Must Read: Becky Bermont on Design
Some of my favorite people to work and interact with are business people who (somehow) find themselves surrounded by designers. In the consulting world, we often call these people “strategists,” but I’m sure there are lots of other names for them. The reason I find them so valuable is that they help me understand how design fits into the rest of the business world, preventing me from being myopic about design. Becky Bermont is one of those people. An MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Becky now works alongside John Maeda as RISD’s VP of Media + Partners. Check out these two articles published by Harvard Business.
Learning from How Designers Think and Work
It’s interesting how Bermont developed her definition of design in essentially the opposite direction that most designers develop theirs. I remember going to a design strategy conference at IIT and being struck at how similar it felt to market research conferences. I see now that designers are people who can make information emotional and visceral, who can make a bigger impact by thoughtfully marrying form and content. They are “experience perfectionists”…
I like how Bermont peels away at the layers of design here. In my opinion, she’s getting close to the core. Design’s biggest value is using aesthetics (you can call it storytelling if you want) to generate both excitement and investment in a certain product or project. This value comes from a combination of design thinking and design making.
How Artist/Leaders Do Things Differently
I won’t lie — for non-artists like me, working in this leadership paradigm has taken some adjustment. But it’s an essential part of our collective commitment to leading our organization authentically. She doesn’t explicitly call it out, but the principles in this post are the heart of my personal definition of design thinking:
- Passion fuels the work
- Form and content can’t be decoupled
- Iteration is expected
- All failures are opportunities for course correction
Designers, in isolation, don’t always see the value of their process or their skills. At worst, they identify the wrong things as their strengths. Of course, the same goes for any business function; we’re at our best when observing and working together. Thanks to Becky and her peers for helping designers understand their true value!
Orange & Kaleidoscope Create Solar Tent Concept
Every year, UK communications company Orange creates solar concept tents for Glastonbury. This year, they asked my friends at Kaleidoscope to help them dream up their latest concept. According to their press release, “Orange know the importance of keeping in contact with friends while onsite and undertook this concept project to look at how the festival goers communication and power supply needs might be met in the future.” The tent features photovoltaic fabric, glo-cation technology, a wireless hub, and groundsheet heat.
Drew Smith Responds to my Mazda 3 Love
A few weeks ago, I professed my love for the new Mazda 3 production, saying it was a great translation of the Nagare theme that Mazda has been using to impress car show attendees. To get a better perspective on the subject, I asked transportation design strategist Drew Smith for his thoughts on the subject. His comment was so thoughtful that I thought it deserved it’s own post. Here it is:
For me this car is a physical embodiment of the massive challenges that automotive designers face when translating a conceptual design language into something that can be produced to a (low) cost.
The whole Nagare series of cars was predicated on the development of a premium - read more expensive to produce - surface and form language that was designed to shift Mazda upmarket. A succesful, authentic production implementation was always going to rely on high levels of attention to detail and manufacturing skill.
With that in mind, I’m not sure that this implementation of the Nagare achieves those goals. Where the concept cars almost universally reminded me of the unbroken surface of a fast-flowing stream (carrying with it connotations of Japanese natural beauty etc.), the implementation on this vehicle is somewhat less high-minded and a lot of it comes down to the way cars are made.
If you separate front, middle and back of the car there are three different games being played.
At the front, it’s clear that they’re trying to cram in as much Nagare-ness as they can to get the facial recognition synapses firing in the prospective buyer. The front clip is actually the cheapest place to play with lots of form and depth, so it’s really no wonder they went to town with it. The fact that it comes across as pretty overdone, however, runs completely counter to the underlying theme of the Nagare - flow - language.
The side surfaces of the car are far more successful in communicating the intent of the language, with the crease in the lower door being particularly nice to let the eye linger on. Funnily enough, these are the most expensive surface to do well, and although they lack much of the magic of the show cars, they’re still nicely resolved.
The rear of the car is probably the biggest disappointment as it doesn’t really speak of anything intrinsically Mazda or Nagare and is an uncomfortable amalgam of many other cars. This isn’t a problem unique to Mazda, however.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my first run-in with the new Mazda 3. I thought it was a great translation of the Nagare design theme that Mazda has been using. To get a better perspective, I asked transporation design strategist Drew Smith for his thoughts on the subject:
They’re far from alone in letting the back of the car get away from them, as evidenced by the new Mercedes E-Class, a car that has almost no rear-end identity.
The front lamps, as you point out, do have some lovely detailing in them that support the theme, but a look at the rears shows none of the same deftness of touch. Similarly, the grille insert pattern is a nice little detail that is let down by the discordant crossbar and number plate placement.
At the end of all this, I come back to my opening statement. The car is representative of the massive challenges we face and the compromises that must be made to make something at a cost that the market can take. If Mazda hadn’t spent so many concepts teasing us with stunningly resolved surfaces, details and proportions, this car would not disappoint me nearly so much, as truth be told, it IS a good piece of production work.
The problem was that, as an industry tragic (and please, dear Strategic Aesthetics reader, remember that that is what I am. I am not a normal person :P), my expectations had been set much higher.
If I put my consumer hat on, I think you might have nailed it Michael. At the end of the day, Mazda is still (despite all their work to the contrary) as mainstream producer selling cars to mainstream consumers. And on that front, I think that the 3 provides a startling new face that deserves to do well in the market place.
I’m still holding out hope for a Mazda that really does justice to all their hard work, however. A new, electric RX-7 based on the Taiki would do nicely!
Thanks again, Drew!
Wanderlust: Kaleidoscope’s 2009 Furniture Design Trends
Earlier this year, the Kaleidoscope team attended the ICFF and the Salone in Milan to check out the furniture. Collecting and organizing our observations, we put together this trend document, now on slideshare:
At Kaleidoscope, we think trends are great, but identifying them isn’t enough. We believe that documents like this one are only as useful to the extent that they’re actionable. With that in mind, we supplemented the trends themselves with three guidelines for applying them (slides 40-44): Assess how the trend overlaps with your work, Immerse yourself in the trend, and last but not least, Create something informed by the trend.
We hope you enjoy this document and welcome any feedback!
DAAPworks 2009
Last week, the University of Cincinnati hosted it’s annual DAAPworks show, celebrating the work of the college’s graduating seniors. For the most part, I spent my time looking through the industrial design projects. From year to year the quality of the work can vary, and the 2009 ID graduates excelled in most categories. In particular, the first graduating class of UC’s Transportation Track showed off a nice collection of capstones. This is the first time, to my recollection, that UC has displayed both the quality and quantity of work that other top-level schools like Art Center and CCS put out consistently.
Clay Mastin
There’s no such thing as a typical ID project (VCR, fire axe) these days. Students attempt to solve problems around anything from soft goods to social media. While creating a mass produced product is still preferred by some critics, students unapologetically use their design skills to tackle whatever problem for which they’re passionate. Often times it is not a product at all. (This usually results in a great project or a terrible one, but that’s a different post altogether.)
Jenn Ashman
Amy Johannigman
Ampersand (Tim Karoleff & Shea Springer)
Vanessa Noritz
Besides ID, the show exhibits fine art, architecture, planning, graphic design, interior design, fashion design, and digital design. There is always inspirational projects outside of one’s own focus, and it’s great to walk the show in search of new perspective.
For more photos from the show, check out Flickr album.
Chair Studio
UCID Juniors recently finished their highly anticipated spring studio - the chair project. It’s an opportunity for the confident upperclassmen to put their aesthetic stamp on an iconic object. They used a nice range of materials, proportions, processes, and aesthetics, making for a really nice collection of work. For more lots more photos, check out the kydlo photostream.
Sam Amis
Brian Bjelovuk
Jenna Edgemon
David Kennedy
Kyle Lewis presents
Professor Tony Kawanari
A Curriculum for Business Design
Ryan Jacoby’s newish blog do_matic is all about business design, so he proposed a futuristic curriculum for an advanced degree in the subject. Bookmark this one because he comes out swinging. Even though design thinking is a bit trendy, Ryan provides it with a sense of longevity by balancing it with essential “non-design thinking” (I don’t know what else to call it). This is a great overview of everything that creative business professionals need to understand, wrapped in a cool story about a student seeking this knowledge. Some of my favorite courses (for what it’s worth) are:
- BDES 266 | Organizational Design and Culture (Charts & Farts)
- BDES 126 | Creating Infectious Action (CIA)
- BDES 105 | Empathy, Inspiration and Alternative Data (Eyes & Ears / AltDat)
Finally, this comment from Ryan is an important point:
I’m not envisioning a “business for designers” curriculum or a “design for business-types” curriculum. It isn’t Design+Business or Business+Design, but instead the program would be focused on the new discipline of business design: a practical mix of entrepreneurship, commerce and art all with the “making” focus you mention.
More of Diane Hay’s Art
I’ve been really sensitive to the use of color in product design lately. Much of this inspiration comes from my interior designer wife and artist mother-in-law. The three of us just installed Diane’s latest series of work at Brutopia in Cincinnati’s Clifton neighborhood, which will be up through June. It’s a massive display of colors, check out these photos from our installation.
Art Website Updated
Nearly every successful designer will cite experimentation as an essential element to keeping your eye and your mind sharp. I experiment in three key ways - by entering design competitions, writing on this blog, and creating fine art. I reminded readers that I have my work at Sidewinder coffee shop in Northside, and now I wanted to announce that my website has been updated with photos of this work. If you’re not in Cincinnati to see it in person, check out the site and let me know what you think!
Through Thonet, Muji Becomes A Brand
Thonet has collaborated with Muji to modernize some of their classic pieces through designers James Irvine and Konstantin Grcic.
This is an interesting shift in strategy for Muji, who typically favors anonymity in both their products and their designers. Anonymity is their true strategic differentiation over other design-focused companies. By naming Irvine and Grcic outright, they acknowledge that their “no brand” is a powerful icon, but it comes at the expense of their key differentiator. A large part of Muji’s global audience is designers and design connoiseurs, so these pieces of furniture may bring a level of credibility to Muji’s furniture offering and open them up to doing more of it (with nice margins, probably). On the other hand, this fickle audience could reject these products and claim that Muji is selling out. To be successful, Muji will need to balance their new transparency while retaining the core equity of their brand.
Muji isn’t the first to grow it’s brand in this way. IKEA has taken a similar approach with their PS line, creating higher end products through higher end designers. The work is beautiful, but I think consumers will be skeptical that IKEA can produce these higher priced items at an equally higher quality. Muji, on the other hand, could have more success with their strategy. Unlike IKEA, they’ve never been known for their low cost position. Price was merely a feature of their “no brand” execution. By choosing designers like Grcic, who respect utility and anonymous beauty, they can grow this part of their business and stay true to the vision that brought them here.