I've got a theory about service design: Great design will never save bad service, but great service will always save bad design.
I say this with a certain level of confidence as I fly from Seattle to Atlanta in seat 31D (yes that's way down in the back and stuck in the middle). I'm uncomfortable, restrained, claustrophobic and bored. I'm forced to wonder, why when so much of the world's service provision has innovated over the past 20 years, the airline economy seat remains devoid of any meaningful improvement?
No doubt a missed opportunity. The iconography of the airline economy seat is a legacy. The coach-class seat could be a testament to intelligent design at its best, serving as an example of ingenuity over adversity, creativity over restriction, and common sense over commerciality. But instead, it fails miserably.
When running a finger across the armrest molded cap end detail, ignoring the trapped chip crumbs, you can sense the angst in the designer as he (or she, but most likely he), battled to retain any sense of integrity as the bitter forces of commercial, operational, engineering and cultural inertia resisted, restricted and reshaped his original creative intent. It's sad really.
Thinking on this I became increasingly frustrated until suddenly something happened: Eye contact. A smile, a genuine connection, with the energized Delta flight attendant. Just like that, that very small connection reprioritized my expectation of brand engagement within the cabin and more or less salvaged the experience.
It was an awakening moment. The flight attendant made bad design tolerable.
Product designers have assumed countless different guises over the past 100 years or so as the profession matured and sought ways of redefining its role and meaning. In the 1920s industry pioneers established the profession of industrial design. The 1930s saw an explosion of experimentation into form, material and symbolism.
The 1950s were an opportunity for industrial designers to master an understanding of production and claim a place in the strategic direction of manufacture. The 1960s saw the more radical 3D designers cross reference popular culture. We saw storytelling in furniture, consumer products and automotive, joining the dots with our contemporaries in fashion, architecture and music. The 1970s saw the birth of marketing positioning and product design evolved again, working with advertising, packaging and retail design as part of a wider narration and taste-setting agenda.
The 1980s gave product design a style. "Lifestyle Design," created by the ad agencies, celebrated by the media and consumed by the affluent, hungry middle class, riding on the back of a new, confident capitalist agenda saw the growth of product design as a separate, style-forming genre. Everything from aftershaves to lemon squeezers had the stylistic treatment of a product designer.
The 1990s saw the industry finding its own voice by questioning its ultimate meaning. Multidisciplinary, sustainability, semantics, lifecycle, design language and usability fully integrated with the burgeoning interactive scene (that had grown from product design) laid the foundations for the influence that the discipline has today.
2000 and beyond gave us experiential branding and the social networking phenomenon; where the brand becomes a platform for connectivity. Products then became an extension of that overall narration and engagement.
Within this context, today's enlightening moment onboard the
aircraft prompted me to consider a somewhat under-acknowledged way that a product designer can create value day in and day out: Product design can play a role in
the art of service delivery.
And when we enable people to deliver service to their best
ability, we create human connectivity--that thing we so crave in an
increasingly digitally-framed and automated world.
As the President and CEO of Teague,
John Barratt is responsible for positioning the company for future
success and building upon Teague's rich heritage. During his three
years in this position, Barratt has guided Teague in building and
strengthening partnerships with some of the world's leading brands. The
result of these collaborative partnerships is design work that has been
recognized with a growing roster of international design awards.
Most of us can picture this Time cover from 1949
featuring Raymond Loewy. It was probably the first time a designer--in this case, an industrial-design renaissance man who sculpted the shapes of everything from Studebakers to Coke bottles--received such
significant and mainstream media attention. But can anyone really remember what came
after that?
There weren't any "covers wars" I'm aware of post-Loewy and his fellow design pioneers, but times are changing. During the past decade we've seen the dramatic rise of a media-generated celebrity design culture--which is beginning to make me wonder, are we accurately presenting a balanced picture of the complexities of the design industry, or simply catering to a celebrity obsessed society?
We unquestionably live in a culture that delights in the success and celebritization of modern day heroes/personalities--those special people endowed with swashbuckling abandon that we can bet our dreams on, that can lead us without fear into the unknown. This adoration is evident in every aspect of our culture (entertainment, education, sport, politics, business, etc.) and design has proven in no way exempt from society's growing desire to measure success via status. Add to that that we're in a period of extreme uncertainty, it makes sense that we'd search out pathfinders to pave the way forward, but at what cost?
The work of these pathfinders is often laudable, but by choosing to fixate on their popularity we miss a valuable opportunity to fully inform consumers. Communicating and celebrating the complexities of design and the design process would go a long way in creating a shared knowledge that could help build the type of educated consumer the world really needs, especially now.
A very brief example: The San Francisco-based Fuseproject (headed by one of the designers to grace the cover of Fast Company, Yves Béhar), whose most successful product launch to date is with Aliph and their beautifully designed Jawbone range of headsets. Aliph is reportedly edging towards $100 million in revenue which is very impressive and deserving of praise for both them and Fuseproject, This product is interesting, not only in its execution, but in its path to realization and the business relationship between Fuseproject and Aliph that facilitated this success. That's what I want to read about, that's the story. Instead, in our celebrity-obsessed society we get treated to articles about Yves Béhar's apartment. I'd rather see these columns dedicated to telling the Jawbone story, or focused elsewhere.
For example, take corporate design managers--like the powerful design teams at Nokia or one of my personal favorites, Belkin Corp. who have used design to enormous effect--growing from $400 million to over $1 billion in a less than five years. These companies are also impressive and deserving of praise, yet somehow more or less left out of the media mix.
Let me be clear, my argument here isn't so much against celebrity as it is for much needed balance; providing that balanced coverage will better educate consumers--raising the bar for our work, and as a consequence, the long-term impact of our contribution.
Who are other unsung heroes in the world of design?
As the President and CEO of Teague,
John Barratt is responsible for positioning the company for future
success and building upon Teague's rich heritage. During his three
years in this position, Barratt has guided Teague in building and
strengthening partnerships with some of the world's leading brands. The
result of these collaborative partnerships is design work that has been
recognized with a growing roster of international design awards.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about thinking. For reasons that are difficult for me to identify, it seems that the design industry lacks any real form of critical thinking. By that I mean a careful and deliberate analysis that's intended to identify genuine existing conditions, rather than the conditions that those with vested interests may want us to believe are true. Could be that the design industry isn't large enough to warrant professional critics, or that the market isn't great enough to consume these critiques, or perhaps that designers are uncomfortable criticizing their colleagues' work? Or maybe it's just that as an industry we are content, or that the intended audience has yet to develop a criterion for evaluation? For whatever reason, my observation still stands: critical thinking in design, whether from historians, educators, authors or journalists, is largely absent.
Like it or not, critical thinking is extremely important; it helps us learn and grow, encourages us to look in the mirror and when necessary, go on a diet. Critical thinking is the catalyst for change.
To underscore my point, that critical thinking is utterly lacking, let me provide an example. We are just emerging from a period in which the prevailing sentiment in design was 'innovation', an era characterized by big fish, big dollars and the growth of design.
Throughout the Innovation Era only modest dissent surfaced, notably from Rick Poynor and Michael Bierut (see "Innovation Is the New Black" by Bierut), but it was somewhat marginalized. The prevailing mindset went largely unchallenged, and critiques often appeared more promotional than evaluative. Finally when a careful and deliberate analysis did come, it came not from a designer, design journalist, educator or author, but from an economic journalist, Michael Wendell, in his BusinessWeek article, "The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S." Understandably that article focused on the macro reasons behind innovation's shortcomings; and so, after seven or so years of the innovation era in design we remain, to the best of my knowledge, without a benchmark, to truly measure innovation's value to business, culture or society. Design grew, but did it better the world, or just line its pockets? If innovation was all around, why didn't it move the needle? Was a product produced in 2007 so different from a product produced in 2000? (Maybe because BusinessWeekdeclared innovation dead in 2008.)
We need to consider this critical thinking deficiency as a serious problem, one that deserves a solution. It's possible the IDSA could become a hub for critical thinking; or that educational organizations--traditionally safe havens where pithy analytical evaluations can live--could drive this forward. Particularly now that two large educational institutions have the added PR pull of big thinkers like John Maeda and Bruce Nussbaum. Or maybe magazines, like this one, could sponsor a 'critically thinking' blog on their respective Web sites. Any which way, let's get on this. Please.
Where do you want to see more critical thinking in design?
As the President and CEO of Teague, John Barratt is responsible for positioning the company for future success and building upon Teague's rich heritage. During his three years in this position, Barratt has guided Teague in building and strengthening partnerships with some of the world's leading brands. The result of these collaborative partnerships is design work that has been recognized with a growing roster of international design awards.
There weren't any "covers wars" I'm aware of post-Loewy and his fellow design pioneers, but times are changing. During the past decade we've seen the dramatic rise of a media-generated celebrity design culture--which is beginning to make me wonder, are we accurately presenting a balanced picture of the complexities of the design industry, or simply catering to a celebrity obsessed society? 
A very brief example: The San Francisco-based Fuseproject (headed by one of the designers to grace 
For example, take corporate design managers--like the powerful design teams at Nokia or one of my personal favorites, Belkin Corp. who have used design to enormous effect--growing from $400 million to over $1 billion in a less than five years. These companies are also impressive and deserving of praise, yet somehow more or less left out of the media mix. 
Like it or not, critical thinking is extremely important; it helps us learn and grow, encourages us to look in the mirror and when necessary, go on a diet. Critical thinking is the catalyst for change. 
