Design Consilience

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

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.

 

Engineers As Creative Design People

A graphic at Logic+Emotion, used in context of a discussion on whether "Designers Are Enemies Of Design", depicts the creative people involved in solving design problems.

There needs to be an addition to this equation of creative problem solvers.

Innovations in materials, performance improvements in existing products and revolutionary developments that enable design innovations come from the engineer. With multidisciplinary teams involved in solving design problems in organizations, the new engineer is not the geeky, gray, slide-rule wielding traditionalist. Stay tuned for my rendition of the new  engineer in the design-centric age.

Becoming An Effective Design Manager

This is a follow up on the Customization And The Democratization Of Design post, which summarized Nussbaum's post "Are Designers The Enemy Of Design". This post specifically discusses a key point that emerged from Nussbaum's article that designers will soon perform a role of design managers, where they develop tools that enable people (aka customers/ consumers) to design products of their own liking i.e. customized products.

The question of how one becomes a good designer would now become a question of how one becomes a good design manager. A good clue is offered up in a CNBC Business of Innovation series video on the role of customers in business innovation.

Robert Schank, Socratic Arts CEO, says that asking the customer what they want is an incorrect approach because customers don't really know what they want or need. He says instead that innovators should watch what people do. Watching their behavior will offer keen insights into what they need.

The reason asking customers cannot articulate what they want is because they tend to rationalize what they want. Listening and observing consumers will allow designers to watch what they do which in turn reflects what the want.

Meg Whitman, Ebay CEO, said that Ebay just provides a platform for customers to buy and sell goods. She said that watching how customers use the trading platform and observing what they do is what helps Ebay optimize the platform in order to help customers do better what they want to do. Entrepreneurs on Ebay are optimizing their experience by dictating what is going through the freedom made available to them.

Calloway, the golf company, hired applied physicists, aerospace engineers and psychologists to "Uncover unvoiced needs and desires" and then helped make golfers feel better by giving them confidence through innovations that allowed them to hit straighter and play better.

By observing a customer use a product it is possible to make improvements to the existing product in small steps, implying that the design is evolving. This type of improvement is evolutionary innovation.

So becoming an effective design manager requires observing the customer and asking why things are the way they are and what's not working. 

One other question to answer is what a product ought to be when you don't know what it is. In other words how do you know what do you know whether people need a product when it doesnt exist. Design managers who develop solutions in this vein are entrepreneurs. This type of design constitutes revolutionary innovation.

In essence becoming an effective design manager involves embracing a customer early on...

Customization And The Democratization Of Design

Bruce Nussbaum poses the question "Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?" [NussbaumOnDesign, March 18]. He contends that every one is a designer, performing everyday activities of their choice or volition to make their lives what they would desire it to be, taking decisions to "design their lives". It is indeed true that we are caught up in a constant feedback loop in taking corrective steps to our actions, tweaking our actions to get to our desired goal. This, he says, it what it is to live a life in beta.

More people are playing the role of designer through the tools being offered to them, such as blogs, Myspace, and clothes. He postulates that people want to participate more in the design process of their lives. This essentially means that people want greater power to customize a product to suit themselves.

What the designer will have to now do is build tools and platforms that people can use in order to build customized products to suit their needs through experiential learning and trial and error.

While Nussbaum claims that exceptional design will be done by star designers, my understanding of the article is that most designers will become design managers, utilizing their understanding of the design process and various design domains to provide navigable maps for people to customize products to their liking. This approach is in opposition to the approach of allowing people complete and uncontrolled access to control the design of a product, which even if possible to develop or manufacture, would result in chaos. Creativity is about controlling chaos (Evolvingtrends) Designers provide the controlling mechanism through governing the choices and freedom made available to the customer.

The designer will be involved as much is designing a product as in building tools to enable the design process. Developing a design pathway for a particular product, some thing Dell achieved through its online configuration tool, is one such example. The designer will envision the design possibilities and a tree of all the scenarios in which the design could be utilized in the degrees of freedom for customization in a configuration tool. 

An issue that comes up in the democratization of design is who owns the design. It is logical that the consumer using a tool to develop a design would own the end product. However, it is important that design choices that are incompatible or unsafe not be permitted, or else the liability would just as well fall on the designer as the consumer. This may take on the undertones of Big Brother, but it is necessary to limit choices in such situations. Nussbaum mentions sustainability as one issue that should concern designers. (In fact, he urges us as consumers to demand products that are sustainable from designers) . Such considerations can be woven into the design thinking and design tools to limit choices to aid in some thing such as sustainable design that will benefit society at large.

All in all, innovation from the masses is here to stay!