Before I used computer-aided design to create products, I had pencils. Before I had pencils, I had Legos. Before Legos, crayons. Before crayons, blocks. And with these tools, I have always been a designer.
The act of exploring alternate ideas, prototyping them, testing them and then breaking them down in search of new ideas has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. It is a way of being that shapes everything I value, everything I do and the way I see the world.
That's probably why it's always a little surprising to me when non-designers find my way a novel--or even useful--way of experiencing life.
I just spent two days at a conference held in San Francisco by the venerable Design Management Institute. The conference, entitled Re-Thinking...Design, was a meeting of about 200 designers and business managers gathered to explore how the practices and processes of design are influencing business.
Leaders from the world of business spoke about how the designers have had it right all along. It's the analytical orientation of business training that is getting in the way of effective business, they argued.
From left to right:
Roger Martin, dean, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto;
conference co-chair
Darrel Rhea, CEO, Cheskin Added Value; conference co-chair
Thomas Lockwood, President DMI
"The world of business is absolutely ready for design. And designers are selling themselves short," said Scott Cook, founder of Intuit. Cook shared with the group about his growing awareness of the importance of listening to customers. At some point after Quicken's enormous success, their customer research revealed that an enormous number of respondents were using Quicken at work. It didn't make sense: It was a personal finance product. After ignoring the findings for three years, Cook finally decided to dig deeper. It turned out that small business owners were in fact using it to manage their business finances rather than using more complex software aimed at accountants. Intuit immediately created QuickBooks, which shot to number one in the business accounting software category in its first month.
Empowering the drive to create products aimed at the needs of real people is this question: Does the business culture favor conversation--or is it stuck in hierarchical control? Classic business management education values control and it depends on deductive reasoning to create that control. "The most important business transformations cannot be proven before they are undertaken," promotes Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. "Analytical and deductive reasoning practices in business destroy value."
Scott Cook continued with an example from another successful company that values the conversation over control. "Toyota is empowering design at all levels." They use an "emergent" model of leadership. They "let the customer vote instead of the boss voting."
Claudia Kotchka, former VP of Innovation at Proctor & Gamble, then used one of my favorite phrases: "Design is more than just making products pretty." Other designers repeated this refrain in their own ways. But at the same time, nearly all of us admitted that we each have an almost instinctive process of designing that is never regular or predictable or repeatable--the opposite of the kind of operations-oriented culture that business craves. Some even eschewed the idea that designers need to learn the language of business.
In my view, it's crucial for business to awaken to the powers of design. I don't think that future enterprises will be able to connect to customers or remain competitive without increasingly fluid and agile management practices that respond more to the idiosyncrasies of real people than to the current fiscal quarter's numbers.
But when it comes to the profession of design, discovering and answering the unmet needs of customers requires a designer's ability to move beyond the expected. It's our job to to create these wonderful expressions, giving personality to a company and delight to the customer.
What do you see as the role of design in business?
As a seasoned product developer with a background in both analytical and creative thinking, John Edson's primary role is to build new programs for clients with the right innovation processes led by the right creative team to make a real difference for
clients. His experience includes managing the birth of successful products for Philips, Motorola, InFocus, and several startups. Products developed under John's management have been honored with accolades from the ID Magazine Design Annual, the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, iF Hannover, PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, and IDSA's Industrial Design Excellence Award.
Developing the contribution of design creativity and innovation process in the service of business, society and the environment, John explores the impact of design creativity in a weekly podcast, Icon-o-Cast, that he hosts with guest speakers ranging from Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum to author and cognitive scientist Don Norman. John is also a regular speaker, having lectured at Wharton School, given a keynote at Intertech's Flexible Display Technologies conference, and participated in a talk for the Business Marketing Association of Northern California. A lecturer at Stanford, John teaches courses in product design and creativity.
I can't possibly write for a week about design without bringing up Apple. Has a single company outside of the fashion world consistently produced such an impressive collection of offerings that have been both successful and adored? This week's iPhone 3G S is no different. Their brand and products and software are beautiful, wonderful, delightful.
But it's really a shame that they are so successful.
Why? Because everyone wants to recreate what they have done, but it's never replicable in the same way. That's because the secret to Apple's success is embedded in the personality of Steve Jobs. He is their chief executive designer. He not only empowers an expert team of designers, engineers and marketers, but if you believe the lore that leaks out of Apple, he works side by side with designers giving birth to new products. And he's just lucky enough that people love his taste as embodied in the brand he's created, the products he makes and the software he designs.
Sure, it's an oversimplification. And sure, not every single decision is perfect. And Apple's products certainly aren't for everyone, for every purpose. But because Jobs focuses without restraint on creating a love affair, most of us are willing to forgive Apple's insufficiencies like we're willing to forgive the insufficiencies in a lover.
So what do we tell companies who come to us, dying to get their own iPod design? Well, we ask them two questions before we meet.
First, is design on the CEO's list of legacy objectives? If not, the design activity is often about creating better window dressing or optimizing a product for usability--but not about creating a remarkable offering. There just won't be the organizational will that standout products require to survive the corporate development processes. Companies that deliver these kinds of products and services have a creative and empowered culture that wants to understand the customer and that goes the extra mile when perfecting the design. This kind of culture has to come from the top.
I'll save the second question for when we set up that meeting.
There are companies that have achieved quite a lot of success without Steve Jobs at the helm. They've done it with a clear vision and empowered culture. Here are two:
Method has made eco-friendly soap cool---and that helped them break into a very competitive market space. Design is a central tenet of their vision that gives them differentiation from both conventional and other eco-oriented soaps.
Southwest Airlines turns cheap, cramped airplanes into a delightful and differentiated experience by empowering everyone in the company to delight customers and improve the service.
Method's brightly-colored soaps and quirky bottle designs are visual ambassadors to the culture they've created. And if you've been on a Southwest flight--especially where the flight attendant raps the safety information--you can definitely see evidence of its cult-like status. What other companies come to mind for you?
As a seasoned product developer with a background in both analytical and creative thinking, John Edson's primary role is to build new programs for clients with the right innovation processes led by the right creative team to make a real difference for
clients. His experience includes managing the birth of successful products for Philips, Motorola, InFocus, and several startups. Products developed under John's management have been honored with accolades from the ID Magazine Design Annual, the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, iF Hannover, PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, and IDSA's Industrial Design Excellence Award.
Developing the contribution of design creativity and innovation process in the service of business, society and the environment, John explores the impact of design creativity in a weekly podcast, Icon-o-Cast, that he hosts with guest speakers ranging from Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum to author and cognitive scientist Don Norman. John is also a regular speaker, having lectured at Wharton School, given a keynote at Intertech's Flexible Display Technologies conference, and participated in a talk for the Business Marketing Association of Northern California. A lecturer at Stanford, John teaches courses in product design and creativity.
A while back, I was standing in a checkout line at a drug store, passing the time by wondering who would ever buy the ugliest clock I'd ever seen, on display at the front of the store. It wasn't a regular sort of ugly. It was nuclear ugly.
Sliced from some unsuspecting tree trunk that never hurt anybody, the heavily shellacked face of the clock preserved pictures of red roses and drippy script type that read "LOVE." The hands and numbers were plastic with a cheap layer of shiny gold-crap covering them.
I was on a roll, hating this thing.
Then, out of the blue, the woman in front of me pointed at it. "Honey," she said to the young girl accompanying her. "Go see how much that is."
My own mother is known for a number of sayings which I carry around with me. One of them is an old standard: There's no accounting for taste.
The nightmare for product managers is working for months on a new product launch only to see their brainchild fail because the market says, "Ew, are you kidding me? That's ugly!" I think this is the reason why so many things we buy are just 'nice': They are perfectly fine products that focus on their functional appeal while borrowing their aesthetic from some other successful thing on the market.
In a recent focus group, we were getting feedback on preferences and habits related to certain electronic products. "They should all be black and silver," declared a rather vocal leader in the group. Everyone else nodded in submission. "Yes, black and silver," they droned. Then the moderator pulled out her Motorola Cobalt phone, a lustrous blue folding number with silver trim. Everyone ogled the phone. And they changed their votes.
The real trick is to resist navigating consumer taste and understand the emotional sources for taste so that you can appeal to them instead.
For the rose-clock lady, I suspect that she was responding to personal associations that I didn't have with the clock, a collection of pleasant memories centered around the idea of home. A remembrance of grandparents, warm times opening presents Christmas morning, the hearty family dining table. The natural grain of the wood showing through the clear overcoat, like a windowed view on nature, captured and brought indoors. Nostalgia. Nature. Nurture.
Around the same time as I encountered the rose clock, we designed a kick scooter, the Xootr, whose design was rooted in the very same framework of meaning as the clock. Its simple use of low tech materials, wood and aluminum and steel, is reminiscent of homemade scooters. Exposed mechanisms and lack of flourish appeal to our sense of so-called simpler times. Xootr triggers feelings of nostalgia subtly and without literally replicating the object of yesteryear.
So ultimately, don't all these things sell by tapping into a person's sense of what is meaningful? I would suggest that they do. That's why some ugly stuff sells, and some beautiful stuff sells more.
What ugly products have you seen being embraced by consumers? Or is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
As a seasoned product developer with a background in both analytical and creative thinking, John Edson's primary role is to build new programs for clients with the right innovation processes led by the right creative team to make a real difference for
clients. His experience includes managing the birth of successful products for Philips, Motorola, InFocus, and several startups. Products developed under John's management have been honored with accolades from the ID Magazine Design Annual, the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, iF Hannover, PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, and IDSA's Industrial Design Excellence Award.
Developing the contribution of design creativity and innovation process in the service of business, society and the environment, John explores the impact of design creativity in a weekly podcast, Icon-o-Cast, that he hosts with guest speakers ranging from Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum to author and cognitive scientist Don Norman. John is also a regular speaker, having lectured at Wharton School, given a keynote at Intertech's Flexible Display Technologies conference, and participated in a talk for the Business Marketing Association of Northern California. A lecturer at Stanford, John teaches courses in product design and creativity.
I was on an airplane yesterday. But before I got on board, I had one of those awkward conversations with a ticket agent that keeps vice presidents of customer service awake at night. She said, "That other person you spoke with at the airlines? He was lying to you."
But...but...but...aren't you the airline? I thought to myself.
Companies are trying to create positive relationships with all of us. And not just service businesses, where the relationship is with other flesh-and-blood people. Manufacturers of shampoo and telephones and discount furniture want to create lasting relationships with loyal customers too, and they rely on their products to do most of the talking.
In olden days, way back before the Industrial Revolution, stuff was created in an intimate setting. There was someone who needed something and there was someone who made it for them. In every case, there existed a relationship between maker and customer.
Today the practice of design is spreading virulently, infecting the business management world among other things. And of course it should. Our modern era of mass production requires enormous organizations to replicate the relationship of a designer artisan with her customer. If that organization doesn't know how to listen to or inspire the customer, the relationship will die.
Understanding the actions, anatomies and aspirations of humans is foundational for creating better products, better relationships.
Case in point is the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush. It's a manual toothbrush that was born out of intense observation of how people hold a brush and resulted in a game changer: a brush that people love because of its comfort and effectiveness, used to perform a job that is about taking care of oneself. Home run.
TiVo came into being with a similar focus on the customer. The product was a revolution when it arrived because it resisted the Silicon Valley urge to be a technology product. It focused instead on television viewing as an experience and delivered my TV on my schedule. More importantly, because the relationship that TiVo designed for customers is about fetching entertainment easily, they are quickly becoming a platform for delivering internet-based content on my terms.
Twitter as a platform has this kind of potential to create a charismatic and empowering relationship. To date, it's been an exciting phenomenon. But like human relationships that seem exciting at the beginning, doesn't it need to reveal something deeper about itself to become a lasting marriage? Can't Twitter at the very least be easier to talk to? It feels to me like the relationship I had with computers before graphical user interfaces. Useful, but not endearing.
What companies do you think have effective maker-consumer relationships?
As a seasoned product developer with a background in both analytical and creative thinking, John Edson's primary role is to build new programs for clients with the right innovation processes led by the right creative team to make a real difference for
clients. His experience includes managing the birth of successful products for Philips, Motorola, InFocus, and several startups. Products developed under John's management have been honored with accolades from the ID Magazine Design Annual, the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, iF Hannover, PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, and IDSA's Industrial Design Excellence Award.
Developing the contribution of design creativity and innovation process in the service of business, society and the environment, John explores the impact of design creativity in a weekly podcast, Icon-o-Cast, that he hosts with guest speakers ranging from Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum to author and cognitive scientist Don Norman. John is also a regular speaker, having lectured at Wharton
School, given a keynote at Intertech's Flexible Display Technologies conference, and participated in a talk for the Business Marketing Association of Northern California. A lecturer at Stanford, John teaches courses in product design and creativity.
HP Pavilion dv200, wave pattern for HP's Imprint Finish designed by Lunar
I bumped into my friend Lori recently and noticed that she had a new PC--a notebook computer from HP sporting graphic patterns that my firm, Lunar, had designed with them. When I asked her about what her checklist contained when she set out to buy a PC, we ended up talking about her list of technical requirements.
I then shared with her some of the backstage stories--how much effort it took to make those beautiful graphics find their way onto the surfaces of the notebook computer. She was amazed. "Why go to all that trouble just for a PC, something that I buy solely for its function?"
Good question. Why did HP spend all those resources to create an unnecessary flourish? After all, HP is a technology company with world-class expertise in delivering the latest wizardry to hungry consumers.
Or is it?
HP Pavilion dv6t Artist Edition 2 Notebook PC designed by Hisako Sakihama
HP's chief designer Sam Lucente casts the corporate mission in a different light. "We're in the business of humanizing technology." Competing solely on the battleground of technology and cost, the familiar argument goes, is a tough way to engage customers. There has to be more, something that is meaningful to people and appealing to their values, their emotions.
Enter the pattern. The business beauty to patterns is that they create visual uniqueness, and they do it efficiently. Patterns do their work on the surface without having to change the canvas. And so the hardware can remain the same while the surfaces can be anything from vibrant and dynamic to subtle and sophisticated--without having to invest an additional dime in manufacturing.
HP Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam edition series
They are finding their way onto all sorts of things of late, a refreshing trend that points to a future way that we will encounter technology products differently, more like fashion than function. And while fashion can be a tricky aspiration in our current economic and ecological times--because it sounds temporary and decadent--it's also an expressive practice that is rooted in connecting regular people with an artist, creator or craftsperson.
The hand of the craftsperson showing up in technology products is perfect for times like these when we want to connect with others for that human touch. And it's working. When Lori was done talking about all the things she was looking for in a PC, I asked, so why'd you choose the HP? She smiled, touched her computer reflectively, and replied, "because it looks so cool."
Are you partial to any patterns on your electronics? And do they affect your purchasing decisions?
As a seasoned product developer with a background in both analytical and creative thinking, John Edson's primary role is to build new programs for clients with the right innovation processes led by the right creative team to make a real difference for
clients. His experience includes managing the birth of successful products for Philips, Motorola, InFocus, and several startups. Products developed under John's management have been honored with accolades from the ID Magazine Design Annual, the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, iF Hannover, PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award, and IDSA's Industrial Design Excellence Award.
Developing the contribution of design creativity and innovation process in the service of business, society and the environment, John explores the impact of design creativity in a weekly podcast, Icon-o-Cast, that he hosts with guest speakers ranging from Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum to author and cognitive scientist Don Norman. John is also a regular speaker, having lectured at Wharton
School, given a keynote at Intertech's Flexible Display Technologies conference, and participated in a talk for the Business Marketing Association of Northern California. A lecturer at Stanford, John teaches courses in product design and creativity.
But it's really a shame that they are so successful.
First, is design on the CEO's list of legacy objectives? If not, the design activity is often about creating better window dressing or optimizing a product for usability--but not about creating a remarkable offering. There just won't be the organizational will that standout products require to survive the corporate development processes. Companies that deliver these kinds of products and services have a creative and empowered culture that wants to understand the customer and that goes the extra mile when perfecting the design. This kind of culture has to come from the top.
There are companies that have achieved quite a lot of success without Steve Jobs at the helm. They've done it with a clear vision and empowered culture. Here are two:
A while back, I was standing in a checkout line at a drug store, passing the time by wondering who would ever buy the ugliest clock I'd ever seen, on display at the front of the store. It wasn't a regular sort of ugly. It was nuclear ugly.
The nightmare for product managers is working for months on a new product launch only to see their brainchild fail because the market says, "Ew, are you kidding me? That's ugly!" I think this is the reason why so many things we buy are just 'nice': They are perfectly fine products that focus on their functional appeal while borrowing their aesthetic from some other successful thing on the market.
Around the same time as I encountered the rose clock, we designed a kick scooter, the Xootr, whose design was rooted in the very same framework of meaning as the clock. Its simple use of low tech materials, wood and aluminum and steel, is reminiscent of homemade scooters. Exposed mechanisms and lack of flourish appeal to our sense of so-called simpler times. Xootr triggers feelings of nostalgia subtly and without literally replicating the object of yesteryear.
In olden days, way back before the Industrial Revolution, stuff was created in an intimate setting. There was someone who needed something and there was someone who made it for them. In every case, there existed a relationship between maker and customer.
Understanding the actions, anatomies and aspirations of humans is foundational for creating better products, better relationships.
Twitter as a platform has this kind of potential to create a charismatic and empowering relationship. To date, it's been an exciting phenomenon. But like human relationships that seem exciting at the beginning, doesn't it need to reveal something deeper about itself to become a lasting marriage? Can't Twitter at the very least be easier to talk to? It feels to me like the relationship I had with computers before graphical user interfaces. Useful, but not endearing.
