Streamlining HP

IBM, the first big organization to pioneer its own consistent style, had maintained during Lucente's tenure a binder of design standards nearly as thick as the Manhattan phone book. Lucente worried that such a regimented approach might discourage innovation. And it would certainly be alien to HP's culture. After having discussions with designers inside and outside, Lucente hit on a different strategy: Craft a "design attitude" to guide rather than steer the product-development teams. "I decided on this experimental approach since nothing conventional--not other designers' experiences or any design management book--was applicable to such a massive undertaking," he says.

The "attitude," as it came to be known, was built around three core attributes: inspired, genuine, trusted. Innocuous as they seem, they were vivid enough for a group of designers to begin to articulate a common visual language. Product teams and consulting firms (now reduced to 10) produced sketches and rough prototypes, and a consensus began to emerge around colors, materials, finishes, graphic icons, and shapes. Lucente's group put it all in a book, then met with every design team in the company. They'd gather in a conference room, about 10 at a time, and discuss the material, page by page. The exercise drove home the idea that HP designers, no matter where they were based or what they worked on, were part of a larger whole.

This venture soon paid its first dividend--of $33 million a year. The audit had uncovered seven variations of racks for the company's servers. So designers in the enterprise-server group used elements from the design-attitude exercise to craft a single mounting kit. The effort not only trimmed the number of parts that went into HP servers but also cut the number of server models by half.

The next breakthrough was with navigation controls. Designers working with corporate program manager Dustin Rosing devised a universal "steering wheel," the Q Control. Shaped like a backward letter Q, with the back button comprising the letter's tail, the control has already turned up on all-in-one ink-jet printers and TV remotes, and won positive reviews for its ergonomics and ease of use.

Rosing posted the control's specs on the internal Web site dubbed the Design Center. Every team working on a next-generation device can download the Q files, as well as guidelines for deploying it on flat or curved surfaces.

The Design Center amounts to an online library for all of the company's universal design assets, including fonts, some 400 software and hardware icons, Flash demos showing how touch screens should operate, even the colors for the backside connectors on notebooks. The net effect is to cut product-planning costs, eliminate redesigns, and free designers to work on the things that will truly differentiate HP products.

Game Time

It's fine with me if design is regarded as nothing more than a business tool, says Lucente. We're here to make money.

HP's purest rubber-meets-the-road attempt at design innovation is the Blackbird PC for computer-game players, due to hit the market this fall. Working with Voodoo, a hot builder of customized machines for gamers that the company acquired last year, HP designers across divisional lines collaborated to reinvent the basic form of a gaming PC. Lucente tapped corporate designer Mark Solomon to lead the effort and kicked in some of the early seed funding. Phil McKinney, chief technology officer for the PC division, provided R&D support and managed the cross-functional team. Marketing chief Chahil played a key role in aligning Blackbird with the division's branding strategy.

The result is a new-style machine mounted on a stand that helps to aerate the heat-generating processing chips. An origami master devised an intricate layout that hides the machine's wiring so as not to interfere with its guts, which players can access by sliding out a side panel. Complementing these customized flourishes are the new standard power-on icon, piano-black finish, and bracket mounts for the disk drives.

"Blackbird," McKinney says, "is a test bed for design elements, such as the cooling architecture, that we will reuse."

While the Blackbird project is not a unique instance of a product-design team embracing a corporate-design initiative, it's also not the norm--at least not yet. To assess his progress, Lucente has undertaken an exhaustive survey called the Design Capability Index. The index measures such factors as the extent to which business units are allocating design resources, engaging in design planning, managing the process, and availing themselves of assets like the Design Center. The results thus far are unspectacular, ranging from 20% to 40% "design effectiveness" across the three divisions. Lucente's goal is to see those scores rise to 70% to 80%.

"This is a long journey, and we know we're only about one-third of the way there," Lucente says. But he's optimistic. "The early indicators are signaling that we're on the right track."

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