Innovation Summer 2018: Design for ________

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Design for ________

SUMMER 2018

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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA SUMMER 2018 ®

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

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

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DESIGN FOR ________ FEATURES 17 Design Is Dead. Long Live Design.

7 Leading Design in the

By Paul Hatch, IDSA Digital Age 18 Capturing the Essence of the Reimagined IDC

An interview with Federico Casalegno

By Joe Stitzlein, IDSA

By Simon Fraser and Ross Stevens

20 A Sense of NOLA

By Stephen B. Wilcox, PhD, FIDSA, and Stephan Clambaneva, IDSA

22 Conversations That Make a Difference: Design Matters IDC Emcee: Debbie Millman

36 Artisans of 4D Printing 39

Dispatch from the IDSA Medical Conference 2018: Improving the Design of Medical Devices

QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA INNOVATION DESIGN FOR ________

Design for ________ IDC 2018

n

4D

n

NOLA

SUMMER 2018

Cesaroni Design Associates Inc., Glenview, IL; Santa Barbara, CA Covestro, Pittsburgh, PA Crown Equipment, New Bremen, OH Dell, Round Rock, TX Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN McAndrews, Held & Malloy, Ltd., Chicago, IL Metaphase Design Group Inc., St. Louis, MO

42 Flight of the Future

Pip Tompkin Design, Los Angeles, CA

By Jacqueline Kern

Pamela Bailey, Facebook, and Ricardo Marquez n Jonah Becker, Fitbit n Safir Bellali, VF Global Innovation Center n Kathleen Brandenburg, IA Collaborative n Lloyd Cooper, IDSA, PUSH Product Design n Erica Eden, PepsiCo n Marc Fenigstein, Alta Motors n Laura Flusche, PhD, MoDA n Gerard Furbershaw, IDSA, LUNAR Emeritus n Becki Hyde, Humana n Navit Keren, Designit n Adi Neuman, Holon Institute of Technology n Steve Selzer n Surya Vanka, IDSA, Authentic Design n Claude Zellweger, Google

3M Design, St. Paul, MN

By Mathieu Turpault, IDSA

24 Design in Tech Report: 45 Appliance Design’s 31st The Responsibility of Industrial Designers Annual Excellence in Design Awards IDC Emcee: John Maeda 26 Speaker Sampling

IDSA AMBASSADORS

Samsung Design America, San Francisco, CA TEAGUE, Seattle, WA THRIVE, Atlanta, GA Tupperware, Orlando, FL

IN EVERY ISSUE

Charter supporters indicated in bold.

4 IDSA HQ

For more information about becoming an

By Chris Livaudais, IDSA

Ambassador, please contact IDSA at 703.707.6000.

6 From the Editor

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

8 Design Defined

By Jeff Smith and Sunil Malhotra

10 Beautility

By Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA

12 Book Review

By Mark Dziersk, FIDSA

13 A Look Back

By Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA

SUMMER 2018

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. ©2018 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 37, No. 1, 2018; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.

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I D S A HQ

OUR HISTORY DOESN’T DEFINE OUR FUTURE

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ive decades ago, a group of industrial designers met in the suburbs of Chicago for three days of fellowship, golf and daytime happy hours—oh yes, there was a bit of design sprinkled in there, too. It was the fall of 1965, and the IDSA National Meeting (as it was called at the time) featured a keynote by Charles Eames, a welcome by Henry Dreyfuss, FIDSA, and a panel discussion exploring what design would be like in 1975. Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to hear their provocations and hypotheses? Do you think they contemplated the connected future we now live in or the amorphous landscape of the design profession?

The amount of time reserved for socializing over “content” particularly stands out to me. While seemingly superficial, the desire for meaningful connections is a consistent request IDSA receives each year from attendees in post-conference feedback.

After all, in many ways the gathering of community is what these events are all about. This is a fundamental service IDSA has facilitated for the past decades of National Meetings turned National Conferences turned International Design Conferences.

It’s also fun to look back at the ’65 event and reflect on how much has changed since then. The definition of industrial design has expanded. The

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WHAT’S NEXT IS NOW

demographic composition of the design workforce is more diverse. The societal and cultural forces at play during that time have shifted. The tools we use to create now are more advanced, though thankfully we can still rely on pencils and sketchpads in a pinch.

As the industrial design profession evolved over the years, we have always strived to use conferences as a means to maintain a pulse on current topics and keep up with the progression. The opportunity to learn from our peers and share information, regardless of buzzworthy trends, is a prevailing value of attendance. Admittedly, some years were better than others, but our community has always endured.

Fast forward to today as we stand with the International Design Conference 2018 quickly approaching. Our team at IDSA headquarters is feverishly orchestrating an event unlike anything we’ve done before. Thankfully, we also have a dedicated group of volunteers providing input and creative vision along the way. So why deviate from our history? Because the current conversation circling design demands it, because the convergence of experience necessitates it and, most of all, because you, our community, deserves it.

This year’s IDC is so much more than a single event. It’s a stake in the ground marking a decisive change in IDSA’s approach to enabling the spaces and moments that inspire us and keep us forever in love with design. We have taken a long, hard look at where we’ve stumbled and succeeded in the past when it comes to our biggest gathering of the year. In doing so, we’ve illuminated countless opportunities to improve the conference experience from end to end. We can’t wait to share this experience with you in New Orleans.

I hope those who attended the 1965 National Meeting would be proud of the evolution and level of inclusion that is represented in this year’s IDC. And if any of you are out there reading this, please share the crazy futures you envisioned for design in 1975. I’m dying to know!

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

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F RO M T HE E DI TOR

THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

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t some point we all count how many conferences we have attended in our careers and ponder which ones really stand out. If you are early in your career, perhaps your first few conferences have left the largest impression. If you have been to many, maybe it is an event or happening that is memorable. For example, I certainly remember the IDSA National Conference in New York City when the city was hit by a complete power outage.

But at the end of the day, the best thing about conferences is going to them. Just being there. A conference is a social construct that provides for the dissemination of knowledge. Some great outcomes happen from events on a stage, but in fact, some truly great things also happen in the spaces and moments in between.

The interaction of people in conference settings leads to various sharing of ideas and learnings and knowledge.

Let’s face it, networking is a big deal, always has been, but with social platforms for networking like Facebook and LinkedIn, the practice has come into high relief. That said, the best way to network is to meet people at an event. Think of it. You are there for a certain reason that connects you.

In the case of the International Design Conference (IDC), it’s design. Since all the attendees are connected this way, what happens next is up to you. You can choose to put yourself out there or not. You can choose to have one long deep meaningful conversation or many small ones.

Many years ago at an IDSA conference on the West Coast I met two young designers, Jeff Smith and Gerard Furbershaw, IDSA, who had just started their own design firm; they called it LUNAR. They had left a larger consultancy to strike out on their own. The name came from the

idea of having done some moonlighting to get started. As we discussed why they set out and what they planned to do with the firm, I found both of them and their philosophy compelling. We met at the closing-night beach party in Southern California, and as we compared our experiences, we became fast friends and stayed in touch over the years.

About seven years ago that connection became part of my destiny as I wound up joining LUNAR and started the LUNAR office in Chicago—something that never would have happened if not for that chance beginning.

This year the IDC will be in New Orleans. It’s not the first time we will be in New Orleans, a great town to let loose in.

But it will be a first-of-its-kind conference, the format changing from the usual hotel-based ballroom environment to an event space and non-connected places to stay. Also, the event will be facilitated by two well-known designers and personalities, John Maeda and Debbie Millman. Maeda’s background is varied, stretching from academia to venture capital to publishing. Millman is a well-known branding expert who headlines a podcast on design and is the originator of a number of conferences herself.

I love the idea of provocative firebrands helping to mix things up as we go along and am looking forward to connecting with both of them. The truth is, I am very much looking forward to the change in format this year and hope to see you all there. Who knows, maybe we can connect.

Oh, and by the way, all these years after that beach party, it turns out that Gerard Furbershaw will be one of the do-notmiss speakers in attendance. Another great connection. So take this conference thing seriously. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet someone who will change the path you follow.

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

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LEADING DESIGN IN THE DIGITAL AGE In early April 2018, Samsung Electronics launched the Samsung Design Innovation Center (SDIC), a new design lab “dedicated to the integration of disruptive user experiences and cutting-edge technologies with product design.”

Dr. Federico Casalegno (above), an associate professor of the practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leads the SDIC’s work and mission. He founded and was director of the MIT Design Lab and was the founder of its predecessor, the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. INNOVATION spoke with Casalegno about the new SDIC and what he and Samsung hope to accomplish.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background in design?

I began in design in the early 1990s as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, first working on a master’s degree and then my PhD in communication and social sciences. At the same time, I worked at Philips Design, where Stefano Marzano was the chief design officer. Marzano was deeply rethinking industrial design as experience design and was revolutionizing how designers work at the corporate level.

My background in the social sciences was a perfect complement to the human-centered design approach.

How does your background at MIT influence your work at Samsung?

All of my work at the SDIC is informed by five key design directions developed while working at MIT. The first, design is making, ensures that while we may do advanced research, our ultimate goal is to make something that can be produced. But before making any “thing,” we apply the second point: design is always problem making first and problem solving later. As part of our approach, we prototype problems and experiences and then prototype solutions.

Of course, design is human-centered and experiencebased. That is more than a mere aspiration; it is an inviolable principle to serve and design for users by providing a meaningful experience. Further, design is about breaking the boundaries of established disciplines. It is the way to escape from technology-driven design. Finally, design is aesthetically beautiful and elegant. We define elegance as the ideal balance between form and function to deliver a delightful and meaningful experience.

Breaking disciplinary boundaries is the essence of my new leadership role. We will expand the SDIC’s capabilities

by adding strong competencies in human-centered experience design. My role is to set the vision and as orchestrator—to make sure it all comes together sonorously.

What new things do you expect to be working on?

We want to understand the evolution of societies, lifestyles and cultures so we can focus on human values.

Only then can we understand how technologies and their evolution can better support core human values. Finally, we can create innovative experiences that will have a positive social impact.

Our work is part of the new phase in the continued development of design in the digital age. The first phase focused on how humans interact with technologies. In the second phase, the focus shifted to what has been called the “ecosystem of services,” in which products and integrated services began to work together. The new phase we’ve now entered is one in which we can create a truly symbiotic relationship between humans and technologies, objects and services capable of making autonomous decisions. Through artificial intelligence and the internet of things, objects are beginning to behave almost as living creatures with personalities.

At the MIT Design Lab, we incorporated bacteria—a living organism—into the design of a running shoe, which enables the shoe to evolve as it gathers information as the shoe is being used to offer better comfort and support, creating an enhanced experience of running. That gives a sense of how fantastical the new phase is in terms of opportunities for design.

What are your big goals for SDIC, and what are challenges must you overcome?

Samsung merges cutting-edge technologies with strong design and manufacturing capabilities. SDIC will add experience-based design to that mix. Manufacturing hardware keeps getting easier, and soon enough, fabrication will be the purview of just about anyone. But understanding humans and crafting experiences that support people in a truly meaningful way is much more difficult. That’s where SDIC comes in. We need to provide a strong human experience and a value-centered vision to help promulgate that vision to all Samsung design studios.

Useful cutting-edge technologies will emerge only after we have a firm grasp on the human values that drive behavior. Employing those technologies, we can, in turn, make society better. n I N N O V AT I O N S U M M E R 2 0 1 8

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DE SI G N DE F I NED

From Design Thinking to Integral Design

A BRIDGE NOT TOO FAR

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his piece is not about today’s abundance of design thinking prescriptions to help businesses be more successful by using design. Nor does it dwell on the practice of design as we have known it.

The full potential of design—to delight and enrich customers while helping businesses be more successful—is layered like an onion. Therefore, greater breadth and depth are needed to understand and explain it more comprehensively. In this brief article, we offer a framework that might just be up to the task of integrating the whole of design.

Subjective Objectivity To date, attempts to fully explain design can be compared to the story of the six blind men and the elephant. This ancient Indian parable broadly goes: A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none were familiar with its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said, “We must inspect and know it by touch.” So they sought it out, found it and groped about it. One person whose hand landed on the trunk said, “This being is like a snake.” For another whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person whose hand was upon its leg, the elephant was like a tree trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said, “It is a wall.”

Another who felt its tail described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk stating the elephant was like a spear.

In some versions, the blind men stop talking and start listening and collaborate in order to “see” the full elephant. In another, a sighted man enters the par-

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able and describes the entire elephant from various perspectives. The blind men then learn that they were all partially correct and partially wrong. The moral is that while one’s subjective experience is true, it may not be the totality of truth, regardless of how objective it may appear.

This is what seems to be happening with design thinking as well. We see at least three possible reasons. First, the strategic use of design in business is in vogue, arguably due to the huge successes of organizations using design, such as innovators like Apple and Airbnb and design adopters like Amazon and Pepsico. Second, social media has made everyone a critic in a globally competitive context. Therefore, products and services have to be better and better to succeed. And third, nobody wants to miss out on achieving the greater success that using design seems to promise. Hence, a general thesis drives modern teaching and consulting approaches to design. This is especially so in design thinking programs, which promise clients methodologies that will help their companies be more successful.

So design thinking can be thought of as the new elephant in the room, a concept many describe according to their own perceptions, but that few call out as an incomplete description of the essential methodology of design. But design is a two-way conversation and demands orginal, innovative and even provocative interactions with custom-

The four quadrants (I, IT, WE and ITS) I is the interior of the individual; IT is the exterior of the individual; WE is the interior of the collective; and ITS corresponds to the exterior of the collective.

© 2018. Jeff Smith & Sunil Malhotra

ers, in addition to a good understanding of and response to their needs and wants. And originality, innovation and provocation are not known to proliferate from using typical customer research methodologies, however design oriented they may claim to be.

Integral Design Framework We believe that describing design from philosopher Ken Wilber’s integral reality perspective provides us with a holistic vantage point to further explain design.

Ken Wilber is an American writer on transpersonal psychology who has proposed a four-quadrant grid to synthesize all human knowledge and experience. All Quadrants All Levels (AQAL) is his basic framework (see diagram on page 8). It models human knowledge and experience along the interior-exterior and individual-collective axes as a comprehensive approach to reality.

As the theory goes, everything in the human experience happens within these four dimensions of reality. Our aspiration in using this framework is that it leads to a more definitive and holistic approach for all who seek to leverage design more fully.

Much of the design journey of LUNAR’s first 30 years

was influenced by Wilber’s integral theory, helping the design firm balance the individual and collective dimensions of product design both internally and externally. The experiences from using this approach in combination with the body of Design-in Tech work at Ideafarms are what led us to the idea of interpreting design through the AQAL framework.

And as such, we think the potential of reducing the blur between design being, design doing, design thinking and design results makes sense going forward.

We have begun prototyping integral design using Wilber’s quadrants (left). And we are optimistic about the possibilities to further describe, correlate, and develop fundamental design disciplines and detailed levels of skills.

This way of laying out design makes it easy to understand the current popularity of its left-brain-oriented quadrants on the right side of the framework (pun unintended).

This is because quantifiable and objective dimensions of reality are almost always more easily accepted by business leaders. Here we find that design thinking maps well as the process or system that seems to most drive measurable results-oriented behavior.

The other dimensions are equally, if not more, significant in ensuring that design does not get relegated to being a mostly quantitative activity and that character and personality do not get diminished. These dimensions, in contrast, come from informed points of view combined with interdisciplinary collaboration, both of which reside in the opposing left quadrants.

Once the definition of the disciplines in each quadrant is clear, the next step is to also include design sub-disciplines and skills. And as we do, we imagine the integral design framework can bridge the left and the right, the top and the bottom, and the corners to corners. In short, we aim to connect all aspects of design successfully to one to another.

—Jeff Smith, Co-founder, Smith+Furbershaw, designsmith@gmail.com and Sunil Malhotra, Co-founder and CEO, Ideafarms, sunil.malhotra@ideafarms.com

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B E A U T I LI TY

FORM FOLLOWS TWEET

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n some kind of student/teacher symmetry/cycle, this fall a fresh batch of industrial design students will be enrolling in school—while Pratt is honoring me with the Alumni Achievement Award. The world they will enter will be completely different from one I graduated into. When I started out, hardly anyone knew what industrial design was. Now everyone seems to be a design thinker. Today Liz Jackson called me “the most industrious designer.”

Our profession has no boundaries. Those graduates will be able to do anything to make all kinds of contributions. Paul

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Revere made pots and revolution. The question is, What does it mean to be an industrial designer?

The design process is essentially the natural selection process on steroids. Evolution jumped the shark; intelligent selection now steers the natural biological process: making choices and thinking ahead. Mastering that concept enabled humans to move out of caves and fly into space. The design spirit—wanting to make things better, to make beautiful stuff—is what propels progress. It’s our pioneer spirit—our entrepreneurial DNA kicking in. “Change is Fun!” says Hartmut Esslinger. Humans may not always pick the best course—we messed up the biosphere, but that opened up new opportunities for design (like solar panels and dikes).

Instead of climbing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs one layer at a time, industrial designers are always trying to achieve all levels at once (functional, safe, meaningful and beautiful). Complexity and contradiction are what industrial designers thrive on. In fact, being able to reconcile conflicting ideas is what design thinking really is. It’s exciting!

Smart design is social design, working in multidisciplinary teams and focusing not just on being user centered—smart design is community centered. And now even products are social: all those IoT devices need to play together. The ecosystem is everything.

The issues the students face aren’t really new.

Alexander Kostellow, FIDSA, one of the founders of industrial design pedagogy, wrote in the July 1947 issue of Interiors magazine, “The industrial designer has a problem of considerable magnitude in integrating appearance and function. And that function is not only a kind of passive or active performance, but is an expression of a type of civilization and a mode of living.”

Instead there is a growing gap between people trying to make the world better and others who think it is fine the way it is and that we are actually messing things up. Watch out!

Many people think that designers are also members of that elite class of experts trying to force our will on the helpless masses (and even on the powerful entitled class). They don’t trust scientists, doctors, lawyers, teachers—experts— off in their own fields or ivory towers detached from “reality.”

Progress has become a power struggle between two conflicting views – both trying to save the world!

The industrial designer has a problem of considerable magnitude in integrating appearance “ and function. And that function is not only a kind of passive or active performance, but is

”

an expression of a type of civilization and a mode of living.

We live in confusing times (our leader eats confusion for breakfast!). One lesson (maybe the only good lesson) of the last election was that it exposed the fact that experts really have lost touch with the popular culture, where being smart, optimistic or talented is generally considered a handicap.

Fear is not unfounded; the future really does look worse: floods, droughts, forest fires, wicked problems and climate change, any change! Media broadcast Vietnam into our living rooms, and now the internet delivers every calamity anywhere into everyone’s hands. Either numb or fearful, or because our attention span has been reduced to the length of a tweet, people are naturally risk-averse, opposed to the idea of failure—especially failing fast and failing often!

In the olden days, humans made up myths and magic to cope with natural fears until the Enlightenment showed that experiments and reason are more helpful guides. During the Depression, it was generally accepted that things were bad; people agreed on what good was and that they could make things better. Now it seems that a lot of people think it’s the reverse: Things were good before, and now a bunch of smarty-pants are trying to make things worse!

We all know about innovations taking on independent lives through mishandling or accidents and unintended consequences like introducing rabbits to Australia. Sailing off the edge of the world may have been crazy, and it turns out that the “Indians” would be happier if they hadn’t been “discovered.” Doctors relieve pain with medicine that is causing the opioid epidemic. To clean up slums, urban planners built housing projects that destroyed communities and caused an increase in crime, and that is now leading to gentrification. No one can predict how good intentions will play out, so it makes sense that doing nothing is a safe strategy—how can doing nothing boomerang? But wait!

Doing nothing can mean causing something worse.

The problems we face are real. Fear is our handicap.

Scientists tell us what kind of weather lies ahead—survival depends on how we design the future. Tough love from Mother Nature is not encouraging. Deep thinking is required to save the Earth. Our job used to be simply designing better stuff—now relieving the fear of progress needs to be a priority. Classic designers like Norman Bel Geddes (Futurama) and Henry Dreyfuss (Demoracity) made dreams

—Alexander Kostellow, FIDSA

come true. Today Philippe Starck (Axiom’s galactic hotel) makes progress look good again. Really good!

Juggling is an essential industrial design skill.

Traditionally, the profession focused on merging three realms: form, function and production. We are form givers working with manufacturers to translate advances in materials and processes into stuff we need. “Form follows function,” according to Louis Sullivan’s 1896 article.

Abstract sculptural form is also functional: beautility. Early industrial designers used art deco style and streamlining to make their products attractive and give them extra meaning.

As the profession matured, practical usefulness became more defined by ergonomics and marketing insights that drove the profession out of fashion. Then Hartmut Esslinger declared, “Form follows emotion!” and Memphis exploded the modernists’ dreams.

A product’s form has again become more about story and brand than the physical object. Industrial designers were masters of mechanics, physics, material properties, molding and all kinds of fabrication. Now that most factories have been off-shored, outsourced or desk-topped and smartphones are capturing all the practical functions, strategy and narrative are driving the design world. Objects communicate fast. Elevator pitches take too long. The narrative is reduced to 240 characters. Form follows tweet.

I’m working with Xenario to design exhibits for the new Shanghai Planetarium, working with astrophysicists like Jim Switzer creating interpretive experiences where a universal (literally) point of view is based on light years, where geological time seems short. We’re colliding galaxies with kids raised on Snapchat and Wechat.

The class of 2018 is finally more diverse and much more female; they are multicultural digital natives and sensitive empathizers. Gone are the gearheads who once ruled the shop. This class is finding a radically different profession and culture where they will need to create their own careers.

What will the following generation look like? What should we teach the new ones? One if by form, two if by function?

One thing is for sure: beautility is a basic. Rowena Reed Kostellow said, ”If you can’t make it more beautiful, what’s the point?” I say to all the teachers, If we aren’t teaching them how to make it more beautiful, what’s the point?

—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com

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B O O K RE V I E W

ORIGINALS How Non-Conformists Move the World

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riginals: How Non-Conformists Move the World is all about seeing the world differently and challenging the status quo. Author Adam Grant is a wellknown Wharton professor and keen observer of the dynamics involved in thinking creatively and, well, originally. The book is a good and informative read, but the thing that really left an impression on me is its timing. In addition to the rich and engaging content, it is a sign of the times. Originals is a part of the zeitgeist of the shifting borders around design and the expanding universe of innovation that everyone is now compelled to participate in.

One of the book’s most intriguing truths is that Grant’s proof points go well beyond the designer, outlining principles used by various firebrands, politicians and business leaders that have resulted in not only innovation but disruption.

Originals looks at a wide range of stories, including the success of disruptive companies like Warby Parker and of individuals such as Dean Kamen, a genius-level mechanical engineer who has engineered and designed many amazing products and medical innovations and, of course, the Segway. Acknowledging Kamen’s continued successes in many important product development areas, the author theorizes what might have gone wrong with the Segway and in the process also calls out innovators like Steve Jobs, an early Segway supporter, for being wrong about it. According to Grant, even the greatest innovators don’t knock it out of the park every time and success in one area of innovation does not guarantee success in every area.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the book are the unexpected angles from which the author attacks our preconceived notions and orthodoxies; for instance, the chapter about what the browser you use says about you and your creative potential. Grant, through an investigation of customer service representatives in call centers, points out that if you use your computer’s default browser, you may be reluctant to move out of your comfort zone when being creative. Going out of your way to download Chrome or Firefox highlights your willingness to experiment.

In one of my favorite parts of the book Grant quotes Picasso, who once memorably said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

Learning throughout life teaches constraint and imparts limits and boundaries. According to Grant, this is one of the reasons why the folks in the middle of corporations are the least likely to press boundaries, challenge orthodoxies and disrupt the status quo. It turns out that leadership and newcomers are far more enabled to challenge or innovate due to where they sit in the organization.

Much of the book is intuitive, like the above observation, but I won’t lie, it took me a little while to finish. Some chapters can drag.

But then I would pick it up again and invariably be drawn into another exciting idea that debunks a myth or unpacks a success.

Punctuated by intriguing chapter titles like “Rebel with a Cause” and “Rethinking Groupthink,” Originals offers both useful and actionable insights. For example, the idea that when faced with a deadline we become our most creative.

According to Grant, for example, both Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address were last-minute accomplishments inspired by the adrenaline rush of “I must finish this now.” I recognize this in myself, both as a designer and especially as a writer often prone to procrastination. Grant points out that procrastination often triggers creativity and that a deadline forces action that often leads to better results.

Grant looks at many different scenarios from how Beethoven’s 5th wasn’t Beethoven’s favorite work to how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs innovated in garages. And he relays an entertaining story about skeptics during the development of the Lion King, a number-one grossing film that almost didn’t happen.

Originals offers something for everyone, and that, I suppose, is the biggest point highlighting again the fact that the boundaries around design are shifting and disruption is quickly becoming the norm, or at least the objective, for innovators everywhere.

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

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Courtesy Harry Giambrone

A LOOK BA C K

Discovering Hidden Histories of Women Designers

DESIGN DETECTIVE

H

ave you ever found an old family photograph album and wondered, “Who are these people?

When was this photo taken and why?” I’ve learned over the years that IDSA is like a family, and a single photo can tell many stories. Those stories must be gathered. It’s exciting detective work!

An Unexpected Photo Connects People & Places The Winter 2015 issue of INNOVATION triggered a hunt that combined lucky breaks, personal interviews, internet research, old-fashioned page-by-page research in libraries and the kind help of university archivists to discover women who earned degrees in industrial design in the 1940s.

Their varied experiences reveal the choices available to women during wartime and the changing roles of women in postwar conditions.

That issue included the final article by Carroll Gantz, FIDSA, and a farewell written by Bret Smith, IDSA, and me for our dear friend who had passed away during the issue’s preparation. In January 2016, Harry Giambrone, living in Dayton, OH, emailed Bret to comment on Gantz’s article.

Giambrone, L/IDSA, had worked at Jack Morgan and Associates after graduating from the University of Dayton’s industrial design program in 1951. Upon learning of my interest in Chicago’s design history, he sent me a staff photo, probably taken in early 1952, which included two women:

Asako Takusagawa and Margaret McCauley.

In various interviews I’ve conducted over the years, I had heard stories about Takusagawa and McCauley, but had never seen photos of either. Giambrone told me that he worked with Takusagawa to draw styling interpretations and renderings and that McCauley worked with Chester Wojtowicz on mechanical drawing.

Asako Takusagawa: From California to Arizona to Chicago During the summer of 2016 while researching the history of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), I looked for familiar names among the students and faculty; Takusagawa’s name jumped off a page. One of five June 1947 graduates in product design, she also was listed with students completing concentrations in ceramics, architectural sculpture and volume design. SAIC industrial design students not only studied the artwork held at the museum; they mingled with fine arts, photography, commercial design and theater classmates. Takusagawa’s teachers included Joseph Palma and Henry Glass, FIDSA, both practicing designers who would have assisted her in a job search.

Internet research sketched out Takusagawa’s life. Born in California in 1920 and a resident of Reedley in the Central Valley agricultural region, Takusagawa was a member of the Delta Phi Delta national honorary art society and one of 40

Above: Staff at Jack Morgan and Associates, Chicago, c. 1952. Jack Morgan, with mustache; Mel Boldt to his left; Asako Takusagawa, standing beside the lamp; Margaret McCauley, with glasses; Harry Giambrone, seated second from left; Chester Wojtowicz, seated to the left of Giambrone.

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Courtesy Kay Hicks Waltman

Staff of C.E. Waltman and Associates, Chicago, c. 1946. C.E. (Chic) Waltman at center, Kay Hicks in white, Charles “Chub” Waltman looking over his father’s shoulder, Jackie Pieper to the right of Chub.

graduates from the California College of Arts and Crafts in May 1942. In 2011, nearly 70 years after her graduation, Asako donated to the school’s scholarship fund.

The daughter of immigrants who toiled as farmers, Takusagawa had never visited Japan. After Japan’s December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, in May 1942 the US government introduced one of the most shameful laws in the country’s history. Japanese-American residents, many of them citizens who mostly lived on the West Coast, were collected and incarcerated in camps set in desolate areas in Western states. In addition to enduring dehumanizing treatment, these 120,000 people lost their businesses and property. Released at war’s end, many suffered more indignities and hardship.

Takusagawa and her family were among those sent to the Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, AZ, where by 1944 she taught art in the camp high school. After 1945, Takusagawa and her parents found their way to Chicago, whose Japanese-American community numbered about 400 in 1940 and swelled to 30,000 by 1950.

After graduating from the School of the Art Institute, Takusagawa began work at Jack Morgan and Associates. In 1952 she was one of the many Morgan employees who joined Mel Boldt when he split off to form his own firm. The designers I interviewed who had worked at Mel Boldt and Associates remembered her as a strong office manager and Boldt’s personal assistant. As Boldt’s eyes and ears, she made sure the day’s production was ready for his review. She served on staff after Boldt’s death until the firm’s closing in the late 1980s. Little has been uncovered about her since that point.

In September 2017, I interviewed Bill Cesaroni, IDSA, who got his first job at Mel Boldt and Associates in 1971.

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There he learned how a design firm operated and how to draw in the signature Boldt style, which defined the firm’s approach to product visualization. Viewing Giambrone’s photo, Cesaroni remembered Takusagawa as one of the most devoted of the firm’s employees—she was first in and last out at the office. He also said, “Margaret [McCauley] was a ‘detail designer.’ She translated the designers’ perspective view renderings into realistic models to provide engineers with a starting point. Detailers were mechanically talented and worked with pencils in full scale on vellum.”

A Lunch Tip Opens a Trail During a lunch with long-time friends in April 2017, one of them suggested I meet Annie Moldafsky, whose husband, Bob Moldafsky, had been one of the creators of Unimark. I was thrilled to meet someone connected with the early days of the first global design firm, founded in Chicago in 1964.

Bob Moldafsky began his studies at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1939 and graduated in industrial design in 1943, along with his friend Ralph Eckerstrom. Two decades later after varied other jobs, they hatched the idea to form Unimark and worked together for 10 years.

Annie told of a memorable party she and Bob hosted at their home in October 1988: the 45th reunion of the 1943 class; graduates from 1940–1945 were also invited.

Her party file contained letters from the event organizers, lists of invitees, a list of graduates (compiled by Professor James Shipley, who began teaching ID at Illinois in 1939 and retired in 1978 as the dean of the art department), and autobiographies written by the party attendees. Annie gave me some of Bob’s papers and showed me his

Margaret [McCauley] was a ‘detail designer.’ She translated the designers’ perspective “ view renderings into realistic models to provide engineers with a starting point. Detailers

”

were mechanically talented and worked with pencils in full scale on vellum.

—Bill Cesaroni, IDSA

Illini yearbooks. Photos of Margaret McCauley and Bob Moldafsky appeared side by side on a page of seniors in the College of Fine and Applied Arts; McCauley was a member of the Society of Illustrators.

The 1943 class included 16 students, many of whom forged notable design careers. Shipley’s list noted Tom Steinbach, whose varied work included time with Raymond Loewy, FIDSA; Wayne Champion, who would establish the San Jose State ID program; and Jacqueline Pieper and Margaret McCauley. His list included 1940 painting graduate Nettie Hart, who designed packaging and airline interiors while at Loewy’s Chicago office and ascended to vice president of Loewy/Snaith, Inc. in New York in 1960. The list also included 1942 student Herbert Zeller, who headed design at Motorola beginning in the mid-1950s, and 1944 graduate Martha Kay Hicks.

After graduating, Jackie Pieper served as the hub for alumni news and with the help of other alums in Chicago, including Nettie Hart, produced a newsletter from 1944 through the early 1950s. Her newsletters reported Illinois grads (men and women) working from California, Seattle, New York, and beyond, operating their own design offices, working on design staffs of major manufacturers and establishing ID education programs. Some worked in theater and art, a few devoted their lives to ministries, and others went into advertising or sales. The 1988 party had propelled the idea of a reunion book of autobiographies, which Pieper circulated in 1991. She donated this manuscript and the newsletters to the university library in 2001. Those papers were the buried treasure that revealed the lives of dozens of Illinois grads and Shipley’s career.

Margaret McCauley, Kay Hicks and Jackie Pieper: Wartime Classmates Women industrial designers enjoyed a unique window of opportunity during the years before, during and immediately after World War II. Patriotic enthusiasm and the pressure of conscription caused men to leave school before completion or enter the military immediately after graduation. Many of the University of Illinois female ID students came from small Midwestern towns and jumped into exciting work and life experiences in Chicago and New York. The University of Illinois provided a pipeline for job prospects that became a coast-to-coast network over the next decades.

Margaret McCauley (born in Rock Island, IL, in 1919) stated that in 1943 “two weeks after graduation, in a fit of patriotism, I went to work at the Curtiss-Wright airplane plant in Columbus, OH.” She found drawing airplane parts boring and headed for Chicago, where she designed products for Dave Chapman’s office for six years and then for Jack Morgan and Associates for two years. When Mel Boldt opened his own design office, she worked for him for 23 years. Retiring in 1975, she moved back to Rock Island to the family home she inherited and worked in a commercial art studio until 1984. She dove into community activities, took up painting, designed traveling exhibits about birds for the National Audubon Society and tutored children. She died in 2011.

The June 1944 class graduated two industrial design students—both female: Kay Hicks and Emily Christopher, who reported to the 1944 alum newsletter, “instead of designing new products for the market, I’m redesigning slightly shattered bodies and tired minds to fit them for the rugged civilian world” at an army hospital in Memphis. After having five daughters, Christopher earned a master’s degree in special education and taught disabled children for 20 years. She died in 2002.

Kay Hicks (born in 1923 in Tallaquah, OK) grew up in Tulsa. She attended a women’s junior college in Mississippi, finishing in May 1941, and entered the University of Illinois that fall. An artist since her youth, she enrolled in the art department and found her niche when she heard Professor Shipley explain the work of industrial designers.

Graduating in the class before Hicks and Christopher, Jackie Pieper (born 1919 in Urbana) worked at C. E. Waltman and Associates, formed in Chicago by Chauncey (C.E.) Waltman (known as “Chic”) in the late 1920s. Pieper shared an apartment with Margaret McCauley. She encouraged Kay Hicks to join her at Waltman after her graduation instead of working for a manufacturer or retailer, advising that working for a consultancy would be more varied and challenging.

During wartime, finding a job was easy but housing was scarce, and the three became roommates—two sharing a double bed and the third on a Murphy bed. Once employed at Waltman, Hicks reported to classmates that she had a few accounts of her own and added, “I love my job, have no husband or prospect for that matter, but have an apartment and nylons, so can’t complain.”

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Postwar Directions for Women Designers Hicks recalled the excitement of designing fashionable women’s accessories—handbags, compacts, jewelry, cigarette cases— in the new plastic materials, as well as all types of consumer products. At war’s end, pilot Charles ”Chub” Waltman settled in Chicago and joined the staff at his father’s firm. Chub and Hicks married in 1947 and went to Sweden to learn about glassware and ceramics and found client work. A gifted artist and witty cartoonist, Chub had not been educated to be a designer and had worked in theater. Living in Stockholm and working through translators, they created product designs for companies eager for American styling. Back in the US and after having two sons, Hicks worked briefly for the Waltman studio. Later she turned to painting and interior design while raising three children. Waltman Associates continued into the 1970s. Still active today, in 2016 Hicks had a solo exhibition of her paintings.

Pieper worked at Waltman for three years and then operated her independent design office for nine years, a bold step for a single woman in the 1950s. Her services included retail interiors and packaging. After a dozen years designing appliances, furniture, outboard motors, toys and shoe stores, she grew tired of a freelancer’s diet of peanut butter and switched careers in 1956 to speech therapy.

Earning a master’s degree, she worked in a suburban Chicago school district for several years, and in 1962 she moved to Battle Creek, MI. There she was a speech and language pathologist for 22 years and became a local legend for her generous philanthropic work with children.

She died in 2009.

The Waltman office and the Pieper-McCauley apartment served as Chicago landing spots for Urbana female classmates. For example, Barbara Kelly worked for Waltman during the 1944 summer and roomed with Pieper and McCauley until Kay Hicks replaced her. Kelly left to spend two and a half years in New York as a designer at Donald Deskey Associates, where she designed packaging, flooring and radios. In 1991 she recalled, “It was a very exciting time to be in the city. Social life was great too!

Soldiers were arriving and departing with lots of money and a desire to see the bright lights, and I joined the fun.” After the war, she married and raised seven children in Pittsburgh and “became a full-time mother and corporate wife with civic and volunteer projects.”

Courtesy Kay Hicks Waltman

A L O O K B ACK

Kay Hicks at a drafting table, c. 1946

Ambitious women remained single and continued their careers after the 1950s. Some women married and soon became mothers, redirecting their energies and talents. Because of society’s norms and expectations, the rigors and rivalries of the male-dominated industrial design practice, as well as the absence of reliable birth control prior to 1960, women rarely combined a full-time design career and parenting. Some women left the demanding industrial design profession to work in allied fields such as teaching, graphic design or interior design, even while raising multiple children; others returned to their artistic roots and engaged in creative pursuits.

Thanks to the generosity of Harry Giambrone, Annie Moldafsky and Kay Hicks Waltman, one photo led to countless stories. But more stories need to be unearthed.

Design schools should reach out to retired teachers and alums. Invite them to classes to share their stories; students will learn life lessons as well as technical skills from past masters of the pen. And train students in the art of recording oral histories. Urge your school to maintain records of its alums. A little digging can uncover hidden histories that will enrich the lives of industrial design students and practitioners.

—Vicki Matranga, H/IDSA Co-Chair, IDSA Design History Section

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DESIGN IS DEAD. LONG LIVE DESIGN.

W

e are living in a remarkable time of societal change. This is not a revolution brought about by technology, but one led by innate human needs to be heard, to be valued and to connect.

Design is an integral part of this change. Design has the versatility to both help define the problem and provide the answer. Design is especially adept at areas of nebulosity where the old rules no longer apply.

The old rules no longer apply. What we called design a decade ago is only a fraction of what is now assigned to its domain. Industrial design too has extended its reach into adjacent areas of design in UI, branding, technology and UX, not to mention our multifaceted role in the C-suite and within startups.

Industrial designers no longer own ID. We no longer work in isolation. We used to think of collaboration as the sharing of (our) ideas with non-designers, the clients or other departments. We represented the voice of the user and had a moral responsibility to raise the bar of the visual aspects of the product or service. That form of role-based collaboration now seems superficial. Just as we see career definitions becoming amorphous in society, our roles within teams have also become interchangeable. The whole team is the designer; the whole team has responsibility for the user and the UI, the brand and the financial outcomes. Silos collapse, and new interdisciplinary agile teams excel. The era of the T-shaped designer is finally upon us.

We are no longer relevant as a profession. Our relevance is in what we can bring to the table that others value. We are no longer defined by the traditional boundaries of our profession, but rather by the skills and approach we practice. To know who we are, we need to understand the others around us, see how we fit into the context. Who are UX designers? Who are makers? Have you met them, exchanged ideas with them, collaborated with them? What do they think we do, and what is our relevance to them? We need to understand them. We no longer operate in isolation.

It’s time to open up the doors and get to know the neighbors.

So IDSA will open up the doors. For over 50 years the IDSA annual conference has provided a unique platform for industrial designers to exchange ideas and has

formed the foundation of many people’s careers. It defined the moral center of our design practice, and together we deepened our understanding of industrial design to the level of expertise and mastery. But today the evolution of ID will come from interdisciplinary learning and close collaboration with other areas of design. So, a conference, too, needs to embrace the expansion of our profession and become a platform for exchanging ideas across all areas of design.

And so it’s born—the cross-disciplinary International Design Conference or IDC. The seed was planted in 2015. The then-IDSA President John Barratt, FIDSA, asked Jeevak Badve, IDSA, and I to analyze the IDSA conference and what it could become. Research on attendee and non-attendee experiences provided us with wide-ranging unmet needs, ideas and complaints, but very few common goals. Research into other conferences provided further ideas and reference points, but it was only once we created user-experience maps that a clearer picture evolved: to build a conference from the ground up based upon user experience and service design principles. The goal was to focus on the experience not just of the attendees but of the speakers and sponsors, too, thus creating a holistic package. This core concept brought many new ideas to the table and a shift toward creating a more inclusive, relevant, cross-disciplinary event.

The IDSA Board bravely agreed to this most radical change.

The very last IDSA conference took place in Atlanta in 2017, leaving a successful end to a long legacy. With the combined resources of both the IDSA staff and dozens of volunteers, including several former conference chairs, plans for the new design-wide conference came together.

The IDC is a new experience. It is a platform for all designers to be heard, to be valued, and to connect. It tightly packs lots of relevant, inspirational content and plenty of juicy open discussions into an unmissable event. We are honored to have two amazing emcees, Debbie Millman and John Maeda, whose charisma and perspective will add value to every corner of the four September days in New Orleans. I hope you have been able to register to be a part of this new beginning and are ready to help us all take design into the next era.

—Paul Hatch, IDSA, CEO, TEAMS Design; paul.hatch@teamsdesign.com

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By Joe Stitzlein, IDSA joe@stitzstudio.com Joe Stitzlein is the co-founder and executive creative director of Stitzlein Studio. The firm has worked with technology leaders, governments, entrepreneurs and Olympic athletes to create identity systems, iconic images, typefaces, digital experiences and branddefining products. Clients have included Intel, Nike, Apple, Netflix, Herman Miller, P&G, KQED, FedEx, Dwell magazine and Michelle Obama.

CAPTURING THE ESSENCE OF THE REIMAGINED IDC

I

’ve been creating brands for over 25 years, and in that time the nature of branding has changed. Brand design has evolved from a mostly 2D discipline concerned with creating timeless expressions of corporations and their products via packaging, advertising and retail to a blend of software design, audio

branding, animation, storytelling and social media. Not to mention that the traditional channels still exist.

It’s not only a more complex landscape for designers to consider; it’s also much more fun—and engaging.

In 2015, IDSA saw an opportunity to create a new conference that would appeal to this growing diversity of design disciplines. It would build on the traditional strengths of IDSA—its expertise in aesthetics, usability and user-centric design thinking— and use these as a platform to welcome discussion and thought leadership from other disciplines of design including UX and brand.

To help launch the reimagined IDC, Stitzlein Studio was approached by IDSA to develop an identity that would be modern and compelling and speak to the diversity of design disciplines present at the IDC. To help establish a firm foundation in this more complex world, at Stitzlein Studio we follow a set of principles, which were helpful for the IDC and hopefully are helpful for you as well.

1. PURPOSEFUL: Strive to capture the brand’s soul with beauty and simplicity.

The International Design Conference stands for a diversity of design disciplines and the timeless values of craft, beauty and simplicity. Our solution was to create a ruthlessly simple mark that reduced the letters IDC to their essence and placed them in a circle born from the geometry of the IDSA word mark. The result is a strong, confident stamp that can be easily replicated and, most importantly, is simple enough so as not to compete with the conference itself. This is a

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delicate dance; it has to be an interesting mark, but it also must provide quiet support for the sum and substance of the conference as well.

2. CONTEXTUAL: Respect the cultural and business context while challenging it.

We began with two points of reference. First, the iconic IDSA logotype, with its red dot over the I. Its simple geometric Bodoni letterforms inspired our custom geometric typography within the IDC logotype. Although the Bodoni letterforms are timelessly beautiful, they don’t scale well to digital use cases, and they don’t have a youthful attitude. Our solution was to create a logotype that is a younger sibling of the precedent set by the IDSA word mark.

Secondly, New Orleans is an important brand context in and of itself. A center of American creativity for music and food, New Orleans has an aesthetic DNA that should be considered. It also has pitfalls that can shift the identity toward clichés. To solve this, we took the colors of the NOLA flag and shifted them to be more vibrant and more modern. In subsequent years the palette will shift to the colors of the next host city.

“When you go to New Orleans, you’re not just going to a city, you’re going to an entire culture.”

—James Carville

3. LIVING: Identities should work harder in the digital era—they should interact with and serve the user.

Unlike timeless analog identities of the past, digital identities need to scale from the constraints of iOS to the animation possibilities of Instagram and to retail and beyond. This is an opportunity to put brands on a timeline and consider animation, interaction and responsiveness.

Mobile and new forms of user input such as voice require brands to now live in multiple dimensions.

We created the IDC system with data and animation at its core. We wanted to delight the viewer with multiple images, voices and color. Modern brand systems don’t derive their appeal and authority from being static. They are algorithmic and alive.

4. SYSTEMIC: Digital identities are not only logos. They are patterns that bring an organization to life.

Brand identities give birth to a system of form, pattern, typography, color and animation that can occupy the channels of a modern brand and show the variety of expression inherent to environments, websites, print and digital. People now engage with emotional brands, and brand patterns help them to create experiences that are more delightful. To support the diversity of design, we crafted a family of images that were data driven.

5. SOULFUL: Digital identities leave a memorable, emotional impression on people.

The Nike Swoosh. Apple. Netflix. Great brand identities should be beautiful, memorable and stirring. Great brand systems leave a positive impression, create love for the brand and, above all, make you feel something for the organization.

The feeling is a promise of a great experience and is an ambassador for the product the organization is selling.

Creating a Living Digital System Our insight for the IDC was simple. We wanted the attendees to leave the conference wanting to take action. What if design wasn’t a noun, but a verb? The modular “Design For______” voice speaks to the end benefit of design for humanity and brings to life the variety of aspirations that every designer has, whether serious or fun. When used as a noun, design is a thing to look at. An industry. When used as a verb, design can show the broad impact we can have on society itself.

The result is a modern design system that captures the creativity of New Orleans while avoiding its clichés. It’s a clean, dynamic system that should present the IDC as a welcoming, exciting platform for thought leadership in design for years to come. n

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A SENSE OF NOLA

E

“There’s more to New Orleans than Bourbon Street!”

veryone loves New Orleans! There’s Bourbon Street, lined with bars selling hurricanes, frozen daiquiris and “big-ass” beers, where closing time has no meaning. There are all the great restaurants and the music clubs in the French Quarter and along Frenchman Street.

And there’s Harrah’s Casino for those who like to gamble.

That’s the New Orleans most visitors experience.

Tennessee Williams once said, “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. All the rest are Cleveland.” New Orleans culture is unlike any other.

What if you could explore the city in a way that no guide today could match? What if you could explore the city through all five heightened senses to get to the heart of it?

Peeling back the layers of each, you would uncover there’s another New Orleans that’s quite magical.

With this multisensorial perspective in hand, we invite you to see, hear, taste, smell and feel the city and prepare to share your strongest sensual experiences during your time in NOLA for IDC. If you want to get a real sense of New Orleans, you may wish to begin by understanding that it—the most northern outpost of the Caribbean—is the only major city in America with a surviving indigenous culture, one derived primarily from West Africa. We want to describe some of the components of this culture for those who, while in New Orleans, want to peel off some of the layers of the onion that it is.

Get in Touch with the Mardi Gras Indians There are approximately 40 surviving Mardi Gras Indian “tribes” or “gangs.” The tradition goes back to the days of slavery, but somewhere along the line, they branded themselves as “Indian tribes,” with names like the Mohawk Hunters and the Creole Wild West. What they really are, though, in my opinion, are surviving West African secret

societies. Many of the cultures in the areas of West Africa where the enslaved people came from have secret societies with well-defined hierarchies, rituals they perform in private, and musical traditions that often include call and response.

The Mardi Gras Indians—Big Chief, Spy Boy, Big Queen, Wild Man—follow a very structured hierarchy. They also perform call-and-response chants that include all sorts of words that nobody now knows the meaning of—“pocky way,” “jock-a-mo-fe-nah-hey,” “iko iko”—which surely derive from the languages the enslaved people brought with them.

They used to have more or less secret Monday night “practices,” which were, to us, traditional African-derived rituals, but these practices are now much less secret. They usually take place in neighborhood bars. In general, the Indians have come out of the shadows over the past few years, so they are much easier for visitors to get a feel for.

The Indians make their own elaborate beaded and feathered suits and parade on Mardi Gras Day as well as certain other days, such as St. Joseph’s Day. These days, some of the Indians perform around town, so if you check the listings in Gambit or Offbeat, you might get a chance to see them.

The Origin Story of Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs Because you can’t dig a grave in New Orleans (the water table is too high), you need to spend your afterlife above ground (Catholics, at least historically, didn’t believe in cremation). An aboveground tomb tends to cost a lot more than a traditional grave, so the cost of burial was historically a difficult issue for those who were financially challenged.

Enter the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. Their traditional function was to provide tombs for their members by collecting small regular fees and creating their own mausoleums.

They gradually expanded to become engines of social cohesion, providing health insurance and other services.

Above: Bourbon Street New Orleans Second Line ©Richard T. Pranke; richardtpranke.com 20

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By Stephen B. Wilcox, PhD, FIDSA, and Stephan Clambaneva, IDSA sbw@dscience.com n Stephan.CLAMBANEVA@3ds.com Stephen Wilcox is a principal and the founder of Design Science, which specializes in optimizing the usability and safety of products. He served for many years as Chair of the IDSA Human Factors Professional Interest Section. n Stephan Clambaneva is the design innovation director at Dassault Systèmes. He is a hybrid designer, ideator, inventor and design value evangelist. He has served on IDSA’s Board of Directors, as the NE DVP and as chair of the IDSA NYC Chapter.

Sense

Description gingerbread architecture, mini plantation mansions, streetcars swaying cities of the dead buried in aboveground houses random second-line parades any day in streets red beans cooking the wafting scents of fried and boiled seafood on Fridays incense burning at the Voodoo shops in the French Quarter music flowing from open doors on to the streets, hawkers the local language: where ya at, ya mom’n’em, zinc (sink), makin’ groceries, ax me a question the Calliope tooting music, the ear-splitting horn of paddle-wheel boats beignets (fried donuts with powdered sugar) a fresh sugared king cake the tart taste of Creole tomato: in season in June the feel of spongy Spanish moss on oak trees in the park the feel of the grass growing on the levees while rolling downhill the feel of the wind before a major storm

Feeling of tradition, beauty religious tradition tradition, individualism hunger Catholic tradition religion, tradition roots, past history tradition, industry tradition, joy tradition, heritage summer, exclusivity beauty, spooky safety, fun freedom and/or fear

There are still about 70 such clubs. At some point, they came up with the idea of holding an annual parade to recruit new members. These “second-line” parades happen yearround and are a great pleasure to join, or at least to watch.

They also provide enough gigs for the brass bands to keep them alive, even during otherwise dry times. Check the listings to see if you can catch a second-line parade, where you can see brass bands and also stepping clubs.

that will keep transporting you back there for years to come.

According to local writer Scott Gold, “the aromatic pulchritude of New Orleans is unrivaled” and includes “Confederate jasmine, the sweet olive, gardenias, magnolia flowers, and, if you’re lucky, blooming angels’ trumpets.” Now if you get within a block of boiled crawfish, beignets, fried shrimp or warm French bread, make sure to indulge yourself with whatever your nose caught a whiff of.

The True Sounds of NOLA The true indigenous music that oozes from the streets of New Orleans is that of the marching brass bands. Every secondline parade needs at least one brass band, usually a few. Their tradition was to play traditional jazz, but a few years back, beginning with the Dirty Dozen, and continuing today with bands like the Hot 8, Rebirth, Newbirth and the Stooges, they began to expand their repertoire to include soul, zydeco, R&B and even hip-hop. In addition to performing in the parades, many of them perform around town at the music clubs or, for the up and comers, in the streets of the French Quarter.

If you have parades, you need colorful groups to march in them. The stepping clubs are groups who march (well, sort of dance while they march) in the second-line parades.

They wear flashy suits, and many of them carry colorful handmade umbrellas. They’ve developed elaborate stepping routines that they perform in the parades.

Rich and Decadent For those of you who are self-proclaimed foodies, you are in for a culinary rollercoaster ride. If you can explain the difference between Cajun and Creole, then make sure to explain it to the rest of the IDC attendees. A simple way to differentiate the two cuisines is that Creole is city food (not particularly spicy with subtle flavors made possible by spices from around the world that the port afforded), while Cajun is country food fortified by strong local peppers. One simple difference is that Creole cuisine uses lots of tomatoes and proper Cajun food doesn’t. Tasting the differences between these famous cuisines allows you to truly appreciate the people who cook them.

We have taken these traditions, which used to be largely private affairs in neighborhoods where tourists were afraid to venture, and have illustrated them using their dominant sensual experience and made them much more accessible.

While in New Orleans, we urge you to wallow in sensual indulgences. You might get a chance to experience the real sense of New Orleans, which is more than getting liquored up on Bourbon Street and bearing your breasts for Mardi Gras beads (two things, by the way, that hardly any natives do). Oh, and don’t forget, IDC is happening there, too! n

Symphony of Smells Although most visitors will have plenty to say about Bourbon Street’s smell, walking around town until the early hours of the morning you will be surprised that it’s not only about spilled liquor. You are in for an olfactory experience in NOLA

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Conversations That Make a Difference

DESIGN MATTERS

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f you ask Debbie Millman why design matters, you are likely to get a clearly articulated and thoughtful response drawn from years

of experience as an author, designer, illustrator and educator. She’s also likely to sprinkle in a few fascinating anecdotes taken from some of the many interviews she’s hosted as founder and curator of Design Matters, a podcast placing a spotlight on the creative culture thriving all around us.

Design Matters is wildly popular, with over 5 million downloads per year since it began in 2005. The sheer breadth of the creative professions featured on the show is profound.

Millman has talked to such cultural luminaries as Marina Abramovic, Thomas Kail, Laurie Anderson, Milton Glaser, Malcolm Gladwell, Shepard Fairey, Barbara Kruger, Amanda Palmer, Alain de Botton and many more. Architects, strategists, artists, musicians, journalists, poets, scientists, actors and activists have all had a seat at the Design Matters table.

Recently, artist Amy Sherald, opened up about the inspiration and process behind her vividly polarizing official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. In each interview, Millman seeks to learn more about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what drives them.

When viewed as a collection, Design Matters begins to reveal a commonality and shared language between design

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Design is one of the few disciplines that is a science as well as an art. Effective, meaningful “ design requires intellectual, rational rigor along with the ability to elicit emotions and beliefs.

Thus, designers must balance both the logic and lyricism of humanity every time they design something, a task that requires a singularly mysterious skill.

”

—Debbie Millman, How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer

disciplines, one that crosses boundaries and is almost foundational no matter the medium one chooses to work in. The late famed design artisan Massimo Vignelli proclaimed this simply in his 2010 interview: “If you can design one thing, you can design anything,” he says. Millman probes further and Vignelli responds, “The design discipline is the same and it’s just the specifics that change … if you can design graphics, you can design furniture. I’ve designed tables to look like Bodoni.”

Like Vignelli, many of Millman’s guests are designers who have at one point in their career created physical artifacts, though they aren’t immediately identified as industrial designers. This is perhaps indicative of the expanding definition of industrial design in era of holistic product experiences. Or maybe it’s just that designers don’t like to be pigeonholed with labels.

Regardless and interestingly, there are only two interviews (out of over 400) with individuals specifically identified as an industrial designer. In 2013, Millman spoke with Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design inc. and perhaps most well-known for his work with Steve Jobs and the Apple Macintosh computers of the mid ’80s. Esslinger recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper Hewitt. The second is Ayse Birsel, IDSA, an award-winning industrial designer and author of Design the Life You Love.

During her 2016 interview, Birsel describes the first time she heard the term “product design” from a family friend via an examination of a humble tea cup: “The vessel was designed such that the liquid doesn’t spill, the handle helps you hold it securely, and the curved edges of the rim feel comfortable on the lips.” These aspects are design “at the human scale,” she says, and clearly mark the moment when she fell in love with design.

Regardless of whom is being interviewed, in almost every episode the audience is presented with a vivid backstory

and genuine narrative illustrating whom these people are and what drives their work as creative leaders. Millman’s ability to delicately pull these stories from her subjects is what makes Design Matters an enduring testament to creativity in all its forms. These accounts reveal the humanity and values behind the design. Many of us probably have similar stories serving as the catalyst for why we chose to do what we do. As a result, we as listeners are drawn in through the shared understanding and vulnerabilities brought to light during the conversation.

This small show that started in an era when little was available on the internet in terms of design discussion has since grown to become a preeminent collection of thoughtful inquiry and open exchange with some of the most prominent design leaders of our time. We would welcome the addition of more industrial designers featured on Design Matters.

If you are out there, raise your hand! But for now, we are happy to listen as the dialogue unfolds and to soak in the experience through the airwaves. n Debbie Millman Named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company, and “one of the most influential designers working today”

by Graphic Design USA, Debbie Millman is also an author, educator and curator. In the 13 years since its inception, the show has garnered over 5 million downloads per year.

Design Matters won a 2011 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, in 2015 Apple designated it one of the best overall podcasts on iTunes, and in 2018 the show was honored by the Webbys. In addition, Design Matters has been listed on over 100 “Best Podcasts” lists, including one of the best podcasts in the world by Business Insider.

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Design in Tech Report

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS

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ver the past several years, John Maeda’s annual Design in Tech report has quickly grown into a definitive resource for insights at the intersection of design and technology. Each year the report grows in scope and distribution while always seeking to be as accessible to the masses

as possible. The fact that they are all open source is a testament to this.

2018 Design in Tech Report, John Maeda

As the name suggests, the reports tend to focus on the digital side of design and delve into topics such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and computational coding.

At first glance, these topics might not seem relevant or even related to industrial design, but let’s take a look at why industrial designers should care about what the Design in Tech report presents.

In his 2016 report, Maeda proposed that there are three types of design: Classical Design – The traditional craft and production of artifacts used by people to assist and improve everyday life.

Design Thinking – Design used as a business tool where the need to innovate in relation to individual customer needs requires empathy and a strategic vision.

Computational Design – Technological advances mean designing for billions of people in real time and design instantly delivered in an ever-evolving state.

These classifications have been a leading point for each Design in Tech report since then. Rightfully so. When looked at in summary, they start to paint a picture that design isn’t just about beauty but also about market relevance and meaningful results—that design has a much broader scope and impact than perhaps had previously been thought. This is further evidenced by the fact that traditional design firm acquisitions continue at a rapid pace: Fjord by Accenture (2013), Adaptive Path by Capital One (2014), LUNAR by McKinsey (2015), Heat by Deloitte (2016), matter by Fjord/ Accenture (2017)—the list goes on.

For 2018, Maeda takes it a step further and posits that “design capabilities don’t scale like Moore’s Law” in the way that technology might. He also says that “design is gener-

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ally used early in the product development process instead of applied at the very end before a final solution is shipped,” which is inherently limiting. “Creating an inclusive culture for designers is how to start building better products,” meaning that if design is ingrained at all levels of the organization, companies have a better chance of success. Finally, among the changes in design tools and systems, “machine intelligence looks to change everything.” So where a traditional industrial designer might look to user research for insight, a future industrial designer will leverage the power of big data to enhance their output.

Let’s focus on computational design and artificial intelligence for a moment. We are all aware of the influx and changing interactions that smart products have had on our lives. Many of you reading this probably helped design them!

In many cases, they invoke a conversational experience to help humans connect to machines. So far, this has primarily been limited to nominal daily tasks such as setting timers, ordering household supplies, playing music and turning off the lights. What would happen if this technology entered the designer’s workspace?

A photographer might say, “Hey AI designer, can you open Photoshop and correct the exposure and color temperature of the images I just uploaded?”

A graphic designer might say, “Hey AI designer, create a few variations of this logo using our new visual brand identity system.” An industrial designer might say, “Hey AI designer, optimize this part for injection molding.” Or, “Hey AI designer, let’s look at a few chamfer variations of that phone bezel I’ve been working on.”

It would then be up to the human behind the commands to decipher and filter the results and chose a pathway forward. But here, too, there are already examples of machines creating sophisticated productionready parts with little to no human intervention.

The 2018 report next tackles inequality, a massive topic with massive implications: “It’s easy in the technology world to look away from inequality because the privileges that come with tech life are pleasurable and self-fulfilling. But designers in tech can easily forget that they’re in a tiny minority of the population that doesn’t really match their much broader consumer market. So getting out of the tech bubble can be a simple yet powerful way to better connect with “real” people who don’t really need what is being created today. Ultimately, it becomes a way to design and make better products for all people. A majority of designers in tech find themselves not working solely on premise. This means that we are entering an era where work can be more evenly distributed outside of hubs like Silicon Valley. Our design imperative at Automattic is to imagine a world where WordPress is good design for all. And we’re currently exploring how remote work can achieve a new level of inclusive design.”

For industrial designers, this basically means get out of your office as much as you can and spend time observing, learning from and designing with the people you are designing for. Perhaps the most enduring example of this comes from Patricia Moore, FIDSA (above) who set out to understand the challenges of aging by disguising herself with elaborate costumes and prostheses to experience life as an elderly woman. She even went so far as to draw upon memories of her own grandmother to create a believable persona she could embody during her multiyear endeavor.

Inclusion = INCLU$ION. Maeda ends the 2018 report with yet another profound provocation. Could designing with an inclusive mindset actually make a positive fiscal impact to a business’ bottom line? He says yes. He also

speaks to inclusion as a responsibility all designers must take on if we hope to have meaningful impact beyond clicks counts and sales figures, what he calls “design inclusively to expand your total addressable market.”

Among his observations: “Changing perception around the idea of ‘helping those who are less fortunate than ourselves’ into ‘learning how ignorant we are as privileged people’ is a useful daily exercise. Using that energy to design and make better products is a certain kind of passion and practice that we’ll see more often in technology companies. Because inclusive design is becoming commonsense. Choose action over wondering what you can do about the world you see and don’t agree with. It’s easy today due to all the technologies we have available to us.”

If we look deep enough, it’s easy to reflect on our own personal biases (known or unknown) and identify how they inform our design decisions. It’s important for industrial designers to maintain this mindfulness throughout all stages of a project and realize that their work can have consequences that span cultural and societal spectrums. Again, this points to our shared responsibility inherent in the work of an industrial designer. n John Maeda John Maeda is an American executive, designer, technologist and product manager-in-training. He recently joined Automattic as global head of computational design + inclusion, and previously served as partner at Kleiner Perkins. An internationally recognized speaker and author, his books include The Laws of Simplicity, Creative Code and Redesigning Leadership.

Maeda’s work explores the area where business, design and technology merge—with his findings shared annually in the Design in Tech Report at SXSW. He serves on the board of directors for Sonos and the global advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy. Maeda is also a member of the technical advisory board for Google’s Advanced Technology + Projects Group. He facilitated the advancement of eBay’s design culture at scale, becoming a Stanford GSB case study on change management. Prior to his work in industry, Maeda was a tenured research professor at the MIT Media Laboratory and the 16th president of RISD.

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The Time Traveler’s Dilemma Product teams have a thirst to create and innovate, but there is tension from the demands to get sh*t done and deliver on today’s P&L. This looks like a race to deliver vs. dramatic reinvention to transform the business.

Unlike time-travel movies whose heroes journey to the past, designers venture to the unexplored future as they imagine a better way. Upon their return to the present, designers face the challenge of translating the opportunities they see against the reality of what is today and of influencing their partners’ hearts and minds to see the same future—beyond the immediate tomorrow.

What if cross-functional product teams could time jump, by imagining a new and innovative future experience together, translating that better future into the day-to-day delivery of products? Pamela Bailey and Ricardo Marquez will share their view of how to transform what designers do intuitively into “time-travel” techniques that bring teams along for the ride.

Pamela Bailey Design Leader Facebook Pamela Bailey leads design thinking and innovation for global products and service experiences that customers love. She champions user­-centered design and coaches teams to “make it smart, then make it beautiful.” A few years ago, while at Intuit, she undertook the first experience-driven redesign of QuickBooks, setting a new company-wide standard for design strategy and earning the K2 Quality Award for Small Business Accounting Software.

Bailey holds an MA in design and has been designing experiences in the software industry for over 15 years. She has a soft spot for gnarly business problems, abstract art, champagne and fashion.

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Ricardo Marquez Designer, Coach & Entrepreneur Ricardo Marquez has more than a decade of experience leading design teams delivering products and services for European, North American and Latin American customers. He believes in designing strategies that put people first, and combining them with creative experiments to obtain sustainable value and success in market. This approach has led to highly rated award-winning offerings in payments, entertainment, communications and retail for companies like Google, Intuit and Telefonica. Marquez is a Carnegie Mellon alumnus, currently focused on accelerating and democratizing scientific innovation globally.

I Want to Make Everyone in the World Healthier We are in the midst of a health revolution with technologies once reserved for the doctor’s office now on our wrists and in our pockets. We can monitor our bodies every hour of every day, but powerful sensors and lots of data are not enough to change one’s health. Data only becomes valuable when leveraged to provide people with insights, motivation and guidance along their ever-changing health journeys. Jonah Becker will discuss the need to design products and experiences that are personalized and engaging and, furthermore, inspire the behavioral changes that lead to positive health outcomes.

Creativity in the Digital Age This is a time when many industries are being disrupted by the convergence of ground-breaking digital tools (computational design and machine learning), exponential manufacturing technologies (new methods of making and additive manufacturing) and shifting consumer expectations (innovation as table stakes). The big question is, What does all this mean for creativity? How can we, as designers, keep up and leverage these technologies for meaningful outcomes?

Safir Bellali Sr. Director, Advanced Digital Creation VF Global Innovation Center Jonah Becker VP of Design Fitbit As VP of design at Fitbit, Jonah Becker leads the ID, UX and UX Research teams to deliver on the vision of making everyone in the world healthier. Before joining Fitbit, Becker was VP of industrial design at HTC, where he was responsible for roadmap, future vision and branding programs across smartphones, VR, imaging and wearables. He was also president and partner at One & Co, a San Francisco design agency acquired by HTC in 2008.

At One & Co, Becker created successful, award-winning products for clients like Nike, Microsoft, Sony, Dell and Burton Snowboards.

With over 20 years of combined experience as an automotive engineer and industrial designer, Safir Bellali has always been fascinated by the role technology can play in unlocking creativity. As head of innovation for Vans, Bellali oversaw a number of innovation initiatives that brought together iconic products and experiences. In his new role driving innovation through digital product creation for VF’s over 25 brands, he aims to explore the endless possibilities offered by digital design tools.

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Why the Best Design Is Invisible: Leveraging Design as Strategy to Achieve Greater Impact To paraphrase Sun Tzu, all people remember is that the war was won—not the strategy it took to achieve the victory. Breakthrough design is often remembered the same way—as a beautiful and transformative object—without regard for the “invisible” multidisciplinary strategy behind it. Through the lens of her recent work with top global brands and a pioneering collaboration with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Kathleen Brandenburg opens the playbook on how to leverage a design mind approach to realize innovation and create greater impact in your organization.

Kathleen Brandenburg Chief Design Strategy Officer & Co-founder IA Collaborative As chief design strategy officer and co-founder of IA Collaborative, Kathleen Brandenburg developed the 7 Elements of Innovation™ process to provide strategic, results-driven, design leadership to IA’s global clients.

Named to Fast Company’s list of “Top 50 Most Influential Designers in America,” Brandenburg speaks on the global stage, from the Hong Kong Design Symposium to the National Institute of Design’s Global Summit, IFA Berlin and UXLondon. She serves on the Innovation Council at Northwestern University, is a visiting professor at Harvard and serves on the board of directors at her alma mater, the Institute of Design, IIT.

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A Different Approach on Innovation: Bending Constraints Every design solution is a function of our ability to fully utilize available resources. This applies whether we work at a massive organization or as a one-person startup.

What if we actually have more resources around us than we realize? What if there was a different perspective that we could adopt that could enhance our ability to create?

Lloyd Cooper’s design perspective was shaped by his mom, who studied design at Parsons, and his dad, who was a naval architect and an engineer. In this session, he will share a story that his dad told him from his experiences in the Normandy Invasion in WWII. This story became the foundation for Cooper’s own continuous learning to fully leverage available resources and bend constraints to create breakthrough solutions.

Lloyd Cooper, IDSA Principal PUSH Product Design Lloyd Cooper’s dad was a naval architect and his mom studied design at Parsons. Growing up in the middle of right-brain and left-brain thinking is a part of what drew him to industrial design. As the managing principal at PUSH Product Design, Cooper works with clients from Medtronic to Yamaha, and is focused on leading diverse product development teams from criteria definition through design for production. Cooper has a special interest in leveraging his mechanical and industrial design background to create innovations that balance robust design with clean aesthetics.

A Case for a Human Approach to Innovation

Designing the Future of Fast with Every Electric Bike

If you take a look at women’s innovation, it won’t take long to be disappointed. Women are treated like robots—cold machines that only respond to hot pink and high protein. Despite demand, human and holistic solutions for women are in short supply. It’s time to make a change and innovate for tribes, not robots. Tribes are real groups of women with shared interest and aspirational lifestyles—a far more human design strategy.

Alta Motors’ intentional integration of design into its technology, engineering and manufacturing disciplines has delivered the Redshift platform—the first electric motorcycles to directly compete against and outperform combustion competitors. Join Alta co-founder, Marc Fenigstein, formerly of frog design, as he speaks to Alta’s growing portfolio of high-performance electric bikes and explains why companies must embrace a multidisciplinary approach to compete in the next era of hardware and develop game-changing, thrill-inducing products. Earlier this year, Alta’s award-winning drivetrain and electric vehicle technology earned an investment from HarleyDavidson, and the two companies plan to co-develop new electric motorcycles.

Erica Eden Director, Global Design Innovation PepsiCo, Inc. Erica Eden is a strategic thinker, driving innovation by understanding what to make, why it matters and how to connect with design. She sees each challenge through the eyes of the consumer and guides ideas into globally scalable opportunities across diverse industries. Eden is an accomplished design leader and intrapreneur with the ability to demonstrate the value of design thinking by converting abstract strategies, trends and insights into concrete user experiences.

Marc Fenigstein Chief Product Officer Alta Motors A technologist, designer and chief product officer of Alta Motors, Marc Fenigstein has spent a career developing unique products for new markets and helping large, staid companies reinvent themselves. He’s worked in venture capital at Redwood Venture Partners and strategy consulting at BCG and frog design, creating products including HP’s SkyRoom software, Carmanah Technologies’ 1700 Series Solar Lighting systems and many others under NDAs. With a propensity to take things apart and rebuild them at a young age, Fenigstein graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine art and engineering and a MEM in engineering and management at Dartmouth College.

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Redesigning a Design Museum

Return to My Roots

What does it mean to redesign a design museum? That’s the question being explored at MODA, the Museum of Design Atlanta. Seven years ago, MODA moved from an office building in the city’s downtown to Atlanta’s burgeoning Midtown arts district. The move prompted MODA’s board of directors and staff to rethink the museum’s practices and to re-evaluate its role in the community.

Now, informed by a commitment to design as an agent of change, MODA is strengthening metro Atlanta’s professional design community, increasing appreciation of design’s power to make the world a better place, providing children and adults with opportunities to learn to think like designers do, and forging new ways for museums to serve their communities.

Laura Flusche will discuss the ongoing project of redesigning MODA in order to build a museum that’s forward facing and meets 21st-century needs.

Why are there so few industrial designers still doing hands-on design in the latter stages of their careers?

Having entered that phase of his career himself, Gerard Furbershaw, IDSA, has pondered that question over the past few years. Through serendipitous events, he had the opportunity to learn current CAD and rendering tools.

These newly acquired skills enabled him to return to his roots and reexperience the passion he had for design when he entered the profession.

Furbershaw will share his professional journey, which began almost 40 years ago. Although most members of our profession are much younger, he presumes that he isn’t alone in having been pulled away from the work he truly loved. He believes his journey may prompt others to question if their current positions can be more emotionally fulfilling by incorporating hands-on design into their work activities.

Laura Flusche, PhD Executive Director Museum of Design Atlanta Laura Flusche is the executive director of the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA). Under her leadership, the museum has been transformed into Atlanta’s design hub, a leader in design education for youth and a trailblazer in exploring ways that a museum can serve its community in the 21st century. A classical archaeologist by training, Flusche lived in Rome, Italy, for 15 years where she taught at the university level, excavated on the Palatine Hill and was a co-founder of the Institute of Design + Culture. She fiercely maintains that design is archaeology backwards.

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Gerard Furbershaw, IDSA Co-founder Emeritus LUNAR Gerard Furbershaw co-founded LUNAR in 1984 and for next 30 years he regularly received recognition in product design books and prestigious design competitions. The University of Southern California’s School of Architecture selected him as its 2012 Distinguished Alumnus and in 2014, LUNAR received the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s National Design Award for Product Design in recognition of its body of work. LUNAR was acquired in 2015 by McKinsey & Company and as of May 2018, Furbershaw and fellow LUNAR co-founder Jeff Smith have set off on a new adventure creating products that emphasize beauty and art.

What Am I Not? Making Magic with Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Technology moves fast. In order to keep up, we must be flexible and collaborative. While specialization is valuable for perfecting your craft, magic happens when crossdisciplinary teams come together to solve problems.

Becki Hyde will show you how product designers, software engineers and product managers can work closely together to deliver human-centered software in a world of ambiguity. Learn how the three disciplines can learn from one another, contribute to each others’ work and grow their careers all at the same time.

Becki Hyde Product Manager Humana Becki Hyde is a designer and product manager, living and working in Louisville, KY. A champion of cross-disciplinary collaboration, she is passionate about creating community and exploring the impact of design in technology. Hyde works in the Digital Experience Center at Humana, and is a leader of the Louisville chapter of IxDA.

Designing Dying Death is inevitable. Yet, we almost never come to it prepared. We are very bad at dying. Most of us are uncomfortable to begin a conversation around death. We generally want to live as well as we can, for as long as we can, but we don’t think about dying well. However, increasing one’s knowledge and developing an action plan can ensure that we die the way we hope to and not leave tough decisions for our loved ones.

In her talk, Keren will address a number of service problems in the current options for end-of-life planning.

She will detail how she tried—and failed—to solve some of them and Keren will share her insights into how a fundamental, yet largely ignored, human experience can be transformed through the perspective of a service designer.

Navit Keren Senior Designer Designit Navit Keren is a senior designer at Designit with a background in visual communication and an emphasis on interaction design. At Designit, Keren works with clients to help them identify problems and co-create future visions and solutions. Her previous work allows her to synthesize a wide range of social, technological and cultural information, consider relevant associated constraints and design accordingly. She graduated from Parsons School of Design with an MFA in design and technology.

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Where Biologists and Manufacturers Meet: Mimicking Natural Habitats in Mass Production With over 60 percent of the world’s population concentrated along its coastlines, coupled with accelerated coastal development, severe stress on natural ecosystems is inevitable. Combined with the growing threat of rising sea levels and increased storminess, urban coastlines worldwide are in dire need of innovative development, combining material adaptation, texture mimicking and macro design. Adi Neuman will discuss the problems that traditional coastal and marine infrastructure impose on the natural environment and habitats along with possible solutions. Through coastal and marine infrastructural design case studies, the chasm between biological desires and manufacturing limitations will be examined. These innovative examples can provide the basic tools for future design leading to win-win solutions bridging aesthetics, economics, engineering and the environment.

Design for Confrontation In today’s increasingly frictionless world, it’s easier than ever to avoid confrontation. The products and services we love are isolating us from different and opposing perspectives. We’re becoming less empathetic and resilient people. But what if these products could help us overcome adversity too? In this talk, Steve Selzer will share thoughts on how design—and the products we love—can help people develop the mindset and skills to constructively confront their teams, their customers and themselves.

Steve Selzer Creative Leader

Adi Neuman Industrial Designer Holon Institute of Technology Adi Neuman is an industrial designer with more than seven years of experience in large-scale design projects in the public domain. In the past five years, Neuman has worked on the design and implementation of environmentally friendly marine and coastal infrastructures, adapting mass manufacturing processes to specific biological and ecological needs. He is a lecturer in the Department of Industrial Design at the Holon Institute of Technology.

Neuman holds a BDes in industrial design from Hadassah College Jerusalem and an MA in environmental studies from Tel-Aviv University.

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Steve Selzer is a designer, manager and creative leader.

Over the last decade, he has led and scaled design at Airbnb, frog design and Fortune 500 companies spanning finance, healthcare, education and more. He is an entrepreneur, teacher and philosopher who is passionate about humanity-centered design and is focused on building products that enrich the human experience—responsibly.

Design Powered Planet Design thinking has now become a competitive advantage adopted by business to win. How can this process impact the numerous social challenges that surround us? Social impact projects have few resources, and the people driving change have no design training. Design Swarms is an approach that has been used by hundreds of ordinary people to produce extraordinary solutions to social justice challenges like homelessness, refugee shelters, aging with independence and healthcare for the bottom of the economic pyramid. This approach gamifies the design process into a simple, low-cost, portable toolkit with a series of prescriptive steps. The steps are depicted on physical posters that fit together to form a gameboard based on the resources, problem and people involved. Teams of people, with no design training participate in a fast-paced facilitated process to direct their creativity and knowledge of the context to quickly produce real solutions that stick.

Tech for Humans.

Not Humans for Tech.

The dilemma of our times is how to design technology that prompts us to both engage with, and disengage from, the devices we use. Increasingly, we find ourselves adapting to the offerings and constraints of technology. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? New technologies carry both risks and potential. At their best, immersive computing and augmented intelligence can become powerful tools for human connection, curiosity and learning. The conversation we need to have today is how designers are going to direct or redirect our relationships with technology in the coming decade. What we need are designers for the human age of computing.

Claude Zellweger Director of Design Google Surya Vanka, IDSA Founder Authentic Design Surya Vanka is a transdisciplinary designer who has worked at the leading edge of physical and digital experiences for 25 years. He is the founder of Authentic Design, president of the Seattle Design Festival and chair of Interaction Week 2019. Vanka was formerly the director of user experience at Microsoft, a tenured professor of design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study.

He is author and creator of a lightweight design technique called Design Swarms that is being adopted in business, non-profit and education worldwide. Vanka has taught design on every continent but Antarctica.

Claude Zellweger is an industrial designer and currently leads immersive design at Google, where he is responsible for the VR/AR space and beyond. He joined Google in 2016 and since then has helped launch the Daydream View. Previously Zellweger held a position as VP of design at HTC, where he oversaw the design of its smartphones as well as the industry defining VR system, HTC Vive. As creative director, Zellweger played a central role in turning HTC into a brand recognized for its design. Previously, he joined One & Co as a partner in 2001 and helped to grow the firm to become one of the Bay Area’s dominant design forces, working with companies such as Nike, Burton, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Zellweger was born in Switzerland and moved to Southern California to study design at ArtCenter.

See more IDC speakers at internationaldesignconference.com.

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INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR IMPACT CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR RELEVANCE CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR EVERYONE CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR COMPASSION CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR TRUTH CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR LOVE CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR DESIRE CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR INCLUSION CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE

Sept. 19–22 New Orleans, LA InternationalDesignConference.com

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR DISRUPTION CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR NEXT CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR DISCOURSE CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR CONNECTION DESIGN FOR COMMUNITY CONFERENCE CONFERENCE INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR VISION CONFERENCE

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN FOR LIFE CONFERENCE

By Simon Fraser and Ross Stevens www.made.ac.nz Professor Simon Fraser has over 40 years’ experience in industry and academia in roles such as assistant design director at the Porsche Design Studio (Austria) and the head of the school and associate dean of research and innovation at the Victoria University of Wellington School of Design. n Victoria University of Wellington Industrial Design Programme Director Ross Stevens has over 30 years’ experience in industry and academia, including designing products with Philippe Starck, and is currently the co-founder and design director for Pureaudio.

ARTISANS OF 4D PRINTING

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ew Zealand’s geographic isolation means it has been populated by people with adventurous and inquisitive minds. These minds gave them the impetus to navigate treacherous seas and find creative new ways of making an unknown territory their home. Thus it isn’t surprising that

New Zealand designers are still utilizing this inherent adventurous and resourceful spirit to explore the latest experimental technologies around 3D printing, searching the unknown and going beyond the simply pragmatic to a level of refinement that combines digital tools with artisan sensitivity.

Experiments in the Fourth Dimension At Victoria University’s School of Design, lecturers and students in the MADE program (Multi-property Additive manufacturing Design Experiments) have perfected their application of 3D printing and are now moving into the realm of 4D printing and its expression in a range of projects. Starting with the concept of time, Jeongbin Ok and Simon Fraser with their students have examined how the long-term impact of products, specifically plastic products, can be limited and mitigated through extensive re- and upcycling in the home while extracting beauty and meaning from this unlikely source. Meanwhile, Bernard Guy, Ben Jack, Tim Miller and Ross Stevens with their students have explored soft materials that allow movement and delicate articulation as a means of expressing emotion and time.

Increasingly, the credit will have to be shared not just among human colleagues but with computer programs as well as generative code and machine learning, adding another fluid and dynamic quality to designing in the fourth dimension.

Environmental awareness has always been an integral part of design teaching at the Victoria University of Wellington—evidenced in the world’s first recyclebot development in 2010. Initially, the recyclebot used only domestic waste like plastic bottles to make new filament, but it quickly moved beyond the pragmatic notion of reduce/recycle/ reuse with a new, more poetic strategy of reclaim/remake/

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reinvigorate. Empowering people to use plastic waste in creative ways gives them the motivation to seek out new sources of plastic waste, or even old 3D prints, and transform them into printing filament ready to bring the next great idea into the world.

Within the MADE program, lecturers and students have consistently been working on projects that could be mistaken for biological lifeforms. Starting with Metaglobs (2008) and Blossom (2012), shown p.37 top, our subsequent close working relationship with Stratasys has enabled our designers to create more intricate and animated creatures. At the time, Blossom spoke to a large audience—specifically Core77—which indicated the relevance of this research to the field. While Blossom aimed to replicate the movement of flower petals through pneumatics, later projects like Lissom (2015) researched hydraulics for better movement control in an effort to create credible and engaging characters to be used in the film industry. The Lissom research showcased the effortless translation of digital ideas into the physical world.

Choreography of Printing Choreography means “dance-writing,” and as such the term is perfectly suitable to describe the relationship between the designer, the printer, the filaments and the environment.

Printed objects like Lissom, p.37 middle, Blossom and Orbit (2017), show p.37 far right, are the literal manifestation of

choreographed printing as they dance within their environment. Whether in water or in air, the tentacled snails, expanding petals or flexible segments on spinning tops seem to be dancing to the designers’ tune.

For Blossom, master’s student Richard Clarkson took inspiration from nature and used flexible material and pneumatics to create flowers with opening petals revealing individually colored gem-like centers. Interconnecting them with a pneumatic system created a symphony of flowers opening up individually or in unison. The blossoms may not be dancing in the wind literally, but air is making them dance and evoking memories of watching flowers unfurl their petals to the rising sun.

Raising the stakes by wanting to move not just parts of the object but the object in its entirety inspired Stevens, Guy and student researchers to create Lissom, a colorful creature that seems to be inquisitive, playful and shy at the same time, gliding through water and interacting with the viewer.

Again, inspiration from nature was taken and used to create a unique “organism” that reminds us of various other creatures. But in this particular form, it took the latest technology and sensitive choreography to make it come alive and move beyond the computer screen into our physical world.

Playfulness and creative design go hand in hand.

Master’s student Tor Robinson explored the well-known and

well-loved spinning top, creating Orbit. The image of a ballerina en pointe comes to mind as Orbit pirouettes across tabletops. The flexible segments of the top gravitate in and out as the centrifugal force increases and decreases and— like dancers and their arms—create unique and intriguing silhouettes during its turns. With flexible materials, Robinson was able to create naturally mobile segments, instead of having to design complicated mechanical joints.

With Designed Deposition (2017), shown p.38 top and middle, master’s student Isabella Molloy went a step further by choreographing the printing process itself rather than the way the object moves. Creating a perfect balance

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between the heat and the movement of the printer nozzle, the extruded filament seems to be floating in thin air as it cools down and hardens. And as thread after thread is extruded, the shape of the object reveals itself, delicate and free of cumbersome support structures.

As for choreography by computer, naturally, as processing power and machine learning capabilities increase, a computer program will be able to choreograph a dance of materials and printers to create unique products and bring them to life. For a computer program to choreograph a dance like that, it has to learn the code of dancing first. The Style Machine, shown bottom right, created by Guy and Jack, is a demonstration of just that, a bespoke generative computer program that is the first step toward interdisciplinary creative communication. It explores the collaborative effort between an industrial designer, a generative code artist, a computer program and a printer, researching and improving the choreography of different language systems to create a desirable object. In this research, the human input still outweighed the artificial input, but as the knowledge base of the computer increases, the balance might well shift.

But how do these poetic experiments feed into the pragmatic side of design? MADE sees no end of opportunity for this rapidly developing technology to transcend diverse industry sectors such as film and healthcare. Our industry partners agree—whether in the form of printed prosthetics for Weta Workshop (The Lord of the Rings) or the New Zealand Artificial Limb Service—both have high expectations in terms of functional performance and emotional appeal, as well as the highest level of craft and customization. And unexpected niche applications continue

to arise. Be it the intricacies of designing multi-material surgical catheters or the dynamic form of wind generators for distributed energy, MADE’s exploration of 3D printing is only just starting.

Creative Partnerships While the MADE team is happy to engross themselves in research, their inquisitive nature makes them seek like minds and expand on their own and others’ knowledge. Traditionally, entering competitions was one way of establishing new connections; nowadays entering into innovative partnerships with hardware and software developers like Stratasys, end-users like Weta Workshop and fellow universities allows deeper working relationships to develop over time—diverse minds sharing knowledge and visions.

It is no secret that the physical size and modest population of New Zealand makes it harder for new ideas to gain momentum on a scale to make them feasible. For example, when New Zealand-based Rocket Lab felt it was time to make its space aspirations come true, it sought out fellow innovators in the US to collaborate with. Even though the MADE team is not personally involved with Rocket Lab, its development and success has been exciting to watch for lots of reasons. Its experimental use of 3D printing technology for its Rutherford engine has been an inspiration to continue pushing boundaries.

New Zealanders may have come to the ends of this Earth, and going to space is one way of satisfying their inquisitive nature. Whether it is the unknown of conquering outer space or the unknown of tinkering with materials and processes, curiosity and adventure still guide creative Kiwis toward exploring the limits of current knowledge through exceptional collaborations. n Designed by MADE, School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Simon Fraser, Bernard Guy, Tim Miller, Jeongbin Ok, IDSA, and Ross Stevens. Text by Petra Alsbach-Stevens.

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By Mathieu Turpault, IDSA mturpault@bresslergroup.com Mathieu Turpault is managing partner and director of design at Bresslergroup, an insight-driven innovation lab based in Philadelphia. He believes good design evokes emotion as much as it solves complicated problems—and emotional appeal can be rationally designed. He earned a Masters in Industrial Design from the École Superieure de Design Industrielle (Paris) and has been with Bresslergroup since 1998.

Dispatch from the IDSA Medical Conference 2018

IMPROVING THE DESIGN OF MEDICAL DEVICES

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ndustry conferences like the IDSA Medical Design Conference 2018 held last spring in Boston continue to be a great way to touch base with colleagues across the industry and discuss what’s on our collective minds. It was clear from the conference that the integration of research into medical product design

is getting more rigorous. It hasn’t been that long since the FDA first began to require evidence of formal design validation from a usability perspective for new medical devices, and the way that requirement is being met continues to evolve. The depth and breadth of usability testing is expanding.

When we got back to Philadelphia, my colleagues Conall Dempsey and Chris Murray and I sat down to talk about the conference while it was still fresh in our minds. These were the biggest takeaways from our two days in Boston:

excited to learn at the conference about IDSA member Sean Hagen’s work on the IDSA Patient Safety Task Force initiative to help designers access healthcare facilities for research purposes.

3. Once you’re in, it’s still challenging. The first pre-conference 1.

The focus on generative workshop was great at highlightresearch continues to intensify.

Radius’ augmented reality presentation ing the challenges of conducting Generative research was at the cenresearch in medical environments. ter of the two pre-conference workOnce you get access, how do you plan and organize for shops we attended the day before the conference. We’ve contextual inquiry in a medical environment, especially previously written about the influence of consumer design someplace like an operating room? It’s a significant balancon the medical device industry (www.bresslergroup.com/ ing act between designers, researchers, the needs of our blog/3-ux-trends-reshaping-medical-product-design). The clients, the needs of facilities and, most importantly, the growing appreciation for design thinking techniques in the needs of patients who are being served by the facility. consumer product space is rippling outward into medical.

This workshop did a good job of communicating some best practices for how to organize yourself and collect info.

2. There are significant obstacles to getting generative We came away with tips for what you might want to carry research off the ground in the medical world. Medical while limited to the two pockets in standard-issue scrubs, product design research is a whole different animal from valuable advice to ensure you assign someone to keep your consumer and B2B product design research. And all of us camera tripod stable, a reminder to keep your focus on the who are doing this kind of work know this well! Recurrent areas you’re studying, and ways to prepare for cold rooms and pervasive challenges include recruitment, patient confiand long hours without food. dentiality and gaining access to healthcare venues. We were

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MEDCON 2018

BlackHägen’s contextual inquiry in a simulated operating room

4. The case for generative research might be strongest in medical product design. One speaker said, “We’re all in the alignment business,” meaning our work is to get stakeholders, patients and engineers aligned in how to design medical products that deliver safe and effective therapy while meeting all stakeholder needs. The good news is that this is being initiated more and more by business leaders who are insisting on leading innovation with research because they recognize that patient safety and patient care are directly tied to business value.

5. There are fluffy bunnies. Bob Schwartz, FIDSA, from GE Healthcare said it well when he framed the two poles in design as “fluffy bunnies versus show me the money.” The “bunnies” represent highly conceptual strategic design work that doesn’t stand a chance unless designers are willing to embrace the necessary business principles that will ensure their concepts reach patients and clinicians. Designers tend to be more motivated by generative qualitative research, but interest from business leadership will be limited until that research is validated by quantitative numbers.

6. Technology is being leveraged in super interesting ways in the name of generative and evaluative research.

Dr. Teodor Grantcharov, a professor of surgery at the University of Toronto, told a rapt audience about the “patient safety black box he has deployed in an operating room at St.

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Michael’s Hospital in Toronto to track adverse surgical events and analyze potential causes” (www.stmichaelshospital.com/ media/detail.php?source=hospital_news/2017/0803).

The black box records nearly everything in the operating room, including video of the surgical procedure, clinician conversations, room temperature and decibel levels. Dr. Grantcharov provided some intriguing insights about this high-risk environment. For example, an operating room door is likely to open every two minutes, and human failure accounts for 69 percent of adverse events. One data point that perhaps works against design researchers gaining more access to the operating room is that having eight people in the operating room is correlated with twice the likelihood of adverse events compared to four people.

In another presentation, Charles Mauro, IDSA, of Mauro Usability Science shared how his research consultancy is leveraging haptic sensors and tracking to optimize human factors for medical devices. He demonstrated how wearable sensors track participant usage of injection devices, how eye tracking combined with EEG (electroencephalography) provides more accurate user feedback on IFUs (instructions for use), and how micro-facial expression technology (Affectiva) can be used to assess the emotional responses of subjects who are self-injecting medication. On a more basic level, he described how placing a simple 3D tracker inside medical packaging can be an effective indicator of how frustrated people get while trying to open it.

Right: Retrospective journey mapping from the BlackHägen pre-conference workshop

Despite the challenges of developing distinct hardware and software to run this technology, Mauro sees significant opportunity in being able to define true human factors capabilities for specific patient populations.

7. AR and VR technology are entering the medical design space. Pavitra Krishnamani from the DICE group within Jefferson Hospital demonstrated how low-cost Samsung Gear virtual reality (VR) headsets are being leveraged to assist both patients (pain management, rehab and psychiatry) and clinicians (CPR and emergency care training). She stressed the importance of involving clinicians throughout the process, underlining the need for research in this space to ensure that VR technology is safe and useful for patients.

Bobby Garfield and Alex Dupont have to be complimented for their informative step-by-step overview of how their team at Radius Design is experimenting with augmented reality (AR) to evaluate medical device concepts. They gave a live demo using a combination of the Microsoft HoloLens headset, Unity software and MicroSoft VisualStudio to place physical mockups in a simulated contextual AR environment.

In their demo, the headset wearer was able to view and interact with the physical mockup of a pole-mounted medical device in the simulated AR environment of a hospital room and bed. This combination of a physical mockup and AR environment simulation allowed the team to create a contextual evaluation that is low cost, travel friendly and quick. They also discussed how this low-cost approach can be leveraged early in the development process to add value to rapid prototype evaluation.

8. “Empathy” is a big word in design and design thinking and in medical product design. Several speakers demonstrated different ways, such as co-creation, to build empathy with patients and clinicians. Aiden Petrie from Ximedica sees voice recognition technology (like Alexa) as an important step in breaking down barriers in healthcare

through natural language device interfaces that promote patient empathy. It was understood that the notion of empathy is always front and center when designing for healthcare.

9. Medical practitioners with a design background bring really interesting perspectives to the conversation.

Lynde Kintner Lutzow is a remarkable industrial designerturned-medical student, now at Tufts University School of Medicine, who gave a captivating review of just a few of the opportunities for design improvements she has identified during her experiences in medical school.

While there has been immense progress, her training continues to uncover significant opportunities for improving the design of medical devices. Lutzow’s hit list includes products that are frustrating to use for both clinicians (CT scan outputs, operating room lighting, computer workstation carts) and patients (spirometers, nasal feeding tubes, toilet sample “hats”).

10. Our last takeaway? There’s a long way to go. We’re a good few years into an impressive industry-wide effort to focus on safety and efficacy through usability in medical product design. We’re well past infancy, but there is still plenty of work to be done.

As Chris Rockwell from Lextant Design said, “Two things kill the [user] experience…ambiguity and unpredictability.” So let’s keep collaborating to address the challenge of improving the simplicity and clarity of medical devices and healthcare systems! n

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By Jacqueline Kern kernjc@ucmail.uc.edu Jacqueline Kern is a public information officer at the University of Cincinnati, where she writes and edits for UC Magazine and works with the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), among other programs and colleges. A proud UC alumna, she comes from a background in journalism, having previously served as the arts and culture editor at the alternative newsweekly Cincinnati CityBeat, where she continue to freelance.

FLIGHT OF THE FUTURE

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ir travel can be a pretty disconnected experience. Oftentimes passengers are left without phone and internet capabilities and have a limited choice in entertainment options to pass the time.

Meanwhile, flight attendants are stretched too thin, from safety instructions to drink orders, to

cater to the needs of many travelers.

That could all change thanks to research Art, and Planning (DAAP) with his experidone at the Live Well Collaborative, a ence researching accessible design for the partnership between the University of 50-and-older market.

Cincinnati (UC) and Procter & Gamble For more than a decade, Live Well (P&G) that works with industry leaders and has connected industry leaders with UC UC students and faculty to form multidiscistudents and faculty to collaborate on innoplinary design project teams. vative design projects. Corporations such Developed as part of a semester-long as Boeing, P&G and Cincinnati Children’s Live Well project, Boeing Onboard is an Hospital Medical Center frequently work in-flight concierge service created with with the collaborative to create new prodvirtual reality (VR) and augmented reality ucts and services for various markets.

(AR) technologies. Using a VR headset, “Companies were looking for a new stratpassengers are guided through a variety of egy that bypassed all of these intellectual options and services throughout their flight property issues,” explained Vogel. with the help of a virtual assistant. Like Today there is also a Live Well Alexa or Siri, this system could walk users Collaborative in Singapore, one of P&G’s Boeing Onboard’s virtual assistant, which through the in-flight safety demo, help is similar to Alexa or Siri, can interact global hubs, based out of Singapore them order a meal and even make travel with users.

Polytechnic. Boeing joined the stateside arrangements. This VR gear also takes inLive Well in 2010 thanks to connections flight entertainment to the next level and might even make made in Singapore. Since then, the aircraft company has your seat seem larger. worked on 11 semester-long projects with UC, resulting in While Boeing is not quite ready to implement this work, seven different patents. “If you put students together with the company has filed a provisional patent on the applicafaculty in a context to see a problem in a completely fresh, tion. It also submitted the project for the Crystal Cabin new way, you will get innovation perceptions that are not Award, the only international award for excellence in aircraft possible in any other way,” said Vogel. interior innovation. The awards were announced during the Aircraft Interiors Expo, where researchers presented the Multidisciplinary Magic project in April in Hamburg, Germany. UC’s work made it to Blake Lane is a doctoral design research fellow at Live Well who works full time leading and managing projects. In the short list of 91 submissions and was one of 24 finalists spring 2017, he led students who applied to Live Well on a for the award. few different projects for Boeing. One group was particularly The Live Well Collaborative was co-founded by Craig Vogel, FIDSA, associate dean of research and graduate studinterested in virtual reality, and that team ended up creating ies and director of the Center for Design Research Innovation, Boeing Onboard. The framework for the project was already in 2007 in partnership with P&G, which was looking to focus in place—Boeing had already approved a virtual reality concept—and the students were able to visualize the application on the underserved 50–70 age range of consumers. Live Well to excellent results. combined Vogel’s roles in the College of Design, Architecture,

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This team included industrial design student Andrew LeTourneau, IDSA (DAAP ’17), master’s of design degree graduate Jack Qi (DAAP ’17), computer science student Ivan Klus (CEAS ’18) and Ming Tang, associate professor in DAAP’s School of Architecture and Interior Design. “None of them knew each other,” said Lane of the students. “It was a nice happenchance for me. You had the master’s student who really offered a lot of the theoretical research component behind it, you had the undergrad industrial design student who modeled and created a lot of the assets for the project, and then you had the computer science student who did all the back-end coding to make it functional.”

Multidisciplinary work is at the core of Live Well, and Klus says he enjoyed working with students outside of his computer science major. “They think differently,” he said of the design students. “I feel like I have more of a design background now than most computer science people. Both my parents were actually artists, so it was a side of me that I felt I didn’t get to do much with.”

Klus became interested in virtual reality technologies after getting to try a VR headset at a UC hackathon, a 24-hour coding competition where caffeine-fueled students create websites, mobile apps and hardware hacks. It was his work at a hackathon that drew the attention of Live Well.

When Klus showed his VR project to collaborative executive director Linda Dunseath, he was hired for a co-op on the spot. While he was on the Boeing project, he also worked with Live Well on a VR project for Cincinnati Children’s creating a virtual tour of the hospital’s regional campus. “I didn’t expect to get any sort of VR development experience while still in college,” said Klus. “I was hoping to just pursue that down the line. So I believe this experience will jump-start my career in the VR field.” Additionally, Klus’ name—along with the other UC students and faculty—is on Boeing’s patent, making for an excellent resume booster.

DAAP professor Ming Tang’s specialty in design visualization, using interactive media like VR and AR to communicate a design concept, made him a perfect fit for this project. “Sometimes you need a really strong visual to sell an idea,” explained Tang. “We quickly set up a pipeline involving students with graphic design, 3D modeling and animation skills, scripting and programming as well as user interface. The team assembled some very big ideas into a model people can see and even interact with in VR and AR.”

Top: UC students work on virtual reality projects at the Live Well Collaborative.

Above: Created as a collaboration between Boeing and UC students and faculty, Boeing Onboard is an interactive in-flight virtual assistant.

The rendering above shows what users would see using virtual reality glasses.

VR vs. AR Virtual reality is completely computer-generated, so everything seen through a headset is a totally simulated world.

Augmented reality overlays computer graphics on the realworld landscape. The best example of AR is the mobile game Pokemon Go, the 2016 hit that uses the player’s GPS to find virtual characters in real-world locations, whether it be a park, a landmark or even on UC’s campus.

The Live Well team used both technologies while developing Boeing Onboard. The application itself is an example of AR: Users see the actual interior of their plane while also being able to interact with the virtual assistant. Movies, apps, menus and other forms of entertainment and amenities could appear on a virtual screen much larger than what the physical space would allow. So users might feel like they have more space to work with—making even a coach seat seem a little bit roomier—without actually encroaching on the seat next to them.

These technologies also allow for the safety instructions to be specific to each user, highlighting the closest exit or simulating the deployment of oxygen masks. This not only makes these demos more useful, but it frees up the flight attendants to assist with other matters.

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FLIGHT

Left: With Boeing Onboard, users can shop online, order food and beverages, and make travel plans all with a holographic interface.

Right: Boeing Onboard could give users personalized safety instructions.

In fact, actual flight attendants played a major role in developing Boeing Onboard. The team interviewed Delta flight attendants from the Cincinnati airport throughout the semester, fine-tuning the work based on their feedback.

“We found out from talking to the flight attendants that [Boeing Onboard] could drastically help with congestion in emergency situations, because everyone’s natural reaction is to run to the door they came in,” said Klus. “If we could highlight the emergency exit and a path going down the aisle way to that exit door instead of the door they came in, that could help massively.”

This is an example of the human-centered design boasted by Live Well. All projects are made with actual users and consumers in mind, not in a vacuum. And naturally, the team worked closely with Boeing on this collaboration.

Boeing’s Cynthia Vandewall works in product strategy and future airplane development. Each year she travels to Cincinnati several times per semester to work on Live Well projects. “Our collaboration with Live Well allows us to ensure we are looking at design challenges with fresh, new perspectives,” she explained. “It gives students insight into the concepts under consideration at Boeing. And, together, we can explore possibilities that might otherwise go untouched until other resources could be made available.”

The opportunity to work on innovative real-world solutions is not just valuable for students but for corporations like Boeing as well. “The best part is that in 10 weeks we receive consistently amazing results for each design challenge we present,” said Vandewall. “Having a diverse teaming structure allows for well-thought-out and more holistic design concepts. I’m continually impressed with the students and professors at UC.”

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Enhancing Collaboration Live Well’s focus on innovative technology, multidisciplinary work and co-creating with corporate partners makes it a perfect occupant for UC’s 1819 Innovation Hub. As part of a $38 million renovation, UC’s new front door to the community will serve as a space for students and faculty to engage with industry on collaborative problem-solving.

Located in a 133,000-square-foot four-story building that dates back to 1929 (1819 refers to the year of UC’s founding), the Innovation Hub offers a one-stop shop for industry to access the university’s extensive resources and is at the heart of UC’s Next Lives Here strategic direction.

The UC Research Institute, UC Simulation Center and Cincinnati Bell are among the hub’s first tenants. The Live Well Collaborative will soon join the hub. Lane sees the move as a win-win. “It will help to link us together with a lot of other innovative groups that are affiliated or want to be affiliated with the university, which will be excellent for us because that will just be more resources that we can tap into and offer our students,” he said. “We can collaborate, and that’s the whole point of why we exist. I think it will enhance that collaborative atmosphere with the rest of the university.”

Vogel sees Boeing Onboard as one of the most futurefeasible projects out of Live Well, meaning the technology is very cutting edge, and although it would take work to implement, it’s realistic and doable. “We were able to see the problem in a whole new way and really use the technology in an empowering way that made sure it was aimed at what people would really want to use it for,” said Vogel. “It’s very customer-centric rather than technology being the lead.

Technology serves the needs of people, which is something we feel is very important in what we do at Live Well.” n

APPLIANCE DESIGN’S 31ST ANNUAL EXCELLENCE IN DESIGN AWARDS

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he voting is done and the winners have been selected for the 2018 appliance DESIGN Excellence in Design Awards.

Winning designs were selected by an independent panel of design experts on the basis of creativity, ease of use and visual appeal. Gold, silver and bronze awards were given across five product categories. In addition to the following profiles of the winning products, a permanent section of the appliance DESIGN website dedicated to the competition can be found at appliancedesign.com/eid. Congratulations to all the winners.

Autoadapt Q-Series Mobile Access Lift (above)

By BraunAbility Design Firm: Purdue University; www.stevevisser.design.com

EID GOLD Awards Lux Island White 63-inch Range Hood

By Zephyr Ventilation; www.zephyronline.com The 63-inch Lux Island features an integrated design that mounts into the ceiling above the island cooktop. The product is the ideal range hood for homeowners who want an unobtrusive view of the kitchen or do not have the space for a wall or island hood. The Lux Island features three strips of industry-first tri-level LED lights, Perimeter Aspiration, multiple blower options and a capacitivetouch remote control.

Category: HVAC

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Price range: Mid-range

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Market: US, Canada

Iberital VISION 2G Espresso Coffee Machine

By Iberital De Recambios SA; www.iberital.com/en/ Design Firm: Andreu Carulla Industrial Design Studio (ACID) Iberital VISION is a professional espresso coffee machine designed following three principles—healthiness, energy efficiency and connectivity—to be a class leader. It is intended for use at coffee shops, restaurants, cafeterias and hotels to brew premium espresso coffee and all kinds of tea and herb infusions, to steam milk, and perform latte art. It is the result of teamwork by the design and the engineering teams, and its development was partially funded by the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument program by EASME, the EU agency for SMEs. Category: Major Appliances & Commercial Vending

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Price range: Top of the line

The Q-Series Lift is designed to provide reliable mobility access for wheelchair users worldwide. For global markets, it hydraulically folds and unfolds from the rear door of a commercial van and lifts 400-kilogram loads to the floor level. The lift supports high loads with a 300 percent stiffer structure than previous designs. The sturdy yet light construction is made possible by using a closed box arm geometry to increase rigidity while removing unnecessary weight.

Simple and intuitive controls and improved LED lighting make the design safer and easier to use than previous models.

Category: Medical Equipment & Devices

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Price range: Top of the line

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Market: Europe

Black + Decker 60V MAX* POWERSWAP™ 20 in. Cordless Mower

By Black + Decker Design Firm: Bresslergroup; www.bresslergroup.com Black + Decker’s 60V MAX* POWERSWAP™ 20 in. Cordless Mower is a new kind of electric mower with the engineering and design features to persuade gas-powered equipment loyalists to convert to cordless. Its two 60-volt batteries sitting side by side can be swapped at the touch of a button, providing more than enough to ensure the mower will complete up to a third of an acre without needing to stop and recharge. Its stamina is reflected in its rugged look and feel.

Category: Outdoor & Leisure Appliances Price range: Top of the line

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Market: US

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Market: EU; soon in the US, China, Korea, Singapore, Australia, South America

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A P P L I A NCE DE SI G N

Meet the Judges Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA, President of Viemeister Industries, New York, NY Viemeister Industries creates traditional and new media solutions. Tucker Viemeister is most famous for the OXO Good Grips kitchen tools designed with Smart Design, the company he helped found in 1979.

He opened frog design’s New York office, Razorfish’s physical design capability group and Springtime-USA, and was founder and lab chief at Rockwell Group and director of special projects with Ralph Appelbaum Associates. He has created fun and profitable things, places and experiences for Apple, Coca-Cola, Cuisinart, Viking, J&J, Timex, Levi’s, Phat Farm, Joe Boxer, Nestlé, Unilever, Motorola, Toshiba, Sharp, Seibu, Toyota, Nike, Knoll, Steelcase, Kate Spade, JetBlue, Cosmopolitan Casino, Yotel, Venice Biennale and the NYC Board of Education. He is now working on products for aging, teaching at Parsons and designing interpretive environments with Xenario, including the Shanghai Planetarium.

Jerome Caruso, L/IDSA, Independent Consultant and Director of Jerome Caruso Design Studio, Lake Forest, IL Jerome Caruso has a unique virtual studio with five decades of product design success for major companies. The efficiency and design continuity of his one-man studio has contributed to the brand strength of companies like Sub-Zero, Wolf and Herman Miller. With his creative direction of product design strategy at Sub-Zero for 26 years, this company has become an American icon. Caruso is the hands-on designer and employs the highest level of engineers, model makers and researchers. The methodology of his studio is holistic, creative and efficient because of the single-person contact with clients, concept creation and product development. Caruso practices and believes that the art of invention and innovation is key to long-term product success. His deep understanding of materials and manufacturing methods has made possible an efficient, proven development process. He believes that “a vision of what should be is my key to breakthroughs in aesthetics as well as functional products that represent progress.”

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John C. Davis, Vice President of Marketing & Product Management, Unified Brands, Conyers, GA John Davis is the vice president of marketing and product management for Unified Brands located in Conyers, GA. He joined Unified Brands, an operating company within the Dover Corporation, in 2014.

Previously he held several positions during 15 years at Traulsen and Hobart, of the ITW Food Equipment Group, after beginning his career at Arneg US. His experience includes roles in engineering, manufacturing, service and parts management, sales, business development, marketing and business management. He earned his MBA at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, after completing a BS in mechanical engineering at Lehigh University. In addition, he completed the Graduate Marketing Program at Tulane University.

Scott Shim, IDSA, Professor of Industrial Design, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN Scott Shim has actively pursued a variety of research topics through the overarching mindset of the contextual application of design thinking, which encourages him to tackle unconventional wicked problems that connect humans to culture, society and technology. Shim is also fully invested in interdisciplinary collaborations and opportunities to search for collective approaches in identifying innovations and responsive solutions. His design work is recognized internationally, with many of his projects appearing in a number of global publications, including the cover of Time magazine. Shim’s professional experience includes more than 10 years in product development, during which time he obtained more than 30 design patents and multiple design awards. He spent a majority of his professional career at the Daewoo Electronics Design Center where he managed various consumer products. Shim continues to be active in design practice and consulting for both domestic and international clients. He recently served as the vice president of education on the IDSA Board.

PetSafe Smart Feed Pet Feeder

By PetSafe Design Firm: Bresslergroup; www.bresslergroup.com The Wi-Fi-enabled PetSafe Smart Feeder uses modern technology to keep busy pet parents connected to their pets. The app lets users customize and schedule up to 12 meals a day, sends notifications once the pet has eaten, and displays the last two weeks of feeder activity. The design is rugged and tactically pet proofed to prevent prying paws from sneaking food or getting into mechanisms. The device is easy to clean and operate and has a simple, sleek look designed to blend into any kitchen.

Category: Small Appliances

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Price range: Top of the line

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Market: US

IRadimed 3880 MRI Patient Monitoring System

By IRadimed Corp.

Design Firm: Helix Design, Inc.; www.helixdesign.com Intended to monitor a single patient’s vital signs for patients undergoing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) procedures, the 3880 MRI Patient Monitoring System is intended for use by healthcare professionals. It was designed for use with adult, pediatric and neonatal patients to monitor electrocardiogram, non-invasive blood pressure, temperature, pulse oximetry, respiration, capnography, oxygen and anesthetic agents.

Category: Medical Equipment & Devices

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Price range: Top of the line

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Market: NH

EID SILVER Awards Aeramax PRO AM 3 PC 9573101 Air Purifier

By Fellowes Brands; www.fellowes.com The advanced and upgraded EnviroSmart™ 2.0 technology of the Aeramax PRO uses dual self-regulating and self-cleaning laser particle sensors to continually read the air, measuring air particles and adjusting to maximize efficiency. It offers visual display screens so you know what’s happening when it’s happening. You can get a measure of the particles going into the PureView™ as well as the lack of particles coming out. The display also detects harmful volatile organic compounds and odors in the adjacent air, providing a visual readout to determine the presence of obnoxious—and noxious—pollutants.

Category: HVAC

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Price range: Top of the line

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Market: US

Perlick 24 in. Column Dual-Zone Wine Reserve – CR24D

By Perlick; www.PerlickCollection.com Design Firm: Collaboration between Perlick and Design Concepts

The Everdure by Heston Blumenthal HUB charcoal barbeque celebrates the technology and science of cooking in a way that is easy to grasp, making professional quality charcoal rotisserie cooking accessible to domestic users for the first time. The HUB features a built-in rotisserie system that uses patented technology that allows users to quickly set up an authentic commercial-quality rotisserie for cooking over coals at three different heights. A discreet motor hidden inside the body of the barbeque powers the rotisserie. Everything about the Everdure

by Heston Blumenthal HUB charcoal barbeque is designed for ease of use. The HUB is also an IDEA 2017 Gold winner.

Category: Outdoor & Leisure Appliances

Well known for its 100-year history of manufacturing high-quality undercounter refrigeration units, Perlick brings its industry expertise to the full-size refrigeration market with its new 24-inch Column Dual-Zone Wine Reserve. Featuring the commercial-quality engineering for which Perlick is known, the sleek wine column features new technology to perfectly store, preserve and serve a wine collection, ensuring it is housed in an optimal environment. With two cooling zones that can be set to different temperatures, triple-pane glass and precision humidity control, every detail of Perlick’s wine column was selected to maximize performance and preservation while beautifully showcasing a collection.

Category: Major Appliances & Commercial Vending

EVERDURE by Heston Blumenthal HUB Charcoal Barbeque

By Shriro Holdings Limited Design Firm: Design + Industry; www.design-industry.com.au

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Price range: Top of the line

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Price range: Mid-range

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Market: Australia, UK

ION™ Bottleless Water Cooler Model 400

By Natural Choice Corp.

Design Firm: Cesaroni Design Associates; https://cesaroni.com/ ION’s Bottleless Water Cooler transforms ordinary tap water into freshly filtered drinking water. With a user friendly LCD touch screen, you can dispense four choices of drinking water, indicated with four different colored accent lights: ambient (white), cold (blue), sparkling (green) or hot (red). Using a CarbonPlus filtration system, the ION™ removes undesirable tastes, odors, lead and more. The clean, contemporary design also features easy front door access for changing the filter and CO2 cartridge.

Category: Small Appliances

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Price range: Mid-range

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Market: US, Canada, Europe

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Market: US I N N O V AT I O N S U M M E R 2 0 1 8

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LG Door-in-Door® Refrigerator with SmartThinQ™ in Matte Black Stainless Steel Model LFXS28566M

By LG Electronics; http://lg.com/us

EID BRONZE Awards Ravenna Black Stainless Steel Kitchen Ventilation Hood

By Zephyr; www.zephyronline.com Zephyr’s Ravenna is the industry’s first kitchen ventilation hood in black stainless steel made with a titanium coating. A sleek alternative to standard stainless steel, Ravenna is made with a militarygrade built-in layer of protection with an anti-smudge coating for easing cleaning. The hood is available in a chimney-style wall mount and features a smoke-gray glass canopy. The hoods is equipped with BriteStrip™ LED lighting, ICON Touch® Controls and Airflow Control Technology (ACT™).

Category: HVAC

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Price range: Mid-range

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Market: North America, Canada

Hestan Pass-Through Convection Oven HPCOP36-NG and HPCOP36-LP

By Hestan Commercial Corp.; www.hestancommercial.com The Hestan Commercial Pass-Through Convection Oven is a heavy-duty high-end piece of commercial foodservice cooking equipment designed for baking, convection baking and finishing with several patent-pending features and benefits. The oven is thermostatically controlled with soft-opening doors on opposite ends. It was designed with a low-profile efficient convection cooking system within a 36-inch-wide frame. The modular design allows the oven to be integrated into a single-sided cooking suite and combined with other Hestan commercial products, such as char broilers, griddles, salamanders, French tops and fryers. It is available in 12 Hestan exclusive colors/finishes.

Category: Major Appliances and Commercial Vending Market: US, Canada

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Price range: Top of the line

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The matte black LG Door-in-Door® Refrigerator featuring SmartThinQ™ technology incorporates a major design innovation with next-generation Door-in-Door technology featuring LG’s most advanced door cooling technology and unrivaled organization. Only the LG Door-in-Door includes bonus door bins for added storage.

Plus, its interior shelves are optimized, so even large wine bottles fit. From making extra ice for a party to getting smartphone notifications when the door’s left open, the LG SmartThinQ app helps users control their refrigerator from anywhere. It even works with the Google Assistant via voice commands. And its new PrintProof™ matte-black finish is stylish and functional.

Category: Major Appliances and Commercial Vending

IDSA.ORG

Price range: Mid-range

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EVERDURE by Heston Blumenthal FURNACE Gas Barbeque

By Shriro Holdings Limited Design Firm: Design + Industry; www.design-industry.com.au The Everdure by Heston Blumenthal FURNACE is a three-burner barbeque featuring an integrated flowing design finished in a range of contemporary colors.

Made from die-cast aluminum that won’t rust, the design features interchangeable cast iron flat and grill plates with cool-to-touch handles so you can change plates easily.

Integrated flame-tamers eliminate flare-ups during cooking.

The easy-to-clean enamel-coated hood creates 360-degree circulation around the food. Fast ignition with instant searing means you’re ready to cook in five minutes, while slender taps put variable flame control at your fingertips.

Category: Outdoor & Leisure Appliances

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Price range: Mid-range

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Market: Australia, UK

Master Lock Electronic Built-in Locker Lock

By Master Lock Design Firm: Bresslergroup; www.bresslergroup.com Designed to elevate the experience for facilities and users, the Electronic Built-In Locker Lock combines a modern design with premium materials to offer improved functionality. It offers a new level of innovation with a high-visibility display, intuitive operation, long battery life and anti-jamming features for reliable security.

Category: Small Appliances

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Market: Global

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Price range: Top of the line

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Market: US

IDEA 2018 Ceremony & Gala Join us September 19 to celebrate the 2018 winners at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, LA. Attendees of the IDEA Ceremony and Gala will be treated to the exhibits in the US Freedom Pavilion.

Learn more at InternationalDesignConference.com/idea-gala.

Caro is an approachable three-wheeled scooter for urban mobility