We are creatures of our culture. The United States, for instance, is a relatively young culture, blessed with a large amount of usable space, excellent natural resources, and ambitious immigrant forebears. But young cultures that have prospered on the utilization of natural resources can be a bit raw. As an example, think about the reluctance of many people involved in the production of products to become more comfortable with, and competent at, handling aesthetic and emotional issues in their lives and culture—in a sense, this reflects our history. Our industrial past is characterized by competent, competitive (sometimes ruthless) people and spectacular material gains. We are still fascinated by them in biographies and history books. The stereotypical insensitive male is a major actor in the U.S. story of the past.
We are amused by anecdotes like General Grant’s oft-quoted comment on music: “I only know two tunes. One is Yankee Doodle and one is not.” He was neither an engineer nor a company president, but he did become president of the United States. Many a “traditional” U.S. male (I once was one until retrained by art school, the university, the women in my life, and time) prefers to gain his pleasures from the outdoors, well-played athletic events, physically attractive women, fast cars and airplanes, good liquor, and perhaps extraordinary business deals. Painting, poetry, dance, and beauty did not fit the U.S. male stereotype of old and were considered, by these men, best left to women.
But such attitudes are not limited to men, or to the United States. I know a large number of men and women in industry who, even though they are highly sensitive people and may have sophisticated knowledge and abilities, are reluctant to apply such thought and skills at work. Many managers in companies, especially those who manufacture hardware, are downright timid in discussing and experimenting with aesthetic factors and educating their engineers and managers about them. The result is that they shortchange aesthetic factors in design compared, say, to people in fashion or architectural design. Professionals who focus on aesthetic considerations have historically been given consulting roles in companies rather than line responsibility, and aesthetic factors seem to take a backseat to those that can be easily quantified.
Since I have spent many years working in a university, I can partly blame education for lack of adequate attention to overall product quality. Most engineers and many managers are, after all, products of our universities. We in the university are obsessed with theory, optimization, rigorous and logical thinking, breakthroughs, and the next big thing—not “goodness.” We teach critical thinking more than creative thinking, and the three R’s over quality. Our faculty members rely upon the written and spoken word, mathematics, and rigorous experiment and quantification when possible. Unfortunately, characteristics of good products, such as elegance, and the emotions involved with outstanding products, namely love, are not easily described by these languages—you can’t put a number on elegance or love. It is also difficult to define such things with the degree of clarity necessary to allow for improvement.
Many engineering school faculty members are neither comfortable nor equipped with the proper background to deal with such topics. Even professors whose personal lives actively embrace philosophical, political, and humanistic considerations are hesitant to bring them into the classroom. Courses generally focus on analysis rather than synthesis. Aspects of products that cannot be modeled or described with mathematics are often referred to as “nontechnical.” Many of these topics are relegated to programs labeled “industrial design” or “product design,” and they are often viewed with suspicion by the majority of engineering school teachers.
This attitude is bound to influence not only admission criteria and course content in engineering schools, but also the attitude of the students themselves. In fact, there is so much emphasis on the logical and the quantitative, and such a heavy diet of left-brain activities in the curricula (mathematical analysis, application of science, relying on precedent, numbers, charts and graphs), that we probably scare off many students who have a real liking for right-brain activities (relating to creativity, emotion, and intuitiveness). Engineering students have too little opportunity to deal with the interaction between people and products or to think about topics outside the traditional engineering curriculum. Business schools are a bit better, exposing students to fields such as organizational behavior, marketing, general management, and strategy. But they also have been increasingly drawn to the quantifiable. Being an engineer, I am certainly a believer in metrics, statistics, and mathematical analysis, but many aspects of quality are difficult to measure.
In the 1980s, there were a large number of publications on the previously mentioned topic of manufacturing quality. Some of the more thoughtful ones were written by David Garvin, then and now a professor in the Harvard Business School. In one widely referenced article, “Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality,” he discussed eight aspects of quality:1
1. Performance
2. Features
3. Reliability
4. Conformance
5. Durability
6. Serviceability
7. Aesthetics
8. Perceived quality
The article’s emphasis is mainly on conformance (deviation from standard) with resulting positive effects on performance, reliability, and durability. Garvin’s article sets the last two qualities apart with the comment, “The final two dimensions of quality are the most subjective. Aesthetics—how a product looks, feels, sounds, tastes, or smells—is clearly a matter of personal judgment and a reflection of individual preferences.” He does not deny that they are important; they are simply less susceptible to universal conclusions. I agree with him, but from my perspective as a designer and consultant, aesthetics and perceived quality, although admittedly difficult to generalize over large populations, often play dominant roles in the success of products. In the context of many people in business with whom I have worked who seem to be allergic to things that cannot be measured and plotted on charts, Garvin deserves a medal for even including the topics—and incidentally an oak leaf cluster for including serviceability, an increasingly neglected component of quality.
The increasing emphasis on marketing in business has been good for the quality of products. When I began my career, many industries seemed alarmingly insensitive to their customers. Products were designed in traditional ways, and since they had no choice, customers were forced to adapt to the products. Now, however, it is standard to attempt to be “closer to the customer.” Such techniques as beta testing and focus groups are now commonplace. Sophisticated quantitative techniques including conjoint analysis are aiding in the traditional marketing problem of separating and prioritizing what the customer wants. However, some of the components of quality are not necessarily given high priority by the customer even if they should be—in crasser terms, customers do not always know what they like.
In addition, marketing has always been weak in the case of unprecedented products—it is difficult for people to respond to something with which they have no experience. And marketing is constrained by the strategy of the company. In creating new products, marketing can help, but certain principles must lead. Products should physically fit people, whether they think to specify it in their focus group or not. Elegance is good, even if people have difficulty in describing it. Symbolism is important, even though many customers may deny it.
Marketing, when applied in business, is also biased by the values of the people involved in the business. Apple’s first “portable” computer was a failure despite their marketing program. Potential customers said that they wanted full Macintosh function, including eight hours of battery life, in as small a box as possible. This sounded terrific to a company perhaps dominated by engineers. But that box weighed 17 pounds, which was not what the customers had in mind. What they really wanted, it turned out, was something small and light. Apple figured that out for the very successful PowerBook line of computers, in which the design goal became “put all the computer you can in a (small) box.” The marketing efforts had missed people’s love of small things—the most with the least—but at the time, most computer users would probably not have admitted it.
Finally, the intent of marketing is to define products that will satisfy the customer and fulfill company financial goals. In order to do this, data is typically gathered on past and potential future customer wants and needs. Often the target is individuals or small groups who have purchasing power in companies. But what is good for individuals and companies may not be good for societies. For example, the desire for powerful gasoline engines in large vehicles is not compatible with increasingly expensive fuel, clean air, and crowded city streets.
I am an optimist about engineers and businesspeople, industry, and product quality and am confident that industry is becoming better at designing and producing products. There are many fine designers in the world. However, many products are being designed by people who are not fine designers. Companies have improved greatly at manufacturing quality (whether locally or outsourced), but many are still wanting. The cross-functional interdisciplinary team approach to product design has brought a much-needed degree of integration to the product development process, but it is still not used in many businesses. Some managers appreciate and are sophisticated about good design. Many, although they would deny it vehemently, are not. There are also engineers who value aesthetics and the emotional response of the users of their devices. But there are certainly those who would prefer not to be involved in such considerations.
This situation is improving in the United States, but the changes began relatively recently, stimulated by foreign competition. Asia and Europe, for example, have more established aesthetic traditions than the United States. Over a longer length of time, societies seem to become more sophisticated and less awkward with things aesthetic and intellectual. Michelangelo carved the Pietà and the Chinese were making Ming vases during the 15th century. The Pilgrims did not arrive in America until the 17th century and spent much of their early effort securing food, shelter, and safety. We have also been preoccupied with fighting wars, making money, and becoming a world power. Our relatively recent changes in aesthetic sensitivity reflect not only maturation but also the increasing criticism and social expectations that stem from the late 1960s and the Vietnam War and our increasing awareness of environmental problems ranging from potential global warming to ugliness—and perhaps the increasing participation of women in product design, development, and manufacturing and in positions of influence in industry.
We are still perhaps better at building large farming and construction equipment, tanks, and airplanes than we are at making furniture that is both comfortable and visually sophisticated. At one time of great frustration, I had both a classical Eames chair and an old La-Z-boy rocker in my living room. The Eames chair was exquisitely elegant and beautiful to look at, but it did not fit me at all. The La-Z-Boy rocker was extraordinarily comfortable, but my wife finally convinced me it should move to my shop. Why couldn’t I have both beauty and comfort? As a possible hint, I once encountered a letter in a well-known business magazine that has an annual feature in which it names the best-designed products of the year. The letter castigated the editor for using professional designers as judges instead of businessmen. The implication was obvious—good, hardheaded businesspeople are the best judges of design. I wrote a letter suggesting that a panel of professional designers be used to pick the 20 most outstanding businesses. I got no reply.
When I worked briefly in the U.S. automobile business 50 years ago, it was stuck in the traditions of its past success. The company I worked for was making a lot of money selling OK machinery in the light of limited overseas and local competition. The diversity of its product line was in name only, because it was seeking to standardize parts across different divisions. There was also little diversity between U.S. car companies. U.S. cars were large, heavy, softly suspended, and sluggish in steering. The top managers of the company were U.S. males with dominantly financial interests. Good designers (whose own automobiles were often foreign in make) tended to leave the company because they simply could not get management interested in a wider variety of products that better fit their customers. The philosophy was “Change its look a little, make it go faster, and advertise the hell out of it.” When I pointed out the market penetration of the Volkswagen Beetle, the response often was that it was not good in deep snow. When GM finally responded to the Beetle with the Corvair, it was a Detroit copy that could not compete.
But 50 years later, can we say that the automobile industry has gotten the message? At the time of this writing, due to overseas competition, increasing sensitivity to the finite supply of oil and the environment, and a bit of bankruptcy, there is a long overdue burst of innovation in the design of automobiles. But will it last? Look up an old automobile ad and compare it with the new ones. Mileage figures are increasing, but there have been few radical changes that respond to traffic problems and the decreasing oil stocks in the world. There is more attention to pollution, but the U.S. automobile industry has not been the leader here—in fact, it has fought it. Automotive ads also still promise to make us more desirable, attractive, and effective if we buy this year’s model (my automobile does not seem to help my image much, but fortunately I do not expect it to).
U.S. automobile companies are trapped by tradition in their design. Where is the efficient commuter machine? Why do I have to either take a ton and a half of metal to the grocery store or risk a bicycle or motorcycle accident because of an overload of shopping bags? Why was it necessary to wait so long for cleaner, more efficient engines, air bags, and hybrid power? Why does the glove compartment in my pickup hold almost nothing, and why can’t the spare tire holder be designed so that my wife can change the tire? The reasons are not simply technical, and they have contributed to the bankruptcy of General Motors and the near-death state of Ford and Chrysler (acquired by Fiat) in the recent recession. After major surgery, these companies are now doing much better, but it remains to be seen how they will respond in the long term—with more advertising or more attention to filling society’s needs.
Another tradition the United States has that can reduce quality is our desire to produce extremely large numbers of a given product. There are good reasons for this obsession with huge production volumes due to economies of scale—per-item savings in everything from design and development costs to tooling, and sufficient cash flow to allow large advertising campaigns and sales networks. But there is a potential loss in product quality in massive production.
As an example of quality problems occurring through trying to satisfy a large number of people, consider the full-sized “half-ton” pickup truck. The sales volume of these products is large, but the variation in products, except perhaps for optional features, is small. At the same time, the usage of these vehicles varies widely from boulevard cruisers to trucks. But the design emphasis over time seems to be swinging from carrying cargo to carrying people. With mine, I haul around large, dirty, ungainly loads and I seldom stray from paved or dirt roads. I only need a standard cab because I don’t take my family or work crews riding, and I need an eight-foot bed because of the loads I carry. I want one that will last a long time (20 or 30 years), be easily maintainable, and be well equipped with tie-down points and other means of securing loads. I want it to have a comfortable bench seat with indestructible upholstery and simple functional features and controls that do not distract me from driving. I do not want it to use a ridiculous amount of fuel and show off the bruises and scratches that it will acquire over time. There are many users like me, and the pickups presently being produced do not fit our needs—they are just not good trucks.
My last pickup had a small V-8 engine, which was larger than I needed, only four weak attach points located at inconvenient points inside the bed, and a body design that both prevented using the outside surface for securing the loads and flaunted all dings and scratches. The mechanical portion of the truck was satisfyingly reliable, but such things as replacing the randomly failing core packs in the ignition system and checking and replacing spark plugs called for a highly intelligent and extremely patient monkey. Unfortunately, the truck, although far from the “luxury” model, included a large number of electric and electronic bells and whistles that could and often did fail, the reasons for and treatment of the failures being often confusing to even “factory certified” mechanics. As a minor example, for some time I had a problem with one of the switches that sensed whether the doors were ajar. It was buried inside the door behind the latch and collected dirt until it no longer functioned properly, causing a few interior and exterior lights to remain constantly on, the dashboard to give erroneous warning signals, and other annoying malfunctions. I tried removing the pertinent fuses but found I would then disable necessary functions.
The first time this malfunction happened, I gave up diagnosing the problem and took it to a dealer. The serviceperson, after telling me how stupidly the switch had been positioned, told me that in such cases they generally changed the switches on both sides, which was difficult because the doors had to be disassembled, but that they would be glad to do so for $500. He also was honest enough to tell me that my problem would probably happen again. My reaction was to take it to another dealer. Serviceman number two agreed with the diagnosis, told me further negative things about the truck’s designers, and then told me it was not necessary to change the switches and squirted a large amount of brake cleaner into the switch area. The problem seemed to be solved, but only temporarily, as it began again in a few days.
The serviceman at dealer number three, having been told of the treatment of serviceman number two, added to my lore of stupidity on the part of the designers and coldly informed me that serviceman number two had been completely off base. He then squirted an even larger amount of penetrating oil into the latch. Under such treatment, the switch seemed to work for a while but once again failed in a few days. At that point I learned how to take the door apart and became an expert replacer of switches and solenoids. One might think that pickups should be designed to survive dirt—apparently not these ones.
Some of my farmer friends had an interesting problem with the same model pickups that were fitted with supercharged diesel engines. The air intakes were so positioned that the engines would suck large quantities of dust into the air filter, causing the truck to require new, rather expensive filter cartridges at an alarming rate, the sticky surface on the cartridge making it impossible to blow the dust buildup off with compressed air. Upon interaction with dealers and designers, my friends got the impression that the designers had not thought much about driving the pickups through dusty fields—this is a truck?
I recently bought a new pickup, and by buying the so-called “working” (stripped) model, managed to escape many bells and whistles, but certainly not all. For instance, this one makes highly obnoxious noises in an attempt to force me to put my seat belt on to move it from my driveway to the garage. But even worse, it is so tall that it requires running boards. I cannot reach loads in the center of the bed while standing on the ground, even though I am significantly taller than most people are. I guess my truck was designed to look cool on Saturday night. Another farmer friend of mine who bought a new 2011 pickup solved the problem by disposing of the standard cargo box and custom-building a flat bed so he could better reach his tools and cargo. I am seriously considering lowering my pickup. If I could more easily reach the objects in the bed, I would love it more.
The majority of pickups sold these days, however, are used more often as cars than as trucks. Unfortunately, they are not good cars, either. Their overall weight, weight distribution, and high center of gravity oppose good handling qualities. The horsepower required to achieve carlike acceleration and top speed ensures the burning of large amounts of fuel. They are cumbersome to park and difficult to maneuver in traffic. If not secured, loads in the bed slide around while accelerating, braking, and turning. Finally, they are decidedly unsafe if driven as a car. Their poorer handling makes evasive action more difficult and braking slower.
Granted that options are available, these trucks are compromise products, like most products being manufactured these days in huge numbers, because of the tradition of attempting to sell one design to a large number of customers. With modern automated manufacturing techniques, however, it should be economically feasible to provide a more diverse offering of products, thereby doing a better job of satisfying customer needs.
In the 1990s, more attention was paid to this matter while manufacturers experimented with extremely flexible factories that could offer highly individualized products. An example was the Panasonic division of Matsushita, which offered bicycles through the Panasonic Individual Custom System. This system produced more than 11 million variations of a bicycle. The customer chose the desired components, dimensions, and other characteristics, and the customized product reached the customer within two weeks after the order. Another was Levi Strauss’s experimentation with individually tailored clothes.
We are proud of the achievements mass production has brought to us, including many products of high quality: VW Bugs, clothespins, and Apple iPods were, or are, mass produced and do their job well, though not loved by everyone. We have equipped large armies with standardized weapons, put our population on the highway with Model Ts and As, and manufactured products so cheaply that we have attained the materialistically highest standard of living in the world.
But people are definitely not all the same, and larger product variability is consistent with this fact. Perhaps there is a portent in the magazine business, which used to be dominated by general-purpose magazines such as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post. These periodicals are now gone, except for thin shadows. Instead the newsstands are filled with specialty magazines like Cycle World, Vanity Fair, BusinessWeek, Arms and Ammo, and U.S. News and World Report. With the advent of the Internet, specialization is even more pronounced: mass production is general production. As it becomes possible to economically produce products that allow a better “fit” with individual customers, industry will hopefully continue to move in that direction.
Traditions and values, especially in large organizations such as manufacturing companies, are extremely difficult to change. It takes time to develop new sensitivities and values on the part of consumers as well as producers. We finally accepted the fact that motorcycles can both go fast and be quiet. We are demanding the same for leaf blowers. Private plane producers and owners have not gotten the message yet. The 2008 spike in fuel costs finally awakened us to the gas-gorging habits of SUVs, which, someday in the near future, are going to be remembered with disbelief.
Economic theory seems to have several embarrassing flaws when it comes to product quality. In particular, it has problems in dealing with anything that does not have a price determined by supply and demand. Such factors unfortunately include the pleasure and pride the owner receives from an extraordinarily crafted, well-functioning, elegant, and beautiful product. It is possible to quantify the cost of making a movie and the box office receipts, but not the joy, insight, or education the viewer receives. We may easily put dollar figures on the cost of making a Porsche and the cost of buying one, but not on the positive feelings of the person who owns and drives it. The businessperson can therefore know the exact dollar profit on a product, but not the exact dollar value of the brand, the advertising, or, indeed, the quality of the product.
This situation may be another reason for reluctance to spend money on product attributes that improve quality. If one wanted to place a value on these attributes in traditional ways, it would involve selling the original version and the improved one, then determining the difference between what could be charged for each of them. This comparison could be done in the case of optional features on automobiles in which products come with different quantities of them. It is obviously possible to know the costs of an iPhone with and without 4G and the selling prices, and therefore determine the increased profit from adding 4G (it is appreciable). But can you imagine Apple producing an ugly iPhone to run a test in order to put a value on attractiveness?
When looking at a particular economic system, even more traditional measures and actions that may inhibit product quality can be found. An obvious one is the desire for continual and as rapid as possible growth in company sales. Managers are humans, and competitive, and want their enterprise to be the largest one of its kind because large is seen as good by many. Also, we individuals only live a relatively few years and want to see our efforts bear as much fruit as possible before we die. And we need to grow faster than our competitors, don’t we? Then there is Wall Street. Stock prices and the perceived performance of management is measured in terms of quarterly performance, usually in terms of sales in the preceding quarter or the equivalent quarter of the previous year—almost never over a five- or ten-year period. This measurement results in the temptation to maximize short-term profit, often by increasing price and decreasing the costs of developing new and better-performing products.
Design is the function in the creation of products that reduces specific (or general) goals of the producer to even more specific inputs for manufacturing. In my admittedly biased view, design plays the critical role in determining product quality. Many, if not most, of the aspects of good quality are in the details, and although many people may have input into the design, designers provide the final details.
Industrial products range from women’s clothing to spacecraft to medical equipment. The design process varies widely from industry to industry, from consulting designer to staff designer, and from design of civilian consumer products to that of weapon systems. Designers of unmanned spacecraft may not have to worry as much about the emotions of the human users as designers of lipsticks do because the products are heavily determined by knowledge, science, and analysis, and humans are involved only until they are launched. These designers work on extremely complex systems in large groups and must worry constantly about weight, reliability, and subsystem integration. However, spacecraft must be assembled, tested, and launched by people. Also, when designers reach the limits of science and analysis, they must depend on feelings and intuition. The opposite may be true for the designers of lipsticks, first concentrating on the centrality of feelings and emotions of the users and then worrying about more technical aspects (for example, creation of cases that keep their shape and protect the lipstick and of mechanisms that allow the lipstick to emerge from these cases in a satisfying and reliable manner). Although the importance of various aspects of design may vary over classes of products, they to some degree extend across all design activities. An increasing number of people are using the term design thinking to address this commonality.
In order to add to product quality, a design group should have the following attributes:
1. Creativity: the ability to have good ideas and implement them (which includes selling the ideas)
2. Comfort with many intellectual disciplines: either knowledge of them or ability to interact easily with those who do have this knowledge
3. Cost consciousness: constant awareness of how much the product will cost to create
4. Coordination abilities: close interaction with manufacturing, marketing, general management, and other related functions
5. Knowledge of the customer: ability and desire to acquire a deep understanding of the customer or end user
6. Understanding of overall quality: a highly developed sense of what creates quality and the ability to distinguish high quality from low
7. “Whole brain” thinking: ability to work with inputs based on knowledge, science, and analysis, but also on feelings, intuition, and judgments
These attributes can be summed up by saying good designers must be good engineers and good artists, but also sympathetic to business and able to work well in a team, the latter requiring social skills as well as technical ones.
It would be nice if all people involved in designing products in an organization were extremely powerful in all of these attributes, but as products become more complicated and sophisticated, greater specialization is needed and more people are involved in the design. The result is that functional and disciplinary groups grow, become formalized, and require increasing organizational skill to ensure that necessary interaction between them occurs.
Design has also increased in sophistication. When I was first introduced to design some 50 years ago, design was simpler. I was hired during my summers in college as a junior engineer at Hunter Engineering, where my uncle was the shop supervisor. The products and business were relatively straightforward—designing custom machinery for industrial customers under contract. I sat at a drafting board surrounded by handbooks and my slide rule and made drawings of parts and assemblies that would then go to the shop to be manufactured and assembled. If I didn’t know what material to choose or how to calculate loads, stresses, temperatures, and other such things, I would get help from a more senior person. No one in the group had a degree in engineering. It was a traditional machine design operation, but among other things, the group designed a sophisticated continuous casting, rolling, and painting system that became the basis for the Hunter Douglas venetian blind business.
We needed to be creative, but we were creative in the sense of putting fairly conventional pieces together. We worked with a narrow set of disciplines (mechanical with an occasional switch or motor) and were good at prototyping and testing. We also worked to a budget that, aside from our boss, we were not involved in setting. We did not interact with manufacturing, although we did a reasonable job of designing for manufacture because we had all worked in shops at some time. Since these were industrial products, we worked more to the specifications of our customers and what our boss told us to do than to a deep understanding of clients’ needs. In fact, we seldom met representatives of our customer company.
We did not think about beauty or cultural fit, but we had a good sense for quality because we were all machinery freaks. We built parts ourselves and knew about surface finishes, tolerances, and other related matters. We owned what machinery we could afford (motorcycles, tools, boats, and so on) and had an appreciation for elegance, efficiency, cleverness, and outstanding performance. I suppose the group could have been considered expert in both the measurable and the nonmeasurable aspects of machine quality. I remember thinking about this fact much later in life, when my uncle, who had dropped out of school after the ninth grade to become a machinist and spent his life working in shops before he became shop supervisor at Hunter Engineering, decided to retire and build custom machinery in his garage. One product was a very large and complicated machine that automatically made fully packaged lemon tarts at high speed—it was simply amazing. With all of my experience and education, I could not have done as well.
I was to encounter different approaches to design working at Shell Oil Company and at General Motors, and studying and teaching at Stanford University, but my next big insight was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Time had passed and such technologies as computers, solid-state circuitry, and titanium had arrived. Not only were the products unprecedented and technically sophisticated, but the stakes were high (the Space Race) and the constraints were extremely severe (weight, reliability, and launch survival issues). I was employed initially as a senior engineer and later as a group supervisor, once again deeply involved in the design of hardware. There were 2,000 of us at JPL, plus contractors, working on two projects—the Ranger lunar program and the Mariner planetary program. The work was much different from that at Hunter Engineering. For one thing, design was done by a large number of people with different job titles (engineer, scientist, designer, technician, and so on). This process was an effort of highly integrated and coordinated teams. And we engineers now worked at desks (with perhaps a drawing board in our office) and generally had degrees in engineering.
We all overlapped job descriptions, worked together, and were necessary in the process of designing and building hardware. There were many more people in the “design section” (still on drafting boards), and they had more formal education (typically two years of college and some with engineering degrees) than those at Hunter Engineering. Engineers came in all flavors (mechanical, electrical, civil, test), typically gave the designers sketches of what they were proposing, and then spent time with them as the details evolved. Large mainframe computers were available to analyze complicated structures and simulate communication systems.
I think industry pays a large penalty from associating the word designer with the type of person I was and the type of work I did when I started my career. The word is often associated with the memory of rooms full of anonymous people carefully “drafting” parts in the aircraft industry in the 1930s. Maybe draftsman was a better word to describe this type of work, but drafting is now done by computers. And design is no longer as straightforward. Designers in industry, however, are still somewhat invisible. As an example, if you look at the membership of the National Academy of Engineering, you find many more managers and academics than people who actually are involved in the details of design. At Stanford, we have the good fortune to have Brad Parkinson, the person credited with the Global Positioning System, on the faculty. That label is fair, since he envisioned it, managed the project while in the U.S. Air Force, and now busies himself finding applications for it. He is an excellent engineer/designer.
A few years ago, Brad was receiving many awards for his GPS work. I asked him once how it felt to be famous, and he replied that it was embarrassing because good engineers are invisible. That is often the case with good designers as well, even though I have met many who are probably more valuable to their employer than some of the executives are. It is time to upgrade our image of designers in industry and make sure that the people doing the design are consistent with our upgraded image.
The work at JPL, unlike that at Hunter Engineering, was technically extremely interdisciplinary, requiring coordination of many parts (subsystems). We had “systems engineers” and “systems managers,” and of course “systems design” to ensure that the spacecraft came complete with handling fixtures and test equipment, the proper number of test prototypes were built, the spacecraft would not be harmed during shipment to the launch site and launch site operations (probably a more hazardous environment than space), and the system was subdivided into subsystems that could be built and worked upon in parallel and assembled into a working unit. Above all, the systems people were in charge of making sure that the spacecraft design was balanced technically and between all of the various interests involved.
The term technical balance refers to adjudicating the various demands of the people responsible for the various subsystems—including communications, structure, propulsion, guidance and control, and science. As an example, the communications section at JPL usually wanted a safety pad of around 10 decibels to communicate to Earth, which was typically done through a steerable parabolic dish that necessarily was constrained during launch and extended once in space—a tricky operation. One way to obtain this safety pad was to make the antenna 10 times as large, but the structures people would rather see it 10 times smaller. Enter the systems engineers.
Another ongoing debate was between JPL and the various user interests involved, such as scientists and the funding agency (the government through NASA). The designers wanted reliability, which is often obtained through simplicity, but the pressure from scientists to fly their experiments was intense and resulted in complexity. Also, scientists tended to want things like magnetic field and cosmic ray fluxes, and the public (and therefore the government) liked mind-blowing photographs—another systems problem.
But JPL was not building products for individual consumers. The business side of the product development at JPL was in fact relatively weak (it dealt with budget control—there was no profit). Marketing consisted of selling NASA on a project, which was aided by the fact that we were the NASA center in charge of unmanned exploration of the solar system. Once the contract was signed, there was not much need to worry about customer demand, liability suits, social effects, or, assuming they were politically acceptable, costs. The products turned out to be visually striking not due to any conscious goal but because of the weight constraints, necessary articulations, and surface treatments needed to maintain temperatures—the appearance was totally determined by the function.
After I left JPL, I became a professor at Stanford teaching courses in engineering design, systems design, and product design, which at that time was a joint effort between the engineering school and the art department. The design process has changed a great deal since I joined the university through the availability of powerful new tools and approaches and changes in organizational approaches and global competition. New economic factors and social and individual values have also played a role. Thanks to computers and research, it seems to me that we have perhaps gotten stronger at purely technical problem solving but not necessarily at how to make products that increase the quality of people’s lives—a situation that has attracted more and more of my interest.
As to other changes in design, when I arrived at Stanford, Silicon Valley was in full bloom. The presence of digital electronics and improving integrated circuits was opening up huge opportunities. Successful companies could be started on a relatively small amount of capital and, if successful, grow rapidly enough to cause the venture capital business to flourish along with the electronics business. More and more designers seemed to be working in small, growing companies and becoming interested in more idealistic problems. Perhaps because of this rather revolutionary era, and the severe overseas competition visible on the U.S. horizon, there was a great increase of interest in creativity, innovation (a word that implies more practical implementation than creativity), and entrepreneurship.
I happened to write a well-timed book on creativity, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas, which although the first edition was written in 1974 is still in print, and became heavily involved in studying, teaching, and consulting about such things. Creativity is an essential element of design, and also of organizational change. And increasing quality usually implies change and innovation. The organizational characteristics necessary to encourage creativity are now well known. At one point, I used the following check sheet in my consulting, and also to help my students with their final projects, in which they acted as creativity consultants to organizational groups. The list includes important aspects of encouraging creativity and increasing innovation not only among designers but also in organizations in general.
1. Are they, the clients, clear on what they want?
2. Are they willing to pay the price (in increased uncertainty, failures, perceived lack of control, and resources) for what they want? Organizations often say they want to become more innovative but are not prepared to tolerate the associated increased experimentation and risk.
3. Do they understand how people act in situations of increased creativity? Organizations that have been operating in a given way for a long time are often unaware that increasing innovation often requires treating people differently and that these people will in turn respond differently.
4. Are they working on the “right” problems? Organizations often devote their effort to alleviating symptoms rather than solving core problems, since the latter involves more uncertainty and perhaps more pain.
5. Do they understand cognitive styles and the necessity not only of using them properly but also of increasing communication between disciplines and business units?
6. Do they know when and how to use “ideation” techniques (e.g., time-and-effort focusers, set breakers, other people’s ideas, crossing cultures, changing environments)?
7. Do they realize that their traditional decision-making approaches may be wrong to evaluate the products of increased innovation? Numbers 5 to 7 have to do with increasing the quantity and quality of concepts and making sure that they are not rejected by old standards. The organization should perhaps think harder about problem-solving habits, learn a few creativity techniques, and pick up more thoughtful decision-making approaches.
8. Are the proper resources (time, people, and money) available? This question is a tough one. Organizations often become interested in increasing innovation when they are in financially tough times. There is no magic.
9. Is the reward system appropriate? Traditional organizations have reward systems based on fairness and seniority, not on recognizing individual contribution.
10. Are groups being properly used to produce and implement new ideas? Traditional groups are converging and safe, but not particularly creative. Creative groups must be managed collaboratively, rather than authoritatively, and managers must worry about the psychological environment as well as schedule and reporting procedures. Although individual creativity is basic, groups can be more creative than individuals in a complex organization can—they have a bigger “brain” and more economic and political clout.
11. Is implementation rigorously planned for? It is harder to make new ideas happen than old ones. Organizations often underestimate the time and resources necessary to do this, resulting in one of the main reasons for failure to increase innovation. Organizations devise and test brilliant new concepts but fail to back them strongly enough to take effect.
12. Do they understand power and politics in the organization and their use in accomplishing change? There is often ambivalence about power and politics in organizations, especially in institutions such as universities.
13. Are changes in the organizational culture needed? Often organizations are “tuned” for one state (plentiful resources, a steady market) and must reconstitute themselves for a new environment.
When I first joined the Stanford faculty, designers of products were necessarily becoming familiar with digital control, computers, and communication. Mechanical and electrical engineering came to overlap to such an extent that a new cross-disciplinary field called mechatronics evolved. Designers in start-up companies also became familiar with topics such as seed capital, mezzanine funding, IPOs, and equity vesting, not to mention working long hours under intense pressure. Business had clearly become a factor in design. Start-ups sometimes had only one or two designers, sometimes none, opening up a major opportunity for consulting design offices (IDEO, Frog). Personal computers were becoming widespread, and the first computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) programs became available.
In another 10 years (in the mid-1970s) I was chairing the Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management department at Stanford, which was in the midst of dealing with manufacturing problems and the competition U.S. companies were feeling from Japan and the Asian Tigers and from new organizational insights that affected product quality. Designers were now working ever more closely with manufacturing people as well as businesspeople. Such topics as designing for manufacture and manufacturing quality were key in design.
Ten years later, I was chairing the Stanford Science, Technology, and Society program, as well as teaching and writing in mechanical engineering and industrial engineering and consulting. Computers were now ubiquitous in design and manufacturing. Although designers still sketched, drawing boards had disappeared. Computers were used to produce the majority of graphics work and perform an increasing amount of analysis. Robots, computer-controlled machining centers, and outsourcing played ever-larger roles in manufacturing. Computers also allowed an increasing amount of simulation and simplified iteration and prototyping—all three increasingly used design tools. Business had become global, and digital communication devices allowed widely separated people to work as groups. Designers accepted that design overlaps not only business and manufacturing but also many other activities having to do with better understanding customers, economics, policy and politics, and generally the quality of life. Social and environmental issues impacted by design were also receiving increasing attention.
An indication of future directions in design is a program in the Stanford Engineering School called the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (informally called the d.school). Hasso Plattner, a founder of SAP, made a large gift to Stanford to start this program, which is directed by David Kelley, a founder of IDEO, a large and successful design and innovation consulting company, who is now a professor at Stanford. The program teaches graduate courses and has ongoing laboratories, offers executive programs and short courses, and is overseen by a number of professors from different schools, departments, and disciplines. The courses change continually but are all based on projects, are taught by at least two people from different academic disciplines, and utilize student teams whose members also represent different disciplines.
People in the program believe that design thinking can be used to solve a wide variety of problems that are not usually thought to be under the purview of design; examples include social and policy problems. They define design thinking broadly and are experimenting with a definition of design that includes not only engineering and business but also a wide variety of other fields, including law, business, education, and many branches of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities—potentially all disciplines. The program considers both technical and emotional aspects of design discussed throughout this book, emphasizing creativity (generating alternate solutions), need finding, and other ways of better understanding the customer’s true problem and making generous use of rapid prototyping during the design process.
Chapter 2 Thought Problem
Choose a product that you suspect might be of higher quality if it were not for narrow-mindedness or tradition on the part of the company that produced it. What might you do if you were chief engineer or president of the company to offset this narrow-mindedness or traditional thinking?
Then choose two more products, one that you believe to be extremely well designed and one that is poorly designed. Upon what do you base your choices? What do you think the causes might have been for both the good design and the bad? If you were CEO of the company responsible for the bad design, where might you look in the company to begin to improve its design competence?