Design Consilience

Quote of the day: Winston Churchill

Quote of the day:

"The empires of the future will be the empires of the mind"
- Winston Churchill

Hilarious Bad Ideas

Here are two ideas that people thought had enough merit to spend several thousand dollars patenting.
Some one actually patented a pogo-copter: take a pogo stick and helicopter blades and wheels and voila! You get the pogo-copter (1969)!

                           

What better protection to go along with your pogo-copter than airbag underpants when you fall on your derrière.

                     

"These brainy briefs feature accelerometers that detect a tumble in progress, sending compressed gas into balloon-like pockets throughout the knickers."

In case you want to license these technologies, technical descriptions for the pogo-copter aka "Jumping Device With Driven Airlift Blades " and airbag undershorts aka "Airbag inflation device" are here and here respectively.

Check out the other ridiculous ideas at the links below.

Via Wired and IZ Reloaded

Art vs. Design

Going along with my post on the Innovation-Growth-Technology Link, here is a diagram I have reproduced from Design_at_the_edge that helps us understand the difference between art, design and business. The caption at the top is my own.

                        

                

Does this mean that a disciplined artist can become a designer or does it mean that a designer is a disciplined artist?

A Conversation on Humanistic Design

This article is derived and extended from a comment I made in response to an on-going conversation on design at The David Report blog.
David Carlson has begun a conversation with Satyendra Pakhalé, Head of the Master of Design for Humanity and Sustainable Living at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands on humanistic design.
Some background research on Satyendra indicates that he completed his Bachelor's in Engineering and a Master's in Industrial Design at IIT in India before pursuing further education in Europe. He has collaborated with numerous companies in Europe, including Phillips in the Netherlands.

            

First of all, credit goes to Satyendra on having been able to bridge the gap between the analytical left and creative right brain. (Updated - I like what Niti Bhan mentioned about how design thinking is really about the whole brain approach to problem solving, "one that uses the logical analytical tools and frameworks of the business world as well as the fuzzier, more intuitive ones from the world of design"). It is critical, as a designer, to be able to have the broad horizontal understanding of the different areas that apply to the creation and realization of a product, while having vertical strengths in one or more of those areas. My views are evident in this post I made on Engineers as Creative Design People. His interest in mass manufacturing  creative designs is an interest I share - beauty and affordability need not be strange bed fellows.

Secondly, in trying to understand Satyendra's design philosophy, I found an article on the Democracy of Design, the essence of which is that he believes how all of design is equal, since they all solve problems and because they all have human value. While it is true that (good) designs solve problems and have human value, it is well-known that there is a hierarchy of human needs (think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs) and hence a hierarchy of the human value of a design. I believe that designs have different values based on the needs they address.

Thirdly, in response to the question of why companies seem to manufacture products that fall into the "Swiss Army Knife" category, this happens due to two reasons:
One, is an improper assessment of the needs i.e. the problem that the design is supposed to solve. Keen observation of the end-user and immersion in the end-user environment is some thing companies such as IDEO have used to great effect.
I believe the other cause is bias. As humans we tend to gravitate towards what we know and understand and attempt to fit any new problem into some thing we have seen before and try to find solutions for the problem from our knowledge base. Learning to distinguish between problems and identifying knowledge gaps become critical in the design problem solving situation. Companies and teams too can exhibit bias - talent and strength in an area such as marketing or industrial design or engineering may bias solution that are skewed towards those strengths. Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Jacoby from IDEO have an interesting article in Design Management Review where they talk about how companies can determine their "innovation bias".

This conversation that David had with Satyendra is part of a five-part series and follow-ups will be posted in the future.

The Innovation-Growth-Technology Link

I couldn't help notice the parallels between the diagram on "Ways to Grow" in Ryan Jacoby and Diego Rodriguez's article in the Design Management Review on "Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go" and the diagram Bob Truitt, serial biomedical entrepreneur and co-founder of Hemocleanse, presented in my biomedical entrepreneurship class.

The "Ways to Grow" figure, below,  helps in identifying and prioritizing growth opportunities and ties them to the nature and type of innovation that would be required of a company. Using this diagram requires determining how the growth is going to happen and then matching that growth requirement to the innovation outcome.
The authors state that the benefit expected from innovating is growth. They say that not only is the value offered to the people (customers) in terms of experiences that make life better for them important but it is also important to keep other shareholders and other stakeholders invested in the venture happy.

                                 

For a technology company, it is important to also link up technologies to growth models and market conditions. The diagram below will help a company link the technology innovation type to the the growth model . Technologies that are highly innovative, which have high barriers to entry and high clinical value (clinical value translates to market value) will offer the highest profit margin and be sustainable over the longer term unlike commodity products.

                                        
 

What is interesting is mapping the innovation-growth diagram to the technology-growth diagram. From connecting the two diagrams it follows that ideal technologies are highly innovative and create new markets and/or are disruptive in nature. Such products are revolutionary in nature, while big company products and good technologies are evolutionary in nature. Commodities are high volume products that only see incremental innovation.

 

Quote of the day: N. R. Narayana Murthy

From an article, "In India, outsourcing moves to the top floor", in the International Herald Tribune on how higher level tasks and not just back-office clerical jobs are being outsourced to India.

N. R. Narayana Murthy, chairman of Indian outsourcing firm Infosys, on the mantra his Western clients follow that helps understand the reason for the flow of higher level design tasks to India:

"Invest where you get maximum returns, source talent from where it is best available, produce where  it's most cost-effective, and sell where the markets are, without being constrained by national boundaries."

Good Corporate Citizenship Directory

Here's an interesting website I found; a directory of companies around the world committed to good corporate citizenship when it comes to the environment and sustainable business practice.

Kompendia is dedicated to providing a handy global corporate responsibility reference intended to assist visitors to:                   

• Learn what companies of all locations, scopes,scales and endeavours are doing locally and in other parts of the world to support the environment, community development, health, culture, and peace - participating in making the world a better and more sustainable place.                    
• Acknowledge those efforts and the value they bring to the development of individuals and societies                    
• Promote the involvement of the private sector in enhancing the quality of life of individuals, communities and ecosystems.

Companies currently on the list include bigwigs like 3M, ABB, HP and Schlumberger.
This directory reflects a grass-roots citizen initiated effort to encouraging companies to go green.

Corporate giants would much rather work on an ISO 14000 standard, which, while also voluntary, would give a company the kind of legitimacy conferred by an ISO rating. The ISO standards do not, however, establish environmental performance standards, which are defined by the companies themselves. The standards are intended to "provide an objective basis for verifying a company's claims about its performance." For us consumers, the ISO standards are"designed to provide customers with a reasonable assurance that the performance claims of a company are accurate."

What is necessary for grass-roots activists and consumers to pair up with organizations that have a global voice in order to get the message of the increasing importance of sustainable development out there. An affiliation between Kompendia and ISO would be one way to get the word out in a more effective manner.