Russia’s new venture is great for a number of reasons – not the least of which is a move towards helping Russia avoid the massive intellectual capital brain-drain it has endured for the last twenty years. But the more subtle implication is the object lesson it provides for most large organisations. It wouldn’t be a stretch to compare most business cultures to the stereotypical red tape and institutional/policy barriers created by many governments. The implication from the NYT article is that, like Russia, to actually create an innovative environment an organisation needs to protect itself from the machinery that makes most organisations tick along so steadily. Easier said than done. But one might argue, if Russia can do it, so can Citibank or British Airways, amongst others.

Perhaps the argument for businesses creating “walled cities” of innovation is short-sighted. The real question isn’t whether or not organisations should create external innovative cultures, it’s knowing how to incubate a culture so that it produces the desired outcomes for growth. I’ve often spoken about the dynamic whereby most businesses enlist two general types of workers: Maintainers and Innovators. These are descriptive of two important approaches to work product (neither of which diminishes the other’s value to an organisation). In this case, Maintainers are skilled at taking a known processes and honing it to a sublime result (think specialists who master an important function and continue to provide incremental improvements over time). This has been the purview of MBA programmes and the model that most businesses aspire and adapt to.

The other approach to work product is the Innovator. In this case, it’s not about incremental improvement, rather it is about wholesale change. Innovators are looking to delve into areas where there is little expertise or specialised knowledge. The goal is to explore the potential of new methods of growth or engagement, typically way outside of the competence and comfort level of the organisation they work within. You can see where having both Maintainers and Innovators within the same organisation would be desirable, but it can also be problematic. Challenging the status quo in many companies can be an exercise in futility, and equally problematic is trying to institute structure and process onto “creative” groups. If this our fate, how can any organisation hope to be both “efficient” and “innovative”?

One of the most common solutions a business might be tempted to take to integrate innovation into their organisation is to create a skunkworks, just as Russia is doing. For those not familiar with the term, Skunk Works was the name of a group at Lockheed Martin that was given a very high degree of autonomy and was unhampered by corporate bureaucracy while they worked on secret projects. In this model, one wouldn’t bother trying to change the existing machine (or the Maintainers in my previous example), instead one would give carte blanche to a smaller and more nimble team to explore and invent without encumbrances. The challenge with this method of innovation is that the results of your skunkworks needs to be incorporated back into the culture where it couldn’t flourish to begin with. While a skunkworks is fantastic as a method for creating new businesses that develop on their own, this method is less useful for creating ideas that can be adopted by an existing organisation. Perhaps Russia’s foray into protected innovation cities isn’t the panacea for business it appears to be at first blush.

To have an integrated impact on an organisation, innovation has to be a function of the business process itself. In my example above, we rely on Maintainers to promote and improve the products, processes, and services necessary for the efficient and predictable running of a business. We have also been asking these same Maintainers to envision, develop, and implement new and disruptive technologies and platforms. It has been clear for at least the last decade that Maintainers are ill prepared for that task. Unfortunately, most organisations who are trying to build a culture of innovation do this by attempting to train Maintainers into being equally successful Innovators. I think this is at the root of the problem. In a general sense, Maintainers are not Innovators, nor is the opposite true.

To fundamentally improve an organisation’s approach to innovation, companies need to build on the inherent skills and talents of their business cultures (which, traditionally, are also inherently non-innovative) by focusing on what both Maintainers and Innovators do well. The real challenge isn’t in trying to develop Maintainers into Innovators, but rather creating a culture that allows Innovators to find success, accolades, and promotion within structures that historically don’t reward such outlier behaviour. Unfortunately, companies typically try to either make the same people play both Maintainer and Innovator roles, or Innovators are sequestered within a skunkworks where they can’t remain vital to the organisation.

It is common for companies, especially ones that are struggling to maintain a competitive position, to look towards outside agencies to help them develop an innovative approach to their business. These agencies typically specialise in strategy, change management, or service design and promise to help develop methods for growth whilst also imparting a process that the company can adopt to implement innovation on their own. My own experience is that those projects go fairly well as long as there is agency involvement, but flounder after completion and no actual change takes hold. This is to be expected, as there are few, if any, innovation advocates within organisations who are empowered to take the ball and run once the agency’s work is completed.

When organisations create incentives for Innovators to flourish within their culture, they create advocates for sustaining innovation. By having internal advocates manage the process of change, Maintainers are free to help integrate new approaches to business and implement the necessary processes and procedures to ensure a robust platform. Basically, Maintainers enlist the expertise of Innovators to implement innovation. Innovators work to challenge, envision, and prototype new approaches to business without having to be “graded” on their ability to function simultaneously as Maintainers.

The call-out to business is that, if they want to create compelling and competitive platforms, they need to enlist the support of Innovators as part of the business culture. This means creating incentives and rewards for promoting innovative behaviour that is separate to what makes a successful Maintainer. The challenge is that traditional metrics and key deliverables are poor indications of successful innovation. The design problem becomes much more focused when it’s not about integrating an innovation culture, but rather defining how to encourage and reward Innovation management and work product. For an organisation that has not yet integrated Innovators into their culture, perhaps the best use of an outside consultancy is to help answer that question.

Just as Russia has suffered a brain drain to the Bay Area, businesses have lost the other half of their talent to Innovators who have no place to flourish in a traditional organisation. Instead, these Innovators often end up working for outside agencies, freelancing, or find themselves under-appreciated and move from company to company, taking their own expertise, knowledge and potential with them. The answer isn’t creating “walled cities of innovation” within companies through skunkworks, outside design firms, or buying one’s innovative competitors. The answer lies in leveraging the inherent skills in two types of staff, Maintainers and Innovators, and incentivising each to be measured for the type of success they promote.

Re-Thinking and Re-Designing Business Strategy
It’s probably my own particular bias that I thought that the panel with Jeanne Liedtka and Tony Golsby-Smith, moderated by Roger Martin, was the highlight of the conference. But the session really stood out for me as one of the most spirited and serious conversations of the two days. All three of them put forth a thesis and then used the conversation to back up their claims. While Tony, Roger and Jeanne were pretty much on the same page about the centrality of design thinking to strategy, each of them had a unique perspective on why that is, and how design can begin to play a stronger role in the strategy space.

Jeanne Liedtka: “Strategy is the most important thing a leader can be doing.” “But if you’re not trying to make tomorrow better than today, why bother doing strategy?” Jeanne talked about her frustration with business managers who are not looking at strategy as an opportunity to invent the future of their organizations. The problem is that the customary strategic processes involve spreadsheets and numeric projections and organizational culture is programmed to seek out certainty over possibility; visionary leadership must step outside that mindset to look for opportunity.

In her research, Jeanne has observed that there are innovative managers out there who grow their businesses despite their organizations’ tendency to crush creative thinking. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit of design that links it so strongly to strategy. Designers excel at finding ways to create new value. But, Jeanne also cautioned us that invention and value creation is not end game. She noted that value itself is an inconsistent principle, because value creation and value capture are two distinct components, and successful innovation requires both. It is not enough simply to create value; we must also invent the business models that allow us to capture that value.

Tony Golsby-Smith: Strategy is about thinking and conversation; not timetables and templates. In the business world, strategy is routinely suffocated under the budgetary process, and organizations fail to create space for vision. The thinking process is shrouded in analytics, yet we’ve never moved an inch into the future by analyzing. Tony then explained of Aristotle’s two roads of thought, Analytics (which dominates Western thinking, and propels management science) and Rhetoric/Dialectic (which is the domain of design and leadership and is the art to analytics’ science). The second road (Rhetoric/Dialectic) introduces values, where the first road is objective. Therefore the second road is better equipped to respond to human problems and gives us a toolkit for creating visions for the future.

Roger Martin: In 1959 the Ford Foundation said that business schools were not analytic enough, and we’ve been glorifying the hegemony of analytics ever since.

Jeanne Liedtka: Jeanne expressed skepticism about large organizations enthusiastically undertaking innovation, noting that, “innovation will continue to be a subversive activity.” Roger Martin responded that, “the subversive activity is to turn the future into the past.” (This prompted me to think that this would be a very interesting essay for the two of them to write.)

Jeanne called up the fixed mindset and learning mindset models researched by Carol Dweck at Stanford. Business thinking is predominated by the fixed mindset, people who are often driven by a fear of failure and of looking stupid. Innovators and design thinkers are more likely to be of the learning mindset, people characterized by actively seeking broad repertoires of experience and who are willing to take risks.

However, Jeanne suggested that these two mindsets can be brought together in the context of the organization through design. The hypothesis generation and testing that is inherent to design approaches is very effective for reducing corporate fear. And the way to succeed, to innovate, is to experiment in the marketplace.

Tony Golsby-Smith: Tony proposed the notion of the dialectic organization, one that is both analytical and rhetorical, capable of using both of Aristotle’s roads of thinking. While analytical thinking is an undeniably critical part of managing an organization well, leadership, decision-making, and innovation are inherently 2nd road activities. (Tony warned us not to make innovation alone the holy grail.)

Roger Martin: Roger added that everyone in the organization should be involved in making choices and determining the future, and therefore rhetorical thinking should not be limited to the province of leaders only.

Bringing Design Thinking to the Analytical World
(or, If Innovation is Subversive, Then Strategy is Heresy)

The second session of Day 2 was presented as a second, deeper conversation with Tony-Golsby Smith. Where the first session explored why there is such a strong relationship between design and strategy, this session would look more into how design might engage with strategy. What hope is there for the design community and the world of organizations to move on from fear and cynicism and to address the big challenges of the future? Tony began by telling us he wanted to be provocative, suggesting that “design is the divine expression of the human condition” and that “strategy is heresy”. Well, that certainly prepared us for a different kind of conversation!

Darrel Rhea asked Tony what were the opportunities or threats for our role as designers? Tony’s reply was that the view of design as craft was too limited to address the problems we’re talking about, that design thinking provides an opportunity for design to move into broader applications. In looking at the bigger, more wicked problems that design is seeking to address, Tony suggested that design becomes an activity of transforming situations (from John Dewey’s conception of “situations”). Changing the world, he said, is not an illegitimate goal. But he noted that we don’t work on the world directly. We work on the world through the system of language.

The case for language: People who can transform situations are very good at language. Conversations themselves are an act of co-creation. And yet language is not the same as communication. In the sense that Tony was speaking, language is thinking, language is the synthesis of the pictures we form in our heads, and language has the capacity to change others’ thinking. The organization itself is a mental construct. No one has ever seen one. Change and design, he said, are a language game. And language is the only tool for leadership.

Tony went on to describe three themes of language: agency (people change the world, not data), synthesis (how we model situations), and conversations (human beings creating shared meaning). In mastering language, Tony suggested that designers have the opportunity to shift their stance from helper/supporter to driver. It is language that allows us to get to strategy as design. But Tony warned that we shouldn’t see language as an activity of abstraction. Design is a physical act, and it is born of the need to make the abstract tangible.

Design & Organizational Transformation
Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research and Claudia Kotchka, formerly of Procter & Gamble, talked about the challenge of bringing design into organizations and how to transform those organizations into design organizations. Bill noted the attraction for designers to work in what otherwise might be considered a hostile environment: if you are successful in this context, you have the ability to impact 1 billion people a day. Claudia talked about the challenge of attracting designers to a company like P&G, and then creating a multicultural organization where different cultures are valued and respected. Both Claudia and Bill agreed that designers have a specialized skillset that makes them different from businesspeople and engineers. Creating tolerance for design culture is not the same thing as doing good design. Bill noted that it was crucial to create a pull, not a push, process, where engineers were actively and enthusiastically inviting designers to the table.

Client/Designer Relationships
Robert Brunner of innovation firm Ammunition LLC presented a provocative story about shifting the paradigm of client/designer relationships. He discussed the importance of being able to work as a partner with your client, and what better way to do so than to share a stake in the outcomes? His company has turned the process around, so that they develop product concepts that interest them and where they see significant market potential, and then they approach clients as partners in IP ownership. In effect, they fully develop the product and then find a client who wants to take their product to market. A fascinating and empowering model, and one that I’m surprised more design firms don’t use.

Business
Roger Martin’s conversation with Scott Cook, co-founder and chairman of Intuit, seemed to be one of the most-enjoyed sessions of the conference. Scott was engaging and low-key during an exchange where he shared stories and wisdom from his twenty-some years of leadership at Intuit. He advised the audience to “run a culture of experimentation” and “allow space for development without managers hanging over projects.” He said he encouraged businesses not to stop at the first idea, which is what they typically do. He discussed management practices, such as bringing out people’s weaknesses as something they can actively work on in a supportive environment. And he talked about the importance of integrating design practices into everything the business does, such as making sure business people get out and do ethnography themselves and become part of the process of identifying and solving problems.

Environmental Design
Two consultants, Deanne Beckwith, who works with Herman Miller’s Programmable Environments Team, and Chauncey Bell, who works with CareCyte, a healthcare delivery innovation group, talked with Darrel Rhea about undertaking projects with significant social innovation potential and the challenges of the bigger systems they are designing within. They each shared what was effectively a case study about their projects. In a nutshell, Chauncey noted that services are the biggest design problem our society currently faces; in looking at how the design of medical facilities can drastically shift the cost equation for the delivery of health care, he reminded us that controlling health care costs was a problem we as a society haven’t even begun to understand, let alone solve. Deanne echoed this, insisting that addressing critical problems like sustainability demands not just designing new things, but new business models.

My initial reflections on the DMI Conference can be read on the post “Thoughts on the Design Management Institute’s 2009 Conference “Re-Thinking Design”".

All these people have been really crucial to the evolution of my thinking and practice of design over that past 5 years or so, so even though I’m not usually much of a conference maven, I realized that it might be pretty fun to be where these people were gathering in the same room.

The organizers chose a different format from the typical parade of slideshows. Instead, the speakers were invited to participate in panel discussions (only two speakers gave slide presentations). DMI President Tom Lockwood described it as “thoughtful conversations with thoughtful people—a process of rethinking design live”. Overall, this format gave a pleasant informality to the proceedings, but I have to admit that at times it had a bit less structure and depth than I might have liked.

I totally agree that no one likes to sit through hours of narrated slide presentations that usually amount to the latest version of a presentation that the speaker is using to promote their business or book. But I do like conferences that force their speakers to put themselves out there a bit, with a bold argument or a new concept. We did get some of this, as Robert Brunner of Ammunition LLC put forward a new business model for design, which involves doing away with clients. Or rather, becoming your own client. Also, Tony Golsby-Smith invited all of us to take thinking more seriously and promoted language as the skillset designers need to master if they want to be able to influence the big problems.

There was a strong representation from the business world as well as design leaders, but many of the attendees were designers who worked in large corporations. I would have liked to see some stronger representation from some of the design schools, too. On the whole, the range of topics was varied, and spoke to the different types of audience members—designers, managers, leaders, and consultants. I wear many of those hats, and I knew it would be a lot of “preaching to the choir” for me. I guess my biggest criticism was that I didn’t feel like the conference challenged my thinking significantly. But it does seem like professional conferences like this are more about finding common ground and sharing experiences in a convivial environment.

The running commentary by the moderators was what really held the sessions together and I appreciated their efforts to reflect on the proceedings as we went along.

On the first day of the conference, Roger Martin noted how enthusiastically business was beginning to embrace design. Darryl Rhea later suggested that the reverse was not necessarily true of design; that designers were generally too cowed by business matters; that design is afraid that it doesn’t know enough about the world of MBAs to make an impact and lets that fear of the unknown keep us out of the conversation. Designers always talk a lot about wanting to have a seat at the table. But I think Rhea’s point is that we don’t get to that table by sitting back and waiting to be asked. (Jeanne Liedtka noted, conversely, that the “table” is overrated, and that a lot of the truly important stuff happens out in the organization.) Several speakers over both days echoed the claim that we have a responsibility to learn the language of business, the language of our clients, of those we are collaborating with.

Rhea noted on Day 2 that one of the conference attendees had asked him “Why is it that the CEO from the accounting products company was more persuasive, more passionate about design—more articulate about design—than the heads of IDEO, Ziba and Adaptive Path?” I agree with that observation. I’m not sure why that was. Perhaps designers feel that they are going into alien territory when it comes to strategy, and so they adopt an unconsciously defensive or wary stance, rather than one of confidence and optimism. In any case, many of the design voices I heard over the two days were both cautious and cynical about design’s opportunity space in the business strategy world. But then, perhaps we designers don’t have the best perspective on design, because we don’t always have the opportunity to pull back and look at the impact and potential of our work from an organizational or societal perspective. We only see ourselves at ground level, where we are making and doing, and we may feel compelled to microscope, rather than telescope, the context of our work.

More thoughts on the conference can be read on the post “Some Highlights from the DMI Re-Thinking Design Conference”.

But the book is also an excellent rumination on the power of Design. Chicago won the world’s fair in 1890 (beating out NYC, Washington DC and St. Louis), just three years before the fair was set to open. Once Chicago was chosen as a venue, a local citizens’ committee of 250 prominent men was created to help steer and promote the fair, and the city formed a corporation with a 45-member Board to finance and build the fair.

The Board appointed a local architect named Daniel Burnham to lead the project. In essence he would become the principal and lead designer (as well as project manager). As you would expect, local politics immediately began to enter the equation as the groups became embroiled in arguments about exactly where in Chicago the fair should happen. By the time Burnham got the go-ahead to begin planning the chosen site, there was less than 2 years left to go about building a world’s fair from scratch. Sound like any design projects you’ve ever worked on?

Too much was at stake in Burnham’s career for him to decline the challenge, though I suspect many of us would have given up in the face of such a seemingly insurmountable task. Ambitiously, Burnham solicited a team of some of the top US architects of the day, a group of East Coasters who were quite dubious about helping podunk Chicago put together a world class project. He assembled his reluctant lean design team, eventually winning them over using the pivotal support of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, who had designed Central Park and many other significant public commissions.

The entire team was, frankly, freaked out by the seeming impossibility of the deadline before them, an absurdly short span of time in which to design, engineer and build a fair expected to host 27 million people over its 6 month lifespan and out-do the French, who had put on a smashing world fair in 1889 with the show-stealing Eiffel Tower as it’s coup de grâce.

The team rallied and put together a plan for 6 majestic main buildings and an overall landscape, which would be further populated by another 200 or so smaller buildings covering a square mile. But the designs came in behind schedule, pushing construction perilously close to the deadline. And throughout the project, Burnham and his team continued to face many barriers and slowdowns caused by the myriad of committees and stakeholders representing local, national and international interests. In the end, the fair went up, and had considerable success, but not without many cracks behind the veneer and a tremendous risk of outright failure. (The Ferris Wheel, the fair’s crowning glory and answer to Paris’ Eiffel, was not completed until 2 months after the fair opened.)

I provide this outline in order to illustrate an important and integral aspect of design work that is so commonly overlooked. Despite having a dream design team, this was not enough to ensure the project’s success. Yes, the design of individual buildings themselves were works of art, but they almost didn’t get built because there was not time or resource to commandeer the various people, systems and decisions that needed to be in place from the very beginning. What makes Devil in the White City such a good read is the suspenseful incredulity that this project ever successfully came together.

For me it is a strong fable of the importance of managing stakeholders well—or the risk of not doing so. The communication to and involvement of stakeholders is a sticky issue for designers. Stakeholder input is almost something of a cliché, in the sense that we all know this is something we need to solicit and nurture, and yet we often dread and avoid it, as Burnham did. How do we get what we need from stakeholders (and give them their due) without being burdended by the baggage of any number of outside groups and individuals?

I think that part of the problem is that “stakeholders” are frequently treated by designers as a secondary concern for a design project, or at worst, an afterthought. There’s often such a strong sense of urgency around the immediate design problem, that we feel that we don’t have the time to get bogged down by what we might see as inexpert or even adversarial input, as was the case for Burnham and his team. All we know is how much faster the work could get done if meddling busybodies kept their noses out of the plans.

Certainly, I think Burnham and his architects worried intensely about their ability to pull off a feat of technical ingenuity and aesthetic brilliance, even without the hovering presence of stakeholders. But the thing is, the stakeholders were the reason the project started out so challenged by scheduling and resources. If anything, Burnham probably didn’t do enough to manage stakeholder expectations and demand appropriate involvement and accountability from them. But he had a lot to prove, and felt his reputation was at stake if he didn’t miraculously succeed in the challenge. How many of us, unfortunately, have found ourselves backed into a similar corner, with a mandate for innovation under severely limited time and budget?

Burnham’s biggest fear about his stakeholders was the threat of descending into “design by committee”-type dynamics, which are sure to kill any coherent vision. And yet, when and how do we involve stakeholders productively? Up-front conversations with a full range of stakeholders can actually help the designer to better understand and scope the problem. While contemporary designers often ascribe to the mantra of user-centered design, we often fail to see stakeholders as an important user group. They may not be direct users or consumers of the system being designed, but there’s no way a really big project will ever get off the ground without the support and endorsement of stakeholders. They have the power to save or doom a project, and stakeholder legacies can overshadow and outlast a design, no matter how brilliant the solution is.

Inviting stakeholders to every single meeting is clearly not helpful. But involving them early on, to help shape the vision, is important and powerful for both designers and stakeholders. In Burnham’s case, the design team was so much flying by the seat of their pants that the vision was almost continuously emergent, until the very moment the fair opened. And in truth, his stakeholders offered Burnham a lot of faith and forbearance—probably far more than contemporary designers would be accorded in a project of that scale. That’s why it’s critical to manage the designer-stakeholder dynamic proactively.

Burnham’s Columbian Exposition is a good example of the challenges that  designers face in large projects. The bigger and more important a project is, the more a designer’s work is going to extend beyond the boundaries of the design task itself. Design gets broadened to a much larger activity, one that must include constant communication, persuasion, and consensus-building. Out of either naivete or stubborn arrogance, Burnham was slow to catch on to this. And it could have spelt failure for his project. I suspect that these types of stakeholder-related failures are really common, but are not failures designers like to talk about. Maybe because many designers see the “stakeholder” problem as being outside the realm of their control, or maybe because the ramifications of poor stakeholder invovlement aren’t felt until several months or even years after the project is completed. After all, the larger the scale and the greater the importance of a design project, the more likely there are to be vast numbers of stakeholders involved.

Photo credit: William Henry Jackson / Chicago Historical Society.

Unique for the sake of uniqueness is even more typical in design schools. As is often the case, you have many capable and creative students working towards a common design problem—perhaps even the same one that a series of previous semesters’ students tackled as well. How is it possible to stand out in a crowd when most approaches to the problem have been touched on, if not delved into to a ridiculous degree? The honest answer is, you can’t. But what is lost in the pursuit of one-upping the competition so to speak, is the lesson that being novel isn’t necessarily a goal in good design. I’m not advocating that designers not attempt to build remarkable and unusual solutions to design problems, because they often will be required to. However, the imperative for new approaches should be driven by research into the needs of the users, and not merely an abstract sense of differentiation. It just may be that the solution that will most address the design problem will not be one that breaks convention and will more likely build on typical or past solutions. Any designer worth their salt will explore the potential of all avenues, including both conservative and innovative approaches.

But designers are encouraged and praised by their peers and professors for originality—sometimes over and above the fit for purpose. And that is a shame. Often times the most elegant solution will be the simplest and easiest to implement. It won’t require a new model or experience map for the user. New technologies won’t need to be created and organisational structures can remain relatively untouched. But those kinds of solutions are un-sexy and seem to show a complete lack of the “creative” skills designers are known for and so proud of. And it isn’t just in school that designers are encouraged to put avant-garde ideas ahead of practical ones. Design firms, design publications, and other designers often admire and praise those who are breaking ground (or “shifting paradigms”) over those who are simply getting things done. To be sure, this isn’t a rampant problem in the real world, but it is enough of an issue that the design industry should be more self policing.

As an example of our lack of enthusiasm for relevant design, we celebrate the Ferrari but have disdain for the Corolla (which, with over 35 million cars manufactured to date, is the best selling car of all time). Of course there is a place for high end sports cars, and Ferrari’s are wonderful examples of form vs. function. But the Corolla was just as effective a design solution, and had a positive effect on an exponentially greater group of people. Why celebrate the design of the Enzo as a higher form of achievement? Because it is sexy and sexy design is rewarding to the aesthetic sensibility and our egos. That’s a really poor aspiration to be encouraging in designers, in my opinion. If you are designing a million dollar sports car, you can play all you want. If you are designing the next “peoples car” you have to consider the cost of manufacturing, economy of materials, localization, usability across a range of needs, longevity, sustainability, ease of repair, customization, and a host of other issue that likely will not be focused on “make it fast and make it pretty”.

But it would be duplicitous of me to put the blame for this only on peer pressure and design school dynamics. Most businesses are not set up to let designers participate in the complete life of a product or service they develop. This is usually seen as an efficiency of skills within an organization (designers design and operations manage). The reality is that it doesn’t allow for the needed experience on seeing what works and what fails. This kind of experience is what builds the judgments necessary for understanding the best solution; novel or otherwise. Perhaps part of the problem is that while designers are correctly taught to take a design past its current limits, most design students are not taught how to elegantly bring the design back to conform with the constraints imposed. In school, students are allowed and even encouraged to leave their solutions “out there”. Or they are taught that it’s OK to sacrifice one or more criteria, so that you begin moving away from a complete solution in favor of a novel one.

Students typically don’t get to see the effect of their ideas in the real world and are not challenged to anticipate them either. As a design manager I’ve seen plenty of portfolios from outstanding graduates who are oblivious to the limits of their work. Why wouldn’t they be? Who has taken the time to challenge them? The better designers quickly begin to understand how to work in the real world, but it is difficult to break the new graduate’s habit of designing to their own sense of “cool” rather than focusing more on the best solution. And that’s assuming their boss, manager, mentor is helping them make that transition. Of course on the flip side, in a business setting, simple and elegant solutions often look deceptively easy to reach, which makes it hard for designers to command value for what they do. A complicated solution is perhaps more likely to be respected as an extension of rarified knowledge, whereas a simple solution might be merely regarded as the product of common sense that anyone could have produced.

Final thoughts:

I’d like to reemphasize that I am not advocating that designers avoid pushing boundaries, conventions, or the status quo. In fact, the opposite is true. The best advances in technology, products, and services have come from truly original thinking. The important lesson that has been inadvertently lost in this process of creating great ideas is the need to make appropriate judgments and not strive for original and unique just for the sake of novelty. When designers play and explore as extensively as they can, it only helps to build their repertoire of solutions to a problem. Great judgment allows them the ability to focus on the idea(s) that are best suited to the problem—even if those ideas seem unexciting. The strong designer knows when to leave the wondrous stuff on the drafting table and when to pursue it with vigor.

We do ourselves a great disservice by not catching our own hubris early in the process and verify that we’ve not made something more complex or unusable than we could have just to be novel. To continue broadening the scope of design into other areas such as business management, social services, and service design, the desire to be unique needs to be tempered with the drive to be relevant.

Photo credit: Design and Punishment, by Ben Cunningham, from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth’s 2007 Three Dimensional Design graduate directory.

The rising cost of gas for automobiles has kicked-started the development of electric and hybrid cars out of the realm of niche and into mainstream, albeit early adopter mainstream. BMW just announced a new electric version of their MINI and Tesla Motors has just released their high-end electric sports car. While this is certainly good for helping to move energy consumption away from specifically using fossil fuels (electric cars can get their power from wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, or other non-crude based supplies), there is another opportunity that waits in the wings:

The return of the boutique coachbuilder.

Over the last century, the breadth of coachbuilders designing the bodies for the chassis of other car manufacturers has waned to the point of being rather exotic. To be sure, companies such as Ghia and Pininfarina still do their thing, but we don’t see novel designs like the Karmann Ghias anymore. The advent of unibody construction has made custom coachbuilding practically impossible¹.

With the advent of electric motors and drive systems comes the potential for car manufacturers to go back to the days when a chassis was sold as-is. Coachworks would then build their own unique body on top of a standard base. Will the simplified electric car allow a new industry of coach manufactures and body shops cater to smaller groups of car buyers? I hope so.

Currently, Tesla Motors is beginning to sell their new electric sports car that will be sure to turn heads. And why shouldn’t it? The body is based off of a Lotus Elise, after Lotus won the design contest for the bodywork. This is a prime example of one company focusing on the motor (a complex and challenging design problem in an of itself) and another focusing on the more visual and tangible experience.

As we speak, both Ford and GM and struggling for relevance in a world that passed them by three decades ago. Is this their opportunity to turn their manufacturing ability into creating inexpensive and easily produced and maintained chassis? Dealerships could potentially partner with as many coachbuilders that they wanted to offer customers actual choice in the vehicle they drove.

I hope that the change to focus on electric motor vehicles is also an opportunity for a move back to more players in the actual design and production of auto styling. The competition and diversity would promote an amazing influx of creativity in an industry that has become, frankly, quite pedestrian. And focusing on creating chassis would allow Ford, GM, and their ilk a graceful way to move on from an industry that they helped devolve into so much cruft to one where their engineering expertise can push electric chassis development with more efficient and cost effective technologies.

¹ Wikipedia, Coachbuilders
Photo: BMW MINI, egmcartech.com