Design_at_the_edge

James Dyson — inventor? inovator?

  James Dyson — inventor 
  Originally uploaded by Bob Naylor

You know the feeling when some everyday product lets you down. ‘I could have designed this better myself’, you think. But how many of us turn our thoughts into actions? James Dyson does. He is a man who likes to make things work better. With his research team he has developed products that have achieved sales of over £3 billion worldwide. Whilst at the Royal College of Art (1970) he designed the Sea Truck for Rotork.

This was intended to be the equivalent of a Land Rover, able to move equipment, stores and livestock between islands, etc.

The buyers/users of the Sea Truck tended to abuse the boat thinking its 6-inch draft made it indestructible... ( extracted from Against the Odds) "As a result they tended to ram it into rocks more often than was strictly good or wholesome.

As designers we knew that we could enhance the product by making it unpuncturable. And the best way to do that was to take our lead from those large plastic water pipes which will not even break if you hit them with a hammer..... the pipes would be bunged with what looked like plastic footballs,..

We bought a farmhouse.. in the Cotswolds. With drystone walls to be built.... I found myself spending a lot of time in the company of a wheel barrow... I discovered what a crummy piece of equipment it [ a navvy barrow] really was.

...It was off to France to test the Tube Boat - ....- where we needed to bung the polyethylene pipes, and where I learned how to mould unpuncturable low-density polyethylene into a sphere. And as I turned my first plasic sphere, I knew waht was happening and I said to myself "This is it matey. This is the answer to all my problems."  A revolutionary wheel.

And the Ball Barrow was born

The frames of the Ball Barrow were sprayed with an epoxy powder which was then baked on. Much of the spray ended up on the conveyor and would be sucked onto a screen. Every hour the line stopped as the blocked screen was cleared. Our suppliers told us that big users had a cyclone installed to centrifuge the powder and collected at the bottom of a conical section.. but it was 30 feet high! And £75,000!

On the way home one night Dyson sketched the Cyclone on the roof of the local sawmill, climbed all over it to see how it worked,and used this knowledge  to construct one of his own. As Against all Odds describes.. it worked! And this also was the inspired solution for the vacuum cleaner problem.. The Dyson cleaner that was the end result of Dyson observing observing how quickly existing bag vacuums lost their suction when he was using one at home.

It is this technology that has proved to be the platform for the Dyson successful growth.

But it is intriguing how each nugget of knowledge has been re-used on other user problems. It is just making the connections that is a necessary start. As to whether we should call James Dyson Inventive  or Innovative....:

 

Inventive Merit... Relieves or avoids the constraints of existing ways of doing things
Innovative Merit... Changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things.
Conclusion.. both terms apply!
 

Sinclair C5 and Innovation Nation

  Sinclair C5 
  Originally uploaded by adactio

“The biggest single failing in British innovation businesses is identifying true market need and specifying a product or service which meets that need. That is the biggest glaring gap.”

Martin Rigby, MD ET Capital.

John Denham, Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills launched his White Paper Innovation Nation yesterday, whilst his colleague Alistair Darling increased the tax burden on entrepreneurial companies! As reported in the Independent, He is planning an Innovation initiative for government departments.  Under the plan, all 21 government departments will be required to draw up an "innovation procurement plan" on how they will incorporate new technologies from smaller businesses..... "Some of it won't work. That's the nature of innovation," said Mr Denham. The potential of revolutionary technology far outweighed the certain failures that will also occur. He said: "You can't have the iPod without the Sinclair C5."

Worryingly we always refer to the Sinclair as an example of failure of British Innovation and iPod as a success... but hang on.... isn't the iPod an example of US success?
I also remember this quote from a presentation by Sir George Cox, “If Bill Gates had started in the UK he would now be the biggest software distributor in Guildford.”
I have been lazily keeping an eye on British innovators to replace the iPod bit of the above statement and my heart beat faster as I read about the sale of Bebo in the Independent over breakfast.... they are Brits and making a fortune.. well done.. no hang on, they live in California.

The biggest and best transforming ventures have been simple ideas with simple strategies.
-- John Doerr, Venture Capitalist

Their story is in the Guardian here and Ihave abstracted pieces below: yet again the Insight that drove their creativity was personal  Blog Early, Blog Often was created because, in the words of Michael Birch  "'I wanted it to be a place where I could exchange photos and keep in touch with my family in England,' Michael Birch's original internet plans were aimed at an older age group - thirty-somethings - but he soon learnt that social networking on-line depends on finding a focus based on more than age - a classroom, for instance, or a particular hobby.
'But you can't control who finds websites popular. Teenagers are always the early adopters online because they have more time on their hands and less money - and social networks are free.'

And so Bebo spread entirely by word of mouth in schools and colleges, to the point where his site now has 100 million page views every day. Bebo is just a refinement of Ringo, Birch's previous attempt at a social networking site that he built in 2003 and sold not long after it reached 400,000 members. And that grew out of BirthdayAlarm.com, a successful birthday reminder service using eCards that currently has 40m users. Birch bought the name Bebo from someone else. 'When we planned the site, all the cool, short names were taken,' he says. ' But after we bought it we invented an acronym for it: blog early blog often.'

It could be that Bebo and co have nothing much to do with social networking in the established sense. Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, recently told the New Yorker that it had more to do with 'voyeurism and exhibitionism. People like to express themselves, and they are curious about other people.' That is to say, it's just a basic human instinct.

On a practical level, the real reason Bebo has taken off so fast is because it can be mastered by a 12-year-old. There is no tricky programming to learn, no software to load. You click on a template and receive instant gratification."

Now what was that killer UK innovation?... and by the way Jonathan Ive is British... does that count?

Picture uploaded  by exfordy. Used with thanks under CC.

Perhaps we should actually be saying :

"Is the iPod the new JCB of the music world. After all the JCB is beautifully designed, available world-wide, changes the lives of people around it; uses the best components from around the world; is iconic and people do great things to music with it."

Picture uploaded  by Indigo Goat  . Used with thanks under CC.

So we need to start with a consumer insight and drive the ideas, concepts, prototypes and implementations from that POV- validity... viability enters the conversation later as we figure out how to make enough money from it to do it again, and again, and... we need to remember that products don't stand alone and may be part of of the armoury of a systems thinker. after all JCB's diesel record breaker is part of their effort of ensuring they have an excellent source of diesel engines... JCB, because Caterpillar, their great rivals, bought out Perkins, the diesel manufacturer to both. So they decided to bring some engine manufacture in-house... which meant developing a diesel of their own. So doing an Apple they looked for partners to enhance their expertise - Construction equipment manufacturer JCB announced plans to develop and manufacture its own 4 and 6 L diesel engines specifically for use in its line of off-highway equipment. The engines, which will comply with future worldwide emissions requirements, are to be developed in close partnership with (link) Ricardo, AVL, Cosworth and Krause.

So maybe we don't need or Sinclair C5's but will make do with JCB... and Ricardo, Cosworth, etc.

Design for surprising all the senses

  i survived 
  Originally uploaded by A tea but no e

Design Sojourn has a post on Design rules...  

What are your Principles of Good Design? .

the thing about rules are they can be broken... and people like Jonathan Ive do just that... having mastered them first. One of the problem with embedding design into an organisation is that it is a cultural issue... if strong sustainable growth is 'good' then we know that innovative practices are the key. Janice KirkPatrick makes the case for design in business with clarity in her presentation

"Innovate Or Deteriorate—Design Or Die"

subtitled  

"The Role Of Design In Innovating For Business Success"
which explores the changing role of design in business through each revolution.. industrial , technological information, etc.
Returning to the Design Sojourn post which I have reproduced and commented on from my Point of View below:

Good Design  ~

1. is a good investment.
This originally started as “Good Design is Good Business” courtesy of Mr. Watson. However in today’s business environment, I belief most people understand this concept, but not many actually see it as an investment that has tangible returns. Therefore most Return on Investment (ROI) calculations can apply here. This means there has to be risk assessments, planning, budget controls, and long term goals set out. It is not, and should never be about making something look good and flogging it for extra cash.

Comment: because Design Investment is a longer term top-line injection it can be seen as ineffective; bottom line actions reap faster but often only short term results. Working on both requires great design behaviour. A strategic view of how design can affect the business side of the organisation can be couched in terms of speed to market (starts paying back earlier), enhancing the innovation hit rate... imagine if one of our launches did much better! How to prove it... do a pilot project to generate the statistics; present the winning case... expect to take a long time to spread across organisation!
2. does not discriminate.
Good design is all encompassing and unifying. It should not just be about the product or look. It should include every single aspect that circulates around a product, including things like experience, usability, packaging and branding. Design thinking can and should be applied into all aspects of the business and organization.

Comment: Good design is inclusive, drawing people in to add energy to the motivating insight, idea, concept, prototype, story, etc., turning it into a winner.

3. does not exist in vacuum.
Nothing comes from nothing. I find the best designs are the right ones for the context it is developed in. Good understanding of user needs, a critical insight on a problem, and a well defined brief is vital for producing the best designs.

Comment: And making sure we have good design processes that touch all the key players on the project... the core team itself of course but also the sponsors, orchestrators, champions and endorsers that encourage and support.

4. satisfies all requirements.
A design cannot be successful if it does not satisfies all requirements of the business and development constraints. This is to a certain extent about compromise, but it is also about prioritizing, and ensuring that you win the war not the battles. Pick your fights and learn to negotiate.

Comment: Don't fight.. persuade! Good, sorry, great design has risks.. mitigating those risks means telling the story persuasively.. fighting means you may win the battle but lose the war! (politics!)

5. is beautiful.
I don’t think too much needs to be said here, but our visual sense is one of the strongest of our 5 senses. There is no justification for bad design or idea. In other words you cannot polish crap. So be self critical instead of letting the market tell you otherwise.

Comment: Design for the 5 senses, in a beautiful market it is VAKOG  

(visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, gustatory and olfactory)

that ensures a lingering experience that we talk about (see below), which is crucial because... 

"brands that win will be those whose consumers tell the best stories"

[See Kenco below]... maybe attractive is a better word than beauty?

6. is innovative, intuitive and clever.
The purpose here is to go beyond aesthetic or focusing too much on the look of a product. (Just in case point 5 threw you off, heh heh!)

Comment: This definition of innovation is useful here:  

"Innovation is something that changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way, or the world in which the customer experiences things. That's innovation." -Kevin Roberts in Lovemarks

also Steve Jobs comments may be relevant  "It goes back to the first brochure we ever did at Apple," he told me. "It was white, with a picture of an apple. Fruit, an apple. . .that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop. . . . But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem - and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works. That's what we wanted to do with Mac."

 

7. is strategic.
This last one, I think is the most important. Design has to be at the highest level of decision making, and part of why an organization exists. My favorite thought is that it should have a vital function in any organization, just like accounting or logistics.

Comment: accounting and logistics are not pervasive, most of accounting is lagging and logistics is creative in the sense of real-time decision-making. design is a more reflective social science. Maybe this model of the organisation might help...

 

 

Conversations:

 take time as

 each player is competing to

 drag conversation into their corner
We need good (design) processes that pull the conversation into the centre.. Tangible models help... they sit at the centre of the large triangle.
And the speed of change?.. Stewart Brand sums it up here

where the each layer changes faster than the layer below it... the gap between fashion and culture is fascinating.. it maybe why design as creating a new thing and design as culture is so difficult!


And finally....

aesthetics is defined here more widely than just the look.. and if you talk to an 'ordinary' person who has bought an iPod that is obvious so... I took this from here as my provocation

Although food is a basic and frequently experienced commodity, careful attention to the aesthetic possibilities of foodstuffs can turn eating into gastronomy. Chefs inspire our aesthetic enjoyment through the visual sense using colour and arrangement; they inspire our senses of taste and smell using spices, diversity/contrast, anticipation, seduction, and decoration/garnishes. In regard to drinking water, there are formal criteria for aesthetic value including odour, colour, total dissolved solids and clarity. There are numerical standards in the U.S. for aesthetic acceptability of these parameters.

 

The power of ...holistic aesthetics:

Designing and presenting essentials- 2 creative zens

  Twisted 
  Originally uploaded by Conor Lawless

Janice Kirkpatrick wrote in Innovation—the politics of change, Sept, 1996

"The creative process, the process of designing, is an excellent ‘tool’ for analysis, synthesis and reconstruction of the world. It reveals the ideologies that motivate us and excite us. This gives us clues which we can then use in developing an innovative strategy which may yield a future which will be appropriate: familiar yet new, challenging yet supportive."

In his last book (of lectures to be delivered in 1984- he died in 1983) "Six Memos for the Next Millennium", Italo Calvino wrote of literature values he felt should be passed on to the next millennium:
1. Lightness- a reaction to the heaviness of life.
2. Quickness- should not be confused with measurable speed; it is about mental agility.
3. Exactitude - a planning process; creating a clear, memorable image; language with nuance.
4. Visibility- making complex relationships understandable and definable.
5. Multiplicity- a system of systems; interpretation at various levels
which he completed and left the title for the last:-
6. Consistency- clarity of content and aesthetics; holistic sustainability

Garr Reynolds writes on pages 31 & 32 of his book Presentationzen

"Creating presentations is a supremely creative process.....

...Once you realise that the preparation of a presentation is a creative act, not merely the assembling of facts and data in a linear fashion, you'll see that preparing a presentation is a "whole-minded" activity that requires as much right-brain thinking as it does left-brain-thinking......... the translation of your content into presentation form will require that you exercise much more of your so-called right brain."

On p.104 in the section on Simplicity Garr refers to the term being "essentially synonymous with clarity, directness, subtlety, essentialness and minimalism." which also maps onto the 6 Memos

If we pull all this together, we may see that the creative processes that gave us something to talk about are the very same ones that will enable us to create the story we wish to tell, and the audience want to hear! They both deserve the time to do a great job of designing the material, as in most presentations we are asking our audience to think innovatively and consider doing something differently. For as Bill Buxton says:

“You have to spend as much time directing your innovation and creativity to fostering a culture of creativity and a receptiveness to innovation as you spend on the ideas themselves.”


Picture link.
So we must remember to plan time and space into our schedules for the creation of a great presentation... as well as great products, services, experiences. Our audience deserves nothing less!