Category: Process

HBR finally succumbs and publishes a design-is-great article, Roberto Verganti’s Innovating Through Design. Here’s his lead-off argument:

If you shop at Target, you may have seen a distinctive teakettle designed by architect Michael Graves. Target’s version is a knock-off (by Graves himself) of his original 1985 design for Alessi, the northern Italian home-furnishings manufacturer. Alessi has sold more than 1.5 million of the original design at five times the price of the Target version. This outstanding teakettle (also known as model 9093) emerged from a process that Roberto Verganti calls “design-driven innovation.” In this article, Verganti describes how Alessi, the lighting manufacturers Flos and Artemide, the furniture maker Kartell, and a few firms in the Lombardy region take a distinctive approach to design and innovation.

He then goes on to describe how these manufacturers — centered around Milan — nurture a community of discourse that eventually gestates into new product designs over the course of several years, contrasted with user research-generated design ideas.

What’s new here is his view that one need not have any design training to participate in this process, the executives in Milan typically having been trained in law or engineering. A radical idea?

A great outcome of Overlap is that the New York attendees — plus other peeps in our network — have been meeting up and continuing the conversation. Some of the same themes keep surfacing, such as the culture of business consulting firms and design firms, and social action. Another is service design.

A fundamental question in service design that we’ve been asking is, to be frank, is this just the same old design under a new title? I’ve spent the better part of the last 13 years designing things for the Internet that, while they result in media and code, are delivered as services. So looking at service design from this point of view doesn’t look much different: there’s a lot of emphasis on the customer and their experience rather than artifacts. But at the end of the day even a service involves making stuff that ultimately facilitates the service.

Service design does seem to be a wonderful catalyst for helping designers consider use of a product over time. Creating interaction points that happen over time isn’t easy to record or communicate, as we turn to time lines, storyboards, flip books, movies, and so on to capture these ideas. A central challenge is to help stakeholders understand what we’re creating in terms of the customer’s experience. It fails when you’re all sitting around staring at an artifact like a web page for a 10 minute critique — as if it were print — when the customer will only look at it for 10 seconds. It’s the experience that needs to be communicated and reviewed, and service design as a frame is helping us talk about these artifacts as interaction rather than just stuff. And that’s a good thing.

Incidentally, Overlap will be happening again in 2007, coordinated by the Toronto set. Stay tuned for details.

Of course we know feedback in human and product performance is important, but this study from K. Anders Ericsson is still interesting. He spent 25 years interviewing and analyzing high-flying professionals and is the coeditor of the recent 918-page book Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

You have to seek out situations where you get feedback. It’s a myth that you get better when you just do the things you enjoy.

Here’s a typical example: Medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice, make an assessment in an effort to solve a particularly difficult case, and then they move on. They may never see him or her again. I recently interviewed a highly successful diagnostician who works very differently. He spends a lot of his own time checking up on his patients, taking extensive notes on what he’s thinking at the time of diagnosis, and checking back to see how accurate he is. This extra step he created gives him a significant advantage compared with his peers. It lets him better understand how and when he’s improving.

I attended the World Futures conference in Toronto recently, and hope to find a spare minute to write up my thoughts on the conference. But one thing that struck me was how markedly different the tone of discussion was between people who relied on forecasting techniques vs. those that relied on trends. The former produced valuable and fascinating forecasts, but had to back them up with authority based on their personal ability, the validity of the technique, or sheer confidence.

The trend people (e.g. SRI, Ray Kurzweil), meanwhile, were remarkably calm and even humble. They looked — as Paul Saffo would have us do — at least twice as far back into the past as they looked into the future. Granted, the trend watchers tended to watch technology, particularly information technology, and this is quite a bit less chaotic then, say, terrorism or epidemics. Nevertheless when looking at 20 or 30 years of data it felt significantly easier to make plausible suppositions about what the next few years will hold. Ray Kurzweil attributes his impressive performance as an inventor to his ability to track trends: “Invention is a matter of timing.”

Subsequently, I’ve noticed that what is often referred to as a trend actually falls — perhaps because of our apophenia or simply marketing cahones — into one of three categories:

1. Isolated — though remarkable — events
2. Several similar events happening at the same time
3. Predictions based on hunches

Harnessing weak signals, wild cards, and Blink-style instinct can be valuable, but they’re not trends. One thing futures studies has to offer those of us working in innovation and design is, somewhat surprisingly, a more sophisticated use of historical information.

Here’s a wonderful little diagram from Central Office of Design…