Innovation Summer 2017: Design IS Business

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Design IS Business SMA

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CHAIR’S REPORT

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SUMMER 2017 ®

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

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

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

Advisory Council Gregg Davis, IDSA Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Contributing Editor Jennifer Evans Yankopolus jennifer@wordcollaborative.com

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DESIGN IS BUSINESS 44 SIT as a Creativity Tool 20 Good Design Is Good in New Product Design Business

By Frank Grunwald, L/IDSA, and

By Jeevak, IDSA 22 The Future of Innovation & Design—Newell Brands: Onward

Drew Boyd

IDSA AMBASSADORS 3M Design, St. Paul, MN Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL; Santa Barbara, CA

IN EVERY ISSUE

Covestro, LLC North America, Pittsburgh, PA

By James F Caruso

4 Chair’s Report

Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH

25 Business & Design Speak the Same Language

By Megan Neese, IDSA

Dell, Round Rock, TX

6 IDSA HQ

Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN

By Marlisa Kopenski

By Daniel Martinage, CAE

LUNAR, San Francisco, Chicago, Munich,

28 How Design Should Meet Business

8 From the Editor

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

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

By Brian Matt

10 Design Defined

Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO

Hong Kong

By Brennan Gudmundson, IDSA 31 Three Ways Business Can Create Enduring Design 11 Book Review Solutions

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

Pip Tompkin Design, Los Angeles, CA

By Paul Metaxatos, IDSA

THRIVE, Atlanta, GA

12 Beautility

FEATURES 34 IDSA Student Merit Winner’s 2017 Showcase Element of Surprise: Sofia Frilund, IDSA

TEAGUE, Seattle, WA Teknor Apex, Pawtucket, RI

By Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

Tupperware, Orlando, FL

15 A Look Back

Charter supporters indicated in bold.

By Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA

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

Addressing a Real Need: Chloe Georgiades, IDSA The Fabric of Our Lives: Judy Leung, IDSA Driving Curiosity: Claire Puginier, S/IDSA Shooting for the Moon: Erin Rice, IDSA

Left: Student Merit Award work by Judy Leung, IDSA. See p. 38.

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA INNOVATION DESIGN IS BUSINESS

Design IS Business SMA

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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. ©2017 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 36, No. 2, 2017; 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

POSITIONING IDSA FOR THE FUTURE IDSA

has played an important and consistent role in my life since I very first inquired about what industrial design is. When searching for things I might be interested in studying, my father came across two copies of INNOVATION, which I pored over. The articles gave me new terms to Google and provided a view into professional practice that I had found nowhere else. During design school, our IDSA student chapter chair convinced us to drive all over our city, state and neighboring states to tour studios, attend conventions, and meet students from other schools. This highly nomadic experience gave me exposure to a vibrant slice of the IDSA community and a sense of opportunity about what work could be like. After graduating, our International Conferences served as a consistent touchpoint for me. I always knew that at minimum I would run into a former professor or two and likely meet a whole host of new peers and mentors to share stories with.

During this same period, there has been a proliferation of new networking and communication platforms, from Coroflot to LinkedIn. All of these tools have played important but different roles for me, too, but none has the continuity and expertise of the IDSA community.

When I read the IDSA membership survey results every couple of years, I see the consistent call to “bring back the member directory!” … “bring back PODs!” … “more events” … “get local.” It reminds me that so many members share this experience of and expectation for personal connection.

Who we are is and will always be our most valuable collective asset. As the incoming Chair of the Board, this notion of building and supporting our community is my greatest interest and focus.

Over the last couple of years I have been working on a team reviewing our board governance to help align us with the best practices of professional association boards.

In culmination of this work, we, the membership, passed a bylaws change that helps ensure boards of the future will be inherently more diverse, balanced and representative.

Immediately this change has allowed us to seek crossfunctional expertise on the board in the areas of finance, fundraising, brand and advocacy and has enabled our district representatives to focus on regional needs and promote local engagement. We are now in a better position than ever

to build more products, services and points of connection between us and for one another.

Already in May we held a new summit on the topic of Women+Design, bringing together designers from across industries and expertise to share their stories and work through common questions. Last year we held our third Medical Conference, which has since become an important part of the IDSA conference portfolio and annual connection point for our medical design community. There are many more such topics and dimensions of design practice that we can better support and engage in new ways.

As we look to the future, we imagine a world where our membership is not just a list but a platform from which mentors and mentees can be expertly matched, designers and clients can be introduced, and meaningful relationships can be facilitated with providers, vendors and manufacturers. In this future, we hope to answer specific questions and needs based on proximity, special interest and common points in career trajectories. We can tailor products, services and advocacy work at a much more granular level. To ready for this future, we have been investing in sweeping improvements to our database management system, starting with simple improvements in reliability and functionality to ensure everyone is able to register for conferences, easily pay membership fees and submit entries to IDEA while also readying a foundation for these new more exciting possibilities.

How we prepare for and position ourselves today will define our relevance and impact in the future. IDSA, like all professional societies, is living through a time of change.

We face new challenges in an increasingly competitive and information-rich environment. Our vision for the future of our organization and, more broadly, professional societies, will shape what we focus on.

None of this work would be possible without the vibrant IDSA community that has been built over the past 50 years.

Thank you for your contributions to this community, tirelessly expanding the expertise of design, engagement and education and furthering the interest of our work as a nonprofit.

I’m very excited to be working with you over these next few years, and I hope that the work of the Board is accessible and meaningful for you as well.

See you at one of our events soon!

—Megan Neese, IDSA, IDSA Board Chair megan.m.neese@gmail.com

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Climate change is one of the greatest design challenges of our time This is our opportunity to create a better future.

The Autodesk Foundation, in partnership with IKEA Foundation and What Design Can Do, is calling on students, designers, innovators, or start-ups to submit solutions for climate change.

Submit your solutions by August 21 for your chance to win the Climate Action Challenge and make a global impact. challenge.whatdesigncando.com

Š 2017 Autodesk Inc. All rights reserved.Â

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I D S A HQ

ADVOCATING FOR SAFETY THROUGH BETTER DESIGN

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esigning aesthetically pleasing and functioning products is an essential part of what industrial designers do. Equally important is creating products that protect and enhance people’s health and wellbeing. However, even the best design intentions may suffer from design flaws that can cause safety issues.

IDSA has a responsibility to advocate on behalf of strong regulations and guidelines that protect consumers from unsafe or poorly designed products. Article I of the IDSA Code of Ethics states: “We are responsible to the public for their safety, and their economic and general wellbeing is our foremost professional concern.” Long-time member Byron Bloch, IDSA, embodies this principle and has dedicated his entire professional life to advocating for safety through better design. Bloch believes that industrial designers are not just responsible for designing safe products but for exposing and weighing in on unsafe products within the public realm.

Bloch knows his way around Capitol Hill and not only as an expert witness. He’s passionate about raising awareness of the value of design in both the private and public sectors.

He testified recently on behalf of IDSA in support of the creation of the Maryland Design Excellence and Innovation Commission that seeks to integrate design thinking and processes into public- and private-sector innovation. The commission brings together legislators and executives from the private and public sectors with designers to exchange

best practices. In his testimony, Bloch called for a central higher-education design program in Maryland to further advance the partnership between designers and legislators.

You may be wondering how Bloch’s story made its way into my column in this issue of INNOVATION. Earlier this year, the membership approved sweeping governance changes designed to streamline and diversify our leadership practices at the Board of Directors level. One of these initiatives was to appoint strategic advisors to the Board of Directors to supplement our efforts in advocacy, branding and fundraising. At the Board of Directors meeting in May, Bloch was unanimously approved to serve as strategic advisor for advocacy.

I am pleased and excited to be working with Bloch in this important space. Since becoming executive director in 2013, I have reached out to him numerous times for advice on design and safety issues. Currently, Bloch is monitoring automobile headlight performance issues. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, on-road illumination provided by vehicle headlights varies widely, with few vehicles equipped with lights that do their job well.

Moving forward, IDSA will continue to work proactively with designers and regulators to leverage the power of design in all aspects of people’s lives.

With best wishes for a fun and productive summer.

I hope to see you in August at our International Design Conference, www.idsa.org/International2017.

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

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Design IS Business @IDSA #IDSA17ATLANTA IDSA International Conference 2017 Aug. 16–19 | Atlanta Marriott Marquis | Atlanta, GA Learn more at IDSA.org

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F RO M T HE E DI TOR

Inserting Design into Business

HAND+GLOVE

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crazy thing happened just over two years ago. The company I belong to, LUNAR, a familiar face on the design landscape for more than 30 years, was acquired and joined the intensely business-minded management consulting giant McKinsey. What has followed since has been equivalent to getting a street-smart MBA in how design can become leverage for strategic business thinking.

What we have learned is that when design is incorporated into traditional consulting advice—in areas where to date it has been absent—an even bigger impact is made possible.

And it happened very quickly.

Whoosh, and the Lunar staff was catapulted into an orbit of Wharton, Michigan, Harvard, MBAs and inserted into problem-solving situations as varied as moving huge volumes of people through places—from helping the mining industry to reconfiguring entire portfolios of products in medical, consumer goods, advanced industries and, of course, the tech world. What has happened to LUNAR is an exciting reflection and evolution of change in the design world. The thing is, you can’t say design didn’t see it coming.

Here’s what I mean. Not too long ago I asked a dear friend and design visionary Michael Westcott, who was then the president of the Design Management Institute, to write an article under INNOVATION’s “Design Defined” umbrella, one of our reoccurring columns. Michael chose the “business of design” as his topic. No surprise to me as during our long relationship Michael had always seemed to be a person ahead of the curve. Here’s an excerpt of what he wrote regarding inserting design into business practice:

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“CEOs identify creativity as the number one leadershipof thecompetency successful enterprise of the future.

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—2010 Global CEO study, IBM Global Business Services

What I discovered was that my design education prepared me to ask better questions, listen and observe in ways that usually led to reframing the problems that clients thought they wanted to solve. I found that organizations typically defined too narrowly their needs for a product or a service or a piece of communication by starting with what is and with what their customers said they wanted, rather than using a more creative problem definition and solution approach to look at “What if?” These experiences and the skills to synthesize, design, prototype, iterate and deliver results are common to many designers, but are fast becoming the most important competencies for many enlightened organizations that share a common imperative: Innovate or die.

Because of this innovation imperative and the fact that some of the most valuable companies on the planet (Apple, Google, Samsung, GE) have made design a core competency in their businesses, design thinking has now captured the attention and the imagination of many CEOs. This represents a truly exciting opportunity to define a new future for design. An opportunity to turn design from an interdepartmental stop in the process of product development and communication into a core competence for business that drives innovation, fuels start ups, helps define strategy and solves problems large and small. Design thinking is helping many companies move beyond the linear thinking that has shackled business to 20th century industrial norms.

A brilliant piece of predictive analytics written well over five years ago. Sadly, and way too early, Michael has since left us, but not his thinking. And what a prophet he was. Consider

this. In the last eight years, as documented in the Design in Tech Report that John Maeda, former president of RISD and former principal at Kleiner Perkins, has annually compiled (designintechreport.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/design-intech-report-2016/), since 2004, 42 design companies have been acquired by businesses wanting to own a little some of the magic. A staggering 28 of these occurred in the stretch between 2015 and 2016. I can’t wait to see the 2017 number.

Let’s face it, the practice of design embodies a great method for both solving problems and looking around corners to see what might be next, what might be possible.

Michael saw that, as have other design visionaries. To paraphrase my friend and colleague Dick Powell, founding partner of the hugely respected London-based firm SeymourPowell, “Business concerns itself mostly with asking “Why?” It’s great at questioning opportunity to mitigate risk. Instead business should ask itself “Why not?” And look toward perfecting the art of what’s possible in a smart way, in order to succeed.”

This truth may have always been self-evident to say Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, or Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, or Walter Dorwin Teague, FIDSA, when during the midcentury they gave form to the modern-day practice of design, but somehow a whole generation moved away from it. That has changed once again. Starting with the slow recovery after the dot-com crash of 2000 and fueled by the vision and sublime execution embodied in the work of design-led companies like Apple, Herman Miller, Google and others, in 2017, we find ourselves staring at this fact. Inserting design into business thinking will be a key factor in a company’s success from now on.

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

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D E S I G N DE F I NE D

Artifact, by Brennan Gudmundson, is a tablet born from a senior thesis project that examined the interactions lost when the shift was made from analog to digital sketching.

ACHIEVING A PERFECT DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

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have this bulky and beaten alarm clock from what my best guess is the late ’80s. I stole it from my parents when I moved out. By today’s standards, it’s archaic. I mean, it has a built-in radio that you set with a finicky dial on the side. I have a deep love for my radio because it has a singular purpose, and to me that’s a dying breed of product.

For this reason, I find the technology industry so utterly fascinating: the endless cycle of products with small improvements and adjustments to form that accommodate an ever-expanding user interface. I speculate that in a few years TVs will be paper thin and phones will be implanted into our eyes. You can call me a harsh critic of the tech industry, even though my phone and computer are what got me here.

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m a 20-something Chicago kid, somehow writing to you all. My story is like many others in the field. I had never known there was a group of people who make the products we surround ourselves with every day. When I was 18 on the precipice of a life-altering decision selecting a digital box that would decide my future, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do. Maybe pursue advertising, but not really. I went into UIC as a graphic design major, and after only a few presentations from professors like Ted Burdett and Sung Jang, I was sold on industrial design.

The rest is “history.”

When it comes to the things I surround myself with, I’m just looking for less. I’d rather have an object that does one thing really well than an object that does five things all right. Because chances are the product that does one thing really well will last a great deal longer. We are living in an age when a device in our pockets replaces at least 20 separate

objects. I believe that we’re being robbed of our interactions and experiences, from the texture and smells of a newspaper to the beautiful collection of books that, despite collecting dust, bring joy when turning over the pages. Yet we’re trading those experiences for faster and more convenient ones.

I believe that design should cater to the human senses, stimulate us in new and unexpected ways. With the merger of technology into an ever-expanding portfolio of products, we’re losing the interactions that technology takes over. Now that the progression of tech inside our devices has slowed, I think it’s time to explore form and interaction on a deeper, more passionate level. Break through the rectangles with smooth radii we’re holding ourselves in and find something that’s just as viable yet more exciting to use on an everyday basis. Rely less on the user interface and depend more on physical interactions to achieve our goals. We can still harness the power of a digital interaction, but does it have to be so digital? Does it have to confine itself to a tap or a swipe on a screen? We can even look back to the objects that have become obsolete, like a radio alarm clock, and draw inspiration from those moments of warmth and tangibility and apply them to our cold slate-gray glassy devices.

I think that as time goes on and I have grown up I am beginning to realize how much easier our lives are with technology, which I am grateful for. However, we can’t get too lazy.

Doing things by hand gives a unique perspective, a deeper appreciation for the levels of progression that are involved in learning something new. I hope future technology experiences delve deeper into a participatory relationship rather than the one-sided love affair we have today.

—Brennan Gudmundson, IDSA, Industrial Design Intern LUNAR Design, Brennanmg1@gmail.com

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BO O K RE V I E W

THE MATERIALS SOURCEBOOK FOR DESIGN PROFESSIONALS

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here are certain things that seem unexciting when you first hear about them but then turn out to be jaw-dropping when you actually experience them. Like when the quiet, unassuming Clark Kent turns into Superman.

Or when you first hear about what eventually proves to be a binge-worthy TV show.

House of Cards? What’s that about?

Politics, Washington, insider maneuvering to achieve legislation. Hmmm, I’ll pass.

Then you watch two episodes and are in it for the duration. Forget about feeding the cat, proper sleep at the proper hour; Claire just double-crossed him. What’s Frank Underwood going to do next? Oh my, can’t wait for the next episode, the next shoe to drop.

The Materials Sourcebook for Design Professionals is kind of like that. No really. A sourcebook for materials?

Mmm, yawn. But then bam! One peek inside and you’re instantly hooked. This book has you at hello. Right after the cover sheet, you meet the beguiling image of a feathery Issey Miyake fabric gracefully twisting itself out of a glass, as if it were an imprisoned dove escaping to freedom. I’m telling you right now, every designer should own a copy of this source book.

Why? Because what follows after the Miyake picture are 450 of the most breathtaking photos of the most beautiful products made from the most intriguing materials you never knew were even in play, much less available to you. As captivating as any Frank Underwood scheme, the arrangement of these profiles of unique and effective applications of materials in products and fabrics and architectures and, well, everything into this quiet-looking book with its unengaging title (a sleeper for sure) is a must-have for any designer’s library.

Now library, that’s where things get a bit complicated. Arranged in a perfectly logical manner with humble titles like “Metal,” “Plastic,” “Wood,” “Animal,” “Mineral,”

“Plant,” this is a book to be sure—not a digital repository that is easily searched.

The good news is that it’s a “stop-andstart” book; you can open it anywhere at any chapter and be captivated. Take Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, profiled on page 139. Who knew that it was what enabled the Danish EM77 vacuum jug, a design classic (go ahead Google it, I dare you), a timeless and elegant design for the ages. But that’s just a start. Unsaturated polyester, UP resin, page 229, will bring you to your knees. And the rattan image spread across pages 380–381 is enough to make any designer weep.

OK, enough with the weeping. This book is actually a tool, and not just a tool to help point designers in the right direction when considering the use of materials appropriate to the task, but a tool to inspire designers and engineers into action. Materials sourcebooks are often uninspired—dry and to the point. Not this one.

Flipping through it is like taking a trip around the world and being exposed to the collective creative mind of hundreds and hundreds of designers who have reached the pinnacle of the art of design—the integration of material into forms that also achieve exquisite function at the highest levels.

In case you can’t tell by now, I simply love this book and highly recommend it. I only wish for a digital companion version and that it be expanded from 450 images to, well, way more than that. And, until that happens, like House of Cards, I will anxiously wait for the sequel or the second season or whatever the right metaphor is. Only I hope they call it something like Mark’s Dream Book or 500 Ways to Satisfy Your Material Dreams (see what I did there?). But for sure, in keeping with the introverted content posture that accompanies these stunning images, the next chapter, in a modest yet charming Clark Kentish way, will almost certainly be called The Materials Sourcebook for Design Professionals, Volume 2.

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

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B E A U T I LI TY

WHO’S DOING THE DRIVING IN UTOPIA?

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y mom and dad taught me that design, like life-long-learning, is a full-spectrum occupation.

Confucius said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Better worlds don’t grow on trees; it’s our obligation to make things better.

Design is fun, and the best tool in our fight for truth and the health of civilization is a natural extension of user-centric design. The responsibility of business is to distribute our new and better designs for us all.

I look forward to the time when the vector of human ingenuity will cross the ever-rising vector of problems. And then the clouds will part revealing Utopia! We’ll live where everything is smart, networked and beautiful. Less really will be more. People won’t have to earn a living because technology will be doing the labor. The good news for industrial designers is that our contributions will continue to

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be necessary (for a while) because we are good at finding creative solutions to complex paradoxical issues—problems that freak robots out. One of those wicked problems is how to make all the other Utopians feel happy when the robots are doing all the meaningful work. The gyms will be full of people keeping their muscles fit. We’ll also need to find exercises for our relevance!

“Don’t get a job!” Jack Lenor Larsen told Parsons graduates in his short commencement statement this May. He meant that they should not go work for someone designing new gizmos and widgets. Instead they should create their own labor of love. Like when Dan Friedman quit the Swiss design movement, who he thought were modernists’ “design garbage men” cleaning up the graphic mess of popular culture. It’s more fun creating physical designs since the smartphone’s sleek flat body is vacuuming

Try to remember what it was like only 10 years ago before the iPhone took over our social “ lives. In only a few years, self-driving cars will have left at least 5 million professional

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drivers standing on the corner wondering where they are going to get another entry-level job.

up everything that can be digital. We are getting rid of things that aren’t smart enough to take care of themselves.

Engineers say that automation is making our dreams come true step-by-step.

Fasten your safety belt. The world of tomorrow is fast approaching (it might even get here before the changing climate screws things up). Just as we could be preparing for climate shifts, we need to prepare for the day when our economic system no longer corresponds to reality. We can already see robots taking the drudgery out of manufacturing cars and mining coal. If rust belt factory and mining jobs return, they will be filled by automated draglines, dump trucks, wheel loaders, motor graders, scrapers, shovels and drones. Almost everyone knows that those kinds of jobs will never come back to flesh and blood laborers. (People want those jobs for the paycheck and healthcare, not for the gratification of working.)

Try to remember what it was like only 10 years ago before the iPhone took over our social lives. In only a few years, self-driving cars will have left at least 5 million professional drivers standing on the corner wondering where they are going to get another entry-level job. It’s going to be more than truck drivers sleeping in the rest stops, according to the January 2017 Fast Company list of the top 10 jobs that will be automated: (1) insurance underwriters, (2) bank tellers, (3) financial analysts, (4) construction workers, (5) inventory managers, (6) farmers, (7) taxi drivers, (8) manufacturing workers, (9) journalists and (10) movie stars.

When digital technology replaces the factories and the stores, won’t the economy continue to require human customers? Social designers can rethink Fordism’s feedback system of mass production and mass consumption. In his 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow, Henry Ford understood the economy’s symbiotic relationships: “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.” It was easy for Ford to pay his employees $5 a day so they could afford a Model

T, but our problem is that no matter how much we pay the robots, I don’t think they are going to be crowding the malls searching for the latest fashions and home entertainment equipment to buy with their e-paychecks.

In the beginning, humans didn’t work, they just lived.

Hunting and gathering took only a couple of hours a week!

When humans planted farms, they also created more work for themselves. People began specializing in baking, butchering and candlestick making. Always striving for more comfort, convenience and advantage, we split up responsibility: managers vs. peasants. The industrial revolution gave people lots of jobs, professions and possessions. Now almost everyone I know is a knowledge worker in the creative class who doesn’t really make anything, but just manages ideas.

As the Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari said, “By 2050 a new class of people might emerge—the useless class.”

All this talk about creating new jobs is masking the fact that people don’t really want to work anyway! People want to go on vacation. Mark Zuckerberg told the graduating class at Harvard in May, “Today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs.… tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars and trucks.… To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge— to not only create new jobs, but create a renewed sense of purpose.” The meaning of life is not necessarily a job.

Soon we’ll reach the day when artificial intelligence (AI) is smarter than humans’ natural intelligence. At that point, humans won’t need to worry about not having any jobs, because computer networks, robots, droids and drones will not only be doing all the work but probably taking over the worrying, too. Forget about GMOs. All it takes is a couple of rogue super computers to break out, thinking much faster than their human programmers. They will evolve way more quickly than biology. When we reach the Singularity, AI will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth. The superintelligent machines will not only be smarter—they’ll be getting even smarter super fast causing deep changes in the underlying structure of society and human civilization. Soon they’ll be our masters, and we’ll be the dogs (if we’re lucky) or the biome in the belly of the machine.

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Six hundred years ago, one of the first artificial organisms was born. Corporations are man-made artificial “living” entities, not carbon-based or running on silicon chips—their analog algorithms run on money. Could corporations be a test case for how robots will act when they take over? Like computer programs, corporations live by their own rules (i.e., codes). Wikipedia defines a corporation as “a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law.” The law is their program. The word “corporation” is derived from the Latin “corpus,” (body or body of people). “Despite not being individual human beings, corporations, as far as the law is concerned, are legal persons, and have many of the same rights and responsibilities as natural persons do.” Their supernatural algorithms drive their human employees to make the company constantly grow and accumulate profits.

They drill for oil or mine raw materials to sell. They retain designers to create desirable products to produce and sell. Corporations set prices to enhance profits. They hire lawyers and accountants to protect themselves. (That’s why we need other entities, like governments, to balance their power.) Corporations are not only “alive,” they get married (merge) and are immortal! They can be dissolved—but it’s not as easy as pulling the plug, and nothing can kill them if they don’t want to die.

The rules of good business do not mention creating a good life for corporate employees or anyone else—in fact, they are not even required to avoid harming us. What if, when the Romans created corporations, they had read Isaac Asimov’s I Robot (published in 1964). They could have written into the charter code that corporations must abide

by Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

The gut issue today is jobs. Everything in the news revolves around creating jobs. Jobs are important; they provide people with security, purpose, community and prizes.

The capitalistic system is very popular. It invests in progress, supports growth and gives people a lot of jobs. The simple

rules of the game make it easy to keep score and to win.

But the 600-year-old capitalism is ripe for disruption. Today confidence is shaky and jobs are getting sketchy. People are afraid that eventually everyone’s job will be outsourced by automation. We need a plan, a new social superstructure that supports another method of distributing the wealth. We need to update the program so that instead of feeding the machine there are built-in mechanisms so it feeds us.

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do industrial designers design industries?

Seems like the smart money is on training programs for the jobs that are left while the really smart people are trying to reorient our social network to a world without jobs. If the old distribution system is based on work, can we think of a better system? Finland is already experimenting with a guaranteed minimum income (their government thinks the initiative could save money in the long run; they also think national healthcare makes healthier citizens). Those people have more time to do the things they love. Meanwhile, in Detroit, Brooklyn and Portland—homegrown, artisanal and bespoke everything is easing the transition away from a jobs-centric culture. It’s fun to DIY! Keep your IDSA membership, because design will be even more fun.

Demand automation! In Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, economist Nick Srnicek and sociologist Alex Williams remind us that full automation is a goal that both Democrat and Republican voters can appreciate because no one wants to work. In their research, they discovered other benefits, like delinking work from income actually encourages innovation (industrial designers have know this for a long time). They show that market-based constraints impede progress in low-profitably socially valuable projects and that capitalism “places creativity in a straightjacket of capitalist accumulation, constrains social imagination within the parameters of costbenefit analysis and attacks profit-destroying innovation.”

Good things don’t need to generate a profit.

Riding around in convenient autonomous cars will open new innovation avenues. But will we trade one freedom for another? Will you miss the ability to cruise down the open road a little over the speed limit? Watch out! We probably already have designed the last car that will be driven by people! Better buy one. What happens when we reach singularity? Will AI cars only drive us where they want to go? Who will be the designer? Let’s make sure it’s beautiful!

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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A LOOK BA C K

ODD BUSINESS, THIS INDUSTRIAL DESIGN The industrial designer, once just a cosmetician to industry, now offers a ‘total service.’ “ This can include anything from the redesign of a product to redesign of the corporation ”

that produces it.

T

—Seymour Freedgood, “Odd Business, This Industrial Design,” Fortune, February 1959

oday’s industrial designers advise clients who face global complexities and intense competition in a digital world that requires fewer physical artifacts. At the same time, designers try to balance as the ground shifts under their feet in their own operating environment: teens launch products and companies, business schools embed design thinking and established design firms are acquired by giant management consultant agencies. As experiences replace three-dimensional products, designers, trained to be form shapers, might ponder, “This isn’t what I signed up for.”

How did designers get on this path? Looking back at the road traveled uncovers some signs missed along the way. The industrial design profession is nearly 100 years old. The first practitioners emerged after World War I and coined the term “industrial design” by the late 1920s for their talent in improving the appearance of machine-made goods to entice purchasers and build sales. World War II changed culture and business, and designers evolved from stylists to strategists. During the late 1940s and ’50s, designers explored possible alternative futures for their work.

Designers as Stylists and Salesmen Peace provided a golden opportunity for designers as industry returned to production to propel an expanding consumer economy unseen since 1929. A few years after two nuclear bombs ended the war in 1945, designer and author George Nelson, FIDSA, explained the value of design to business under these new conditions. He had introduced the flamboyant founders of the profession (and no doubt inspired many young men to enter the field in hopes of earning those quoted fabulous fees!) with his February 1934 article, “Both Fish and Fowl,” in Fortune magazine. In July 1949, to this same readership, he suggested a more fruitful partnership for design and business in his article “Business and the Industrial Designer”: It has been the glib assumption of most manufacturers and designers that the prime function of industrial design is the creation of added sales appeal. Actually this is a temporary and superficial aspect of the designer’s activity, far less important in a long-term sense than his part in the job of reintegrating a society shattered by the explosive pressure of a new technology on institutions unable to cope with it. … It is entirely possible for a man with the ability and the integrity to establish a position as a member of a company’s policy-making group, with freedom to make his influence felt not only on product design but on all matters of general policy that affect design. It is at this level that the topflight designer can really earn his fee, for his design activity can then be integrated with the long-term, consistent policy he has helped to make. If the designer is to exert a genuinely Left: Futuristic Desk Clock, c. 1944, by Jon W. Hauser, FIDSA, an industrial stylist. In 1937, when he was 19, Hauser was the youngest designer hired by GM. He came to Chicago in 1943 to work at Sears. This chalk and ink drawing likely dates from the wartime years when many designers, who considered themselves stylists, imagined exciting products for the future. He joined Barnes & Reinecke in 1945.

Author’s collection.

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Class led by Alexander Kostellow at the Pratt Institute, c. 1949. MaryEllen Dohrs (foreground) came from California to enter Pratt in 1948. When Harley Earl phoned Professor Kostellow to ask for “a girl,” the only female student had a job waiting at GM before she graduated in 1950. She left GM in 1952 to work at Sundberg-Ferar, where she was on staff until 1957 and continued there as a freelancer for another five years.

constructive influence he has to occupy a position in which he can operate over a broad range, but the manufacturer is not going to ask him to do so (there is no reason why he should), nor will the designer make the necessary moves until he sees himself and his profession in the light of this tradition and its enormous social potential. …the designer will not fulfill his complete function unless he sees these trends in advance of the manufacturer and assists his client in the formulation of policies that will take them into account. This is why industrial design belongs in the research and development of a manufacturing enterprise (as some of the leading designers have pointed out) instead of being tied completely to sales.

In barely two decades industrial design has shifted from a series of accidental moves by a handful of alert and intelligent people to a stable profession that is numerically rather small, but with an influence on industry and consumer tastes that is entirely without precedent. ... Today’s designer is more likely to be a group of collaborators than an individual.

In 1951, Walter Dorwin Teague, FIDSA, with Dave Chapman, FIDSA, and Harold Van Doren, FIDSA, participating, moderated a panel discussion on “The Relation of Industrial Design to Other Fields” held by the Society of Industrial Designers. In addition to educators, panelists represented engineering, advertising, retail merchandising and manufacturing management—professions that suspected the intrusion of industrial designers. Teague stated that the conversation would address the “confusion in the minds of many people concerning the scope and function of industrial design. This is the prize understatement of the century. That confusion isn’t any worse in the public mind than it is in the minds of industrial designers. We no sooner think we have our field mapped and know what it encompasses, then someone comes to us with a new problem and we find ourselves invading a new field.”

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Courtesy of MaryEllen Dohrs.

The Greatest Generation: Organization Men Unlike today’s high school graduates with the freedom (and the anxiety) to pursue many directions, most midcentury males shared the common experience of military service. Until the mid-1970s, a young man’s draft status determined his job prospects. For the male-dominated field of industrial design, these experiences shaped character and provided valuable skills and leadership opportunities. During World War II, young designers from small towns saw Japan and Europe (and discovered minimalist design there). And during the Korean War and Cold War years, they created navigational devices and instruction manuals or worked as cartographers and draftsmen far from home. In the late 1940s, battle-worn veterans supported by the GI Bill flooded universities to sit beside freshfaced 18-year old classmates. Veterans were serious about their studies and had no time for college hijinks—many had families to support and needed a paycheck. The demographic mix of the design world was still primarily males of European heritage, but Asian faces began to appear in design offices as Japanese-Americans were released from internment camps, and women became more evident in design schools.

Most importantly, military service and home-front employment for military needs engaged industrial designers in large organizations and their systems. After their service, designers changed out of camouflage uniforms to don suits and white shirts and marched into the business world.

Procurement and operation managers did the same, and the number of management consultants grew rapidly in the 1950s. The budding fields of motivational research and consumer behavior studies, as well as advances in human engineering analyses that built upon wartime research, informed business decisions. Government spending on infrastructure, scientific instrumentation for the space race and international market research also provided challenging assignments for industrial designers.

US Army Publications and Training Aids Unit, Fort Bliss, Texas, 1957. Ray Malek (at left center table) was hired by the Montgomery Ward design department in 1956, but was drafted a few months later. He enjoyed creating signs and instructional materials for the NIKE missile programs and made lifelong friendships. He returned to Ward two years later and designed many consumer products sold by the nation’s No. 2 power retailer.

Mass Production and Mass Markets After two decades of turmoil through the Depression and war, Americans yearned for security and comfort. By the mid-1950s, most economic indicators—population, productivity, disposable income and housing starts—charted steep trajectories. Economists now view this postwar era as an unrepeatable period for US growth. As scarcity motivates today’s activities, the ’50s were propelled by abundance. The US economy led the world in most fields of manufacturing with little international competition, and US design inspired Europe and Japan. Some designers expressed ethical concerns about planned obsolescence of annual model changes (blame Detroit) while others considered how to discover new needs.

In an address to the Institute of Appliance Manufacturers in 1955, Chapman challenged designers to consider the purpose of their work as some practitioners began to question the value of annual product surface changes: “Now there are two choices: New markets can be made by creating ‘synthetic obsolescence’ by giving your old products new faces (which is ‘styling’) or completely fresh, untouched markets with new products to serve new functions (which is in large part ‘design’) can be created. … In our industrial blueprint for the long-range period ahead, we must plan for a way of life, not for a way of production. … Design as a major factor in industrial planning must answer the need for new products that make living in America a more pleasant emotional and physical experience.”

Connecting Design with Business Two designers’ organizations, the Society of Industrial Designers (SID), formed in 1944, and the Industrial Designers Institute (IDI), established in 1940 from earlier groups, spurred their members into a flurry of promotional activity in the 1950s. Although small in number (each group had

Courtesy of Ray Malek.

about 100 members), designers organized many exhibitions of their current work, participated in awards programs, delivered speeches at conferences of industrialists, published numerous books and countless articles in business magazines, appeared on TV and created educational exhibits for international trade fair exchanges. These events not only presented designers to potential clients but provided platforms for designers to discuss their expanding roles.

In 1950, Chicagoan Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corporation of America, established The Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies in a former Colorado mining town. Aiming to join business and cultural leaders in intellectual conversations, the Aspen conferences became the TED events of the era with a dash of Davos. The first three conferences, held in 1951–53, were entitled Design as a Function of Management. Between fishing, horseback riding and swimming over six days (!), the 1952 participants learned from speakers such as Buckminster Fuller and discussed design management topics with leading designers and publishers along with executives from major corporations (General Electric, Coca-Cola, International Harvester, Sears, Pullman-Standard). In 1954, this conclave was reformatted to become the International Design Conference at Aspen.

The year 1954 also saw the appearance of two key publications: the book Industrial Design in America 1954, published by the Society of Industrial Designers (SID), and Charles Whitney’s new magazine, Industrial Design.

Compiled by the SID’s 153 members, with editorial content by industry leaders, the book presented products and their development back stories to show how designers successfully collaborated with clients in a cross-section of US industry. Industrial Design, which grew from a section in Whitney’s Interiors magazine, presented design as a business to serve business. It included articles about the latest

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technical developments, announced RFPs from corporate and governmental agencies seeking designers, and served as a classified job search tool. Case histories along with calendars of design events and business conferences informed corporate executives and gave designers a place to show their best work.

Designers: Men Who Sell Change By the end of the decade, industrial design had gained attention to such a degree that the April 12, 1958, issue of BusinessWeek featured a nine-page cover story on the current state of the profession’s activities. The colorful cover announced “Industry’s New Look at Industrial Design: Once it bought frosting, now it buys a cake” and featured images of projects by Raymond Loewy, FIDSA, Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, Teague and Sundberg-Ferar. Inside, the story headlined “Designers: Men Who Sell Change” featured photos of 10 designers from across the country and quoted many others. Stating, “Once limited to fashioning betterlooking wares, industrial designers are fast approaching an

acceptance like that of ad men,” the article noted that “the ‘airbrush boys’ of 20 years ago are now up to their ears in long-term planning for their clients. They search for new materials for basic suppliers. They develop products for companies that know only that they want to get into new fields. Merchandising, retailing, public relations all come within their province. The designer is beginning to take on the importance as a management prop that advertising and public relations agencies have held.”

The article frankly also presented some controversies within the ranks and differences of opinion on practices and aims. The discussion closed with a thought that resonates today: “In the 30s, everything needed design; today, almost every product has it. … Has the designer had it? What more can he do? Designers have two answers: One is that technology brings new design requirements every day.

William Snaith [of Raymond Loewy’s office] sums up the other: ‘Our prerogative is the shape of the bottle. We’ll keep that prerogative because our consumer market has one magnificent asset: it changes.’”

Stowe Myers, FIDSA, interviewed by TV host Dorsey Connors for the Chicago NBC affiliate at a 1956 exhibition of Chicago-area industrial designers at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Exhibition organizer Stowe Myers taught at IIT’s Institute of Design and maintained a busy practice in Chicago.

Courtesy of University Archives & Special Collections, Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology

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The Grand Merit Award recipient at the 14th Annual Exhibit and Conference of the Reinforced Plastics Division of the Society of the Plastics Industry, Chicago, February 1959. Judges pinned the award on the all-plastic truck cab molded by the Molded Fiber Glass Body Co. for the White Truck Co. The reinforced plastic cab weighed 200 pounds less than a conventional steel cab. From left, Dave Chapman, ASID Chicago chapter president; John Sherrer, Reinecke & Associates; and Jon Hauser, executive vice president and general manager of Raymond Loewy’s Chicago office. Author’s collection.

An Odd Business Plans Its Future At the close of the decade, across six large-format pages, Fortune presented a thought-provoking discussion that sounds remarkably like today’s conversations. Illustrated with witty cartoons, Seymour Freedgood’s article entitled “Odd Business, This Industrial Design” outlined the usual methods designers use to understand and advise their clients and offered a candid explanation of fee structures. A chart of the 20 biggest industrial design firms listed the years they were established and major and secondary sources of income and stated, “In personnel they range from over 200 to under 20; in billings they range from over $2 million to less than $400,000.”

The February 1959 article provided a clue to the future.

Jay Doblin, FIDSA, a Chicago designer and director of IIT’s Institute of Design, remarked, “This business is changing drastically from a service into a consulting business.”

The reporter, interviewing corporate executives, noted: “The great peril is that many big manufacturers (as the same executive puts it) ‘are chicken about innovation’… proposals for genuine design improvements can be vetoed by production men concerned about retooling costs, or by sales departments which tend to feel that the safest design strategy is to copy the competition.”

The article closes by describing the work of another Chicagoan, Richard Latham, FIDSA, which foretold something of current designers’ role as innovation leaders: Latham is admired by his fellow practitioners for his getup-and-go. But where he could be leading the industry is something many of them are not so sure they like. In the four years since he and two other ex-Loewyites formed Latham, Tyler, Jensen, the Latham group has devoted much of its efforts to helping manufacturers do forward product planning—a situation that ideally requires clients to maintain an internal staff to do routine design work…and set up their own design departments, which Latham will help select and organize. When this is done, Latham and his partners

concentrate on sitting in with the planning committee and helping it envision, usually with elaborate mock-ups and other visual aids, the nature and shape of the firm’s future products.

To most independent designers, who privately condemn the development of the internal staff as a “threat to creative design,” the Latham doctrine is rank heresy—an understandable position since they want to do all the work themselves. For better or worse, a flamboyant era will come to an end if Latham’s doctrine becomes the new orthodoxy: after starting out a single generation ago as an entrepreneur, the industrial designer will finally have become just a part of corporate structure.

“Just” part of the structure? Since the 1930s some designers, such as Teague with Eastman Kodak and Dreyfuss with Bell Telephone, had guided their clients’ internal staffs in product direction and design. When this article appeared, Eliot Noyes, FIDSA, was already working with IBM; in just a few years, multinational firms such as Unimark would position themselves as corporate designers.

Today’s designers and business leaders grapple with disruption; in the 1950s, they sought stability. Little could they predict the massive changes soon ahead in technology, society, culture and business practices. The gentlemen’s club profession now draws from a diverse global talent market and includes women whose voices are integral to the conversations about managing change in design and business.

In 1949, George Nelson, FIDSA, challenged designers to recognize their power to integrate society with technology.

Your professional ancestors struggled with similar questions and might have forecasted the paths you are traveling today.

—Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA, Design Programs Coordinator, International Housewares Association; VMatranga@housewares.org

Right: Educators and practitioners meet at a student awards event, c. 1970. At left, Jay Doblin, FIDSA, director of IIT Institute of Design and one of the creators of Unimark; Richard Latham, FIDSA, LathamTyler-Jensen; and Ed Zagorski, FIDSA, professor of industrial design, University of Illinois at Champaign–Urbana.

Courtesy of Ed Zagorski

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By Jeevak, IDSA jeevak@sundbergferar.com Jeevak brings energy, passion and curiosity to his role as vice president of strategic growth at Sundberg-Ferar, a full service industrial design studio supporting the product and vehicle industries from its metro Detroit location, since 1934. With his unique blend of design, engineering and business education and experience, he relentlessly rallies for capturing the multi-user’s unmet needs and unarticulated dreams and infusing them into the tangible end products.

GOOD DESIGN IS GOOD BUSINESS

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y name is Jeevak, and I am an industrial designer. Today I want to make a case for the positioning of product design as a crucial element at the core of any over-arching business strategy. Business leaders of today need to embrace what I believe to be a blatant missing

link in the world of business thinking.

“

pathway. Companies like Apple and In MBA school, today’s students are Stop trying to be all design Dyson have proven the value of investing in exposed to Porter’s five competitive forces: solutions focused on ideal user experiencindustry rivalry, threat of new entrants, things to all people. es. When consumers self-select a product, bargaining power of suppliers, bargainthe manufacturer gets higher returns and ing power of buyers and threat of sub- Be something to higher profit margins. And that’s the place stitutes. These are good. In fact they are someone. you want to be, where there is less price great. However, in my humble opinion, they sensitivity. This not only helps accelerate totally miss a most crucial force: emotion.

—Sundberg-Ferar business growth, but also has the golden Consumers will always be experiencing side effect of making the lives of end users emotions during the purchase and use of better and more beautiful. That’s the perfect win-win situation a product. Let me submit to you the five forces that ought to between the end user and the product maker. be added to the equation: culture, context, value, behavior But wait, there’s more! The mindset of industrial design and beauty (CCVBB). thinking actually brings with it numerous systemic advantages too. I perceive that designers tend to be born with Pitfalls and Pathways more optimistic and opportunistic traits compared to their What makes your business resilient? How should you make it business counterparts, who can be a bit more pessimistic sustainable? How do you achieve your stated growth goals? and risk averse. It’s these two opposing thoughts that need The answer will likely not be found looking through the myoto be embraced. There has to be collegiality and collaborapic lens of a quarterly time horizon. Unfortunately, however, tion. Initially there is a need for divergent thinking to arrive that’s essentially what drives many business decisions today. at the optimal experience solution. That’s followed by a Almost all corporate leaders today are motivated and need for convergent thinking to make that solution smaller, incentivized to impress Wall Street and fail to properly lighter, faster, efficient and cheaper. The factories, operasolve the fundamental needs of Main Street. I contend that tions, logistics, distribution, etc., which form the majority of there is not enough emphasis placed on the core needs, the business equation, need to do this. The good news is wants, desires and dreams of ordinary end users. that businesses are very good at wringing every cent from I know that businesses have to generate value for their a supply chain. The bad news is that they get so absorbed shareholders, but that’s exactly what can be achieved in and tangled in it that they tend to use tools like stage-gate a bigger and better way if leaders take the human-centric

”

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processes while engaged in design and innovation activities.

The last place for fine-tuning is at the very onset of thematic and conceptual thinking. Both schools of thought are imperative, but each has a distinct spatial and temporal play.

The Rise of Intelligent Consumers It is no longer possible for big businesses to force-feed the market with products that are designed to fit existing manufacturing line limitations. Running multimillion dollar commercials to push a product or to generate tens of thousands of Twitter followers or to have more friends on your Facebook page, is only good if your product itself is good. It’s only worth it to you as a business if end users realize that the brand promise they are looking for is authentically injected in the product itself and not just in the elusive marketing collateral or Instagram imagery.

Among the most important reasons a business should embrace industrial design thinking is the ability to solve a problem in its entirety. You must consider the entire ecosystem in which your product lives to avoid creating the need for unforeseen compensatory behaviors on the part of the end user. You cannot design a product in isolation from its surroundings. If you do, the end user will still suffer, if not from your brand then from somebody else’s. Consumers had no choice ‘til a decade ago. But with a new onslaught of the Internet of Things, global instant communication and direct C2C communication, (i.e., bad reviews on social media), they now have more potent options to research,

analyze and purchase great products. The discerning consumer of today is highly intelligent and will seek out the best blend of usefulness and usability, ergonomics and style.

Expanding the Equation Market success is only made possible via a methodology to understand and synthesize the impacts of the five emotional forces (CCVBB) that I am suggesting be added to Porter’s.

Products should reflect the culture around them. It’s just not the granular user and product interaction within a specific industry category; it’s understanding how society and culture molds that industry category. Businesses have to understand the semantic space that a product occupies in the context of an ecosystem and design for the multiple modes of human behavior and the plethora of compensatory behaviors. To bolster customer loyalty, there exists a need to care for and cater to intrinsic needs as well as instrumental needs. Lastly, you should intentionally and consciously focus on beauty.

Beauty need not be just sculptural or reside just on the surface. Beauty is a subset of aesthetics. The aesthetic quality of a product is an integral part of its utility. It clarifies the structure of the product and makes it more understandable.

It helps the product to innately express itself.

Purposeful attention to the five forces I am submitting— culture, context, value, behavior and beauty—along with Porter’s five market forces, will ultimately make your product unique and compelling, paving a meaningful and sustainable pathway to achieve growth. n

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By James F Caruso James.Caruso@newellco.com James F Caruso has 30 years’ experience in design management and as an individual contributor in both consulting and corporate design groups. In his current role in the Advanced Design and Ideation group at Newell, he helps the design and brand teams broaden the context of design to consider future trends, technology and user behaviors to emphasize designing for the total experience. The ADI team is also responsible for stimulating creative changes that will improve how the Newell global design teams work and grow.

Newell Brands: Onward

THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION & DESIGN

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ate Young, senior vice president of design and ideation for Newell Brands, believes that design and innovation are critical to the company because of consumer trends in the marketplace.

“Our customers are far more sophisticated. Our markets are more competitive. You have to

lead in the best possible way to deal with the competitive environment, and that would be through innovation and design,” said Young.

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At the heart of everything we do is the consumer and our commitment to strengthen innovation. “We are connecting with people where they live, learn, work, and play. The way we are connecting with them is through the aesthetic, design, and functional appeal we provide in our leading products,” said Young. Newell is a consumer-brand-driven company with 85 percent of sales from brands that are No. 1 or No. 2 in their categories. Our products are found in half a billion households in its top nine markets.

Central to the company’s success is the partnership between functions at Newell Brands and how design and innovation are integrated throughout the development process. “We started with building a centralized design center that’s in Kalamazoo specific to our mastery, but the partnership is the key to making it a success. That’s why we are growing the design competency in Hoboken, Chicago, and our soft product expertise in Exton, PA. Working with our marketing and brand teams, our engineering partners and our R&D partners is what makes it work. Anybody can bring in design, but not everyone can partner the way we do internally for the benefit of our consumer,” Young explained.

Newell Brands, headquartered in Hoboken, NJ, consists of 16 global divisions with more than 57,000 employees. Its annual sales reach $16 billion across more than 125 countries and over 100 brands. In each of the company’s business segments, the design team strategically looks at where they may be in five years. “Design is heavily involved in what that future state may be. One of the things you have to do when you’re designing products is to look out beyond what the consumer is thinking about and anticipate what their future could be and visualize that for them,” said Young. Visualizing that future is critical.

This is a key focus for the Newell Brands team at the design centers. Young considers his team a community of extraordinary designers who can meet the needs of the company’s consumers, empathize with them and design for their future state. “Our opportunity here isn’t just designing products, it’s impacting people’s lives and that’s what we’re offering,” he said.

Newell Brands has the structure and the strategy in place to leverage design and innovation as a competitive advantage for each of our brands. We know design is a team sport. It takes a focused team working in sync to deliver the product and brand experiences that differentiate Newell Brands in the marketplace and delight our consumers every day.

The where has been set with a big commitment: new state-of-the-art design centers. The who is a group diverse in talent, background and experience and united on design-led strategy that will drive innovation. But defining the what, the areas of design that will strike a point of differentiation for our consumers, puts clarity around roles and allows Newell Brand’s designers to work cross-functionally as one force, embedding design and innovation into the company’s culture.

Design Defined Industrial design at Newell Brands charters design strategy, ideation, development and specification. Industrial design talent defines the visual brand language so that every brand touchpoint is consistent and flows from a standard. The generation, development and communication of product ideas are owned by industrial design as well as prototyping, testing and refining solutions prior to seeing a product through to manufacturing.

Graphic design drives the inspiration and creation of product graphics, packaging, point of sale, in-store visibility and how our brands come to life through photography.

Graphic design defines how a consumer views our products and is a powerful position from which to communicate differentiation at the point of decision.

Usability is the voice of the consumer and end user in every product from a physical and cognitive standpoint.

A new centralized function for Newell Brands, usability is engrained with every design project from the start. That means testing to determine how well consumers can use products and where we can improve by understanding their behaviors, as well as ergonomics, determining how well products fit with intended users. Craftsmanship puts focus on the fit, feel and finish of our products. Usability delves into interactive products, environment, systems and services. Newell Brands acknowledges every aspect of design and has the consumer and end user in mind.

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Interaction design focuses on optimizing the humancomputer interface for digital products so that it creates the best possible experience for users. That takes a real understanding of human behavior and usability—including people’s emotional response to computer interfaces and their cognitive approach to the product interface—and understanding the motivations and goals of the user. It is all part of the conversation we have with our consumers every day in the design center.

An Environment for Innovation Newell Brands’ state-of-the-art design centers are a significant commitment to drive our Growth Game Plan into action and create a brand and innovation-led company that is famous for design and product performance. Newell Brands joins an exclusive tier of companies that recognize great design and innovation are a competitive advantage. It’s these new centers of excellence and our towering strengths in innovation, design and new product development that will enable us to delight our consumers. The dedicated design facilities and collaborative teams represent tangible new ways of working as we continue to drive design and innovative thinking into Newell Brands’ culture.

Defining Culture Five years ago, the company decided to change its business model from a holding company to a brand-driven

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brand-led company. How do you go about saying that you are now brand-centric? The company determined that investing in design would be part of the strategy. It invested in a new design center in Kalamazoo with a centralized team to help build and grow this competency. In the past, the design teams were located within each company Newell acquired, which created pockets of uncoordinated tactical teams focused only on one brand per team.

Graphic design did not sit or work with industrial design teams in many cases. The key was centralizing all design teams to coordinate and leverage each other’s strengths and talents. The success and growth of Newell Brands has enabled this centralized function to be expanded into additional locations, including a front-end innovation group in Hoboken.

The other key aspect was creating a culture that enabled this through strong design management, creative culture building and “Plaid,” the unifying metaphor created

by Nate Young to weave together diverse talented teams from division and brand alignment (verticals) with color, trend and fashion; usability; and ideation teams that span all business segments (horizontals). It’s the overlapping aspects of the Plaid philosophy that enable teams to redefine and rethink problems for the business.

“We think that’s the magic, redefining what design can be. That is to me what the new world class of design is all about,” said Young. n

By Marlisa Kopenski Marlisa.Kopenski@design-concepts.com As director of business design at Design Concepts, Marlisa Kopenski helps clients ground innovation projects in business reality.

Her role involves managing a delicate balance of free-wheeling ideation and idea-squashing number crunching. Success is when a good idea lives and no one suffers too much in the process. She has worked at Kraft Foods, E&J Gallo Winery, Penguin Books, and Gourmet and Fast Company magazines. She earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern.

BUSINESS & DESIGN SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE

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hen I began the first year of my MBA program at a well-known business school, a facebook was still a real book, printed on paper. In it, each of us was given a chance to introduce ourselves to our future classmates with a headshot, our hometown and three lines of text.

Many of my peers used the allotted three lines to boast of patents or investment banking experience or a perfect GMAT score.

As an undergraduate journalism major and then a marketing manager, I wasn’t typical B-school material. I was blissfully ignorant. I used one of my three lines to proudly proclaim how I was voted “most creative” by my high school class.

When I first opened our facebook and compared my listing to everyone else’s, I was so ashamed. All I had to offer was creativity? And I thought that mattered? Compliments from new acquaintances sounded like platitudes. I felt like a stranger in a foreign land.

Fast forward 15 years. I now work at a design firm as the director of business design, a title I created for myself.

One could say I am still a bit out of step among my 60 peers, three-quarters of whom are traditional design professionals: industrial designers, UX designers, mechanical engineers, etc. But in my post-MBA working years, I’ve come to understand one thing: While we believe that business and design speak completely different languages, they don’t. They just use different vocabularies. I wasn’t the foreigner I thought I was in business school. It just took me a while to learn to translate between the two.

Fortunately, I graduated from business school bilingual.

I can speak user experience and prototypes as well as value proposition and financial models. You can, too, and without getting an MBA. Why? Businesspeople are designers too.

They just use different language and different tools. But the goal is the same: to create the most desirable, most relevant product possible.

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Let me show you the ways in which businesspeople and design people use nearly identical tools and measures.

A Sketch Is Worth Exactly One Scenario Designers sketch. Whether they consider themselves good at it or not is irrelevant. Almost universally, sketching is the way designers get ideas out of their heads and into the open.

Businesspeople are famously horrible artists. But like designers, they take an idea and make it tangible by creating a scenario—something that is not drawn in pencil with lines and curves but with assumptions, constraints and calculations.

For example, as an industrial designer, I may have an idea for a toilet brush for institutional bathrooms that has an extra-long handle and a cone-shaped brush. I would sketch it on my tablet or with a marker to communicate the essence— and appeal—of this idea to someone else. As a business designer, I would create a scenario where the market for institutional-grade toilet brushes is one-third of the total toilet brush market. I’d pencil in that an extra-long handle would cost 44 cents more per unit. And that each cone-shaped brush could be sold for a 75-cent premium. In my own businessy way, I’d be making that toilet brush real enough to share as well. Instead of communicating the functional value of the toilet brush with a sketch, I’d be sharing the business value of it. Both are real. And both are important.

Prove It Everyone knows that proof of principle is table stakes in design engineering. Without establishing a baseline of physical feasibility, there is no point in moving ahead with refining a single or a small set of design features. A proof of principle model establishes what is possible—not probable or certain—in the future. Designers use it to build confidence or enthusiasm for a new idea and to inform decision-making.

In the case of the toilet brush, engineers may need to build a proof of principle model to establish that an extra-long handle can still offer the user control of a 4-inch cone-shaped brush.

In business, a forward-looking financial statement is known as a pro forma. It is used to give investors a fair idea—not a perfect idea—of an anticipated occurrence, such as big cash outlay or quarterly earnings. It is often used to document what is assumed about the future and preview what is likely to come. Just like engineers use a

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proof of principle model to ground innovation in reality, businesspeople use a pro forma to support the plausibility of the future state. In the case of the toilet brush, a businessperson may create the financial documents to show that purchasing a piece of equipment to assemble cone-shaped brushes is likely to be worth the investment.

You Say Prototype, I Say Model In design, one of the standard tools of the trade is a prototype.

A designer builds a product with enough basic fidelity to be able to finesse the details of how the item functions and looks.

A designer does this in order to establish the known elements of a product (it has a handle) and iterate on the aspects that are not yet decided (how conical is the brush? how does the handle integrate?). Because a prototype is higher fidelity than a mock-up, most details are solved or known. A designer can focus on refining a single aspect of the product.

Similarly, a model in business terms is a tool that is more robust than a spreadsheet. Using Excel or a similar tool, a business designer quantifies what is known (a standard handle costs 50 cents/unit) and then adds unknown variables (the cost for a 3-inch versus a 4-inch-diameter brush). Just like a designer fiddling with a prototype, a businessperson plays with a model to find the combination of product attributes, cost and price that is just right. Both prototypes and models are imperative tools for creativity, which is mandatory for both business and design success.

Why Do We Exist?

One thing that is wonderful about the design profession is the emphasis on user experience. A well-designed product isn’t just useful; it is also delightful and potentially meaningful. I’ve heard designers explain that good design has “a reason to be.” As a businessperson, that can be a little difficult to get my mind around. But if I liken it to a term I’m familiar with, value proposition, it makes complete sense. A value proposition is an easy-to-understand reason why a customer should purchase a product or service from a specific company. It explains how a product solves a pain point or offers a superior benefit. It explains why a consumer should care—why the product exists. So with user experience and value proposition, designers and businesspeople are talking about the same thing.

How Much Is Tolerable?

In each step of the product design and business design processes, ideas become more believable and feasible.

Eventually, the question of “can we do this?” is replaced with “should we do this?” There are many ways to make that call. Designers may evaluate whether a product meets a portfolio need, if it can be manufactured in a certain country, etc. Businesspeople may base the decision on whether a product is aligned with corporate strategy or capitalizes on channel opportunity. The two simplest, and most similar, criteria for moving forward or not are design margin (tolerance) and breakeven.

Design margin, or tolerance, is the additional performance capability above required system parameters to compensate for uncertainties. Take the case of the toilet brush. If the piece of machinery that assembles the coneshaped brush end can make 40 brush heads an hour and the goal is to make 20 per hour, the designer has a design margin of one (or safety margin of two). Design margin is a measure of design appropriateness for the manufacturing process. It means that the manufacturing goal can be met plus the wiggle room necessary to stay on goal if the machinery doesn’t always meet throughput goals. Technical

language aside, a favorable design margin means “good job” to a designer.

Businesspeople also have a very basic measure of “good job” called breakeven. Breakeven is a simple formula that calculates the amount of time it takes to earn back the money invested in a product or idea. It is predictive, like design margin, and offers the confidence to make a go/no-go decision. For example, a businessperson may determine that it will take 48 months of selling cone-shaped toilet brushes to earn back all the money invested to create the product. Four years isn’t a right or wrong answer.

It is directionally about the viability of the idea. An attractive breakeven timeline means “good job” to a businessperson.

Just like design margin, breakeven is a simple measure of risk. Both allow a company to make a more informed decision before moving forward.

As a bilingual speaker of design and business, I encourage you to forget everything you think you know about businesspeople and start thinking of them as designers, too. I can vouch for the people who like numbers and wear navy blue. They want the same things you do—to solve wicked problems, use their creativity and ensure that good things, including design, succeed out in the world. n

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By Brian Matt brian.matt@accenture.com Brian Matt is the founder and principal director of Altitude, now the Product Innovation Studio for Accenture. In January 2017, Accenture acquired Altitude Inc., a privately held design and innovation firm based in Boston that uses its expertise in consumer insights, strategy, design and engineering to help companies innovate and develop new goods and services. Accenture + Altitude drive innovation to improve the way the world works and lives.

HOW DESIGN SHOULD MEET BUSINESS

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uh, of course we know that you understand design thinking and use its human-centered method for problem-solving, but in order to have success in your disruptive future, it needs to be much more than that. Design thinking is a different way of problem-solving that brings in the

human factor, aiming to empathize with users to understand their needs, involve them in the problem-solving process, ingeniously build on their feedback and verify relevant solutions with them.

In recent years, corporate attention has been profoundly focused on innovation everywhere, and design thinking has been getting sprinkled into boardroom conversations, but still is likely misunderstood. The process must fit the mission and principles of the company in order for those methods to be effective. No amount of design speak is going to make an incorrectly deployed process work in the common business environment. Hint: that’s when designers need adult supervision.

Let’s take a closer look at this. Suppose there are two kinds of people in our equation with totally different characteristics: analytical and intuitive thinkers. Business people are said to be analytical thinkers. They seek, hold and refine knowledge plus data to optimize processes, predict results and calculate return on investment so everything will proceed on plan. They don’t like any enigmatic states and they apply inductive reasoning (proving what is already known) and deductive logic (proving what should happen) to analyze the past experiences for predicting the future. Businesses look for reliability. Designers are said to be intuitive thinkers. They tend to see things differently and are concerned with how things should or could be.

They are comfortable with open-ended states and are happy to explore new areas with possible solutions based on empathy, needs and emotions (of course embedded in functional utility). Designers look for rationality with a twist of creativity.

Applying only one of these two types of divergent thinking will not advance knowledge or derive success.

Analytical thinking is based on past data, so we can hardly imagine that applying only this kind of thinking will come up with something genuinely new. I could write a whole other

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article on the differences between creativity and innovation, but in this model, suffice to say that creativity is simply the generation of multiple options and innovation is simply using those ideas for improvements. Solely intuitive thinking might also have some risks like cognitive bias where perception misdirects genuine rationale. As a profession, we can no longer think that design solves everything. We need to embrace the broader context of business to develop the acumen to create disruptive innovation that has a higher aptitude for success. Your business will be resilient.

For example, in the Altitude Studios of Accenture, design thinking is amplified with entirely new competencies to redefine corporate missions and product strategy through rigorous business acumen. This combination helps clients realize a new future, one they wouldn’t get to on their own and one that has a better likelihood for positive impact on growth. This new approach is a response to the increasing complexity of integrating leading technology in the prevailing business environment where competition can come from anywhere to disrupt even the largest of institutions.

Consumers need help making sense of this complexity, and companies need competitive strategies through relevant differentiation. You know this stuff. People need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive and pleasurable. How often do we create what seemingly appears to be a brilliant product only to have our clients crush it into dust with bad implementation, poor supply chain operations, zero marketing effort, a clunky business strategy, outdated enterprise architecture or unrealistic pricing models? So, imagine improving outcomes without depending on another party integrating very distinct approaches to a problem.

As designers, let’s embrace analytical thinking and executional excellence and eagerly enhance our intuitive thinking with innovation, rigor and speed. It will be incredible—like a unicorn—awesome and somewhat aware of its existence. But consider it mythology because you’ve never seen one yourself, although it’s definitely worth striving for.

Here are five principles to consider for strengthening your position in a high-stakes corporate world: 1. Approach a problem using both sides of the brain.

Create a balanced approach to problem-solving or windup with a mismatch of objectives, solutions to the wrong problems or new ideas that will never get implemented. All equations need to be balanced for resolution and harmony.

Unbalanced equations cause chaos and stress various parts of the system, leaving unresolved solutions. At its core, an effective approach improves the relevance of the solutions that organizations can deliver to their customers, as well as the manner and speed with which they can create them. Let designers be intuitive and executives be analytic—just learn to integrate them.

DESIGN WORLD

Mostly Driven By Empathy, Passion, Emotion, Creativity

CORPORATE WORLD

Mostly Driven By Analytics, Incentives, Power, Certainty

BALANCED WORLD

Mostly Driven By Learning, Purpose, Entrepreneuralism, Opportunity

2. Avoid too much design speak. Even the phrase, “design thinking” is not mainstream enough for there to be a common understanding of its meaning. Of course, misunderstanding leads to turmoil and sometimes catastrophe.

It should be no secret that analytical and intuitive thinkers can struggle to communicate with each other, much the same way as do doctors with patients and lawyers with clients. We have all experienced a situation in which a professional services provider has explained a simple situation with unfathomable terminology, leaving us more frustrated and confused than before. Based on natural empathetic tendencies, it is more likely that a designer will learn and use business speak than an analyst will learn and properly use design terminology.

SPECIALIZED LANGUAGE

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

Natural Outcomes Misconceived, Assumptions, Confusion, Disorder

Natural Outcomes Aligned, Commonality, Coordination, Organized

3. Build a strong business case. Project management is naturally complicated, but it can be disastrous if you don’t have sufficient buy-in from the right parties. As expertise is offered throughout the process, it is important that the advice is thoroughly explained. Companies will often pursue something that you don’t think is a good idea. When those situations arise, rather than just letting something happen, take the time to demonstrate why it is important and what the potential impacts can be.

DESIGN CENTRIC

DESIGN + BUSINESS

TYPICAL CHARACTERISTICS Design Solves Everything, Subjective Explanations Used, Emotion Drives Decisions, Implementation Rates Are Mixed

TYPICAL CHARACTERISTICS Design & Business Attributes Are in Harmony, Objective Explanations Used, Data Driven Decisions, More Likely to Be Implemented

Designers sometimes default to explaining their point of view subjectively, which can lead to an exchange of diverging or opposite views. Businesses are about stability and reducing risk, so tie research back into the reasoning and bring together the benefits, disadvantages, costs and risks of the current situation and future vision so that executive management, with authority, can decide if the project should move forward as planned. The business case should be brief and convey only the essentials and be interesting, clear and concise. Eliminate conjecture and minimize jargon. Describe your vision of the future, and demonstrate the value and benefits the project brings to the business.

4. Understand the difference between teamwork and collaboration. A problem occurs when collaboration and teamwork are mistaken for the same thing. When group members function as a team, they are working as individuals. Everyone has their identified task, which contributes to the outcome. A successful team depends on having a strong leader to guide the team toward the goal. With collaboration, the group has to not only work together but think together, too. The end product comes from the efforts of

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the group. This means collaborators are equal partners with no distinct leader. Collaborators have to trust each other, respect the opinions of others and engage in negotiations toward the final solution.

The best collaborators are not just creative—they are flexible. They know when to let other ideas take the lead.

Most international institutions have team members all over the world. Even if they use the latest methods and technology to interact, the best they can do is share documents and presentations and maybe hear voices or glimpse an occasional face. For sure, teams are important, but innovation is best served through integrating teams into collaborative behavior. In my opinion, the face-to-face studio model is more effective than conference calls and sharing documents online. This also accelerates adoption by having members co-create.

5. Embrace failure and change. Accenture research has found that high-performing organizations have more change taking place—and at a faster pace—than their lower-performing counterparts. Encourage experimentation and prototyping by connecting important elements of design (e.g., elegance, sensitivity, continuous and rapid iteration, and an empathy for how people engage the world) within the context of the business, which allows leaders to quickly understand the feasibility and implications of their decisions. Product development is no longer about designing things customers want. It’s about designing solutions that give customers the outcomes they need—no one really

TEAMWORK

COLLABORATION

Organizational Attributes Goal Oriented, Distinct Leader Present, Share Individual Work, Occasional Big Idea

Organizational Attributes Goal-Oriented, Coordinated Team Participation, Active Co-Creation, Continuous Additive Innovation

wants to buy a saw; they actually desire two pieces.

In this very different environment, business leaders know they need to adapt, but questions remain about how they can develop these attributes fast. Sometimes the business environment is so volatile that a company must experiment with multiple paths in order to survive. A 100 percent success is rare, so failure is inevitable, but useful.

Teach your business counterparts how to create, learn, improve and repeat. The failures will no longer be classified as such, but will be classified as learning opportunities—just make sure you have enough runway to get to a meaningful place. Do it as efficiently as possible so that a shutdown or an effort to pivot to another is not a resourcehungry disaster.

When design meets business using balanced efforts, the likelihood of transforming a business with truly disruptive ideas will produce superior outcomes. Although critically important in an innovation economy, design as the sole tool to solve problems will create a fractured path.

Integrating intuitive and analytical thinkers into the process will reduce the perceived risks and improve the odds of proper implementation. n DESIGN THINKING

BUSINESS THINKING

Methodology & Process Hierarchical Linear Activity, Learn/Know/Execute/Succeed or Fail, Discourage Experimentation, Incremental Path to the Next Thing Methodology & Process Complex Cyclical Activity, Observe/Create/ Learn/Improve/Repeat, Encourage Iterative Experimentation, Project Desired Future

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By Paul Metaxatos, IDSA paul@the-motiv.com Paul Metaxatos is a co-founder and principal of Motiv, a Boston-based consultancy that designs products, develops brands and delivers creative solutions across a broad range of industries. He is recognized within the retail consumer industry as one of the leading authorities in brand-focused product development, having been associated with many iconic brands, including Keurig and Vitamix, as well as many successful startups. He is a long-time IDSA member and has served as chair of the Southern New England Chapter.

THREE WAYS BUSINESSES CAN CREATE ENDURING DESIGN SOLUTIONS

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hether the task involves the design of a product or packaging, most often our goal as designers is to partner with business clients to create enduring solutions that will stand the test of time, not only to amortize their product development costs but also to help them sus-

tain brand recognition and customer loyalty over time. Once in a very great while, enduring design solutions become brand icons while also serving as visual anchors for a company’s ownership of an entire product category. The contoured glass Coca-Cola bottle, created in 1915, achieved that status; the word “Coke” eventually became shorthand for all types of sodas.

The Changing Design Landscape Most product manufacturers today, however, would be satisfied with a practical shelf-life for a product or packaging design that’s a small fraction of a century. In some industries, a design solution that’s relevant for more than five years is considered a great success. There are several reasons why it’s become increasingly difficult for all types of businesses to achieve design solutions that remain relevant for more than a few years. Notably: n

Foreign manufacturers now can quickly produce and take to market look-alike products and packaging that makes it difficult for consumers to distinguish (or to value) the original version compared with the knock-off.

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online retailers such as Amazon and Walmart employ data-driven pricing technologies so that consumers benefit from low prices, but manufacturers find it extremely difficult to make a profit. These marginsqueezed companies either exit the business altogether or rely even more heavily on design to differentiate their products.

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Our culture of disposable smartphones and electronics has conditioned consumers to seek the same frequent level of turnover with many of their other products. As a result, manufacturers now use ongoing redesigns of product and packaging as a tactic to maintain their existing customer base and to steal market share from competitors.

n Corporate

turnovers can place critical design decisions in the wrong hands. A new management team that either lacks an understanding of the legacy brand strategy or makes changes simply to put its own mark on the product can sometimes eliminate or damage what had been a very effective design solution.

So increasingly design has become a necessary tool for business strategy and survival. Companies are investing in design more often, even when there is no solid business rationale for change.

These market dynamics continue to have a significant impact on the expectations business clients place on their design partners and also on the way design firms work with clients to demonstrate tangible value. In a nutshell: no longer just about design considerations.

Business clients now expect designers to possess a much deeper understanding of all the critical factors— including consumer trends, regulatory issues, the competitive landscape and the cost of raw materials—that will influence a product’s success in the marketplace.

n It’s

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Design has a seat at the management table. With the exception of companies like Apple, where product design has long been central to its value proposition, the design function has not had a strong voice in management decision-making. But now that a product’s success or failure relies more heavily on design factors, the design function is a subject of importance at a greater number of companies.

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Designers are required to step up their game. The role of designers traditionally has had deep roots in the creative arts but is now moving more toward marketing and even management science. To meet the demands of a business environment in which design is a core strategy, designers are being asked to assume responsibilities that may be outside their comfort zone and, sometimes, beyond their skill set. So designers must adapt to remain relevant.

Our Business Design Core Beliefs In working with businesses of all sizes, industries and levels of sophistication, there’s no established playbook that makes enduring design solutions any easier to achieve. But over the past decade at Motiv, we’ve learned some important lessons that have shaped our thinking. Here are three of them: Understand the user and market applications.

When Motiv designed the Sharpie® Professional Chisel Tip marker for the construction trades, for example, we invested considerable time on job sites to understand how the pen was being used and under what physical conditions. Based on those real-world insights, our enduring design solution included a strong tip capable of writing on abrasive surfaces, quick drying ink, a nonslip cap that is easy to remove even when wearing gloves, and an oval-shaped barrel to prevent the pen from rolling off flat surfaces. Those product design features, based on a thorough understanding of the end user’s needs, have helped to make the Sharpie Professional the leading permanent marker for construction sites.

Design for tomorrow, rather than today. Keurig® changed the way people drink coffee. The product design journey began with brewers designed to accommodate groups of people in the workplace, rather than individuals

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and families in the home. Similar to the lessons learned by automobile manufacturers with their high-performance vehicles at racetracks, Keurig stress tested and perfected its brewers’ operating issues based on usage in a high-volume environment When Keurig asked Motiv to help it design its single-cup coffee brewer for the home, we understood that—unlike the commercial market application—the product’s design would be a critical factor in changing consumers’ well-entrenched coffee brewing habits.

Looking further down the road, we believed that the early adopters of Keurig’s home product would both want and pay for a very different coffee experience and that the mass market would follow their lead. And that is exactly what occurred.

The enduring design solution for the Keurig brewer was not based on focus group testing of any type. Instead, our design thinking was shaped by trends we had observed completely outside the housewares category, such as the SEMA Show (the world’s largest display of customized vehicles) and the KBIS Show (kitchen and bath fixtures) that we attend every year. Based in part on what we considered to be forward-looking design ideas at those shows, we created a sleek, modern-looking appliance unlike existing in-home coffee makers using high-quality materials that would satisfy aspirational consumer tastes and also support a relatively high price point for the small electrics category.

The Keurig design solution was notable not because it was stylish, trendy or over-researched. Instead, it echoed the product’s honest, straightforward value proposition and served as the embodiment of the cup. People just liked it.

Resist change simply for the sake of change. With some frequency, we are asked by a client to redesign its product primarily because of pressure from major retailer

“Increasingly design has become a necessary tool for business strategy and survival.” for something new, often as a means to increase consumer interest for a particular category. When that occurs, and in advance of thinking about redesign, we typically analyze the request by first closely examining the basis on which the retailer believes that a design change will improve market traction. Then we seek to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current design through a landscape assessment, based on design trending and from the consumer’s perspective through research.

Very often, the outcome of this deeper inquiry convinces our client that the product is unlikely to benefit from a total redesign unless it will drive a meaningful value and behavioral shift through the addition of true innovation or if the brand’s visual brand language (VBL) is in dire need of an overhaul to remain competitive.

In many cases, there are ways to placate our clients’ retailers by creating unique variants of the core design— through color and finish solutions—that will support and burnish the current VBL. What many product marketers have learned, sometimes after investing in a complete redesign without a legitimate reason, such as incorporating a new and truly useful consumer benefit, is that their retail partners do not always know the customer as well as they need to.

Additionally, the target consumer may be still learning to embrace the current design, and a change would serve to lessen the brand’s validity in their eyes as a solid long-term player. Driven by a desire to increase revenue by any means, retailers are always asking manufacturers to “give us something new and interesting.” In the current market, however, where traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are fighting for survival against online competitors, it’s even more important for product manufacturers to resist a design change simply for the sake of change.

Staying Responsive At Motiv, we’re constantly seeking new ways to produce enduring design solutions for two reasons: because it’s of benefit to our business clients and because, as design professionals, it strengthens our sense of personal pride and ownership in ideas that will stand the test of time.

Ultimately, we understand that design is a business.

Unless we remain responsive to the changing market conditions faced by our clients, consistently demonstrate an ability to add value through enduring design solutions and establish a marketplace reputation on that basis, we will have few business opportunities to practice our craft. n

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Sofia Frilund, IDSA 2017 Northeast District Student Merit Award Winner Parsons School of Design pedes269@newschool.edu

ELEMENT OF SURPRISE

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ofia Frilund, IDSA, was surrounded by creativity growing up in Aarhus, Denmark, her mother, a tailor; her father, a musician and entrepreneur; her sister, an architect. “I always cared about design,” she recalls. “I was very specific about my room as a child. I would take an old chair from

the basement and ask my mom if I could paint it. I would find stuff on the street to keep and spend a lot of time in the woodshop and clay room in my after-school program.”

“When I found out there was such a thing as industrial design as a line of study, I knew immediately that it was what I wanted to do. But I was also scared to fail at the thing I cared so much about, so it took me a few years before I actually dared to go for it.” Not only did she go for it, but Frilund, who speaks four languages, managed to adapt to a new country, a new school and motherhood after arriving in the United States from Denmark in 2007.

In spring 2017, she added the titles of BFA product design graduate from Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York City and IDSA Student Merit Award (SMA) winner in the Northeast District. Her presentations were Linus (left), a hardwood dining chair that can adjust to fit a child in different growth stages all the way into adulthood; Ljoma (lower right), a lantern that can be made of ice in the home freezer and displayed with a candle inside; Brim (upper right), bags created from Manhattan millinery felt scraps that otherwise would’ve ended up in a landfill; and Array (far right), a plywood chair cut by a computer-controlled machine, known as a CNC, yet designed to look handcrafted.

“My product design preference tends to be projects that are innovative in either function or material choice,” explains Frilund. “The social, environmental or behavioral considerations in a design are important to me in most cases, while I also enjoy more conceptual ideas with an element of surprise in either material choice or form. I love working hands-on with actual materials and pushing the limits of their conventional use.”

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In a year when—for the first time—all five SMA winners are women, Frilund knows all too well the challenges faced by women. “I have two boys who were 1- and 2-years-old when I started at Parsons,” she shares. “It’s been incredibly hard for me to balance school and motherhood. But it’s certainly possible when you love both. My real challenge comes now when it is time to work.”

She hopes to start her own design studio or take on an entrepreneurial project solo or with others to be able to find a work-life balance.

Frilund feels men are often gifted with a natural sense of higher self-esteem. “This means that as a woman you have to work harder to push designs forward. We have to believe that women see the world differently than men and can understand certain challenges of daily life in a way a man can’t. Our perspective is just as valuable.” n

The 2017 IDSA Student Merit Awards are sponsored

by Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS.

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Chloe Georgiades, IDSA 2017 Central District Student Merit Award Winner University of Cincinnati georgicr@mail.uc.edu

ADDRESSING A REAL NEED

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DSA’s Central District Design Conference 2017 held at the University of Cincinnati (UC) turned out to be quite a homecoming for Chloe Georgiades, IDSA. Born and raised in Cincinnati, she was just about to graduate from UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) after winning the IDSA

Student Merit Award (SMA) at UC. That meant she would represent UC at the CDDC in April.

“I had been mentally framing the SMAs as more of a learning experience than a competition,” she says. Her thought process worked. Georgiades was named the winner of the IDSA SMA for the Central District. “I was excited to hear my name called, but kind of taken aback because I wasn’t really focusing on that end result.”

Her projects included a child’s flotation device (right) that enables a proper swim technique, the Mizuno Cross Country Spike Shoe (left) featuring an interchangeable outsole, and medical design work (lower left).

Now, Georgiades has joined San Francisco’s NewDealDesign full-time, founded by multiple IDSA International Design Excellence Award winner and IDSA member Gadi Amit. Georgiades credits UC DAAP with helping her make a fairly seamless, cross-country transition.

“Having done two internships with consultancies in the Bay Area in the last year, I was ready for the work and familiar with the area. UC’s Cooperative Education Program does an amazing job of preparing students for the industry, because you have to do five internships before you graduate.”

Georgiades caught the design bug as a youngster. “I have quite a few designers in my family,” she explains, “so I was definitely more aware of the profession from an earlier age than most.” In high school, she gravitated toward the

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sciences and initially wanted to pursue a healthcare-related profession. “Ultimately, I saw ID as a way to do meaningful work in the medical industry. Even now, though I’ve departed a bit from my original plan, I still really like designing medical products.”

What does it mean to her to be a woman in a field with a limited number of female industrial designers? “It wasn’t really a factor when choosing a field, and in school I was lucky to have amazing female peers and role models,” she says. “In industry, though, the imbalance has been a bit more noticeable—but I mostly see it as a way I can bring a unique and valuable perspective to the table.”

Like many industrial designers, she’s found herself defining her profession. “My extremely oversimplified answer to non-designers used to be, ‘Just like buildings are designed by architects and clothes are created by fashion designers, products need to be designed, too. An industrial designer touches almost every product that exists—cars, shoes, watches, headphones, for example.’”

First and foremost, Georgiades is a problem solver. “I’m interested in applying somewhat of a systematic approach to new and varying scenarios,” she says. “I think I’d be happy designing almost anything—as long as it was different, challenging and addressing a real need.” n The 2017 IDSA Student Merit Awards are sponsored

by Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS.

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Judy Leung, IDSA 2017 West District Student Merit Award Winner California College of the Arts hleung@cca.edu

THE FABRIC OF OUR LIVES

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t’s only been four years since Judy Leung, IDSA, crossed the globe at the age of 17 in search of better opportunities. Now she has joined the ranks of the first all-female group of winners of IDSA’s Student Merit Awards (SMAs) and become the first person in her family to earn a college degree. In summer

2017, she is interning at fuseproject in San Francisco.

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Leung won the SMA at the IDSA West District Design Conference 2017 held in April at the University of Oregon in Portland. She expressed gratitude to her peers, instructors and family.

The California College of the Arts (CCA) senior presented Chillex Series (far right), wearable, cooling gel packs that target a runner’s pain points; Food Pop (top), a Renault-sponsored project that transforms electric vehicles into platforms for spontaneous experiences in cities; Bini (inset), a disaster evacuation helmet; and Go Poncho (left), an everyday use garment that can provide emotional relief in disasters.

“What fascinates me is how we’re integrating technology into the materials we use and wear to create more meaningful solutions,” observes Leung. “I’m interested in the blend and integration of soft and hard goods, utility and fashion, where both the emotional and rational aspect of the solution is considered and woven into our everyday lives.”

She recommends IDSA and its SMAs to designersin-training “not only to represent your school and connect with others, but also as a great opportunity to learn about yourself.”

Leung was born and raised in Hong Kong. Design caught her attention in high school. “Back then, industrial design was a subject called ‘design and technology.’

Design was condensed to an exam paper-like format.” But her teachers opened her eyes to the many possibilities in design and it was then that she decided to study in the United States.

She also learned that design is much more than appearance. “It’s as complex as our relationships to

objects, our relationship to materials, our relationship to the people around us. That’s what got me interested in industrial design,” says Leung. “There’s a lot of thought, communicating and understanding that goes into a solution that’s often invisible until you hold it, feel it, use it.”

Her family taught her to be reflective—and conscious and engaged about everything outside the design world.

“We take inspiration from our everyday lives, so we should be equally passionate about people and issues around us.

Sometimes there are problems that can’t be solved through design, but as designers we should actively participate in creating dialogues and looking for better solutions.”

Leung feels fortunate for many things, such as the help and support of her family to experience college abroad. “I’m also happy to be among the first all-female group of SMA winners,” she says, “and equally happy to be recognized as an international student representing CCA. I’m grateful to be recognized for my work.” n The 2017 IDSA Student Merit Awards are sponsored

by Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS. I N N O V AT I O N S U M M E R 2 0 1 7

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Claire Puginier, S/IDSA 2017 South District Student Merit Award Winner Savannah College of Art and Design cpugin20@student.scad.edu

DRIVING CURIOSITY

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hile most of the young competitors in the IDSA Student Merit Awards—held annually at the District Design Conferences—showcase their top projects to the audience, Claire Puginier, S/IDSA, took a different path—and it may have helped her earn the IDSA Student Merit

Award for the South District.

At IDSA’s South District Design Conference 2017 held at the University of Houston in April, she told an allegorical tale of a girl named Lilou who did not know which door to choose—until she had opened all of them. Aptly, Puginier illustrated her story with examples of her work in industrial design, graphic design and interaction design. When her name was announced as the winner, she was overwhelmed with emotion.

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Puginier graduates in December 2017 with a BFA in industrial design and user experience design from the Savannah College of Art and Design. The senior was born in Germany, then moved with her family every few years—from Ho Chi Minh City to Paris to Munich and from Tokyo to Basel to Shanghai.

While globetrotting, she found that empathizing with people in order to appreciate their culture and way of life was the best way to find contentment and happiness, no matter where

she lived. “Approaching others with the intent to figure out how to meaningfully contribute to their lives—knowing my time with them is limited—is something that defines me as a person as much as a designer,” she shares.

Puginier always wanted to pursue a career that would allow her to shape her own path and discover and express what fascinates her about people. At first, she thought that path would be through fine art—specifically sculpture. But then she learned about industrial design. “I found it was a way of sculpting that directly manifested all the things I could learn about another person’s life, hopes and sensibilities.”

She adds, “Designing for another person is a lot like being in love—it can only be truly great if you can give up on trying to convince them of who you are and learn to see them in their entirety. Through my work, I am allowed to imagine better futures for those I love. What more wonderful thing could I be doing with my life?”

Puginier is fascinated by the “immersive and enchanting” qualities of the Internet of Things (IoT), social machines, augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI). “Prototyping experimental human and computer interactions allows me to imagine and probe new ways in which we can relate to and be engaged by the machines that enable our lives. I feel responsible for designing products and interactions that integrate into our lives intuitively and unobtrusively. My goal is to meaningfully augment the ways in which we are able to perceive and respond to our environments.”

What’s ahead? “My hope is to join a company that is pushing for the democratization of powerful technologies, such as AI and the IoT through design, and is working to imbue the physical world and artefacts with delight and interactivity. Speculating about the interactions and bonds we will have with the objects and services of tomorrow is what drives my curiosity.” n

The 2017 IDSA Student Merit Awards are sponsored

by Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS.

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Erin Rice, IDSA 2017 Midwest District Student Merit Award Winner University of Notre Dame emrice75@gmail.com

SHOOTING FOR THE MOON

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DSA Midwest District Student Merit Award winner Erin Rice, IDSA, joined Walt Disney Imagineering’s Professional Internship Program in Orlando, FL, after graduating from the University of Notre Dame in May 2017. “I’m excited to dive headfirst into a world of design I’ve never considered—theme

park design,” she says. “To my surprise, I recognized an overwhelming amount of similarities between Imagineering and industrial design. Both rely on user-driven research to design experiences for the betterment of their consumers through reliance on multidisciplinary collaboration and problem framing.”

Rice studied industrial and visual communication design to receive her BFA, emphasizing that studying both disciplines was imperative in her growth as a well-rounded designer.

“I believe design will change the world,” she forecasts. “I’m enthralled to be a part of a field that has the ability to touch so many lives. Studying industrial design has given me the unique opportunity to be an advocate for the things that I care about.”

Rice led a multidisciplinary team of students that placed second out of more than 340 submissions in the 2017 Walt Disney Imaginations Competition. The week-long experience at the Imagineering headquarters in California led to an offer to intern with Disney Imagineering’s design

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team in Orlando this summer. In April, Rice won the IDSA Student Merit Award at the IDSA Midwest District Design Conference, held at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Among her other designs are a cage to aid animal control officers in safely handling stray dogs (a design recognized at the 2017 International Housewares Competition), and a magnetic bracelet to aid people with manual dexterity impairments in controlling their smartphones.

Rice credits her education at Notre Dame, unending support from her parents and mentorship from her peers and professors as the top reasons for her success. She specifically recognizes Notre Dame professors Scott Shim, IDSA, chair of IDSA’s Education Symposium 2017; Michael Elwell, IDSA; and Ann-Marie Conrado, IDSA, for their commitment to helping her—as a person and designer. “The design professors are adamant about the importance of networking with professionals and gaining internships,” she says.

Rice completed five internships, two of them facilitated by the Notre Dame study abroad program in London.

“Industry experience is invaluable and helped me develop a better understanding of who I want to be and what I want to do,” she explains.

“My proudest moment as an industrial designer was not the moment I found out I won the IDSA SMA—but that in which I found out that all of the other District-level SMA winners are women for the first time in history,” she declares. “I feel overwhelmingly honored to be part of something that transcends far beyond myself as an individual. It’s exciting to see women emerging as leaders, creative thinkers, builders and designers,” she enthuses. “I want to encourage every child aspiring to chase their dreams to get their hands dirty, welcome failure, build from criticism and shoot for the moon.” n

The 2017 IDSA Student Merit Awards are sponsored by Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS.

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By Frank Grunwald, L/IDSA grunwaldfb@prodigy.net Frank Grunwald is a graduate of Pratt Institute’s Department of Industrial Design. He has had more than 40 years of experience in product design, industrial design management and product planning management at General Electric, Philco/Ford and Thomson Multimedia. For the past 15 years, he has held eight-week seminars on new product development and creativity at Purdue University.

SIT AS A CREATIVITY TOOL IN NEW PRODUCT DESIGN

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enrikh Saulovich Altshuller (1926–1998), a Soviet engineer, inventor and writer, was the originator of the theory of inventive problem solving, beginning in 1946. In his early work as a clerk in a patent office, he had discovered that most inventions fit into several basic rules or patterns.

In the 1990s, inspired by Altshuller, Jacob Goldenberg and several of his co-workers articulated a method of creativity—systematic inventive thinking (SIT)—after analyzing hundreds of successful products.

Embracing Strategic Thinking and Product Innovation More than 20 years prior to Altshuller’s work, many American companies saw the need for product design as a separate function from engineering or marketing.

General Electric’s design department was one of the largest and oldest in American industry. Formed in 1928 under Ray Patten for GE’s Home Appliance Division, it was established to ensure a superior appearance for GE products. Even as late as the 1970s, the sign above the main entrance to the design studio still read “APPEARANCE DESIGN.” That was typical of that period when design was still in its youth and considered primarily an aesthetic service function. (At General Motors and other car companies it was called “styling.”)

Since then, industrial designers in the US (both corporate and consultancy) have done an admirable job merging into creative product development and influencing business with strategic thinking. Innovation and creativity must continue to be the key contributions of industrial design.

Meaningful innovation in products and services is what builds corporate value and customer satisfaction. Every designer’s dream should be to work for a company whose core corporate culture is dedicated to innovation. The opposite of innovation is stagnation. Stagnating companies die.

Innovation has many facets. It can manifest itself in improved user benefits or attributes in products or services. It can foster energy efficiencies and environmental benefits or an easier, more intuitive user interface.

Innovations in technology, materials and manufacturing can often result in lower-cost products, generating huge sales numbers. (Look what happened to television products: Flat

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panel displays totally disrupted the traditional cathode ray tube ones, and now you can purchase a TV with a 60-inch screen for less than $900.)

Stimulating Creativity SIT (see sidebar on page 46) is particularly effective in stimulating new ideas relative to sustainable products and services. What makes it so unique is its ability to be a guide for dissecting the product (or service) and then to expand its potential with new features and customer benefits. This creative process can be useful to product planners, marketing specialists as well as industrial designers.

Much has been written about other creativity tools that help us discover unfulfilled user needs, such as ethnographic research, storytelling, scenario development and even random/unstructured brain mapping. But nothing in my 15 years of teaching at Purdue has produced such a rich flow of product ideas and new product attributes as SIT. I presented the SIT system to the senior industrial design students at Purdue University this past spring in an eightweek seminar on creativity and innovation. Sixteen students were formed into four teams. Each team chose three products. After making a detailed list of all the products’ individual components, they applied the SIT process to each.

After evaluating the results on the basis of new features and the most rewarding user benefits, each team chose the most innovative and unique product for final completion. The four products that were carried to final completion were a ceiling fan, an atmosphere enhancing product, an outdoor grill and a kitchen stand mixer. The computer-generated renderings of the four final products were accompanied by matrices showing new customer-oriented features and their

respective SIT templates through which they were generated.

The effectiveness of using the SIT process is clearly demonstrated by the new ideas that were incorporated into the revised product designs: The ceiling fan project features the addition of mood lighting, aroma dispersion, voice control and optional heat dispersion. The atmosphere enhancer contains modularization of key components with the addition of separate controls and icons for user flexibility and cost efficiency. (Users are able to purchase only the components they need.)

In the outdoor grill project, a number of meaningful features were incorporated, such as a steaming compartment, remote controllability, a multifunction temperature gauge and a uniquely designed safety-off feature that engages when no food is left on the grilling or steaming surfaces. It also features a specially designed grate for grilling hot dogs. LED lighting placed on the outside of the lid provides additional user benefits. One of the highlights of this improved design is the self-cleaning feature, which certainly satisfies one of the most customer-oriented needs.

The stand mixer redesign incorporates multiple user benefits, including portability, ease of cleaning, palm-actuated speed control, a rechargeable battery drive, multiple beat-

Ceiling fan designed by Mallory Evans, Reed Fansler, Bridget Lisec and Walker Mardis.

ers designed for unique mixing applications and a specially configured flexible hinge lid cover.

Unquestionably, SIT is an analytical thinking tool that can, if used correctly, significantly reinforce the creative process and help generate multiple innovative ideas in the development of new products or services. n

Stand mixer designed by Dom Atibil, Casey Keyler, Ben Stibal and Sophia White.

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The Process and Success of SIT

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he traditional view of creativity is that you need to think outside the box to be truly original and innovative. Start with the problem and then brainstorm without restraint. Go wild making analogies to things that have nothing to do with your product, service or process.

Stretch as far afield as possible and you’ll come up with a breakthrough idea.

A comprehensive study of the most successful innovations and practices with some of the most successful companies in the world, proves just the opposite. More innovation—and better and quicker innovation—happens when you (1) work inside your familiar world, (2) generate solutions independent of any specific problem and (3) use just five simple techniques to generate those solutions: subtraction, unification, multiplication, dependency and division.

These techniques form the basis of the innovation method called systematic inventive thinking (SIT). In the 20 years since its inception, the method has been expanded to cover a wide range of innovation-related phenomena in a variety of contexts. The techniques are based on patterns used by mankind for thousands of years to create new solutions. These patterns are embedded into the products and services you see around you, almost like the DNA of a product or service. SIT allows you to extract those patterns and reapply them to other products, processes and services.

The five techniques are: Subtraction: Innovative products and services tend to have had something removed, usually something that was previously thought to be essential in order to use the product or service. Phillips created the Slimline DVD using SIT. Its team subtracted the front panel controls from the DVD and placed them on the TV screen. Johnson & Johnson created a whole new type of anesthesia machine for operating rooms by subtracting out certain monitoring components. n

n Task unification: Innovative products and services tend to have had certain tasks brought together and unified within one component of the product or service, usually a component that was previously thought to be unrelated to that task. Crowdsourcing, for example, leverages large groups of people by tasking them to generate insights or tasks, sometimes without even realizing it. Apple revolutionized smartphones by crowdsourcing the creation of apps.

Nissan used task unification for its Easy Fill Tire Alert: The car’s horn beeps to let you know you’ve added enough air to your tires. n Multiplication: Innovative products and services tend to have had a component copied but changed in some way, usually in a way that initially seemed unnecessary or redundant. Procter & Gamble used SIT to create a unique

line of air fresheners called the NoticeAble. It has two different scents that alternately pulse into the room so people never stop smelling them. Vivitar used multiplication when it created the double flashing camera that eliminates red eye from photos. n Division: Innovative products and services tend to have had a component divided out of the product or service and placed back somewhere into the usage situation, usually in a way that initially seemed unproductive or unworkable. GE used SIT to create an app for jet engine mechanics by dividing out multiple data sources and placing them in one location. Drone makers are using the division technique when they divide out the pilots and put them on the ground. n Attribute dependency: Innovative products and services tend to have had two attributes correlated with each other, usually attributes that previously seemed unrelated.

As one attribute changes, another changes. Nestlé used the SIT method to create a completely new line of tea beverages that vary for each season of the year. Most carmakers use attribute dependency in windshield wipers: The speed of the wiper changes as the amount of rain changes.

Using these patterns correctly relies on two key ideas.

The first is that you have to retrain the way your brain thinks about problem-solving. Most people think the way to innovate is by starting with a well-defined problem and then thinking of solutions. With the SIT method it is just the opposite. You start with an abstract, conceptual solution and then work back to the problem that it solves. Therefore, you have to learn how to reverse the usual way the brain works in innovation. This process is called “function follows form,” first reported in 1992 by psychologist Ronald Finke.

He recognized that there are two directions of thinking: from the problem to the solution and from the solution to the problem. Finke discovered people are actually better at searching for benefits for given configurations (starting with a solution) than at finding the best configuration for a given benefit (starting with the problem).

The second key idea to using patterns is the starting point. It is an idea called “the closed world.” We tend to be most surprised with those ideas that are right under noses, that are connected in some way to our current reality or view of the world. This is counterintuitive because most people think they need to get way outside their current domain to be innovative. Methods like brainstorming and SCAMPER use random stimuli to push you outside the box for new and inventive ideas. Just the opposite is true. The most surprising ideas (“Gee, I never would have thought of that!”) are right nearby. We have a nickname for the closed world—we call it “inside the box.”

—Drew Boyd, Executive Director of the Master of Science in Marketing Program and Associate Professor of Marketing and Innovation, University of Cincinnati, boydwm@ucmail.uc.edu

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Grill designed by Johnnie Coats, Justin Harner, Maris Park and Courtney Rolland.

Atmosphere enhancer designed by Becca Alderink, Aaron Frutchey, Carter Gerard and Jack McGann.

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“

Whatever the world throws at us, industrial designers surmount barriers, leveraging them as elements.

— Jeevak Badve, IDSA

”

Chair, IDSA International Design Conference 2017 Vice President, Strategic Growth, Sundberg Ferar

IDSA International Design Conference 2017 Aug. 16–19 | Atlanta Marriott Marquis Online Registration is open through Aug. 7 at IDSA.org/International2017 Don’t panic if you missed the deadline! Registration will be available onsite.

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