CPH127

I had high hopes for Giles Slade’s Made to Break after reading a positive review of it that promised more than the doom and gloom critique of mass manufacturing by adding interesting back-stories of the development of a range of every day objects. Unfortunately, Made to Break didn’t live up to this billing. It never really does get beyond the doom and gloom, mixes it with a heavy does of conspiratorial paranoia, and applies this formula to every product it looks at. Even more unfortunate, Slade missed a chance to do a much-needed update to the time-worn critique to highlight the real issues we are facing today.

The author’s fascination (horror actually) with planned obsolescence (designing products to intentionally fail prematurely or fall out of style on schedule) follows in a long trail of critiques of the concept. Let me say that there’s little I find likeable about the idea of planned obsolesence - it’s a cynical, underhanded method of getting people to buy more products, more often. I’ll take Slade’s word that it was practiced as widely as he describes in the first half of the twentieth century. And let’s also agree that the early generations of industrial designers - Slade calls out Brooks Stevens for particular scorn for his invention and promotion of planned obsolescence - were instrumental in facilitating it.

At the same time there were also designers who truly tried to create long-lived, durable products that would have a timeless style. Charles and Ray Eames and Dieter Rams come to mind.

Scheduled style obsolescence was honed to perfection by the stylists of Detroit, led by Harley Earl at GM. But to imply this mentality is in place today, unchanged, is completely false in my experience. Never in all my years of practicing have I had a client tell me they want a product to fail after a certain number of months - without exception mechanisms are designed to last as long as we can make them (often designing under a number of constraints such as size, cost, material usage, etc. which perhaps gives the impression they are designed to fail after a certain time). I’ve never had a client say "Make this look good, but not too good. Leave some in reserve for next year so we can get people to buy it all over again." Everyone wants to make the best damn product they can at the time. Hyper competition won’t allow anything less.

Like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney fighting a Cold war in a terrorist world long after the Iron Curtain has come down, Slade persists in a world view that is decades out of date. That world simply doesn’t exist anymore.

(Slade doesn’t help his case by riddling the book with
small factual errors that add up to a sense that he didn’t do his homework. In the
chapter on the development of computer UI’s I lost count of the number
of basic errors: Alan Kay’s Smalltalk is referred to as a networking
method when in fact it was a programming method; the history of Jobs,
Raskin, the Mac and the Lisa is quite contorted; Raskin named the
Macintosh after his favorite eating apple, not because it grew around
Cupertino.)

But a subtler point lost on Slade is that it doesn’t exist because it doesn’t need to. Another world has replaced it, that of voluntary obsolescence, which serves the economic purpose even better. Like the transition of Cold war to ad hoc terrorism, this shift is also one from top-down authoritarianism to decentralized action. The approach of planned obsolescence has so pervaded and framed our consumption mentality that we (as consumers) don’t need to have products go out of style on a planned basis or have them fail on schedule for us to be more than happy to replace fully functioning products with new ones. This fact has saved Apple’s bacon and made them the darling of Wall Street again.

Three major forces are driving this.

1. Style: People are more aesthetically sophisticated and demanding than they used to be, and want more frequent sating of style fixes. When the first design shows were put together for the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the curators had to cast far and wide to put together enough well-designed products to make it worthwhile. Today an afternoon in Target would do the trick (well, perhaps a stop in Moss [LINK] wouldn’t go amiss).
2. Technological progress: Technology is obviously evolving rapidly, furiously, unpredictably, and at the same time becoming networked together in webs of products, services and software that were undreamed of in the 1950’s. This leads to dependencies of performance within the systems that drives updates (ie, updates to replace products that are fine in isolation but obsolete within the network)
3. Competition: The business world is far more competitive and complex than it was 75 years ago with many more players, and those players are more sophisticated. It is this hyper competition that is a major cause of ever more rapid product releases, particularly in the tech sectors, the antithesis of the conspiratorial tone that Slade relies upon.

Slade talks about style and technological obsolescence but doesn’t connect them together into a modern framework, instead adopting the old-guard "save the poor public from being duped by the big bad corporation" trope.

I don’t believe people are simple, unthinking "consumers" of all things provided. They (we) are thoughtful, discriminating, unpredictable, fickle, rational and emotional beings. If we were easy to push product to year after year, companies’ lives would be a heck of a lot easier. But we don’t just take what they give. Long gone are the days when companies could push the new tail fins and have the culture unanimously cry "And they are good!". Decisions now are more localized and individualized, thus less prone to predictability and more prone to churn.

Voluntary obsolescence has greatly sped up consumption from what it was under the days of planned obsolescence. This has led to a degree of ecological destruction (with much more coming from the wastestream yet to be made) that should be of major concern. Whereas the older critique of planned obsolescence was more of a moral crusade - prevent the helpless public from being duped out of its money! - the attention now needs to be on the ecological price we, our children, and our grandchildren will be paying for our current freedom to obsolete our posessions.

Which general was it that said "You always fight your last war"? Unforuntately Giles Slade is doing just that, and has missed an opportunity at an opportune time to critique the new world of voluntary obsolescence and the ecological damage that it is causing.

I’m throwing this provocative question out to our global audience on CPH127, whether establishing a national design council, creating a national design policy, or in general, bringing government support to the design industry has any benefit?

My reason for doing so is not out of any particular opinion on my part, instead, two recent issues in the news impelled this question out of curiousity. Especially since I know that our esteemed founders are closely connected to the Danish Design Council :).

The first article, from The Hindu, announces India’s imminent ratification of a National Design Policy, creation of an Indian Design Council, and most interesting, their intention to create a "mark" to qualify good design. This article states,

"The National Design Policy will be announced in January. Merely
coming out with a policy statement will not suffice, as it will have to
be followed up with implementation. Among other things, the `Designed
in India’ label will have to be linked with a certain quality
specification," Mr N.N. Prasad, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Commerce
and Industry, said.

The attempt would be to position `Designed in India’ as a
label that assures quality and utility. This could be in conjunction
with other labels - `Made in India’ and `Served from India’.

A mechanism will be worked out for creating a brand image for
Indian designs through the award of an `India Design Mark’ that satisfy
certain criteria such as appeal, centricity, ergonomic features, safety
and environment findings.

The EETimes, on the other hand, has an article titled "The politicization of Innovation" and covers the recently proposed bill submitted to the United States Congress, the "National Innovation Policy 2005" [.doc link] While I will not enter into the "is design equal to innovation" debate, an overly battered dead horse, methinks, I do however wonder if a national design policy or design council, along the lines of those established in Europe, (notably the UK, the DDC of course :), ANZAC and Asia (Japan, Taiwan, Korea - all leaders in consumer electronics) would benefit American industry. Indeed, this Innovation Policy, and it’s intention to create a President’s Council on Innovation, could possibly be the equivalent of a design council/policy, as per the other nations, I doubt though, that it is. These are it’s three key initiatives,

increasing investment in basic research;

improving science and technology talent;

and developing a robust innovation infrastructure.

and their terminology implies a) that innovation is inherently technology led and that b) design is not innovation.  On the other hand, for argument’s sake, if this were a design policy and the intention was to create a national design council, do you think that it would be of greater benefit? If so, how and why? While on this topic, I’d like to throw out a few more questions on design policies in general, are they useful to nations? Actually, what I’m asking is, Hans, do you do anything over at that Design Council? [just kidding]  Here’s a link to Ars Technica, which has a pessimistic view of this initiative by the US to give balance, and perhaps add fuel to this discussion.

Michael Beirut wrote a thoughtful piece on "Innovation is the new black" at Design Observer, where he made a point, amongst others, that,

It turned out that the operant word at the symposium wasn’t design but innovation.  Yes, innovation. Everyone wanted to know about it. Everyone wanted to talk about it. One of the panelists was Business Week’s legendary design advocate Bruce Nussbaum.
"When I talk to my editors about design, I have trouble keeping them
interested," he confessed. "But there’s a tremendous interest in
innovation." The lesson to me seemed clear. If we want the business
world to pay attention to us, we need to purge the d-word from our
vocabularies. That’s right: we are all innovators now.

I appreciated his take from the classical designer’s point of view, as it gives balance to the word "innovation" showing up everywhere, but more importantly, was this very insightful response by Larry Keeley of Doblin, on the subject that innovation is not equivalent to design and should not be used interchangeably. Larry’s kindly given me permission to post his comment in full here on CPH127, so here it is:

Although not a new topic the principles of design are often taken for granted as being largely aesthetic considerations. This is particularly so for people like myself who are from a 2D background.

It is important however to recognise how such principles extend beyond the visual organisation of design elements into the realm of experience design.

In 1997 NC State University, The Center for Universal Design, developed a set of Universal Design principles compiled by advocates of universal design, [listed in alphabetical
order: Bettye Rose Connell, Mike Jones, Ron Mace, Jim Mueller, Abir
Mullick, Elaine Ostroff, Jon Sanford, Ed Steinfeld, Molly Story, and
Gregg Vanderheiden.]

The seven principles are listed as:

principle one: equitable use
principle two: flexibilty in use
principle three: simple and intuitive
principle four: perceptible information
principle five: tolerance for error
principle six: low physical effort
principle seven: size and space for approach and use

A recent posting at the lovely site UIGarden provides more detail. It’s a great site and I think you will enjoy browsing this and other articles.

As part of the recent AO2005 Innovation Summit, Morgan McLintic, a vice president and senior partner at Lewis Global Public Relations, interviewed David Kelley, the founder and chairman of product design firm IDEO and a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. This is a four part post from that session.

From part one:

What are your thoughts about the state of innovation today?

Kelley: I’m happy to say that innovation is still playing as a
concept throughout the world. You know, it surprises me sometimes when
we sell innovation strategy services in different places: I’m always
thinking that innovation will have a pendulum effect, that it will run
its course and then come back. But the truth is, everybody is
interested in innovation. We had the slowdown in the economy, and now
if you look at where companies think they’re going, you’ll see that
they’re dusting off their old stuff and that they really want
innovation. If I were in some kind of fad business, I would be a little
concerned, but it seems like year after year people want to hear about
how they can become more innovative. I think the thing that has
changed a bit is that when companies come to me, they don’t necessarily
want or need a new product or service; they want to actually change the
whole innovation culture. They want to get so that they routinely
innovate in their culture. That, I believe, is a change—and a welcome
one.

McLintic: You’ve spoken in the past about fostering a culture of
innovation that becomes deeply embedded in organizations. If I were a
CEO, how would I go about doing that?

Kelley: I think the trick is trying to understand the barriers
to innovation in your organization. Some organizations are fear based;
others are focused on one aspect of the innovation equation rather than
the whole thing. The thing that’s interesting about building a culture of innovation
(and that I try to teach my students as well as the people who work
with me at IDEO) is that you need to have empathy for every aspect of
innovation. You have to be empathetic about technology, which we’ve
been very good at focusing on. And then you need to think about
business viability. As a techie graduating with an electrical
engineering degree, I was really irritated when I got out into the
world and found that businesspeople were driving the bus. I thought,
‘Well, jeez, it’s all about electrical engineering; if you don’t know
about semiconductors, you aren’t going to be important within an
organization.’ But it turns out that business viability is something
you must  understand. The same thing goes for human values.

Our bias—my bias and the thing I’m most excited about—is that there
exists a new way into innovation, which people are just beginning to
pay attention to. We know how you go in from a technological point of
view; we kind of know how you go in from a business point of view.And we’re now finding innovation by going in through a human-centered point of view.
Once you ask, What do people need?, you can pursue technical
feasibility and business viability from that point of view. This
human-centered view of innovation is just now starting to be funded and
valued in the innovation space.

McLintic: Is there a difference, then, between analytical thinking (the sort of logical left-brain way of thinking) and design thinking.

Kelley: Yes. What’s happened is that universities have been very
good at developing analytical thinking—making outlines, approaching
problems analytically—and I don’t want anybody to stop doing that. Now,
however, Stanford and other universities are beginning to focus on design thinking.
The reason for that is that if you take great analytical thinkers and
teach them ways to be better at design thinking, you get what we call
T-shaped people—people who have depth and an integrative approach to
thinking. This will lead to different kinds of innovations. We’ll be
looking in different places and finding different things.

In academia, we have these tall towers of knowledge, and mining those
towers of knowledge is really important. Let’s get more Nobel prizes;
let’s go as deep as we can. But I think that by putting different
people together and having them think in this integrative way, we’ll
achieve new kinds of innovation.

Read the whole series here.

Hans-Henrik, Jacob and myself will be involved in Index and especially in Index:Views - the summit for creative leaders - next week. This is hardly anything new for our regular readers However, this is far from the only global design event in Copenhagen next week!

Era 05: World Design Congress will also open its doors and although almost every session is sold out, I was asked by the project manager Marc (and by his colleauge Marie) to post a small advertisment for an interesting session on Intellectual Property. If your intersted in this topic and you are in or around Copenhagen next week, this is worth checking out!

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday’s news was all about the merger between the global brands - Adidas and Reebok, with much speculation on how this would impact Nike. Apparently, Nike is estimated to have 30% of the world market and the combined "Adibok" will now have 20%. Even more interesting, as it touches upon subjects we’ve been discussing here on corporate culture, it’s effect on creativity and innovation, innovation and strategy et al, is this article in BusinessWeek today.

To quote some interesting bits for discussion,

While the combination
of Adidas and Reebok looks terrific on paper, successful mergers need
to work between real people who, in this case, will have to break down
cultural differences between companies with "two hugely different
cultures,” says Jeffrey Bliss, president of Javelin Group, a sports
marketing firm and a former New Balance executive. "The German
mentality of control, engineering, and production, vs. the U.S.
marketing- driven culture…in reality, I don’t think [the merged
company] is going to dent the market, because Nike is already too far
ahead."
….

But the real test of
success for Adidas’ acquisition is how well the company manages its new
portfolio and executes new products and marketing plans that allow the
two big brands to complement each other rather than duplicate efforts.
….

This makes it all the
more logical for Adidas to concentrate on higher-margin,
innovation-driven shoes as it leverages Reebok’s distribution and
product development resources to increase its presence into basketball,
hockey, and fashion/athletic segments like bicycling and skateboarding
where consumers have proved willing to pay top dollar for high-end
shoes.

As you can see, and I encourage you to read the full article as well as other coverage on this topic, the thrust of the issues seem to be

1. Bringing two widely diverging corporate cultures together successfully in a synergistic mix that enhances their strengths while balancing their weaknesses, without tumbling into a downward spiral of cross cultural miscommunication and attitude clashes.
2. Balancing two strong brands, each with it’s own identity and ownership in different market spaces. The consensus amongst the analysts seems to point to leaving each brand as a stand alone entity and focusing the benefits of the merger on below the line areas such as distribution channels, economies of scale and manufacturing network.
3. And lastly, what does this merger imply for Nike, the market leader? Certainly, it does imply a certain amount of pressure on their innovation strategy and strengthening their brand value, as no leader can afford to stay standing still for too long if they are to retain their lead.

This will be an interesting story to follow in the near future, I think, especially to see how these companies manage innovation, brand building, corporate culture and creativity.