At lunch a few months ago, one of Fast Company's expert bloggers gave me a tip: check out design at Dell, he suggested. I was skeptical. Design at Dell? Isn't that an oxymoron?
For most of its 25-year history, Dell has been known as a company long on efficiency and cost-savings, and short on design. Dell machines may not have been sexy, but they worked just fine, and you gave you a lot of computing power for the buck. For years, I've been toting a little Inspiron with me when I travel; it's nearly as light as a netbook with all the power of a big, honkin' desktop. It's just not, well, too sexy.
But three years ago, after watching their competitive advantage in price erode, and their functional-but-unlovable design emerge as a real roadblock to sales, Dell executives finally got religion on design.
Luckily, they had Ken Musgrave at hand to help with the company's transformation from one that focused on paring costs and improving supply chain efficiencies to one where design is right up there with marketing, engineering and sales in the corporate hierarchy.
Musgrave is a good man to have in your corner if you're looking to reinvent your company through design. An award-winning designer himself (with a slew of honors from IDEA, Red Dot, and iF), with two design degrees and an MBA, he's been the director of Dell's Experience Design Group for the past eight years. He runs a team of over 100 creative professionals, who make sure that everything from notebooks to servers are designed to deliver superior user experience as well as performance.
And he's been a tireless advocate for the company's attempt to make sure its products were sustainably designed and responsibly recycled, launching the Re-Generation sustainable design competition that encouraged design pros and educators to explore the trade-offs and contradictions involved in trying to achieve sustainability.
Ken's made huge progress in three years, launching the Dell Consumer Personalization Strategy (If I had ordered my laptop today, I could have chosen patterns ranging from dots to plaids to Audubon prints), the 17-inch Dell Precision notebook intended for creative pros, and the Latitude family of notebooks. But his proudest achievement is the Studio Hybrid, the only LEED-certified consumer desktop on the market.
Often, the real test for any designer--particularly in a tech company--is if you can earn the respect of the engineers. On that count, Musgrave has hit a home run. Witness what Steve Belt, vp for business client engineering, told IDSA's journal, Innovation: "Ken...stands his ground for why a risk may be worth taking and necessary to success. If someone wasn't there to push back and remind us of why we have to make it work, we'd slide into the comfort zone of safe and predictable decisions. He reminds us that we can't just claim industrial design is important and then act on it when it's convenience. We have to give it equal priority and treatment all the time. People...should see design in every Dell product."
It may shock you to hear that I know very little about video gaming. OK, that's actually an overstatement. I know nothing about video gaming. That's not to say I don't have deep admiration, nay, awe for folks who not only understand this robust industry, but who are finding new and exciting ways to make money from it.
That leads me to this week's guest blogger. Brett Lovelady is the founder and Chief Instigator of Astro Studios, one of the select design shops that last year was among the "Design Factories" featured in our October design issue. I've admired Brett and his company's work for quite a while--way back when they were first developing Nike's Triax watches, Microsoft's XBox 360 gaming system, and Alienware Computers.
What most impressed me was Brett's relentless focus on users--not just gamers and tech jocks, who instinctively know how to convert to iso files when their DVD drives overheat from excessive use--but the rest of us who muddle along trying to find the mute button on our cell phones. He told me about one meeting at Microsoft, where he advised the notoriously user-unfriendly software giant's hard core developers that dazzling their geekish brethren with their technological wizardry, while personally satisfying, did not always endear them to a mainstream audience. "They told us, 'Give people more features!'" he said, recounting the meeting. "I told them, 'If you want a killer product, you need to go simple, simple, simple.'" Indeed, he says, that dictum has become a mantra at Astro.
In June, San Francisco-based Astro celebrated a significant anniversary, turning 15 years old. Fittingly, Lovelady told me, over that period of time, the company's work has helped to generate some $15B in revenues for clients. Well, happy birthday to you!
Last year, Astro spun off a totally new venture-backed company, ASTRO Gaming, to leverage the group's expertise in the field by designing high performance equipment to improve the "sport" of video gaming, specifically for the sport's pros. ASTRO Gaming intends, Brett tells me, to become to professional gaming equipment what "Burton is to snowboarding, and Nike is to running." Nothing wrong with aiming high!
To that end, ASTRO has teamed up with Major League Gaming, the NYC-based, emerging gaming media empire (similar to leagues like the NFL/NBA/ MLB) to improve grassroots tournament play. And just this month, the Astro team earned two honorable mentions in I.D. Magazine's Annual Design Review for the Astro Gaming A40 Audio System and the A40 Packaging.
But, according to Brett, ASTRO and his "lethal team" have only just begun, promising some yet-to-be-divulged blockbusters in the works. We can't wait to see what comes next.
I've never met Sapient's Worldwide Chief Creative Officer Gaston Legorburu, but if I wanted to connect with him this week, my best bet would be to hang around bars in Cannes after midnight.
That's where the real business of the big annual advertising lollapalooza gets done, and Legorburu has a serious "to-do" list that he'll be ticking through as he works the crowd. "You'd be amazed at the amount of work that gets done at the Gutter Bar at 3 a.m," he told us, hours before boarding a flight in Miami for the Cannes Advertising Festival. "In one square block area, all the players in advertising assemble, deals are struck, and you find out the gossip on who's moving to what agency."
Best of all, he says, lots of clients go there. "They tend to be big package goods advertisers, beer brands, etc., who are often behind the curve when it comes to digital. We see that as a huge opportunity."
Boston-based Sapient is going to the festival this year with an added ace up its sleeve. Last week it concluded a $50M agreement with Shanghai-based Nitro Group, which counts Mars, Nike, Con Agra, Volvo and Foot Locker among its clients, in an exotic deal: one of the rare occasions when a digital agency purchases a traditional shop.
With the added creative spark of the new team, Legorburu--who built his previous agency, Planning Group International, into the largest privately held interactive agency in the U.S. before selling out to Sapient in 2006--bets he has a strong tale to tell over the Kronenbourg 1664s. Plus, Sapient itself is entering digitial work on Coke's "Open Happiness" campaign.
For the past few years, Sapient, better known for its strategic interactive work than its creative chops,has attended the festival, but mostly in the role of spectators. Still, they had a dream: what if marketing and advertising could be driven by consumer behavior, and not just by 30-second commercials? What if they could design a two-stage rocket: build a giant digital agency, then pair it with a creative powerhouse--all under one roof, with one P&L?
"We thought we might be able to sell the idea of a think tank--where 10 people work on your business, but all working together," Legoburu says. "It would be better than a collection of agencies, like in the holding company model, that we could deploy on clients' behalf."
So this year, with the freshly-consummated Nitro deal in their back pocket, they were eager to storm the beaches with the news. Then came the downturn, and everybody started wavering on travel plans. "We were worried that nobody would show up!" Legorburu says.
But by the end of the week, agency types, more fearful of being left out than of submitting T&Es for Cannes, donned their game faces and began booking flights. Some are bunking at the Best Western instead of the Carlton, or staying three days instead of five, but most are calculating that, when the chips are down, it's better to act now and apologize later.
"Cannes represents a lot of what's wrong with Madison Avenue," Legoburu says, "but it's important in terms of building a reputation and in getting attention for recruitment." For Legorburu and his buds, the game plan is clear: get out the news that Sapient means to be a major player in the creative realm, and not just a big, work-a-day interactive shop; remind prospective clients that the agency now has a mighty global footprint, from Shanghai to Miami; and lure some of that restless, disgruntled talent from competitors.
Anybody seeking to make contact, knows where to find him: "We will have 3 a.m. bar-rotating schedule," he says. "Look for the Sapient guys."
Legorburu will be following the awards for Fast Company this week, focusing on the evolution of digital advertising and design. And, of course, covering the party beat.
(Full disclosure: a member of my family works for a separate division of Sapient.)
Here are some of Sapient's and Nitro's recent projects:
Sapient designed the Happiness Factory sites for Coke.
Sapient also designed Coke's interactive work for Samsung's slick new touchscreen vending machine, which was the hit of CES in January.
Here is ad that Nitro Group created for the The Best Job in the World: being caretaker for an island in Queensland, Australia.
Nitro just launched a campaign for Healthy Choice featuring Julia Louis Dreyfus.
And lastly, Sapient launched a series of entertaining behind the scenes shows for Celebrity Cruise lines. This one featurs a ramped-up, manic trip through the Panama Canal -- with only two feet to spare on each side of the ship.
Over the past two decades, as technology has become more ubiquitous, the line between home and work has increasingly blurred. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever taken your Blackberry to bed.)This transformation has spawned the need for our homes to function as workspaces --- and the desire for our offices to have the comforts of home.
In conjunction with the party celebrating June’s Most Creative People issue, we tried to envision what a really creative workspace might look like. We asked a variety of top flight home and office furniture companies, and one technology company, to loan us their best-in-class furnishings for the project. The goal was to create a space that was as beautiful as it was functional, as efficient as it was emotionally appealing. The result was the “Imagineered Workspace.”
In this series of videos, designers from each of the participating companies talk about the trends they’re seeing in office design, why facilities planners so often get space design all wrong, and why modernism flourished more in American offices than in our homes.
A few months ago I was up at MIT's Media Lab, where I happened to wander by a lab where John Underkoffler, who developed the gestural interface that Steven Spielberg used in "The Minority Report," was playing with some new technology. He graciously let me fool around with it. I better stick to writing. But I thought of that experience when I recently saw ads for HP's Touchsmart PC, with its snazzy user interface.
So I was delighted when I learned that the designers behind the remarkable machine were none other than John Edson and his team at Lunar Design. Knowing John and the values he evangelizes every day as the company's president, I wasn't surprised that the product embodied Lunar's mantra of "creativity that makes a difference."
Last time that John was in the office, he showed me two particularly memorable projects. One was a small, discreet device for the treatment of sleep apnea. Called Provent Therapy, it was created for Ventus Medical, to be an alternative to the bulky equipment most sufferers had to endure. The other was a concept for a sort of next generation nursery, with automated rocking, bottle warming and programmable lighting. It was so clever it almost made me long for the days of having an infant again. Well, not quite.
This diverse portfolio of projects is standard fare at Lunar, where John, an engineer-designer who would look at home as the bassist in an indie rock band, rallies the troops to create award-winning designs that have included everything from the Zootr to the ULTRA II SD PLUS flash memory card and a green version of San Disk's ImageMate Reader.
Lately, John says, the company's focus has been on best practices in sustainability, both within the company and in the designs they create. The group recently published the "Designer's Field Guide to Sustainability," and John regularly speaks at industry conferences on the topic.
All that's just fine, but as John noted recently on Icon-o-cast, the company's blog, "As designers, we have a panoply of motivations. We want our clients to be happy, for their products to sell in the millions, for our peers to admire us, for our work to matter to people, to make a difference in the world. But now I realize all that is meaningless. What we really want is for our work to be featured in the music video at the top of the charts. Check it: Boom Boom Pow by the Black Eyed Peas uses the HP TouchSmart PC to frame their hypnotic vision of the future."
Now, all the Peas need is that Ross Lovegrove desk....
Grilling season is nigh upon us, which means it's a sad time in New York. Like many big cities with high rents and hyper-vigilant fire codes, balconies where a burger-craving apartment dweller could set up a little grill are in short supply. At least in my neighborhood.
Which is why when Robert Brunner, founder and creative director of the San Francisco-based design firm Ammunition, showed me his cunning little Element grill from Fuego it nearly broke my heart. The 24,000 BTU, dual-burner charmer looks a little like R2D2, and comes with four different cook-top options, including a pizza stone. It comes in red! I'm ready to move to the suburbs, just to have one.
Brunner's products tend to inspire that kind of devotion. Just look at his pedigree: as director of industrial design at Apple in 1989, he founded the Apple Industrial Design Group. He and his team developed the original Macintosh PowerBook, Newton and 20th Anniversary Mac. Oh, yes. He also was the guy who hired Johnny Ive--a distinction, he laughs, that will likely be written on his tombstone.
After Apple, he became a partner at Pentagram in San Francisco, working on everything from Nike to Nokia. He also launched Fuego, a firm that marries BBQ grill technology to design.
Most recently, Brunner's been working with clean-tech accelerator Noribachi to start a new company, Regen, which will soon unveil a slew of products powered by light. From the renderings I've seen, they're nothing like your father's solar-powered gear.
Which brings me back to the grill of my dreams. Nice work, Brunner. Make a grown woman weep. Guess I'll head off to Shake Shack to outsource my jones for BBQ in a grill-for-hire burger.
Here are some of Ammunition's recent projects:
The Element Grill for Fuego. I'll take one of these; also the ocean view, please.
National Cash Register is one of those grand old American companies that, come the digital revolution, might have gone the way of the rotary phone. Instead, with a trimmed down name (now NCR), and a ramped up R&D operation, the company is transforming the way we handle our money--or its digital equivalent.
We visited NCR’s "Innovation Center," an expansive high-rise display space filled with next-gen ATMs, kiosks, and self-service systems that will let you do everything from check into a hotel (and find your way to your room), to burn a movie (and redeem the old ones you no longer want.)
We were most taken with the possibilities of using our cellphones to conduct business in all sorts of intriguing new ways. We got the company to demonstrate a few cutting edge applications that may soon appear in a bank or hotel near you.
One of the biggest complaints designers in consumer product companies have is that their organization's engineers just don't ‘get' design. That, they would argue, is why so many products--especially in consumer electronics--are so maddeningly complex, counter-intuitive, and user-unfriendly.
Mark Dziersk aims to change all that. From his perch as adjunct professor in Northwestern University's Master of Product Development program, he introduces left brained engineers, IT pros, and chemical engineering Ph.Ds, among others, to the joys awaiting in the other half of their craniums.
I sat in on one of Mark's classes, Essentials of Industrial Design, two years ago, and was amazed that, by the end of the session, he had this buttoned-down group of geeks acting out skits, doodling drawings, and coming up with wacky ideas in brainstorming sessions, just like a bunch of blue-haired, nose-ringed design school kids. And the proof is in the pudding. The products that come out of that program are consistently useful, marketable, and delightfully innovative. As Dziersk likes to encourage his proteges, "Creativity plus risk, gets you the grade." It's as true in business as it is in the classroom.
But teaching is just a sideline to Dziersk's main gig, as VP Design at Brandimage - Desgrippes & Laga, one of the world's largest design and branding firms.At
brandimage, Dziersk has worked on projects for clients ranging from
Dove to Banana Republic to a pop-up store for Henri Bendel.Dziersk joined brandimage in 2007, after 13 years at the Chicago product design firm Herbst Lazar Bell, where he and his teams won dozens of awards for products as diverse as the Motorola NFL Coaches' Headset and the first single-use camera for Kodak. Dziersk, himself, holds over 100 patents.
Dziersk also gives back to his larger professional community as well, having served on the board of the Industrial Designers Society of America and as president of the society in 1998. He also acted as executive editor of IDSA's premier publication, Innovation, introducing new design elements and recruiting authors from outside the design field.
Here are some of the products Dziersk and his team have designed:
Smart Design is, well, one of the smartest design shops we know. You may not know the firm by name, but you certainly know its products: OXO Good Grips kitchen tools, Hewlett Packard Photo Printers, Ford's "Smart Gauge" for hybrid vehicles, and the new line of OXO office products are just a few.
But the thing that won my heart about Smart was their design for the most successful Father's Day present I ever gave my husband: the Flip Mini Digital Camcorder. But from the minute, Hank opened the Flip, he was smitten. He loved its size, its ease of use, its look. In short, its intelligent, intuitive design. He wasn't alone. Since its introduction in 2007, the Flip has sold more than 2 million units, and it now holds one fifth of the market. Even Sony is playing catch up.
The Flip was a consumer electronic design even a woman could love, which brings me to the point where I must confess my additional bias. Last January, I moderated a CES panel in Las Vegas with two of Smart's brightest lights, Erica Eden and Agnete Egna, of the company's Femme Den. The topic was one dear to my heart: "Design and Gender: Thinking about Sex and Electronics. The women made a great case for the idea that if designers kept women's needs in mind, they'd likely win even more customers among the Y-chromosome jockeys in the marketplace. Back we go, to the Flip.
Afterwards, a bunch of Smarties and I went out to dinner to celebrate at Red Square, and I had the good fortune of being seated next to the firm's co-founder and president, Tom Dair.
In addition to his role as company president, Tom runs the day-to-day operations of the San Francisco office, and heads up the company's Insights and Strategy discipline. In that role, he's been a tireless advocate of universal design--an effort that anyone who has used OXO's tools can vouch for.
He's also a believer in the importance of creativity in design, an idea that seems like a no-brainer until you've worked in corporate America, where many folks think process is a good substitute for original thinking.
Tom himself is a pretty creative thinker, holding at least 19 patents ("I've lost track," he says modestly), for products as complex as medical devices and as simple as the first toothbrush specifically designed for kids.
This week, Tom told us, he wanted to blog about some design-related stories based on his 30 years of experience in the field. He promised to start out with some basic design ideas and principles related to form, materials and typography, and hinted that by the end of the week he might "turn them on their head a bit." Later in the week, he says he'll touch on some loftier topics, including process and strategy. Sounds pretty smart to us.
Designing anything beneficial--for one dollar or less--was the challenge Pratt students set for themselves as part of this year's ICFF Design Schools' Exhibition.
Surprisingly, the Pratt students managed to come up with a wide array of intriguing items, many of which were born of cast-off materials. That made their cost not only less than a dollar, but environmentally solid gold.
Directed by Pratt's professor of industrial design, Mark Goetz, students were asked to create designs that factored in such things as transportation, energy, material, waste, labor, and wide array of manufacturing costs. Some 80 graduate and undergraduate students took the challenge, and 15 of the best were chosen to participate in the exhibit.
"Students really gained a greater understanding, and cautious respect for all that goes into a product before and especially after it is designed," Goetz said. "In many cases, even with the most sincere of intentions, students learned their pieces exceeded the cost of a dollar. But most importantly, they learned why. Our students earnestly continue to search for ways to maximize the value of what they have offer to the world while minimizing the impact their ideas will have on the environment."
Students! Send us your projects and we'll feature the best on Fast Company's Design Channel. Email submissions to: fcdesign@fastcompany.com
Musgrave is a good man to have in your corner if you're looking to reinvent your company through design. An award-winning designer himself (with a slew of honors from IDEA, Red Dot, and iF), with two design degrees and an MBA, he's been the director of Dell's Experience Design Group for the past eight years. He runs a team of over 100 creative professionals, who make sure that everything from notebooks to servers are designed to deliver superior user experience as well as performance. 
That leads me to this week's guest blogger. Brett Lovelady is the founder and Chief Instigator of 
That's where the real business of the big annual advertising lollapalooza gets done, and Legorburu has a serious "to-do" list that he'll be ticking through as he works the crowd. "You'd be amazed at the amount of work that gets done at the Gutter Bar at 3 a.m," he told us, hours before boarding a flight in Miami for the Cannes Advertising Festival. "In one square block area, all the players in advertising assemble, deals are struck, and you find out the gossip on who's moving to what agency."
So I was delighted when I learned that the designers behind the remarkable machine were none other than John Edson and his team at Lunar Design. Knowing John and the values he evangelizes every day as the company's president, I wasn't surprised that the product embodied Lunar's mantra of "creativity that makes a difference."
Brunner's products tend to inspire that kind of devotion. Just look at his pedigree: as director of industrial design at Apple in 1989, he founded the Apple Industrial Design Group. He and his team developed the original Macintosh PowerBook, Newton and 20th Anniversary Mac. Oh, yes. He also was the guy who hired 
Afterwards, a bunch of Smarties and I went out to dinner to celebrate at Red Square, and I had the good fortune of being seated next to the firm's co-founder and president, Tom Dair. 
