John Thackara has written an excellent follow up of necessary design tasks required to support the concepts put forth in this Guardian article and encapsulates the situation succinctly,

If something must be done, rather than just talked about, then design moves centre stage.

From a statement [pdf] released by the Chartered Society of Designers, UK, here are the highlights:

...the review published on the 30th October by Sir Nicholas Stern has much more relevance to the design sector and although it provides gloomy reading it also offers the design profession challenges and opportunities that it should readily embrace.

Stern calculates the cost of taking action now against climate change at an average globally of 1% of GDP. He calculates the cost to GDP of not doing anything to be 5%, with opinions ranging to 20%. Even on Stern’s figures, an investment today will produce a 400% return by 2050. Even 1% is an ambitious amount but design can play a role in lowering the initial costs of our high carbon economic growth and so that a balance is achieved of levying taxes and lessening energy use.

As a profession we influence products of all sorts and buildings and the energy they use. In design development and service design we are also able to reduce the energy used in delivering them. But in order to do so the designer must posses the knowledge needed to deal with such matters. This will involve collaboration, new working methods, knowledge transfer and a new attitude to design research.

If Stern is taken seriously then designers will see new opportunities for their services, they will need to adopt a business language in order for design to become embedded in the range of businesses strategies and to take a seat in the boardroom, and they will enter new overseas markets which need to invest in products that allow them to trade in carbon emissions. For those economies that are loathe to invest the figure suggested by Stern for fear of inhibiting their rapid economic growth, design and innovation will be paramount in ensuring they are not disadvantaged.

And for those who argue that any action is irrelevant due to the behaviour of India and China, well consider the influence our profession could have on their designers of the future...

Victor Lombardi of the Noisebetweenstations blog has kindly consented to a reblog of his seminal post "Is design the new management consultancy?" here. He uses logic and evidence to break down the facts and reach the possible answer. Which is no, design is not the new management consultancy.

Some folks are asking this question. I've spent the past two years making the transition from designer to business consultant, jumping a lot of hurdles along the way. Here's a little of what I learned:

* Highlight opportunities instead of bitching. As designers, we walk around in the world and feel overly sensitive to everything that isn't designed well. We watch customers struggle when using poorly designed products. There's an inclination to highlight these faults to executives whom we think should know about these faults. And maybe they should, but mostly they need help seeing the big opportunities. It might sound like product faults and market opportunities are simply the flip side of the same coin, but it's the difference between being perceived as a whiny designer and a valued business advisor.

* Know your limits. When I hear a designer say, "We were doing the same kind of work McKinsey would do" I think "You really have no fucking idea what McKinsey does." I used to work at BCG (in the IT dept) and I have yet to meet a designer with thinking, methods, and tools nearly as sophisticated as those consultants. Just consider the career path at these firms: they take the top students from the top business schools who in turn have taken the top undergrads, and so on. Then the consultants work in a demanding up-or-out environment where excellence is necessary. This culture breeds great execution much more effectively than the best design studio cultures.

And I've beat the design thinking drum as much as anyone, but it's naive to believe only designers think this way.

* Invest in new hammers. Not every business problem is best solved by a product/service design or redesign. Sometimes an acquisition is the answer, or a divestiture, or hedging the financial markets. Business leaders have a lot of tools in their toolbox: marketing, sales, operations, finance, IT, HR, strategy, customer service etc., and each of these in turn has a deep toolbox, with practitioners who all want more strategic influence. Understanding them - and knowing when product or service design is not the best approach - makes for a more well-rounded management consultant.

* See the big picture. Sometimes design does have direct influence on business strategy. But describing that influence in terms of customer experience alone can lack the information that executives want to hear. Learning how to describe design's benefits in financial and strategic language is key.

* Be realistic about the influence of design. The current barrage of Fast Company and BusinessWeek stories on design can lull us into the impression that design is now king. In my experience, this isn't anywhere near the case. Sure, there are great changes happening: I see more companies doing field research and more realization of the power of customer experience. But it'll take years for the generations of business people to change their thinking and practices.

* Know what you mean when you use the word strategy. Unfortunately, strategy has become a muddled word, the meaning even traditional management consultants don't agree on (see Strategy Bites Back for an amusing look at the situation). But this is no excuse for us to practice muddled thinking. Here's a simple way I've been clarifying it in conversation:
o Product/service design: decide how to create something
o Design strategy: decide what to create, with a perspective beyond the current cycle (e.g. 3-5 years)
o Business strategy: decide what a business should do, with a perspective beyond the current cycle (e.g. 3-5 years)

Join the conversation in Victor's blog here.

Here is a 5 minute video on Don Norman to commemerate his receiving the 2006 Benjamin Franklin Medal for laying the foundations of user centered design.

Video

We live in an uncertain world.  Many people find uncertainty personally stressful and try to create order by making early decisions that reduce risk and uncertainty. Traditional business practice is to eliminate uncertainty so that planning can take place. That's good practice and common sense, but here's a tip for managers who want to improve their design team's innovation depth: develop the ability to tolerate uncertainty.

A tolerance for uncertainty may allow better quality answers by delaying decision making until more is known about a situation. The point is convincingly argued by Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Business, Tom Peters and others. 

Toyota exercises a similar attitude while developing their cars. Jeffrey Liker describes this as Principle 13 in The Toyota Way;  "Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options, implement rapidly".

In practice this may mean periodically re-evaluating the reasons for doing something; even the reason for the entire project or the reason for the company's existence. It may mean not deciding on any particular design until later in the process.

It will certainly mean walking with uncertainty for a little longer than you'd normally be comfortable with. Both Mr Martin and Professor Liker point out that this uncertainty should be planned for and incorporated in your design process. Let's call it disciplined uncertainty; reconciling the two worlds of reliable process and creative exploration.

Don't be afraid of uncertainty, it may seem like procrastination, foot-dragging or even indecision, but provided you've planned to be uncertain for a while, you're likely to see more powerful ideas from your team. 

by Tasos Calantzis

You've presented nearly your entire product idea in under a half hour and three slides remain. Here are the last three rules before you finish.

Rule#10: Show that there is inherent intellectual property that can be defended.

Intellectual Property for our purposes here describes the valuable ideas that could defend your product in a competitive environment. Usually we'd be talking about robust intellectual property such as a utility patent, however that's not the only kind. Proprietary processes, economies of scale, exclusive supply deals, speed to market or your company's powerful brand name all create barriers to entry for competitors and leverage for negotiation when selling the product. All to make dealing with you the easiest, most logical option for your partners and tricky for competitors. In addition, it's taken for granted that the idea doesn't infringe on any one else's idea. That's easily and checked on Google but much more thoroughly so by your patent attorney.

Rule#11: Admit that there are unanswered questions (even doubts) about the product idea.

Of the roughly 30,000 new product introduced by the consumer packaged goods industry every year, 70% to 90% will not be in the market after 12 months. Clearly, there is no such thing as a "sure thing" in this business. You gain credibility if you acknowledge this. You may have unanswered questions about practicalities like production or selling price issues. They could also relate to intangibles like the product's likelihood of attracting investment. Telling potential partners your doubts encourages them to think of solutions together with you.

Rule#12: Demonstrate that this could form a growing business.

Product ideas that have the potential for expansion into a range of products or an entire new business have the edge on one-hit wonders. After the realism of the previous rule, this is the opportunity to show some optimism about the potential beyond this idea. The previous slides should have answered the important business questions, this one reminds everyone why they were worth asking in the first place.

By now you've realized that this series is not perfect and should actually have been called "A Pretty Good Product Pitch". Nonetheless, these 12 rules are a fast way to summarize the key facts that decision makers need to evaluate a product idea. They're also not a bad way to sort out your own thoughts about that hit product you have in mind. And to make sure your next product pitch ends in success.

The Perfect Product Pitch is a 4-part series by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis of Readymade. It covers the 12 essential things you already knew about pitching a product idea to your boss, client or VC guys but forgot last time around. Thanks go out to Dave Bayless at Evergreen Innovation Partners for providing the basis for this series.

Fast Company's September issue is the 2006 Masters of Design special. Here is a summary of this year's selection of masters:

The Mind Reader - Steve McCallion, creative director, Ziba Design, in Portland, Oregon

McCallion, a sharp, linear thinker who speaks in complete paragraphs, argues that it's not enough to study the average user. "We're going for something deeper - to understand why people want what they want," he says. "Our ability to invent is solely dependent on our ability to capture that dynamic relationship between the brand and the culture that finds it relevant."

The Catalyst - Jochen Zeitz, CEO, Puma AG, in Nuremberg, Germany

Struggling to articulate his personal aesthetic, the best Jochen Zeitz seems to be able to do is, not Karl Lagerfeld: "I'm more the person for clean design," says the CEO of Puma AG, in a Teutonic staccato. "I think my taste is very straightforward, as opposed to a Lagerfeld - over the top."

Asked if he considers himself a designer, or even thinks like one, Zeitz shoots back, "No." Yet since 1993, when he took over the now 58-year-old feline brand (at age 30, when he was the youngest chairman of the German Stock Exchange), he has harnessed design to give it still another life.

The Wordsmith - Paula Scher, at the New York offices of Pentagram, where she is a partner

Within the design community, Scher is known both for her passionate populism - she has little patience for esoteric "just those of us who speak Helvetica" snobbery - and for her take-no-prisoners defense of good work. "As a designer, Paula has no particular ideological point of view," says Michael Bierut, her partner at the prestigious design firm Pentagram. "She's really, really eclectic. She only cares about making things that are good."

Go browse through the rest of the issue here.

Within a large design group you are likely to encounter two distinguishing career goals: designers who want to manage others and designers who don't. As a result, it makes sense for the organizational structure of the group to support the career goals of both individual contributors and managers.
[...]
In both cases, the opportunities may exist beyond the design organization. Product Leads may opt to pursue more direct product ownership by absorbing business responsibilities and becoming business/product owners in the Product Management organization. Strategic Designers may instead expand their skills to include new business growth and move into Product or Corporate Strategy groups. The diagram below illustrates these potential growth paths as well as those found within the design group (red lines).

Read the full post accompanying this growth chart here.

Luke Wroblewski, a prolific writer and design strategist, has written a series on the organizational structure of a corporate design department. He has kindly permitted DD to reblog three of his posts on the topic here.

In Design Group Organization I outlined the structural relationship between Product Leads (designers responsible for a specific business unit's product designs) and Strategic Designers (designers who lead the integration of corporate strategy and product concepts) within a large design team. In this organizational model, Product Leads and Strategic Designers often work on the same product but in different roles and at varying capacities.

During the ideation phase of a new product, the Strategic Designer is heavily involved. They work with key business stakeholders and corporate or product strategy teams to illustrate a vision of success through product concepts. They use the power of narrative and visualization to collaboratively develop a product vision that corporate stakeholders ultimately sign-off on.

During this process, the Product Lead is involved but does not need to absorb the overhead of the strategy development process. As a result, they remain able to direct the efforts of their design team on existing products for which they remain responsible. The Strategic Designer is handling most of the hands-on work and meetings for the new product.

As the ideation phase moves closer to implementation the Product Lead becomes more involved. They begin to work closely with the Strategic Designer on more detailed information architecture and interaction design concepts. Gradually this process generates a complete design spec for the new product. During this period, the Strategic Designer's involvement lessens as the Product Lead takes on ownership of the product.

Read the full post here.

Luke Wroblewski, a prolific writer and design strategist, has written a series on the organizational structure of a corporate design department. He has kindly permitted DD to reblog three of his posts on the topic here.

It's hard to work in a large design team without getting at least somewhat involved in how the group is organized. During my time within such teams, I've been a part of many discussions and iterations of different organization models.

From these experiences, I've developed a model that seems to be able to sustain a large amount of distinct project work and simultaneously support the diversity of the designers within the team.

The model is under laid by the fact that in addition to different skill-levels, designers also have unique strengths and interests in particular types of design work. In particular: product design, strategic design, and design management.

Read the rest of the explanatory text that accompanies this diagram here.

Luke Wroblewski, a prolific writer and design strategist, has written a series on the organizational structure of a corporate design department. He has kindly permitted DD to reblog three of his posts on the topic here.

Based on the previous conversation with Don Norman, author Trenouth then spoke to Craig Vogel about his thoughts on the subject:

Author of "Breakthrough Products", former IDSA president, and Director of Center for Design Research and Innovation, Craig Vogel shared his thoughts on activity-centered design and personas.

Experience design and activity design are the same. But knowing a person's preferences is also important because a functional solution should be complimented with lifestyle attributes.

Norman is a psychologist and not a designer. His focus is on human activity which is fine. I think there is more to products than [just the] action analysis but it is an essential component.

So according to Vogel a study of activity while necessary, is insufficient. Norman says that a study of activity is not only necessary and sufficient, but it is potentially dangerous to look beyond activity as this could prove distracting, resulting in poorer product designs.

In the integrated new product development process outlined in "Breakthrough Products" Vogel says that good product design results in products that are useful, usable and desirable. Norman is a social scientist. As such his professional bias is toward measurability and hence activity-centered design. Usability is easily measured, while utility and desirability are not.

Norman's concern is valid though. Human-centered design and tools like personas can often find themselves distracted by matters irrelevant to the design. Vogel's respose is that the danger is in untrained implementation, and that a human-centered perspective and tools like personas are incredibly valuable in delivering products that are more useful, usable and desirable.

John Trenouth has a masters in design from Carnegie Mellon University and over a decade of experience designing interactive products and systems in both telecommunications and healthcare. Currently he blogs at niblettes and runs a boutique design firm Spire Innovation specializing in product innovation and design research.

If you've made it this far into your product pitch without everyone glazing over, you're probably going to get to finish your presentation. So now you can relax and give a bit of background information before delivering the most important bit of information; the product's revenue potential.

Rule#7: Describe the thinking behind the product.

You might want to head off some time-consuming and arduous cross-questioning by describing what lines of thinking you've discarded in the past. Of course then you'd have to say why have you've chosen your current approach. It's not necessary to go into detail but the people listening to you need to be able to make their own minds up about whether your idea has been tackled in the most promising way.

Rule#8: Explain what potential customers think of the product.

If the budget allows good qualitative research, commission it by all means. If not, a good indication of the product's likely appeal can be obtained with a simple questionnaire. It's critical that no-one closely involved with the project be sent to gather this research. They're likely to sell the idea, however tacitly, to the interviewees. This kind of research doesn't need hundreds of respondents. Usually as few as 20 or 30 properly filtered respondents will give a good idea of whether the product has the right appeal or not. The filter to be applied is simply the core user description from Rule#3.

Without going into the psychology of the interview situation, there are at least three points to note. First, the object is to understand whether the person sees any valuable, rare benefit in this product that they would actually pay for. Second, dead end questions (for example yes/no questions) are much less helpful than open questions that don't lead the witness and allow them to express their opinion. This would include, for example, asking whether they see any difference between this and other similar products. Finally, the most important question is going to be something like "Why wouldn't you buy this product?". This is to discover whether there are any hurdles to this person adopting this product. People overwhelmingly prefer the status quo. Almost every new product has to displace some existing product or preconception in your customer's life or face utter failure. This is a good place to find out whether your product has enough appeal to do that.

Rule#9: Estimate the potential revenue of the product.

As a project develops, sophisticated financial analysis may become necessary but, like all of these rules, the idea is to arrive at a realistic guess early on. Working on a scrap of paper or a quick spreadsheet, what is your best estimate of the retail revenue of the product over time? What key assumptions are you making about the size of the core market? Awareness levels? Distribution coverage? Sustained market share? Price? Repurchase rates and repurchase cycles? In other words, nothing that the census bureau and a bit of web surfing can't turn up.

The Perfect Product Pitch is a 4-part series by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis of Readymade. It covers the 12 essential things you already knew about pitching a product idea to your boss, client or VC guys but forgot last time around. Thanks go out to Dave Bayless at Evergreen Innovation Partners for providing the basis for this series.

Jonathan Ive, CBE, has been extensively covered by BusinessWeek in the September 25th issue. The lead article is an indepth well written look at the design process at Apple followed by the highly reserved Ive and his team. What are the key things about this team at Apple?

They're close-knit and self supportive.

It's a team that has worked in idyllic comfort for many years. Some designers were at the company long before Ive arrived in 1992. They rarely attend industry events or awards ceremonies. It's as though they don't require outside recognition because there isn't any higher authority on design excellence than each other, and because sharing too much information only risks helping others close the gap. [...] "Its good old-fashioned camaraderie -- everyone with the same aim, no egos involved," says British fashion designer Paul Smith, a friend since the late 1990s when Ive sent him a new iMac. "They have lots of dinners together, take lots of field trips. And they've turned these gray frumpy objects called computers into desirable pieces of sculpture you'd want even if you didn't use them.

They're global bringing numerous cultures to the creative table.

And they personally reflect the design sensibilities of Apple's products -- casually chic, elitist and with a definite Euro bent. The team, made up of thirty- and fortysomethings, has a definite international flair. Members include not only the British Ive but also New Zealander Danny Coster, Italian Daniele De Iuliis, and German Rico Zörkendörfer.

They're important - to the company and are treated as such.

Most of Ive's team live in San Francisco, and rumor has it that the starting salary for the group is around $200,000, some 50% above the industry average. They work together in a large open studio with little personal space but great privacy. Many Apple employees aren't allowed in, for fear they'd catch a glimpse of some upcoming product. A massive sound system pumps up the music. Ive invests his design dollars in state-of-the-art prototyping equipment, not large numbers of people. And his design process revolves around intense iteration -- making and remaking models to visualize new concepts. [...] Ive's team at Apple isn't the usual design ghetto of creativity that exists inside most corporations. They work closely and intensely with engineers, marketers, and even outside manufacturing contractors in Asia who actually build the products. Rather than being simple stylists, they're leading innovators in the use of new materials and production processes. The design group was able to figure out how to put a layer of clear plastic over the white or black core of an iPod, giving it a tremendous depth of texture, and still be able to build each unit in just seconds.

Read the rest for a peek into the mind of the man behind the iPod. Or take a look at this slideshow of his work. In fact, go figure out the details of why you really love the iPod.

You've explained the usefulness of your product idea in one sentence, shown that it's dramatically different and figured out exactly who is going to buy it. Even a hardened skeptic would have to give you a few more minutes before torching your proposal. How do you use those precious minutes?  Here are the next 3 rules:

Rule#4: Show an understanding of how the product fits into a person's life.

It's time to transport your audience into the future, to a day when your new product is a happy part of someone's life. Artists and illustrators would use a storyboard to sketch the scene. Photographs can work very well too. What you want to show in a few frames is the context that a person will experience the product in. Understanding the circumstances surrounding the product is very useful in refining the product idea. At the very least it demonstrates some understanding of the user's point of view and how that's different from the point of view of the people in the room looking at your PowerPoint.

Rule#5: Show some proof that the product actually works in real life.

One of the things that distinguishes inventors from other types of product developers is that they tend to have a prototype handy. Not much captures the imagination of an audience like a working model of something new. Even if it's puffing steam and dripping oil, a prototype lets everybody know how big the challenge is, how much of it has been nailed and how much is still to come. Most of all, a working prototype is proof that the product actually does the job it is meant to do. 

Rule#6: Describe the product's usefulness in a quantifiable way.

Clayton Christensen says that a good way to understand your product is to understand the job it will be doing for someone. The well known analogy is that people don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. Of course, whatever that job is, it should be poorly served by existing solutions. If it's at all possible to quantify the difference between the old way and the new idea, do it. It makes for a convincing argument. To use another wood shop analogy, you could say; "When preparing to cut a piece of wood with a saw, people want to minimize the time it takes to make an accurate measurement. Ordinary measuring tools are clumsy and time-consuming to use accurately." Then the pay-off line; "The special guide reduces the time it takes to measure and set-up a cut by 25%." People need it, they can't easily get it, this thing does it, bingo!

The Perfect Product Pitch is a 4-part series by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis of Readymade. It covers the 12 essential things you already knew about pitching a product idea to your boss, client or VC guys but forgot last time around. Thanks go out to Dave Bayless at Evergreen Innovation Partners for providing the basis for this series.

Last year, Don Norman wrote a couple of articles (Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful and HCD harmful? A Clarification) critically examining what is called user-centered or human-centered design. Instead of being human-centered, Norman says design should be activity-centered. The following is a short interview with Norman on the use of personas and activity centered design.

How does (or should) the thesis of your article, if accepted, affect a group's use of personas as a design tool? Should we forget about personas (except as a communication tool) and concentrate on activities as the driving forces behind product design?

Don: Well, we got along quite well without personas before they became popular. I do not think they are important for the intelligent, observant, designer. As I (and you) said, I think they are useful mainly in communicating the decisions to other people.

I think the emphasis on activities is the key.

Is there perhaps too much growing faith in the power of personas at the expense of in-depth understanding of activities and their associated problems?

Don: Absolutely. The persona still says nothing about how to design.

Is a focus on activities perhaps too mechanistic, and blind to all the nuanced subjectivities of experience that contribute to a product's success or failure, that are better captured between the lines of a persona narrative?

Don: No.

Any single prescription runs the risk of being accepted mechanically. But if you have only average designers, then mechanical solutions are apt to be pretty good -- better than they might produce otherwise.

Is a persona centered design approach even a user centered design approach? Or are many of us simply seduced by ease and economy of them compared with studying actual people?

Don: If you don't study real people, then you can't produce sensible personas! A persona is, after all, a distillation of the knowledge gathered about numerous individuals.

What is a comfortable balance between understanding people and activities in terms of designing better products? Your articles hint at an answer here.

Don: In no way can you understand activities without understanding people. An activity is the set of actions (perceptions, thoughts, decisions, and actions) made within t he context of a set of goals. One cannot separate activities from people. Activities are goal-driven, and goals exist only in the heads of people. A major support need is to handle changing goals, and interrupted goal-driven activity -- and this involves people.

John Trenouth has a masters in design from Carnegie Mellon University and over a decade of experience designing interactive products and systems in both telecommunications and healthcare. Currently he blogs at niblettes and runs a boutique design firm Spire Innovation specializing in product innovation and design research.

Andrew Zolli recently wrote in his piece in BusinessWeek,

And eventually, corporate managers will master these skills, at which point every consumer product will be permanently dipped in white acrylic, come with an ergonomic fly wheel, and embody a whimsical anthropomorphic cuteness.

Then what? To find the next deep wellsprings of innovation, you have to learn to listen to "weak signals"-fringe ideas today that will be common wisdom tomorrow.

He identifies three key areas as fringe ideas for innovation - 'ecology', 'gaming' and 'social networking'. One could also view these as emerging markets, that is, those that can be defined as emerging opportunity areas for innovation. Then, instead of the run of the mill understanding that emerging markets are countries or nations, lets look at them from the socioeconomic and geopolitical point of view. Now, we have 5 emerging markets:-

1. Geographic
Here is where BRIC, ASEAN, Mercosul et al get covered - the emerging markets of India, China, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt etc

2. Gaming and virtual worlds
This is an emerging market in its own right, witness only the amount of business being done on Second Life. Does it also include stuff like all the brand placement in "Talladega Nights" etc?

3. Social networking or "my life online"
This is the sweet spot where companies like Skype, Typepad and Google perceive as emerging markets, among others.

4. Sustainability
There is probably a better word for this emerging market, but ecology, the environment, global warming, climate change and resource contraints lead to the emergence of a market for 'green' products, services and messages.

5. Social development/ bottom of the pyramid
Dominic Basulto over at the BusinessInnovationInsider blog has an excellent summary of CK Prahalad's latest look at the opportunities in this space. Here is a snippet on innovating for this market,

Prahalad outlines the four conditions that must be present for similar types of breakthrough innovations to occur:

(1) The innovation must result in a product or service of world-class quality;

(2) The innovation must achieve a significant price reduction - at least 90% off the cost of a comparable product or service in the West;

(3) The innovation must be scalable: It must be able to be produced, marketed, and used in many locales and circumstances;

(4) The innovation must be affordable at the bottom of the economic pyramid, reaching people with the lowest levels of income in any given society.

And finally, while it may or may not be an emerging market in its own right, demographic changes in the western world point towards the 'greying' population, a segment that requires significant design and development insights in healthcare and lifestyle products.

"You dominate in one market, does that help you dominate in another?"

Wal-Mart's recent problems in Germany and the subsequent analysis uncovers some of the pitfalls that face market leaders when they choose to cross cultural borders. The common theme is that if you do not already possess an 'iconic' brand - Starbucks or Apple are the common examples - you must adapt to the indigenous culture. And this applies across the board from your business model, marketing strategy and product mix to choosing to follow HR practices from your home culture or local culture. While none would like to acknowledge that their brand may not be considered as iconic as Starbucks' or Apple's, here are 5 common mistakes companies make when structuring a global brand strategy.

1. Interpret, don't translate
2. Value is contextual
3. Playing follow the leader
4. Making assumptions
5. Ineffectual leadership

Download the full article [PDF] from ReBrand here.

Your product pitch isn't going well and the reason is suddenly clear. No-one else thinks the idea is much good. If only the clock could be turned back and an extra week spliced in, then this could all have gone so much better. Or could it? Here's the checklist you'd have needed; filled with the 12 essential things you already knew but somehow forgot this time.

Rule#1: Explain the usefulness of the idea in one sentence

Any aspiring moviemaker, salesperson, social networker or evangelist knows that you have to explain your killer concept in 30 seconds if you want anyone to listen. Yes, the old elevator pitch. It doesn't hurt to relate it to what your listener already knows too. There's going to be a hiccup if you've got to explain particle physics before they get it. Before your audience starts getting ideas about how close this thing is to reality, BJ Fogg recommends explaining how long you've been working on this right up front; to create a realistic expectation.

Rule#2: Show that the product is dramatically better than current products.

According to Doug Hall, it is critical to explain the one or two most important benefits of your product. Surprisingly, mentioning any further benefits actually decreases your chance of success. That needs to be immediately followed by two supporting arguments. Firstly, why should anyone believe that you can deliver those benefits and secondly what is the most dramatic, meaningful difference between this and other products?

Rule#3: Understand exactly who will buy the product.

Google probably knows more about you than your own government by now, so it follows that you could find out quite a bit about the exact kind of person most likely to buy your product. If that doesn't work you could always buy some research. What about their lifestyle drives their burning desire for your product? Very often, you'll learn more from observing the way people feel about things than how they are able to articulate those feelings. What about them will cause them to perceive your product as really quite a lot better than alternatives? The sagest advice is that if everybody is a core user, nobody is a core user. It is extremely unlikely that your product will make dramatic difference to everybody, all the time.

The Perfect Product Pitch is a 4-part series by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis of Readymade. It covers the 12 essential things you already knew about pitching a product idea to your boss, client or VC guys but forgot last time around. Thanks go out to Dave Bayless at Evergreen Innovation Partners for providing the basis for this series.

A recent five part Design Directory article penned by Tasos Calantzis was written to bring insight as to how design can be integrated into the realm of business. More to the point, the lead-in suggests that design's primary corporate challenge is to gain equal billing alongside traditional C-level functions. It was also suggested that this thinking might ruffle some feathers. It is without a doubt that this was one of the more prophetic statements made within the article.

Throughout the article there are several terms thrown about in a shotgun fashion. Included are terms like design thinking, design of product systems, and the commoditization of design. All of which are hot button topics and very quickly polarize discussions when it comes to how design should be implemented in a corporate environment. 

The article alludes to the idea that designers can't forget that their core competency is product styling. One might infer from this that Tasos believes that designers need to realize that the real value of design is styling. It can be summed up by the quote:

"The most familiar image of design is as a creator of style. In fact despite the many other meaningful things that design can do, it could be argued that infusing products with designer style is the core competence of design."

If one truly believes that the design industry is becoming a corporate commodity it is easily argued that it is because a designer is thought of as "stylist" by the corporate world. Throw a million design monkeys into a room with a million crayons and eventually you will end up with a rendering of the next "iPod Killer". 

There is no doubt that good styling can help make a product a hit. It needs to be made clear that what makes for a long lasting, timeless product that people can't imagine their lives without is a product that has been thought of in context of its whole system. At the very least someone that truly understands the idea of design thinking should be leading that charge. Low hanging fruit examples would be products such as the Eames Chair, or more contemporary products like the iPod. Products such as these didn't get designed believing styling was the core competency of the process. It was the designer's understanding of the experience of sitting in a comfortable chair reading a book, or having their music collection become something that is easily extensible and carried with them in their pocket. On the contrary, one could argue that companies like Sony have great styling. Their products are beautifully fashioned, but they seem yet to grasp (or arguably have forgotten) the holistic system of design.

Designing Product Systems is a term that came out in this article that requires more discussion. Designing product systems is a philosophy on which the design industry can hang their hat. Company's like IDEO have laid the foundation for this type of thinking while companies like OneOak Design (Developers of Product Systems) have recently been founded on the principle of designing for product systems. Designing product systems stems from a basic belief that design is integral to the development of any product.

A colleague once described design as the spearhead of the product development process. However, designers need to be more than the head of the spear, for that implies that design is far too free to be pointed in whichever direction the wielder wants in the heat of battle. A designer needs to be able to assimilate information from virtually every single business discipline in order to be successful in the process. Corporations that believe that design is a "need to know" player in the process will never be able to realize the impact design can have on their product line.

Mr. Calantzis gets design. One could even go as far as agreeing that he understands design thinking. Walking away from his article(s) believing that his voice is one that will be carrying design into the bored rooms of the corporate world is a bit of a stretch. The article had a bit too much of a feeling of resignation to the status quo. Too much of a feeling that design SHOULD blend into the noise. He said:

"Using design to improve the way things look and work may be an old fashioned notion but it served industry well for the whole of the last century and it remains one of the things that designers do best."

Maintaining that what designers do best is styling is keeping the industry in the 20^th Century. Design is part of a larger holistic process. Design is a complex industry that is as difficult to describe as "Engineering" or the color black. A true design thinker uses their skill of styling as one of the many tools in the chest to realize the conversion of disciplines. One could argue that there is no other industry that that must listen and translate information from virtually every other discipline in the building. Without understanding the market, the product fails. Without understanding the Engineering behind the product, you can't properly style the product. Without understanding the manufacturing process one can very quickly design in more problems and costs downstream that will completely strangle the products success.

It is the corporations that understand that designing a product as part of a complex system that are ushering in the next wave of products that tap into the social fabric of human nature. Design is growing up and trading in its styling badge for one that is more representative of the growing responsibility of design in the corporate environment. Resigning to being a stylist is not doing the industry and the products it represents justice.

Jon Winebrenner is the industrial design partner in the Vancouver, BC design firm OneOak Design. For the five years prior to starting OneOak Design Jon worked as lead Industrial Designer for Sierra Wireless on the now defunct Voq Smartphone program. It is during this time working for Sierra Wireless that he had the opportunity to work along side companies like Ziba Design, fuseproject, and RKS Design. Between being a fly on the wall while working with these companies and seeing a full Smartphone development process fail from the inside out, Jon was allowed to learn to believe in the Design for Product Systems philosophy.

Part of the fuzziness in defining what design actually is, is due to old definitions having outlived their usefulness. Some businesses  have come to realize that design is much more than making things look pretty. In many cases a link can be found between how effectively design is used in an organization and the overall success of that organization.

A short list of companies who are undisputed industry leaders could include Nike, Apple, Proctor & Gamble, Nokia , Toyota and Samsung. In each case, success can be attributed to other factors but the influence of design has been integral. 

These are companies who aim to be the absolute leaders in their industries; unique and far ahead of their competitors. They have discovered that the tactical ability of solving business problems with design creates successes that can now be knitted together with the emerging culture of innovation to create a strategic tool. For these leaders, design has become integrated into the business as a C-level function.

For companies like this, one finds a hierarchy of design thinking. Firstly a robust design process produces individual products which are carefully considered relative to their competitors. More than that, these products are designed in response to latent user needs and therefore ahead of current thinking. They form part of well-designed product systems which solve business problems. Finally, design thinking is applied in ten areas of business, transforming the organization.

It is this last layer of design thinking that contains the true advantage. Design is not an activity that is owned by designers. It is merely a profitable use of creativity. It can be learnt and applied by anyone in the organization. This is part of it's power. Used correctly, design thinking can give any person in the organization a new ability to create dramatically increased value; just like efficiency, quality and customer focus have been able to.

Design has the ability to create products and experiences that have never existed before. When people all over the organization are thinking in this way, the true originality of their ideas cannot be predicted. Competitors can only follow because the organization is continuously disrupting the field.

Design is not the only way of disrupting the field. Methods like Six Sigma, the Toyota Way and the Theory of Constraints also make the same claim. The difference is that these are all process improvement methods whereas design applies innovation to products and experiences. In fact a good design consultancy will use these and other methods as tools in creating disruptive innovation through design.

Design has a great ability to be used in collaboration with other fields of expertise. That's why it works so well with branding, advertising, engineering and architecture and other fields; to the point that it sometimes becomes indistinguishable from them.

Thanks to Jess McMullin for producing the original template on which this series is based and for giving his permission to use it.

The Power of Design is a series in 5 parts by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

Hybrid Organizations as a Strategy for Supporting New Product Development is the title of a research paper by Alison Rieple, Adrian Haberberg, and Jon Gander of the University of Westminster.

A summary of their findings:

This paper focuses on strategic alliances, in which one firm (normally a large, multi-product corporation) obtains critical product-development resources, such as design or technological know-how, from an independent firm (normally a smaller and more specialized design consultancy or a technology developer). The two firms develop a fairly close relationship - perhaps only for the period of a specific assignment, but often over a longer period spanning several projects. These hybrid relationships are governed through informal means, such as unwritten agreements between key individuals, as much as through the more usual form of legal contracts.

Crucial to the success of a hybrid are "boundary-spanners." These are members of the partner organizations who are able to move freely within both, translating the requirements of each into language and behavior that is acceptable to, and understandable by, the other. Trust between the senior managers who set up a hybrid in the first place, and the boundary spanners who maintain the relationship subsequently, is a critical factor. Trust lowers cost and raises productivity. Cooperation increases under conditions of trust, because with trust such costly barriers as formal contracts and detailed monitoring can be removed. The resulting less-formal specifications can also allow the parties to respond more rapidly to any changes in circumstances.

Hybrids protect the smaller firm from the stifling effects of the larger firm, while allowing its creative knowledge to be exploited. This happens through what is, in effect, a "semi-permeable membrane" in which certain features are blocked from movement while others are transferred.

Boundary-spanners, or bridgers, as they are sometimes described, are people who move between both organizations, translating the norms of each into language and behavior that are acceptable to, and understandable by, the other. There is almost no research on the role that boundary-spanners have in hybrid organizational structures, and yet they are likely to be one of the most important factors in the success of those structures. After all, new product development is a social-, collaborative-, and interaction- intensive process involving experimentation and negotiation over the lifecycle of the new product's evolving form, bringing together knowledge, expertise, and technologies from different sources into a whole. Learning involves the negotiated resolution of constraints and generates new knowledge, which may then be embedded in the design of new technologies, products, or processes. Thus boundary-spanners need to be skilled first of all in the nuances of creating a new product.

A perfect example of successful boundary spanners can be found in an article written by Tom Mulhern and Dave Lathrop, of Conifer Research and Steelcase Inc., respectively. Their article,"Building and Tending Bridges: Rethinking How Consultants Support Change," detailed the way in which design consultant Conifer Research used its methodological expertise in furniture and workspace design to improve Steelcase's product innovation and organizational performance. Although Mulhern and Lathrop had not worked together before, they had "worked around each other" and knew a lot of the same people. They were both part of an established network of relationships and reputation, and this is likely to have facilitated the development of trust between the two organizational boundary-spanners.

Mulhern and Lathrop also epitomize the internal boundary-spanner role. Steelcase had previously gone out of its way to seek external perspectives from a "host of brilliant, innovative, but generally outside resources, with the outcome generally packaged as a 'deliverable.'" But in order to achieve the impact they sought, Mulhern and Lathrop recognized that their job would be to inspire insiders to take up the cause. They described this process as developing "experience bridges." The bridges they established linked people, information, and process and thereby "dramatically accelerated" progress through the development of shared understanding.

In conclusion, it seems as though a strategic alliance between a large corporation and a small creative house works effectively for product innovation, with the role of the boundary spanner being crucial to the success of this approach.

Using design to improve the way things look and work may be an old fashioned notion but it served industry well for the whole of the last century and it remains one of the things that designers do best.

In this century, however, more is being asked of design. And faced with new threats, designers are happily obliging. It turns out that design thinking is well suited to solving all sorts of business problems. Organizations looking for a steadier advantage than the usual tit-for-tat style of competing have turned, amongst other things, to design.

The question has been whether products themselves could open up new markets, to actually create new opportunities instead of being created to fill opportunities. In order to do that, this type of organization has had to start to figure out how to think ahead of the field instead of reacting to the moves of competitors. It's probably true that design's main advantage over other types of business consulting is it's ability to understand people's needs and meet them in practical and desirable ways. To do this, designers use ethnographic research to observe real people in real situations. As humans, our actions betray needs that are simply too obvious to mention. Very often the way customers behave points out unexplored day-to-day problem areas. This is where an astute team could make life much richer for a customer. 

This results in the ability to spot opportunities for the business before competitors do.

That's not to say that design could supplant other types of business problem solving, just that design could be thought of as a permanent, legitimate business function. This has propelled design's day-to-day role from thinking about individual products to thinking about product systems.

By this description, solving business problems using design starts to look like a whole lot of wrenching change. That impression isn't diminished by the term "culture of innovation" which gets thrown around as a new aspirational goal. In reality though, innovation is not just for the guys in lab coats and creativity can be learnt. Businesses find that workers at the coal face are full of ideas of how to make better use of their time and effort as well as pleasing customers. Sometimes all that's required is a good design team to guide the process.

That process starts by linking the tactical hits that are possible through ordinary form and function design. These small successes together with customer understanding and a growing ability to solve problems creatively allow the organization to move faster with new ideas.

All of which makes for a distinct advantage. However this does not yet add up to leadership in an industry. For that, design needs to be a strategic tool.

Next: Leadership

The Power of Design is a series in 5 parts by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

From Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton's new book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense comes this concise encapsulation of design thinking,

Design thinking is one of enlightened trial and error wherein one observes the world, identifies the patterns of behaviour, generates ideas, gets feedback, repeats the process, and keeps on refining.

From this starting point then, lets look at each word in turn, from the point of view of putting it into practice.

Design is fundamentally a value system, a set of principles, that is then manifested in tangible form.

Conventionally, this has been known as setting the design criteria. However, rather than specification guidelines, as used in engineering, if one were to change metrics and numbers into values or emotional responses, one could, in fact, create a method for building and managing a brand.

For example, once you are able to identify your core value proposition, what sets you apart from the rest - it doesn't even have to be only your competition or the industry in which in you belong, but in totality - you can then use those characteristics to set your criteria.

Here is way that the persona or story, once identified, translates into the 'design criteria' or the specification document i.e. the PRD. However, when you take this one step further, into the perceptual or intangible, you can use the same qualities, identified by the persona or story, to articulate the essence of your brand.

Once a picture of this hypothetical brand is captured, to a degree, by this snapshot, every element that supports it, is held up and measured against one question only. Does this activity, action, message or product, work towards maintaining the integrity of the big picture brand personality? Or does it set up a cognitive dissonance in the customer's mind because it breaks away from the existing perceptual image of the company or brand?

This then becomes the only feedback necessary in guiding the process of building the brand, product design, marketing strategy, or even corporate planning. Are we being true to ourselves? Are we consistent with our brand promise? Are we keeping the faith?

And as you can see, this process of do, check, tweak, redo, maps on to the definition of design thinking given in bold above and also the basic user centered design process.

Design thinking is nothing more than the application of the user centred design process to all and any business activity, rather than just the creation of tangible products.

One of the recurring patterns of late is how mobile phones - not just the handset, but the system as a whole, have become drivers of innovation in emerging economies.

For those who have no fixed address, a phone in their pocket provides a connection to the rest of the world, and a means to be reached. The story of Jeevanlal Pitodia, the pavement dwelling vegetable seller without a fixed shop or stall triggered this thought. Neelakantan's observations only fueled them - whether it was the cab driver or the junk seller.

For all of them and more, the phone was more than just a device with which to place a call. It's an instant office, a receptionist who'll take messages, an inbox where orders can be placed, the equivalent of an email address or website, and most important, for all micro entreprenuers, a means for new clients to reach them.

Not just in India or China; this phenomena of the handphone - freed from the shackles of state sponsored infrastructure required for landlines in the majority of these developing nations - has demonstrated its effect in improving the micro economy and providing opportunities for the entreprenuerially minded in hitherto backward regions around the world.

Larry Keeley talks about post industrial platforms, philosophies such as self expression, political freedom, enlightenment and mastery - he said that these were the foundations on which successful businesses of the future would be built. One can see them all, in one form or the another, in the simple concept of one very small, but very powerful device.

If only designing successful new products was always as easy as making the new one work better than anything before it. Every product manager knows that it's not - but try telling that to your designers! Their training is in making things look and work better. What your designers would call incremental functional improvement is one part of creating successful design, but it's not enough to ensure success. That's why adding blades to razors has been such a game of diminishing returns.

Clearly there are good reasons to compete by making something that works better than any competitor. This is the beginning of innovation. But that still doesn't take us out of 5 blade razor territory. The improvement must be much bigger than that.  It's important to actually make something easier or more effective for the customer in a way that they can somehow measure.  And when they measure it, it must be dramatically different. As Doug Hall and his peers point out, a big reason why many products fail is the ordinary person's resistance to change. This means that a new design has to be an extraordinary improvement over previous designs before someone is persuaded to give it a try. The temptation to take a leading product and make the new one 10% better is a well-documented way to fail with new products.

The way that companies usually go about innovating is by studying other successful products (especially competing products) and trying to improve on them. This is both the strength and weakness of functional improvement. On the one hand, improved function can clearly give a new product an advantage, but because the new product is based on previous products, it's also easy to copy.

This means that there is seldom a long term advantage to functional improvement and success is often hit and miss. This focus only on single products instead of the deeper thinking that can produce a whole system of innovative ideas, hampers longer term success.

Like adding style to products, adding extra benefits by innovating is not normally costly compared to the potential for success that it offers. It can be quite an efficient way of using existing resources to improve sales. You don't have to be 3M, HP or Samsung to have innovation. It's just a way of thinking that can be learnt. Innovation is simply a clever idea that has been successfully commercialized. Any company can do it  by training its people to think like, well, designers. 

But developing people's creative abilities is still not an asset that can give a company a long term edge. It's a great start because it creates the raw material for the reinvention which every company must have to succeed, but to win in the long term a culture of innovation is needed.

Next: Solving Business Problems

The Power of Design is a series in 5 parts by guest contributorTasos Calantzis looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

Chris Conley was in town last week for a short presentation he made on the behalf of the IIT Institute of Design. DD went to find out more about the work he's doing at his product development firm, GravityTank.

DesignDirectory: Chris, your bio says "At Gravity Tank he leads the development of Integrated DefinitionTM, a way of working that leverages the core competencies of design to enable cross-functional client teams to define new product and service innovations." What exactly does this mean?

Chris Conley: Well, let me start by explaining why clients come to us and perhaps that will lead to some clarity about GravityTank's offer and what we do there. There are three key reasons companies approach us:-

1. When they're looking for new market opportunities - usually within their existing product line or new product categories areas to explore. They know the market opportunity they want to target, such as "baby boomers" or "retail channels" but need help to define the product or product category that would allow them to take advantage of this opportunity.

2. New product or service definition - this kind of program results in a unique document describing what products or services should be developed and why. It provides the essential information, the 'show and tell' that neither the traditional technical specifications documents nor marketing's MRD provide. We deliver a clear design direction that our clients can then take to their favourite industrial design studio for the final design and development work. It's much more than a design brief as it includes strategy elements, related business numbers as well as platform considerations and design criteria to shape the final form.

3. Business challenges - This is the fuzziest of the 'fuzzy front end', when a business is facing a very specific challenge, but doesn't really know why and want us to take look not only at their products and services but their business system to see what can be tweaked.

DD: So your final deliverable is not the design of the product but a waymarker towards that design? It sounds like it's more tangible than the 'blue sky' innovation and brainstorming popular today and yet not the deliverable of an industrial design studio. Yet you prototype, in fact, you're a big proponent of rapid prototyping and it's benefits. How does that fit in with what you do?

CC: I'm always amazed at how hard it is to convey that we use design and prototyping to help figure out what to go and design. Business people use spreadsheets to model a potential business early in the process. But they are not the same folks that implement the actual business system that builds and launches the business in the market. But in design, it is hard for people to understand that while you may not be doing the final production design, design and prototypes are essential to figuring it out what to pursue.

DD: Those are words to remember, indeed. Thank you, Chris.

Here is a quick summary of trends spotted in this year's Red Dot competion:

Competition participation and results

Asia - from product piracy to design award After Asian companies and designers - apart from Japan - have mostly been in the spotlight in recent years due to so-called product piracy, this region appears to be increasingly developing a design quality of its own.

Professor Dr. Peter Zec explains that "Entries by Asian companies in the design competition have once again increased clearly. Within the last two years, the number of submitted products has almost quadrupled. This shows that above all global Asian companies are increasingly recognizing that in the long run they cannot rely on low prices only. Instead, the quality, the brand development and product culture are becoming increasingly important to create loyal customers in western industrial nations."

The number of red dots going to Asian companies is rising: 98 products received a distinction in the red dot award: product design 2006, mostly in the product category "Media and home electronics" - whereas just two years ago it was only 33 products.

Zec: "This means that western competitors have to prepare for tough times and be even more innovative and creative."

Summary

The jurors were impressed with the overall very high quality standards of the submitted products, which can now be found in all industries.

Even in product categories that used to be neglected with regards to design such as Medicine and Life Science as well as in the trades design has become an important as well as essential competition factor.

In traditionally design-oriented industries such as the manufacturing of automobiles or household appliances the influence of design has increased.

In the field of media and home electronics, however, devices have become so complex that design is not living up to its full potential yet. In this field it is creativity, not technology, which currently sets the limits, according to the jurors. However, design experts expect a large breakthrough in the near future. Products such as the iPod Nano by Apple or a projector by LG indicate the future directions.

The most familiar image of design is as a creator of style. In fact despite the many other meaningful things that design can do, it could be argued that infusing products with designer style is the core competence of design. So we enter a discussion about beauty and the value of beauty.

The company that decides to use design to differentiate itself is betting that improving its style is a way of attracting customers. There's an interesting difference in approach to design between different cultures. The yardstick that businesses use to measure good design in the USA is usually improved sales. This is pragmatic and measurable. In Europe, however weight is given to abstract elements of design(the kind art students would talk about; proportion, line, color and so on) which determine whether a particular design has been well executed or not. Ordinary Europeans, and therefore businesspeople more frequently recognize these elements intuitively and are able to form an opinion on a design. This is perhaps why European products have certain characteristic styles that are easy to identify.  

It has been said that other countries like Japan blend the two approaches. This understanding of how design style is perceived is important when deciding when design can be exported across borders successfully.

In product design, improved style means making products look stylish and cool. However there are several layers to this 'coolness' as Diego Rodriguez so eloquently explains. To artists, designers and all aesthetes, creating beauty is in itself valuable. Businesses in America sometimes need to be convinced of that, usually when customers with the same sensibilities react to the beauty by buying it.

In the world of designers, few are able to marry the high art of original, iconic style with the depth of  technical and commercial abilities needed to succeed with complex consumer products. As successful as Michael Graves has been working together with Target designing coat hooks and wall clocks, his range of consumer electronics was a failure. Even Yves Behar of Fuseproject, who has an apparently technically competent portfolio, commented in a revealing interview that the $100 laptop project is much more difficult for his studio than their regular work designing slick lifestyle products.

There is a downside to designer style. If style is the only reason for using design, the gain turns out to be short term. Style is easy to copy (just ask Alessi)and the style focus tends to be on one product at a time because the company is looking for quick easy successes by applying style. Since the reward is short lived, it's prudent to allocate a minimum of resources to developing style as a differentiating factor. Hence the company employing design only for it's style potential is always either playing catch up or jumping ahead only to fall quickly behind again.

In this situation, similar to the company which doesn't yet use design for style, cost is the major weapon. Improved style cannot sufficiently differentiate products and services without highly competitive costs to attract customers. Attractive or distinctive style does offer a business a significant advantage over competitors whose style is less so. It places the company near the head of the pack and can sometimes stop commoditization and purely cost-driven competition.

Fortunately, style is closely followed in the minds of businesspeople by another attribute of design which adds benefits which make it harder for competitors to follow.

Next: Improving Function

The Power of Design is a series in 5 parts by guest contributorTasos Calantzis looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

Manufacturers and designers of products that contain electronic parts are aware of the new environmental directives being laid down in Europe referred to as WEEE and RoHS.

The RoHS legislation only covers countries in the European Union. So why should companies in the United States care? The fact is, the regulations only apply to Europe, but countries throughout the world that sell or distribute products in Europe, or even supply components to companies that sell or distribute products in Europe, need to be aware of and compliant with RoHS.

Here is a quick FAQ on what these regulations entail and what it means for global consumer durable products:

What is RoHS?

The European Union (EU) Directive on the Restriction of certain Hazardous Substances. This bans the use of certain substances in electrical and electronic equipment products placed on the European market after July 2006.

Download RoHS PDF.

The following product categories are impacted under the RoHS Directive:

1. Large household appliances: refrigerators, washers, stoves, air conditioners
2. Small household appliances: vacuum cleaners, hair dryers, coffee makers, irons
3. Computing & communications equipment: computers, printers, copiers, phones
4. Consumer electronics: TVs, DVD players, stereos, video cameras
5. Lighting: lamps, lighting fixtures, light bulbs
6. Power tools: drills, saws, nail guns, sprayers, lathes, trimmers, blowers
7. Toys and sports equipment: videogames, electric trains, treadmills
8. Automatic dispensers: vending machines, ATM machines

The following products are currently exempted from RoHS compliance:

1. Large stationary industrial tools
2. Control and monitoring equipment
3. National security use and military equipment
4. Medical devices
5. Some light bulbs and some batteries
6. Spare parts for electronic equipment in the market before July 1, 2006.

What is WEEE?

Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment. Deals with the best available treatment, recovery & recycling of electrical and electronic equipment. Legislation becomes effective Aug 13, 2005. All EEE put on the market as from that date have to be WEEE marked (EN50419) and have to be collected after the products end of life.

Download WEEE Directive PDF here.

Which products are affected under the WEEE directive?

Large domestic devices (refrigerator, washing machine, microwave,...)
Small domestic devices (vacuum cleaner, iron, hair dryer,...)
IT & remote communication device (mainfraime, PC,... )
Consumer devices (radio, TV, video, audio, ...)
Illumination (fluorescent, discharge lamp,...)
Power Tool (drill, lathe, polishing tool, lawnmower, ...)
Toys (train/car racing set, game devices,...)
Medical devices (radiation therapy device, electrocardiogram,...)
Measure & controller (scale, measuring machine,...)
Vending machines (various)

A detailed FAQ with the list of banned materials and the products covered by these directives is available here. [courtesy Brady Europe]

Which other countries are applying the EU's directives?

The RoHS laws affect only the EU. But a number of non-EU countries have adopted the idea and put in place similar laws or voluntary regulations to the same effect. Following is an overview of the expected consequences.

China
China has recently published a "China RoHS". An official translation is still pending.

Japan
There are no RoHS equivalent laws in Japan, however the industry is following a voluntary program that aims to remove lead from the production process by the end of 2005.

USA
The USA has no federal laws to reduce the use of lead. Though California has issued the "California RoHS" law that prohibits selling electronic products containing lead in California after January 1st 2007.

Korea
South Korea has recently announced a similar law which is commonly refered to as KoreaRoHS.

Taiwan
Expected to create a similar regulation by 2008.

Australia
Regulation in place or pending.

Other countries
As of now no other countries have similar laws. Though it is to be expected that more countries will follow the RoHS initiative either by issuing laws or by the industry voluntarily following the RoHS.

Much of the discussion about the role of design in companies is clouded by jargon and designer up selling. Most designers will tell you with a straight face that design is the most important factor for any business, which is obviously just not true. There's a more realistic battle for designers selling their services to corporations. That is to get design equal billing alongside the traditional C-level functions.

Design evangelists may be aghast at such a statement but it is possible that design is just not a real requirement for some companies. For example, a company may simply have much more pressing operational problems than design. For design to be effective, quality and cost must be under control, engineering, inventory and supply chain must be efficient and marketing and sales must be in working order. Design may also be considered fundamental to a company's functioning but it may simply not be the priority yet.

A company could be functioning effectively but be working in a utterly commoditized area. Should the manufacturer of the yellow triangles that cleaning staff around the world use to warn of slippery floors be looking for a design edge? There's no doubt that the most moribund industry (coffins anyone?) can be attacked with design. Indeed these are often the juiciest targets for an ambitious company daring to redefine an industry. The question is whether this is a sure-fire requirement for every dull, worthy market.

On the far end of the spectrum, highly sophisticated companies working in high technology areas could also see design as a less than strategic tool. Design thinker Steve Portigal noted the irony of Flextronics, the $18bn global ODM, being voted one of the Wired 40 based on it's design ambitions. In fact Flextronics caused a little seismic event amongst designers a few years ago when then CEO, Michael Marks announced to the world that design had become a commodity and was no longer a strategic advantage. This was shortly after the acquisition of Frog, the celebrated boutique shop and was followed by the shedding of Frog together with some other non-core businesses.  Only time will tell how prophetic Mark's words turn out to be.

In the case of defensible intellectual property devoid of design, the candidates are rare who can build a company on that basis as opposed to a single product. Most end up like Polaroid. There are also cases where some other advantage; massive scale, superior reach, hyper vertical integration and so on, confers an advantage that design simply can't match. However,  these advantages boil down to cost.

And cost is where the discussion winds up. For without design the reliable tools of quality and efficiency strive to lower the price without any hope of raising it sustainably. So there may be exceptions but for most companies another tool is required; one that can break the zero-sum game of cost-driven competition.

Next: Improving Style

The Power of Design by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis is a series in 5 parts looking at the different ways in which design can be used within a company, cutting away hyperbole in the typical design sales pitch and investigating the real benefits of design to customers,  the organization and its revenue. The 5 parts discuss incremental steps: no design, style, form & function, solving business problems and achieving leadership.

From the 6th Asian Design Conference held in Tsukuba, Japan, here is the complete section on the theme Design Marketing. Papers presented are downloadable as PDF files. Explore the rest of the themes on the site as well, just a few years old, the papers are exhaustive, well researched and provide insight into design today.

A Study of Brand Image and Design The Character Design for the Improvement of Brand Image
Mikio FUJITO, Mikio YAMASHITA, Yoji KITANI

Industrial Design and Innovation in Mexican Enterprises.
Julio FRIAS-PENA, Christopher O'BRIEN

On the Solution of Design Management of Electric Equipment Manufacturing Company in Japan - Productivity Of Design Section As A Tool Of Business Project Promotion-
Tsuyoshi OTANI, Norikazu MORISAKI, Seiji WADA

About the ability demanded by In-House designer and the management Through The Transition Of "Function Of The Design Section" And "Obligation As An In-House Designer"
Seiji WADA, Tsuyoshi OTANI

Design Efficiency of Market Seeker Strategy and Marker Leader Strategy
Jin-Ryeol Lee, Myoung-joo Kim, Young-sung Hwang

E-brand Design with 3C Strategy   - A case study of e-brand website analysis
Kim Yu Jin, Kwon Eun Sook

If you are involved in product design, you need to understand how a product impacts on the environment. To develop truly sustainable products, you must be able to assess which design solution is environmentally preferable. [Courtesy Pre Consultants]

10 Golden Guidelines for Ecodesign

1. Do not design products, but life cycles
2. Natural materials are not always better
3. Energy consumption: often underestimated
4. Increase product life time
5. Do not design products, but services
6. Use a minimum of material
7. Use recycled materials
8. Make your product recyclable
9. Ask stupid questions
10. Become an O2 member!

South Africa's vibrant design industry is a surprise when you first discover it. Typical impressions of the Dark Continent don't usually include one of the world's best advertising and communication design industries, but local studios regularly make off with Clios and Cannes Lions.

Other creative industries do equally well; Time magazine called South Africa the number one destination for fashion design in 2003. A government initiative to create greater value from South Africa's gold, platinum and diamond mines is stimulating the jewelry design industry. A booming retail sector combined with record property prices and huge growth in construction is driving interior design and architecture.

Cape Town's International Design Indaba reflects the explosion in South Africa's creative industries with this annual 3-day conference joining the A-list of global design gatherings. Speakers now comprise the most important names in design from around the world, as noted in the May 2006 issue of ID magazine.

One gets the feeling that the design world may be warming to a dose of earthy, rich, African flavor. From London to Dubai to Singapore, South African designers are being noticed. This is a testament to the world-class education and multi-cultural sensitivity of local designers.

Until now, the euphoria hasn't extended to South African product design. South Africa's manufacturing industry struggles to absorb the 15-odd graduates each year and the local opportunities for product designers are mostly in supporting the media and branding industry with 3D skills.

However things could be changing for South African product designers. Recently some South African product design studios have started to grab international attention. Csape Town-based studio XYZ had its condom applicator displayed as part of MOMA's SAFE: Design Takes On Risk exhibition in 2005/6. Durban's Egg Design was rated by GDR in London as one of the Top 10 Young Design Companies' to watch in 2001 and exhibited successfully at 100% Design.

When Pretoria-based Readymade won a Red Dot Award and a Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award last year for product design, they were surprised to find out that they were the first African company ever to do so. From this unlikely position Readymade has been effective in designing for global brands that need unique ideas.

Could this be is the beginning of South African product designers emulating their world-beating peers in the other creative industries? Maybe that's South Africa's next surprise.

About the author: Tasos Calantzis is a South African product designer and founder of Readymade.

The IDSA/BusinessWeek 2006 Industrial Design Excellence (IDEA) awards have just been announced. Chris Conley, who chaired the Jury this year, describes this year's jury, his reasons for selecting them and the awards selection process, here's a snippet,

With the increasing profile of design in business and the broadening of design's role in innovation, I used the opportunity to shape a jury unlike those of previous years. I invited a broad range of professionals, targeting those I knew cared deeply about design and were involved routinely in creating new, successful products and services. But I wanted these jurors to come from marketing, business development, and senior business leadership positions in addition to industrial design.

Corporate design teams took the lead this year, with Japanese giant, Matsushita raking in 6 awards. BusinessWeek interviews Toyoyuki Uematsu, head of the Panasonic Design Company, as the corporation's design division is known. In the 6 years since Matsushita's CEO made design a priority and integrated the disparate design divisions under Uematsu, the company's products have undergone a visual change, creating a coherent brand strategy, and coinciding with net earning bounding to 15-year highs for the once ailing company.

Best Product Design 2006 was awarded to Decathlon, a French manufacturer of sports and outdoor equipment.

Among design consultancies, Ziba Design of Portland, Oregon, took the lead with 3 golds and a bronze, totalling 4 awards altogether. Note that of Panasonic's 6, only one was a gold. Ziba's work with Lenovo stands out in all aspects of what good design should be - indepth research, unerring insights and superlative form giving. Yes, DD is proud of Ziba, which means 'beautiful' in Farsi.

An insightful comment on culture specific design, such as Lenovo's shown above, came from Don Norman, guru of good design,

Juror Don Norman (author of Emotional Design and The Design of Everyday Things) said: "At first the judges said 'yuck' to the design but then changed their minds when the research showed the Chinese didn't want our sleek U.S. design but their own from their own culture."

The awards tables for corporate teams seems to demonstrate the companies who have committed themselves to good design - Samsung, Philips, Lenovo and Panasonic are already global brands. Is Decathlon on its way?

Of the three largest design consultancies by size, only DesignContinuum (250+ employees) makes a showing. Where are traditional winners IDEO this year? Innovating, I'm sure. In the meantime, DD says Yay! to newdealdesign, Stuart Karten Design, One and Co, BresslerGroup and Lunar Design.

Students from Art Center College of Design and the Pratt Institute have put their schools on the map, here are the Student Design winners.

DD's favorite was the Pluma, a Portuguese entry, by design firm Brandia Central which won the gold in packaging. Having used LPG gas extensively for home cooking, this gas cylinder is half the weight of the usual metal cans - perfect for maneuvring in small kitchens.

Finally, the IDSA Gallery has the exhaustive listings and descriptions of the 108 medal winners this year. Or browse all 108 in this slideshow.

Here are links to some information rich websites on new product strategy and development:

The New Product Development Body of Knowledge

An extensive collection of the A to Z of corporate strategy and new product development, covering basics such as Porter's Five Forces to the fuzzy front end and ideation techniques.

The Tabor Report on Product Strategy

Do you have a problem here? It is very rare that you'll perceive product strategy as the critical issue from within your company. The symptoms you'll notice are unfocused value propositions, poor press and analyst reviews, difficulty getting leads, no repeatability in sales cycles, endless pricing debates, poor sales volume, and a high degree of shelfware. You are likely to believe you have a "target market problem" or a need to "rework the go to market plan," when the problem is the product itself. For lots of psychological reasons, people outside your company will see a product issue much more clearly than you.

Product Design: One strategy for the Environment and Business

On waste from the Texas Government.

Guidelines for designers working on designs for the elderly

What is such a market looking for? In a recent study my organisation undertook with an American research corporation, the fundamental requirement of elderly people that emerged was that the product should enhance and not degrade their health. This conclusion, however does not have as easy application as might at first be thought.

New Product Introduction.

An outline of the NPI process along with a comprehensive list of tools and techniques used during the product design process.

Guide to effective product design.

Answering questions from "what is good design?" to "How do we reduce risks by prototyping?" Recommended - Briefing an Industrial Designer

Don Norman writes in his essay "Industrial Design: Claims without substance" on the importance of validating the design solution to a problem. Here's his introduction,

Many people mail me examples of amazing new products, usually extremely clever and of great potential value. Many is the time I have visited design schools across the world to be shown wonderful examples of student and faculty work, each cleverly done, each accompanied by a long explanation of why the product solves some long-endured real problem. But do they really work? Do they really solve problems? Nobody knows. The designers simply assert that they do.

Claims are worthless unless backed up by data. We will never know if the claims are true unless they are tested in controlled, sensible trials, where performance with the new device is compared with performance without, and moreover where the test is designed in such a way that it is fair, accurate, and unbiased. No, we don't need the full-scale experimental rigor of experimental psychology or a clinical test of a new drug, but we need proof of assertion.

Well worth the read. Also worth browsing through is his section on "In praise of good design" where products whose claims have been verified are emphasized.

LG Electronics has just won Red Dot's prestigious Design Team of the Year award with a corporate strategy of raising their image globally through the use of product design. From their design philosophy page:

Step One: The core management philosophy is the first and foremost element of their corporate strategy of embedding design as a means of raising their global brand image. In their words, "The message, which a corporate pursues such as spirits, visions, culture etc. including philosophy, should be effectively conveyed to customers for uplifting the corporate image.. Hence the management philosophy should be considered at the beginning."

Step Two: This is their formula for product identity. In their words, "PI(Product Identity) means to embody and to sustain the brand image through product design. CIPD, the process to make products' identity & uniqueness gradually for customers' recognition of brand and its value."

Step Three: How they see product identity's role in raising the overall corporate image of the company. In their words, "As an essential factor in connection between customers and company, product conveys of company to its customers. CIPD, Corporate Identity through Product Design, aims at propagation of sustaining LG's identity as well as its establishment through design activities, which will help us to gain the trust from customers."

Finally their global design organizational structure:

There have been a number of laws passed in recent years all focused on helping to ensure that people who have disabilities will be able to continue to participate in different aspects of daily life and to use the products and services they encounter in their lives. Since a number of these laws affect people who design products, there has been increased interest in disability access by manufacturers. There has also however, been some confusion between the laws and what they cover. This quicksheet is intended to give a quick and general overview of some of these laws. This is not a complete or comprehensive writeup and is somewhat simplified to make it easier to understand the major purpose and features of the different laws. At the end of each section is a link to a web site with more complete information about the laws and related regulations.

ADA - Americans with Disabilities Act

The ADA can be characterized as a civil rights law. It basically says that people with disabilities have a right to be able to access and use any facilities and programs that are available to other members of the public. For example, if you have a store or other service that you offer to the public, then it should be accessible to and usable by people who have disabilities.

If you are a manufacturer, it does NOT say that you must produce accessible products. You do have to make your stores accessible, as well as any parts of your company that you allow the public to access and use. You also have to make your company accessible to any employees who have disabilities and you cannot refuse to hire someone with a disability because of the disability, etc. But the ADA does not require anything particular of a company with regard to the accessibility of their products. (Though the ADA may require that your customers have accessible products if they use them in connection with their delivery of services to the public. (E.g. if you make ATMs) Some aspects of this are limited to what is not an undue burden. Other aspects are not. The ADAAG (ADA Accessibility Guidelines) set forth specific guidelines for accessibility for buildings and some devices (Phones, ATMs, Assistive Listening Systems). For more information see the U.S. Department of Justice Americans with Disabilities Act ADA home page. A list of Resources on the Americans with Disabilities Act is also available in the Information Resources section here.

Sec 255 of the Telecommunications Act

Unlike the ADA, this law specifically requires manufacturers of telecommunication products and services to make those products and services accessible to people with disabilities whenever it is "readily achievable" (i.e. it can be done with little effort or expense).

Section 255 states that: "MANUFACTURING- A manufacturer of telecommunications equipment or customer premises equipment shall ensure that the equipment is designed, developed, and fabricated to be accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities, if readily achievable. "TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES- A provider of telecommunications service shall ensure that the service is accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities, if readily achievable. "COMPATIBILITY- Whenever the requirements of subsections (b) and (c) are not readily achievable, such a manufacturer or provider shall ensure that the equipment or service is compatible with existing peripheral devices or specialized customer premises equipment commonly used by individuals with disabilities to achieve access, if readily achievable. The Access Board created a set of guidelines for Telecommunications Access which the FCC has adopted. The final rulemaking for Section 255 can be found on the FCC Disabilities Issues Task Force Section 255 page.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act

Section 508 does not require companies to do anything. It requires the US Government to purchase accessible Electronic and Information Technologies (E&IT) whenever it is not an "undue burden" to do so. Thus, there are marketing or sales incentives for industry to create accessible products if they want to sell them to the government. But there is no requirement that they do so.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires access to the Federal government's electronic and information technology. The law covers all types of electronic and information technology in the Federal sector and is not limited to assistive technologies used by people with disabilities. It applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use such technology. Federal agencies must ensure that this technology is accessible to employees and the public to the extent it does not pose an "undue burden." The law directs the Access Board to develop access standards for this technology that will become part of the Federal procurement regulations.

The scope of Section 508 is limited to the Federal sector. It does not apply to the private sector, nor does Section 508 impose requirements on the recipients of Federal funds (with the possible exception of recipients of Tech Act Grants to States). For more information see the Department of Justice Section 508 Home Page.

Courtesy TRACE Wisconsin

From the UK Design Council's new Design Factfinder site comes this interesting concept of 'design alert' businesses. Their definition from their glossary,

Design alert business

As part of our annual survey, we interviewed 1,500 businesses across the UK. From these, we identified 250 businesses that had observed a direct impact from the use of design on several business performance measures. We call these businesses 'design alert'. We went back to them with more detailed questions on their use of design and whether they could quantify the results. The bottom line benefits that design alert businesses have seen are explained in The link between design and business performance.

From the details of the research, the most outstanding factoid was this one:

Do design alert businesses employ designers at senior levels?

Half of design alert businesses have a designer at senior managerial and/or executive levels.Senior management is the most common level at which designers are found.

While the rest of the research demonstrates the increase in return on investment in design among 'design alert' businesses, nothing underscores their commitment than having designers at the seniormost positions in management.

The essential concept for this terracotta home composting unit called The Daily Dump is that is has been concieved as an open source design project. One where you can choose to download the design drawings and arrange to have the product made by your local potter (at least in India). Thus, believes the designer, Poonam Bir Kasturi, the IP is available for all to use, benefiting the individual potters, the environment and the households who begin to hygenically process their compostable waste. The Daily Dump offers a regular maintenance service for a small fee in Bangalore.

A detailed case study of the local, social and larger environmental impact will be available soon.

Herman D'Hooge, innovation strategist in the User-Centered Platform Solutions Division at Intel, explains a user-centered innovation process and how your company can use it to engineer and develop innovative products. D'Hooge also gives an example of a product - China Home Learning PC - that was developed for the Chinese consumer market with this strategy.

This is from Electronics Business Online and a good read. The sections covered by this case study include:

How to foster innovation
Translate process into engineering product requirements
Case study: the China Home Learning PC

And here is the summary:

People-inspired technology innovation increases the likelihood that a product or technology being developed will meet the needs and desires of actual users. As such, it is a risk-reduction technique that starts with understanding the needs and desires of real people and continues with working through an iterative creative process of defining user experiences and then translating that into actionable technical requirements.

Although technologists can simply be handed a technical requirements specification, there is tremendous value in involving engineers and technologists throughout the design process: from user research and observation to working with the user experience developers, because it instills a deeper appreciation of the reasons for designing the product and the resultant technology requirements. Using this process almost always leads to superior technology product solutions.

Electrolux is a global home appliance manufacturer who designs and develops products that are specifically created for particular regions or countries. They're taking the lead in connecting with their customers in a very special way.

For example, in Australia, they have just launched a luxury barbecue designed by fourth generation architect, Jeppe Utzon. His grandfather Jorn Utzon designed the legendary Sydney Opera House. To Electrolux, Utzon's design antecedants were impeccable for the Australian market, plus he was as Scandinavian as the company. Though Jeppe had never designed a product before or even barbecued (Copenhagen is rarely warm enough for outdoor cooking), Electrolux's Asia Pacific design head, Lars Erikson said in today's Australian Age,

"He was here and we had a vision and we talked about taking an Aussie product and injecting it with good Scandinavian design," Erikson says. "As a Scandinavian company, we don't want our products to look Asian or American, we want them to look Scandinavian."

Yet the 'barbie' is an integral part of Aussie culture and the final design, a sleek minimalist piece caused a design sensation. It's marketed as the first 'design inspired' BBQ, retailing at $8900. Here is a PDF of their design vision written by Lars Erikson.

Similarly, for India, Electrolux designed and developed an unusual washing machine, the 'Washy Talky' which instructs the user in three languages - English, Hindi or Tamil. Their rationale for this product demonstrates a deep understanding of how domestic chores are traditionally done in India, and by whom. From their site,

"In the past, middle-class families would have servants to do their laundry for them," explains Marija Borenius, corporate press officer for Electrolux. "Now they are doing it themselves, but they still feel anxious about it, since they don't have a lot of experience with how domestic appliances work."

Washy Talky ends that anxiety by guiding users through the washing process step by step with phrases like, "Add the detergent, close the lid and relax." If the user accidentally leaves the lid open, she will say, "Please close the lid."

Nidhi Malik, assistant manager marketing for Electrolux Kelvinator India, admits that one could always just refer to an owner's manual, but points out that women often prefer not to have to read manuals. "Also, in affluent homes where a maid is washing the clothes," she notes, "a machine that can guide her is a real blessing. Servants relate to Washy Talky as if it were an intelligent maid."

Electolux also runs an international student design competition, the Electrolux Design Lab. Last year's winner, a Singaporean student team developed an ionic clothing cleaning system.

Their combined activities seem like an example of using design to connect with their local markets around the world in relevant ways without losing their core brand identity and vision.

Although good design is almost impossible to define, common themes hold true across industry sectors and product types. A well-designed product tends to combine the following qualities:

* Useful
It works well and functions as promised. It does what it is expected to and satisfies a minimum or appropriate level of performance.

* Usable
It has appropriate ergonomics and user interface, considering how, where, how often and who will be using it.

* Desirable
It looks good! What looks good will be dependent upon the nature of the market, the lifestyle, culture, age, gender, education, occupation and place of use. What looks good is also dependent upon other competitive and complementary products. In general, it is important for the product aesthetics to be appropriate for the market, users and usage environment. A good test is if customers are prepared to pay a premium because they desire it.

* Producible
It must be capable of economical volume manufacture using appropriate production methods, considering the impact on the organisation of new components, assemblies and processes. Producible products combine optimisation of assembly and manufacture with modularity and platform strategies.

* Profitable
It must result in sufficient business rewards, measured in terms of market share, gross margin, break even, turnover or sales volume. Financial rewards may also be supplemented by other business benefits.

* Differentiated
The benefits of good design are seen in products which are clearly differentiated. Differentiation can be gained through satisfying core user benefits in new ways, by delivering excellence in one of the product's physical attributes or by providing leading support services around the physical goods. The figure below demonstrates these 'layers' and indicates some of the characteristics within each:

1. The inner layer represents the core benefits which are delivered to customers and users.

2. The middle layer signifies the actual product attributes which can be split into the tangible attributes that are measurable and quantifiable - the performance characteristics - and the 'intangible' attributes. The intangible attributes are those subjective qualities which are often viewed as opinion based, such as appearance, style, feel, character and ease of use.

3. The final layer represents the business and market attributes which are essential to promote, sell and support the product.

Courtesy Better Product Design

Hewlett-Packard is making a name for itself as a leader in green design. From their website,

Design-for-Environment (DfE) is an engineering perspective in which the environmentally related characteristics of a product, process or facility are optimized. Together, HP's product stewards and product designers identify, prioritize and recommend environmental improvements through a company-wide DfE program. HP's DfE guidelines derive from evolving customer expectations and regulatory requirements, but they are also influenced by the personal commitment of its employees.

The Design for Environment program has three priorities:

* Energy efficiency - reduce the energy needed to manufacture and use our products
* Materials innovation - reduce the amount of materials used in our products and develop materials that have less environmental impact and more value at end-of-life
* Design for recyclability - design equipment that is easier to upgrade and/or recycle

HP's DfE guidelines recommend that its product designers consider the following:

* Place environmental stewards on every design team to identify design changes that may reduce environmental impact throughout the product's life cycle.
* Eliminate the use of polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame-retardants where applicable.
* Reduce the number and types of materials used, and standardize on the types of plastic resins used.
* Use molded-in colors and finishes instead of paint, coatings or plating whenever possible.
* Help customers use resources responsibly by minimizing the energy consumption of HP's printing, imaging and computing products.
* Increase the use of pre-and post-consumer recycled materials in product packaging.
* Minimize customer waste burdens by using fewer product or packaging materials overall.
* Design for disassembly and recyclability by implementing solutions such as the ISO 11469 plastics labeling standard, minimizing the number of fasteners and the number of tools necessary for disassembly.

By intending to use the same concept as that of the Wikipedia, the USPTO has announced their Peer to Patent Program, in order to better scrutinize new patent applications without increasing the load on their existing manpower resources. From the Daily Tech,

One of the goals of the program is to excessively scrutinize inventions while increasing certainty and stability in the patent program. To get some more information about the Peer to Patent program, please look around this website, which also includes a very extensive FAQ section. An interesting policy is the project's response on companies or individuals that may attempt to game the system:

Competition will drive more information into the process. So long as people make valid arguments as rated by their peers, their personal agenda is irrelevant. Having many participants in the process dilutes the effect of any bad apples or unconstructive participants. Within any social reputation system, norms evolve to safeguard the quality of participation and we can expect something similar here.

Certainly, there are some interesting connotations with this idea. Imagining IBM, AMD and Intel validating or invalidating each other's patents would solve dozens, if not hundreds of fringe IP law suits before they even occur.

Talking about fringe IP lawsuits, the BBC has this news snippet on Walmart seeking to protect it's use of the "Smiley Face" as a trademark in the United States. At this point, no one is quite sure who designed the ubiquitious logo.

Meanwhile, in another article, the rise of technology and the internet has resulted in branding turf wars between brands who previously shared a common name - Polo, for example.

Disputes really stepped up a gear with the advent of the internet. The use of domain names has led to turf wars between the owners of trade marks that previously had happily co-existed.

AK Designs of Bluffdale, UT, creates a new product category that fills an unmet need among customers.

Styling, innovation and affordability put AK's offerings snugly between low-tech "banana" chairs and elaborate electronic chairs, decked out with speakers and leather, that sell for up to $2,000. AK's products were attractive to mass retailers like Costco and Best Buy, among others. Gamers looking for comfort and styling could find what they needed with AK Rockers, which can cost as little as $79.99.

"They (Best Buy) thought it would be great with gamers," Warner said. "They pulled it in and it blew up. They sold so many units." Design is the key to the young company's success, he said.

"These buyers - Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, whoever it is - they recognize that's an intangible. Anyone who has the right design sense, that understands the customer, it's gold."

Best Buy, for example, has about a dozen products in various categories it wants AK to develop. They're not the only ones smitten by the company. Costco wanted AK to develop an office chair; Best Buy did likewise only a few weeks later. The AK Octane, for both gamers and office workers, was born.

"We have three main principles that have to be part of anything that goes out our door, whether it's a product or if it's product design or sales packet. It's got to be cool, it's got to be innovative and it's got to be intuitive. When you look at it, you get it. You know how to use it. It welcomes you to it. It's not something you have to figure out," Warner said.

What social developments will create new growth opportunities and/or challenges for global businesses in the future?

"In creating the Top 20, we wanted to get beyond the trend lists that are really just about the U.S. or rich countries, and think about consumers everywhere," Tom Conger, founder of Social Technologies commented. "While a trend may be more mature in one part of the world than another, many of these trends are happening in the poorest nations, as well as the richest."

The 20 trends identified, in no particular order, are:

* Cultural Flows The spread of ideas, media, products, brands and lifestyles, collectively referred to as cultural flow, to new places is increasing as the number of cultural poles rises and the world becomes more interconnected. Cultural flows are significant because they expose consumers in both developed and developing markets to new ideas, products, and ways of thinking.

* Time Pressure People around the world are feeling more pressured for time in their lives. Many consumers feel they have less time to manage mounting levels of activity, information, and choice, and the resulting accelerated pace of life. While time pressure and its effects are felt most intensely in developed countries, change in occurring most rapidly in emerging markets.

* Cultural Multipolarity The ability to produce and disseminate culture in its modern forms is rising in more places around the world. New centers of cultural power are ascending, driving the emergence of cultural multipolarity.

* Asia Rising The countries of Asia are strengthening their economic and cultural clout and boosting their prominence in the world. This is clear whether measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates, increasing scientific and technological capabilities, the growing variety of goods and services now available to Asian consumers, or simply the feeling of buzzing energy on a busy street in Bangalore, Shanghai, Bangkok.

* Media Spread More people have access to mass media than ever before. Media devices including radios, televisions, computers and mobile phones are becoming more affordable, while new broadcast media, like satellite and the Internet, are increasing choices and accessibility.

* Social Freedom The range of personal, political and economic options open to individuals is growing around the world. Propelled by political change, economic growth, and information flows, social freedom is expanding the range of choices available to consumers and allowing individualism to spread.

* Transparency No, this isn't Sarbanes Oxley, or at least not entirely. The increasing ability to gather, store, and share information is making it easier to know about people, products, companies, and governments, propelling the world towards transparency. Driving factors include information technology, the spread of media, social freedom, and rising incomes and education levels.

* Monetization Consumers are increasingly substituting purchased products, devices, and services for labor and time. As more people equate time with money, many are choosing monetized goods and services - from packaged flour to washing machines to dog-walking services - that offer convenience and time savings.

* Rising Mobility People are upgrading their mobility, enabling them to move farther and faster than before. Rising mobility in emerging markets will be transformational, impacting lifestyles, and opening up new areas of demand for mobility-related goods and services.

* Migration Over the next few decades, international and internal migration will continue at high levels, altering both the lives of people moving and the societies and regions receiving them. This migration will affect language, social values, food, entertainment, and many other aspects of daily life.

* Networked World Networked information devices are spreading, enabling new connections between people, organizations, and objects and allowing more information to travel faster. Already, 15 percent of the 6.4 billion people on the planet have some form of direct Internet access, and the number with access to fixed and mobile phone networks is higher still, at over 2 billion. The networked world trend is having profound impacts, which are likely to accelerate.

* Consumerism Thanks to globalization and rising incomes, consumerism is becoming an option for more than ever before. As this happens, lifestyles that rely on consumer goods - and center on the acquisition of these goods - continue to spread around the world.

* Changing Families The basic size and structure of families are changing all over the world. Fertility rates are falling, resulting in fewer births and smaller families. Smaller families are driving the aging of the world population, and changing the structure of many societies in emerging and developing markets.

* Women's Power Women around the globe continue to gain social, political, and economic power. They are exercising greater control over their lives and pursuing new options, propelled by better education and changing values and social attitiudes.

* Electrification Access to electricity is growing around the world, and a number of developing nations are pushing forward aggressively with electrification programs. Electricity changes lives - how people cook and do daily chores, how they work, their access to entertainment and information, and the general pace of life.

* Aging The global population is not only aging, but will age faster in coming decades than in the past. By 2050, the median age is projected to rise by 10 years, to 37 and there will be nearly 2 billion people aged 60 and over.

* Ethical Consumption Ethical consumption integrates personal values into purchasing choices. Rather than focusing only on standard consumer variables such as price, quality, and convenience, buyers consider ethical, religious, political, and other beliefs in their decisions.

* Population Growth Population growth continues to be one of the world's most significant trends. Every decade adds hundreds of millions of people to the global population, with the vast majority in medium- and lower-income countries.

* Growing Middle-Class Over the last century the emergence of large middle-income groups within more developed societies has gone hand-in-hand with the creation of modern consumerism. Now a new wave of middle-class growth is unfolding in emerging markets.

* Urbanization The number of people living in urban areas has risen sharply in recent decades, from roughly 1 billion in 1960, to 3 billion now. People's lives change when they move from rural areas to cities. They can do different work, increase their income, and encounter new social rules, ideas and lifestyles. The fastest urban growth will occur in emerging and developing markets, driving the creation of vast numbers of new customers.

Rebrand100 has courteously shared their FAQ on rebranding with DesignDirectory, here are some key questions verbatim:

Q : When do organizations need to rebrand?

A : Organizations rebrand when they need to address strategic business goals, such as

* Better align with shifting customer preferences
* Manage a merger, acquisition or change in advertising strategy
* Extend products and services into new markets
* Showcase efforts for the environment or social responsibility
* Establish brand cohesiveness and consistency across media
* Revitalize or modernize an existing brand
* Spin-off new products or services, or develop a sub-brand
* Manage changes in internal management structure or culture

Q : What is the value of rebranding to the consumer?

A : The value of rebranding is in improving experiences that impact people's lives. Brands evolve to keep up with changing demographics, consumer lifestyles, various ethnicities becoming more prevalent and changing spending habits. Rebranding affects many touchpoints that provide consumer experiences, for example product delivery, or the bills you receive, as well as packaging, advertising and the retail environment.

Q : Do consumers know when something has been rebranded?

A : Not necessarily. Rebrands can be very visible, as in the case of new packaging or a new experience that resonates with consumers. In general, the more disciplines involved in the rebrand, the more visible it is to consumers. Sometimes rebranding is subtle, or purely internal to signal organizational shifts.

Q : How is rebranding different from branding?

A : Ongoing evolution makes rebranding different from creating new brands. Rebranding requires that a brand had previously existed, and had some identifiable personality in the minds of clients or consumers.

Q : How do companies approach rebranding successfully?

A : Successful rebranding requires a plan and a strategy. Companies need to assess the current brand equities, the marketplace and state of the business. They need to retain what works by leveraging existing brand equities to allow the brand to reemerge with a unique presence, a riveting promise and a fresh approach.

Q : What are the most common mistakes companies make in rebranding?

A : There are three common mistakes in rebranding:

1 . Not leveraging existing brand equity and the goodwill the brand has built among current customers.
2. The internal team is skeptical and internal buy-in does not occur.
3. The rebrand lacks credibility or is a superficial facelift with no broader strategy

Q : When are rebrands unsuccessful?

A : Unsuccessful rebrands share a few characteristics. In many cases, they're simply not believable. Sometimes organizations discard or ignore existing brand equities, or do not take consumer feedback into account.

Q : Are there best practices for rebranding?

A : It's essential that:

* a multidisciplinary conversation take place throughout the brand's evolution
* creatives are part of the core strategic team
* the organization is clear on its strategic goals
* existing brand equities are not discounted
* internal buy-in is obtained from employees
* there's an emotional connection, some sensory response by customers

Universal Design is defined as the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.

Principle One: Equitable Use
The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities

Guidelines
* Provide the same means of use for all users: identical whenever possible; equivalent when not.
* Avoid segregating or stigmatizing any users.
* Provisions for privacy, security, and safety should be equally available to all users.
* Make the design appealing to all users.

Principle Two: Flexibility in Use
The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.

Guidelines
* Provide choice in methods of use.
* Accommodate right- or left-handed access and use.
* Facilitate the user's accuracy and precision.
* Provide adaptability to the user's pace.

Principle Three: Simple and Intuitive
Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.

Guidelines
* Eliminate unnecessary complexity.
* Be consistent with user expectations and intuition.
* Accommodate a wide range of literacy and language skills.
* Arrange information consistent with its importance.
* Provide effective prompting and feedback during and after task completion.

Principle Four: Perceptible Information
The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user's sensory abilities.

Guidelines
* Use different modes (pictorial, verbal, tactile) for redundant presentation of essential information.
* Provide adequate contrast between essential information and its surroundings.
* Maximize "legibility" of essential information.
* Differentiate elements in ways that can be described (i.e., make it easy to give instructions or directions).
* Provide compatibility with a variety of techniques or devices used by people with sensory limitations.

Principle Five: Tolerance for Error
The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.

Guidelines
* Arrange elements to minimize hazards and errors: most used elements, most accessible; hazardous elements eliminated, isolated, or shielded.
* Provide warnings of hazards and errors.
* Provide fail safe features.
* Discourage unconscious action in tasks that require vigilance.

Principle Six: Low Physical Effort
The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.

Guidelines
* Allow user to maintain a neutral body position.
* Use reasonable operating forces.
* Minimize repetitive actions.
* Minimize sustained physical effort

Principle Seven: Size and Space for approach and use
Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user's body size, posture, or mobility.

Guidelines
* Provide a clear line of sight to important elements for any seated or standing user.
* Make reach to all components comfortable for any seated or standing user.
* Accommodate variations in hand and grip size.
* Provide adequate space for the use of assistive devices or personal assistance.

The Principles of Universal Design were developed by The Center for Universal Design in collaboration with a consortium of universal design researchers and practitioners from across the United States. Copyright © 1997 NC State University, The Center for Universal Design.

The ups and downs of the auto industry have been in the news of late, particularly on the design front. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn's now well known speech has been covered extensively, but his words on the need for good design are well worth highlighting,

"Bland cookie-cutter designs undermine value as does price-dominated advertising," Ghosn said. "Permanent sales put us in the same category as mattresses and three-day suits.

"It doesn't have to be this way. Customers love their Blackberries, TiVos and big screen TVs. We must ignite the passion of buyers not just with cars with 500 horsepower and 1G skid pad capability."

Ghosn also took a swipe at retro car designs.

"When a culture starts to mine its past, it's usually because people are afraid of the future," he said.

A review of this season's major auto shows points out the general trend amongst automakers - 'frantic' was the adjective used - to churn out something for everyone. They offered vehicles powered by diesel fuel, hybrid systems and ethanol, massive pickups and tiny subcompacts, nostalgic muscle cars and futuristic crossovers. Here's the summary:

What's happened: Automakers, flush with new technology and eager to figure out rapidly changing consumer tastes, unveiled hundreds of new vehicles this year at the major auto shows in Detroit, Chicago, Geneva and New York.

Why the onslaught: Finding the right mix of vehicles to draw in consumers is more essential than ever - especially for struggling U.S. automakers General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. - because of fierce competition and high gasoline prices.

Filling niches: Automakers are responding with more products to fill every niche, which is a boon for consumers but painful and expensive for U.S. automakers.

Any wonder Ghosn was moved to speak as he did at the New York show keynote last week? Seems like a clear lack of focus.

Meanwhile, other manufacturers are pumping up their design and innovation investments - Honda breaks ground for a $15 million new design center in California while Aston Martin expands an ambitious retail program with an emphasis on design and detailing.

And a new US automobile manufacturer, Carbon Motors, announces their intent to collaborate with Georgia tech to develop the world's first vehicle built expressly for law enforcement agencies.

The company, which will market its innovative "purpose-built" vehicle directly to customers, also plans to revolutionize U.S. automobile manufacturing as a lean and integrated organization. In March, the firm announced plans to locate its headquarters, research and development center, direct sales center, customer service, and mid-volume production and logistics operations in the metropolitan Atlanta area.

Fortune Magazine says, Design guru Scott Henderson has won numerous awards for his cutting-edge work for companies like Cuisinart, Hewlett-Packard, and OXO International. Today, he's helping design a box to hold diaper rash ointment.
[...]
To gain an edge, smart manufacturers are doing whatever it takes to capture the attention (and aesthetics) of today's chic parents-to-be who are willing -sometimes even eager - to pay top dollar for products that seamlessly blend fashion and function.

"They realize, like so many companies don't, that design is the last great competitive advantage," says Henderson, who has two kids himself, and says that Skip Hop [bags pictured above] is his favorite client.

And not just companies but designers themselves are jumping in the fray with products specially created for young children and infants, starting their own firms like Arizona based Boon who recently got noticed by Target after winning the Innovation award at the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association trade show with the FrogPod shown below.

The Intellicot, created by four men whose final industrial product design project at Britain's Coventry University turned into "a labour of love" is another such story of a company created around a product. It is an aquarium-like creation, with classic wooden bars swapped for a breakout-proof polycarbonate glass wall and features a built-in video camera, connected to a portable monitor, that can be carried around the house.

Other trends showing up in the baby product segment of late include Walmart's entry into organic cotton baby clothes and organic baby foods plus all natural cleaning products. Looks like green is in as well as good looks.

Via the BBC comes news of this house coming up in Southern California built out of scrapped Boeing 747.

"The recycling of the 4.5 million parts of this 'big aluminium can' is seen as an extreme example of sustainable reuse and appropriation. American consumers and industry throw away enough aluminium in a year to rebuild our entire aeroplane commercial fleet every three months."

The Rochester Institute of Technology has been awarded a $465,000 grant by the Henry Luce Foundation for the creation of an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Sustainability.

"We fully expect this program to advance the development of environmentally and socially sound industrial system design while also educating engineers and policy makers around the world on the importance of sustainable principles," adds Nabil Nasr, director of the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies and leader of RIT's Interdisciplinary Design Team for the Ph.D. "The ultimate goal is to produce graduates, at the highest educational level, that are equipped to become leaders in creating a more sustainable society both in their own communities and around the world."

HP wins the first Design for Recycling Award. From the announcement made by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries,

This year ISRI chose to honor a company or individual whose product design has incorporated one or more of the following:

* Reduction in the number of different recyclable materials
* Reduction or elimination of hazardous constituents
* Increased yield of the product's recyclables
* Improvement in the safety of recycling
* Design that allows for easy disassembly for recycling

Here's more information on Green Product Design and how to implement it.

I found Paul Graham's essay Design and Research to contain some extremely powerful concepts on design for the user. His lucid language better articulates some of the issues around user centered design that we struggle with daily. Here are some particularly strong snippets:

The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving. So ultimately we're aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.

The answer to the paradox, I think, is that you have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. It's much like being a doctor. You can't just treat a patient's symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.

This focus on the user is a kind of axiom from which most of the practice of good design can be derived, and around which most design issues center.

If good design must do what the user needs, who is the user? When I say that design must be for users, I don't mean to imply that good design aims at some kind of lowest common denominator. You can pick any group of users you want. If you're designing a tool, for example, you can design it for anyone from beginners to experts, and what's good design for one group might be bad for another. The point is, you have to pick some group of users. I don't think you can even talk about good or bad design except with reference to some intended user.

You're most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer himself. When you design something for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be for people you consider to be less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated.

That's a problem, because looking down on the user, however benevolently, seems inevitably to corrupt the designer. I suspect that very few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You can see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Java, were created for other people to use.

If you think you're designing something for idiots, the odds are that you're not designing something good, even for idiots.

From John Trenouth comes this excellent short deliberation on whether first to market is more advantageous than waiting for something well designed. Here is his post in full,

The oft parroted common wisdom is that to succeed you need to get your thing to market first. I generally skeptical of anything oft parroted. Sure the early bird gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese. Here are a few examples:

* VHS. Worse than betamax on nearly every level. What's a betamax?
* Quicken. At the time of Inuit's 1984 release of Quicken there had already been over 40 commercial software packages for personal finance
* Office. Know anyone who still uses Lotus123, VisiCalc or WordPerfect?
* World of Warcraft.Released at a time when there were countless MMORPGs, most of which also fantasy based, and it left them all in the dust
* Dyson Vacuums. Upstart company is devouring the tired old vacuum cleaner market
* Del.icio.us. Blink.com came first by years, had vastly more users, and more funding, but its long gone now and Del.icio.us is the gold standard for online bookmarking.

I suppose I am just a little biased. As a designer I seek to optimize the user's experience with a product and the value they get from it. But in a true first-to-market context the value is in the raw capabilities the new product's functionality exposes (i'll post on the related basis of competition issue shortly). So, first-to-market scenarios are primarily marketing plays, while best-to-market scenarios are iNPD (engineering, marketing and design) plays.

But if you really are first to market, that means your latent market has lived well enough without your product all these years. So would a few more days or weeks spent on design really be too much to ask?

One argument might be that "we have to ship 1.0 to start realizing revenue, then we'll let the designers do their thing." Of course downstream redesignings are, generally speaking, drastically more costly than upstream design.

Another argument might be "we need to move now and capture market share before our competitors do." Forget the myopia of letting your competitors define your product strategies, but if your competitors are in fact that hot on your heels then now is the time to start redesigning your product, not after you and your competitor both deploy roughly the same product at roughly the same time for roughly the same customers. Competition then becomes a big stalemated game of rock, paper, scissors.

Check out Ari Paparo's post about how his experiences at Blink show how it is more important to get it right than to get there first.

From the PDF of The 25 Most Innovative companies in the world, here are the Top 10 companies, their rankings last year, and the reason Why they are considered Innovative.

Here is a round up of some upcoming events, workshops and conferences to note on your calender:

May 22-24, 2006, Boston MA

The 4th Annual Front End of Innovation conference co-sponsored by the PDMA and the Institute for International Research. The keynote speaker line-up includes Clayton Christensen, Professor and Author of "The Innovator's Dilemma" and "The Innovator's Solution"; Terry Jones, Founder and Former CEO of Travelocity; Tom Kelley, Author of "The Art of Innovation: Lessons Learned from IDEO" and "Ten Faces of Innovation"; Claudia Kotchka, Vice President of Design Innovation and Strategy at Procter & Gamble; Renee Mauborgne, Professor and Author of "Blue Ocean Strategy"; and many more. Peter A. Koen, Associate Professor in the Wesley J. Howe School of Technology Management, Stevens Institute of Technology, will chair.

May 26-28, 2006, Pacific Grove, CA

The Overlap is an un-conference for anyone who wants to learn more about merging business practices with design-centric problem solving and customer understanding. Speakers include Clement Mok, Lorraine Justice, Brad Nemer, Tom Mulhern, Richard Farson, Erin Liman, Chris Conley and Kristian Simsarian. Space is very limited and registration is by invitation only, please contact Victor Lombardi for more information. Organizers include Steve Portigal, Jess McMullin, Dirk Knemeyer, John Zapolski and your editor.

June 6th, 2006, San Francisco, CA

Products exist in a vast, often-messy environment of services, brands, cultures and competitors. But successful companies are realizing that deliberately and strategically designing products for the context in which they live can result in more imaginative, better integrated, and ultimately more humane offerings. From MP3 players and gaming consoles to kitchen appliances and office furniture, this panel discussion will focus on how to incorporate holistic thinking into product development, creating objects that are not only sensitive to their surroundings, but often define them. Moderator: Jessie Scanlon, BusinessWeek; Panelists: Diego Rodriguez, IDEO & Metacool; Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting; Peter Rojas, Engadget; Robyn Waters, RW Trend

Register now!

Creativity Courses in Europe: Summer 06

The Creativity Workshop helps people believe in and develop their imagination through using a unique series of exercises in memoir, creative writing, visual arts, sense perception, brainstorming, and storytelling.

Crete: June 19 - 28
Provence: June 29 - July 8
Florence: July 9 - 18
Barcelona: July 19 - 28
Prague: July 28 - August 6
Dublin: August 6 - 15
Bruges: August 15 - 24

Green product design requires a team approach to product development to ensure that each phase of the process - needs analysis, conceptual design, physical and functional attribute trade-offs, materials selection, process planning, production, use and service, marketing, distribution, and final disposition - is considered concurrently. The following steps address both corporate-level and product-level issues:

Develop Business Strategies to Capture Value from Lifecycle Thinking:
Cross-functional teams (including designers, purchasing, EHS, and operations) can explore opportunities to create business value while reducing environmental impacts across the product lifecycle.

Practice Full-Cost Accounting:
Full-cost or total cost accounting aims to improve financial analysis by incorporating the costs of product disposal and environmental impact - data that is often neglected by traditional accounting systems. Thus it helps identify opportunities to reduce waste and develop innovative business models.

Explore Reuse Options for Materials and Products:
"Closed-loop" production allows manufacturers to reuse materials and components in the creation of new original products. "Down-cycling" is possible when materials cannot be reused in the original product but can be reused in other, less refined products. For example, some fabric is reused as sound-deadening material in cars. Closed-loop manufacturing is preferable to down-cycling; its processes eliminate waste and resource use because waste serves as the resource. Companies can reuse materials internally or sell their "waste" to other companies that use it as raw material. Some companies specialize in using reusable materials and can be good partners in extended product responsibility efforts.

Perform Required Analyses During Product Design and Development:
Consider the environmental impacts of the project at every phase. Look at the effects of the manufacturing processes, the product distribution system, the product's intended use and operation, and eventual disposition. For each phase, specifically identify and evaluate the use of resources including energy and water, the creation of waste, effluents and other emissions, and potential effects on the health and safety of workers and users.

Ground rules for Green Product Design:

o Don't simply design products. Design product systems and life cycles and, when practical, design services. Customers want a solution for a certain problem, which may call for a service instead of a product.

o Don't assume that natural materials are always better. Some synthetics may have less impact on the environment than the extraction of a natural resource.

o Don't forget energy consumption. Many design teams focus their attention on material selection without considering the amount of energy needed to produce or process the material.

o Attempt to increase or extend product lifetime. Products that cannot be reused are often not economically or ecologically efficient or effective.

o Use less materials. This may seem obvious, but it is more complex than it appears. Take a critical look at product dimensions, materials strength, and production techniques to ensure that materials are used efficiently.

o Use recycled materials or recovered components. It is not enough to design products that are recyclable; incorporate already recycled material into the design.

Develop Markets for Green-Designed Products:
To attract consumers that support sustainability, many companies advertise their design for environment initiatives. Companies with reuse initiatives may find value in developing incentives and marketing these programs so that consumers will know how to return the products and will be motivated to do so.

Publicize and Celebrate Success:
Get the word out to employees, customers, suppliers and the community and reap the benefits of good public relations and responsible corporate citizenship.

Content summarized from BSR.

In the news today,

Venture capitalist John Doerr made his name and fortune with early investments in Netscape Communications, Amazon.com , Google and other pioneering tech firms that went from scrappy start-ups to household names.

Now, he and his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, are placing big bets on an emerging sector he calls "green technology," one he believes could become as lucrative as information technology and biotechnology.

Menlo Park-based Kleiner Perkins plans to set aside $100 million of its latest $600 million fund for technologies that help provide cleaner energy, transportation, air and water.

"This field of greentech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century," Doerr said. "There's never been a better time than now to start or accelerate a greentech venture."

As one of Silicon Valley's most respected investors, Doerr's decision to champion green technology as the next big thing is generating buzz in the venture capital community.
[...]
VCs point to the global forces driving greentech investment: the rising cost of fuel, the economic expansion of China, India and other Asian nations; and growing worries over global warming.

"In my opinion, it's one of the most pressing global challenges we face," Doerr said. "It's causing the nations of the world to put an even higher priority than we have now on innovation."

How can you begin to incorporate 'green' principles in your product development process? Start with an introduction to Green Product Design and it's benefits to your entire firm then steps to implement it.

'Green technologies' are creating a buzz as the next big thing for the investment community, and 'green products' will soon be in the market. Here's an introduction to Green Product Design:

Green product design, also known as design for environment (DfE), design for eco-efficiency or sustainable product design, involves proactively addressing environmental considerations in the earliest stages of the product development process in order to minimize negative environmental impacts throughout the product's life cycle.

Green product design can encompass material selection, resource use, production requirements and planning for the final disposition (recycling, reuse, or disposal) of a product. It is not a stand-alone methodology but one that must be integrated with a company's existing product design so that environmental parameters can be balanced with traditional product attributes such as quality, cost, and functionality.

Green products can be made with fewer materials and can be designed to be more easily upgraded, disassembled, recycled, and reused than their conventional counterparts.

Implementing green product design can provide numerous benefits to a company. Focusing on resource efficiencies can reduce costs and often shorten production time. Because designing green products sometimes requires bringing diverse functional groups to the design table, green product design efforts can also drive product and process innovation.

Companies are increasingly regarding green product design as a comprehensive way to address pollution laws, resource use concerns, and restrictions on hazardous or toxic materials. Green product design can also provide an important tool in helping companies meet Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) mandates, such as requirements by the European Union that electronics manufacturers take back and recycle end-of-life products.

Next: A summary of how to implement a green product design and development process at your company.

Courtesy BSR.

This is an outline of the simplified process of selecting a design firm. This is not intended to be exhaustive and each topic will be covered in greater detail in future posts. Here is a suggested checklist of criteria by which to evaluate each firm.

Step 1 - Selection

a. Identify objectives, critical issues and program
b. Establish selection time frame and brief
c. Invite appropriate firms to submit written proposals presenting their qualifications and capability
d. Evaluate proposals are evaluated and a short list determined
e. Arrange tours of your company/site for the shortlisted firms
f. Conduct interviews and portfolio reviews and rank shortlisted firms order of preference

Step 2 - Definition

a. Top ranked firm is invited to participate in further discussion to develop a fuller understanding of the project requirement
b. Scope of service required for project is agreed and fees negotiated
c. Upon agreement, the creative/design process commences, as per the agreed scale of fees
d. If agreement cannot be reached with the top ranked firm, negotiations are broken off and commenced with second ranked firm and so on until agreement is reached

Step 3 - Retention

a. The agreement covering the above negotiated arrangement is executed
b. All firms involved are advised of the outcome of the selection process
c. A report is prepared setting out the reasons for the final selection - compare against suggested Selection checklist

As you can see, this resembles the candidate selection process for a job opening.

Courtesy AGDA

Packaging design can be viewed in four different ways:

• a means of protecting the contents of a package
• a contributor to the cost of the end product
• a sales canvas on which to promote the product's attributes and benefits
• a part of the product experience itself.

While many companies have traditionally considered packaging as one or both of the first two points, we're going to take a look at the last two - as it is here where design is concerned with adding real value. Whether you're a manufacturer or a retailer, packaging design should be viewed as an investment not a cost. Unfortunately too many businesses still look first at the price of design development rather than the value of the work.

A notable example of value addition is Target's new medicine bottle. Designed by Deborah Adler, a 29-year-old graphic designer whose ClearRx prescription-packaging system was launched last year to much acclaim. This NY Metro article analyses the design changes Adler made in order to improve and correct issues with existing systems.

Packaging design in the modern age has gone way beyond simple functional benefits. It is now one of the most sophisticated and powerful examples of the designer's craft. Most products are meaningless (or at least undifferentiated) without their packaging. It can often end up becoming the thing of real value above and beyond the actual product itself - the packaging becomes the brand.

An iconic example of the integration of a brand and it's packaging is the classic Coca Cola bottle, now a familiar shape no matter what is done to it. Designed deliberately to be "recognized in the dark" or even if broken, it is an example of packaging design as enduring art.

A well-designed pack must address the needs of its life cycle. This life cycle runs from the moment it is used to wrap its product (whether this is by hand or in a factory), through its journey to the point of sale, followed by its journey to the point of use and - finally with increasingly tough environmental laws - to its after-use. The WRAP Innovation Fund supports corporate efforts to decrease packaging waste through grants and research.

Good packaging leads to increased sales - Metaphase Design Group recently made news with their Listerine bottle redesign. Sales grew by double digits,  when  the old whiskey-bottle-style container was replaced with a design that features a built-in hand grip and a larger cap. The grip makes the bottle easier to lift, while the big mouth encourages buyers to chug straight from the container. It used to take about six months for consumers to finish off jumbo bottles of mouthwash. Now they empty them more quickly which means more frequent trips to the store to restock.

Increasingly, as big box retailers such as Walmart focus on improving their supply chain efficiencies, package design can play a large role in shaving shipping and inventory costs as well.

RFID technology enabled Gillette to get their new Fusion razor on store shelves 11 days faster than its normal turn-around time for product launches, which translates into 11 days of sales in 400 stores that the retailers and Gillette might have otherwise missed.

Gillette managers attribute the swiftness of the Fusion launch to the added visibility the tagged goods provided the company. This visibility began as the goods arrived at the retailers' distribution centers and ended, most importantly, at the retailers' box-crushing machines, where reads of the Fusion case tags allowed Gillette to infer that all contents had been placed on shelves. In cases where the retailer's feedback network showed the Fusion razors or promotional displays had reached a retail store's back room, but no read events were recorded showing the goods being brought to the sales floor in a timely manner, Gillette contacted the managers of those stores and requested the razors and displays be brought out.

- Some content adapted from Design Council UK.

The final part of our four part summarization of methods of evaluating design,(parts one, two and three).

One goal of design evaluation is to get beyond a first impression where one simply "likes" or "dislikes" a work of design. The aim is to go the next step to understand why the designer made the design decisions he or she did, and to assess the appropriateness of those choices. With practice, you will find that you can appreciate works of design which you might not initially like because you now understand the logic and merits of the design's form, function, and significance.

Form, Function, Significance

This method of evaluation looks at three overlapping dimensions of any type of design: its visual FORM, its intended FUNCTION or functional performance, and its various forms of meaning and SIGNIFICANCE.

Design Evaluation Criteria

The following are key questions one can ask and answer using a variety of visual examples drawn from the world of design, both past and present. These questions are organized into three categories pertaining to the design's function, its visual form, and its significance or meaning.

FUNCTION

What is the design's function of purpose?
How is this function fulfilled?
What is the genealogy (origin) of this function?

FORM

What is the design's formal (visual) logic and "vocabulary"?
What is influencing this form?
What is the genealogy of this form?

SIGNIFICANCE

What is the design's perceived significance or meaning?
What is the design's general significance?
What is the design's historical significance?
Does the design carry symbolic meaning?
What is the design's impact?

This is the third of four methods of design evaluation presented by Jack Williamson, Cranbrook Academy of Art. Here are Parts One Two and Four.

Aims, Means, Consequences

This method of evaluation was developed by Peter Madsen to assess the ethical implications of human decisions. Although not originally developed to evaluate design, it is very useful in assessing design at different developmental stages: during design conception (when "aims" are important), during design execution (when "means" are important) , or after a design has been implemented and exists as an independent product, communication or environment (when "consequences" are important).

To understand this method, it is useful to work backwards from "consequences." The method's purpose is to understand how consequences, both good and bad, are related to, and in most cases determined by, aims and means. For example, a good consequence would most likely require a good aim to precede it. However, a good aim does not necessarily guarantee a good outcome, because the means employed may be inadequate to achieve the intended aim.

For example, a good design aim ("design a signage system for a hospital that serves all users") might not be realized if the wrong means are employed (a designer is used who possesses no prior experience designing hospital way finding systems, or a fabricator is used who utilizes inappropriate materials, like pigments that prematurely fade with exposure to sunlight, making letters hard to read). In these cases, a good aim is undermined by the inability to follow through and implement the aim properly.

The Design's Aim

"Is the aim just?" That is, is the aim worthwhile? If the aim is not worthwhile, the consequence will also not be worthwhile. So a failed outcome may be traceable to an unworthy aim. or to an aim which, though not bad in itself, is incapable of successful implementation.

Aims which are either unclear or too general fall into this category, because they lack enough specific information for appropriate implementation to occur. Returning to our hospital signage system example, it would not be sufficient to have as the aim, "design a good signage system," without also clarifying what "good" means (i.e. serves all users, works within the available budget, can be easily updated by our staff, etc.).

Also, the "aim" may actually consist of many related aims on the part of both the client and the designer (who may not be an individual but consist of a team of designers in a design firm). With many different people involved, there may be conflicting aims, or the aim may become unfocused, either of which could compromise the outcome.

It is important to realize that the stated aim of a design may actually be but one of a number of actual aims driving a design project, and that the final project outcomes may in fact reflect one or more of these driving aims.

The Design's Means

Evaluating the means allows us to identify the possibility that the means may be inadequate to accomplish the intended aim, and may actually substitute new aims, as an example given below demonstrates.

The key question regarding means is: "Are the means appropriate to accomplish the aim?" Failed design outcomes are sometimes traceable to inappropriate means. Because designers are often used when the nature of a problem or need is still unclear, it may happen that the level of resources and commitment required to solve a problem is not known at the outset, when the aims are formulated.

Using the hospital signage system example again, the hospital may realize it needs a better signage system, but may not realize what a good system costs to design, fabricate, install and maintain. Also, the hospital, not knowing the difference between an effective and ineffective signage system, may make a decision based solely on cost, hire an inexperienced design firm to save money, and end up wasting the money they do spend because the means employed (wrong design firm) are inappropriate. By selecting an unqualified design firm, the hospital has unwittingly modified the original aim of the project, because the new firm is unable to "design a good signage system."

The Design's Consequences

Do the consequences achieve the intended aims, and if they do will they continue to do so over time?

The aims may be good, and the means may be equally good, but this still does not guarantee that the consequences or outcomes will be good. Consequences must be assessed independent of the aims and means, to confirm that the full range of impacts or outcomes are indeed acceptable. Even when the aims are good, unforeseen consequences are possible, and only by conducting a thorough and on-going assessment can one know that the appropriate outcomes have been achieved and will continue to be achieved.

For example, let us assume that the earlier mentioned hospital signage system is appropriately designed and implemented. Later on, a new clinic is built near the older hospital by an architecture firm using a completely different type of wayfinding system. At a certain point in time the two separate buildings are connected so that to users it is perceived as one big hospital building. To work well, the two wayfinding systems must now be harmonized. What was once a good system, is now ineffective, because it doesn't encompass the whole of the new facility.

Continued from Part One, is the summary of the second of four basic design evaluation methods, as presented by Jack Williamson, Cranbrook Academy of Art. Part three and four here.

ERIC (Effective, Responsive, Informative, Compatible)

This evaluation method, developed by Katherine and Michael McCoy, uses four criteria words which are more directive and value-loaded than the "Five Ws and an H" approach. However, like the former method, these four criteria can be applied to virtually any type of design.

Effective

Does the design make effective use human and material resources?

If we applied this criterion to a manufactured product, does the design of the product result in the effective use of time and money invested; from the time it takes to manufacture the product (no unnecessary parts to assemble), to the time it takes to operate it (quick and easy), to the purchase price of the product (reasonable cost for the value gained)? In the case of a manufactured product, the effective use of material resources might include the elimination of unnecessary packaging.

Responsive

Is the design responsive to people and their needs?

Does the design anticipate and serve the range of needs associated with a particular task situation? For example, is the design of a public community park responsive to the needs of all its users?

To answer this one might first consider the needs of the people in the particular community where the park was located. This might include the need for exercise (shuffleboard and tennis courts), or the need for socialization (benches that face one another, a band shell for community arts performances and celebrations).

Informative

Is the design informative? That is, does it communicate its nature and use value clearly?

Any type of design needs to be informative. A building interior might be informative if, in its very design, the layout was so clear that a minimum of signs was necessary for people to find their way to important destinations. For example, instead of hiding stairways behind walls, it might be possible to reveal stairways so that where they were located could be easily seen from many points within the interior layout.

Compatible

Is the design compatible with people and the environment?

An example of compatible design might be a house which is made with materials from its immediate environment. The use of local materials (stone and wood) might help it to visually harmonize with its site, while eliminating the need to create unnecessary pollution by shipping the materials from a great distance.

ERIC Conclusion

The four criteria: effective, responsive, informative, and compatible are useful concepts with which to evaluate any type of design.

They are qualitative criteria which are based on values assumptions. For instance, for the criteria "effective," it is assumed that efficiency is an important value. Although "efficiency" may itself be defined in different ways, one might assume that an efficiently designed housing complex, for example, would allow one to drive to and from home in the quickest manner possible. However, if there was a central parking area away from the houses, people might have more social encounters with neighbors while walking to and from their cars. In social terms, that might be a more effective design solution.

The truth is, we all use criteria to evaluate the design of places, products and communications we encounter and use everyday, whether or not we are fully conscious of the criteria and the values implicit in those criteria. As the "efficiency" example above is meant to demonstrate, we need to critically evaluate the criteria we use.

From Design Michigan's Design Futures Program, comes this powerful presentation by Jack Williamson, Cranbrook Academy of Art, on understanding how to critique design . You can access the original as a PDF or a PowerPoint presentation, but here's a summary of the first of four design evaluation methods he describes. The rest will be continued in parts two, three and four.

1. Five Ws and an H
This method seems simple at first, but can become more complicated and involved as one tries to apply it.

WHO is the design for?

That is, who is the "end user"? Is there one or many different users? If the work of design is a chair, does the chair meet the various needs of the user, or different users? If the end user is an elderly person, perhaps the chair should be especially easy to exit, taking the least amount of energy to lift oneself up and out of it.

WHAT is the purpose of the design?
WHAT is it meant to do or accomplish?

Sticking with the example of the chair, its primary purpose is to support a sitter. If it is a lounge chair it may be meant not only to support a person but to do so in a manner which is comfortable for extended periods of time.

WHERE and WHEN is it meant to be used?

Again, if the work of design is a chair, the context of use is very important. If a chair is meant to be used at the beach, it should probably be light weight and portable, like folding chairs with a wood frame and a canvas sling that conforms to different body sizes and shapes.

WHY was it created? WHY does it look and function the way it does?

This is meant to be a deeper question, which goes beyond the first question of "What is its purpose?" (which would be one way to answer "Why was it created").

Asking WHY causes us to consider not only the user's need, but the designer's and client's motivations as well.

If a manufacturer's motivation to make a chair is only to make money, this might explain why the materials are cheap, or the design copies another design rather than being original and fresh. Asking WHY it looks and functions the way it does might cause us to compare it to other chairs, and lead to bigger questions like why do some cultures use chairs while other cultures may not. There are many WHY questions that could be asked.

HOW does it function, use materials, etc.?

Asking HOW requires us to examine the design carefully, often comparing it to similar designs. The question, "HOW does it use materials?," in the case of a chair, might lead us to assess how ecologically responsible it is in the type of wood it uses (is it a renewable species), how the chair is dealt with at the end of its life cycle (can its materials be recycled and reused, disposed of safely, etc.).

Five Ws and an H Conclusion

The value of this method of evaluation is that the "Five Ws and an H" are easy to remember, and can be applied to virtually any type of design: an architectural or urban environment, a product, a piece or system of graphic communication. It is a very flexible method because it is non-directive, requiring the evaluator to apply the trigger word in an appropriate way. Very often it requires research, because although many of the questions may be answered in a preliminary way, they usually force us to gather more information to give a complete answer.

No design focused blog would be complete without a shout out to Apple on their 30th Anniversary. Founded on April 1st, 1976, they have firmly established themselves as the poster child for the power of good design and continuous innovation as a fundamental aspect of successful corporate strategy.

A brand that attracts rabid fans, who demonstrate their loyalty and devotion above and beyond the call of duty.

A company whose commitment to innovation, supersedes any fear of failure - PC World's brief history of Apple's innovations that failed. To quote,

For a more comprehensive look at other failed Apple products, check out Insanely Great's 10 Worst Macs Ever Built and LowEndMac's Road Apples. But in the end, a history of high-profile failures does not mean that Apple is on the road to ruin. To the contrary, the high number of failures indicates a willingness to take big risks---and reap, on occasion, huge rewards.

Their marketing communications and brand strategy over the past three decades has consistently supported their innovative mindset, their design thinking, if you will. Here's a collection of iconic Apple ads through the decades. Who can forget 1984?

From Britain's Times Online comes this paean to "the great god of computer design, Jobs, and his son, Jonathan Ive", an art inspired analysis of Apple's product design genius,

For fear you will think, possibly correctly, that my rediscovered faith has driven me mad, I will not wax too lyrical about Ive's current designs. I will only say that I know of no product, the most refined cars included, that comes close to attaining their strangely glowing celebration of their functionality. Other products - Issey Miyake's clothes, say - are just as great works of art, but only Apple brings this level of aesthetic excellence to the mass market, and it does so within the demanding technical confines of the electronics involved.

Wired's roundup of their best Apple stories ever and a gallery of every Apple ever made.

And finally, in the unlikely event we were unsure how and why Apple is design's posterchild, is this tribute from The Australian Age,

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, it would have been easy to write off Apple Computer as an also-ran in the computer business. Mired in losses and suffering from an exodus of top talent, Apple's prospects were so dim in 1996 that some observers were convinced that a takeover was all that could save it.
[...]
Jobs's vision, his preternatural grasp of the importance of functional design and his flair for stage craft have transformed Apple into one of the world's most recognisable brands. Sales of its phenomenally successful iPod personal music player drove revenues and profits at the company to record highs last year and have established the computer maker as a dominant force in online music.

Let's start from the beginning of the user centered design process, borrowing from IDEO their visual of the process [because it would be so much faster than recreating it myself, thank you for the loan]

Observation --> Insights --> Prototyping --> Implementation

Very simplified of course, but this is the basic step by step approach, and if you'll note, the first step, before developing a strategy, designing a product or creating a service, is the focus on the interplay of three key factors:

• User desirability
• Business viability
• Technical feasibility

In other words, the questions to ask are is this something that the intended target audience wants (as evidenced by our observations and other ethnographic methods), is it something that we can give them - i.e. is it cost effective for us to make (business viability) and can we make it in the first place (technical feasiblity). The design brief then emerges from the results of these insights.

[Summarized from Shopping for Innovation, coauthored by Steve Portigal - read the full article for insightful details]

There are many things you need to consider before hiring a design firm, but we're going to start with three:

1.    The Problem  - Defining your needs
2.    The People - Who the players are
3.    The Partnership - The nature of the engagement.

Design firms are businesses, but with unique perspectives and unique work processes. Understanding a bit of the industry culture will go a long way in helping you to establish a successful engagement.

The Problem: Defining your goals
Having these goals well-articulated and written down on paper as a starting point for the discussion is crucial. You may find that your reasons for bringing in design services differ from others in your organization, so you need to get your story straight before you begin talking to creatives. Although your desired outcome may be very specific, the designer's process to delivering your outcome will inevitably involve challenging its very foundations. The key issue here is framing the problem correctly. So though you'll want to define your problem as clearly as possible to begin with, you should also be willing to engage in discussions with designers in order to craft a more open-ended, innovative, and ultimately actionable problem statement.

The People - Defining the Archetypes

While there will naturally be complexity and diversity, very broadly, design firms can be categorized very broadly into three types:

1. 'Bigbox' Design Firm - The firms represented by this archetype are large-say 50+ people-and are well-staffed in a broad range of services. They may have armies of model-makers or production people, or they may have specialists that you wouldn't expect (cognitive psychologists, for example). They attract strong talent, and often have detailed, rigorous work processes, since the logistics of operating a large business who's metier is creative can be challenging.

Pros and Cons - If you're looking for a firm to provide design services on a global level, a large consultancy may have some obvious advantages. Large firms often have the experience, expertise and ability to manage and work with the sometimes bureaucratic and rigid requirements of corporate behemoths, establishing credibility in executing across multiple platforms and geographical locations. But you'll pay 'bigbox' prices, they maynot be able to 'turn on a dime' like a smaller firm, you will have to go through layers to reach the design team and you may not always get the 'A' team. Ask to see the portfolio of the team assigned to your project.

2. 'Boutique' Design Firm - At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Boutique design firm, a smaller, often-nimble group - say 10 people - who are accustomed to highly creative, demanding assignments, and thrive on a compact organizational structure. Denise Lee Yohn, previously VP of Brand and Strategy for Sony Electronics and now running an independent marketing practice, reflects that "the smaller shops I've worked with tend to bring expertise instead of process, ways of thinking instead of methodologies." Shane Brentham, Autodesk, adds that "the smaller firms are often more willing to push the envelope a little creatively."

Pros and Cons -  Other advantages to working with a smaller firm: A more intimate connection with the designer, less insulation by account managers from the "talent," a personal connection and consistent hand-holding - designers who pick up their own phone. These are the kinds of things that can make working with a small design firm more personal and satisfying. Boutique firms can be faster with change orders, and turn on a dime (though they may not want to); redirecting a BigBox may require communicating your wishes - through an account manager - to many layers of participants. 

3. The Dream Team -  This is where a team of specialists - often including employees of the hiring firm, the design firm, or experienced outside freelancers - are put together to take on a specific project. Collectively, they possess the expertise appropriate to the design challenge, and are handpicked in a very calculated way. The idea here is that you assemble the best on a project-specific basis, and when the project's done, they're done (with the implication that you may reassemble the team together on another project if the results were successful).

Pros and Cons - This approach is not for beginners, and is very targeted. It recognizes that as design moves up the value chain and integrates more and more with corporate strategy at the core level, it becomes a specialty, not a commodity. And as product and service offerings become more complex, you may find that the best route to innovation is a customized route. Specialty areas can include research, new product definition, innovation planning or the application of design thinking to business processes. So while the concept is one of the best to work with, be aware of where and how you are intending to utilize this approach.

The Partnership: Anticipating the relationship

Are you looking for a "partner" or a "vendor"? This is a critical question to ask yourself before you begin searching out particular design firms, but its answer is something that may change once you start meeting some.

A partner is a firm to collaborate on jointly developing a new product or service offering. It's a relationship that places as much focus on the means as the ends; on the process as the product. The ultimate deliverables may be fuzzier in this kind of relationship, but through a rigorous review process, both parties work toward agreed-upon goals.

A vendor, on the other hand, can be thought of as a firm you hire when you have a specific product to be designed with predefined criteria. You've done your homework; you understand your market. You need good thinking, but you also need a pair of hands to actualize your wishes. Vendors don't challenge your business proposition; they fulfill it.

Another consideration: What are you intending to build with your design service provider, and where are you in the product development cycle? Sometimes a design firm is brought in to fix a problem; other times a design firm is brought in to provide strategic design services and to really take a look at what the company is about, where their legacy is, and to help shape their aspirations for the future. Are you looking for this kind of long-term, strategic partnership, or are you looking for someone to build a working prototype and bill you for it?

In the end, of course, finding and cultivating a successful working relationship with a design firm is an emotional process - you're looking for chemistry. It is a very competitive field, filled with many highly competent, qualified companies. The best thing to do is to go out and meet all kinds of shapes and sizes; only then will you have a better idea of how you feel around these people and their organizations, and what kind of designers you'd like to work with.  Do your homework, make a short list of companies, and then meet them. If you're shopping for innovation, be a smart shopper.

This research on how teams work, (PDF link) and what makes them successful from Northwestern University, published in the journal Science, focuses on creative teams in the arts and sciences. These findings unearth some intriguing points that I can see being transferred very easily to the creation of a successful innovation team.

Highlights of this research study :

• They discovered that the composition of a great team is the same whether you are working on Broadway or in economics.
• The researchers [...] found that successful teams had a diverse
  membership - not of race and gender but of old blood and new. New team
  members clearly added creative spark and critical links to the
  experience of the entire industry.
• Unsuccessful teams were isolated from each other whereas the
  members of successful teams were interconnected, [..], across a giant
  cluster of artists or scientists.
• "Do people go out of their way to collaborate with new people?"
  said Luis A. Nunes Amaral, associate professor of chemical and
  biological engineering and the corresponding author on the paper. "Do
  they take this risk?
• "We found that teams that achieved success [..] were fundamentally
  assembled in the same way, by bringing in some experienced people who
  had not worked together before. The unsuccessful teams repeated the
  same collaborations over and over again."
• "We discovered that assembling a successful team depends on
  choosing the right balance of diversity and cohesion - achieving the
  bliss point intersection of the two." Diversity represents new
  collaborations while cohesion comes from repeat collaborations.
• "The entire network looks different when you compare a successful
  team with an unsuccessful team," said Amaral. [Unsuccessful teams]"
  form a network broken into small, unconnected clusters while the
  [successful ]teams give rise to a giant, connected cluster. A strong
  correlation clearly exists between team assembly and the quality of the
  team's creations. You need someone new to get the creative juices going
  so you don't get trapped in the same ideas over and over again."
• "If your systemic network has teams with only incumbents, and
  especially incumbents who have worked together repeatedly, your field
  tends to have low impact scores. The fact that we found this across
  fields with equally powerful minds suggests that how the brain power of
  a field is organized into different kinds of networks determines the
  field's success."

If you're seeking the services of an innovative design studio or strategic new product development consultant, take a moment to analyze the stage at which your company is at right now before you browse through the search fields in our design directory. Derived from Sylver Consulting's insightful analysis, here are some things to consider before hiring an 'innovation consultant' :

1. Which of these statements best describes your organization?

A. Currently engulfed in the flames of the "burning platform" . Profits are dropping, products are not selling and you know you need help to figure out  what to do about it.

B. Emerged from the days of the "burning platform" and have come to understand that innovation is not a start/stop process, but an evolving one that requires constant attention.

C. Leader in your industry and are determined to stay there. Failure is accepted within the organization because you understand and fully embrace the numbers game in product development.

What is motivating the firm at each stage?

For companies engulfed in the flames of the "burning platform," the need for innovation is a reactive mode. The turnaround time on the project becomes the foremost goal, and "innovation" in this situation is often an attempt to play 'catch up' with their rivals.

For organizations that have recently emerged from the days of the "burning platform," the focus now shifts to quick hits and small wins— there's some stability in market share and sales, but the days of job insecurity are too close to feel comfort with "blue sky" or "conceptual projects" that cannot provide immediate returns on investment.

Industry leaders or those that choose to behave like leaders, think strategically about where they are today, and where they want to be in the future. They still need the small wins for continuing the cash flow, but they  more tactically about how those successes contribute to the longer term corporate strategy.

How does this understanding help you maximise your investment in design services?

Because the motivation for seeking help defines the "innovation tolerance" of the organisation which in turn provides insight into the success criteria for the project. By understanding the level of innovation you need, you can identify the deliverable that makes the most business sense. This kind of analysis helps determine if the project needs to be geared toward discovering the breakthrough, revolutionary product in its category (the iPod), or if the conservative, low/no cost solution is the more appropriate direction to drive (the new Word template).

What next?

Once the requirements have been framed correctly, in the context of your organization's current needs, you are able to identify the kind of design firm appropriate for the task at hand. The deliverables drive the budget, the timeframe, the results, and ultimately help define the metrics of success for the given project.

Via Core77's blog comes this success story on OXO - who made a mark in design with their award winning OXO Goodgrips potato peeler - its a fascinating read about their innovative culture and continual striving for perfection. Their corporate philosophy is based on the principles of Universal Design, and how it benefits users, one of the few firms that have placed good design as a core competency in their corporate strategy. 

I've pulled out some lessons from their idea generation and product development process:

Talk to people - Talk to shoppers in supermarkets, talk to chefs in restaurants, talk to cooks, talk to culinary students, and most importantly talk to your customers.

The staff is constantly considering products to Oxoize [...] The theory of universal design, meaning one tool should fit all of them, compels Oxo to look for ways to change anything for the better.

"We do a lot of shopping, we do a lot of talking to consumers and chefs," Sohn said. "We do consumer testing, we do a lot of surveys, we talk to people we know, people our sales reps know, all over the country."

Listen, really listen to your customers - These days, many of OXO's products are not developed from scratch but instead are product ideas or prototypes submitted by their own customers. After all, they are the ones who will buy and use your products.

The measuring cup is one of five Oxo products that were not in-house eurekas but came to the company from outside in the last 10 years. "We have some very passionate consumers," said Gretchen Holt, [...]. Ideas also flow in from retailers and wannabe inventors.

An ice cube tray that releases one cube at a time came from a man who only insisted that the tray carry a line saying it was invented in Peru; a potato masher was suggested by a "mom in Toronto who was not looking to make money" and took a case full of mashers as payment; a mango splitter was devised by a minister from upstate New York who travels to underdeveloped countries in the tropics where mangos are a staple.

"He came up with a prototype and a video of him using it," Sohn said, but other prototypes may show up as "two paper clips stuck together with gum." One idea that did not work out was a turkey lifter that just didn't sell.

Know when to let go - Even after months of investing time and money on a particular product idea or project, OXO is willing to kill the project if it doesn't meet their corporate vision of an innovative yet affordable product that also looks good.

Oxo can "spend 18 months on a product and then make a decision not to go forward," Witt said. "We might find seven things needed but if they were incorporated, it would cost $900," Sohn added. "We don't believe in making something unaffordable." And that is one reason why the company is careful about embarking on products, let alone dreaming them up from scratch. As company president Lee said, "When you create something new, you create a hundred other problems."

Leave the design to the experts - Oxo tests the prototypes and works closely with their design firms to iterate and reiterate their products until they are satisfied with them, but once they have the product idea they hand it over to the design firm to bring it to life.

Surprisingly, what Oxo does not do is design. The staff is made up of product managers and engineers, all focusing on the idea end. They then work with nine industrial design firms, including two in Japan, to translate pie-cutter-in-the-sky notions into eminently usable gadgets.

"The ideas of what to make and what features to offer come from here," Lee said, then designers at companies such as Smart Design in New York and Bally in Pittsburgh do the rest. Once the prototypes come back, temps are hired to test them repeatedly - throwing a chip bag clip against the floor 10,000 times, running a measuring cup through the dishwasher into soapy infinity - and the second-guessing begins.

Good is never enough - To truly create products that inspire loyal and passionate customers, never be satisfied with products that just 'do the job'. OXOnians believe that every product that rolls out should have a 'wow' factor or 'eureka' factor.

"Oxonians," as they call themselves, can work for years to perfect a single product only to start trying to find something wrong with it as soon as it arrives from the factory. Good is never enough.

"A lot of this is just a culture of people constantly looking for something wrong, not only other people's products but ours as well," said Alex Lee, the company's president.

Be willing to make and learn from mistakes - With over 500 products in their lineup, there are bound to be some that don't quite make it, if it bombs, kill the product or tweak it some more. "We never consider anything finished," said Larry Witt, Oxo's vice president of sales and market development.

Not everything turns to squishy gold in Oxo's hands, though. Lee said an attempt to make a better bagel slicer was a disaster because it was designed using bagels from the tri-state area around company headquarters.

When it was unveiled at the housewares show in Chicago that year, the local bagels were smaller and did not fit. After struggling to adapt it to fit bagels of any size, the company ultimately gave up. "If we had known how hard it was," Lee said, "we would have designed it from scratch."

Gad Shaanan, founder of Gad Shaanan Design, shown above, contends that customers make up their minds about a product in just three seconds. From this news article,

The industrial design firm focuses on that crucial three seconds they say a product has to connect with consumers. That connection, says chief executive Gad Shaanan, is made with the heart, not the mind.

"There are so many products out there, and salespeople know less and less," Shaanan said. "You need a detail that a consumer can relate to, something that creates a bond with the consumer."

That detail is unlikely to be what the product's engineers are most proud of - the power or speed of the operating system, for instance - and more likely to be some seemingly mundane aspect that makes the user's experience more pleasant.

It's why someone will walk into a car dealership with a budget of $20,000 and walk away with a $25,000 car, or why someone spends $3 on an angled, rubber-grip toothbrush when any dentist will tell you the straight-handled 99-cent version works just as well.

Steve Portigal contributes his perspective of ethnographic research and its applications.

As companies continue to realize the need for understanding customers (especially when considering the launch of a new product or entering a new market) they are turning to tools such as "ethnographic research." With designers, market researchers, anthropologists and others offering this sort of service, trying to put forward an acceptable definition of ethnographic research is an increasingly tricky endeavor. The literature is littered with alternative terminology, from "site visit" through "contextual research" through "user safaris." Although precise terminology is not without its place, it's probably more useful here to set the jargon aside and consider a simple three-step process:

1. We examine our users (be they consumers or other) in their own context
2. We develop a set of inferences (you might also call this interpretation, or synthesis)
3. We apply our new insights to a business or design problem otherwise, why are we doing the work?)

Of course, it's the stage of "examine our users" that gets the most attention, because it's the most tangible part of the process. We can further break that into three key activities:

1. Observation

- watching what people are doing, how they do it, getting a sense of usage, and of process

2. Interviewing

- interacting directly with some people who can shed light on our problem, be they customers, users, former customers, future users, lead users, etc.
- asking questions, giving them exercises or tasks
- listening to what they say, how they say it, what they don't say
- paying attention to where what they say and what they do doesn't align

3. Understanding cultural context

- considering the culture within which our people are making decisions
- looking at media, trends, advertising, and other symbols of cultural "norms"

So often, companies go to the trouble of studying customers, only to address the opportunities revealed by usage. For example, an award-winning snow shovel was redesigned when the design team went out to watch how their product was being used, found that women instead of men were shoveling, and so they made the handle smaller.

But there's much more that can be revealed. What is the shoveling occasion (or, if you will, ritual) really about? What meanings does it hold? Does it hearken back to childhood? Or does it represent female independence? Or the nurturing of motherhood? Or the abandonment by men? Probably it's none of those, but the point is that within the ordinary activity of shoveling we can find deep meanings that can provide enormous opportunities for innovation as we question the basic assumptions about what the product could possibly be.

Our first in the series "Ask the Expert", we spoke to Anaezi Modu, founder of ReBrand and director of ReBrand 100. She is former SVP, Brand Experience and Strategy Director at Bank of America (previously FleetBoston Financial). Here's a bonus link to her case study for Icograda titled "Where strategy meets design".

DesignDirectory: Anaezi, would you share with us the most important piece of advice that you would give to someone who would be starting the search for design services? Say, for example, your successor at Bank of America - the person responsible for shaping the global brand strategy.

Anaezi Modu: I'd tell them that the most important thing they need to look for in a potential strategic branding partner is evidence of user centeredness. Design firms talk about being user centric, being empathetic to their user's needs, sensitive to the nuances of the marketplace and being open minded and observing without judgement. But do they realize that we are their users?

DD: By "we" being their users, you mean yourself in the client's position?

AM: Yes. Often a design firm will come in and give their spiel about design and branding, which of course, is their area of expertise, but fail to realize that our business (financial services, in my case) is our area of expertise. Many feel that if they have done work for one banking brand, they can correlate that experience to another bank's brand. That may not be true. Each bank, financial services institution, (or business) has its own focus areas and its own strategy and this where it becomes important for you to evaluate whether this is a design partner who is willing to listen, to understand your business and your strategy, to demonstrate that they are indeed empathetic, open minded and willing to learn. Sensitivity to the changing nature of the audience is also important. Vendors should be aware that clients, especially corporate ones, observe the make-up of the work team, and note if the team is representative of the diverse make-up of their customers. I just don't see that very often and it's often very frustrating to get that message across. Bank of America sought to reach out to all our customers, around the world, how can we say we're a global brand if we don't support it with our brand strategy?

DD: What about evaluating their portfolio or previous experience? Any tips on what to look for when choosing a firm?

AM: Yes. There are two key things to look for in a firm's portfolio - first, ask to see examples of their work where they have demonstrated that a brand is an evolving entity, not a dramatic change from the past. Often, as was the case in Bank of America, our brand has a history and heritage, an existing relationship with our customers, we cannot suddenly make a 180 degree turn. Customers don't like it. The design firm should be able to show a natural evoluation towards the strategic objective over a period of time rather than a sudden change.

The second is ask to see example of where their design effort has effected a change in the way the brand is perceived. In the market, with the customers, with the audience. Ask them to demonstrate successful rebranding efforts, if that is what you are seeking, or successful examples of using design to achieve the objective for which you are seeking a design firm.

DD: You mean if it were a product to be designed and their objective was to increase lagging sales, they should ask for demonstrations of where a design studio had successfully managed to achieve that for a prior client?

AM: Yes. Instead of asking for examples of similar products or industry examples, ask to see similar end result examples, regardless of product category or industry.

DD: Wow. That really makes sense. Thank you so much Anaezi Modu, for being this week's expert.

Maytag intends to sell Hoover. Apparently, Hoover's market share had fallen dramatically in the last quarter of 2005 and this first mover - the inventor of the vacuum cleaner - has thrown up its hands and given up the fight against Dyson - the upstart entrant in the playing field. This articlefrom the Times Online has some amazing figures for the market share beating taken by Hoover in the 4 years since Dyson entered the US market. I've converted their table of figures into a chart that better demonstrates the plunge,

Consistently across all the news and analysis this weekend is the singular message that this drop in Hoover's market share in just four years, after decades of market leadership, is entirely due to the lack of any consistent strategy of innovation and design. On the other hand, Dyson's iconic status as an industrial design leader, engineering innovator and persistent inventor (over 5000 prototypes alone for the first model James Dyson launched) does not require introduction. Add to this, their award winning new market entry strategy and you have all the ingredients of a winner.

What is amazing is that some ways this entire episode breaks all the rules of conventional business wisdom - vacuum cleaners are commodities in today's market, while every other player in the market competed on price, Dyson walked in not only with an entirely new technology but also pegged his unusual looking (then) product at a price point over 200% higher than the industry average. He was the late entrant in a very mature market with very established players with very well known brands - after all 'hoover' has become a generic term for cleaning up in UK english. Here are the seeds of a case study of disruptive innovation and the strategic use of good design.

This little cellphone by Motorola won the second tender by the GSM Association for their "Emerging Markets handset programme" announced last week.

Designed to retail at $30, the GSM claims that they have already received orders for 12 million phones. Many wonder where the profits may lie when the cost of production is squeezed to the barest minimum in order to develop a product affordable by those in developing markets, since developing a cutting edge phone for the US, European and Japanese market offers higher margins.

Developing products for those at the base of the pyramid can be profitable, in more than just one sense. CK Prahalad, eminent strategy guru, whose HBR Article "The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" [free reg. required] first articulated the opportunities that lay in volume markets, rather than the margin markets of the developed world.

These emerging markets provide alternate options for companies facing stagnant home markets and looking to expand beyond their traditional areas. And in the case of affordable mobile communication, offer opportunities for sustainable development that traditional aid cannot always provide. The real challenge would be the development of user interfaces that do away with the need for text based menus and screens - thus obviating both the language problem as well as the literacy problem. Then a truly global system of communication would be possible.

"China's market is not just big, it is also increasingly crowded. For foreign companies, making money here demands more effort," says Alan Horton, an analyst at US-based Summit Consulting Co.

From China Business Weekly comes this insightful look at the current state of the market and what multinationals must overcome in order to succeed in China. Statistics quoted are sobering - from 3 or 4 brands of shampoo in the 1980's, there are now over 3000. Over the same period, the number of toothpaste brands rose from 100 to almost 800. Fruit juice makers were unknown two decades ago, now there are more than 160. More than 100 car models were launched in 2004, double from only two years before.

So how do multinationals cope? Going Chinese seems to be the direction chosen by most, either by cutting costs or by developing more locally popular products.

"You can't survive in China without becoming a Chinese company. That includes local technology development, product design, procurement, manufacturing and sales," says Yun Jong-Yong, chief executive of Samsung Electronics

And, adds Gary Coleman, global managing director of Manufacturing Industry Practice with Deloitte,

"Emerging markets around the world offer significant growth potential, but the most successful and profitable companies will be those that really understand their customers and take a different approach,"

The two most important things for competing successfully in a new market are
a) understanding local customers and then
b) designing products that address their needs and values.

Contextual research provides one such means to effectively understand a market - also known as ethnographic research or user observation - insights derived from the results provide direction and guides for new product development. Firms like SonicRim conduct large scale contextual research programs in countries around the world for their clients, using ethnographic techniques such as observing users in their natural environment or interacting with products to generate the insights that lead to the development of new products and services. Based in the Bay Area, Cheskin is another such firm that leverages their expertise in market research to uncover opportunities for innovation in service and product offerings. Others deliver new product definition documents based on research results along with a cohesive business strategy to support the successful new market entry. Alternative strategies include working with specialists like Portigal Consulting, who leverages his extensive network of professionals around the world.

Research has increasingly become a vital first step in the design process, and as global markets rapidly become more competitive, it is one that cannot be overlooked.

The WRAP (the Waste & Resources Action Programme) Waste Minimisation Innovation Fund - an 8 million pound programme encouraging innovative packaging initiatives that reduce household waste - is now accepting project proposals from global brands, major retailers and leading packaging companies.

From the website,

Applications are open to any organisation with an innovative idea which they believe will have a significant impact on minimising packaging or food waste from the home. The only requirement is that the project should involve a retailer or major brand, to maximise the chances that any successful innovations are widely adopted.

Applications are open until the closing dates of 31st March for expressions of interest on Food Waste projects, and 20th April for Packaging Innovation tenders.

WRAP's Innovation Fund Manager, Mike Robey, said:

We are keen to encourage applications from project teams which could include manufacturers, packaging suppliers, designers, as well as brands and retailers. All proposals must demonstrate a potential major impact on minimising household waste.

So far, our independent assessment panel has approved funding for a range of activities, from consumer research to R&D and production trials, technical feasibility studies and pilots, and we are happy to consider a wide range of ideas.

In this round of funding, WRAP is asking organisations to apply under one of two criteria - proposals to reduce packaging waste in the home; and proposals that aim to significantly reduce domestic food waste.

A notable recent achievement was by food manufacturer HJ Heinz who carried out successful trials of a new "easy open" can that uses less steel than any other can in its class in collaboration with packaging manufacturers Impress Group BV with 250,000 pounds in funding from WRAP's Waste Minimisation Innovation Fund. Said Gerald Sturdy, technical director at Impress BV,

"Lightweighting food cans is not as straightforward as it might first seem. Our 60 strong innovation team had to overcome a number of technical challenges to ensure that the integrity of the can - its look and feel, strength and behaviour - remained unchanged, whilst developing the lightest can ends in the industry."

But this change alone would save 1,400 tonnes of steel waste every year according to the company.