Innovation Summer 2016: The State of Design

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

The State of Design CONSULTANT

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EDUCATION

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CORPORATE

SUMMER 2016

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SUMMER 2016 ®

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

Advertising Katrina Kona IDSA 703.707.6000 x100 katrinak@idsa.org

Advisory Council Gregg Davis, IDSA Alistair Hamilton, IDSA

Contributing Editor Jennifer Evans Yankopolus

Subscriptions/Copies IDSA 703.707.6000 idsa@idsa.org

jennifer@wordcollaborative.com

678.612.7463 ®

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

Annual Subscriptions Within the US $85 Canada & Mexico $100 International $150 Single Copies Fall/Yearbook All others

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THE STATE OF DESIGN CONSULTANT 18 A Design-Led Future by Simon Kidd, I/IDSA 19 Change As It Ever Was by Scott Stropkay, IDSA 20 The Good, the Bad and the Enduring by Donald Strum, IDSA, and Rob Van Varick, IDSA

21 22 23 24 25 26 28 29

Leadership By Design by Patricia Moore, FIDSA Adapting to Change by William Cesaroni, IDSA Maintaining a Proper Vision by Paul Hatch, IDSA Surprise & Delight by Julie Heard, IDSA Digital Disruption by Scott Henderson, IDSA Is the Sky Falling? by Jonathan Dalton Trash Talk by Pip Tompkin, IDSA Behind the Inevitable by Elijah Wiegmann, IDSA

EDUCATION 31 How We Make Makes the World by Rama Chorpash, IDSA 32 Equipping Future Change Agents by James W.R. Fathers, IDSA 34 Design Problems for Design Educators by Sooshin Choi, IDSA 35 Without Boundaries by Peter Haythornthwaite, IDSA 36 The Discovery of Wisdom by Owen Foster, IDSA 37 Innovation Integration by Angela Yeh, IDSA 38 Art of the State by Lorraine Justice, FIDSA 39 Classroom Disruption by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA 40 A Road to World Peace by Dr. Noel Mayo, IDSA 41 The Big Bang by Craig M. Vogel, FIDSA 42 An Abbreviated Design Methodology by Allen Samuels, L/IDSA 43 The Need to Formalize Design Knowledge by Patrick Whitney, IDSA 44 The Broadening Sweep of Design Education by Ann-Marie Conrado, IDSA 45 The Human in the Center by Dave Richter-O’Connell CORPORATE 46 The Method Designer by Michael Paterson, I/IDSA 47 Educating T-Shaped Designers by Ken Musgrave, IDSA 48 Building a Successful Innovation Program by Matt Eyring 49 Design Streams, Teams & Vision by Jim Kendall 50 Generalist & Specialist by Kevin Shinn, IDSA 51 Preparing for Practice Now by Robert T. Schwartz, FIDSA 52 The Evolving Role of Design by Hina Shahid, IDSA 53 Think Small by Rotimi Solola, IDSA 54 Persistence Becomes Pervasive by Lou Lenzi, FIDSA 56 Maximum Strategic Impact by Paul Magee, IDSA 57 The Sweet Spot by Eric Quint, IDSA 58 Full Circle by Megan Neese, IDSA 59 The Need for Prudence by Farrell M. Calabrese, IDSA

IN EVERY ISSUE

4 IDSA HQ

by Daniel Martinage, CAE

6 From the Editor

by Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

8 Design Defined

by William Bullock, FIDSA

10 Beautility

by Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

12 Book Review

by Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

14 A Look Back

by Russell Flinchum 60 Showcase IDSA AMBASSADORS 3M Design, St. Paul, MN Banner & Witcoff, Chicago; Washington, DC; Boston; Portland, OR Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL; Santa Barbara, CA Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH Dell, Round Rock, TX Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN Jerome Caruso Design Inc., Lake Forest, IL LUNAR, San Francisco, Chicago, Munich, Hong Kong McAndrews, Held & Malloy, Ltd., Chicago, IL Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO solidThinking, Troy, MI TEAGUE, Seattle, WA; Munich, Germany Teknor Apex, Pawtucket, RI Thrive, Atlanta, GA Tupperware, Orlando, FL Charter supporters indicated by color.

For more information about becoming an Ambassador, please contact Katrina Kona at 703.707.6000 x100.

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA INNOVATION THE STATE OF DESIGN

The State of Design CONSULTANT

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SUMMER 2016

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. ©2016 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 35, No. 2, 2016; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

Advertisers’ Index 7 Autodesk 30 College for Creative Studies 5 Eastman Innovation Lab 1 Essential 16 IDSA International Conference 2016 16 IDSA Medical Design Conference 2016 c4 LUNAR c3 Mixer Group c2 Pip Tompkin 17 solidThinking 13 Thrive

I D S A HQ

DESIGN PATENT LAW TAKES CENTER STAGE

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he US Supreme Court’s decision to hear an appeal on the Samsung v. Apple patent infringement case marks the first time in more than a century that the high court has examined design patents. Opponents on both sides of the issue agree that a ruling in this case could impact design patents in the United States significantly.

The Supreme Court will focus only on one of the issues Samsung had brought for appeal: whether damages relating to a design patent should be apportioned in relation to the value added by the patented design or cover the entire profit on the infringing product, as the current law stipulates.

Leading up to the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case, IDSA’s position on the Samsung v. Apple patent dispute had been to not weigh in on the specifics of the case or to side with one company over the other. As a nonprofit membership association, IDSA needed its membership to provide direction.

Our change in strategy came about as a result of IDSA’s 2016 Member and Industry Research Program Survey, in which we asked our members what IDSA’s role should be on regulatory issues. More than 60 percent of respondents indicated that IDSA should take a more active role. The most common issue identified as critically important in the survey was design patent protection and intellectual property.

IDSA’s Board of Directors created a task force to explore how IDSA should formulate a position on intellectual property and patent issues to protect industrial designers from the growing threat of global piracy.

The task force spawned a partnership between IDSA, the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School and Penn’s Integrated Product Design Program—with the intent of co-sponsoring

a series of invitation-only roundtable discussions on design patent law. The first roundtable was held on April 8, 2016, at Penn’s Law School in Philadelphia with 16 leading designers, patent attorneys and educators.

Discussion focused primarily on issues surrounding the Supreme Court’s hearing of the Samsung v. Apple case.

The group recommended collectively that IDSA develop an independent amicus curiae brief that supports the maintenance of current patent law, not the appeal for apportionment.

IDSA’s Board of Directors approved creating the amicus brief—with Robert Katz, A/IDSA, of Banner & Witcoff taking the lead, assisted by Peter Bressler, FIDSA; Cooper Woodring, FIDSA; Charles Mauro, IDSA; and Nancy Perkins, FIDSA, as advisers—with myself serving as a liaison between IDSA leadership and the legal team. The roundtable plans to gather again later this summer and in the fall to identify and discuss other patent issues likely to impact industrial design in the future.

IDSA was in the spotlight as the official co-sponsor of the 10th annual United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Design Day on April 19, 2016, in Arlington, VA. The then-IDSA Chair Emeritus Austen Angell, FIDSA, (above) and I addressed the standing-room-only crowd of 400 on “What’s Trending on Design.” For the first time, the program was webcast to all four USPTO regional offices across the country.

IDSA’s involvement in the roundtable, amicus brief and USTPO Design Day are all evidence of how the Society continues to uphold one of its key missions—advocacy—by championing industrial design and its value to business and society as a whole.

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

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#MaterialsMatter

F RO M T HE E DI TOR

STATE OF THE ART

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erminology and jargon can often be confusing. Take “leading edge,” “bleeding edge” and “cutting edge.”

They usually mean “ahead of the curve” in some fashion. The term “state of the art,” on the other hand, means, according to Wikipedia, “the highest level of general development, as of a device, technique, or scientific field achieved at a particular time. It also refers to such a level of development reached at any particular time as a result of the common methodologies employed at the time.”

In this issue of INNOVATION, we explore the realm where something transitions from being on the edge to being common as well as the common methods in use in industrial design today. In the service of this effort, we turned to a cutting-edge design tool as a way of generating content: crowdsourcing. Instead of a small number of authors focusing on a single topic, we reached out to a large group of design experts to get a mixed and balanced view of the state of the art today in industrial design.

It’s a big ask to profile the dimensions of the field in one issue. To do it we needed a tool, a framework, so we established three verticals—consultant, education and corporate—to encompass the perspective of most design initiatives. INNOVATION invited an equal amount of opinions from each area. We gave everyone a bookend as to how many words to use and invited suggestions for photos and submissions of original photos and art. Of course this is a nonscientific survey, as they say, but our ambition is to provide a fair cross section and distribution of perspectives from each of these three points of view.

This mix of ideas and impressions is made more important by the moment design finds itself in as it transforms before our eyes into the thing we always have hoped it would: the best way for business and society to thrive. Sure there are other ways, especially in business (for example, distribution, marketing, pricing), but these methods generally don’t leave humanity better off in the wake of their executions. It has always been design’s great value and, some would also argue, hubris, that we as a profession believe we can improve life and living through our method. It starts with identifying true a need and then uses the practice to answer that need. What could have more impact than that?

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In Valuing the Art of Industrial Design: A Profile of the Sector and Its Importance to Manufacturing, Technology, and Innovation, the National Endowment for the Arts’ seminal 2013 report, author Bonnie Nichols describes design as “a field with a large and extensive presence in our nation’s manufacturing and services industries” and says that “designers are prolifically inventing new products, processes, and systems that have a profound impact on our economy and civil society.” As an indicator of the state of the art of design, the report describes in detail “the growing movement of design thinking to social impact design” and calls for an expanded definition for industrial design. It points out that “today’s industrial designers find themselves in a variety of roles and functions beyond the development of manufactured products. ... working on projects for a variety of organizations, from government entities to private enterprises. Using a creative lens for approaching complex problems or challenges (often referred to as the design process), designers are engaged by a range of clients to bring a fresh approach to age-old issues. Industrial designers are not just designing commercial products, but designing user experiences, processes, and systems by applying the creative approach of what has been come to be known as ‘design thinking’.”

The report suggests that “the idea to utilize the design process as a way to analyze and innovate has been widely embraced—from business schools to major consulting practices—and has changed the landscape of how industrial designers work.” Of the expanding role industrial designers play, it says that “design thinking requires industrial designers to work on diverse teams to solve these more complex challenges. In a typical firm, a team might include an engineer, design strategist, marketer, and anthropologist, as well as software designers and developers, as products become more intelligent and responsive to media inputs.”

This report is a spot-on analysis of the landscape of industrial design today. It suggests that designers now more than ever design less for clients and more for social causes and populations that need design but can’t pay for it, and that education is “retooling” their curricula by creating hybrid programs focused more than ever on cross-functional understanding. It also calls out the current designer-as-

“It has always been design’s great value and, some would also argue, hubris that

we as a profession believe we can improve life and living through our method.

It starts with identifying true a need and then uses the practice to answer that need.

What could have more impact than that?

entrepreneur trend, suggesting that “new funding platforms such as Kickstarter have enabled entrepreneurial designers to obtain capital to explore conceptual ideas and realize new inventions.”

On the origins of the term “state of the art,” Wikipedia notes that it was first used in 1910, as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary, in Gas Turbine, an engineering manual written by Henry Harrison Suplee. Specifically Suplee wrote: “In the present state of the art this is all that can be done.” According to Wikipedia, “The term, ‘art,’ itself refers to the useful arts, skills and methods relating to

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practical subjects such as manufacture and craftsmanship, rather than in the sense of the performing arts and the fine arts. Over time, use of the term increased in all fields where this kind of art has a significant role.”

It’s clear that industrial design has a significant role to play in the manufacture and craftsmanship of products and services as well as in promoting design as an art and a form of independent expression—an art that leaves us all better off in a meaningful way. We hope that after reading this issue of INNOVATION you will have a better sense of the state of the art of industrial design today.

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

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Autodesk and Fusion 360 are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product and services offerings, and specifications and pricing at any time without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document. © 2015 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.

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21/09/2015 12:25

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DESIGN AS THE MOTHER I like the name “industrial design” and I’m sticking to it.

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y journey in design began more than a half century ago when a listing for industrial design in a college course catalog caught my mother’s eye as something I might enjoy pursuing. Since then I have spent much of my adult life explaining first to my mother and then to others what it is that industrial designers do— and do not do. I estimate that in my years as an educator I have answered the question “What is industrial design?” for parents and prospective students perhaps 5,000 times.

Even among colleagues and administrators at the storied university at which I now reside the question still comes up.

When I graduated from Auburn with my BID there was one industrial design consultancy in all of Atlanta, the nearest urban center. New York and Chicago were the design meccas, and outside of that pickings could be slim.

My first job title was associate engineer because industrial design was not yet recognized by the federal government as an official profession warranting a job title. That has all changed now, of course. In the intervening half century, the profession has grown and matured as industry recognized its value. The challenge of helping design new design programs and watching them mature into schools of design has been particularly rewarding.

One of the difficulties we have always had in explaining what it is that we do is that industrial designers do so many different things. In earlier years when IDSA published a hard-copy membership directory, it included a list of design activities (i.e., the types of design) practiced by its members.

I once counted more than 85, and that was 25 years ago.

Another problem that has been debated off and on over the

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years is that the name of our profession implies the design of industry or industry engineering. While the term “industrial design” may not help the public grasp the art of what we do, in the context of well-designed mass-produced products the name industrial design makes perfect sense to them.

But a remarkable thing has now happened. Industry has discovered, in large part due to Apple and its user-centric design and manufacturing, that it can no longer compete on the basis of technology alone, and that products (virtual or real) must delight customers. Designers as never before are being called upon to innovate new and sustainable solutions to unmet needs.

Similarly, in the academy, design thinking and methods are increasingly embraced by engineering, business, the sciences and the humanities as both an effective approach to learning and as an alternative to the scientific method of inquiry. There is increasing interest in what we industrial designers do and how we do it. At my research university, my industrial design colleagues and students alike are in demand as never before as research and teaching collaborators in programs across campus. Through these collaborations, the university, siloed for many years by increasing specialization, is being reinvented, embracing the very notion of a university as education in both science and art.

With the notion of design (industrial) thinking increasingly embraced by fields as diverse as engineering, marketing, sociology, psychology and others, the demand for industrial designers and what it is that we do has increased exponentially. The array of jobs industrial designers perform

OF INNOVATION has expanded from the real (think product design) to include the virtual, with all-encompassing titles like humancentered design, user interface design, interaction design and user experience design. The emerging discipline of experience design is taking hold and involves collaboration across different disciplines in the design of a wide array of products and environments, events and services. The fact that graduates from our industrial design programs have always worked in these areas since their inception is well established; it is what most industrial design programs worth their salt have always done: prepare students for design that focuses on addressing the real needs of users.

Just as the profession, particularly consultancies, are increasingly embracing lucrative opportunities with clients in the virtual design realm, industrial design programs are likewise rushing to establish programs of study to attract students in response to this growing industry demand and the realities of enrollment-driven funding.

Designers always have the itch for something new, so the debate about what we call ourselves will never end. A new name or names may be coined to address the specific needs of industry and the user/consumer. For example, the thing that both puzzles and delights me about experience design is that to us it is nothing new; it is what we have always done as industrial designers. We can be proud that industrial design is the parent that spins off these specializations as the need arises.

As it happens, I’m writing this on Mother’s Day in the US. I like the name “industrial design.” It is what I do. I’m siding with mom on this.

—William Bullock, FIDSA, Professor and Chair of Industrial Design, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign wbullock@illinois.edu Margaret T. Bullock

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B E A U T I LI TY

MAGIC THINKING: 3 WISHES

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agic thinkers control time and space. Magicians, wizards and sorcerers manipulate supernatural forces, make things (dis)appear and transform ordinary things into precious things. To J.Q. Public, designers seem to do all that too. And we do! Using nothing more than our imaginations, designers conjure up fantastic things, transform sows’ ears into unbelievable gadgets, cast spells on materials to make stunning cars and housewares appear out of nowhere. J.Q. assumes some kind of alchemy makes their smartphones work and sunglasses just fall out of the sky.

Industrial designers’ products are more magical than Aladdin’s lamp. Our “magic thinking” (a stepmother of design thinking) creates beautiful and meaningful things that can have real magical effects on emotions and behavior and they actually exist! Physical forms have magical power that attracts people, seduces them, and helps them develop taste and feel good. Maybe that seems like a trick, but beautility actually does have power, unlike charms, talismans and crystal hokum.

Wish #1: More design making! Design is more than magic—it’s a profession with a process for living better.

Beginning with playing with blocks and crayons, junior designers become empowered through learning by making to collaborate in their own education and to become lifelong learners. Lifelong design is all about play! It is actually living better.

It is a miracle that we can take a piece of paper and a pencil and draw a design. When I was a kid, we would draw regular things like houses and cats, but when we drew something else that didn’t represent anything, we’d call it a “design.” Lately I’ve been making little design doodles in the Parsons’ makerspace. I take a scrap of wood, cut a shape on the band saw and sand it for a while until it looks good.

It’s nothing special, but I get that magic feeling of making something with my hands. I’m in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow zone—a beautiful state.

The fathers of our profession came from theater: Norman Bel Geddes and even Henry Dreyfuss were set designers, and Raymond Loewy began as a window dresser. They knew how to use lighting magic and how to cast spells with special effects. They understood the enchanting power of narrative. Their streamlining and later Reinhart

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Butter and Mike McCoy’s product semantics gave paranormal meaning to inanimate teapots and toasters. Designers wield powerful magic that makes people fall in love!

Wish #2: Think ahead. Since designers make things that people want, let’s make people want things that are good for us. We gratify people by anticipating their needs and making things work more effectively—now ecological fit is imperative. Universal design thinking is just thinking ahead by not producing barriers. We make so-called handicaps magically vanish and systems more sustainable. You don’t need to know any secret magic words to be a designer—everyone should be thinking ahead!

Magicians design their tricks. Through a user-centered approach, magicians envision what will amaze the audience and then reverse engineer the experience, figuring out how to trick them. The magician shows the audience only part of what’s actually happening so it appears like they pull a real rabbit out of an empty hat or saw a person in half. The illusions are design tools, even though distraction and camouflage are the opposite of what we thought we learned in school. Designers use form tricks to make cars look longer and lower or fun and chubby (even though the chassis is more or less the same). That magic is also helpful for camouflaging joints with exaggerated reveals and making flat planes look flat by making them bulge out a little so they don’t look concave. We specify accent colors to trick the eye. We disguise air vents and less-than-optimal surfaces with cool textures and patterns. We use magic thinking to make signs easier to read, interfaces more intuitive and machines safer to use by focusing the user’s attention on what’s important. As the magician Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) says: “If you spend a lot of time lying to people, you think a lot about what the truth means.”

Magic thinking is design thinking but steeped in the spicy cauldron of outback superstitions and ancient supernatural forces. Understanding magic and myths is an ethnographic tool for discovering primordial human needs and desires. Fairy tales describe basic human fears and wishes. Who wouldn’t want to live in a candy house or marry the prince? But watch out, they are cautionary tales: there is always a hidden price to pay for spinning hay into gold. Yet

“Magic thinking is design thinking but steeped in the spicy cauldron of

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outback superstitions and ancient supernatural forces.

people still want things to happen magically! Magic is our dream: the black arts can conjure easy riches, foresee the future, give superpowers, hide secrets, get quick revenge.

But sorcerers’ charms have their own rules.

The rationalist’s problem with magic is that it works outside the laws of nature and is based on deception—of course, some form of dishonesty is necessary to cast the spell (that’s why Disneyland is a little creepy and politicians can seem inauthentic). It’s stupid to fool Mother Nature!

The other day my nephew’s grandmother said, “Everything is possible if you are ignorant!” Using magic is a trade off.

It takes away space and time (instant gratification can lead to instant dismay and eventually infinite boredom). It eliminates responsibility, and most of all, magic eradicates reality.

“Who thinks anymore?” said my teenage nephew.

People say they want life to be easy and comfortable.

The world is becoming their supernatural dream where magic technology is at their fingertips: magic boxes cook food instantly, even smaller magic boxes play music, magic picture frames play games, magic wands change the channel and magic carpets drive us wherever we tell them to take us. As Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001, said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And now in virtual reality everything else is possible!

It used to be that humans had to deal with the cards we were dealt: early humans huddled out of the rain in caves and ate the food they could catch. Human progress began with mastering the magic of fire and overcoming mythological forces (like thunder and lightning). Eventually we figured out how to draw and record stories with mysterious signs only priests and nerds could decipher.

Design floats between the abstract and the real—it’s an intellectual process with concrete results! Designers are jugglers of the artificial and authentic. The post-industrial era is also post-natural, genetically modified—GMOs raised in greenhouses by robots. Wild animals, free-range game and single-cell biology are now designed more by humans than Mother Nature. Darwinian forces are being warped by us. Designers could end up like Walt Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice (you can read about the next era in Post Human by designer Dan Friedman published by Jeffrey Deitch in 1986).

Wish #3: Now that we can do anything, we need to figure out what not to do. More technology that will enable us to design real materials with new “natural” properties to help rebalance the ecosystem. Like magic, nanotechnology will grow matter and build artificial networks we need to survive the coming global disruptions.

It used to be a battle against nature—volcanoes and wild animals were the enemy. Climate change is World War III—us against the world and we are “winning” big time. Now storms are caused by us! As Pogo says, “We met the enemy and it is us!” To really win, we have to prove Victor Papanek —“There are professions more harmful than industrial design.”—Wrong.

That puts a lot of pressure on us! The exciting thing about the popularity of innovation and entrepreneurship today is that it creates the supportive atmosphere for design solutions to the wicked problems we face.

You don’t need to look in a crystal ball to see what’s going on. No matter what anyone says, the mess we are in is not going to be fixed with wishes and magic! Because as Ben Franklin said, “Well done is better than well said.”

Industrial designers create real things that work on real problems.

The time is now to apply our real talents, our real thinking to make some real progress!

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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BO O K RE V I E W

X: THE EXPERIENCE WHEN BUSINESS MEETS DESIGN

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ow. What a great user experience reading this book is. Isn’t that what we all say after a great experience? Wow. This is the most accomplished book of its kind that I have read in that it not only maps out why experience is important but also goes into both the fundamental and tricky aspects of how to create them. For example, UX+CX+BX=Experience. You have to read the book to comprehend that, but once you do, you understand why it makes sense and after that you can’t unread what you have read because that knowledge = great experience.

And that’s just one chapter.

Brian Solis’ interactive and engaging book is full of useful tools, grids, stories and methods. Its layout and design facilitate a fast read, moving you smoothly through each compact and energetic chapter. Everything about the book engages, like the interesting and cheeky chapter titles: Human Algorithm, Holy Persona, Journey Mapping, Circle of Fire, Moments of Truth, for example. The imagery, the formatting, even the typography reinforce the author’s message: experience counts.

The title is a little long and somewhat awkward, but it’s fitting, and the author covers the topic in a comprehensive way. In making your way through the book, you are struck by the idea that surely companies don’t do everything Solis outlines, or rather don’t do all of it in one place at one time.

In most companies there is not, for example, a professional or key company officer who covers each subject profiled in these chapters, but there should be. Rather, I am assuming from experience that many of the ideas covered here are accomplished through homogenized duties and tasks done by corporate groups like customer service, marketing design and sales. In X we get a persuasive argument for the need for a leader to oversee this new discipline. This book is a comprehensive primer for just such a person—the CXO, the chief experience officer—but really it’s invaluable for

anyone involved in setting strategy for a company around the experiences its customers have with its products or services.

In addition to providing useful tools, throughout the book the author does a great job of dropping in contemporary references to movies and cultural events as helpful demonstrations and memory aides.

There is, of course, the obligatory nods to the current icons of experience thinking like Steve Jobs and Dyson, but even these are done in an acknowledged and somewhat fresh voice that first pays homage and then uses the examples to illustrate a potential quotient for success. Interestingly for me personally, visualizing strategy is a powerful tool explored in the chapter called Grid. This is a topic I am very interested in and have written about in the past because it is such an effective communication tool. You can find many useful ideas like this in X. Is there perhaps too much information here? It is presented in a way that is more entertaining than applied.

Perhaps, but I forgive the book these idiosyncrasies in the tradeoff that is evident—an engaging book that creates a great experience. Each chapter actually stands as its own self-contained read about a habit or objective to aim for.

X is more of a living document that you can refer to over and over again to engage or refresh, rather than a read that requires your dedicated attention over a long period to get a 250-page payoff.

Brian Solis has done a great job of taking the state of the art in experience design and presenting it in a clear, enjoyable and useful read. This book should be on the shelf of everyone forging ahead in this new design economy mindset where a person’s experience with a product or service defines the brand for all of us. Solis is clearly well versed in the understanding of how experiences create business success, and this book is a thorough exploration of the matter. Trust me, reading this book is a great experience.

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

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A L O O K B ACK

Phil Patton (1952–2015)

THE BEST FRIEND AMERICAN DESIGN EVER HAD

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any readers of INNOVATION will be familiar with the name Phil Patton, which is at least partly explainable by the fact that Phil began writing for Esquire and other major publications as early as the 1970s. It was

only after his death on September 22, 2015 that his many friends learned of the illness that killed him. Phil would have been the last person to draw attention to his departure, and it is this modesty, a vital part of his particular form of genius, that motivated me to write about him. Although he was not an industrial designer, he was perhaps the best design critic of his generation, a car guy who was interested in many, many things other than cars.

Phil probably reached most of the readers of INNOVATION through his column in the now-defunct automotive section of the New York Times, where he once explained (and diagrammed) the language of car designers for an audience unfamiliar with terms like “tumblehome” and “greenhouse.”

(Not to mention, “porkchop,” “babyassing” and “catwalk”— has any other profession given rise to such rich descriptive jargon?) Among his many books were Bug and Made in USA—friendly guides through complex historical terrain that were never patronizing. And here finally I begin to get to the heart of the man and what he meant to his friends.

Phil could be critical, but there was never anything spiteful in his criticism that I can recall—something more like the disappointment of a caring parent. And in the layer beneath the critic was a man of such modesty that most of us learned of his accomplishments only when planning began for a memorial to him at the Cooper Hewitt. When asked where he did his undergrad, Phil would reply that he went to school in Boston. He did not say that he left Broughton High School in Raleigh, NC, to attend Harvard on scholarship, and then did the unbelievable (and no longer possible) one-year master’s in comparative literature at Columbia University. His thesis was on Vladimir Nabokov. His thesis advisor, who knew

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Nabokov, passed the thesis on to its subject. Nabokov then invited Phil to visit him and his wife in France.

I can remember precisely the first time I met Phil in the basement of the Cooper Hewitt at Egle Zygas’ desk in the Education Department where Zygas introduced me to a fellow wearing glasses and a bolo tie resplendent with a scorpion embedded in plastic. I didn’t really know who he was yet, but obviously he made an impression! I also remember the first time I read something he wrote. It was an article in the Village Voice about the critical difference between Eastern North Carolina barbecue (the standard by which all others are judged) and, well, anything else billed as barbecue. Phil Patton was from North Carolina, as am I. North Carolinians usually bond over this understanding of what constitutes the definitive item, which eludes many others (perhaps Texans and brisket come close to this same ethos, but Good God, man, barbecue is meant to be made of pork shoulders cooked over hickory with some vinegar and pepper flakes and that’s it, OK?).

Anyway, Phil not only knew good barbecue but had found someone who was bringing real North Carolina ’cue to Brooklyn—I mean physically bringing it north. So Phil was no dilettante; he was a man who knew where the action

By Russell Flinchum raflinch@ncsu.edu Russell Flinchum, PhD, is an associate professor in the departments of graphic design and industrial design/art+design in NC State University’s College of Design. He is the author of Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit (Rizzoli/CooperHewitt, National Design Museum, 1997) and American Design (5 Continents/The Museum of Modern Art, 2008). Photo: Ben Scott

was. And the action was in a place I had never heard of in Brooklyn, much less ever been to. In a single article Phil had shown himself to be both better informed than I and more resourceful. What do you look for in a critic?

Fast forward approximately a decade, and we’re sitting around a table in the Education Wing of the Museum of Modern Art. I’m at the end of what has been a very good 10 years of being a tour guide, gallery lecturer, brown bag lunch lecturer—whatever they would let me do (for money).

I was somewhat overdue for retirement as this job was really intended for a graduate student, not someone who had received his PhD several years before. It was an evening lecture course called The Automobile Aesthetically Considered and was rooted in my research into MoMA’s on-again, offagain relationship with cars. Six people signed up (luckily a break-even point for the museum), but with the implication that this was my swan song. It was absolutely great.

We had a salesman from Maserati, a fellow who wrote for Microsoft’s magazine, the wonderful Bonnie Wright whose father had been a graphic designer in LA in the 1950s and drove a Ferrari—everyone had a story. Plus Phil Patton. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so flattered. Phil listened more than he spoke, because it was those stories, and not the cars they described, that spoke to his heart. And unlike the rather lame storytelling that is constantly stressed in design schools today, these stories were about deep human relationships cemented by machines. Here we begin to get into Phil’s territory. Although Phil anchored his stories in things, they were usually really about people and human values and the idea that design could be generous or hilariously cheap, and he believed that both points on this spectrum were worth looking at. In fact, he believed that almost everything was worth looking at.

The only time Phil and I had a conversation that veered from a mutual downloading of information and opinion into the personal was when I asked him about his youth.

He told me his father was a bomber pilot in World War II and had been shot down, wounded and blinded in combat.

He no doubt counted on Phil and his brother to see the world for him. I think Phil taught us how to see the world and to see it differently. He is most famous not for a flaming dismissal of someone’s failure to grasp the fundamentals of automotive design but for his charming and brief history of the coffee cup lid. Through the remarkable efforts of Pamela

Horn at the Cooper Hewitt, Paul Herzan, Neil Donnelly, Matthew Kennedy and many others, a wonderful survey of Phil’s writings has been published as Top This and Other Parables of Design: Selected Writings of Phil Patton (available at the Cooper Hewitt online store for $17.95). A copy will fit in your jacket pocket, and that is where it belongs.

Take it out during that subway ride or that 15 minutes you’d normally play with your phone in a waiting room. Phil will cheer you up and make you look at things differently. You may find yourself feeling that same sense of companionship I felt when we’d go with friends to the Greenwich Concours d’Elegance, which it appears will not be held this year as its principal sponsor died last year as well. Phil would have had something wise and philosophical to write at this point. All I can write is that we miss you, Phil. n

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Save-the-Date

Nov. 11–12 • San Francisco, CA • UCSF Medical Center Join designers, medical professionals and experts in related fields for keynote sessions, panels and hands-on workshops—focusing on creating meaningful value to truly transform the healthcare system.

Learn more at IDSA.org/2016Medical

Making Things Happen Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center IDSA International Conference featuring the new IDSA Career Center; and keynotes from Ford Motor Company, Shinola, MAYA Design and The Empowerment Plan. This great event will be a celebration for industrial design in this revitalized city!

International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) Ceremony & Gala The Henry Ford Museum IDEA Ceremony – free and open to all | IDEA Gala – ticketed event Making Things Happen in Design Education Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center IDSA/Eastman Innovation Lab Education Symposium

Make It Happen. Register Today.

IDSA.org/Detroit @IDSA #IDSADetroit16

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IDSA Members Register for FREE at Converge2016.com/IDSA

CO N S U LTANT

A DESIGN-LED FUTURE

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believe we have witnessed a real paradigm shift.

Designers have now been empowered to inject their thinking into the very early stages of the development process. Their role is no longer quarantined to aesthetics around predetermined packages of technology. They now have a voice from the outset. This has resulted in much better designed, more purposeful products, and broadly speaking has translated into financial rewards for businesses willing to adopt this strategy.

The current crop of successful design-driven businesses has proven that there is a new willingness to give designers the keys to pretty much every room in the house.

The real question now is whether they are fully equipped to operate in this broader landscape. What tools, education and training do the next generation of designers need to fully take advantage of this increased level of responsibility? —Simon Kidd, I/IDSA simonkidd@blackmagicdesign.com Kidd is the director of industrial design at Blackmagic Design.

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CHANGE AS IT EVER WAS

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engineers. From that technical foundation, we expanded our capabilities, adding more diverse design-oriented contributors and over time took the design leadership mantle.

The leaders in these firms, and many others, have helped organizations experience the power of design.

It’s only natural now that those organizations would pursue design themselves. Yes, large companies, contract manufacturers and management consultants are pursuing design by acquiring capable consulting firms. But in-house design certainly isn’t new, and there will always be a need for quality design consulting. So there’s nothing particularly new here. What is new is the level of system complexity for which we’ll be expected to design solutions. I suspect we’ll find ourselves expanding the definition of what design is and who contributes...again.

esign consulting is the same as it’s always been.

There are people to understand, problems to solve, and clarifying and confounding constraints. It’s changing too, as it always has, to address more people with bigger and tougher problems under even more complex constraints.

Historically speaking, forward-looking design leaders have always embraced the essence of what it’s meant to be a designer while they pursued the boundaries of design.

Their ability to develop inner design confidence by exploring the edges of the design world is what’s made design important and valuable.

I began my career at RichardsonSmith because in the early ’80s we thought great design required more than great designers to be most impactful. We added researchers, writers, sociologists, anthropologists, business consultants, model makers, architects, and mechanical and systems engineers to our core industrial, graphic, and commercial interior design offering. In doing so, we became one of the world’s most influential design consultants. When Fitch acquired us, we expanded globally and morphed over the years as different leaders pursued different visions. I moved from Fitch to IDEO because I liked their unmatched ability to deliver the highest-quality design as manufactured products.

At IDEO our view of design consulting was highly engineering oriented; at the time two-thirds of the design staff were

“The path of least resistance leads to

—Scott Stropkay, IDSA scott@essential-design.com Stropkay is a partner at Essential Design in Boston where he leads multidisciplinary product, user experience and service design work for client companies.

”

crooked rivers and crooked men.

—Henry David Thoreau

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CO N S U LTANT

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE ENDURING

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eople talk about two sides of a coin and two sides to every story. In the real world, there are two sides to everything: the good and the bad. For today’s design consultancies, the good news is that design is more highly valued and in greater demand than ever before. Designers intuitively organize and simplify that which is complex. There is a collective awareness about how design thinking can be used to solve a variety of problems that transcend the look, feel and function of an object. In a rapidly shifting world, clients understand this power, extending our role beyond the design of things to the design of business. More so than ever before, businesses value creativity, agility, tenacity, collaboration and emotional intelligence. In turn, design consultancies have earned a seat at the executive table, allowing us to help identify, define and solve a multitude of systems problems. More and more, design consultancies are asked to be change agents and provide leadership.

On the other hand, we do see some negative trends for design consultancies. Companies that value design continue to bring it in-house, reducing demand for consultancies.

As design becomes a more widely used strategy, its power and true meaning has become misunderstood or misrepresented by some. The demand for design has led to large managerial consultants acquiring design firms. Will these acquisitions allow the creativity that is revolutionizing today’s business culture to continue to thrive? Or will it get throttled by the machine? And while systems-thinking projects are intellectually stimulating, as a product designer nothing can replace the first time you hold and use each new product you’ve designed.

With that said, the future is extremely bright for design consultants. Our true value comes from the people and the culture of creativity fostered within the consulting environment. Our depth of experience and diversity of work leads to deep contextual knowledge of human behavior. We see rapid shifts in the world that call for creative solutions in retail, healthcare, education, government and technology.

Design is not only in demand; it is critical to finding the path forward, and design consultancies are best positioned to deliver enduring solutions.

—Donald Strum, IDSA, and Rob Van Varick, IDSA dstrum@michaelgraves.com n rvanvarick@michaelgraves.com

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Strum is principal–product design at Michael Graves Architecture & Design. Van Varick is principal–design, insights & strategy at Michael Graves Architecture & Design.

LEADERSHIP BY DESIGN

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hen I combined my primary education in design with medical school and social gerontology, friends and colleagues wondered if I weren’t risking my reputation as a designer. But clients were quick to understand the importance of a holistic approach to creating design innovation, and consultancies broadened their perspectives with multidisciplinary teams. Now the latest shift is bringing design to the boardroom for the delivery of systemic exemplars. My deliverables as a design consultant are more business plans and guidance for development and research than traditional products. Next up? Designers have to take a place on the political stage. Leadership by design might just be the best offering we can provide. —Patricia Moore, FIDSA designmoore@cox.net Moore, a designer and gerontologist, traveled to more than 100 cities in the US and Canada for three years disguised as various women in their 80s to learn about the challenges older people face, raising awareness of universal design among the design community.

She is currently head of MooreDesign Associates.

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CO N S U LTANT

ADAPTING TO CHANGE

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he main changes I have seen in my career and in 36 years of owning an industrial design consulting firm can be labeled under four headings: technology, clients, employees and the American economy.

The changes in technology have been beyond comprehension. Thirty–six years ago we were still creating concept renderings with Magic Markers while sitting at $2,000 workstations (furniture and supplies). Eight years later I was spending $20,000 on one 2D (AutoCAD) workstation. Six years after that I was spending $60,000 on one 3D (Pro/E) workstation. Fortunately, now it’s about $12,000 for one 3D (SolidWorks) workstation. If someone would have told me when I started that I would eventually spend over half a million dollars on computer equipment and software, I probably would have never gone into business.

The change in clients has also been interesting. Originally, most consulting design firms desired large Fortune 500 corporations as clients, rather than small privately held companies. The larger corporations had larger design budgets, longer lead times and more loyalty. Today it is just the opposite. Since too many corporate CEOs have become celebrity CEOs, the loyalty and longevity of corporate managers and directors have diminished. This reduction of corporate loyalty has passed down to the way consultants are treated as well. In the 1980s, consultants were as good as their last job, which was more than fair. Today, many large public corporations solicit multiple quotes from multiple consultants, regardless of how dedicated or productive the most recent consultant may have been. Too often price—not design quality or loyalty—determines which consultant receives the next project. In contrast, most privately held companies are more loyal to their employees and their employees are more loyal to their employer. That loyalty is then passed down to

their consultants. It creates a wonderful working relationship and the opportunity for great product design. Thus we cherish our privately held companies and clients.

The evolution of the industrial design employee has been impressive and necessary. Forty years ago, a new industrial design graduate who had a reasonable sense of design and could draw or render well always landed a job.

I know because I was one of them. Today, the new graduates are amazing. They have a good sense of design, are mechanically inclined, understand ergonomics and user interface, plus are computer wizards. I don’t know how university professors have time to teach so much. The sad result is that design agencies like mine can complete twice the amount of work with half the number of designers we once employed.

Lastly, we must mention the American economy. When I started working, manufacturing was about 37 percent of the gross national product; today it is about 12 percent.

First came Japan, then Korea, then Mexico and now China.

The fewer products that are made in this country, the more difficult it is to acquire new US clients and the fewer jobs we have to offer new industrial designers. Unfortunately, I do not see a quick fix to the current situation, nor do I believe in isolationism. Fortunately, because of communication software like GoToMeetings, we can service our domestic clients that use Chinese manufacturers. That being said, Chinese industrial designers make about 10 percent of what we pay our industrial designers, which makes it difficult to acquire Chinese clients.

A lot has happened to the industrial design profession in 36 years. However, it has happened to almost all professions. Life (and business) is about change and always will be.

Those who adapt to change survive, just like Darwin said.

—William Cesaroni, IDSA wcesaroni@cesaroni.com Cesaroni incorporated Cesaroni Design Associates in 1979.

Prior to going on his own, he worked for the largest consultant in Chicago, Mel Boldt, and what was once a highly thought-of corporation, Bell & Howell. Cesaroni Design’s main location is 20 minutes north of Chicago, with branch locations in Santa Barbara, CA, and Naples, FL.

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MAINTAINING A PROPER VISION

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his is a very exciting time to be involved in design.

But the newfound C-suite recognition of design brings its own set of challenges for us. The new designer needs to not only understand the basics of adjacent areas such as marketing, user interface, brand strategy and coding, but also be able to pull aspects from these areas and combine them into one cohesive, simple

solution. Design is a highly powerful communication tool that gives us the ability to take this solution and create a vision— one that can define the course for a product, a brand or an entire company. With this new responsibility we need to ensure that our ideas are coupled with the careful strategy and intelligence a vision deserves—a vision that still protects the users we’ve fought so long to defend.

—Paul Hatch, IDSA paul.hatch@teamsdesign.com Hatch is CEO of TEAMS Design USA, a global user experience and industrial design firm with over 1,000 design awards. He has spoken at several conferences on design and technology and was Chair of the IDSA International Conference in 2013. He is also cofounder of the non-profit Design House, and known for an event called Fight Club, which the New York Times called “a Designer Slugfest.”

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SURPRISE & DELIGHT

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he state of design is beautiful, but only if you’ve embraced a broader way of thinking and developed a wider set of skills. It’s necessary to be able to engage in the entire development process now, and I think that’s a good thing.

The general public recognizes good design whether they realize it or not. When people read product reviews on Amazon, or in the App Store, they are really seeking input about design and usability. The consideration of design is something that’s essential to a great product. People expect

to be surprised and delighted from the moment they discover a brand.

In order to deliver on these expectations, we are now designing the whole experience, and that means our expertise and collaboration skills must cross disciplines and often our educational training. We have seen the design departments of our corporate clients diversify and grow to meet these customer expectations. Consulting designers must have these same skills in order to engage and deliver as well.

—Julie Heard, FIDSA julie@mixergroup.com Heard is a co-founder and partner at Mixer Design Group in Austin, TX—a creative partner for global brands.

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DIGITAL DISRUPTION

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he state of physical design in 2016 has been colossally driven by the nonphysical. In the late ’90s, every designer strived to elevate the crappy—products we went to the grocery store to buy because someone dropped a carton of eggs, forcing us to shell out $3.99 for a sponge mop. A designer’s special skills had the power to disrupt—we were shocking, transforming and transcending.

A new disruption has blown away all of this hard work: the digital disruption. IBM shared some facts on its IBMforentrepreneurs.com site that point to the obliteration of the physical: The world’s largest taxi company does not own any taxis (Uber), the largest accommodation provider has no real estate (Airbnb), the largest movie house owns no cinemas (Netflix). The list is vast.

There are fewer physical stores to buy stuff in, which means that no one sees or touches the real things—they get tiny thumbnails instead. For a product to register, preexisting brand recognition is needed—not whether the product is well designed, because you can’t see that in a thumbnail.

These consumers are referred to as savvy—a code word meaning that they buy based on price. Price competition as the sole sales driver was the norm before we started perfecting mops back in 1999!

To overcome this, today’s products must deliver a functional benefit that is deemed essential. All nonessential knickknacks have long been thrown over the sides of this fast-moving digital hot air balloon because millennials don’t want things—they actually hate stuff. It’s best to move fast and carry less. Talking about emotion in design is so yesterday.

The best-sellers now have that why-didn’t-I-think-ofthat quality—a function story that goes viral. The current state of design is forcing the return of innovation and problem-solving over the need to beautify the forgotten object.

—Scott Henderson, IDSA scott@scotthendersoninc.com Henderson is an American designer who runs the Brooklyn-based design studio Scott Henderson Inc. His product design work for a global client base as well as the products he has designed and marketed through his own brand have had a significant influence on the field worldwide.

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C O NS U LTANT

IS THE SKY FALLING?

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t is undoubtedly an excellent time for design, and as an industry we should all give ourselves a big pat on the back for all the work done and progress made. The business of design is changing with in-house design becoming more common and the embracing of design thinking as a strategic business tool to solve problems and drive profit.

So what does this mean for design consulting? Has it had its day? Is the sky falling?

We think not. Our profession is indeed evolving, and design consultants always need to reconsider their value proposition to remain relevant. But more than ever, consultants have a significant and valuable role to play in helping their corporate peers succeed. The engagement model will need to evolve and change, and to be successful consultants will have to amplify the areas where they provide real strategic long-term value. The future is bright, but only

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if we collectively seize the opportunity business is giving us to demonstrate the value of our profession. Here are three key areas where consultants have, and will continue to have, an immediate and profound impact for their client partners: Speed Is the New IP Traditionally, consulting was built on the simple premise that clients could not solve their own problems. But the world has changed. The rate of change is the new dilemma, and we face unprecedented uncertainty with the status quo being constantly threatened by new entrants seemingly overnight. Companies are slowly having to walk away from the methods that got them where they are today. Competitive barriers of the past, such as manufacturing strength and distribution power, no longer guarantee a sustainable future. Industry boundaries are dissolving, and disruptive

companies like Tesla, Uber and Airbnb are swiftly displacing incumbents and reshaping entire industries without having any traditional knowledge of the markets they have entered.

The ability to adapt faster than your competitors is a growing source of competitive advantage, and having flexible and nimble teams at your disposal is critical to achieving this.

Today, achieving speed is the new intellectual property, and design consulting firms are ideally positioned to deliver this and assist their corporate peers on the road to success.

Expert teams assembled at a given moment to solve a particular problem are critical to achieving unstoppable momentum. Consultants can be deployed quickly against any given problem with a given capacity for focus, testing and learning quickly, making them a vital part of any organization’s competitive advantage. The key is integrating them in the right way.

The increasing importance of speed can be seen in the recent popularization of the notion of sprints: get traction quickly and fail fast. This is something that has not traditionally been associated with corporate teams, whose strength is an in-depth knowledge of the problem space and managing the day-to-day. Consultants can help in-house teams quickly get ideas built, test and learn, and outdistance the competition as well as bring a unique outside-in view—an objective lens—that can help in-house teams be more future focused and take the long view on their category and business.

Mind the Talent Gap The war for talent is alive and well and fiercely contested in the design world. We are experiencing a massive shortage of qualified individuals despite the increasing number of people entering the field. Corporations are investing heavily in design thinking, building significant internal departments and making acquisitions to build capability quickly. This seemingly uncritical adoption of design thinking still has to deliver results at scale outside the already celebrated successes. It may not be the panacea for all. Does owning a chisel make you a master carpenter? We think not.

We are onboarding a new generation of practitioners, which is incredibly exciting, but the level of design maturity is concerning. In the interim, we will have to manage the gap in much-needed strategic thinking and seasoned tradecraft to make the promise of design thinking take hold long term.

Recruiting scores of new graduates may bolster the corporate design ranks, but without strategic leadership at scale, teams stand to be rudderless. This is one of the biggest challenges facing our industry today. Will corporate America

have the patience? Design and innovation are people-based initiatives, not quick fixes, and we are all aware of the obsessive focus on quarterly earnings and the short-term pressure to perform. How do we square this circle? Again, consultants have a valuable role to play.

The DNA of creative people has primarily lived in smaller firms with the DNA of corporations being that of an operator tasked with the delivery of consistent, predictable results.

Closer partnership and greater integration with the development of shared working practices will reap benefits for both operating models. It should be a win-win, and is critical for design to fulfill its potential as a strategic business tool.

Mindset Over Skill Set The greatest value consultants can bring to their corporate peers is their mindset. Consulting design firms are made up of people with hyphenated backgrounds who can bring different perspectives from various specialties to connect the seemingly unconnected and illuminate opportunities for new value creation. Consultants have this panoramic view because they are typically generalists who work across analogous industries and problems. Mindset is, and will continue to be, a consultant’s biggest value.

Consultants and client partners both have to move away from the bring-me-the-solution mentality of deploying expertise toward a new mindset that helps corporations add new capabilities to their teams through intense collaboration and learning by doing. All the world’s great athletes have coaches who assist them in reaching their peak performance. An outside-in view and the objectivity it brings is critical to their self-awareness and success. Consultants can offer their value in a similar way: helping corporate teams guard against corporate myopia, escape the gravity of their organization and think freely.

Let’s face it, design is hard and cultural change is even more challenging, and design thinking requires both. To make the most of this opportunity before us, we must truly partner to succeed.

—Jonathan Dalton j.dalton@thrivethinking.com Dalton is CEO and co-founder of THRIVE, a product development and innovation strategy firm that helps ambitious leaders build profitable brands through informed design. He helps Fortune 500 companies achieve organic growth through human-centered product and strategic brand design.

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CO N S U LTANT

TRASH TALK

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e live in an exciting and tragic time where the elements that allow us to bring creative design solutions to an increasing number of global corporations are the very elements that empower us to poison our planet. Better connectivity, affordable manufacturing and easy access to design resources have given rise to a new product development model that is turning out to be a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, this new model allows fresh voices to enter tired, old dialogues, challenging the status quo and forcing traditional financially driven businesses to seek out deeper ways to connect with people. A growing number of large companies seek out design consultancies like ours to help them develop competitive, people-centric and emotionally-charged applications for their roster of technological advances.

On the other hand, by empowering just anyone to enter the process of producing products—without fully grasping a

designer’s responsibility to make fewer, better things—we allow finite resources to be squandered on experiments that are not well engineered, do not have longevity, are not ergonomic and, as a result, do not succeed in the market and end up in landfills.

So what is the solution? How do we remain open to new points of view without sacrificing our shared planet along the way? Clearly this problem is too complex for any one person or organization to tackle. As professional designers, however, we can immediately begin participating in one possible solution by unifying our voices to educate those entering the world of product development. Never before has there been a greater need for quality design and design thinking to protect us from generating unnecessary waste. Together, and with the help of organizations such as IDSA, we must provide easily accessible guidance to help anyone interested in this dialogue create products thoughtfully and responsibly.

—Pip Tompkin, IDSA info@piptompkin.com Tompkin is the award-winning designer responsible for creating revolutionary products and strategies for companies such as DAQRI, Dell, Microsoft, Nokia, Toshiba, Vizio, Polycom, Twitter, iRobot, HTC, Playjam, Discovery Kids and Belkin. In 2008, he launched the Pip Tompkin Studio, a design consultancy that opened its doors to international acclaim and quickly established itself as an incubator of progressive design solutions for forward-thinking companies.

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BEHIND THE INEVITABLE

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oo many design studios present line-item research as an end result. We are designers. We are paid to synthesize research into forms, ideas and products.

In my experience, the best designers use research and testing so organically in their process that they become indistinguishable from the work, reinforcing the design so well that the outcome becomes inevitable. How could it be anything but that design? Actually, designers know that there could have been a hundred other inevitable solutions, but let’s keep that our little secret.

I’m not saying don’t do research. For the love of Don Norman, be empathic! Watch people, set up tests, ask the right questions, but aren’t we all tired of seeing pictures of Post-it notes? Filling more of the wall doesn’t make the outcome any better. Design something! Fuse that information you’ve gathered and let it flow through you. Have a perspective! Put the ideal user through your own filter. You are the sum total of your childhood taking apart the toaster, your late nights in design school and your professional experience accumulated through years of work. You are what clients are paying for, and we’ve found that they really like it when that’s what you deliver.

—Elijah Wiegmann, IDSA elijah@basedesignco.com Wiegmann is the founder of Base Design Studio in Pittsburgh, PA, and Chair of the Western Pennsylvania IDSA chapter. With over 10 years of experience, he and his team provide modern process, design, and manufacturing expertise to connect hardware, brand, and marketing support for startups, medical products and services, new technologies and stagnant industries.

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Graduate Programs in Design

Students of the College for Creative Studies’ graduate studies programs address the issues of sustainable communities, new modes of mobility, human technology experiences, innovative product development and color and materials solution. With more than 100 years of excellence as a leader in art and design education, CCS continues to be one of the nation’s premier colleges for the creative disciplines. Come and make a difference. Be an agent of change and a catalyst for transformation. Join us. Be a part of one of our programs: Color and Materials Design, Integrated Design, Interaction Design or Transportation Design.

www.collegeforcreativestudies.edu

E D U CAT I ON

HOW WE MAKE MAKES THE WORLD

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or designers and non-designers alike, instruments of creation, means of production, as well as avenues for promotion and sales are available as never before.

Whether creators are working globally in a community MakerSpace or have a low-cost US-based membership to TechShop or Maker’s Row, and a subscription to Fusion 360, aspiring entrepreneurs have unprecedented platforms to design, develop, test, fundraise and disseminate.

Transcending a myopic focus on market and manufacturing, shared tools across multiple communities are beginning to afford greater convergence of aspirational ideas and values. This allows us to more fully embrace and respond to the uncertainties of our time.

While the capacity to design and make is increasingly democratized, design-led universities play a critical role in helping designers and society at large frame not just how we make but why we make. We have an opportunity to positively impact pressing social and ecological questions

as never before. Our programs at Parsons are doing this in numerous ways.

Graduate students are manufacturing low-volume localized production runs to investigate implications of shipping and livelihood. We recently worked with Global Green to create strategies to replace and redesign non-recoverable polystyrene foam lunch trays (New York City uses 830,000 daily).

After the project finished, the Urban School Food Alliance began a plan to implement compostable plates at cafeterias in six of the largest school districts in the US, including New York. Recently, a team of four alumni was one of two winning teams in UNICEF’s Wearables for Good challenge with their SoaPen project, a portable wearable soap that encourages hand washing.

Design has never had better ways to engage ethical dimensions than it does now. Let’s develop beautiful, progressive, long-lasting breakthrough products that challenge the status quo—that is if they can be funded on Kickstarter.

—Rama Chorpash, IDSA chorpasr@newschool.edu Chorpash is the director of the industrial design MFA at Parsons School of Design where he is associate professor of product design.

His namesake practice, Rama Chorpash Design, has done design and consulting work for companies such as Victorinox Swiss Army, Ikea and the Museum of Modern Art Store.

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EQUIPPING FUTURE CHANGE AGENTS

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he question posed was, What is the state of education today: the good, the bad and ugly? If you remember the film of the same name, each of the three main characters was trying to get to the hidden loot first. What are we trying to get to? What’s the goal?

I would suggest that it is, How to change industrial design education so that it’s relevant for the industry both now and in the future? How do we get there? Hopefully by good change, avoiding bad change and limiting ugly change.

One of the keys is to prioritize and leverage the holistic student experience. It’s not enough to just think about what happens in individual classrooms. We can add so much more value by considering how we can facilitate emerging designers to leverage the whole university experience: studying abroad, business, humanities, art, technology, internships, etc.

Educators and institutions also have to become more agile to remain relevant. It is vital that we adapt and develop new curricula that respond to changes in the industry so that we can equip our graduates with the skills and competencies they will need.

Students in industrial design are developing a fantastic mix of transferable skills that will enable them to respond to the changing context of practice and to address the needs of roles that have yet to be invented. But do they know this and can they sell these skills effectively to employers and clients?

One of the challenges is that it’s sometimes tough for graduates with a diverse mix of skills to demonstrate them to employers who were educated in a different era and have different expectations from a portfolio.

I remain convinced that an education in industrial design is the best preparation for being a critical change agent to help society address the increasingly complex challenges we face.

Can designers save the world? No, of course not, but we can help!

—James W.R. Fathers, IDSA jwfather@syr.edu

Fathers joined Syracuse University in 2013 as the founding director of the School of Design. Prior to this he spent 15 years as a design educator in the UK and 10 years before that as a designer in manufacturing and a consultant to small and medium enterprises on innovation and design.

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DESIGN PROBLEMS FOR DESIGN EDUCATORS

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esign education, at its dawn, was mainly focused on aesthetics and the basic mechanical aspects of things.

This required lots of drawing and making in order to train designers as form creators. Thus intuitiveness was the virtue of designers in the past. This was the time when design was owned by designers only.

Design education today, where design is shared by all—designers and non-designers—puts lots of emphasis on thinking, researching and communicating, which are all very important for creating more meaningful designs. It has been a truly exciting transition.

However, there are still challenges for educators and students. The gap between thinking and doing is widening, and this is especially reflected in college students. Design research arms designers with a plethora of information, but many designers have lost their voices as they rely more and more on information rather than inspiration. Also, rapid digital fabrication has made possible so much that was out of reach, but at the expense of craftsmanship.

These challenges, and others, require educators to rethink design education. One consideration we must make is whether we plan to educate designers or people who can simply do design. The key to success is distinguishing between the two. At the College for Creative Studies, we have been renovating our college-wide curriculum to adapt to the future of design education so that our students will be equipped with strong expertise based on craftsmanship along with truly interdisciplinary creative approaches.

—Sooshin Choi, IDSA sooshin@collegeforcreativestudies.edu Choi is a designer of things, designers and design education. He is the provost, vice president for academic affairs, and professor of design at the College for Creative Studies, responsible for the academic vision and mission of the College. He was the IDSA Education VP for 2012–2014 and is the Chair for the 2016 IDSA International Conference in Detroit.

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WITHOUT BOUNDARIES Design education works when it actively cultivates: • curiosity • divergent-convergent thinking • design comprehension and judgment • beauty in all its dimensions • design as a boundless continuum • fearlessness • iterative, fluid thinking and doing • relativity of past to future • entrepreneurial spirit and business sense • knowledge of everything • connectedness of creativity and technology • focus on the unmet needs and desires of people • the uniqueness of you • mastery of one design discipline with capability in many • focus on the well being of earth and goodwill to others Design education is ugly when it: • accepts students for the sake of income • fails to pioneer change • is unable to question itself • lacks vision and purpose • is too narrow • focuses on skills more than thinking —Peter Haythornthwaite, IDSA peterh@creativelab.co.nz Haythornthwaite is a design practitioner, and adjunct professor at Victoria University of Wellington. He is co-architect of the New Zealand Government’s Better by Design program to enable small and medium organizations to integrate design culture into business culture, allowing them to compete and win in international markets.

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THE DISCOVERY OF WISDOM

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very year new focuses in education enter society and academia, such as lessons of innovation, empathy and skills. However, they are not leading the next generation to the discovery of wisdom. Wisdom is a long process that does not happen overnight. It starts with observation and the collection of data. The next component is the experience that develops from the positive effects of immersion and failures. The only thing people can claim as 100 percent their own is their failures. Combining data and experience creates knowledge. One without the other diminishes the complete understanding of the information.

Once you have obtained various forms of knowledge, you will grow to a point where you are able to connect these dots of understanding and then apply them to life. This is wisdom.

So where are we going wrong, you ask? Students of today are the greatest data collectors of all time.

Information seems to be at their fingertips. But where are the experiences? Social media? Instructional videos? The internet? We are not allowing the next generation to find their own answers. They are not experiencing their own failures, and without this very important block as a foundation, the walls of wisdom cannot be built. —Owen Foster, IDSA ofoster@scad.edu Foster is the chair of the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College of Art and Design and a co-creator of SHiFT.

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INNOVATION INTEGRATION

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his is an exciting time for design. It is the foremost industry responsible for innovation in business today.

Business now sees investment in innovation as an essential element to success. Design is finally reaching its pinnacle, and in the next five years it will be an essential aspect of all businesses in one form or another.

As innovation expertise transcends all industry categories, businesses are now competing for the same pool of innovation professionals. Thus it’s becoming a talent’s market.

With every discipline executing a form of innovation, design thinking has become ubiquitous. More than ever, businesses are finding it harder to determine what kind of innovation they need.

In the business industry, the next cultural shift and challenge for design and innovation to be effective is innovation integration.

Education needs to train designers to understand business and ensure that design directly meets their needs. —Angela Yeh, IDSA angela@yehideology.com Yeh is a thought leader and entrepreneur at the intersection of design, strategy and business. She is CEO of Yeh IDeology, a leading talent strategy consultancy that collaborates with companies to develop talent strategies and recruitment programs that foster innovation and growth, helping clients build mission-critical teams through a design thinking and strategic approach. She actively supports the design community and has held several roles within IDSA.

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ART OF THE STATE

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he state of the art of design today is a moving and differentiated target, if we consider what is going on across the world in relation to design. Design in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America is so differentiated due to cultural differences and the opportunities of the day. Maybe China, Germany and the US are some of the countries who have complex state-of-the-art manufacturing. Maybe Africa and rural Mexico have state-of-the-art design crafts. Maybe Japan and Scandinavia have state-ofthe-art housewares design. Maybe Switzerland and the UK have state-of-the-art communication design.

I could go on with this, but the point is that there are many states of art in design for me. A state-of-the-art earthenware pot from South America may be held in as high esteem as a complex factory-made product. The best way to find the state of the art in design is to look at the skills, technological advances and aesthetic explorations in products and services in the world and use them as a clue to understanding people and their differences. These explorations should be introduced into design education in a way that is supportive of this differentiation in capabilities and materials. —Lorraine Justice, FIDSA lxjpgd@rit.edu Justice is the dean of the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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CLASSROOM DISRUPTION

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esign education is in flux for three reasons: 1. The role of the professional industrial designer is changing.

2. The nature of work in general is changing.

3. The world is changing.

Global warming is a huge opportunity for industrial designers to create new products and systems to address changing climate, rising sea levels, food delivery, the reuse of dying forests, water conservation and green energy production, just to name a few. Industrial designers don’t just need to learn CAD to draw slick new cars; they need to dive deep to learn how to use computational thinking to smooth the disruptions digital technology is causing all traditional social systems.

People migrated from farms to work in factories. Now the good jobs are being a knowledge worker in banks, law firms, branding, strategy and business consulting. In the future, people won’t have to go to work because they will be able to do all their work on their phone from whereever they are—trading nothing but insights and intellectual property over the internet. When most of the population becomes knowledge workers and warriors, society will need to replace the old reward and support structure based on property and hours with a more psychological system based on meaningful work. Luckily, industrial designers, like artisanal chefs and baristas, know how to translate BS into good, tangible things and at the same time contribute to collaborative business distribution systems.

Design students need to learn all the old Industrial Revolution skills of mass production methods and materials—but because of the third industrial revolution, they also need to master new distributed additive manufacturing techniques and conceive totally new microengineered materials based on needs rather than availability. Design schools have a lot to teach: both design thinking and making while training students how actually design (i.e., how to put all those features and functions together beautifully).

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA tv@tuckerviemeister.com Viemeister helped create OXO GoodGrips and other fun, profitable products. Viemeister Industries is now involved with wearable hearing augmentation, using nanotechnology for hip protection and exhibitions for the Abu Dhabi Expo 2020.

Bag for Publicolor by Tucker and LouLou Viemeister

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A ROAD TO WORLD PEACE

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he future of the design arts and the designer is very bright indeed. As more and more people come to understand the importance of design, the more opportunities are presented to designers. For the first time, design entrepreneurs can garner funding for their projects without giving up control of their businesses. Kickstarter, GoFundMe and many others have presented opportunities that were inconceivable 15 years ago. Could this amazing desire to help others lead to, dare I say it, world peace? —Dr. Noel Mayo, IDSA mayo.1@osu.edu

Dr. Noel Mayo is an Ohio Eminent Scholar in Art and Design Technology at The Ohio State University. He is also owner of Noel Mayo Associates, Inc., the first African American-owned industrial design firm in the country. He has over 250 design patents and over 25 utility patents with Lutron Electronics Company, Inc., where he conceived of the first screwless snap-on faceplate.

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Craig Vogel, FIDSA and Xuan Teng, Master of Design student, College of DAAP, University of Cincinnati

THE BIG BANG

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he field of design is going through what I refer to as the big bang. Traditional design disciplines are blurring corporate internal design groups, and design consultancies are forming with entirely new frameworks and ranges of professionals. The breadth and vertical opportunities are expanding to allow design to play in spaces never before open to us. We are also witnessing new definitions of design and design thinking happening almost daily. While I originally was disturbed by this, I have decided to jump fully into the middle of this dynamic new space with all its ambiguity.

At this point in my career, I am fortunate to find myself doing research at a state university within a college that combines schools of design, art, architecture and planning.

The college’s programs are not only connected internally but also across the university. The University of Cincinnati

has a major health complex with a college of medicine.

Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati is one of the top children’s clinical and research hospitals in the world. I am working with students and colleagues on several different projects exploring the issue of patient-centered empathic healthcare.

This is one of the biggest growth areas for design that is open to all design disciplines.

In order to meet these new opportunities in design we need to expand our education programs in the US to include more timely and relevant graduate programs, particularly PhD design programs. To that end, the college of DAAP at the University of Cincinnati will be hosting the next International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference (IASDR) in the fall of 2017. This is the first time this conference will be held in the US. We welcome your participation in this groundbreaking event.

—Craig M. Vogel, FIDSA vogelcg@ucmail.uc.edu Vogel is an associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Design Architecture, Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. He is also co-author of the book Creating Breakthrough Products with Jonathan Cagan and co-founded the Live Well Collaborative, a joint venture between UC and P&G.

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AN ABBREVIATED DESIGN METHODOLOGY

D E S I G N

Determine what needs to be done and develop a plan of action that can define the project, problem, processes, product and outcomes you desire.

Educate yourself broadly to include the who, where, when, why and how and consider what was and what is and imagine what can be.

Sketch, model and visualize your ideas, notions, questions, issues, discoveries and more. Don’t censor, assess or be too critical until you have exhausted all of your possibilities.

Ideate, invent and innovate to include concepts and designs that are ordinary, extraordinary and beyond belief.

Go and seek out thoughtful individuals who can help you assess your most promising concepts and designs and who will provide insightful and creative advice to include candid, constructive and informed criticism.

Now, refine and present your most promising concepts and designs with confidence and share your criteria and proposed solutions for how you have tried to solve a problem, enabled individuals, advanced our culture and advanced what it means to be human. —Allen Samuels, L/IDSA allenall@umich.edu Samuels is the emeritus professor and dean of the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. He has been a member of IDSA since 1967.

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THE NEED TO FORMALIZE DESIGN KNOWLEDGE

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growing number of leaders of all types of organizations, whether they are in the private, social or public sector, believe that some of the core capabilities of design are useful to them. IBM is trying to hire 1,000 designers. McKinsey and other management consultants are buying design firms to ensure they are truly innovative. China has 1,000 schools claiming to teach design. I am told that Shenzhen, a city of about 10 million people and the “factory of the world,” has 80,000 product designers. Some of our IIT graduates are taking positions in various public policy offices, including the White House.

This demand is creating an avalanche of options for learning design. One-week camps, classes at your local incubator about designing apps, elective classes in business schools and watching Ted Talks with design luminaries are all available. Companies can work with universities to create multiyear programs customized for senior employees.

It seems like everyone wants a designer or to be a designer. The situation is growing and dynamic, except in the schools offering undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Here, with the exception of very few schools, life is slower.

This is a problem. Design has been invited to tackle bigger, more complex problems than ever before. It needs stronger, faster methods to grapple with the complexity and rate of change (inherent in this are the problems presented by the organization asking for help). In other fields, faculty members in graduate schools play a meaningful role in turning informal knowledge into rigorous methods and theories.

Growth of Knowledge Most of the core capabilities of design still exist as informal knowledge, which makes them hard to teach and explain.

Reframe Visualize Create Options Comfort with Create Value Probabilism Empathize Abstract Produce

Visualize The Bauhaus curriculum codified systems of drawing, image making, and modeling.

It became the dominate model for design education.

Emphasize Classes about ethnographic methods in design were first offered in the 1980s.

The core capabilities of design exist in a cloud of unstructured knowledge. While they are powerful, they are difficult to teach and explain to people who have not studied them. It is normal in other fields for graduate schools to study patterns in professional work, conduct experiments and develop theories and methods that increase the quality and speed of teaching and practice. Graduate schools of design do very little of this.

The relationship between academics and business provides a good example. The central story of 20th-century business processes is one of executives adopting new predictive business models and production processes that helped them be certain about the big bets required in the economy of scale. Much of this knowledge was formed in universities by professors who saw patterns in the ad hoc nature of business. They refined these patterns in order to create formal theories, frameworks and methods that could be taught and practiced more efficiently than learning on the job. Examples of academics building theories that became standard are McKinsey at the University of Chicago showing how budgets can be used as a planning tool, Merton at Columbia inventing focus groups, Porter at Harvard developing the theory of corporate strategy, and Prahalad at the University of Michigan developing the framework of core competency.

Executives seeking help from design have often had unsatisfactory experiences with the traditional ways of planning new offerings. The recent surge in using design is fueled by leaders of organizations who recognize they need a structured way of creating innovations that are likely to succeed, rather than business processes that pretend certainty is possible.

But design is at risk because the informality of our traditional practices are slow and not understandable by the uninitiated. They are not up to the new challenges.

Since the Bauhaus published its landmark, curriculum that became the standard for most design schools surprisingly little progress has been made in formalizing the ad hoc knowledge that was passed from master to apprentice. With the possible exception of user observation methods, it is difficult to identify any examples that have been accepted by a significant section of the design field.

Designers are being asked to address a growing number of challenges that are more complicated than before.

Our traditional knowledge is valuable but needs to be formalized to meet the scale and scope of the challenges. A small number of schools, including KAIST, the Design Lab at UC San Diego, Stanford, Tongji, TU Delft and the IIT Institute of Design, are undertaking various initiatives to formalize design knowledge. It’s a big task and we welcome others to join us.

—Patrick Whitney, IDSA whitney@id.iit.edu Whitney is a professor and dean of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

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THE BROADENING SWEEP OF DESIGN EDUCATION

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ndustrial design education today is undergoing a sea change, moving from a technical degree emphasizing proficiencies in specific skill sets to a broad, humanistic approach for identifying and solving comprehensive problems in the built environment. As an educator in a national liberal arts institution, I find myself teaching classrooms of engineering, science and business students, opening their eyes to the design of the world around them.

Design education is no longer just for designers. Our reality is increasingly mediated through the lens of image and object technologies that are radically transforming the way we live, work and connect. Design has become a fundamental way of seeing, framing, understanding and humanizing the disruptions of technology and change.

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There will be a need for design educators that are as comfortable teaching the mechanics of sketching as facilitating dialogue and collaboration between disciplines. And we will need many more of them. —Ann-Marie Conrado, IDSA ann-marie.conrado.2@nd.edu Conrado is an assistant professor in industrial design at the University of Notre Dame. She was awarded the IDSA Young Educator of the Year Award in 2008 for her contributions to educating the next generation of designers in realizing the potential of design to advance the common good. Before returning to academia, she garnered numerous awards, including an IDEA Gold, and is the founder of HOPE Initiative, a nonprofit utilizing design in developing countries.

THE HUMAN IN THE CENTER

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n the first morning of an Intro to Industrial Design class, I channeled my best 2.5 million-year-old upright-walking human ancestor and acted out an encounter with a flowering fruit tree. My dilemma: I could immediately respond to my physiological needs and eat the easily accessible ground falls or set my sights on the reddest and ripest specimens still on the vine but just out of reach.

I scanned the classroom and found a strategically hidden tree branch. I broke a long limb off the branch, extended my limited arm’s reach and harvested the apple.

In this I committed the first act of design—identifying an opportunity, recognizing a human capability to be leveraged, finding an available material, shaping it to my purpose, and, finally, solving my problem and fulfilling my needs and desires.

The state of design education has always been a juggle of intrinsic and extrinsic skill building—physical, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, ethical, ecological, technological and methodological—along a constantly moving human and cultural timeline. How to fit 10-plus pounds of “design” into a 2-pound sack? A brief reminder of our paleo past may help keep the contemporary design process in perspective.

As industrial design curriculums navigate the complex shifts from the industrial to the information age, analog to digital, tangible to virtual, and discrete objects to complex meta-systems of product, service, experience, application and interconnection, it is imperative that we take great care to teach that at the core of everything we do there is always a simple, elemental human need. Students with a clear understanding of this timeless human responsibility easily engage with a range of traditional and emerging design tools, scales, scopes, processes and methodologies and keep the torch burning for our most important stakeholder—the human in the center—at any point along the human timeline.

—Dave Richter-O’Connell dave1@ksu.edu Richter-O’Connell got a BSID from the Institute of Design in 1988 and spent six years in the toy industry and 14 years at the Kohler Co. doing advanced concept and new product development. He got an MFA from UW Madison in design studies in 2011 and moved into academia as an assistant professor in Kansas State University’s Interior Architecture and Product Design program. He is currently serving as the vice chair of the IDSA KC Chapter.

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THE METHOD DESIGNER

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n corporate product development or industrial design consulting roles, industrial designers are often forced to rely on intuition and secondary sympathetic understanding of the user, context and problem to produce effective designs. In this situation, budgets and resources can be tight, and with technology rapidly advancing, time is short. You often hear phrases like “Just make it look beautiful!”

Visualizing, thinking about the user and story boarding are great and build sympathetic understanding. However, to ensure the best possible outcomes for the product we need to shift toward an empathic awareness of the people using our products. This is a powerful approach when designing for people in different age groups, social and cultural contexts, and high-performance or niche users.

To expand my own understanding, I have often framed my approach as if I were an actor embracing the role of

the character I am playing—commonly known as method acting. In method acting, the idea is to convey truth through a more human system of acting in which actors build a cognitive and emotional understanding of the character they are playing by personally immersing themselves into aspects of the character’s real-life experience. Method designing could describe a similar approach to design.

By utilizing personal immersions, we can attempt to gain empathy for the people who will end up using the product we are designing. We should immerse ourselves to learn not just the users’ physical, cognitive and contextual experience but, more importantly, their emotional and psychological experience. At the very least, method designing arms us with a tacit knowledge that makes our design effort more focused and purposeful. Often it leads to real innovation, providing the client additional value in the form of intellectual property and giving users a new and better experience.

—Michael Paterson, I/IDSA thejamjam@gmail.com

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Paterson is currently a senior industrial designer at GoPro. He has previously worked with Philips Design and TEAGUE, and has earned numerous design awards. By observing behaviors and experiencing and studying other human situations, Paterson strives to create memorable and relevant product experiences.

EDUCATING T-SHAPED DESIGNERS

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he current focus of design practice has long been shifting from objects to experiences. For over 10 years, most design teams have self-identified as having a more multidisciplinary experience design scope.

Often in the search for talent, we seek designers who are cross-disciplined, or T-shaped: deep in one area but able to go broad in others. These are the people who operate in the gaps between the traditional boundaries of the established disciplines of industrial design, graphic/visual design and human factors (or, say, cognitive psychology). This trend is a convergence of the digital and physical creative disciplines. These are the most coveted designers. But the vast majority of schools don’t teach too far outside the bounding box of a core discipline, and once out in the professional world, it takes time to learn these crossover skills.

In the meantime, there is a tremendous demand for designers who do this well. There are not enough of them to go around. The demand for these disciplines is also rapidly expanding in areas that have not traditionally deployed these types of creatives—domains like the automotive in-cabin experience, the emerging self-driving cars, smart-home ecosystems and smart appliances, to name a few.

As the demand for integrated product experiences continues to expand, so too will the demand for the creatives who work collaboratively across their boundaries to design these experiences. I expect we will soon begin to see more converged design disciplines, emphasizing the need to formalize the education of experience design.

—Ken Musgrave, IDSA ken_musgrave@live.com Musgrave is the vice president, head of global experience design for HP. He leads a globally diverse multidisciplinary team of creative professionals that define and design digital, physical and mobile user experiences for HP’s 2D and new 3D printing products.

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BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL INNOVATION PROGRAM

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As soon as a company has a chief innovation officer you know that a company has a problem,” Apple CEO Tim Cook boldly stated shortly after I became the chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivint Smart Home. His statement put a determined smile on my face, but also caused me to reflect more deeply on the key elements of corporate innovation success.

Corporate innovation is frequently viewed as an isolated group of people sitting on beanbag chairs dreaming up moon shots. Although a stereotypical notion, caution is definitely warranted. In the decade I spent as a management consultant for Fortune 500 companies, I was exposed to my fair share of innovation program successes and struggles. Failures could often be traced to the company’s inability to show meaningful return on investment on the millions of dollars funding their program.

At Vivint, I’ve abided by two principles to ensure that our Innovation Center follows a different path.

Start close to the core. At Vivint, we imbedded our innovation efforts directly into the core product organization and focused on delivering tangible results quickly. Among other things, we shipped a new smart home hub, a back-end cloud platform and an in-house-designed doorbell camera all within the first two-and-a-half years. These products were closely aligned with the company’s explicit goal to build the

industry’s most comprehensive smart home platform. Most importantly, they helped to meaningfully move the sales needle. Innovation teams need to ensure that new products and services are not tangential to core business objectives.

Use concrete success to buy time for riskier bets.

Solid execution close to the core gives you the freedom for greater experimentation, both with products and the overall business model. Our successful initial wave of innovation has created a strong platform for exploring machine learning, human-robot interaction, and a number of exciting new potential distribution and profit models.

When innovation is tightly aligned with core business functions, is focused on delivering customer value and delivers tangible results, it can be a powerful engine for growth.

—Matt Eyring meyring@vivint.com Eyring is the chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivint Smart Home, a leading provider of smart home technology. He oversees the Vivint Innovation Center and leads the company’s strategy and growth initiatives for the smart home.

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DESIGN STREAMS, TEAMS & VISION

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fter teaching, consulting and working in the industrial design industry, I have come to believe that common product development terms are misleading and possibly wrong.

The following should be reframed:

From Product Development Pipeline to Product Development Stream The idea that the product development process is linear and all that is needed to produce a successful product is a step-by-step stage-gate process has never been true. At least, it needs to be thought of as a recurrent helical stream of activities that keeps circulating to create value. Streams come from somewhere and flow to somewhere else—they are a part of an ecosystem. Eddies and streams of work flows are apt analogies because you never know what will be mixed into the process and in what concentration, and what the effect will be on the outcome. I have seen color changes reshape an industry. I have seen rivers of ideas diluted by oceans of sameness. Strong streams carry, flow over and around objects and, if successful, gain volume.

Additionally, dipping your toe in the same river twice is not possible, especially in a world of torrents of information flow driving rapid product creation. Don’t expect to identically repeat the process.

From Hero to Community I have heard plenty about hero designers. The mass media seem to reinforce this idea. The reality is that there are few (at least, no designer I have ever met) who have successfully delivered a product to market without the support or camaraderie of other designers, engineers, marketers, lawyers, manufacturing experts, salespeople, family members, etc.

Teams or communities of motivated professionals will always outperform the individual.

From Options to Focused Vision It is no longer about possible product options. In this day of rapid communications and an overabundance of things, having more options is not valuable and has even shown up as a polluting waste problem. Having more options is not better. Sustainable customer-focused desirable experiences need to be designed to show decision makers and consumers what is valuable. This requires deep thought and experiments that paint a view to the world that is different from today’s offerings. Designers should use their visualization tool kits to show clients what builds brand equity and what delights customers and shareholders.

—Jim Kendall jwkendall3@gmail.com Kendall’s career has spanned design from analog markers to digital networks. He is currently creating the future at a global appliance manufacturer.

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Photo courtesy of THRIVE.

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GENERALIST & SPECIALIST

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he good news is that it is a great time to be an industrial designer. More and more companies that historically did not utilize design in their product development efforts are now realizing the need and turning to the industrial design community for help. In addition, technology and design are converging at an incredible pace. All of this is opening up tremendous opportunities and challenges. The role of the industrial designer is becoming more diverse and, in many ways, more complex.

With the advent of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing we are seeing a surge in the amount of inventors and startups in need of design and product development services.

Many do not have any product development experience and require in-depth consulting that goes far beyond just aesthetics and function. Today’s industrial designer needs

to have a keen understanding of business, marketing and manufacturing to be able to proficiently advise and consult.

It is no secret that technology and technology-based projects are on the rise, and it is not uncommon for design to be actively involved in complex systems, processes and business models. Once again, having a diverse design group has never been more important.

Opportunities for designers at all levels have never been better. There is a noticeable increase in executive management positions and leadership roles. The profession now has many specialized areas of focus, and there is an abundance of opportunity for both the industrial design generalist and specialist.

All in all, design is thriving. —Kevin Shinn, IDSA kshinn@altair.com Shinn is the vice president of industrial design at Altair Thinklabs.

The Thinklabs studio is a global creative company that helps businesses succeed through human-centered design.

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PREPARING FOR PRACTICE NOW

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t’s not news that in order to have a strategic impact in practice designers must show up as businesspeople in the context of their discipline, just as our colleagues in marketing, engineering and finance do. This does not mean we have to abandon our principles or ignore our essential core design training. On the contrary, the way we are taught to think and do can be a huge complement and supplement to business challenges.

So what are some things we are seeing in industry that underscore how to prepare for practice now?

There is tremendous pressure in many industry segments to shift from strictly physical to digital and physical. It’s not enough to design and sell physical objects anymore. Everything has to be smart and connected.

Hence the emergence of connected technology both large and small, from LED light bulbs that are Bluetoothenabled and can control your whole house to jet engines that autonomously talk to the ground to report their status and what they need. This trend is and will completely shift brands, require consistency across hardware and software experiences, and transform how products will be designed and presented to customers and consumers.

The other theme we see emerging is interdependence.

This has a number of levels to it in general management and for designers and design leaders. Divisions can’t be siloed anymore. Functions can’t be siloed anymore. And certainly designers and design teams cannot be siloed from each other in how they create and collaborate. Ever-shrinking budgets and the drive to reduce costs require new kinds of group genius and collaboration.

Finally, we are also seeing recognition that companies have to think about their customers and consumers as collaborators and co-creators, rather than just people to sell stuff to—because anyone can do that. Customer intimacy is driven more and more by such deeper kinds of relationships.

This helps drive sales in a fiercely competitive environment that is changing due to cost pressures and technology advancements.

To prepare for practice now, designers must still learn to draw and see and make and seek in order to understand and tell stories and deliver results. Moreover, they must be ready to help their companies succeed strategically in the context of a rapidly changing global business environment.

—Robert T. Schwartz, FIDSA RobertSchwartz@ge.com Schwartz is general manager, global design and user experience at GE Healthcare, leading six studios in five countries and a team of 60. He’s held similar positions at Procter & Gamble, Motorola and IDSA, among others.

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THE EVOLVING ROLE OF DESIGN

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he state of design is strong, perhaps stronger than ever before. Big and small design consultancies are sprouting up everywhere, some of which have been bought by big corporations in their pursuit of new ideas and innovation. Industrial design has branched out to at least half a dozen specialized disciplines: product design, user experience design, service design, design research, business design, design strategy and so on. Further, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to point to where one discipline ends and the other begins. Design is beginning to get a seat at the management table. Consequently, the definition of what is considered the purview of design is evolving.

Traditionally design has been part of research and development, working within marketing, engineering or business teams. Today it is at the forefront of new product development and innovation initiatives. Some sectors that have previously had limited exposure to

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design, such as insurance, investment and financial services, are now building enterprise-level design capabilities.

Differentiation, customer engagement and customer experience are the most pervasive reasons for corporations to employ design professionals in various capacities. The kind of problems and challenges faced by businesses today are complex and systemic. Tackling these requires professionals with a hybrid set of skills that lie at the intersection of business, design and technology. —Hina Shahid, IDSA @Hinakiduniya Shahid is a multidisciplinary designer with a decade of design experience in industries such as financial services, healthcare, consumer electronics, hospitality, retail and architectural interiors. Currently at MetLife, she is a senior research and experience strategist working at the intersection of research, design and business.

THINK SMALL

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oming out of school, many people imagine that some day they’re going to change the world. For most, that day never comes. They’re thinking too big! I’ve seen so many students and young professionals stifle their progress by overwhelming themselves trying to create a big impact, change behaviors and fix the world’s problems.

“Think big,” we’re told, and as students and young professionals we often get so wrapped around this phrase that we pressure ourselves into attempting something that’s just out of our hands. Thomas Edison’s greatest contribution to illuminating the world was his work in designing a filament that would burn bright while still maintaining enough resistance to keep burning consistently for a long time. A filament—that tiny wire on the inside of a light bulb. Kind of hard to imagine that the answer to bringing light to billions of people around the world ended up being a tiny wire.

Sometimes we don’t understand enough about the problems we’re trying to solve, which makes us naive in our approach and limits our chance of success. However, that’s not a terrible thing. You’re more likely to attempt the impossible if you don’t know your chance of failure, but it’s not every day that the impossible is realized.

The more you know about the problem you are trying to solve, the more likely you are to succeed. Think small.

Quite frankly, small is a lot easier and more manageable, and solving smaller problems leads to solving bigger problems.

So don’t design to change the world. Strive to be considerate and meaningful in your designs, and change will occur.

—Rotimi Solola, IDSA solola.slmdesign@gmail.com Solola graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2015.

He was the 2015 Merit Award recipient for the Midwest. Having interned at Design Integrity, Motorola and MNML, Solola kicked off his career at Motorola Mobility. He enjoys mentoring and giving live demos on sketching and rendering techniques.

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PERSISTENCE BECOMES PERVASIVE

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doubt anyone reading this journal would say that the state of our profession and its practice is anything but incredibly healthy and thriving. Commercially speaking, outstanding examples of design work are no longer the rare exception, nor are products from overseas firms, which are now commonly accepted and understood. Gone are the days of constantly preaching the value of good design in business, singling out those few occasions of a business success built on a strong design foundation. This doesn’t mean we no longer need to recognize and celebrate such success, but it does mean we’re past the need to pontificate on the value of design to business leaders at all levels.

We owe this state to any number of factors: the hypercompetitive nature of global markets, the more sophisticated and aware customer, the need to tame the multitude of new technologies present in our lives, etc. However, let’s not overlook the role of our professional society, IDSA, in relentlessly driving design awareness over time. Job well done.

This assessment must also acknowledge how the tools, techniques and processes we employ everyday as designers have become ingrained in everyday business practices— and increasingly in the government and public sector. One only needs to look at the ever-bulging business publication bookshelf for proof. The number of books on design thinking and related design-centered innovation processes seems to multiply daily. This is incredibly encouraging both today and into the future. Here too, this may be a case where our profession’s persistence is paying off—or maybe it just makes a ton of sense for business leaders in today’s environment.

—Lou Lenzi, FIDSA lou.lenzi@ge.com

Lenzi is design director for GE Appliances, where he leads the industrial design, user interface design and user experience design for GE’s major appliance division. He holds a BS in industrial design from the University of Cincinnati.

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MAXIMUM STRATEGIC IMPACT

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he embrace of design thinking by the corporate C-suite, along with the ever-increasing realization of the power of great user experience, has positioned design to be as relevant as ever in the corporate world.

As a result, it appears that many companies are expanding the reach of their internal design organizations beyond the classical interpretations of industrial and graphic design. It’s not surprising to see design organizations include expanded capabilities like research and interaction design on their teams. And it pays dividends. The companies that get it continue to leverage design for competitive advantage.

That’s the good news.

The ugly truth is that despite the repeated proven value provided by design in nearly every product segment, there are still too many companies that do not invest sufficiently in their internal design organizations. Many times the investment gap is not purely financial or human resource-related— it’s structural.

For design to provide its maximum value, it needs to be positioned to provide maximum strategic impact, not just to a company’s offerings but to the organization itself. When business-minded designers are empowered, they can be highly effective guardians of the company’s best interest.

—Paul Magee, IDSA paul.magee@crown.com Magee is currently director of industrial design, Americas for Crown Equipment. He has over 20 years of corporate design experience in a variety of industries.

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THE SWEET SPOT

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he demand for cultural relevance has raised the stakes for corporations to compete globally, and that’s the sweet spot where design can have impact.

However, as corporations tend to be large and complex, their ability to act upon the simultaneous challenge and opportunity presented by design is often compromised.

Understanding design itself—its approach, value and multidisciplinary dimension—can be a significant hurdle to overcome for those not formally trained in design. As design leaders, it’s important to educate colleagues that design is not just about enhancing existing business practices; it’s about transformation.

The need to align new approaches, processes, resources, talent and desired results requires open dialogue with the opportunity for design to demonstrate its value. Although progress may take some time, the good news is that it’s happening. While design has traditionally been perceived as a service, momentum is building with increasing evidence for design as a strategic lever for competitive advantage through innovation and brand to enhance the customer experience. Design leaders are getting a seat at the table, and design teams are expanding.

Progress relies on a two-way street, however. Business needs to understand design, but design also needs to understand business. It’s not good enough to talk about emotion, passion and creativity. Designers need to appreciate the global complexity of large enterprises, exhibiting diplomacy and patience to navigate organizational change.

Creative skills and empathy through design apply across the spectrum of commercial success, from program alignment to product development and the brand and customer experience. Like any other function, design in a vacuum has limitations. Collaboration across other functions and stakeholder groups, including partners, customers, governments and academia, is critical.

In short, design is an engine for transformation that relies upon the principle of collaborative creativity. This is what will drive design leadership forward, uniting purpose with partnership.

—Eric Quint, IDSA www.3m.com/design n @3MDesign Quint is the chief design officer for the 3M Company. He is responsible for driving design functional leadership as a vital creative platform throughout the 3M global organization. In this role, he builds and manages multidisciplinary design teams that strengthen the contribution of global design to innovation and branding across the enterprise.

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FULL CIRCLE

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esign is embedded in broad and strategic conversations about the future of our industry, products and brand. The understanding of what design is and what it can bring to the conversation may not always be articulated, but it is present.

I’ve often felt the expectation to extol the value of design as a way to empower and broaden the reach of the discipline. Just tracking the evolution in degree names reflects this—from graphic design to communication design to interaction design, each broadening the reach of what design can influence.

I assumed this trajectory would continue on a linear path and insinuate more and more complicated frames,

Multimedia theater production and projection design by Piama Habibullah.

as was the case with service design, business design and system design. At the same time, I thought the disciplines of design were getting to be really granular. (My best friend is a projection designer who works with the digital theater space where lighting and form intersect.)

But in my experience, the evolution of design has been neither linear nor granular. Instead it seems to have (ironically) come full circle with the renewed popularity of the term “product” in the tech industry. Nowadays a product is assumed to be a complex hybrid of hardware, software, service and system, and the subsequent product designer (and PMs, or product managers) are assumed to work across every touchpoint of the business to bring to life a user story.

I never imagined a situation where a software developer would be schooling me on what a user story is. But there I was, and wow, did I learn a lot. I feel like design had already been there decades before me. I feel this frequently.

Designers of the past have already been almost everywhere in my world. They may not be adequately credited, but their influence is obvious.

—Megan Neese, IDSA megan.m.neese@gmail.com Neese is a senior manager in the Future Lab at Nissan Motor Ltd., a cross-functional team tasked with uncovering new business opportunities for the future of automotive. Prior to this she filled similar roles at BMW Group DesignworksUSA and Samsung Design America. She holds a bachelor’s in industrial design and a master’s in product development from Carnegie Mellon University.

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THE NEED FOR PRUDENCE

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hether we’re talking about a consumer product, a service or even a new material, in order to drive true innovation, design and sustainability need to be incorporated early in the development stage. Through supplying materials to a university design program or tasking a firm with pushing a new material beyond its limits, we routinely solicit feedback on our materials from designers and industrial design students to inform our next generation of materials.

Calabrese is the creative manager for the Eastman Innovation Lab, a strategic program that pairs Eastman experts in material science with leaders in industrial design and architecture. Calabrese believes that materials can advance the world around us and dedicates her time at Eastman to help educate designers and brands about material possibilities—helping to bring new innovations to market.

—Farrell M. Calabrese, IDSA fcalabrese@eastman.com

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S HO WCASE

OH, BABY! “Speakeasy.”

VersaMe Starling designed by Whipsaw Inc for VersaMe; www.whipsaw.com

“Easy rotating rearward and forward,

giving the most convenience to parents and exceptional safeguarding for children.

”

Rotating Baby Car Seat designed

by Max-Inf; www.max-inf.com

“Stay connected to your doctor through every stage of your pregnancy.”

OnTrack Pregnancy Monitoring System designed by Jacinto Berrios, Josep-Maria Serra, Juan Name and Marcelo Kertész of the NewSchool of Architecture & Design

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“Aria is the next generation of inhalers that unify form, technology, and human factors to create the next generation of Asthma drug delivery.”

Aria Inhalers designed by THRIVE; www.thrivethinking.com

“A smarter closed-system transfer device for chemotherapy that protect healthcare workers.”

Halo® designed by Design Concepts for Corvida Medical®; www.design-concepts.com

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“Wahoo Bamboo.”

S HO WCASE

Google OnHub designed by Whipsaw Inc for Google / TP-Link; www.whipsaw.com

“The dynamics between sound and image have never been more defined.”

Visual Speaker designed by Marcelo Kertész of the NewSchool of Architecture & Design

“Its unique, innovative design makes it

outstanding and exceeds the limitations of the current designs.

”

Composable Clip designed by Lion Enterprise Co., Ltd.

“Elegance.”

Bamboo Studio designed by Tianzi Sheng of Tsinghua University; www.qingshe-bamboo.lofter.com

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“Looks beautiful. Works beautifully.

”

Geometric styling and intuitive functionality that accomplishes kitchen tasks with ease.

Edgewater Semi-professional Kitchen Faucet designed by American Standard; www.americanstandard.com

“A unique process utilizing design, forecasting and material exploration for strategy development.”

User Centered Material Strategy Development designed by Jennifer Peavey for Eastman Chemical Company

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“An eyecatching, portable,

lightweight design offering a pleasing sound to people located throughout the room.

“The most electronically sophisticated, compact

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Acoustic SFX Amplifer designed by Fender Musical Instruments in collaboration with IDEO; www.fender.com

and aesthetically elegant stenograph machine ever created.

”

Luminex designed by Cesaroni Design for Stenograph; www.cesaroni.com

“A portable device that comfortably stretches “The Mars Flavia 500 Creation high

performance workplace brewer delivers the perfect brew from the boardroom to the break room.

”

Flavia 500 Creation designed by THRIVE for Mars Drinks; www.thrivethinking.com

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the neck to relieve stiffness, tension headaches and more.

”

Necksaviour designed by PDT for Epiphany Innovations; www.pdt.com