In February of last year I and a co-worker had an excellent time at Adaptive Path’s MX Conference held in San Francisco. The speakers were solid. The cool, smart and interesting people-to-meet quotient was quite high (including Adam Richardson of frog and Brooks Protzmann of Dell). I immediately became an advocate, have blogged about some of the speakers here, and continue to relate back to the experience and what I learned. The theme of the conference, “Managing Experience through Creative Leadership,” is one that is clearly industry agnostic, focused on creating successful and engaging audience experiences, and stands to benefit a multitude of businesses and teams regardless of their proximity to or intersection with a stereotypically “creative” business. This stuff should matter to all of us.
I’m going back again this year, and those that know me have already heard this about a thousand times. I have sent out invitations to join me at the conference. I am attending with a co-worker and friend, who also is a participant in our yearly “Innovation Tours.” This year’s tour begins with the MX Conference, and then we are scheduling tours and information sessions with a number of companies and organizations in and around the Bay Area. This should be an inspiring and invaluable trip, and an opportunity to make some great connections.
I received a confirmation email from Adaptive Path, and in that was something that I thought to be incredibly cool. They are paying a lot of attention to the time we are not at the sessions, and creating opportunities for all of the attendees to cross paths. There are the obligatory end of day cocktail receptions, and daily lunches scheduled as part of the conference, but it is the reservations for tables of eight made at restaurants around San Francisco that struck me as especially cool. As an attendee, just decide where you want to eat and show up. The reservation is already made and you have no idea who you will be dining with, which presents all kinds of happy accidents. It’s a dining/conference mashup, and a service for those not familiar with the city to get them out and meeting others.
So, yeah, I’m looking forward to this conference. I’m planning on live tweeting (inspired by David Armano’s tweets from the AdAge event a few weeks ago) the interesting things that I learn, and will try to recap at the end of each day here on schneiderism. You can follow the conference on twitter by following me.
Heavy, heavy day. Great discussion, new connections, incredible research, and too many emails and phone calls. I feel tired in a good way and as a contrast to the rather intense post of yesterday I offer this really rich animation just sent to me by a co-worker and via Vimeo. This is about all I can handle for the moment but am working on a number of posts on topics like the upcoming MX Conference in San Francisco from Adaptive Path, which I am attending, and a new Workplace of The Future piece stemming from conversations with Darren Shavor of Steelcase. Good times.
I don’t care what business or what industry you are talking about, innovation matters big time. I get this, and my investigations into how you cultivate a culture of innovation is an ongoing theme on schneiderism. I find it really interesting that companies like Toyota (as well as BMW, Porsche, Audi, Tata, Nissan, VW, Mazda…) continue to receive coverage with regards to the success of the innovative internal cultures they have supported, and the measurable benefits of those cultures in terms of market success, while essentially the entire American automotive industry struggles to find itself, let alone perpetuate a culture of innovation, let alone even THINK about market success. Many, including myself, have looked closely at how Toyota’s long history of creating and supporting innovation wherever it sets up shop. In many ways, innovation defines Toyota. Recently, Fortune took a similar look at Honda and revealed another deeply innovative company culture. It also revealed the demonstrable benefits of that culture.
For Honda, innovation is equivalent to excellence, and excellence clearly pays. The article states that since 2002 Honda’s revenues have grown close to 40%, approaching $94.8 billion. Most interesting to me is that Honda’s U.S. market share has risen from 6.7% in 2000 to 9.6% in 2007. That is partly because of American manufacturers LOSING market share, but is also because Honda continues to provide smart, affordable and innovative products that people WANT. Badly. Honda, along with Toyota and BMW, are the only automobile companies to make it into Fortune’s list of the top 20 of the World’s Most Admired Companies. Apple is number one, by the way.
So, how does Honda make this happen? They let people experiment and explore. The culture encourages this. Leadership wants it. More specifically, they encourage their engineers, especially those who drive R&D, to be entrepreneurial in their pursuits. The kicker is that at Honda not only are employees typically paid less than at the competition, but their opportunities to move up in the organization are pretty limited. That’s because Honda is very, very flat as an organization… and it is this flatness that empowers people to experiment and to be entrepreneurial. To innovate. Employees tend to be incredibly loyal to Honda, as an added bonus, and this also is directly related to the flatness of the organization. That, and they magnify their passion by being around others who are so invested in experimenting, improving, and creating. Others that are passionate about innovating. There is even a surprisingly cool section on Honda’s corporate website dedicated to their focus on innovation, and the important results of that focus. Masaaki Kato, president and CEO of Honda R&D, offers his perspective on Honda’s innovation success:
“We want to look down the road. We do not want to be influenced by the business.”
Masaaki Kato, president and CEO of Honda Research and Development
From the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre and the Nokia Research Center comes this exploration of the future application of nanoscale electonics technology. Very cool, and probably not that far from reality, given the momentum in nanotech. This longish video takes you through several of the nanoscale innovations:
This motivates me to complete a series of posts I have been working on related to nanotechnology. They are taking me awhile because I continue to find more to read. We live in very interesting times.
This is an absolutely gorgeous rendering of the Federal Building in San Francisco designed by Thom Mayne and his team at Morphosis. Mayne is now navigating the LEED certification process for this project. Originally, the building was on track to obtain a minimum of LEED Silver certification. The interesting thing is that it seems LEED certification, the US Green Building Council, and Thom Mayne are not on the same page as some of the technologies employed for this project are, as Mayne asserts, so absolutely cutting edge they are not actually yet part of the LEED certification process. Upwards of 70% of the building is temperature moderated through natural ventilation, and this was achieved through incredibly complex modeling of the interior environments and how air should naturally move through them, and controlled though a custom window wall that regulates internal air temperature, thermal mass storage, and passive and active sunshading. While LEED addresses items like bicycle racks and construction materials recycling, the thermal comfort and air quality regulated by Mayne’s system do not impact certification in a substantive way.
Like any high profile project, it is not without some controversy. To my mind, this project highlights some of the drawbacks of the USGBC’s point based LEED certification program. It would seem that sometimes designing sustainably and designing “LEED” are not the same thing.
I have been closely following the progress of OMA’s project with Chinese Central Television (CCTV). The initial design presented an iconic tension, but also seemed to be dangerously monolithic. The writer of toomanytribbles, a blog that I thoroughly enjoy and subscribe to, was recently in China and snapped several gorgeous images from which she produced a cool video of the CCTV tower under construction and in the context of the neighboring buildings. Seeing this building take shape in its environment is exciting, and reassures me that OMA knows what the hell they are doing. This is a very, very cool building. I cannot wait to see the interior environments. Here is a rendering of the building design:
This is a question that is incredibly important to me for a number of reasons, and that I address directly whenever possible. Priority among the reasons this is important would be two, the first being that I have found great success by taking the creative generalist path, the second that I have found great success by the combination of creative generalists with specialists. One does not obviate the other, they are instead profoundly complimentary. I just read a very well written post at CreativeGeneralist that is a comprehensive survey of both the value of being a creative generalist, and the value of having them as members of your team. The author of the article broadly defines five areas in which creative generalists excel and create value, which I include below with excerpts that I found to be especially worthy of highlighting:
Wander + Wonder - Finding possibility
“Ideas follow inspiration, which comes freely at a friendly intersection of diverse multidisciplinary, multi-industry, multicultural thinking – exactly the kind of thinking that our focused lives tend not to have enough of.”
Synthesize + Summarize - Connect the dots and present complex information succinctly
“Diversity generates economic expansion. We have an environment teeming with differentiations and obscure inspirations by way of hyperinnovation, culture blur, and enhanced communications. Organizations have more points of inspiration, not only as a result of their own activities but also of others’ from every industry all over the world.”
Link + Leap - Generating ideas, take a simple insight and find a transcending application.
“Effective leaders today understand that we’re no longer operating in a linear cause-and-effect world but rather in more of a web-like ecosystem where inter-relationships shape direction, decisions, and delegation.”
Mix + Match - Make worlds collide and harness collaborative energies.
“There are many instances where organizations are not, in their processes, motivated to function horizontally or outside of their traditional bounds, and there are many talented individuals locked in the tunnel vision of their pursuits, blindly unaware that collaboration could be the best move they make.”
“Generalists play the often overlooked yet essential role of identifying specialists’ strengths and directing project activities and timing in such a way that makes the most effective use of them.”
Experience + Empathize - Understand humanity and life’s many interrelationships.
“Ideation feeds on lateral thinking and free association. And the farther one can look the more there is to learn and connect. In this sense, crossing cultural borders – replete with unique languages, customs, traditions, politics, religions, senses (sights, sounds, smells, tastes), technologies, and philosophies – is the most expansive lateral thinking that can be done. Developing a deeper understanding of how other cultures solve problems is a huge leadership asset…”
“Embracing a human-centered observational and empathic approach tunes into multiple perspectives, various worldviews. And this is both inspiring and empowering, not simply because of the exposure and the reality check but because, again, it taps into the intersectional riches of diversity.”
This book is not fetishistic, as many logo and identity books tend to be. Design Matters // Logos, by the team at Capsule, is an excellent and methodical review of the thinking, process and decision making behind a series of very successful identities created by a diverse group of designers (from Futurebrand to Sagmeister). The subtitle “An Essential Primer For Today’s Competitive Market” gives this away. I appreciate and find it fascinating to see what designers and design teams worked through to get to the end result, to be privy to the strategy behind something as mistakenly subjective as a logo. Each identity reviewed is broken down into these sections:
Introduction - a brief overview of the situation and the objectives
Planning - the foundational work leading up to design
Creating - details related to the development of the identity
Implementing - how the identity was introduced and executed
It is an incredibly informative book, as well as being very well designed. Beautiful, really. The organization and information contained within lend themselves to repeat reading, and it is the kind of book that becomes a frequent resource for a review on identity strategy and inspiration. I found the extensive section on planning to be of particular value, given my penchant for strategy and well-developed rationale, and is something that any team setting out to create identity would benefit from reading… especially pages 36-37 which offers some great insights into navigating the complexities of the research process.
Full disclosure, I received this book from Rockport Publishers. I love free books, when they are good, and I recommend this one without hesitation and will be keeping it in my “active” stack of books. It rocks.
That is the title of an excellent post I came across at FutureLab. We have discussed design thinking, and its value to business, here before. This post by Idris Mootee, succinctly breaks down the foundational principles of design thinking and how they might be appropriately applied. Idris Mootee is not only all over the concept of design thinking, he has built a successful consultancy around it. Perhaps the most important point made in the post is in the opening sentences. Typically, when “design thinking” comes up in a meeting or discussion of strategy it is relegated to something to do with aesthetics, and there is a disconnection with how design thinking might be relevant to strategy, which unfortunately still struggles to mean something beyond an analysis of spreadsheets and increasingly complex formulas. In reality:
“I explained to them that “design thinking” is crucial to any innovation effort if a company wants to break out of its current competitive structure.”
Idris Mootee
In many ways, business is still stuck in an approach to innovation and strategy that is based on optimization, which at a high level means maximizing inherent resources and market influence to create a competitive advantage. This can work, and historically has been a beneficial approach to a diversity of companies. The problem is that this approach does not scale and it is dominated by a cycle of business performance. You cannot optimize every quarter. Optimization follows a much longer cycle of action and response. Applying design thinking to the strategic breakdown of advantage in business brings an empathic approach to supporting innovation, and involves a more holistic analysis of business, one that asymetricaly surveys not only the competitive landscape, but has at its core a people centered approach to business. This involves needs assessment, strategic risk review, and the creative collaboration around how to take advantage of the results of these key assessments. Here is Mootee’s presentation of the 10 Design Thinking Principles for Strategic Business Innovation:
The perspective of this interesting article I found at BusinessWeek is that design value is increasingly driven by very effective and highly collaborative teams. Behind this is the ever-increasing realization that design has the potential to transform and grow business in ways not previously considered. Business leaders are getting this, and as the value of effective design teams become more widely recognized and understood, they are paying more focused attention to how they might effectively support these teams in new and different ways. This is in part due to the complexity of the situations engaged by design teams, that they defy an object approach and rely intensely on an effective collaborative process to achieve the desired end. It is also partly due to changing expectations for the value of design, that it has definitively moved beyond the domain of creating beautiful things and resoundingly into the realm of creating beautiful things that work really well and provide an experience that exceeds audience expectations and solves important problems, while increasing shareholder value. A choice quote from the article:
“The tastemaker idea is out of date. Perhaps there’s a place for taste-making within the consumer market, but the approach is out of date when it comes to more complex stuff, where it’s not just about creating beautiful things…Take sustainability. You can’t have an iconic object approach to the problems of sustainability. It’s a systematic thing.”
Jeremy Myerson - Director of Innovation, Royal College of Art
None of this is to say that process, which I have posted about before, should suddenly take precedence over individual inspiration. It is that the complexity of problems demands a more holistic approach to addressing potential solutions. This is about the power of an effective team, the power of successful facilitation, to take solutions far beyond what perhaps a lone genius may be able to provide. At the level of designing complex interactions and environments that must address a matrix of need, this is increasingly evident.
I have been reading a newish book from Japanese designer Kenya Hara, which came to me as an incredibly thoughtful gift. “Designing Design”, which is excellent, is not so much a portfolio or biography as much as a treatise on Hara’s philosophy of design, a philosophy that is both insightful and interesting, distinctive, and deeply immersive. His work is iconic in many ways, but not because of anything remotely approaching a signature flourish. He places significant focus on how allof our senses are affected by design, which encompasses everything from objects to environments.
Inside his book are beautiful images of his work, as well as that of others who have collaborated with him or contributed to projects he has curated. The images provide important references to his ideas and observations, and they are well integrated. The book functions almost as an illustrated guidebook to Hara’s design philosophy, visually representing the application of his thinking. Also, the design of this book is superbly elegant and engaging:
As a designer, Hara’s work reflects thought and consideration that seems contradictory in that it is both minimalist and comprehensive. It is evident that this is not a person who takes design lightly, and perhaps considers it more of an epistemological exercise:
“The human brain likes anything that entails a great deal of information.”
Kenya Hara
The book is divided into chapters that individually and collectively investigate:
This post would be a continuation on my theme about thoughts on the future building culture, at least for my immediate team. You can read related posts here, though you have to scroll down for some of the more inflammatory ones. In any event, our team has been deep into investigations of business model and approach as it relates to the built environment, and one organization and one person continues to surface as a vanguard and a contrarian, and consistently at the heart of the examples we provide to each other. Pictured above is Rem Koolhaas, the founder of OMA and AMO. He has a well-known and well-developed record as an architect and designer, and has managed to be seemingly ubiquitous with active projects dotting the globe. OMA has been tireless in execution, and is providing solutions to the domain of exclusive and high profile clients. Pushing boundaries is hard, intense, and expensive work and it takes clients with the money and steely resolve to partner with the likes of Rem Koolhaas. In any event, the results seem to be beneficial for all involved.
Via Eikongraphia I came across a conference held in Rotterdam last November with the overarching theme of how the future of architecture, “Architectuur 2.0″, is presently being shaped. All of the speakers (whose lectures can be viewed here in the archives… in Dutch, I am still looking for full transcripts in English), collectively the group known as the SuperDutch, seemed excellent. But it was a couple of Rem’s comments that stuck with me. He talked about partnerships, and how they are incredibly underestimated, and went on to list a number of examples that, in his view, regardless of the result, helped him move the needle. As you survey the density, and audacity, of the work being done by OMA and AMO worldwide it is evident that none of this could happen, none of it would really even be possible, without that approach to the collective project team. How we partner, and how well we partner, is ultimately the determiner of project success. This obviously extends far beyond just the built environment, but if there was an industry that was plagued with the challenges of navigating partnerships successfully, I would have to say it is architecture and design. At least in the United States.
This is changing, though, and architects are beginning to reconnect with the making, and reconnect with clients. Or, perhaps, connect differently. Smart architecture teams are organizing around projects in new ways that are incorporating research and technology for a remix of the user experience. They are fast, nimble, innovative and not afraid of risk nor of liability. All of these are givens. They approach challenges holistically, with a design brief informed by smart, comprehensive research and well-reasoned conclusions. If it is your goal to create value, to do more than just meet minimal requirements, than this approach is a necessity. The alternative is to let the value of design be eroded, and ultimately distributed across an increasingly complex vendor environment. Not an option. But to prevent this, or to circumvent it entirely, goes right back to Rem’s comments regarding partnership, that “partnership is an underestimated theme.”
The dreaded curse of knowledge, that as we become more expert in something we also begin to limit and eventually lose the ability to innovate. Is this possible?
Janet Rae-Dupree thinks so, and in an article in the New York Times titled Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, she looked at how innovation is actually better supported by toning down the level of expertise. The premise she explores is that once we become expert we lose the ability to think freely, and operate instead from the place of our expertise. She points out that as we become more knowledgeable and expert in our fields our language and thought patterns change to such a degree that outsiders and non-experts often will not understand. This knowledge/action patterning then begins to wear behavioral paths for us that inhibit our ability to operate without the support of what we know to be true, and instills avoidance tendencies for things that are outside of that expertise.
This would seem to align with my post earlier regarding building innovative cultures, and the idea that you need to attract talent to your team that bring both a unique perspective AND a willingness to challenge convention, argue on behalf of ideas, and embrace risk.
We have spent a fair amount of time on this site investigating issues and ideas around innovation (especially back in October of last year). This is because few things can so substantially affect the fortunes of a company to the extent that supporting innovation can. Nothing new here, open any business magazine or visit any number of blogs and innovation is being discussed. This pervasiveness is born out of the priority and value we place on being able build the cultures that allow us to innovate consistently, and well. It is also because creating these cultures is incredibly challenging, and we benefit from learning how others have navigated these challenges.
I read yesterday an excellent article in Architectural Record by Andrew Pressman titled “Creating a Firm Culture That Supports Innovation” that offered a perspective that warrants sharing. This perspective begins with the increasing recognition that a firm’s cultural environment is a critical factor not only in producing the best possible design work but also in attracting and retaining both new staff and clients. In any creative enterprise you are only as good as your people, teams, and degree to which they are supported. A significant component of the talent war is demonstrating to prospects that you offer the culture that will support them in their creative work. Additionally, just as the business press is permeated with investigations into innovation, so are clients. The expectation for design excellence, and for teams and methodologies that put innovation front and center, should be considered a best practice by clients looking for creative services. For creative teams, fostering this culture and being able to identify successful outcomes is a significant competitive differentiator.
The article highlights an approach promoted by Robert Sutton in work featured in the Harvard Business Review back in 2000/2001, but still right on the money. It is an extreme approach to fostering innovation and acknowledges that new perspectives and ideas often emanate from “mavericks” with wildly diverse backgrounds, who harbor no preconceptions, and who are undaunted in challenging the status quo and championing their ideas. These mavericks are invaluable to successful innovation subcultures, and their ultimate impact on the organizational culture at large. Sounds good. The main points of this approach:
- Hire naive misfits who argue with you
- Encourage failure
- Avoid letting client input limit your vision
- Fully commit to risky ventures
I’ll let you read the article to get the full story, but there is some particularly valuable insight offered by Ted Hoff, an innovator and inventor of microprocessors, with respect to how client input can limit your vision. He says:
“Don’t do what your customers want; Do something better.”
Ted Hoff
I think all of the points above are important, and while they may sound somewhat intuitive they are very difficult to maintain in practice. Many organizations exist specifically to limit the existence of these behaviors, they are counterintuitive to an “established” enterprise and threaten the order that some managers can spend their entire careers trying to create. They defy predictability, and therefore deny managers the ability to financially model and plan. Therein lies the challenge, to encourage these behaviors in support of an innovative culture and in contrast to the ubiquitous corporate model. To realize and champion that business as usual in creative enterprise is a definitive path to extinction.
The Cold War was the catalyst for the development of a diversity of interesting vehicles, platforms and technologies, but few have been of more interesting to me than the Soviet “Lun” ekranoplan pictured above and below. The Soviet Union began developing the wing-in-ground (WIG) ground effect technology in the 1930’s, but the craft reached a pinnacle of sorts in the 1980’s with the Lun (one of which can be seen at Google Earth), though WIG craft have yet to reach any broad application, whether military or commercial. Ekranoplans benefit from WIG in two important ways, the first being the ability to achieve incredibly high speeds and the second that flying at 10 to 50 feet above the surface makes them largely undetectable by radar.
WIG works as a high pressure region develops beneath the wing’s lower surface and above the water surface, which enhances its lift compared to a conventional wing in free air. The close proximity of the water also disrupts the formation of wing-tip vortices, which are a major cause of induced drag on conventional wings in free air. To benefit from WIG, the airfoil must have a relatively flat lower surface in order to increase lift. WIG craft have an advantage over water-bourne craft in that a huge amount of power is needed to overcome the drag of the water. By flying just above the water that power can be used for speed and carrying capacity.
Ekranoplans were developed in a range of sizes and applications, but they could reach enormous proportions and cargo carrying capacity. The Lun, among the largest to be developed, spanned 240 feet long with a wingspan of 144 feet. Its size would be comparable to a Boeing 747. It had a maximum takeoff weight of 882,000 pounds and a range of over 1,800 miles. This behemoth could cruise at 341 mph, leaving traditional naval vessels quickly in its wake.
Several nations, including Russia and the United States, continue to explore the potential of WIG (like the Boeing Pelican), and China appears to have an active WIG program, but to date none have pushed this technology to the limit as Soviet designers and engineers did towards the end of the Cold War.
A Soviet Lun Ekranoplan transport at rest with crew on the exterior giving an idea of the size of the craft.
Few things have been as expansively influential in the world of design and the emerging Modern movement as the Bauhaus school and design movement that originated out of Dessau, Germany shortly after WWI ended. Bauhaus translates roughly into English to mean “house of building.” Though very short lived, existing only from when Walter Gropius (a recently decommissioned German officer) founded the school in 1919 to its disbanding in 1933, enough people were touched by the design leadership and thinking at the school to carry it throughout the world. That, and many of the instructors found themselves at schools elsewhere in the world where they could continue the good work and sharpen the minds of future designers and architects. Walter Gropius ended up at Harvard’s design school in 1934, subsequently helping a number of students and instructors make their way to positions and careers in the United States. This migration of Bauhausians to the United States set the stage for the launching of a design movement here that lasts to this day.
There is a concise article in the IHT that gives a nice overview of the Bauhaus and some of the personalities that made it happen. The article is in response to what sounds like an excellent exhibit tracing the history of the Bauhaus at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
That graphic above looks like it could have been from 1969. I posted about the Constellation and Orion programs earlier, but just spent way to much time on HowStuffWorks and found an excellent and concise summary of the details around the Orion CEV. It is interesting how much from the Apollo program we are leveraging for Orion and Constellation. NASA has gone back to the future, so to speak. It makes perfect sense, in the vein of continuous improvement, as the Apollo program worked very well nearly forty years ago. With today’s advancements in electronics, computers, materials, and propulsion (not to mention everything we have learned from the shuttle and the ISS), Orion should benefit from a very long list of innovations and improvements. Earlier I had read that this program would not be coming online until 2015, five years after the decommissioning of the Space Shuttle leaving quite a gap in our ability to reach space without the help of others. Now I am seeing estimates of 2011 for Orion to be operational, keeping us in what is building up to be an incredibly competitive space race with China, India, Japan, Russia, and the ESA.
Those that know me well will be shocked by this post. Yes, I have been a Dell hater. My personal experiences with their products over the years have left me both very frustrated and disappointed. Then I went to Adaptive Path’s MX Conference in San Francisco in February of 2007, just about a year ago. It was a dense, terrific conference loosely themed around managing for the user experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing all of the speakers. One in particular, though, really caught my attention. It was Brooks Protzmann, the manager of the then recently launched Experience Design Group at Dell. I would be nice saying that he had his work cut out for him in front of this obviously predominantly Apple loving crowd. I think he did a great job presenting. He owned Dell’s past mistakes regarding the user, and made a point to own why those mistakes had happened (despite these realities being inherited challenges). That alone was refreshing. He then outlined how Dell’s approach to product design and the user experience was in the process of being radically transformed. He was incredibly honest and open, and provided us a window into the course he and his team were setting for Dell.
The results of that direction are now evident. Though I have yet to interact with any of these products, it includes a range of desktops, laptops and the above monitor (a refreshingly complete, if somewhat overwrought, departure from Dell’s design language) the photos for which made it to all the various gadget blogs late last fall. This is certainly a step in the right direction for design and user experience over at Dell, and these changes are beginning to surface not just within Dell’s product line, but with Dell’s entire customer engagement strategy and is evidence that Protzmann delivered on his promise to improve experience and interaction design for Dell customers. This is an exciting transformation to see, and it has been enough of a change for me, and many others, to take notice. What is even more impressive, and demands attention and acknowledgment, is how quickly Protzmann and his team were able to redirect Dell’s approach to interaction and product design, and ultimately redirect Dell’s culture and approach to their customers. It’s been less than a year since MX. That’s impressive. The big question, though, if it will be enough to truly transform Dell and market perception in the long term.
Update: Just saw another new product design leaked over at Engadget, a laptop, that definitely looks nice.
I have been following this story like the wide-eyed ten year old that I am when it comes to anything related to even the remote possibility that I might someday be able to experience the weightlessness of space. Earlier this week Sir Richard Branson unveiled the design of Virgin Galactic’s new orbitalspace launch system, the carrier vehicle WhiteKnightTwo and the suborbital craft SpaceShipTwo (pictured above). This would be phase two of Virgin Galactic’s plan to “improve” humanity’s access to space. At $200,000 per seat that would be wealthy humanity, at least initially until the operation scales and ticket prices come down dramatically. Back in 2005 Branson’s Virgin Group and Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites announced an agreement to form a new aerospace production company to build a fleet of commercial sub-orbital spaceships and launch aircraft. The new company, The Spaceship Company owns the designs of the SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two launch systems. See my previous post on Burt Rutan.
SpaceShipTwo will hold six passengers and two pilots and will fly higher than SpaceShipOne, the craft created by Scaled Composites that became the first private venture to enter Earth’s orbit, winning the Ansari X-prize in the process. Virgin Galactic hopes to launch its first public flight before 2009 and is now taking seat reservations. 200 people have already purchased tickets.
The commercial flights will be about 2.5 hours in duration with only a few minutes of that actually being spent in orbit experiencing weightlessness. At $200,000 per flight, that is $1,333 per minute.
We live in a world of technology fetishism, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of consumer electronics, and few have had as significant an impact on design in this category as Dieter Rams. Renowned for his work at Braun and for creating the “Braun style”, his work in interaction and interface design not only shaped an entire generation of consumer electronics, and industrial designers, but set a standard for clean, excellent design that we see manifested today in seminal products like those from Apple. Back in 2004 Metropolis did a feature on him in which he provided his design philosophy in ten points, which I recently came across again and thought important to highlight:
“These points cannot be set in stone because just as technology and culture are constantly developing, so are ideas about good design.”
- Dieter Rams
1. Good design is innovative.
Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology and can never be an end in itself.
2. Good design makes a product useful.
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of the product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
3. Good design is aesthetic.
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4. Good design makes a product understandable.
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5. Good design is honest.
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful, or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
6. Good design is unobtrusive.
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are
neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
7. Good design is long-lasting.
It avoids being fashionable, and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years–even in today’s throwaway society.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Nothing must be arbitrary. Care and accuracy in the design process shows respect toward the consumer.
9. Good design is environmentally friendly.
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the life cycle of the product.
10. Good design is as little design as possible.
Less but better–because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with inessentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity!
More on Rams and an interview with him at designboom.
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