Design Skills: Which Matter Most?
We all know that being a great industrial designer isn’t as simple as being a good sketcher, having a creative personality, or observing objectively. Being a great industrial designer requires a nuanced balance of many important skills and personality traits, but which matter the most?
In an effort to better understand and organize a young designer’s skill set, I’ve initiated a survey to gain insights from industrial design managers around the world. The survey is a brief set of 7 questions that asks design managers to record their preferences when interviewing junior designers. With the insights from this project, I’ll distill the results into guidelines that will help young designers better develop themselves.
If you’re an industrial designer who is or has been responsible for hiring co-op, intern, or junior industrial designers, I hope you’ll participate. If you don’t fit the profile but are still interested in the project, please share it with your team to help me get a diverse set of responses.
UC Chair Studio 2010
I made a quick visit to University of Cincinnati recently to see the fourth-year industrial design studio’s chair projects. As always, there was a broad range of solutions as the maturing students strive to refine their own points of view on design through this project. The deceptively simple chair allows for myriad possibilities when it comes to aesthetics and materials.
Many students outsourced the production of their chairs this year, possibly mirroring a general shift in design away from artifacts and towards ideas. While a very different experience than building the chair on their own, my take on this outsourcing is that the students learn a valuable skill in managing someone else to execute their vision. Ideally, UC will require some projects to be built by hand and some to be outsourced, since both are great experiences for a student to have. Check out a few of the projects here or visit my Flickr page to see a larger set.
All the “ID” work at the 2010 DAAPworks
Last week, University of Cincinnati seniors showed off their final projects. Here is a selection of the industrial design projects. (I wish I could have documented the whole show!) There was a great range of work, with a strong interest in furniture this year. My main criticism is with some of the critics themselves, who still think “ID” is defined only as products and tangible objects. Sure, it’s always great to casually walk through the space and breathe in beautifully considered medical devices, consumer electronics, or juvenile products, but industrial design has evolved far far beyond the final object. Some professionals still don’t even consider soft goods a legitimate endeavor! If anyone would like to weigh in on this point of view, I’d love to have a spirited conversation about it.
I believe no matter what the capstone topic, there is potential for both success and failure. Many of the students uncovered opportunities involving retail, brand positioning, experience design, new business ventures, and more. The product is not always the solution, and this new generation of students understands that. Congratulations to all the new graduates! Check out the full set of photos on Flickr.
The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
As a consultant, our business lives and dies with each presentation. Each time we speak with a client, no matter how formal or informal, it is an opportunity to leave an impression that inspires them to ask us for help solving with their latest challenge. I also stress the importance of the public speaking to my students, and I often cite Steve Jobs as the best source of inspiration. Jobs is a great example for design students because he must always relate his message back to something tangible, whether it is one of Apple’s interfaces, products, or a retail experiences. The keynote of the original iPhone is my gold standard for tone, structure, and details of how a student should present their own work.
Recently, my design director lent me a copy of Carmine Gallo’s The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. This is the second book on presentations that I’ve read in as many years, the other being Jerry Weissman’s Presenting To Win. Where the latter is a better reference, Gallo’s book is filled with inspiring examples, most of which can be reviewed on YouTube. The two books share a lot of the same points on preparation and structure, but there are some nice additions that come out when specifically studying Jobs.
Plan Plan Plan
As with many books on presentation, Gallo recommends that planning for a presentation is best done on paper, not on powerpoint. Jobs is a relentless planner, not a natural. A good presentation answers the questions, “What’s the one thing that matters most?” and “Why should you care?” for it’s audience. I’ll continue to promote this point only until I stop hearing speeches that fail to answer these questions.
Be The Protagonist
Products are not just products, they are solutions to some problem. We designers know better, but too often we forget this when it matters most. Through the lens of storytelling, solutions are the protagonists that save the day. Paint a vivid picture of your audience’s pain point (the antagonist) early in your presentation, always before you present your solution. Finally, end your speeches as Aristotle would, with a call to action.
The Holy Shit Moment
Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Scientist John Media reports, “The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things…it does pay attention to an emotionally-charged event.” Plan a holy shit moment by telling a personal story, revealing some unexpected information, or delivering a demonstration that will be a memorable experience for your audience. Make sure you build up to the moment properly and rehearse to make it come off effortlessly.
The New Renu
We’ve always used Bausch + Lomb’s renu contact solution, so I was excited to see the packaging refreshed with new graphics in a clear, textured bottle. As a product, in hand, it’s great. However, there are a few things holding it back from being a truly great piece of strategic aesthetics.
Everything about this bottle felt immediately like a good move on B+L’s part: the clear bottle and friendly graphics are disruptive in a category filled with competition struggling to straddle the healthcare and CPG worlds. Pentagram, the agency handling Bausch + Lomb’s new identity, seemed to find category balance in part through the addition of a nice serif typeface. For more background on the graphic design, read about the work on Pentagram’s site or from the critics at Brand New. Beyond the graphic aspects, selecting a transparent PETE bottle over the opaque HDPE one gives B+L a better sensory experience. The thinner walls of the new bottle make it easier and enjoyable to squeeze. A slight texture prevents it from feeling too stock, and it probably helps a little bit functionally. Finally, a clear bottle works well in the store because shoppers like to see the product they’re going to purchase.
However, all the advantages of packaging contact solution in a clear bottle are erased by the paper box that covers it up. I’m not sure if this is a regulatory issue or if it’s an unwritten rule for the category, but every bottle of contact solution comes in a secondary box (image courtesy of The Dieline). Regardless, Bausch + Lomb may have missed an opportunity for more disruptive innovation and more category leadership. Clear bottles typically cost more than the opaque ones, so why invest the money if it’s not going to help the brand stand out in the store? On the other hand, one could substitute a clear acetate box for the paper one in order to celebrate the bottle inside. It would be a bigger investment, both to spec a clear box and to spend time working in a more integrated manner to make the entire package work together. This example, much like the Dove Go Fresh bottles, indicates that achieving good design today is much more of a management challenge than an aesthetic one. I’m confident Bausch + Lomb will have success despite some of these details, but I think the payoff would have been bigger had they achieved a more holistic vision of how they want people to experience their products.
Beyond MBTI: Two more preference tests
Right on the heels of my experiment tracking designers’ Myers-Briggs results, I stumbled onto this creativity test from the Art Institute of Vancouver through a discussion on LinkedIn. The test is based on Dr. Roger Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning brain research from 1981. Not surprisingly, many of the industrial designers in the group are reporting a near 50/50 split between left and right brain thinking.
What I find more interesting are the subcategories that make up each side. On the right side are holistic, random, concrete, intuitive, nonverbal, and fantasy-oriented. The left side is made up of linear, sequential, symbolic, logical, verbal, and reality-based. Take the test and look for interesting highs and lows. For instance, I scored high on sequential but low on linear processing. It’s important for me to understand how this seemingly narrow difference in processing could affect my ability to learn a new skill or digest an important piece of information.
Finally, Brian Westbrook offered up another test called the HBDI. It tests the whole brain: left, right, front, and back. Ned Hermann, a manager at General Electric, developed the test in the 1970s. For more information, download this PDF profile.
Take the quiz, join the Industrial Design group on LinkedIn, and add your comment!
Dyson DC24 Blueprint
We recently upgraded to a Dyson DC24 Blueprint. Rather than the traditional golden and metal colorway, the blueprint comes in white and has added printed details about range of motion, stress testing, and more technical information. It’s a beautiful product, inside and out, so I decided to document some of the less expected angles and share the design.
Admiring Dyson’s from afar, I always imagined that part of the beauty was in a “secret” level of detail where the appearance of deceptively simple volumes with tangent intersections were actually more sophisticated curvature surfaces (like an Apple laptop). In reality, they’re really just the simple forms we’d expect. Why do you think this works? Is there something cognitively “right” about assigning this vocabulary to tools like a vacuum cleaner? Looking at the Dyson in person reminds me of Gray Holland’s hypothesis on surfacing can relate to functionality. It will be interesting to see how Dyson products evolve now that they’ve become a lifestyle brand. Anyway, here are the pictures:
2010 DAAP Student Merit Finalists
This week, the top industrial design students from UC’s DAAP program presented their work as a part of the IDSA student merit awards. A group of professionals judged the work and selected Tracy Subisak to represent UC at the upcoming district conference in Grand Rapids. Having worked with all of these students, I’m sure it was a difficult decision, even just to narrow it down to this group of seven. This is an extremely talented group of soon-to-be graduates, and I wish them luck as they prepare for their capstone presentations at DAAPworks this June.
Results: What Personality Types Are Designers?
About a week ago, I challenged the idea that ISFJ was the ideal Myers-Briggs personality type for designers and asked designers to take the test and submit their results. 64 designers recorded their profiles, and here are the results of the poll:
While there wasn’t one personality that was most popular, results showed a strong level of Intuition and Judging among the group. I don’t believe that having strong Sensing and Perceiving traits necessarily rules out one’s ability to be a talented designer. However, someone with these traits should be aware of these as key differences when working with other designers around them.
About half of the designers surveyed were either INTJ, ENFJ, or ENFP. I’ll follow up with additional thoughts on what these profiles mean and what design careers best map to the most popular personality types. Visit the poll if you’d like to take the quiz and record your profile. If the results change significantly, I’ll update and report the changes. Finally, there are some great conversations both on this site and on the Core77 discussion boards.
Are you surprised that designers weren’t more biased towards Introversion or Feeling traits? Do we need more Perceiving in the design world? What do you make of these results?
Which personality types make the best designer?
Do designers share personality traits that make them successful? Even more specifically, can personality types indicate a likelihood that one will be a better manager, researcher, or stylist?
If you’re not familiar with it, the Jung Myers-Briggs Type Indicator documents 16 personality types based on four categories: Extroversion vs. Introversion, Intuiting vs. Sensing, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judging vs. Perceiving. The test asks a series of simple questions and then assigns a four letter type along with the strength of each of those preferences. For example, I’m an INTJ. That means I tend to work well alone, focus on the future, seek logical explanations, and structure the world around me. The test has it’s critics, but for the sake of exploring my initial questions it serves as a good starting point. In addition to providing a personality type and description, many profilers provide advice for the ideal careers that match each type’s strengths. Here’s where it gets interesting.The ISFJ is listed as an ideal personality type for a career “designer.” This means that the ideal designer is:
- Introverted – likes to work alone, seeks to understand the world, prefers depth over breadth
- Sensing – trusts facts and data, accepts the world as it is, prefers practicality
- Feeling – seeks harmony, considers the feelings of others
- Judging – gains control through planning, focuses on results
While many of those traits work well in the design world, I can just as easily see opportunities where the opposite personality traits might be preferred. The definition of “designer” on this site is ambiguous, so let’s see if their recommendations hold true or if we can create some better ones.
What is your personality type? How well do your personality traits fit your current position? Click here to take the test and leave a comment with your result. Will we discover that certain traits are define certain types of designers?
On Twitter
- Inspired by the iphone 4...How would you redesign your materials & processes class? 2 weeks ago
- American creativity newsweek: http://bit.ly/90iJzi 2 weeks ago
- What's your definition of a good critique? How do you feel after one is finished? 2 weeks ago
- Graphic designers can be self-righteous, but it's cool when it's f-ing funny. http://bit.ly/ad194s 2 weeks ago
- Summarizing the design skills survey. Excited to share. Plus, drinking some Templeton Rye. 3 weeks ago
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