering and architectural drawings as well as decorative and artistic drawings. The prevailing philosophy of the time seemed to be that if it could be accurately drawn, it could be manufactured industrially. Thus, industrial design could be regarded as the universal language of manufacture and industry.

The other reason the book is of interest is the historical context of the time in which it was published. The Industrial Revolution required a number of new technological skills, among them mechanical engineering, science, mechanical drawing and manufacturing processes. By the mid-1820s, Great Britain, France, the United States and Germany all had engineering schools, then-called mechanic’s institutes. The new industrial technology of the period also included what we would term “design,” but was often called the “mechanic arts.” In 1826, the National Academy of Design was founded

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in New York to teach the “Arts of Design,” which encouraged the mutual meaning of both.

Females, in particular, were anxious to join the industrial workforce, and many of the first design schools targeted women, including the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (founded in 1848 and acquired by the Franklin Institute in 1850 and renamed the Philadelphia School of Design; now known as the Moore College of Art and Design), the New England School of Design for Women in Boston (1851), the New York School of Design for Women (1852) and the Maryland Institute for Promotion of Mechanic Arts in Baltimore (1854). These schools provided what were called the art industries (lamps, glassware, furniture, watches, fabric, wallpaper, carpets, etc.) with designers trained in the decorative, two-dimensional arts.

London, of course, was then the global center of the Industrial Revolution taking place in the West. Only two years before the Practical Draughtsman was published, London was the site of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry in All Nations, the first World’s Fair, known also as the Great Exhibition. Held in the all-glass Crystal Palace, the exhibition was due in large part to the efforts of Henry Cole, a British civil servant and member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. In 1849, he had founded the Journal of Design, reporting on the design of all types of products and which was already chiding designers for allowing additive ornament on products to overshadow the primary utilitarian purpose of the design.

It was at the Great Exhibition of 1851 that the purely utilitarian designs by Americans, including the .45 caliber revolver by Samuel Colt, the horse-drawn grain reaper by Cyrus McCormick and the racing yacht America by George Steers, captured the headlines and improved the appreciation of utility over ornament. McCormick won the Gold Medal, the highest award at the fair, and, of course, the America won the first Royal Yacht Squadron Cup, which became better known over the years as the America’s Cup, as America remained unbeaten in the event despite 25 challenges over 113 years.

The term “industrial design” survived to become the title of our profession. During the early 19th century, however, the expanding education system for technology grew more and more specialized, and the all-inclusive subject known as industrial design in 1853 was subdivided into separate, specialized components under the purview of specific professions. Architectural drawing was now taught by architectural schools, engineering drawing by engineering schools,

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and the more artistic aspects of industrial drawing were taught by design schools, which were soon referred to as art schools and which also taught the more refined, respected and rewarded fine arts.

It is not surprising that by the 1870s the term “industrial design” became a rarely-used synonym for the much more commonly used term “industrial art,” which had by then been categorically defined as decorative designs applied to the surface of any manufactured product. Walter Smith, director of art and education for the state of Massachusetts, said in his extensive catalog of designs that were exhibited at the US Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 that “no line could be drawn between the fine and industrial arts because artists often select utilitarian objects upon which to apply their art.” Smith also said that “ornamental art is the fruition of ‘industrial design,’” suggesting that elaborate ornamentation was the highest form of industrial art at the time.

The common meaning of industrial design and industrial art survived until the 1930s, despite the fact that in 1913 the US Patent Department formally defined industrial design as “the distinguishing form of products that have marketable value,” which had been legally protected by US design patents since 1842. After 1900, the world was deluged with high-volume, low-cost utilitarian products such as automobiles, washing machines, refrigerators, stoves and a myriad of electrical appliances. Because these industries were highly technical (mechanical and/or electrical) in nature and because their utilitarian products were not considered decorative or artistic, they were categorically referred to as the artless industries (to distinguish them from the art industries mentioned earlier), and their products were designed entirely by engineers with no industrial artists on staff. Art students were generally unwilling to consider careers in these industries, which they thought of as dirty, noisy, low-paying and not providing any personal or artistic recognition.

At the end of World War II, Walter Sargent, at the time director of the Department of Fine and Industrial Art at the University of Chicago, realized that before the war European countries had already been far ahead of the US in industrial art, and this would only become even more true after the war when the Bauhaus, Constructivism and L’Esprit Nouveau would all be initiated. In a September 1918 article, “The Training of Designers” in the American Magazine of Art, Sargent wrote, “The situation regarding industrial design in the US is improving, but so far as we can estimate…we shall need after the war about fifty thousand more industrial designers than are now available or in training…[We] shall have to depend upon ourselves more than in the past, not

only for designers, but for styles of design,” alluding to the historic US practice of copying European designs. Sargent wrote, “If we are to compete successfully, we must cultivate originality.”

Sargent’s article may have been read by Joseph Claude Sinel, a New Zealander who arrived in San Francisco from Australia in 1918 and started his own design firm in 1923 with business cards that read “industrial design.” Some books claimed he invented the term, but in 1969 he denied this and said that he did not know where he got the term from.

Sargent’s warning was ignored by industry until the Paris Art Deco Exposition of 1925 in which the US declined to participate because it had no original designs to show.

The exposition awakened the US public to modern design and inspired the founders of our profession to enter the former, artless industries where design was sorely needed and demanded by the awakened public. Even so, our founders

initially called themselves decorative artists and craftsmen or industrial artists. As we know, it was not until 1934 that the term industrial design, in use for at least 75 years, was formally adopted by the new profession after George Nelson used it in an article he wrote for Fortune magazine describing the new profession.

The 1853 prediction that industrial design, already the “medium between thought and execution,” would become a “universal language” has certainly been proven true, with talented industrial designers around the world designing most of mankind’s mass-produced products. According to Icsid, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, it has about 150 members (design associations) in more than 50 countries, representing about 150,000 designers globally.

Probably at least twice that number are not formal members of organizations, swelling the global total to nearly half a million whose first language is design. Way to go!

—Carroll Gantz, FIDSA carrgantz@bellsouth.net

SAVE THE DATE for the premier Medical Device Design Event!

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Tampa, FL

Early Registration Opens July 23

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Originally published in Winter 2000

Case 12:30

THE ALARM/CLOCK/RADIO

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his example of electronic technology gone wrong can be found on bedside stands in almost every hotel on the planet. This irritating piece of equipment remains one of the leading “poster boys” in the Department of Operational Obfuscation. A masterful conglomeration of ergonomic confusion

that fully deserves the accusation of Design Crime.

Have you ever been brave enough to accept the formidable challenge of trying to set the ALARM on this device? You are first confronted with the choice between a buzzer alarm or a radio alarm. If you prefer the radio alarm you are confronted with two more choices: AM or FM? If you select either of these modes, then you have to tune to a local radio station (rock, country, news, Latin, talk show, classical, jazz, evangelical) and hope that the station you choose is on the air when you’re ready to awaken.

Next comes the setting of the critical WAKE UP time on your alarm clock. First you have to switch into a SET mode in which it is assumed that you’ll know that holding a button down will step the first blinking digit in the LCD display through a 12-number sequence to set the HOUR. This takes several tries since you can’t back up and invariably scroll past the hour that you want.

Now it is further assumed that you know the next step is the MINUTE setting, which asks you to scroll through 60 number choices. Again, you will undoubtedly scroll around several times until you are able to land successfully on the minute setting of your choice. You now have the wake-up time displayed, but you must remember to change modes to return the clock to the current time display. There is no visual confirmation you’ve got the alarm time properly set unless you return to the alarm mode.

We’re not quite set yet! It is likewise assumed that you know enough to set a choice of meridian, that is, either PM or AM. You should not confuse the latter with the AM radio frequency mode. This choice is a fairly critical maneuver since it represents an error factor of 12 hours, which could not only cause you to miss your plans, but also could upset the lady from housekeeping who is trying to change the sheets on your bed.

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Wait! We’re not quite done yet. Just so you won’t feel that you haven’t been presented with a sufficient number of options, additional mode buttons have been added that let you choose to snooze another 10 minutes (if you are the type of person who likes to ignore the initial alarm signal) or fall asleep to the sound of the radio with a pretimed shutoff.

But the designer’s crowning achievement is to crowd all of those critical mode choices—OFF, ON, ALARM and MUSIC—into a single, cheapo, multi-function switch that asks you to move through four set position detents within the total, lateral space of 1/3 of an inch. This primary switch knob is inevitably about half the size of a TicTac®. For some devious reason the designers invariably choose the color black for all of the switch knobs. This makes them virtually invisible against the black housing and a serious challenge for the suddenly awakened traveler to fumble around for trying to shut off the alarm or find the snooze button, for that matter.

I’ve heard of poor souls who lay awake all night watching the clock (and that damned blinking colon) for fear that the alarm may not be properly set to go off on time. Little wonder most people punch in a wake-up call on the phone to the front desk, where it is assumed there will be a human or a robot who will know what time it is.

It makes one long for the bygone days of the trusty old ‘”Big Ben” alarm clock, where manually setting the red alarm pointer on the analog clock face needed no complex book of instructions and was totally intuitive and reassuring. You just pulled the alarm button up to turn the alarm ON, and you could reach out and slap it OFF without even looking.

Of course Big Ben didn’t offer the wonderful option of waking up to rap music.

By Budd Steinhilber, FIDSA jbudd@hawaii.rr.com

In 1940 Budd Steinhilber entered Pratt Institute’s industrial design program, studying under founding director Donald Dohner, as well as Rowena Reed Kostellow, FIDSA and Eva Zeisel. He got his first design paycheck in 1942, working for Raymond Loewy for $17.50 a week. He’s been banging around in the profession for 73 years designing everything from fountain pens to MRI scanners and nuclear submarines. Apparently too bullheaded to quit, he’s still working—currently self-employed (earning about $17.50 a week).

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irst, a note concerning the birth of the Design Crimes column. After an annual design awards ceremony some years ago, our executive director was giddy that the latest issue of INNOVATION had grown to more than 100 pages. She asked me how I liked it. I said, “For me there are some things still missing.” She asked, “What things?” “Well,” I answered, “every article is 110 percent positive, featuring impressive stories of innovative and commercially successful product designs. But why aren’t we also recognizing our design failures? They’re part of the learning process. I think INNOVATION comes off as a little pedantic. And there is a total lack of humor.” She responded, “OK Budd, you’ve got the job.”

Too young to remember cartoonist Jimmy Hatlo? He did a newspaper feature called “There Oughta Be a Law.” He’d depict some familiar frustration that we all suffered in our daily lives and immediately recognized. Jimmy preached that there oughta be a law against stupidity (he never ran out of subject matter).

I have no idea how many Design Crimes I’ve penned in all, but in terms of reader response, the most popular would have to be the one on maddening motel alarm/clock/radios. It seemed to strike a chord with every traveler. I think that ubiquitous alarm device has pretty much been made obsolete by smartphones and tablets. But I bet many still remain perched on dusty bedside tables endlessly blinking their red colons.

I did a rant about tall shampoo bottles with slippery surfaces that topple over easily and defy getting a safe grip.

The shelves at Target still overflow with such designs. I did a rant on commercial bath tissue (we called it toilet paper) dispensers. Still there is little improvement in the fixtures supporting this critical activity. That mini-size plastic bottle of Tylenol® still demands that you line up a tiny, molded arrow on the lid with an almost invisible arrow on the bottle itself. Even then, the force required to snap it open remains a challenge for even Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just

the thing for an arthritic elder with dwindling eyesight—the primary customer. I did rants on the design of four-ton SUVs, hygienically deficient motel rooms, stupid surge suppressors, sanitary-challenging toilet stools, energywasting supermarkets, black buttons on black fields (e.g., DVD players and TV remotes), perplexing push buttons in elevators, confusing ceiling fan chains and offensive blister packaging. I even took a few jabs at ugly graphic design, starting with US paper currency and ending with “Why can’t they get the perforated line on a tear-off coupon slip aligned with the paper fold?”

How have we progressed? When I recently asked a large group of people to describe some product deficiency they feel deserves to be arrested, nine out of 10 immediately complained about an irritant in their tablet software.

So despite all of the wondrous advances in technology and communication, we still seem unable to eradicate bad design. Some Design Crimes just continue to irritate year after year after year.

Oops, gotta go. Just got an alert from the Precinct.

Another really bad design spotted on the freeway. n I N N O V AT I O N S U M M E R 2 0 1 5

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Originally published in Fall 1989

ANATOMY OF A DESIGN PATENT

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here’s an old notion that inventors will invent whether or not the fruits of their labors are protected.

However, manufacturers will not invest in inventions without adequate protection and the assurance of some time in which to recoup that investment. If, due to inadequate protection, no one

will manufacture or sell inventions, “homo inventus” will ultimately die out for lack of funding.

Key to the problem of protecting our manufacturers’ investment in innovation is the issue of intellectual property protection that exactly fits the needs of the modem industrial designer. This protection should satisfy several requirements: n It must be readily available; n It must be rapidly secured; n It must be clear and precise in what is covered; n It must not be overly expensive; and most importantly, n It must fully protect the intellectual property needs of the user, in this case the industrial designer.

For practical purposes, this degree of protection is not available today. As many designers have realized, their best work—blending form with function until both are inseparable and indistinguishable—falls between the protection of utility and design patents. The one protects function only; the other exclusively protects nonfunctional aesthetics. While Congress debates the Design Piracy Act, which is intended to change this, industrial designers should make use of what protection is available, making sure that they seek the most comprehensive and defensible protection available.

In this article, I will explain the Design Patent Application process because, with the Design Piracy Act probably several years away from enactment, the design patent is the protection of choice for many industrial designers.

The Pros and Cons of Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents There are several ways to protect the intellectual property of the industrial designer. These include patents, copyrights and trademarks, with patents being further divided into utility patents and design patents. Each of these modes of protection is intended to protect a specific portion of the inventor’s intellectual property. It is my intent to familiarize you with the various types of protection and how to ensure the best possible submission for a design patent.

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Copyrights: Copyright law protects only the creator’s form of expression from being copied. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated or embodied. As specified in the Committee report for the 1976 Copyright Law (H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. 55 (1976)): “In adopting this amendatory language, the Committee is seeking to draw as clear a line as possible between copyrightable works of applied art and uncopyrightable works of industrial design...the Committee’s intention is not to offer it [industrial design] copyright protection under the bill.” Since modem industrial design intimately connects form and function, this separability restriction seriously undermines the ability of the copyright law to adequately protect industrial designs.

Trademarks: Since trademark law protects only the source of origin, it is of little consequence in preventing copying so long as the copier does not try to pass off copied goods as being in some way associated with the original designer or company. Moreover, it is very difficult to obtain protection for functional design features under Trademark Law. A feature is considered functional if, for example, it is essential to the use or purpose of the article or if it affects the cost or quality of the article. This definition of “functional” renders trademark law nearly useless as a means of fully and adequately protecting industrial designs.

Utility Patents: A utility patent protects an invention as embodied in a structure, process or composition of matter.

As stated in The Law of Patents, by William C. Robinson: “Except in a design, the shape of an invention, or of its integral elements, does not necessarily affect its essential character. In a design the shape is the invention and hence any diversity of shape which makes a different expression on the eye changes the substance of the invention, and creates a new design. But in other instruments this attribute is usually

By Terry M. Gernstein terrygern@yahoo.com

Terry M. Gernstein received his BSME from Purdue University, his MSME from the University of Tennessee, and his JD from American University, and he taught mechanical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University. He was admitted to the bar in 1972 and has been in private practice since 1987. He has successfully prosecuted thousands of patents, including patents covering the placement of GPS in cellular telephones as well as patents covering minimally invasive surgical instruments.

of little consequence. Diversities of shape in a machine, or in its subordinate parts, are merely formal variations, unless they indicate a change in its principle or mode of operation.”

This principle has been followed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. If the device defined in a claim differs from the “prior art” only in its form or shape, the Patent Office usually adopts the position that form is a matter of choice, and hence is not patentable with a utility patent. Thus, the form of the industrial design is often not fully protectable using a utility patent. Nonetheless, many industrial designers hold utility patents, and there is a sense that the utility patent is the most viable, defensible protection available.

Design Patents: A design patent protects the overall aesthetic appearance of an article. The design patent thus is concerned only with how an article or device looks, not with how it is made or how it functions. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has begun to read the design patent law with greater liberality, recognizing the failure of a literal interpretation to meet the exigencies of modem realities.

Nonetheless, this protection, originally intended to cover ornamental design, still fails to expressly protect the best work of the industrial designer: By protecting only the form where it performs no function, the design patent ignores the important blending role of industrial design that makes its contributions critical to product value and customer satisfaction, not just superficial decoration.

How to Submit an Effective Design Patent With the Design Piracy Act introduced but still several years away from enactment, the design patent remains the protection of choice for many industrial designs. The best possible coverage from such a patent, however, requires careful preparation of an application and a close working relationship with an attorney. Full disclosure can ensure that any design patent that is ultimately obtained will cover precisely what the inventor deems to be the invention. A design application is comprised of the major sections discussed below.

Specifications and Claim: This section sets forth a short, descriptive title for the invention (such as “Chair”). The specification also sets forth a “Descriptive of the Drawing Figures.” At a minimum, the disclosure material should include the following figures: a front perspective view showing the design; rear, side and end views; top and bottom plan views; front and rear elevational views; right and left side elevational views; and views of any special portions of the device which are important to the design.

If all of these views are included, there may be some redundancy, but redundancy is better than inadvertently leaving something out. Let me explain. If you make a change to an application, the patent office will assign your application the filing date of the change. Say you filed first on July 1, 1989. Knowing that you could offer the design for sale as much as one year prior to filing an application, you had introduced the design at a tradeshow in February 1989.

In March 1990, you file a change to your application, but now your file date is March 1990.The fact that your product was offered for sale more than one year prior to filing would invalidate your application! Although you can’t change the character of the aesthetic features in your design without receiving a new filing date, you are allowed to expand or enlarge on an aesthetic feature that has been suggested by the first application.

Drawing: Photographs of the device embodying the design are generally adequate for the disclosure of a design to an attorney. Each photograph should show the device in one of the views mentioned above and should be taken using a strong light positioned above, to the left of the object so that light falls on the device from about 45 degrees. The attorney will give these photographs to a patent drafter who will prepare patent drawings for inclusion in the patent application. Therefore, the inventor should be sure that all nuances of the design are shown in the drawings. Any detail that is not readily apparent should be identified by marking on the photographs or by a separate notation.

Declaration: Whom should you include as inventors? The general rule of thumb is: If a person contributed something to the claimed design that could be considered as being inventive rather than merely routine, that person should be included. However, a patent is personal property, like a person’s car, and all co-inventors are considered tenants in common with regard to ownership of that property.

All possible individuals should be listed in the disclosure to the attorney, and let the attorney sort out the true inventors.

Claim for Small Entity Status: If the applicant can qualify for Small Entity Status, the fees are reduced by 50 percent, to $75. The attorney will need to know whether or not the invention has been assigned or licensed, or if any of the inventors are under some legal obligations to assign or license (such as an employment contract), and to whom it has been assigned or licensed. If the status of the applicant changes (e.g., the invention is assigned) while the application is pending, the attorney should be notified.

Information Disclosure Statement: In this section, the applicant and the attorney identify any information that the

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Patent Office should know about in order to provide proper and complete examination of the patentability of the claimed design. If the invention is on sale, described in a printed publication or in public use for more than one year prior to the filing date, the inventor may have forfeited the right to file a patent application (unless there are special circumstances). Therefore, identify and explain these here so the Patent Office can determine if the circumstances surrounding the activity will excuse the activity. Any patents, other references or similar devices found in a preliminary patentability search should also be identified here. The inventor may want to include how long the invention has been under development prior to the filing; if the work was stopped for a lengthy period; or if the inventor has any foreign patents or foreign patent applications on file.

If you question why you should tell the Patent Office something that might prevent you from obtaining a patent, remember that the patent law imposes a duty on you to do so. Furthermore, it is much better (and cheaper) to discover early in the prosecution that no patent should be issued.

A disclosure containing all of the above should make the patent application thorough enough to cover all of the important aspects of the inventive design. In this manner, even though the design patent is not a perfect form of protection for the industrial designer’s intellectual property, at least the design patent that is obtained will be the best that it can be.

The attorney will use the disclosure to either prepare a patent application or have a patentability search conducted.

The results of the patentability search help determine if the application should be filed or further refined. A thorough disclosure will ensure a thorough search and hence is the best basis for a determination of whether or not to proceed with an application and how best to proceed.

Once the application has been prepared, it will be sent to the inventor for signature. At that time, the inventor should carefully review all portions of the document. Anything that is not understood should be questioned.

After the application has been filed, the term “patent pending” can be used in conjunction with the design, and the next step is up to the Patent Office.

The Patent Office’s Actions In design cases, there is as much as a two-year delay before the Patent Office initially acts on the application. This delay can be considerably reduced by filing a petition to make the application special. It costs an additional $80 as of this writing plus added attorney fees; however, it may be well-worth

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it to protect against copying by competitors, as shown by the Avia vs. LA Gear case, 853 F2d 1557, 7USPQ2d 1548 (CAFC 1988).

In the initial office action, the Patent Office can either allow the case or reject it. If the case is allowed, the next step is payment of issue fees, correcting any informalities and filing formal drawings. If the case is rejected, the applicant has a number of opportunities for increasingly binding decisions that can overturn a rejection. These culminate at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and, finally, the Supreme Court.

Conclusion Protecting your creative output is worth the effort, using the best system for each case. A number of significant cases have been won for design patents in the 1980s against foreign copiers, most notably the Black & Decker Dustbuster™ in 1983. Moreover, the interpretation of the design patent law by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is slowly becoming less literal, making these patents still more defensible.

Obtaining a design patent can be a long and drawn out undertaking. Its expense will vary with the complexity of the application, but will range on average between $1,000 and $1,500 (including attorney, patent office and drafter fees).

Needless to say, if an application is rejected and requires prosecution, the cost will increase. In fact, none of the modes of intellectual property protection meet the criteria of good protection for industrial design: ready availability, rapid access, clear coverage, affordability and full protection. So, it clearly behooves industrial designers to exercise care in obtaining the best possible coverage from the range of protection available. I hope these suggestions have demystified the process somewhat for those who have never troubled with it before.

I

t goes without saying that intellectual property protection is critically important to an industrial designer. Therefore, I believe it is worthwhile to revisit my previous article to discuss another tool that may be useful to the industrial designer in protecting intellectual property. My article reviewed the pros and cons of several types of intellectual property protection and the mechanics of obtaining a design patent. This update extends that discussion into a strategy that takes advantage of an additional tool, a provisional patent application, and an intellectual property protection strategy that uses a provisional patent application in conjunction with a design patent application.

Provisional Patent Application The provisional patent application was introduced into US Patent Law in 1994 and permits an inventor to file a simple and inexpensive document—which the inventor can prepare and file on their own. Doing so establishes a patent application filing date for all the material disclosed in that document.

The provisional application need only contain a description of the invention sufficient to show what the inventor considers the invention to be. It does not need formal drawings (hand sketches will suffice) and can be handwritten. In many ways, the provisional application is similar to the old process of sending a registered letter containing a description of the invention. The difference is that the provisional application is maintained by the Patent Office and the inventor is granted a filing date that can be later claimed as the filing date of a utility patent application for the invention disclosed in the provisional application.

The Patent Office maintains the application for one year during which time the inventor can mark the product as “patent pending.” If an application for a utility patent is filed during that year, the utility patent application can claim the filing date of the provisional application as its filing date, which provides many benefits. It must be noted that a provisional application is not a full patent application and thus does not stop statutory time limits that might prohibit the filing of a patent application. The Patent Office examines the provisional application only to ensure that there is some written description, the name and contact information for the inventor are provided, and the government filing fee is included. The current fee is $260 for large entities, $130 for small entities and $65 for micro-entities. Nothing further is required to have a provisional patent application on file.

The Patent Office abandons the provisional application after one year if it has not been cited in an application for a utility patent. However, if the inventor refiles the provisional application, a new one-year period is started when the new application is filed. The new application can be identical to the old application or it can contain new material. The priority filing date is then the date of the new application (not the old application). The provisional application cannot be used to establish a filing date for a design patent application; however, the use of a provisional application in conjunction with a design application to protect intellectual property is discussed below.

Strategy It is well known that utility patent applications are complex, expensive and time consuming. These characteristics are not

problems if the inventor already has a market for the product that is significant enough to warrant the effort and expense.

However, they can be a barrier if the inventor does not yet have a market for the invention. These difficulties can be alleviated by using a provisional patent application in conjunction with a design patent application.

Since it is often the overall aesthetic appearance of a product that initially attracts a potential consumer to choose one product from among many, one portion of an invention is its appearance. An attractive appearance is an invention. The consumer will make a decision about whether to purchase the product based on its features, but the consumer will not even get to this decision if they are not first attracted to the product.

Thus, protecting inventive appearance is important.

Protection of appearance is the raison d’être of a design patent. Thus, the first step would be to file an application for a design patent on the appearance of the product.

A design patent will not protect, and should not disclose, the functions of the product. These details may not even be finalized until the product has been on the market for a while and the inventor has received feedback. The provisional patent application is perfect for this situation. The inventor files a provisional application on the functional details of the invention simultaneously with the filing of a design patent application on the appearance. The product is then marked as “patent pending” with the invented design obtaining all the benefits associated with a design patent application and the function capable of being protected as necessary during development.

While the design application is pending, the function can be altered as necessary and a string of provisional applications filed. The design application will continue in force during the test marketing. Even if the appearance changes, the original design application may still cover the changed design. However, even if it doesn’t, the cost of filing a new design application is still significantly less than that of a utility application.

Once the inventor determines that a utility application is appropriate, the inventor can file a utility application which claims the priority filing date(s) of any provisional application(s) less than one year old. At some time, both the form and function of the product will be protected by patents. However, the significant expense of a utility application will be deferred until the market warrants it. Until then, the portion of the invention that is important in first attracting consumer attention is protected and the portion of the invention that will produce a continuing market can be developed and still receive the most cost-efficient protection. n

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Originally published in Summer 1992

DESIGN & ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION

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here can be little doubt that the environment and the ecological balance of the planet are no longer sustainable. To redress the balance, we must examine what we can contribute from our specific role in society. The question is: “what can I do as a professor, construction worker, taxi driver,

school teacher, prostitute, lawyer, pianist, homemaker, student, manager, politician or farmer? What is the impact of my work on the environment?” This is one dimension of ecological intervention that has not been sufficiently explored. Yet, it is the only scale humans can comprehend and act within. Consequently, it is in the totality of individual actions of relatively small scale that a long-term solution to our environmental crisis lies.

Let’s start by placing our discussion in the context of world history, or eco-history. As James Burke showed in the PBSaired show “After the Warming,” environmental catastrophe has shaped how civilizations have evolved or died out.

While history makes change seem to occur on a grand and intimidating scale, in reality, environmental catastrophe and survival occurred because individuals made decisions that, in the aggregate, affected the whole. Rarely do we find centralized megaprojects solving the problems, and even these occur on a historically small scale. It is the agglomeration of actions that has crescendoed into catastrophe, and which holds the hope for our environmental salvation.

A Brief History of Environmental Disaster 12,000 years ago an environmental crisis led to the development of agriculture as people learned to turn wild annual grasses into domesticated cereals. It began in the southern Levant under the simultaneous pressure of drought, high temperatures, overpopulation and overexploitation of natural resources. The “Little Ice Age” in Western Europe (1550 to 1700) helped to shape ways of living, farming and—by extension—artistic expression (Appleby, 1981). Other recent studies suggest the influence of climate and eco-catastrophes in the shifting fortunes of the Mayan Civilization of Central America.

The depletion of forests has occurred not once but many times and in a great many different places. There was an energy crisis developing in England by the sixteenth cen-

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tury, forcing people to turn to coal to keep from freezing during the winter. Not only was weather getting colder, but the nobles had discovered that sheep farming was extremely profitable and were deforesting their lands in pursuit of that wealth (Nef, 1977; Simmons, 1989). China depleted its own forest reserves in a similar way and went through a long and difficult energy squeeze between 1400 and 1800, during which the Chinese were forced to burn straw and build with bamboo (Smil, 1984).

Eco-historians now have much data on China and are prepared to ask what may have been the relationship between rainfall and drought cycles in the rise and expansion of the treeless terrain and the subsequent expansion of the Central Asian steppe peoples (Elvin, 1990). (Remember that all deserts in the world—with the exception of the Central Australian Outback—are man made, and I emphasize man, since women have had no part in the decisions that led to desertification.)

Our current concern with the biosphere is the result of recent catastrophes. One of the earlier indicators of the potential hazards posed by industry came 35 years ago with the Minimata disease that poisoned thousands in Chizo Prefecture. It was followed soon by large-scale dioxin poisoning in Sardinia and other parts of Italy. Since then we have had—among many smaller nuclear accidents—the near thermonuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania; the poisoning of thousands by Union Carbide in Bhopal, India; the Chernobyl disaster in Russia; and the accidental poisoning by Swiss pharmaceutical factories of the Rhine from its sources in Switzerland through Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. We have had an average of one major oceanic oil spill every second day for the past 18 years, terminating recently in the Exxon Valdez disaster, which will affect the Alaskan coastline and fishing grounds beyond the end of this century. On the average of three times a day, somewhere in the world towns or villages are being evacuated because of the spillage of toxic chemicals from train wrecks or truck crashes (Appleby).

All this skips over more long-range disasters such as the slow death of German, Scandinavian and North American forests due to acid rain. The confluence of such events gives rise to the most threatening result: the greenhouse effect. Our best computer modeling tells us that we may expect a rise of temperature of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2000, and a consequent rise in sea levels of about 3 feet. This doesn’t sound threatening, until one stops to realize that over a beach with a normal slope, such a rise would bring the ocean 295 feet above its current tide line.

One might add that the greenhouse effect is caused not just by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), nitrogen oxide (NOX5) and carbon dioxide (C02), but also by enormous increases in methane generation. Part of this methane comes from termites in whose digestive tracts microbes use an enzyme to convert cellulose into sugars, giving off methane in the process. There is roughly one-fourth of a ton of termites per person in the world. A further methane generator is cattle, and finally, most disturbingly, rice patties, which vent enormous quantities of methane into the atmosphere. The

methane problem caused by cattle and rice farming is an aggregate of individual activities practiced on a huge scale.

Even such seemingly trivial changes in the environment as the enormous increase of malaria-bearing mosquitoes and tsetse flies can be directly traced to the fact that these insects are attracted to, and breed in, the approximately 1.6 billion abandoned automobile and truck tires in dumps across the world.

That industrial designers, graphic designers and architects will need to have a profound influence in helping to turn things around is so obvious that this observation seems banal. Yet there is a secondary problem. It is the one of human scale, the threat of bigness. Only recently I read that “a massive global attack against ecological deterioration is needed.” There is no question that the problems facing us are enormous. But “massive attack” sounds entirely too militaristic to describe soft energy ways of helping Gaia. It also seems much too inhuman in scale. I would ask you to consider my most primary conviction as a human being, a designer and an ecologist: Nothing Big Works—Ever! One only has to look at General Motors, General Dynamics or General Electric to see the truth of this proposition. It is equally true of those large countries made impotent by their own ungovernable size such as the former Soviet Union, the United States, China and India.

The problems may be worldwide, yet they will yield only to decentralized, local intervention and human-scale efforts.

This is partially due to the fact that we still aren’t able to assess the impact of what we do as designers. Hence, if our intrusions are small, the chance of major mishaps is reassuringly remote. The following example of design intervention may seem trivial. It is trivial, as it is a first small attempt to reverse the ongoing trend of “bigger is better” and to challenge the perceived wisdom of “progress.”

A Packaging Solution: One Small Step We routinely overpackage things. In some cases this is to lend some sort of visual charisma to contents that are essentially worthless but sell at enormously inflated prices.

Perfumes, toiletries and Christmas decanters of expensive whiskeys come most readily to mind. But the package can be equally destructive at the down-scale end of the market. Quick food places such as McDonald’s have for decades used small Styrofoam coffins in which to serve their cheeseburgers, Big Macs and double-bacon cheeseburgers. Recently McDonald’s has been convinced to switch to paper containers.

Styrofoam is an enormously damaging material. Its manufacture contributes to holes in the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect. The use of the material, once manufactured, is dubious. Finally, after Styrofoam has been discarded, it continues as an environmental and toxic hazard in spite of the pious lies perpetrated on the public by plastics manufacturers and their tame PR spokespeople.

Trying to find a substitute for this particular packaging material has engaged me in research and design for a Japanese corporation for three years. It seemed that there had to be alternative, organic ways to package things.

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Begin with the concept that there is really nothing new in the world that needs to be packaged and shipped. The materials used to pack such early precision instruments as Galileo’s celestial telescopes and Van Leuwenhoek’s earliest microscopes were Spanish moss, other dried mosses, sand, sawdust, crushed and dried leaves or dried grasses, thin cotton bags filled with down feathers or eiderdown, wood chips and much else. The one thing all these materials have in common is that they are completely recyclable since they are all organic and will return to the natural environment.

My own earliest introduction to this way of dealing with packaging was my first job as a young boy in New York City.

I worked in the basement of the Museum of Modern Art, and it was my task to ship small sculptures to members of the museum who were renting art objects for a few months at a time. I remember that in addition to shipping boxes of wood or cardboard, we had two gigantic popcorn machines and made popcorn—unsalted and without cheese, of course— in which to pack the sculpture pieces, since “Styrofoam worms” did not exist as yet. To my delight, several entrepreneurs are reviving this use of popcorn and succeeding dramatically.

In 1989 I was hired by a Japanese corporation, specializing in computers, cameras, lenses, high-fidelity componentry, photocopying machines and other similar high-tech products, to do in-depth research in organic packaging.

Over the years I could concentrate research around plants that surround their seeds with an enormous bulk of fluffy protective material to protect and cradle them. The specific seed we have researched expands its bulk when the plants run to seed to occupy more than 40 times the original volume. We designed the packaging to use these plant fibers. They form a center layer between two sheets of recyclable rice paper, which is sewn into quilt squares with a hemp-derived thread. On the Japanese home mar-

ket, this method of softly cradling precision parts is already in experimental use, and will be used for export soon. To exaggerate somewhat: it would theoretically be possible in a year or two for someone to buy a camera or CD player and, after unwrapping it, literally dump the package in the back garden where the recyclable, organic components of the package (augmented with nitrate boosters) will actually help the garden grow.

Finding the Brighter Side The whole ecology question seems to be just one more example of people being way ahead of their governments.

The second greatest man-made ecological tragedy was the burning of more than 500 oil wells in Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War. This destructive act resulted from a splendid cooperation between the Iraqi military with the US and British air forces. Yet it was only the second worst ecological disaster in our century. By far the worst was the systematic destruction and defoliation of the South Asian forests in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia through Agent Orange and other “goodies” manufactured by Dow Chemical—the same wonderful folks who brought us Napalm and silicone breast implants. Yet the Japanese industrialists have recognized the environmental and ecological horrors for what they really are: vast new challenges for humankind that must be solved. More: vast possibilities for future earnings since no other government or industrial power takes these threats seriously yet.

These difficult times for the earth call not just for passion, imagination, intelligence and hard work, but—more profoundly—for a sense of optimism that is willing to work without a full understanding of how small individual actions might affect the global picture. We must not despise the small action. Change comes one person at a time, one step at a time.

—By Victor Papanek, IDSA, FSIAD

SOLUTIONS FOR OUR UNPRECEDENTED ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

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ictor Papanek understood both the growing scale of the global ecological crisis and the role of the design disciplines in creating it. In the 1960s through the 1990s, he vociferously rejected pretentious, unusable or dangerous products. He wrote, “Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected by the designer.”

After writing many ground breaking works on environmental and social imperatives in design, such as Design for the Real World, he died prematurely in 1998. As his student and friend, I imagine in this article what he might have thought about the environmental and design developments in the last two decades had he been here to observe.

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The Illusion of Success One of Papanek’s messages in his 1992 article was that human societies frequently push to the limits of their environments, often with disastrous consequences.

Researchers continue to explore the relationships between different societies’ biotic and abiotic resource use, their technological innovation and the durability of those societies. Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress postulated that the modern concept of progress is a trap, like many traps before, that initially gives the impression of power over the meager accommodations of our biosphere. Continuing in its current direction, progress will push us in a corner where we have fewer and fewer resources to squander.

By Philip White, IDSA, LCACP A designer, researcher and instructor, Philip White is associate professor in the Industrial Design Program of The Design School, and Senior Sustainability Scientist in the School of Sustainability, both at Arizona State University. He helps companies improve their ecological and social performance via Orb Analysis for Design, and is a Life Cycle Assessment Certified Practitioner. In 2014, he coedited, with Rita Schenck, the textbook Environmental Life Cycle Assessment Textbook: Measuring the Environmental Impacts of Products, and in 2013, authored, with Louise St. Pierre and Steve Belletire, IDSA, Okala Practitioner: Integrating Ecological Design.

Polypropylene (PP) cap

Societies are built on soil to support agriculture. When that soil erodes, so erodes the attendant human population.

Wright notes how only two societies have held a long-term record: Egypt and China.

Egypt’s lands were fertilized perpetually by the Nile’s annual floods, while China’s deep rich soil had been deposited over the millennia by wind, and its hillside paddies abated erosion.

Massive prehistoric herds of mastodons and horses gave the illusion of endless success. Efficient hunting ended predation as a livelihood. Easy kills supported more babies who grew to be more hunters. More hunters eventually obliterated their prey. Similarly, in the last half century, the US has taken direct or indirect control of most of the Earth’s resources and been powered by unprecedented consumption of finite fossil fuels, which also give the illusion of endless success.

Echoing Wright, Jarod Diamond in Collapse analyzed what makes societies robust. Diamond posits that, among other factors, environmental degradation, climate change and a society’s responses to its ecological problems are key attributes of long-term success. Diamond suggests that environmentalists (and, by extension, designers) should boldly praise companies that balance economics with ecology because these companies need encouragement.

The chart on page 29 notes just a few of the major environmental events that have occurred during the last 20 years. Some of these are positive developments, like the removal of the bald eagle from the US threatened species list, and 2011 being the year that global human birth rates started what is hoped to be a long-term downward trend.

The majority, however, describe environmental accidents (such as the Fukushima disaster), the growing threats to biodiversity (such as that one in four mammals will become extinct because of human actions), or reports about evidence of climate change (such as the predictions from NOAA’s climate researchers that the level of carbon dioxide expected by 2050 will lead to a sea-level rise and droughts that will last for a millennium).

Papanek, like his colleague Buckminster Fuller, generally avoided discussion of legislative methods to solve environmental problems. He surely supported the creation of the US EPA, the federal environmental laws and

international agreements such as the Montreal Protocol, which phased out the vast majority of chemicals that PP ring stuck on PET bottle destroy the stratospheric ozone layer.

Both Fuller and Papanek sought to empower product designers and their Polyethylene Terephthalate larger product development teams (PET) bottle and enterprises to think beyond basic return on investment and take stronger environmental actions than required Sticker made from unknown by law. plastic type adhered with Prior to the 1990s, the two politiunidentified glue cal parties in the US largely cooperated on environmental legislation. But since Bottle with the 1990s, environmental issues have dysfunctional increasingly become a bitter partisan recyclability wedge that has stymied, among other things, agreements on slowing global climate change.

Papanek may have reacted to this catastrophic situation by entering the fray of political debate. Undoubtedly, he would have reiterated the necessity for designers to take whatever steps they can to reduce the environmental effects of the systems they design.

Rethinking Dysfunctional Systems Papanek would abhor the proliferation of plastic in food packaging today. Plastic packaging has spread through the entire grocery store, including produce and beverages.

Most of these plastic packages are not designed for effective recycling, while others are completely unnecessary. Do we really need clear thermoformed plastic boxes for green beans and spinach that we dispose of the minute we empty the package?

Take the typical, disposable, beverage bottle blown from polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The average amount of PET per bottle has dropped about 45 percent in these two decades. Further, PET from beverage bottles is the most common type of plastic that is recycled in North America. In theory these represent positive developments.

But if we consider the process of recycling this PET, questions arise.

The bottle is an amalgam of polymers and adhesives that do not easily recycle. The body is PET, while the cap is most frequently polypropylene (PP). The label might be PET, but it could be PP or other polymer “blends”—proprietary plastic combinations that the label manufacturers are not required to divulge to the public. Making matters worse, the labels are

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attached with a wide range of proprietary adhesives that can also contaminate the PET in the recycling process.

According to the plastics industry, these beverage bottle materials pose no problem. The bottle, cap and label are chopped into small chips, and in the washing process, the chips of heterogeneous material readily separate. The majority of recycled PET on the market, however, has been downgraded by these other materials mixing with the PET. This down-cycled PET is used for making fabric or carpet fibers, but not to make new beverage bottles. This design problem can be solved if the industry makes it a priority.

One potential solution may be a mono-material plastic bottle with printable mono-material label and adhesion process (such as friction welding or water-solvent glue) that will not contaminate the recycled plastic.

Deinking of paper pulp in the paper recycling process represents another technology that is ripe for redesign.

Metrics allow us to compare the environmental impacts of different types of paper. Let’s compare primary (virgin) bleached white paper, secondary (recycled) unbleached paper from which the ink has not been removed and secondary bleached paper from which the ink has been removed in the recycling process. These three papers can be compared using Okala impacts per pound of paper (from Okala Practitioner), which combine 10 environmental impact types in one value, and using pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) per pound paper, a measure of climate change potential.

Paper recycling reduces the Okala impacts more than 60 percent and the pounds of carbon dioxide by 45 percent compared to making paper from all-virgin wood pulp. However, in comparing the virgin white paper to the recycled white paper, recycling with bleaching and the removal of the ink does not reduce the Okala impacts, and it reduces the pounds of carbon dioxide by only 13 percent.

This indicates the need to rethink the entire printed paper life cycle. Inks should be formulated to allow the removal of the inks in the recycling process using less energy and without aggressive chemicals. Similar opportunities for potential major environmental advancements are all around us. They need to be identified and made research priorities.

With the California drought pushing into its fourth year and agriculture consuming the largest share of water in the state, the need to deploy water-efficient irrigation methods

This aboveground modular drip irrigation system is easy to install and remove. It significantly reduces emitter damage while reducing overall water use compared to other irrigation methods. Solution by Dhey Acharya, Jessica Croitoru, Kewvin Kolden and Lizhou Zhang, interdisciplinary graduate design students at Arizona State University.

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is critical. Drip irrigation evaporates significantly less water than other types of irrigation. Most large-scale agricultural drip irrigation systems are easily damaged by mechanical weeding and unearthing of the pipes each planting season.

One solution proposed by a team of my graduate design students from Arizona State University is a modular system wherein the drip irrigation emitters fit flush in subterranean spikes. Locating pipes for removal involves no guesswork, with diminished damage to emitters. Papanek pressed for the development of such resource efficient systems: “Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive ... must dedicate itself to doing the most with the least.”

Urgent Need for Solutions Papanek forged many critical concepts that have since become fully integrated in much of design education and are widely practiced in the design disciplines. For instance, he recommended including diverse specialists in the design process (such as anthropologists, electronic systems engineers, medical experts and material chemists) to enrich the outcome, presaging the current emphasis on interdisciplinary design teams. He would have applauded the incorporation of environmental science in the design process via life cycle assessment methods such as the Okala Impact Factors.

Pattie Moore, FIDSA, a universal design pioneer, noted Papanek’s profound respect for universal design and its ethic of meeting the needs of people of all abilities. Similarly, Papanek would have supported, with few reservations, Design for the Majority, Design for the 90% and Design Activism. He emphasized that credible design movements should be based on substantive social and environmental awareness, as he notes in The Green Imperative: “New meaning and new forms for the objects we create, [should be] based more on real requirements than arbitrarily invented style.”

As an environmentalist of the 1960s, Papanek knew that the burgeoning needs of our expanding population would increasingly collide with the limited resources of our biosphere. Exactly how these conflicts would manifest and when they would occur were topics of conjecture. We were confident that the conflicts would place extraordinary strains on societies, our political systems and the natural world on which we depend.

We now observe the human population at 7.3 billion, probably peaking above 9 billion by mid-century, with our ever-growing demand for food, the rapid and undeniable unraveling of the Earth’s climate, the tragic decline of most wild habitats and the extinction of a vast swath of wild species. For the first time, humans in this century hold the daunting responsibility to secure the quality of life for the future inhabitants of our planet.

The opportunities for designers to intervene have never been greater. We can propose alternatives, both within and outside the market system. We can design solutions that serve the real needs of the underserved. And, as much as is possible, we can preserve the fragile and irreplaceable biodiversity of our home. n

Environmental Developments and Disasters 1995–2015 Year

Environmental Accidents and Biodiversity Loss

1995– 1996

Seven out of 10 scientists estimated that we are experiencing the largest mass extinction of species in human history, reported the Worldwatch Institute. n More than 300 million gallons of coal slurry spilled into the Big Sandy River, KY, destroying 100 miles of streams.

2001

Overfishing has removed 90 percent of the animal biomass in the oceans’ major fishing areas. – International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

2004

Amphibian populations are declining more rapidly than birds or mammals due to habitat loss and unidentified processes. – IUCN

Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for starting the Green Belt Movement, planting millions of trees across Africa to slow deforestation.

A Pentagon report described how climate change could potentially halt the warm Atlantic ocean currents, giving Europe the climate of Siberia.

2005

An explosion in a Jilin Petrochemical Co. refinery released 100 tons of benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua River, China, contaminating drinking water for millions in China and Russia.

The European Parliament banned six phthalates used in plastic childcare products because of their carcinogenic effects.

The Earth’s overall temperature reached its highest level in 12,000 years, according to NASA’s James Hansen and others.

2006

Toxic waste dumped by the Trafigura Company in the Ivory Coast sickened 7,000 people. n The World Conservation Union reported that the Niger Delta was one of the most polluted places on Earth. The Nigerian oil pipelines leaks the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez every year.

The EPA strengthened air-quality standards for particle pollution, which can harm lung and heart functions.

Exxon gave $2.9M to 35 groups that had “misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence.”

– Royal Society

2007

As ivory trade restrictions collapsed, 23,000 African elephants were poached in 2006 (4 percent of the total population) and has since worsened. – IUCN n The bald eagle was removed from the US threatened species list.

Rising sea levels threaten key infrastructure in the US. – US National Research Council n Satellite imagery revealed the NW Passage was free of ice and fully navigable.

2008

n

More than a billion gallons of toxic coal fly ash sludge spilled near Kingston, TN. The IUCN warned that one in four of the world’s mammals could become extinct from human actions.

A 160-sq. mi. section of the Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica melted. n The polar bear was listed as a threatened species in the US.

2009

The Chinese government reported that coal mining accidents in China officially kill 5,000 miners per year (unofficially 20,000). n The Deepwater Horizon disaster released 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, devastating coastal environments from Louisiana to Florida.

Climate researchers from NOAA said that the CO2 levels expected by 2050 will lead to a sea-level rise and droughts that will last for a millennium.

2010

An industrial dam broke in Devecser, Hungary, spilling 1 million cubic meters of toxic waste. n The International Whaling Commission talks to negotiate limits between nations collapsed, while whale poaching continued.

Canada placed bisphenol A (BPA), a common additive in plastics, on its toxic substances list.

The EPA increased automotive fuel efficiency standards and, for the first time, regulated greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 regulations for coal-fired power plants followed.

2011

The Fukushima nuclear reactor melted down, creating a major public health and environment disaster in Japan estimated to be much larger than the Chernobyl disaster. n Deforestation in Canada and Russia was reported to exceed deforestation in tropical rain forests. n The number of people born in 2011 (82,047,000) was lower than in 2010 (82,074,000), beginning what is hoped to be a long-term trend of declining global birth rates.

Canada regulated phthalates, a chemical additive used to soften plastics.

NASA reported that the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet has been going through the most extensive melt since observations began 33 years ago. Fully melted, Greenland ice will raise the world’s sea level by 20 feet.

2012

Research found that 60% of all Chinese groundwater was polluted, requiring it to be treated to be drinkable or in some places rendering it non-potable. n 20 tons of cadmium leaked in the Longjiang River, China. n A seven-fold increase in human birth defects in Iraq in the past 20 years was reported to coincide with the US’s use of uranium-tipped ammunition.

2013

Lead poisoning killed 400 children working in Nigeria’s gold mines. n Floating garbage patches cover 4 percent of the Pacific Ocean, and the slowly photodegrading plastic in the patches are consumed by most forms of sea life, often with fatal consequences. – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Neonicotinoid pesticides, which are attributed to the acute decline of bees, were banned for use on all bee-attractive crops in the EU.

The IPPC said that climate scientists are 95 percent certain that “human influence has been the dominant cause” of global warming.

2014

According to the latest research, 25 percent of the world’s cartilaginous fish, sharks and rays among them, face extinction within the next few decades. n A spill of methyl cyclohexane contaminated surface water for 300,000 people in Charleston, WV.

The two nations with the largest CO2 emissions, the US and China, announced CO2 reduction goals. The US will reduce its net greenhouse gas emissions to 26–28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, while China agreed to reach peak CO2 emissions around 2030.

Melting sea ice in the Arctic and the resulting exposure of dark water is reducing the atmosphere’s ability to release heat more than previously forecasted. – NASA n Massive quantities of methane erupted from the melting permafrost and the floor of the East Siberian Sea, and entered the atmosphere, comprising a global warming positive feedback loop.

2015

Adult soft shell clams now have shells that are 30–40 percent thinner than clams removed from the same sediments 50 years ago as a result of increased CO2 levels in the ocean. – NOAA

Since 1995, hundreds of environmentalists, journalists and indigenous people fighting to protect wild habitats have been imprisoned without due process, assassinated or executed in Bolivia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and Russia.

Unprecedented drought afflicted nations around the world. Mandatory water conservation regulations were instituted in California. n Atmospheric CO2 concentrations rose above 403 parts per million. The last time the atmosphere held this much carbon the seas were 120 feet higher.

* Text in green indicates a positive note

Environmental Actions

Climate Change If CO2 emissions are maintained at 1994 levels, they will reach about 500 ppm (nearly twice the preindustrial concentration) by 2100, stated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC).

Hurricane Sandy killed 253 people and cost $65 billion in damages, and is widely understood to have been caused, at least in part, by climate change.

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T HE N& NO W

Originally published in Winter 1999

How Design Is Changing Organizations

A FOCUS ON ‘WHAT IF?’

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s American cyclist Lance Armstrong was recovering from life-threatening cancer, he set his sights on riding down the Champs-Elysees in the winning yellow jersey of the Tour de France.

This visualization kept him focused on his recovery and the steps necessary to achieve the goal.

He then rehearsed the key stages, and barely three years later he was there—winning the tour by a larger margin than even he could have imagined.

When you are focused on the day-to-day, visualizing success can be hard, and predicting the future virtually impossible. But design, like no other discipline, offers an opportunity to visualize what could be. It is the job of designers to take what we know about today and to ask ”what if?”

We are trained to synthesize the possibilities of technology, the needs of customers, the constraints of commerce and the influence of art. The results are often inspirational, and business leaders are beginning to recognize the power of design.

Beyond the traditional role of design in product development, CEOs are increasingly turning to design to help them visualize the future in two interesting ways: n Strategic symbols: By creating tangible symbols of their vision, resourceful leaders communicate and align their organizations in ways that they could not with typical presentations. n Strategic visualizations: Building creative teams to visualize breakthrough opportunities and generate new uses of technology can have a direct impact on the strategy of a company.

Using Symbols to Articulate Vision When he returned as interim CEO, Steve Jobs knew that Apple needed highly visible signs of change to stem the tide of losses in confidence and profits. He turned to his industrial design group to create the iMac and to his advertising agency to create the “Think Different” campaign in preparation for its launch. By focusing its efforts around these two symbols of its original counterculture vision, Apple began a string of profitable quarters.

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Similarly, IBM’s e-business positioning has served as a symbolic focus and catalyst for change that has helped align every part of the 280,000-person organization. Developed

by Ogilvy & Mather, e-business and the e-mark have been adopted by much of the IT industry as a way to define the connection of traditional network computing with the benefits of the Web, further aligning an entire industry. This plays directly to IBM’s strengths by combining its networking and hardware strengths with software applications and global consulting. It is also connecting IBM with a younger generation of small business owners that it had previously failed to reach.

For years, automotive companies have been using their advanced studios to envision future opportunities and gauge public reaction to new ideas in the form of show cars.

The VW Beetle is a good example of this type of strategic symbol—it demonstrates perfectly how powerful a product can be in providing a symbolic focus and a rallying point for a brand or a company. The groundwork was laid in 1994, when the Beetle was first featured at auto shows to represent the values, attitude, heritage and niche customer focus of the brand. This focus helped inspire the “Drivers Wanted” advertising campaign and fueled the subsequent comeback of the VW brand in the US market.

A Picture Is Worth More Than a Thousand Words It’s difficult to motivate people with the typical PowerPoint presentation that is so often used to try to communicate strategy and tactics to the ranks. Words and charts fall short when it comes to getting people excited about new ideas.

Pictures and prototypes, on the other hand, have a more

visceral power to engage the viewer. They can overcome gaps in language, understanding and perception to unite people around a strategy in ways that presentations and directives simply cannot.

The use of product and communication design to symbolize company values or help align organizations is not new. Back in 1934, Fortune explored the impact of Loewy, Teague, Bel Geddes and other designers on corporate America. More recently, companies such as Herman Miller, IBM and Olivetti created highly visible programs with the best design teams they could assemble—efforts that resulted in products that have become symbols of their organizations and landmarks in the industrial era. As the world economy enters a new stage, design is once again becoming a truly strategic asset for innovative companies.

Convergence Makes Design More Important Than Ever The convergence of television and telephones with the Web and the growth of a completely connected computer infrastructure are forcing companies to paint new pictures of what media mean to them and to their customers. IBM hosts workshops to discuss “pervasive computing,” for example. And unusual alliances among strategists, designers, ad agencies, management consultants, researchers and technologies are being created all the time to address this sea change in the economy.

To compete in this new marketplace, companies are creating what Philips Electronics calls “strategic futures,” assembling multidisciplinary teams of designers, psychologists, researchers and marketers to generate “what if?” scenarios for alternative paths for a product, brand or business.

Thomson Electronics has employed a strategic approach to studying convergence. Through its Advanced Design Group, new scenarios are generated and then promoted through advertising and at trade shows to get feedback before Thomson makes major new investments.

Developing Strategic Visualizations The opportunity for designers in this new economy is to reach across disciplines and consider the context in which their products are developed. This includes understanding the relationship of the product to company priorities, financial constraints, marketplace realities and other parts of the marketing mix. To be successful, companies should consider these five steps: n Document strategic priorities and vision through clear communication; n Conduct meaningful research to learn about marketplace realities, including company assets, competitive threats, channel opportunities and customer motivations; n Generate broad concepts that place your products in a larger context in order to exploit market gaps or overcome compromises that consumers have been forced to accept and to profitably break through the patterns of the marketplace; n Consider product ecosystems, that is, the interrelationships between products and environments, between your products and those of your competitors, and the software and systems that link them; and n Develop visualizations that consider all the elements of the marketing mix: product, price, place, promotion and packaging.

Increasingly, business leaders are using design strategically to create the tangible symbols that give life to their vision. Advanced design teams, such as those at Thomson, Apple, Philips and IBM, are collaborating across functions to look beyond day-to-day business. They are exploiting new technologies, anticipating market threats and envisioning new opportunities to leapfrog traditional competitors. In this era of rapid change, resourceful design managers provide a new and very powerful set of decision-making and communication tools to spark innovation, align their organizations, reduce risk and spur growth.

—By Michael Westcott, IDSA

Design-Driven Companies Continue to Deliver Results!

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lthough many things have changed since Michael Westcott wrote “A Focus on ‘What If?’” in 1999 (we no longer cite Lance Armstrong as a role model, for example), the fundamental premise remains, and is perhaps more mission critical to innovation in business and society: “Design, like no other discipline, offers an opportunity to visualize what could be.” In an ever-evolving volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) world, design offers an alternative to a past-driven, decision-making mindset with a what-if framework for the future.

Moreover, many more business leaders are now beginning to recognize the value of design. The latest DMI–Motiv Strategies Design Value Index study benchmarking the value of design is eye-opening. Design-driven companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 219 percent over 10 years (dmi.org/value). Sixteen companies made the Index, meeting eight criteria for inclusion. They represent organizations referenced by Westcott, ones that go beyond the traditional role of design in product development to design in strategy and business model development.

The role of design in creating strategic symbols has grown as well, representing tangible symbols of increasingly complex ideas, systems, data and experiences. Rather than merely expressing strategy, design has become an engine for creating and sustaining innovation. n —By Carole Bilson, IDSA, cbilson@dmi.org

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T HE N& NO W

Originally published in Fall 1989

A Research Project

THE DYNAMICS OF INTERDISCIPLINARY DESIGN

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s designers, we know that the nature of our work requires us to appreciate and cooperate with professionals from many different disciplines in order to arrive at the best possible solution. Yet each profession still educates its students in discreet programs with neat and easily managed

courses where, for the most part, everyone is learning to do the same thing, the same way, with the same tools.

No wonder, then, that when these disciplines need to work together, the process is full of misunderstanding, conflict and disdain for contributions from other disciplines. The result is often frustration, anxiety and anger.

The whole idea of who, how, when and where design is carried out was the subject of many hours of discussion between myself and four colleagues, each from a different design discipline. Together we represented industrial design, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and industrial operations engineering.

We set out to explore designing, designers and their designs in order to gain insight into how designing is actually carried out and under what circumstances can the three be better understood and refined. To this end, we sought and won support from The National Science Foundation for an interdisciplinary research project to observe and learn about design processes. The research project stretched over three years and resulted in more than 100 observations on the design process and the interaction of design teams.

The Project’s Structure We invited five students each from our respective disciplines to participate in a two-semester sequence. We divided these 25 students into five teams, placing one person from each discipline on each team. In the first semester, the teams had to develop their design solutions from problem statements through to three-dimensional models. In the second semester, the students had the opportunity to further develop their designs from three-dimensional models to full working prototypes made from actual manufacturing materials and processes. In fact, they were required to use an IBM robot

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in an adjoining lab for actual robotic fabrication or assembly.

In addition, each faculty participant presented three to four lectures to the entire class, thus sharing their respective disciplines’ philosophies, methodologies, tools and emphasis.

Although it was a research project, the students were more than experimental subjects. They got to hear new information, including some provocative contradictions. The process itself exposed them to the challenges of collaboration. It also required that they go beyond the paper solutions to a completed prototype, a rare opportunity.

Although our primary interest was with observing the student teams and not with their designs as in traditional design courses, their designs were innovative and professional. Over the three years, student teams designed free standing library book collection stations (1986); fixturing systems for robotic fabrication and assembly (1987); and mechanical devices that emulated the locomotion found in an animal of their choice (1988). We documented all major design presentations on videotape for use in our research, as well as still another tool for the students to use as they refined their presentation skills.

We made hundreds of observations over the three-year period. The following are a few that represent an interesting mix of issues. I should point out that I am not a social scientist, but rather a designer and, therefore, cannot quantify or state that my observations are universal. I simply offer them to you in hope that they generate interesting questions and ideas for you to pursue.

By Allen Samuels, IDSA allenall@umich.edu

Allen Samuels has been an industrial designer and member of IDSA since 1966. He has maintained a professional practice concurrent with his teaching at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan where he was a full professor (1975–2008) and dean (1993–99). In retirement, he continues to design products that deal with aging, disaster relief and concepts that are beyond current technologies. Acknowledgment: This project was supported by The National Science Foundation.

Faculty participants were: Professors Allen Samuels (Industrial Design); Panos Papalambros (Mechanical Engineering); Joe Eisley (Aerospace Engineering); Lynn Conway (Electrical and Computer Engineering); and Dev Kochar (lndustrial and Operations Engineering).

Observations About Individual Designers n Almost all the participating designers felt they were always to be responsible for generating innovative and inventive designs. However, after lengthy discussion, these same designers felt that both as students and as professional designers, innovation and invention represented high risk for themselves and for their companies. They felt a more realistic strategy was for designers and companies to follow the lead of innovative and inventive competitors and to work to emulate their offerings, thus reducing risk for themselves and for their company. Certainly this attitude represents a risk in itself and it may affect our overall ability to be truly competitive in today’s highly innovative and inventive global market. n

Those designers who were trained on computers only often could not fully appreciate the ramifications of a three-dimensional object as it appeared on a flat twodimensional computer screen.

n

Some designers naturally relied on their intuition and then on their knowledge. Others relied on their knowledge and then on their intuition. Some dismissed intuition totally.

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Some designers chose to play a minor role on a team.

When found out, they were criticized and given lowquality tasks to do. These designers found it all but impossible to regain status.

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When individual designers were asked to list their personal values and then describe how their values were expressed through their designs, many could not respond.

Most designers eagerly worked to resolve a given design problem in technical terms, but they often could not address or clearly express the proposed effect of their design on targeted constituents.

Some withheld their concepts during informal concept evaluation sessions, waiting for “Glory Times” when the

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audience would be more receptive, when stakes and rewards would be at their highest, and when attention would be formalized. Unfortunately, the approach often backfired if a concept was faulty. n

Verbal skills employed forcefully and persistently could convince a team to go with what was sometimes a lesser design proposal.

n

Engineering students often focused first on functional components when approaching a design problem.

Industrial design students were often preoccupied with external form issues. Both groups saw the other as seeing the “wrong” issues and depended on the other to solve whatever problem the other left behind, be it external form or internal realities. Their collective behavior reflected their discipline-specific orientation and bias.

Observations About Team Interaction n The ideal team size was around five. Uneven numbers eliminated the possibility of a tie, forcing teams to resolve conflicts. Teams with fewer members often lacked the ability to do a great number of tasks at any one time. n

Some teams used a “core” team around which other individuals were added or eliminated as required. More flexible, it was also more difficult to manage.

n

Early in a team’s life, leadership often changed from one individual to another based on an individual’s overall intelligence, capability, experience, verbal skills and personality. Often the person perceived as the most capable became the team leader, yet the most capable persons were not always the best leaders.

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Democracy in those teams where individuals were to be equal did cause decision-making problems. An individual who did not like the mediated conclusion still had an equal right to not cooperate.

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Some designers minimized project and problem variables while others extended them. When a team had both types on it, they could seriously disrupt work.

Observations About the Design & Development Process n Generating a sound problem statement and then formulating an appropriate design methodology was usually seen as a chore, if seen at all. They wanted to design products and vested all their creativity here.

Many designers never assumed responsibility for formulating or questioning a problem statement. n

Each team member interpreted a given problem statement differently. Often, instead of capitalizing on the differences and expanding the problem scope, teams worked to summarize and thus limit the project scope, trading breadth for consensus and ease of management.

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Long-term projects were often structured into understandable mini-projects and phases, which made them seem more reasonable. Achievable sub-tasks provided valuable performance evaluation benchmarks that helped teams keep sight of their project objectives.

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Quality results did not correlate with intelligent, wellordered and articulate design methodologies, necessarily. Sloppy habits sometimes produced excellent results, although there tended to be better results from those using better methods.

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Project planning seldom accounted for inevitable failures, false starts, second and third tries, and surprises.

Personalities, sexual mix, nationalities and age differences were some factors that could undermine a team’s performance.

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leaders led based on their capabilities during a particular project phase where their expertise was determined to be superior.

Because team leaders also participated as designers, separating authority from equal contribution was not always simple. A leader’s concepts were not to receive special consideration, causing some leaders to inflate or deflate the value of their ideas in order to be seen as fair.

When a team leader was successful, a team’s expectations often rose. When leaders realized this, they were sometimes intimidated by their own power and would work to limit or control the team’s project and expectations. Objectives were then modified so as not to overchallenge the team and threaten the team’s chances for success.

Highly confident leaders often shared leadership, letting it change hands depending on who had the particular skills needed during particular project phases or tasks.

Some teams broke major projects down into subprojects with each one led by a different member. This scheme gave everyone a richer educational experience.

Not all teams had a leader to whom everyone reported, yet in those teams where all members were equal, informal leaders arose as necessity demanded. The quality of work produced in both situations did not seem to be affected by the organizational setup alone. Unofficial

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When project leaders managed a work sequence, including goal identification-action-evaluation and reward, it improved motivation, maintained project momentum and gave long-term projects needed benchmarks.

Observations About Concept Generation n As each team member produced concepts, so did each team member have to act on all of the concepts put forth. This motivated them to invest in every concept and tended to ensure every concept a full hearing, discouraging the “mine/yours” problem. n

Designers behaved differently in different stages of the project, reflecting a sense that early conceptualization and research were open and exciting, and that detailing and final design work were serious and restrictive work.

The early high levels of enthusiasm and open inquiry declined once a design was being detailed.

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Designers were quick to eliminate concepts prematurely and generate additional concepts when any flaw was identified. Seldom would they correct the perceived flaw.

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Individuals and teams producing large quantities of concepts often generated more exciting and original concepts than individuals and teams that produced few options.

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Concepts visualized on paper were considered less valuable than when visualized on a computer.

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Some designers first wrote a list of criteria to help them generate concepts. Others used their generation of concepts as a means of questioning and identifying sound product and project criteria. They then conceptualized again in order to formulate viable design concepts. The latter approach seemed to provide better design criteria and initial concepts.

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Some designers attacked a design problem directly by dealing first and almost exclusively with the technical aspects of the device. The history, context, environment, form, competitiveness, cultural, legal and other issues seemed nonexistent and were, in fact, often excluded in design considerations. Most design education seems to deal with “how” and not with “why.”

Some designers initiated their designing by first identifying what technical components were required within a functional device. They then worked to develop concepts around these components. Other designers developed generalized concepts and after identifying the most promising concepts, they then specified the components that would provide the required functions.

Observations About the Evaluation & Selection of Concepts n Teams found criteria more useful when ranked as absolute, negotiable, marginal and optional. They often found agreeing on the actual ranking, however, a very difficult task. n

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The teams found that risks associated with various concepts could be better appreciated and managed if each concept was placed under categories such as low, moderate or high risk. However, risk was seen differently by each participating designer.

Cost and price considerations were always significant criteria against which every design was measured. The relationship between price and value, however, was more difficult to reconcile.

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When a concept was considered too costly, the team often dropped it, failing to reconsider it in terms of cost reduction or adding value to justify higher costs.

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During a project, if new and “friendly” information was found that would influence the design in positive ways, it was often easily incorporated into the project. If “unfriendly,” the information was often ignored.

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Evaluative criteria were sometimes custom made to fit the concepts. Criteria were often altered by designers, but seldom to further constrain the design problem.

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When a problem could not be easily solved, for any number of reasons (lack of time, resources, expertise, etc.), designers had few qualms about changing the problem to better suit their capabilities and resources.

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Highly motivated and enthusiastic individuals and teams sometimes had difficulty evaluating their work objectively. Enthusiasm and team spirit, at times, blinded their ability to identify strong concepts from weak ones.

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Words and phrases (sky blue, constraints, wild idea, conceptual, intuitive, notion, visualize, off the wall) often influenced the value of what was being heard.

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Those who could draw and illustrate an idea clearly were sometimes appointed to this task primarily—they became visual secretaries for other team members who could not document an idea.

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At design presentations, designers who provided specific comments aimed directly at each constituent’s typical concerns, recognizing the various points of view, had their design concepts more readily accepted.

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Excellent concepts were sometimes deemed undervalued because the evaluator lacked the relevant knowledge and experience.

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During concept evaluation sessions, there were always those who offered still more concepts rather than constructive criticism. They saw evaluation and conceptualization as the same thing.

Every constituency had their own hierarchy of benefits and risks and therefore the trade-offs they were willing to make were often different one from another.

Many interesting design concepts were dropped because the design tools being employed by the designers could not support or help the designers clarify and develop the concept. The fault lay with the designers and their choice of tools and not necessarily with the original concept.

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Simple and direct solutions to problems were often seen as too easy and less than valuable. Low tech was often devalued and only complicated solutions were seen as satisfying and professional.

The designers defined good designs broadly as those that satisfied a given people, their purpose, place and time. They tended to consider some “World” products faulty, even irresponsible, yet they recognized that the pressures of international marketing require simple and generalized design responses. They wrestled with this dichotomy.

Observations About the Development Phase n The idea that a designed object can, through its form, express important information to the end user was foreign to all but the industrial designers. The use of nonverbal and visual design cues as a means to communicate utility, complexity, orientation, control, motion, human factors, value and other issues was seen as a vague and almost mystical concept. n

Unlike facts, intuition, notions, senses and feelings left designers anxious and uneasy.

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Some designers adhered to their initial problem statement and would not consider modifying it no matter what new information was discovered. The farther into the project, the less flexible the designers became and the more unwelcome new information was.

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Halfway through a project, designers were often irritable, tired, bored, vulnerable and discouraged. Toward project end, spirits and attitudes would pick up, almost matching the levels at project initiation.

Robotic fabrication, robotic assembly and flexible factory opportunities create limitations and opportunities that affect the design of mass-produced objects.

Often, such implementation, manufacturing, assembly and testing issues were not dealt with until a design was being finalized. Designers considered the idea of including such considerations early on in design conceptualization as stifling creativity.

The cost/price equation was considered important to designers and those business persons consulted from outside of the class. Cost restraints were respected by both groups. However, seldom were “added value” arguments put forth. If and when they were, they were very difficult to quantify and, thus, often less than convincing.

Observations About Design Environments & Tools n Physical spaces are required for individuals to work alone, to work in small team groups and for meetings of larger numbers. Teams required a sense of their own secured space with their own tools in place.

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Tools that enabled group interaction were used most frequently, ranging from a low-tech erasable board mounted to a wall to a high-tech experimental environment that provided individual keyboards and video screens and a large common computer screen on which whole groups of people could interact. They also used paper and pencil, computer and various software programs, mathematical modeling, finite element analysis, words and word chains, matrices, and various twoand three-dimensional sketch model-making materials and techniques.

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The designers were comfortable with the tools of their discipline but carefully tried the tools that were new to them. When left to themselves, however, most used only the tools they were most familiar with.

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Round tables seemed to promote more equal participation as opposed to rectangular ones. Rectangular tables almost always provoked a comment about the person who sat at the head of the table, criticizing them for presuming a leadership role.

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The participants saw drawing as a “trivial” skill; however, those designers who could draw well were often able to convince others of the merits of their design proposal. Often the value of a design was established by the quality of the drawing.

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Computers quickly presented many decisions for the designer to make. It also forced designers to make decisions so fast that often they lacked the time to give reasonable consideration to the issues involved.

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Because two-dimensional tools were often used to solve three-dimensional questions and issues, component fit, fastening, component interference, scale, motion and other design details turned out to be inaccurate or impossible when ultimately modeled in three dimensions.

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Rapid prototyping was carried out in part on a computer -driven mill. The ability to quickly generate a design on the video screen and then have the mill produce the part was very helpful in saving time as the need for drawing production was eliminated. Because it was relatively easy to do and because some designers were weak at translating from two to three dimensions, the computer-mill was used to make many trial parts.

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Making many trial parts often with trivial changes took away the time advantage gained by having such a tool.

This capability could not, in itself, make up for the lack of two- to three-dimensional translation experience.

Ramifications for Design & Design Education This research made clear that in today’s educational institutions we fail to prepare designers of all kinds for multidisciplinary collaboration. Our graduates may welcome the spirit of the idea, but they have no idea how to initiate or manage productive collaboration. Instead, designers are taught discipline-specific methodologies, tools and skills. It should be no surprise, then, that they bring discipline-specific biases to projects, biases that often block logical attempts at collaboration. In short, we teach designers how not to hear and work with others.

Design education is still traditional in its approach, philosophies, tools, content and breadth. New ideas and techniques are difficult to include in traditional educational programs. When new ideas are included, often the old ideas are dropped and not blended with the new.

The most significant results of our experiment were the few insights that may help us see and understand a bit more about the activity called designing. For example, we learned that we know very little about how designing is carried out, both by individuals and teams. We declare that collaboration is crucial, yet few know much about how to structure and evaluate a successful collaboration. We learned that there are many who call themselves designers who see designing very differently in terms of objectives, scope, methodology, tools, environments and expected yield. We learned that design research is an opportunity waiting to be explored and yet few design education programs carry out research about design process. We saw little sensitivity to the human being who would use the design, but a lot of interest in the technology of achieving the design. Often, results were in fact valueless, superficial and hollow technological configurations with little significant purpose, place or value.

We also discovered that there is much we can do to identify and develop our knowledge about designers, designing and designs. As design educators, we can carry out additional experimental and cross-disciplinary courses.

As design practitioners, we can reconsider not only how we design but why we design. And as end users of designs, we can be more thoughtful and demanding as we determine what we will live with and what we will not accept.

Multidisciplinary Design, 27 Years Later

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hen I wrote the original article, I was still a professor of art and design in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. The series of special sponsored courses described in it were among the best teaching experiences of my career because each time we provided this multidisciplinary experience to our multidisciplinary group of students we all (faculty and students) learned much more than just how to design, develop and prototype an original design.

We were immersed in individual and team dynamics and all the challenges that come from bringing people from various disciplines together to work on a team. This, of course, was our purpose. Although the courses were titled An Advanced Design Lab, where students designed and fabricated prototypes solving challenging problems we faculty generated, the real purpose of the courses was to observe and gain insights into individual and team dynamics, collaboration and team management across mixes of disciplines that included industrial design, mechanical engineering, business, architecture, and computer and industrial engineering. Throughout the courses we observed and noted the dynamics of how individuals and teams work. We especially wanted to identify the nuances of and obstacles to teamwork, creativity and design methodologies.

Now that I am retired and it has been some years since I taught the courses, as I read my original article I found that much of what I observed still holds up. I think that today more professionals understand the benefits of having multidisciplinary teams; however, people in mixed teams continue to find it difficult to work together in professional practice.

Individuals from different disciplines still do not necessarily share definitions of common words and activities such as research, conceptualization, visualization, modeling, form, function and aesthetics. Each discipline brings a different sense of identifying objectives, timing and methodology while working through a problem. Visualization skills and experience with various design tools and three dimensions in real time and in real life are not easily shared and understood by everyone. The measure of scale, value, aesthetics, ergonomics and complexity also continue to be considered differently.

Solving challenging problems and designing a device, it turned out, was easier for our students and faculty than working in a team where each member represented a different discipline and each was convinced that their way of working was the best way of working. Even though more companies today understand the benefits of multidisciplinary teamwork and breaking down traditional departmental boundaries, such work still creates team and project management challenges. The companies that continue to push a project through from one department to another and another in series until a design or product is completed pay a different price for piecemeal design.

Design tools and technologies certainly have changed since my original article, but human dynamics still are the key to any creative enterprise. As long as universities continue to maintain those traditional barriers and boundaries around each discipline and produce rather myopic graduates who have not benefitted from multidisciplinary thinking, experiences, courses and methodologies, problems will result when these people meet one another to work in professional settings. They will find that the world does not rotate around them and their particular way of seeing, thinking and working.

I am proud to say that when I was still teaching at the university, as a result of the Advanced Design Lab, I developed and put into place a dual degree program that enabled undergraduates to earn two degrees in five years: a BFA (industrial design) and a BS (mechanical engineering).

The idea was to provide students the best of both engineering and design methodologies and tools and thus produce a more open minded and creative “designer.�

In summary, as long as we still educate our students within traditional disciplines with traditional boundaries, workers will be challenged when they are in professional settings and find themselves surrounded by and teamed with others who see the world very differently. If only we could prepare them so that when they arrive in the professional world they are experienced, open and eager to expand their way of working as part of a divergent team of individuals who are each able to contribute and to enhance one another resulting in enriched work experiences and extraordinary end products. n

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T HE N& NO W

Originally published in Summer 2000

CONTEXTS OF ACHIEVEMENT

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enchmarks for success are as unique as the individual. They vary throughout life as personal priorities change. The unique circumstances at a particular point in time impact our choices and options. The accomplishments of others, when viewed in various historical contexts, have

provided me with learning, inspiration and higher goals.

Role models present a concept of what achievements are within the realm of possibility. The career paths of four women have provided me with my most valuable benchmarks: Anna Keichline, Anne Swainson, Sharyn Thompson, FIDSA, and Betty Baugh, IDSA. It’s Already Been Done When I was in college I’d call home frequently. The many discussion topics that arose in the late 1960s sometimes involved gender issues. My parents would remind me, “Well, your great aunt was an architect 60 years ago, so what’s the problem?”

Having a role model like Anna Keichline as a family member provided me with a real vision of a successful woman in a male-dominated profession. Even though I didn’t have many details about her experience, her example provided the encouragement I needed. Her achievements became my personal benchmark. Discovering more about Anna’s accomplishments in order to better understand the essence of her personal drive has become a lifelong pursuit.

Her interest in the non-traditional started early. When she was just 14, Philadelphia’s Inquirer cited her awardwinning skills in building furniture. In 1903, it was news for a girl to proclaim that she “may devote life to industrial art.”

Anna earned her degree in architecture from Cornell University in 1911, becoming only the fifth woman to do so.

Many women who received degrees were never hired to put their ideas into reality, but Anna was different. She became one of the very first women to practice architecture in the United States and was the first woman admitted to registry as an architect in Pennsylvania.

Anna can claim design authorship to at least 24 commercial buildings and residences. She also published research articles on air conditioning systems using her patented “Building Block” and was granted six utility patents and one design patent. (See “The Patents of a Design Pioneer” in the Spring 1991 issue of INNOVATION.) In

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addition to her work as an architect and inventor, Anna was recruited as a special agent to the army’s military intelligence division during World War I. Furthermore, many of Anna’s patents and projects were completed before women had the right to vote. In the context of the time, her achievements are simply awesome. Time has only made her achievements more cherished.

Anna’s legacy so fascinated me that in 1991 I moved my office to her hometown of Bellefonte, PA, to research her career. The year-long venture resulted in archiving her work— an effort undertaken at significant cost to me financially, but worth every dollar I spent. When faced with a difficult challenge or perplexing situation, I often wonder how Anna would have handled it. Since discussion isn’t possible, the archives have become an important link to her strength. For me, documenting Anna Keichline’s history is an ongoing adventure that brings many personal and professional rewards.

Great Depression? What Depression?

In 1931, Anne Swainson was recruited at the age of 31 to start Montgomery Ward’s Bureau of Design. A brochure published by the Chicago Athenaeum describes her impact: “The conception of the Bureau of Design was new and her invention; it was a service to buyers in evaluating the quality and appearance of products that Montgomery Ward ordered from thousands of outside suppliers.”

In addition to designing everything from refrigerators to welding equipment, the designers in Ward’s team transformed the company’s catalogue to include photographs and designed packaging systems for its many product lines.

According to the brochure, Anne Swainson “revolutionized the mail order cataloging industry...commanded an army of architects and industrial designers that turned out superb products under the Montgomery Ward label and...educated and launched the careers of many important industrial designers.”

Anne was the first woman executive at Montgomery Ward. She must have had enormous self-confidence, not to

By Nancy J. Perkins, FIDSA njperkins@earthlink.net

Nancy J. Perkins is principal of Perkins Design Ltd., an industrial design consultancy for consumer products, mass transit and industrial equipment. Her corporate experience includes Sears, Jarden Consumer Solutions and CEO of a nonprofit employing people who are blind.

She is an expert witness and a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and was awarded an IDSA Fellowship in 1993.

mention good taste and a real eye for how to successfully wed “good design” with “better manufacturing.” “The success of the Bureau,” observed Jane Thompson in a 1956 Industrial Design article, “depended ultimately on Anne Swainson’s winning the buyer’s confidence, persuading them of the value of better design on the market, and in the management of a business like Wards.”

The Bureau of Design was one of the first examples of how an in-house design department successfully impacted the assets of a large corporation. Design as corporate strategic advantage was thus born in the early 1930s. In 1931 and 1932 the company lost a total of more than $14 million.

By 1933, catalogue profits leaped to over $2 million—in large part due to the new catalogue. Sales continued to grow and had reached almost a half-billion dollars by 1939.

What could be more difficult than turning around a major corporation during the Great Depression?

Thanks to Christian Narkiewicz-Laine and his colleagues, Swainson’s remarkable story was captured in 1994 by the Chicago Athenaeum. I would put Anne Swainson alongside Henry Dreyfuss and Raymond Loewy as one of the pioneers of our profession.

Respect Through Distinguished Service It was my involvement in IDSA that provided me an opportunity to work with Sharyn Thompson, FIDSA. In 1992, we decided to form IDSA’s Women’s Section to help provide valuable networking opportunities among women and more diverse content at national conferences. Sharyn’s character exemplifies IDSA’s Fellowship award; she earned the affection and respect of the membership through her distinguished service to the association and the profession.

Sharyn and her husband, industrial designer Carl Thompson, were a cohesive design team who combined family life with their respective design careers. As Carl remembers, they “ate, drank and lived design.” Their work together as Thompson & Thompson Design included such accounts as Kenyon Marine and Scan Optics among others.

They were an efficient, effective team and, most importantly, they had fun.

Sharyn designed for an extensive range of product categories: from a patented surgical stapler for Acme United, to furniture accessories for Ethan Allen (an account we worked on together), to industrial equipment for the paper manufacturing industry, to office products for Hunt Boston. She also designed aircraft interiors, major appliances and dinnerware.

Her work for the Arts & Music Center for the Handicapped resulted in the creation of Braille flashcards to help blind children learn music scales.

As director of the University of Bridgeport’s design department, Sharyn was in a position to guide many students toward successful careers. She was always available for encouragement and advice. She gave of herself without sense of personal reward and was an excellent team player.

But her single constant motivator was to increase opportunities for women in our profession. She viewed this as her personal responsibility.

I don’t recall Sharyn being intimidated by anything— even in her battle with cancer. Although we lost her to it in 1995, her example has left an indelible impression on those who knew her.

Licensing and Royalties: The Financial Advantage Among the achievements of Betty Baugh, FIDSA, is her success in negotiating royalties and licensing agreements for designs in glass and other materials. She has demonstrated that business savvy on top of excellent design skills adds to a designer’s ability to earn money and to control the design process.

Betty’s advice? Create a licensing system with royalties as payment of design fees. She explains that this has proven to be an invaluable tool in developing good client relationships. The agreement establishes the designer as part owner of the product with a vested interest in the success of the design. In licensing the design, the designer agrees that the manufacturer has the right to produce and sell the design. However, the molds, pattern and drawings are still the property of the designer. The designer may patent or copyright the products, and the manufacturer may negotiate to share in the agreement. The process thus allows for total control over the prototyping process while using the in-house mold makers and pattern finishers.

Bringing in new technology often is the incentive for a manufacturer to agree to a royalty arrangement. The designer’s system of payment can follow the system the company uses to pay its sales people. Most companies are accustomed to quarterly payment systems, so they find this workable for their accounting systems.

For the designer, these contracts have financial advantages; they are bankable as collateral for purchasing real estate, equipment and materials. A longer track record for a product improves it as a selling tool for future designs.

Betty’s legacy also proves that it is possible to “have it all”—a rewarding family life and a successful design career.

Having done it all, it comes as no surprise that she has been so successful at district conference fundraising and in developing IDSA’s membership programs. Her drive on behalf of IDSA has been described as “legendary.”

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Context: The True Measurement Despite the historical contexts that imposed legal, educational and attitudinal obstacles in the way of women, Anna Keichline, Anne Swainson, Sharyn Thompson and Betty Baugh have succeeded in establishing successful careers and forging new paths for others. Their scope of work and business savvy is a reminder of the possibilities open to all of us. Their influence on others will continue for many years to come. Reviewing their life journeys can help create new and higher benchmarks for designers—it has for me.

S

ince my original article written in 2000, the four women I wrote about have continued to influence my career path and choices, most of the time subconsciously. And I still find it inspiring knowing they have all made their mark and influenced our profession.

I can’t help being in awe of the astounding accomplishments by Anne Swainson, her leadership in organizing corporate America’s first design department for a major retailer—and during the Great Depression. She rebranded Montgomery Ward as a retailer of goods for the middle class. Much was riding on the success of her ideas for the company’s survival. Her influence in demonstrating the importance of design to business fostered the industrial design community that later thrived in Chicago. Many of these industrial design consultants either got their start working in her department or sold services to Wards.

Other companies copied Wards’ business model for inhouse design departments, notably my alma mater Sears, Roebuck & Company. How is it, then, that someone so accomplished, who had such influence has been so ignored by our design history? For me, few compare to Swainson’s design guts and influence.

Since 2000 I’ve discovered the most exciting aspects and records of my great aunt Anna Keichline’s career. There is more to come as I develop additional research contacts.

As stated in the 2000 article, I thought she was recruited for service in the Military Intelligence Division (MID) of the Army during World War I. Newly uncovered documents reveal that she volunteered to serve in the MID.

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In a letter Anna wrote on February 6, 1918, to Capt.

Harry A. Taylor of the MID offering to help with the war effort, she described her qualifications as a graduate of Cornell and a practicing architect. Such experience, she wrote, “would suggest a draughting or office job, but if you should deem it advisable to give me something more difficult, or as I wish to say more dangerous, I should much prefer it.” She started work in Washington in May 1918 and continued until the end of the war in November. When she resigned to return to her architecture practice in Bellefonte, PA, Col. John M. Dunn, acting director of MID, accepted her resignation, noting “the efficient manner in which you have handled the matters entrusted to you by this office, and to express to you our appreciation for the patriotic spirit which prompted you to offer your services to us regardless of personal sacrifice.”

Her response? “I feel that the appreciation should be on my side—my having been given the opportunity to serve. I know of no other way to express this—than to say I will bear my experience in mind, study when possible, so that should the occasions arise, I will have more to offer.”

Anna’s letters to the MID provide insight into her financial success as a 28-year-old independently practicing architect. As she noted in her application, her “fees were something over six thousand,” equivalent to more than $122,000 in 2015 dollars. She began her record for patenting inventions in 1912, one year out of college, hiring attorneys in Washington, DC, to file the applications. She was granted six utility patents and one design patent.

Anna was not a person to be intimidated, even when marching down the main street of her hometown in 1913 in support of a woman’s right to vote. A photo taken of her shows women holding banners with Anna leading the group, and disgruntled men (and potential clients) on the sidewalk with their arms crossed in disgust at such an outrageous idea as women’s suffrage. Anna succeeded professionally as an architect and inventor, even by today’s standards, and was relatively unaffected by attitudes and cultural norms. The records documenting her achievements prove her professional perseverance.

In 2010, I was able to purchase a home in Bellefonte, PA, that Anna designed in 1936 (above). It is very gratifying to have the mirror Sharyn Thompson designed for Ethan Allen on the wall of my living room and Betty Baugh’s Sunburst glass and metal serveware collection for Nambé on the mantle above my fireplace. I’m surrounded by the thoughtful elegance they’ve all created. Connecting with Anna’s hometown has given me the opportunity to share her archives with the local community in a permanent gallery I curated at the Bellefonte Art Museum. This visibility for Anna’s accomplishments has been an important motivator for me, particularly when I see the impact her story has on others. In 2002, my colleagues and I applied to the Pennsylvania State Historical Commission for a permanent marker, which was placed in front of the Plaza Theater in Bellefonte that was designed by Anna in 1925. The dedication of a permanent memorial to her achievements is an important symbol of mainstream recognition. The more I discover about Anna, the more inspired I become to continue to share her extraordinary story. n

T HE N& NO W

Originally published in Fall 1986

Designing the Experience

MARKET VALUE INNOVATION

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raditionally, designers have assessed the end result of their work in terms of the product. This focus is now rapidly changing to include the much larger domain of a user’s total product experience as the primary value in design. For example, Cooper Woodring recently challenged the

membership of IDSA to embrace a more ambitious perspective: “American business doesn’t need industrial designers to make a thing reality. An engineer can do that. The value of design is not the product but the product’s ability to satisfy people’s needs and wants—consumer satisfaction.” He also goes on to point out that emphasis of this service is a critical part of the differentiation that IDSA members should employ when marketing their services.

Most companies consider new products a risky but essential requirement for long-term profitability. Such risk can be significantly reduced by design services that focus development on designing what really makes products successful—the customer’s experience of value. Far too often the direct profit link in product planning and development programs is lost because a formal process and media to support the direct development of the customer’s experience does not exist in the corporation. It is precisely this service that the teaming of industrial designers with human factors psychologists (ID/HFP) can provide.

This article describes the logic, process and deliverables of design programs that focus on innovating and engineering the customer’s experience of product value (emotional, learning experiences beyond the actual user/ product interaction). It provides a structure for the marketing and practice of an advanced form of product design and planning using an integrated ID/HFP team.

Finally, it describes the state of development of these two professions in terms of this combined design activity and provides some tips on such groups’ strengths, weaknesses and growth opportunities.

Development Strategies and Market Risk A market value innovation process reduces risk. By focusing the development process on the user’s value experience, we set out from the beginning to design what is really

needed and wanted and reduce the uncertainty and risk in product innovation. This adds a critical competitive edge to a company’s development investment. To illustrate, the table on the next page defines the difference between the development of commodity goods and innovative products in terms of four levels of value development strategy. While the development of any product or service will have some elements from each of the four levels, almost always one level or another will dominate.

The first two columns of the table describe a focus on the development of commodity goods to meet established market values. The price category is focused on the task of minimizing price, often producing knock-offs. Its most common advocates are manufacturing, distribution and sales departments. It has the strong advantages of limited market risk in that it capitalizes on someone else’s demonstration of a viable market and requires only a simple manufacturingdriven company. Its major weakness is a potential loss of product quality. Plastic coat hangers, inexpensive digital watches and many PC clones are all examples of minimal price matched-feature products. The features category is the land of market differentiation. Its most common advocate is marketing. It incorporates the strong advantages of the price category, and it increases the design risk only slightly. Its major weakness is its inclination to proliferate features to almost humorous extremes. The fast-food baked potato, cigarettes and car radios are all examples of product

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Strategies to Reduce Development Risk Commodity Goods: Established Market Values, Yesterday’s Customers Categories Advocates Tasks Weakness Market Risk Examples

Price

Features

Customer Value

Marketing

Engineering, R&D

Industrial Design, Human Factors, Psychology

Drive down price of established market values

Mix proven and popular features

Invent new and exclusive technical wizardry

Develop novel product value experiences

Loss of quality

Proliferation of features

Disregard for customer needs

?

LOW

MODERATE

VERY HIGH

MODERATE

$25 cassette tape player $5 digital wrist watch Chevrolet Drip Coffee makers IBM-PC clones Plastic Coat Hangers

Cassette tape telephone-alarm clock Solar-digital calendar-calculatorwrist watch Cadillac Cigarettes Car Radios Fast foods

CD laser disk players Digital wrist computer Vector sports car Nimslo 3-D camera Bearcat Scanner Touch digital microwave oven

Sony Walkman Swatch Chrysler mini-van Visicalc 3M Post-it Pads Polaroid camera

Customer Value Experiences: Design That Reduces Risk The fourth level of development strategy is the focus of this article. In the customer value category, the design team seeks to develop novel customer product value experiences.

Its most eloquent advocates are industrial designers and human factors psychologists. Its key advantage is the overview of market value and motivation that it generates and which in turn provides a platform for driving the development of new products and product planning. The design team first

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

Technology

Manufacturing, Distribution, Sales

areas where a wide-ranging (even wild) mixture of feature combinations is used to differentiate what are basically the same products.

The last two columns of the table describe a focus on the development of innovative products that pioneer new market values. The technology category is the first level of real new product value development. Its most frequent advocates are engineering and research and development departments. Its major task is the creation of new and exclusive technology, and it aims at being first in new markets. Its weakness is an often overwhelming focus on its own technology, a focus that may miss the critical customer values required for market success. The combination of novel market values and minimal market value design can very often make this a high-risk approach. Touch-controlled panels on the digital microwave ovens of the early 1980s offer a classic example: On some models it took six separate operator entries to boil a cup of water. Needless to say, analog dial timers quickly made a comeback. In contrast, the Bearcat Scanner is a story of technology/market value luck. Here a technology was basically developed for its own sake and aimed at a very special market. The marketing team had no idea that general curiosity and less consumer travel due to rising gas prices would cause vast numbers of customers to spend hundreds of dollars just to listen in on CB and emergency radio traffic.

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Innovative Products: Pioneered Market Values, Tomorrow’s Customers

specifies targeted customer value experiences, then engineers the interactive events (i.e., turning on a stereo receiver, selecting the proper radio band, adjusting speaker balance and so forth) that will cause these experiences, and finally verifies that these events and resulting values have been achieved with the products designed. These overt steps design in market value and so reduce risk.

When it’s done right, everything seems obvious and simple. For example, the Swatch provides customers with moderately priced, easy-to-read analog wrist jewelry with a highly personalized appearance. The loud ticking is all part of the customer experience of traditional (perceived expensive) technology combined with very different aesthetics.

Likewise, the Sony Walkman allows users to quietly and with minimal effort take their music with them wherever they walk. It provides personal control where little existed before.

VisiCalc and Wordstar are perhaps all-time record holders of sorts. They provided a relatively simple and direct value for the ultimate technology-in-search-of-a-purpose of our time—the personal computer. In each of these cases, the development team created a clear customer value experience. Our goal is a design process that consciously and reliably specifies such product value experience.

The most compelling argument for focusing design at the customer value level is simply that no matter how a company creates a product or service, it is in fact creating a customer value experience. It can either design these product value experiences consciously and with the great care they deserve, copy previously successful market values, or hope to pull it off with seat-of-the pants judgments and a lot of luck.

Companies employ design teams to help assure the success of products in the marketplace. An ideal development process would produce successful products 100 percent of the time for a minimal investment. The closer we can come to providing such a service the more valuable our services are.

By Ronald J. Sears, PhD, IDSA ronsears@pvmspec.com

Ron Sears is president of the Design Consortium and for 35 years has worked with clients and consulting firms on design research and strategy projects. He developed the Product Value Matrixsm (PVMsm) model in 1986 to better understand, specify and measure the value of human experience we design into things. Acknowledgements: My sincere thanks to Alex Bally, Dino Mariano, Liz Sanders, Ken Schory and Richard Seif for their timely reviews and suggestions. However, don’t blame them if you disagree with my analysis and predictions.

Supporting Confidence in Development, a Critical Factor In the planning and concept development phase, a company’s rate of investment is modest. It becomes substantial with engineering development and out and out scary as the product goes into production and enters the marketplace. On the other hand, confidence in the product’s likely success in the marketplace rises rapidly in the planning and concept development phase as the program is studied and sold within the company. But, once the program is funded for development, confidence usually flattens out until market testing. Therein lies a major problem for our clients and our opportunity.

As long as confidence exceeds investment, the development process will proceed more or less smoothly and constructively. However, when the investment levels exceed confidence levels by large amounts, a pervasive feeling of risk descends on the development process and the resulting pressure, self-doubt and worry can create an unhealthy environment, loss of team focus, irrational decision-making and so on.

Designing Customer Satisfaction What product experience events do we actually design to create customer satisfaction? The table on the next page describes the components of customer satisfaction in terms of customer experience (physical fit, learning and understanding, purpose, emotion and commitment), related product characteristics (form and movement, information and dialogue, service, personality and cost/ worth) and most importantly, on the diagonal, the intervening ergonomic, operational, utility, image, and purchase and ownership events to be designed.

The lower left four-by-four area of the table forms the major focus of a product design process. Outside of this four-by-four area, purchase and ownership events, customer commitment and product cost/worth represent the end product of the design effort with one important exception. Marketing criteria, such as distribution, merchandising, advertising and sale pricing, act as a very powerful final determinant of product success. In a truly integrated design process these variables and their uniquely related product purchase events are designed along with the product. For example, a power tool to be sold in mass retail outlet stores must “self-merchandise.” Its design should clearly express its key features and value since it will usually be displayed out of its box with no knowledgeable sales staff on hand.

The five types of interaction events along the diagonal in the table on the next page allow us to translate back and forth between desired customer experiences and implied

physical design specifications. They are usually very specific to the individual design problem. In contrast, the general principles and product criteria noted in the bottom half of each diagonal box are givens at the beginning of the design process and seldom unique.

Taken alone, traditional industrial design and human factors psychologist projects do not address design problems at all five levels. A normal industrial design program might emphasize image, some utility events and apply basic anthropometric principles. A graphics design program might address purchase events alone with a new package design.

Likewise, human factors psychologist projects would normally cover ergonomics, operational events and some aspects of utility. In market value design, the ID/HFP team addresses all five of these event categories simultaneously as part of an integrated system of customer value experience. Ignoring parts of the design task or treating them in isolation risks less than optimal design results.

As the scope of the design task has expanded to include all levels of the design problem, the depth of design at each of these four levels has likewise expanded to match the larger product system goals. The open cells in the matrix represent these additional integrated design objectives. It is not enough in most cases to simply apply known principles or the client’s initial design criteria. The complexity of a thoughtful, in-depth design solution requires wider-ranging creative efforts. Where in the past we would have been content to design a handle in isolation from the rest of the product, adhering to anthropometrically correct dimensions, now we look past the given anthropometric rules and tables and analyze how the handle design should facilitate a system of ergonomic, operational, utility and image events.

Likewise, operational events that were once considered in isolation are now part of an overall system of knowledge about what a product does, how it works and how it is controlled. Utility events will often be expanded beyond the client’s initial criteria after an analysis of use patterns uncovers opportunities. Rather than simply applying understood symbolic elements to the product’s image, we attempt to create new variations of images particularly appropriate to the unique product being designed.

Practical Implications of the ID/HFP Partnership What are the deliverables from projects that claim to directly design a customer’s experience? To illustrate the practical implications of such joint ID/HFP projects I have outlined some examples of the “extra ingredients” the two professions contribute to each other’s projects. In all four cases, I describe the content of a major client presentation.

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Components of Customer Satisfaction

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Customer Commitment

Emotion

PURCHASE & OWNERSHIP EVENTS Marketing Criteria

(Emotional experience in an Ergonomic Event)

IMAGE EVENTS Symbolic Criteria

Purpose

UTILITY EVENTS Functional Criteria

Learning & Understanding Physical Fit

OPERATIONAL EVENTS Learning & Cognitive Principles ERGONOMIC EVENTS Anthropometric Principles Form and Movement

Information and Dialogue

Service

Personality

Cost/Worth

PRODUCT CHARACTERISTICS

Case One: A manufacturer of lawn and garden equipment requested an ID/HFP design study of a new type of lawn spreader. At a progress meeting, the team presented results of the operational analysis along with a number of renderings and rough mockups. The team used photographs and segments of videotapes to summarize a number of undesirable ergonomic, operational, utility and image events.

The design team felt one problem currently tolerated in the industry was unacceptably noticeable in the new product. It used a detailed series of photographs to illustrate the frequency of the problem, its noticeability by customers and some possible mechanisms to solve the problem.

Using a mockup of one mechanism in a live demonstration, the designers motivated the client’s engineering group to address the problem. Here clear photographic documentation of the user’s view of the product problem combined with a demonstration of at least one mechanical solution motivated management acceptance of design change.

n

Case Two: A manufacturer of petroleum pumps requested the ID/HFP team to redesign a combination pump controller and cash register for use in gas station/convenience stores. In addition to competitive appearance studies, materials requirements and so on, the team made a series of videotapes of both the client’s and major competitor’s systems in operation. An analysis of the operational sequences and conversations between attendants and customers indicated

n

that virtually all the current designs required information (the pump number) that customers seldom remember. Analyzing a storyboard of an alternative operator interface design, the design team found that it was more self-explanatory than currently available machines and that it significantly reduced operational steps. By presenting this new interface logic in storyboard form to a number of major client customers for review, the team won their approval and thus the reluctant acceptance of an initially skeptical client management.

Case Three: A manufacturer of process control equipment requested HFP analysis of its current operator control panel design practices. The project included computer graphics and product designers to support the development and presentation of design alternatives. The project began with an extensive review of the use of a number of panel designs by operators in plants along with interviews of the client’s engineers, customers and operations staff. Next, the team compiled a summary document listing desirable and undesirable client and customer experiences at each stage of the business process. It then broke each of these categories down into ergonomic, operational, utility and image events. Using this experience/events analysis as a starting point, the HFP/ ID team then generated design opportunities to solve specific problems and illustrate strategic development directions. The team recorded these concepts in a large number of sketches and presented them, together with the experience/events

n

References Hanna, Annetta, “Design Quiz.” Industrial Design, January/February, 1986.

IDSA/Gallup Business Management Attitude Study, IDSA: 1985.

Kotler, Philip and G. Alexander Rath, “Design: A Powerful But Neglected Strategic Tool,” Journal of Business Strategy, Fall, 1984.

Pew, Richard W. and Paul Brefka, “The Human Factors Approach,” “The Industrial Design Approach,” Human Factors Society Bulletin, July, 1985.

Takeuchi, Hirotaka and lkujiro Nonaka, “The New Product Development Game,” The Harvard Business Review, Vol. 1, January/February, 1986.

Wilcox. Stephen, “Can the Human Factors Engineer Rely Upon Cognitive Psychology?,” Proceedings from Interface ’85, the Fourth Symposium on Human Factors

and lndustrial Design in Consumer Products, May, 1985.

Woodring, Cooper, “Woodring Challenges Membership to Recognize Real Value of Design,” Design Perspectives, IDSA: January, 1985.

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analysis, to the client. That presentation led to agreement on a series of major strategic principles for further development.

In this case, the ability to picture in concrete terms a wide range of abstract human factors opportunities allowed seven client participants as well as the consulting team to arrive at a consensus in two six-hour meetings. The team then presented the recommended strategic changes in operator interface design in a formal report with selected illustrations to client management.

Case Four: In the final case, a start-up firm requested an ID group to develop the ultimate personal computer appearance design. Based on a semantic differential analysis of consumer preference for current design stereotypes, the group described a number of generic design opportunity areas. Later, the design team narrowed the alternatives down to two choices. In a semantic-differential analysis of these alternatives using customers in retail computer stores, the team found that people perceived one design as having a lasting novelty, making it the choice for production.

In this case, the team developed, tested and supported an advanced aesthetic design concept using a series of psychological measurement techniques. This product received an IDEA award and has been included in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art.

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Professional Opportunities: Filling a Basic Business Need Although it is easy to name a wide range of specialized disciplines that contribute to our current technological wizardry, corporate management cannot easily name a single professional group that will focus and coordinate the innovation of purpose and marketable value into products for customers.

Note, for example, the variety of professionals in product management positions. The majority come from marketing,

sales, engineering and finance. None of these disciplines focus directly on the components of human experience, perceptions of value and creation of novelty. Their tools and process instead deal most effectively with optimizing the profitability of existing product values in the marketplace.

(See the price and feature levels in the table on page 42 and marketing criteria in the table on page 44.)

Companies in effect assign the most critical aspects of product development to individuals with, at best, indirect training in the relevant design areas. This may explain why many companies consider successful product management to be somewhat of a black art.

The ID/HFP team is in a position to fill a basic need in a great many companies if the message and examples of results can be put in front of the right individuals and we choose to provide the service. Corporate management in many cases already “knows” what industrial designers do according to the IDSA/Gallup Business Management Attitude Study results, so this task may sometimes require untraining.

The table below summarizes the current professional activities of the industrial designer and human factors psychologist in product development and how these activities fit together to form the integrated design services described here. The letter “X” denotes product development activities that are normally not part of each profession’s separate activities. Most development projects begin at Stage I or II with a study of the current marketplace and competition or when team members create and develop alternative concepts. Sometimes an evaluation of products (Stage III) is conducted before launch. If the product fails to turn out well after development or it does not perform as hoped, a modification of products in the marketplace or failure assessment (Stage V) may be done to rescue it. On fairly rare occasions, companies will step back to plan and develop design strategies for families of products (Stage I).

Professional Activities in Product Development CATEGORIES

PLAN & DEVELOP DESIGN STRATEGIES I

STUDY CURRENT MARKETPLACE & COMPETITION II

CREATE & DEVELOP ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTS III

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN FOCUS (Active stereotype: create new designs and over-all product systems)

Establish principles, standards and guidelines for designing families of products

Audit of competitive environment: Establish functional and aesthetic requirements

Generate appropriate concepts using diverse modeling tools

HUMAN FACTORS FOCUS (Passive stereotype: apply principles and measure specific results)

Theory of performance and preference for families of products: • Learning and cognition • Ergonomics • Knowledge models • Motivation

Field and laboratory research to study and specify performance and preference requirements

X NORMALLY NOT DONE (Opportunity to expand breadth of design process)

EVALUATION OF PRODUCTS BEFORE LAUNCH IV

MODIFICATION OF PRODUCTS IN MARKETPLACE V

NORMALLY NOT DONE (Opportunity to add conviction to design recommendations)

Superficial enhancement: • Minor form modifications • Color • Graphics • Packaging • Decoration

Field and laboratory research to verify success of design concepts

Market failure assessment and recommendation

X

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In Stages I, II and V of the development process, the industrial designer and human factors psychologist provide different yet complementary services that together directly and effectively aid in the development of the customer’s experience of value. For example, if the task is to study the current marketplace and competition, the industrial designer covers aesthetic requirements and competition in the marketplace where the human factors psychologist emphasizes formal measurements of performance and preference. In Stages Ill and IV, however, each group currently ignores a major professional opportunity (marked X). The human factors psychologist seldom generates the wide range of alternative product design concepts common to most industrial design processes, and the industrial designer normally avoids the human factors psychologist’s pre-market evaluation of a proposed design.

The claim here is quite simple: Combining the activities described in the five stages in the previous table provides a better way to develop products and services and a major competitive opportunity for those companies that adopt the procedures. Of particular value is the use of market value innovation as a strategic platform from which many products can be derived.

A Renaissance Team Some very interesting things happen to the design process when these professions work together. They have different styles of thinking that are integral to their suitability for market value innovation. The typical human factors psychologist is more convergent where the industrial designer is divergent in the design concepts generated. As a result, industrial design projects are usually more open, wide ranging and consequently less formally structured than human factors projects. In any design effort, there is a time to carefully plan, a time to create and a time to carefully implement the results. Strict adherence to either stereotype alone would be a disaster. Each profession’s bias tends to provide a necessary complement to the other’s.

Differences in cognitive style tie very directly into the media used by each profession and the individual contributions of each group to design solutions. It is the interplay between each group’s style that enables a rapid and satisfying exploration of a problem area. Industrial design is more skilled in the use of visual media to simultaneously present many parallel ideas together in one broad system view, providing breadth. Human factors psychology is more skilled in the use of verbal media to logically string an in-depth series of related design ideas together as a deep principle, providing depth. The industrial designer tends to contribute breadth ideas in visualizations where the human factors psychologists tend to present depth ideas in words.

A rich interplay and rapid exploration of the design problem occurs because each group can skillfully and quickly elaborate on the other’s contribution and together search the complete problem. This mutual expansion of the other’s thoughts into a different style and media is exciting.

Perhaps equally important, each style keeps the other from spreading itself too thin in the big picture (breadth) or getting buried in one or two principles (depth).

These points reflect the common problems of balancing timely project control versus unpredictable creativity, established design practice versus surprising new solutions and so on. The dynamic tension of tools and process in an ID/HFP team allows it to go immediately into the business of creating new market values and major profit opportunities for its employers.

Controlling Market Risk Allows More Adventuresome Design The expansion of design’s mission to include the user’s total product experience and the growing number of ID/HFP project teams represents a major business and professional opportunity for all of us. Together we can help clients reduce their risk in new product development. On the flip side, the better we control market risk, the more daring and creative we can be in our design planning and development.

Acknowledgements: Conversations and design projects with individuals, including Ken Schory at NCR; Arnold Wasserman at NCR and then Xerox; Chuck Leinbach and John Rheinfrank at Richardson/Smith; Steve Albert at GVO; Alan Frank at Henry Dreyfuss; Steve Wilcox at Herbst, LaZar, Rogers and Bell; and Joe Ballay and Tim Cunningham at Carnegie Mellon, have all helped form and shape these ideas. In particular, Alex Bally of Carnegie Mellon provided the initial challenge and then many thoughtful hours of critique to focus the concepts presented.

Measuring the Value of the Things We Might Create Value Innovation Accounting

T

he goal of my Fall 1986 article was to predict the evolution of industrial design innovation practice.

Much of what a group of us (Alex Bally, FIDSA; Chuck Leinbach; Chuck Mauro, IDSA; Liz Sanders, IDSA; Lucy Suchman; Steve Wilcox, FIDSA; Cooper Woodring, FIDSA and many others) suggested back then has come true. Designing the experience with the participation of professions like human factors, psychology, anthropology and others has become normal practice. What’s going to happen next?

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I believe more strongly than ever that measuring the value of the experience we plan to design into things must become a normal part of our innovation process. To advance as a profession, I believe we need to embrace our accountability for the human value we create and the profits we promise. I also predict that the adoption of a formal version of value innovation accounting is inevitable. Here are a few arguments for this prediction, along with some data we’ve collected that show accurate measurements are possible using our process (PVMSM Open Content License,

Table 1 PVMsm Measurements Predict Market Value of New System Concepts

Year after year of lost opportunities for design careers, investor returns, customer benefits, and our economy and society as a whole—all because we have no objective measures of the future market value of what we might create.

Correlation: r= .9631 p=.00012 8.5 Concept 6

8.0

Customer Ratings of Market Value

7.5 Concept 3

7.0

Concept 5

6.5

Concept 2

.95 Prediction Interval

6.0 Concept 1

5.5 Concept 4

5.0 4.5 Current Product 2

4.0

Current Product 1

3.5 1.0

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2.0

2.2

2.4

2.6

2.8

3.0

PVMsm Measurements

www.pvmspec.com). Note that I use the word “value” in this discussion to mean valued human experience resulting from all stakeholder interactions with a product.

The Terrible Cost of Uncertainty We all pay a price for our uncertainty in predicting the value of innovations. To rationally manage any innovation project, we must understand and control three types of risk: n Resources Risk: staffing and financing to final project completion n Technology Risk: enabling the product and the manufacturing process n Value Risk: predicting the future value of the things we might create Value risk dominates. No matter how talented our MBAs and engineers, we cannot rationally manage resources or develop new technologies without confidence in our understanding of the future value of our intended innovations.

Anyone working in new product development has watched great innovations cast aside because of uncertainty about future value. These losses result from individual selfcensorship, reflexive team decisions to keep on track and management directions to avoid out-of-scope ideas.

We even limit our exploration of possible innovations before we start. Consider the practice of prioritization in design briefs to boil everything down to a few critical needs.

It never occurs to most of us that you cannot logically get to an innovation that elegantly simplifies previous complexity without starting with a fully detailed (complex) specification in the first place (see “Dancing Through Complexity” in Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind).

Finally, the problems listed so far assume we actually commit to a value innovation project in the first place. One long-established business strategy (see pages 212–14 in Michael Porter’s classic Competitive Advantage) is for companies to signal each other in the marketplace (unintentionally or not) that they will not invest in significant innovations, and then everyone can have safe profits without the cost and presumed inherent risks of innovation for just a little while longer. Also consider renowned venture capital funds (such as www.shv.com/approach#) that sell their investors on pure technology plays to strategically avoid the presumed inherent risks of innovative value propositions.

Striking Improvements in Accuracy Ultimately, value innovation accounting will only happen when there is strong evidence that we can accurately predict market performance. Unfortunately, the methodology used in most design case studies is not scientifically rigorous. Most studies are open to obvious alternative explanations. In other cases, measures of actual market performance are distorted or simply unavailable. Most important, the business managers we need to convince are not impressed by data that demonstrate success years after a product has launched.

They need evidence that the design process we are promoting will provide real-time validated predictions of the future market success of innovations in their current project.

Occasionally over the last 30 years of our applications of the PVM Process, I’ve had the opportunity to collect robust research data that meet all three of these criteria: n There were no obvious alternative explanations for the accuracy of PVM measurements of current and future market performance. n Good measurements of actual product market performance were available both before innovation (validation against current products) and after launch. n Complete PVM specifications and measurements were produced at a time when they could have been or were used to manage innovation in real time.

In one case, Apple asked us to compare interactions with its planned new PowerBook design versus major competitive notebooks. A year later, after the PowerBook was launched, we used average monthly retail street price data to measure actual competitive market performance.

We looked at how well PVM measurements predicted each competitive notebook’s ability to support its original pricing over its first 10 months in the marketplace. The results were striking. The correlation between PVM measurements and holding initial pricing was .85 (p<.007). PVM measurements accurately predicted which computers would and would not suffer heavy discounting. In financial terms, the six computer designs with lower PVM scores had been discounted an average of $900 after 10 months in the market, compared to virtually no discount for the two computer designs with high scores. The estimated differences in manufacturing costs between the high and low PVM score computers was at most $200. By month 10, that’s an average of $700 lost profit per sale across six major competitors.

In a second case, we were given the opportunity to create a detailed PVM specification for hospital infrastructure systems that sell for $1 million to over $2 million each (specific information is proprietary). We then developed and calculated related PVM measurements for the two current competitive systems and seven new concepts. Each new concept was represented with both mockups that showed basic functions and a brief marketing PowerPoint presentation.

Purchase decisions for these systems are made by expert committees. We put together such a committee with

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Virtuous Circle of Benefits for Industrial Design and Accounting

These measurements also allow innovation projects to be managed with a degree of creative and financial precision not previously available.

Industrial Design & Accounting

Investments to Increase the Accuracy of Value Innovation Measurements

Accounting

Industrial Design

More Accurate Fiscal Control

More Accurate Measurements and More Value Innovations

Accounting

More Accurate Asset Accrual Accounts and More Valuable Assets

an average of 25 years of professional experience and presented them with the new concepts. After a review of all the concepts, we had each participant independently assign ratings (see chart on previous page). PVM measurements correlated .96 (p<.00012) with “Purchase Committee” ratings of the relative desirability of the concepts. In practical terms, this means that in 19 out of 20 separate judgments future Customer Ratings for Concept 6 (PVM score = 2.75) will be between 7.5 and a perfect 10 (see .95 Prediction Interval lines in the table on the previous page).

Given the importance of the project, our client then had independent market research firms repeat our testing with much larger samples of customers who compared less detailed descriptions of only the best of the new system concepts with current competitive systems. Their findings verified our results.

These two studies provide strong evidence that we can make extremely accurate real-time measurements of the future market value of innovations as they are being created.

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Why Become Value Innovation Accountants?

Why should industrial designers incorporate a value specification and measurement process like PVM into their already crowded curriculum and professional activities?

First, because designers would be ill-advised to allow another profession to take over a critical part of the learning that drives the quality of their own creative process. Second, because the accuracy of these value measurements changes the game for both managing the innovation process and related financial planning. Industrial designers need to be part of this new game.

Predictions There’s an incredible need to measure the value of things we might create, and there’s an openly available paradigm (PVM) that provides such measurements and supports rational management of what most consider unmanageable.

Everything is in place to launch value innovation accounting.

I‘m predicting changes to both industrial design innovation and accounting practice. I think this will happen because both professions will be increasingly motivated to invest in the required changes. Industrial designers can greatly improve their knowledge and creative process by participating in expanded front-end stakeholder research, organizing specifications and then creating accurate measurements of the future value of innovations. These same specifications and measurements also support more rational investment and management of innovation projects.

For accounting, the ability to immediately accrue the value of future innovation-based assets greatly increases the accuracy of fiscal management and helps lead the way to improved financial returns. So for both industrial design and accounting, the accuracy and real-time availability of these measurements are important shared goals and that will promote a virtuous circle of improvements (see left).

Once value innovation accounting becomes standard practice, businesses will, of course, still be tempted by short-term financial returns. But that more primitive strategy will now have worthy competition in the form of innovation asset accrual accounts that represent longer-term profits and real value creation. n

By Cooper Woodring, FIDSA ccwoodring@cox.net

Cooper Woodring earned a bachelor’s from Kansas and a master’s from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Most of his career was spent with JCPenney in NYC. Woodring is past president of IDSA; was appointed by Ronald Reagan to head a cultural exchange mission, “Design in America,” behind the then-Iron Curtain; and currently serves as an expert witness in design patent litigation.

DESIGNING WITH CORPORATE GOALS IN MIND

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nderstanding corporate goals is a vital link in the industrial design process. A design manager must know what the corporate goals are and how to use them in designing products that help the company achieve those goals. Without that understanding, a design department is unlikely

to contribute to corporate success. Where the hitch lies is in setting the stage for that understanding—in order to understand you must first have open communication channels to senior management whose foremost responsibility is setting those goals.

Before looking at how you can work with your company’s goals, you might want to evaluate the goal-setting policies of your corporation, applying the old Navy saying that “You can judge a captain by the look of his ship.” A rusty, smoking warship with lines and tarps flapping in the breeze signals either a lost battle, a less than competent commander or, worse, both. There’s also probably a lost battle in the picture resulting from the commander’s incompetence.

This axiom applies to business as well. You can judge your senior management from the “look” of your company, taking in everything the public sees from second-rate products to belching smokestacks. If your company looks like the ship that just lost the battle and if there are no clear corporate goals to change that image, then you are probably just wasting your time and talent on a hopeless cause.

What Corporate Goals Are There may be no greater disservice to American business than Milton Freidman’s widely publicized opinion that “business’ only reason for being is to generate profits for shareholders.” If you think making a profit is the sum of your company’s goals, then you have some rethinking to do.

Making a profit is no more the purpose of a corporation than breathing is the purpose of life. Breathing is necessary to life, but your life purpose is hopefully somewhat more meaningful. By the same token, making a profit is a cor-

porate necessity. Without profits, the company must close, a result which makes no sense for customers, suppliers, employees or investors.

Even stockholders look for more than current profitability in evaluating the desirability of a company’s stock. They recognize that future profitability is directly tied to corporate goals and strategies. These goals and strategies, therefore, may have a greater net effect upon the stockholders’ equity in a corporation than does current profitability. Witness Chrysler, on the verge of bankruptcy and desperately in debt. Its stock goes up as a result of investor confidence that corporate goals set by senior management are achievable and can lead to future profitability.

Our understanding of corporate goals is cluttered with a lot of other misconceptions. For instance, refusing to pay bribes or accept kickbacks is often thought of as a corporate goal. It is in fact no more than a corporation obeying the law.

Similarly, it is not a corporate goal when a company insists on strict safety rules in its operations, truthfulness in its advertising and equal opportunities for its employees. These are simply examples of a corporation obeying the law and practicing sound management. If your company is still trying to achieve these—leave. It is going to be a long time before its priorities can address the things we are going to talk about here.

What, then, constitutes a goal? Webster tells us it is “an end that one strives to attain.” Corporate goals should be

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Originally published in Spring 1982

desirable and within the resources available (including financial assets, talent, environment and so on) to accomplish.

Another critical quality to meaningful corporate goals is the time frame within which we hope to attain the objective.

In design terms, corporate goals act like a well-defined statement of a problem. All designers know that a welldefined problem constitutes at least half of an acceptable solution. A vague definition of the problem will result in more solutions, but those solutions will be difficult to accept. We have all received criteria by which to measure the success of a design, only to have the client perceive the solution as inconsistent with a preconceived notion, a notion that differs from those original criteria. Similarly, when goals are poorly articulated, designs that are based on them will probably fail to help the company attain its goals.

But above all, goals must be market oriented rather than company oriented. The success of a new product depends upon defining as accurately as possible what the market needs, not what the company does best.

How General a Goal Should Be There is one other aspect of understanding corporate goals that merits mention to designers. A goal must state only what a solution must do, without stating how to do it. You don’t want our Hanover Wooden Mousetrap Company to limit its future growth with a goal statement that precludes the attributes of higher technology if in fact that is the key to its growth. For instance, if the word “wood” appears in the Hanover Wooden Mousetrap Company’s goal statement with a how-to-do-it statement, the goal may be limiting achievement of the company’s real goal.

As we have seen, “increasing profits” is too general a statement to act as an effective goal. In fact, increasing profits isn’t a goal at all, but a result or reward for achieving a worthy goal. Conversely, goals can be so limiting as to perpetuate only what the corporation is already doing.

Neither is right. The best goals are a delicate balance between the two extremes, defined by sensitive management with an eye toward the goal’s time frame.

How Goals Reflect the Company The complexity of corporate goals is consistent with the size, diversity and uniqueness of the corporation. The senior management of the Hanover Wooden Mousetrap Company can probably agree on a single succinct corporate goal in one day whereas the senior management of Intercontinental Industries might find it difficult to clearly articulate and prioritize its corporate goals in several months. In fact, it is probably more important to articulate goals in larger, more complex organizations because so many of their employees are necessarily far removed from the corporation’s mainstream and reminders of its raison d’etre.

Large corporations often operate many businesses that they describe as profit centers. These centers are no more than separate business entities that can be isolated and evaluated by contribution or return on investment or equity. They are often diverse businesses, sometimes with no more relationship to one another than competing for the parent company’s resources. Each may develop its own corporate goals which collectively become the goals of the parent organization.

This arrangement often leads to some seemingly strange goals. ITT includes among its corporate goals baking better bread, growing greener grass, financially protecting young families and immortalizing significant people. ITT owns Wonder Bread, Scott Grass, Hartford Insurance and Who’s Who.

The Risks of Business Without Goals When corporations are young and small, they have set out to achieve some rather specific objectives. Resources are assembled from stockholders or loans and poured into the enterprise. Everyone is busily engaged in activity designed to carry the organization toward its goal.

As time goes by and the company grows, however, that goal may change or evolve into something else. Unfortunately in the case of many companies, the activity remains the same, becoming an end unto itself. This false goal—the activity— becomes the criteria for making decisions. Understandably those decisions get progressively worse.

Examples of this deterioration are all too familiar. The accountants act as if the business exists so that they can keep books on it. They no longer keep books so the boss can run the business better. The sales department acts as if there is no problem that can’t be solved by more sales.

Sales go up, but profits go down. The designers think the company should exist solely to produce their award-winning designs, but their product line remains much the same.

Ultimately, senior management loses sight of the goals of the organization and demands more and more activity rather than results. In the end, everyone spends their careers taking in more administrative laundry, creating more jobs and hierarchies and generating more activity—all of which is increasingly unrelated to the original reason the company was formed.

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Undirected activity cuts profits, looses ball games and obviously fails to achieve missions. That in turn has a disastrous effect on people—they shrink personally and professionally. The effect is cumulative. They are criticized for failure, growing out of not knowing what constitutes success which, in turn, produces reluctance to discover problems.

Obviously the problems they discover will be attributed to their own shortcomings. Suggesting solutions in such an environment is risky. Looking busy is safer than being productive. The security of this syndrome is, of course, inherently false, and rewards diminish at an accelerated rate.

An organization, after all, is not an end unto itself. It is an evolving means for achieving objectives or corporate goals.

In short, regardless of the shape goals must take, how simple, difficult or diverse they are, the moral is that they are essential. As Ted Levitt of Harvard once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” As a result, establishing corporate goals that are clearly communicated and interpreted is the foremost responsibility of senior management.

What Strategies Can Do Now we know why we must have goals. Goals are implemented by strategies, just as questions are satisfied by answers. But the two are often confused.

Some time ago, as I was watching Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan in a presidential debate, it occurred to me that they were describing goals for America. One wanted to make government bigger; the other wanted to make government smaller; I wanted to make government work. One wanted to balance the budget; the other wanted to sell more gold; I wanted to stop inflation. And so on.

In retrospect, I saw that they weren’t stating goals at all. They were offering strategies for attaining goals, which is the step that comes after the goals are clearly understood.

Webster says a strategy is a “plan for a large-scale operation.” Often several alternate plans can run simultaneously with the “faster track” option usually succeeding.

Unlike goals, which should contain a dream element, strategies must be down-to-earth.

A classic example of this occurred when President Roosevelt asked Mark Twain for his opinion on how to neutralize the effectiveness of Germany’s U Boats. After careful thought, Twain replied, “Drain the ocean.” While it is difficult to argue the theoretical effectiveness of his strategy, it is easy to argue the practicality of it. Creative strategies are fine, but even those must be achievable and practical.

The Japanese have long said that “the right question is more important than the right answer.” So it is with goals and strategies. No strategy will help a bad goal, just as no design will help a bad product. Assuming that the corporate goals are “right,” then alternate strategies are developed to attain the goal.

When to Be Practical, When to Be Impractical Goals should not be limited by our current inability to attain them. Strategies, however, must be limited by ability, time and resources. Establishing corporate goals and strategies appears to be a linear process, but in fact should be subject to the looping or recycling process that we practice daily in design. Sometimes a brilliant strategy can modify a goal or attain it in less time.

There is an understandable reluctance on the part of responsible senior management to commit to a goal that sounds more like wishful thinking than sound business practice. The perceived risk and fear of failure associated with ambitious goals often prevent us from committing to the types of goals we would truly like to attain. The resultant lesser goals are often successfully achieved, but are subject to the old nothing-ventured, nothing-gained syndrome.

Simple goals, if ambitious enough, can be viewed with real skepticism. But dynamic leadership often accompanies ambitious goals. The simplest goal statement I can think of, coupled with the most ambition I can imagine, was President Kennedy’s “We’re going to land a man on the moon.” He outlined a precise time frame and we beat it by one year.

Successfully achieving too modest a goal can result in lost market share and lost confidence in Yankee ingenuity to compete with ever increasing foreign innovation and competition. Even partial success of an ambitious goal can be far more profitable than complete success of an overly modest goal.

The awareness of such excessive conservatism has been an important factor in American business’ rapid changeover from linear management systems to matrix management systems.

The Matrix Way Out of the Caution Trap The matrix system overcomes a number of problems, but was basically designed to avoid the blind leading the blind, an inherent pitfall of the traditional linear management system. The matrix system assures that the creative input comes before the decisions are made that would exclude the truly better mousetrap.

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In the matrix system, the designer interacts with other disciplines in senior management to creatively alleviate the fears and risks associated with more ambitious goals until such time as the new goal is no longer considered higher risk, only higher reward. Having paved the way in this manner to the establishment and conscious acceptance of a new, more ambitious corporate goal, who could be in a better position to continue the strategy than the designer?

Tools for Applying Corporate Goals Corporate goals and strategies may lead to the development of new business, new markets, new services or new products. To assure that new consumer products reinforce corporate objectives rather than conflict with them, designers should understand the marketplace and the retail environment in which our products will compete.

All consumer products can be classified into categories that have different characteristics in the consumer attitudes and retail environments and, therefore, in design.

The first classification is quite basic. All consumer products are either wants or needs. Wants are those items that generally make life more enjoyable. Needs are those items we must have to survive. Many new products start out as wants and mature into needs as their market gains exposure and ultimately saturation. Refrigerators were once a want, or even a wish, but rapidly became a need, until now we would hardly know how to survive without one.

Wants can be subdivided into lifestyle products and specialist products, and needs can be subdivided into service products and consumable products. Let me define them further. Lifestyle merchandise is characterized by the new. It is fashionable and exciting. It brings esteem. Lifestyle products are jewelry, art, home furnishings, fashion apparel and cosmetics. They’re usually found in better department stores and malls or regional shopping centers.

Specialist merchandise is characterized by high technology and high performance. Specialist products are cameras, stereo systems, video equipment, some hobbies, sporting equipment and musical instruments. They all relate to the customer’s competence and usually require trained sales people and specialized assortments.

Service products are just what the name implies. They provide service and can be built-in, like telephones and major appliances, or they can be portables like personal care appliances, housekeeping equipment and tools. They probably all started out as lifestyle products sold in better department stores, then became specialist products sold in appliance stores, and now have become service products sold primarily by discounters.

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Consumables are the convenience items that are needed to keep us going, like food, drugs, gasoline, Kleenex and newspapers. They are sold in discounters, supermarkets, drug stores and more and more often in convenience shops.

Being aware in advance of these basic inevitable selling environments, each with quite different consumer attitudes, should allow the design department to better understand why some corporate goals are limited by their channel of distribution. These basic categories also influence what strategies may be realistic and practical.

How to Define Your Company It should be obvious that before we can understand a corporation’s goals, we must understand what it is now. One simple tool to help clarify this complex issue is a corporate image profile.

This profile of your corporation can be expressed and communicated in what is called a semantic differential. The oversimplified version (illustrated on page 53) is constructed with a set of opposite image characteristics (like new vs. old, expensive vs. cheap, and genuine vs. fake) with a simple rating scale in the middle of which should lie a neutral or neither position.

Consumer or market research can determine what your corporation is by asking your customer. We could call such profiling “Designing by Objectives.” It will undoubtedly remove some of the subjectivity and intuitiveness from your designers’ work, but it won’t impair their creativity. It will simply channel that creativity toward more meaningful results for the consumer, the company, the designer and the stockholders.

Concluding Thoughts I’d like to reinforce the point of this article by quoting a comment made by a smart designer: “Don’t ask me to design a bridge, tell me you want to cross a river.” The point is, designing a bridge is a strategy while crossing the river is the goal.

This designer rightfully felt that when the goal was clear, he could most enthusiastically support the particular strategy.

Similarly, a surgeon must confirm the diagnosis prior to performing the operation prescribed to fix the disorder.

Establishing goals, as I have previously said, is the foremost responsibility of the senior management of any corporation. But making those goals attainable requires their communication which, in turn, requires cooperation and willingness to communicate at both the senior management and design levels. It is one of your primary responsibilities as a design manager to strive for that smooth communication and to then include the goals as part of the design process.

E

ven if I could, I wouldn’t take back anything I wrote 33 years ago in my article “Designing with Corporate Goals in Mind.” I would, however, simplify the key points of the article. Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply enough, you don’t understand it well enough.”

I wrote, “There may be no greater disservice to American business than Milton Friedman’s widely publicized opinion that ‘business’ only reason for being is to generate profits for shareholders.’” What I failed to say is that profits aren’t the goal; they’re the reward for making things better, or making better things. Apple’s goal wasn’t to generate more profits; it was to create the world’s most intelligent, easiest-to-use and best-looking smartphone. Generating more profits was the reward for nailing that lofty goal.

I also wrote, “The designer interacts with other disciplines in senior management to creatively alleviate the fears and risks associated with more ambitious goals until such time as the new goal is no longer considered higher risk, only higher reward.” In 1982, as head of design for JCPenney, I did not interact with other disciplines in senior management. Design did not have a seat at senior management’s table, so design couldn’t contribute to the corporation’s establishing higher-reward—but still achievable—goals. Design not being a part of corporations’ senior management was not unusual in 1982. However, at that time JCPenney was becoming more heavily invested in, and supportive of, design and the consumer benefits derived therefrom. This is critically important for retailers because retailers are more dependent upon positive consumer perceptions for success than are, for example, manufacturers.

Surprisingly, five years later, in 1987, JCPenney abruptly reversed course and dissolved its design department and fired all of its designers, right at a time when other corporations were moving design up in the corporate hierarchy and increasing design’s sphere of influence. Not surprisingly, when JCPenney dissolved its design operations in 1987, its stock was selling for $86 a share. Today, you can buy all you want for $8.60 a share, or 10 percent of its value some 28 years earlier.

We often read stories of great successes attributable to design, like the Apple story, but rarely do we read stories of great failure attributable to design. Certainly, design, or more accurately the lack of it, is not the sole reason JCPenney is on life support, but it is unquestionably a significant contributing factor.

I also wrote, “It should be obvious that before we can understand a corporation’s goals, we must understand what it is now. One simple tool to help clarify this com-

Very

Somewhat

Neither

Somewhat

Very

Corporate Goals

by Design

Cheap

Expensive

Old

New

Genuine

Fake

Exciting

Dull

Masculine

Feminine

Stodgy

Youthful

Unreliable

Reliable

JCPenney Image Profile

Current Desired

plex issue is a corporate image profile,” which I called a semantic differential. Above is a hypothetical and overly simplified corporate image profile for JCPenney. I’m admittedly guessing at where JCPenney’s image is currently and in what direction it must move in order to survive, but my guess is a well-educated one, after decades of retail design experience.

As you can see, my opinion of JCPenney’s current image is not indicative of a highly desirable destination or a fun place for consumers to shop for exciting, new and better merchandise. My assessment is possibly slightly off target, but the direction the company must move to in order to survive is quite clear in each measurable semantic. Only design knows how to move the qualities of the semantic differential from the current to the desired locations, because the retailer’s customers perceive the qualities in the image profile visually, or by design.

So the simplified message of my 1982 article is, first, a corporation has to learn how it is perceived by its customers, because how it is perceived by its customers is what it really is. Second, it must know which way to move, or not move, each of the qualities on its image profile. Third, and most importantly, it must understand how to get from where it currently is to where it desires to be in each semantic differential.

It is this third part that is almost solely dependent upon a visionary, cohesive and persuasive corporate design strategy. Without design, or without design having the right sphere of influence within the corporate structure, it’s just not going to happen. And, sadly at JCPenney it just didn’t happen.

I hope I explained that simply enough, Mr. Einstein. n

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By Seth Orsborn, PhD, IDSA; Jonathan Cagan, PhD, PE, IDSA; Peter Boatwright, PhD seth.orsborn@bucknell.edu, cagan@cmu.edu, boatwright@cmu.edu

Discovering Novel Design Directions that Align with User Preferences

CONTINUOUS VISUAL CONJOINT

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ne of the challenges when exploring a design space is for designers to create novel and relevant design concepts while developing or maintaining a design aesthetic or brand identity. Regardless of the domain—packaging, products or environments—designers are always

looking for insightful relationships between visual attributes within the design language. These relationships then guide how we move an aesthetic forward while maintaining clear ties back to the original language of the brand or product family. At times this work can be inefficient or, worse, deviate from the core aesthetic requirements.

Exploring Directions Most designers have embraced the fact that computer technology can be used to help express or create the ideas they have generated using their experience, training, expertise and intuition. As technology continues to progress and the world of design continues to become more complex, there are opportunities to leverage new methodologies in our search for great designs.

We’ve created a technique called continuous visual conjoint. We’ve taken conjoint analysis from marketing research, which methodically uncovers combinations of attributes that customers prefer, and merged it with a statistical method called principle component analysis, making it useful for designers in the visual space. Rather than simply relying on verbal descriptions or static imagery, continuous visual conjoint leverages the power of visual imagery to get richer insights into user preferences, reveal unintuitive relationships between designs and create effective design concepts. The beauty of this approach for designers is that continuous visual conjoint doesn’t produce final designs.

Rather it is a tool to help designers explore directions that they may not have considered, directions that maintain their desired design language.

The value of continuous visual conjoint is threefold. First, it can provide insights into the existing marketplace when

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combined with market research variables like demographic data. Second, it can reduce the iterations within the conceptual design phase by providing explicit, albeit broad, design constraints. While it can help prevent unnecessary iterations in which designers are simply trying to find concepts that users will respond to positively, it will not hinder a designer’s ability to explore creatively. Third, because the root of the method is analytical, it can provide designers with quantitative support for their qualitative decisions. Tension often arises between designers and marketing and engineering when designers make informed decisions because other disciplines are not trained to recognize and pursue intuitive directions. Visual conjoint can provide designers with insightful directions based on mathematical formulas that give designers the leverage they need to enforce design decisions when marketing and engineering attempt to steer design concepts away from their original intent.

The challenge with designing new concepts is that design spaces are inherently large. Changing just one design attribute can have repercussions on other decisions throughout the design space that can in turn affect the final design. Our patent-pending solution is to discover mathematical relationships between design attributes in a class of products and then use this information to effectively explore the complex design space.

Discovering Relationships Let’s say you have been tasked to design a novel bike helmet. You may start with a diverse sample of the variety of helmets currently available in the market to determine the key design attributes you should consider as you move forward with your conceptualization.

For example, you may think that the shape of the footprint of the helmet is foundational to this design space. As you select all the physical features you think are important, you should also collect the geometric data for these elements. This can be as simple as importing information from previous designs, if you have it, or tracing drawings in a CAD program. Regardless of how this data is captured, the key design attributes of the product, like the shape of the helmet in the example, can be represented mathematically.

Importantly, continuous visual conjoint isn’t limited to just shape. Another attribute in the helmet example is the number of vents. Color could be another attribute. Anything that can be represented with a number or a selection from a group of possibilities can be used in this method. The designer can even select binary options—yes or no—like visor or no visor.

The designs in the helmet example all come from the same class of products. Just as easily, a designer could choose a set of designs from the same brand to define the language.

Now that we have data that represents the design space we want to explore, we can discover nonobvious relationships between these various design attributes by leveraging a multidimensional scaling technique called principle component analysis. While the math in the background is fairly complex, the concept is quite simple. Principle component analysis takes the relationships between several design attributes and distills them down to a single elementary relationship called a principle component, or PC. As the principle component analysis explores the design space, it creates a whole series of these elementary relationships, PCs, creating a reconfigured design space based upon the interactions between the design attributes, not the design attributes themselves. Each of these new relationships is numbered hierarchically, PC1, PC2, PC3, etc., according to how well it represents the original design space. While simple conceptually, it can get quite complicated mathematically when you start to include many design attributes and their complex representations. We rely on computation to determine the most important principle components so the designer does not have to.

Principle component analysis allows us to discover similarities between existing designs that hadn’t been previously apparent to the designer. Of course, discovering new relationships gives you the ability to explore new directions for novel conceptual designs. If all the sample designs used in the analysis share a design language, for example they are all from the same brand, continuous visual conjoint can ensure that the conceptual designs stay within a given design language.

If we wanted to visually represent the new reconfigured design space (below), we could set up graphical axes that compare different principle components in the new design space, for example PC1 versus PC2. (Keep in mind that in any design space there can be many principle components.

This example maps the two attributes that have the biggest impact on distinguishing between different designs.) Now, instead of just considering how the various helmet sizes might be related to each other, you can see that in PC1 the size of the helmet is directly related to the number of vents in the helmet and the shape of the front of the helmet. These three design attributes are closely linked and create a new dimension that can be explored. PC2 captures different relationships, such as between the footprint and the rear vent configuration in this example.

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The authors explore the complex, interdisciplinary nature of product development. Seth Orsborn is an assistant professor in Markets, Innovation, and Design, a unique undergraduate program at Bucknell University that prepares students to be leaders in creative environments. Jonathan Cagan and Peter Boatwright are co-founders and directors of the Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, formalizing and teaching methods in innovation that join designers with engineers and marketers.

Jonathan Cagan is a professor in mechanical engineering. Peter Boatwright is a professor in the Tepper School of Business.

If we take the nine diverse helmets from the original sample and place them in the newly reconfigured design space, you can see that they fall into some clear clusters and gaps. (Of course, this is all contingent upon which design attributes the designer chooses, giving the designer a lot of freedom to explore within existing spaces.) The gaps within the reconfigured design space show areas where there is potential for design exploration (the tan area of the previous chart). These are areas where helmets don’t currently exist and where it might be worth creating some concepts that fall within this space. Conversely, it might not be worth exploring if the areas are inappropriate for a particular design language.

One of the best parts of continuous visual conjoint is that regardless of which design attributes the designer chooses, principle component analysis will only link the most prevalent attributes when creating the new reconfigured design space (above). This means that the designer has the freedom to explore attributes not selected by these principle component analysis attributes. For example, while the lower left quadrant is constrained to a larger helmet with fewer vents and a more rounded front (PC1) and a more oval footprint and the layout of the rear vents (PC2), it says nothing of the shape of the rear of the helmet or the configuration or shape of the vents themselves. This gives the designer a lot of flexibility when exploring this quadrant of the reconfigured design space, using direction from the analysis coupled with creative exploration. If this were the exploration of a brand language, only the elements central to the language would appear linked in the PC. The elements that didn’t appear would provide the designer with directions for potential exploration.

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Capturing Feedback While having novel design directions in which to explore is useful, the amazing part of this method is that the designer can get user feedback on a few distinct concepts within the design space. The example above shows a question that elicited feedback on which design feels professional, a question format that could be used to collect feedback on other issues, like which helmet appears most safe, which helmet looks most exciting or even which helmet a user prefers. The system is then able to interpolate between the given concepts to better understand how users might react to them even though they haven’t even seen them and to determine which areas of the design space have the most user reaction. This approach eliminates the need for extra iterations since it allows user feedback to be inferred without the need to conduct another study, each of which is costly and time consuming.

User response to design concepts can be gathered in a variety of scenarios, from showing conceptual drawings within a consumer study to online surveys. Given the mathematical nature behind this method, it is quite easy to create an online study where users can simply select a preferred design from a set of options. This information can then be used to inform conceptual exploration. The extra value in this stage of continuous visual conjoint is that user feedback, when represented with mathematical models, can be leveraged by designers to support their design decisions when engineering and marketing try to force a design away from its original intent.

Of course, this method isn’t limited to the class of bicycle helmets. It can be used for any consumer product. Whether it’s drills or sunglasses, product classes or brand languages, if the design attributes can be represented using numbers, then continuous visual conjoint can help designers explore parts of the design space they haven’t considered and infer user responses on designs they have not yet seen. Continuous visual conjoint provides the designer with potentially novel design directions for exploration, provides efficient user feedback for design concepts and supports design decisions as products move from concept through to production. n

By Michael Prince michael@startbeyond.com A graduate of Syracuse University, Michael Prince’s has concentrated his career on integrating design with business and marketing. His professional experience includes product development at Sony Corporation and RCA/Thomson Media before founding Beyond Design, Inc.—a strategic design consultancy—in 1994. As an entrepreneur, his strength lies in uncovering product opportunities and providing creativity and innovation to successfully market products.

DESIGNING WITHIN THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE LAW

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hat is the first thing you think about when developing a new product or service? Is it the overall look, functionality, target market, competition? Beyond deciding on a look and function, there are multiple intellectual property rights that must be considered. It is impossible

to look through only one lens. With so many different products and services already on the market or in development, how do you know that your design hasn’t already been protected? And if it has, how close is too close for design infringement?

Understanding the Four Corners of the Law My career as a professional entrepreneur began with The Ultimate Hanger®, an innovative organization product designed to hold more weight and attire or accessories than the average hanger. At that time, I didn’t put a high value on intellectual property rights, nor did I have the funds to file a patent. Since the inception of The Ultimate Hanger, I have realized the value of design infringement and how it can help. It is impossible to be in the product development industry without being curious about intellectual property law or having made a share of mistakes and/or successes in terms of intellectual property. Throughout my career, I have learned to design within the four corners of the law—the piece of paper that contains the contract that secures your product or service from being imitated by a competitor.

Each corner symbolizes aspects of intellectual property law that an individual or company can pursue.

After all, one of our goals as designers is to come up with unique solutions and bring innovation to market. It is never too early in the design process to consider intellectual property rights, from both a clearance and a procurement standpoint. I can’t stress how imperative it is to have a patent search done by a professional because often they will dig up prior art. In some cases it might be open domain, but you

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also might find products protected by intellectual property rights that are similar to what you are trying to create. While you certainly don’t want to infringe on the intellectual property of others, you also don’t want to needlessly yield too much space and lose out on an entire market.

What Makes a Chuck a Chuck?

Many legal cases throughout the years have brought intellectual property law to the forefront of the product development industry from well-known cases like Apple v. Samsung to less publicized ones such as Crocs v. International Trade Commission. I was recently reading an article from the Boston Globe* regarding Converse suing 31 companies for allegedly making knockoffs of its iconic Chuck Taylor design, which features a distinctive rubber toe cap and striped midsole. The article mentioned that in early February, New Balance filed a lawsuit criticizing Converse’s “aggressive efforts” to protect its Chuck Taylor sneakers from imitators.

New Balance said that the description of the Chuck trademark includes common ornamental or functional features that are not unique to Chucks and could be applied to any number of shoes, including its own PF Flyers. While New Balance was not among the companies sued last fall, it wants to preemptively protect its shoes from a potential suit.

After all is said and done, the real question is—what makes a Chuck a Chuck?

I had a recent conversation with design law expert Christopher V. Carani, a partner at the Chicago-based intellectual property law firm McAndrews, Held & Malloy, Ltd. He is a leading voice on intellectual property law and was kind enough to share his thoughts on the Converse case and what companies need to understand about intellectual property law. Below are a few highlights from our conversation.

*

www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/10/14/converse-sues-retailers-

over-immitation-chuck-taylors/lKuVLTkmhzcqh46UkrdlKO/story.html

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When companies have been making shoes similar to Chucks for years, why did Converse wait until now to sue? I wouldn’t be too sure that Converse hasn’t been enforcing these rights over the years; it seems like just now the company’s efforts have gained media attention.

Often it’s when imitators start reaching major retailers that it becomes a bigger issue for the right holder. For instance, Ralph Lauren is one of the 31 companies sued by Converse for designing shoes that resemble Chucks. Most likely it was the mass production and widespread distribution that brought Converse to this point.

How is this different than companies following Apple’s lead with something like the iPad? It goes back to the question—how close is too close? This is somewhat of a subjective line. Is it benign inspiration or pure theft? Most recently, the California jury in Apple v. Samsung concluded that the Samsung smartphone infringed Apple’s iPhone design patents, but also concluded that the Samsung Galaxy tablet did not infringe on Apple’s iPad design patent.

One thing to keep in mind is that design law will not prohibit someone from making any sneaker—or any tablet, in the case of Apple. The scope of the right comes down to the specific design. Bottom line, you don’t need this specific design to sell gym shoes. It’s wrongheaded to say that Apple’s design is the only design for a tablet. It is misguided to say that if Apple has a design patent or other intellectual property right that it precludes any other design in that product category. Whether it is a design patent, trade dress or something else, the right protects, and only protects, the specific design—whether it is an iPad, Surface Pro, Galaxy or some other tablet. Stated another way—it is only protecting that particular flavor, not soda in general. If you can identify what gives the design its unique flavor and then omit or add to it, you can, more often than not, avoid design intellectual property issues. The key is identifying what the parameters of the intellectual property right are.

What exactly is a trade dress? A trademark protects names and logos, whereas a trade dress is a specific form of a trademark directed at product appearance. A trade dress consists of all the various elements that are used to promote a product or service. Trade dress rights are not something you can acquire at the outset of a product launch because no customer association has been developed with your product and the design. Often you will need to wait a few years for the design to mature in the market to give consumers a chance to identify your product based solely on the aesthetic design. It is a visual test purely based on opinion and has to do with the way that a product’s look registers in the mind of an ordinary purchaser of a particular product.

For trade dress rights to subsist, consumers have to associate the design with a single source.

For example, Coke has a trade dress on the contoured shape of its bottle. You don’t need a label to tell you what the product is—the ordinary purchaser would recognize that the contour signifies a single source—Coke. In the case of Chuck Taylor, people see the design (even without the Converse logo or any other writing) and know what it is because of the rubber toe and stripe. Converse achieved the trade dress organically over time and is using this to its advantage. In order to win the lawsuit, Converse will have to prove that the public will likely be confused as to the source of the accused products, believing that they were manufactured by Converse when in fact they were not.

Many companies do not proactively register trade dress rights with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)—they first wait to see if someone knocks them off.

While it is true that the USPTO is more willing to grant a registered trademark than a registered trade dress, applicants should not rule out registering a trade dress. The decision to pursue registration really depends on how central that design is to your company and brand.

trade dress rights granted in error have a greater risk of stifling competition. The USPTO wants to be extra sure that the trade dress is nonfunctional. Care must be exercised to ensure that a trade dress right is not a substitute for utility patents. A wrongly granted trade dress can stifle competition—particularly if there are not many alternative designs.

This concern is not as great with words and logos where there are many alternatives. They also vigorously check to make sure that the alleged design has indeed established the necessary customer association. For registered trade dress, my experience has been that the USPTO is quite demanding in its proof requirements, whereas in trademark application they tend to be more lenient.

Why do companies wait to see if someone will knock off their design versus securing trade dress rights ahead of time? The main reason why companies might employ a wait-and-see approach is cost. Instead of incurring the cost for prosecuting a registered trade dress right, a company might just wait until there is infringement and then move forward. Also, the longer you wait to apply, often the stronger your case will be because then you can show more market exposure and recognition, which is one of the keys to a successful application for registered trade dress.

Waiting can also be helpful for strategically articulating what exactly are the defining elements of one’s trade dress.

Oftentimes, it is difficult to determine this without the passage of time and customer feedback. Unlike the one-year statutory bar for patents, there is no deadline in which to file an application for registered trade dress.

I have heard the comment that there are no new ideas, only variations or improvements. Do you have any thoughts on this comment from a legal perspective?

It has been my experience that the majority of patent advancements are variations of or improvements on existing designs. It is rare to see a truly pioneering design or idea. They just don’t come around that often. Too many clients or companies think they need to find a “cure for cancer” before they talk to an intellectual property attorney about securing intellectual property rights. However, it is just as important, if not more important, to patent the incremental changes—you don’t need some earth-shaking breakthrough to pursue an intellectual property right.

In conclusion, our key takeaway is that no single law or type of legal document can give a company all the protection it needs. But with multiple types of protection from design and utility patents to trademark and trade dress, a company can successfully protect its intellectual property against its competitors. When these strategies are used properly and together, innovation takes center stage beyond the four corners of the law. n

You mentioned that the USPTO is more willing to grant a trademark but not a trade dress. Why is this? The USPTO gives extra scrutiny to trade dress applications, which regard objects and things rather than names and logos, because

What is the most important thing for companies to understand about intellectual property rights? It’s a twoway street. One, you want to make sure you are proactive in protecting your intellectual property. I have secured many registered trade dress rights. If you care about your product design, secure it as early as possible. Otherwise, like many products knocked off in the market, you might risk being your competition’s personal designer. If you have not secured your design patent rights upfront, your complaints typically will fall on deaf ears.

Two, you need to ensure that when you release a product you are not stepping on anyone’s toes. Be vigilant to clear your product of any intellectual property violations.

With respect to Chuck Taylor, the defendants should have taken a closer look to see if this design was protected—it appears that they did not. My experience has been that, even if protected, there is still ample opportunity to work around the design and still get what you are looking for. To do so, it is important to understand the scope of the rights so you know how far away from the line you need to get in order to be clear of any wrongdoing.

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S HO WCASE

“The surface and base of the shoes can be disassembled.”

Color Flip-Flops designed by Kao, Chen-yuan for De Guang Digital Design Co. Ltd.; www.besty-eve.com.tw

“Form: Line-Plane-Solid is a traveling exhibition examining the role of form in product design.”

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Form: Line-Plane-Solid designed by Industrial Design student team (A. Barrette, C. Butterfield, A. Chiles, C. Crowley, C. Efird, L. Garada, J. Kim, C. Kitchen, A. McNealy, H. Minnix, L. Morgan, C. Pon, A. Phung, B. Pughe, S. Qureshi, T. Sasaki, S. Shumaker, M. Walker, E. Weaver. Direction: C. Taylor & M. Vernon) for Virginia Tech

“Self-service for gourmets.

This design proposes an evolution of self-service toward a 24/7 gourmet experience.

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Button Gourmet designed by MORMEDI for GRUPO AZKOYEN; www.mormedi.com

“The Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses is a wearable device that accesses the digital world and more.

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Vuzix M100 designed by KEK Associates; www.kekdesign.com

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S HO WCASE

“The smart vaping experience.”

Treasure-Vape designed by MORMEDI for NEXVAP; www.mormedi.com

“BQ’s product design strategy.”

Aquaris E Product Design Strategy designed by MORMEDI for MUNDO READERS; www.mormedi.com

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“The Bretford PowerRack keeps your technology

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tools charged, elegant, organized, and ready to go.

Bretford PowerRack designed by Cesaroni Design and Bretford Manufacturing, Inc.; http://cesaroni.com/industries/consumer_electronics/Bretford_PowerRack_IPAD2.php

“New, ingeniously designed, stylish wooden stool” Sit anyway as you like designed by Yemin Creative Furnishing Co., Ltd. (Yemin owns the IP rights.); http://19376.webab.shiwangyun.com/index.html

“The PowerSync+ Cart™

remotely charges and syncs connected devices, all in one mobile product.

”

Bretford Powersync+ designed by Cesaroni Design and Bretford Manufacturing, Inc.; http://cesaroni.com/industries/furniture/2012_Apple_World_Cart_Blk.php

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S H O W CASE

“The magic key to your smart-home kingdom.”

Smart 7 designed by The SmartData Tech Inc.; www.7ishere.com

“LeapFrog’s LeapTV™ is an educational active video gaming system designed especially for young children.

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LeapFrog LeapTV designed by KEK Associates and LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc.; www.kekdesign.com

“State-of-the-art all-in-one

retro tube stereo system supporting DSD, DXD, Bluetooth, vinyl, computer and headphones.

”

Retro Stereo 50 designed by iFi Audio; ifi-audio.com

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PLACE IMAGE FILLING WHOLE GREY AREA. CHANGE TEXT. HIDE/DELETE PRINT REQUIREMENTS LAY-

TITLE HERE Body copy/tag line here CREATIVITY THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE | CALIFORNIA – CHICAGO – EUROPE – HONG KONG