I found the full audio and slide presentation of Peter Merholz from Adaptative Path. I think he describes in a clear way the shift Industrial Design is going trough; taking the focus out of the product and concentrating on the user experience first.

This poses somehow an opposite approach compared to the past of Industrial Design. Let’s make a really really short review:

During the 50’s production was mainly focused on productivity. The best example of rationalization and standardization was Ford.

After WWII, with the economies in expansion, there was a high demand of products that could only be fulfilled at a reasonable price trough high volume productions. Industrial Design didn’t exist yet in the business world, but was always a cosmetic job after the engineering of the product. This type of design intervention was to become a milestone. The general misconception about the designer as a stylist doing a superfluous decoration comes from those days.

All the resulting products ended up being very similar, since they were focused on technical issues rather than on the user. Products used to compete (and we can still see this today) on technical features and companies started feeling a further need for differentiation. The path was long before design started playing a role in the business world. Companies centered on quality management, value chain management, and all sort of marketing strategies to create more value for the customer. They didn’t find any better way to differentiate the product by itself so they centered on the service.

Technology evolved, production cycles became shorter and prices dropped. Technology innovation became a standard for survival. Companies felt more and more the need to decompress the economic pressure when design started having a true impact and it became the new differentiation factor.

Industrial Design doesn’t really focus on the product nor on the user. ID focuses on the interface, this means the interaction between the user and the product. So, if we get this right, we will be able to understand the role ID is playing today. The introduction of design in the business environment has also been possible because these two are finding a common language. More and more designers are getting business and marketing skills. On the other hand, business managers are getting training on design thinking, mainly because they need to acquire the skill to think in a creative way and learn how to handle uncertainty in a fast paced always changing environment.

So, it seems very natural now to understand why designers are thinking today beyond the product. User experience is the new differentiation driver, it requires a more holistic and strategic approach to achieve the goal. The limits between the product and service are now fuzzy, since they are part of the same and seamless user experience.

As we can see, this evolution has taken Industrial Design to a whole new level, becoming a very powerful business tool.

To finish, I would like to point out that further changes are needed to consolidate this relation. On one hand, designers will have to deal with more responsibilities and extend their typical knowledge field (i.e.creating new research tools, Return Over Design Investment (RODI) measurement techniques, etc). On the other hand, organizations will have overcome a cultural change to place design in its new role and take the most out of it.

I suggest you take a time to watch and enjoy Peter’s presentation after the jump.

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I would like to mention 2 recent articles posted on metropolismag.com related to the green trend.

The first one, “What it means to be green” explains all the different labels actually used to certify “green products”. The second article, “7 Steps in the lifecycle of a green product” is based on the Okala guide to Eco-Design elaborated by IDSA. What is interesting about the article is that it organizes the story of a greener product around … 7 steps (yes you guessed right). The image seen below, (by Criswell Lappin) is a very effective visual guide that we could have at hand to ask the right questions when designing our next product.

It is possible to apply Deming’s 14 points to Industrial Design?

First a really quick introduction for those that are not familiar with Deming’s work. Dr. Willam Edward Deming was a North American satistician, college professor, author and consultant who was a great contributor to improve industrial production during WWII. But Deming is best known as the father as Japan’s post war industry revival. Deming’s philosophy was summarized in 14 points that have been an inspiration for important changes in many organizations throughout the world. He is also called the father of TQM (Total Quality Management), since most of the TQM theory came from his book “Out of the crisis” published in 1982.

Lets review the 14 points from a design perspective…

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Here is my second entry for the water saving design contest.

It is another simple product that could make the people think and change their attitude.

The “Sponge World” could also be great for kids, and I think it shows in a very graphical way that you have the world in your hands (and you are filling it with soap).

Time: 15 minutes.

There is a very interesting contest going on at the Core77 Forums. The basic idea is to have a 1hr design challenge. Give the most you can and present a design proposal in just 60 minutes!

The theme for this 1st edition is “Water saving designs for the bathroom”, which is a very interesting topic.

This was my entry:

My guess is that no matter what we do, it depends on people to save resources. We need to work trough design to create a change in the minds and the attitudes.

The idea: Use a simple design intervention on a standard product to generate an attitude change in the people.

The Slogan: People often see the problems far away and don’t take any action. The (laser etched) phrase intends to makes the user feel like a fundamental actor in shaping the future by bringing it to the present.

The Image: Demo image taken from gettyimages.com, edited in a standard photo editing software. Total time: 40 min aprox. It communicates that taking care of water is related to the creation of life.

This could be part of a wider marketing campaign in which different phrases with stats could be engraved on water related products.

View the rest of the entries.

This is indeed an interesting project. The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, developed an email client based on the classic Lettera 22 typewriter.With a different point of view, old mechanical technology was used to make new technology more accessible. Modern technologies are sometimes challenging for some people, and this new interface will allow a large segment of “boomers” to adopt email in a more natural way.

The email is typed in a special form, and when the letter is finished and you take the paper out of the carriage, the email is sent via telephone.

As stated in the product page: “This project directly responds to the monopoly of electronic interfaces for email access. While the sudden proliferation of the Internet enables dynamic, remote and instant electronic communication for a technocratic society, it ignores or even dismisses the needs and sentiments of a generation of people caught in the rift between redundant technologies and ungraspable modern interfaces. For them emailing means reaching across all that is familiar, into a befuddling way of engaging with the originally simple, intuitive task of writing or receiving a letter. Its interface, the computer then becomes a discriminating device, which creates new social cleavages, between the ‘have’ and ‘have-nots’ of the digital realm.”

It would be also nice to incorporate in a seamless way, the possibility to embed hand writing, pictures or drawings (maybe gluing the picture on the form), voice and video recording. I know there are other products for similar use, but I bet your grandma will not be able to send you the traditional cake recipe with her own instructions with audio or video via fax or telephone. Off course you could receive that info via snail mail, but it would take longer and probably she will not be able to include multimedia. A camera phone could be also used, but they are still expensive and complicated for grandma, not to mention that she will need a more expensive service plan.

I still see the need of a new product that combines the natural interaction of a personal conversation and hand writing with the benefits of modern technology. It love the idea of changing the keyboard for a more intuitive input device, like a block of paper. And change the computer for a cheap and small device maybe connected to the TV, and that way be able to receive multimedia letters (emails) from your children or grandchildren.

Product page.

The Innovation Backlash By Reena Jana. Via Businessweek

In one 30-second TV spot, former Ford Motor Chairman and Chief Executive Bill Ford used the word “innovation” almost once every eight seconds. “If you look at the Ford Motor Company, innovation has driven everything we’ve done,” Ford said in the opening of the ad, which ran from late 2005 into 2006. The repetitions came to feel like a mantra as he concluded, “Innovation will be the compass that guides this company going forward.” That campaign has by now been abandoned.

Perhaps because in 2006, the year that followed the launch of these spots declaring innovation to be a core brand value, Ford (F) saw an unprecedented loss of $12.7 billion—surpassing its previous record of $7.39 billion set in 1992. The unfortunate timing of the TV spot before Ford’s worst year ever illustrates how companies are increasingly flying the innovation banner, hoping if they say the magic word loud enough, the public will see their brand as inventive and forward-thinking.

But the overuse of the term is now leading to an innovation backlash, or at least to an attempt to define and measure what “innovation” really means and how it can be measured. (more…)

There’s a storm brewing in designland. A backlash is gathering momentum, and what’s more, some of its chief dissidents are design’s leading lights.

Philippe Starck sheepishly peered out of the cover of December’s Icon magazine, under the ‘I killed design’ banner. In an Observer article a few months earlier Stephen Bailey, the fiery British design critic, exclaimed “When I hear the word ‘designer’, I reach for my chainsaw.”

Just as critics from outside design are sharpening their knives, designers are becoming racked with self-doubt and -loathing. We have surfed the wave of adoring interest, but the shifts that have taken place have left designland in intellectual disarray and in bad shape to defend itself.

This rising tide of disaffection tends to share two themes: a distaste for the superficiality of design’s media-celebrity nexus; and a growing discomfort with design’s role in generating ‘useless stuff’. These two complementary critiques could be abbreviated as Anti-fluff and Anti-stuff. (more…)