Design Defined

Coco Chanel’s little black dress. An Apple iPhone. A paperclip.

It’s easy enough to explain what these disparate objects share in common: they’re design classics.

The question is: how do we define good design? If we were able to distill the enduring qualities that all design classics share, what somethings would we hold in our hands?

To us, good design is a creative process involving the disciplined execution of a meticulous plan to produce something that precisely fits its intended purpose. No more, no less.

The somethings we bring to life through the design process share four qualities:

• Elegance The creative process of design generally produces physical beauty, aesthetic sophistication or conceptual elegance
• Improved efficiency Good design produces things that work better but only use resources sparingly
• Appropriateness Good design works well in the real world with minimum impact on the environment
• Success Good design sells successfully and it is easily adopted by the people and organisations that buy it.

Design is the tool that we use to continuously reshape the world around us. So good design is not always tangible: we also design services, experiences and polices.

Nor is good design necessarily innovative. The best solutions are sometimes quite mundane.

Good design isn’t always pretty, either. Sometimes, producing an appropriate design does not demand physical beauty.

Good design is not always widely popular. What matters is that it is popular with the people it is intended for.

Which is why some people will always love Chanel, others will always love Apple – and we’ll all love the humble paperclip.



21st Century African

 An irresistible object, a homeless man and the future economy of the world

On a chilly late autumn afternoon the curator of one of Europe’s most prestigious art and design museums clicked through images of a new wooden vase and immediately ordered 8 pieces via e-mail for sale in the museum store. She hadn’t seen the actual product yet but liked the pictures enough to place the order.

Two weeks earlier, the creative director of one of the largest safari lodge companies in the world, which owns some of the most prestigious properties on 3 continents, stopped while going through images of items for new décor in the lodges. “He’s not the kind to get excited about a new item typically, he’s seen so much over the years, he just kind of goes ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but this time he stopped and said “Wow; we’ve got to have those”, says an assistant.

Just over a month earlier, two buyers from one of America’s most respected chain of décor retailers had an unexpected meeting. They were on their annual global pilgrimage to source the most interesting items from around the world to stock in their stores. “This is unique; we’ve just come from the Milan furniture fair and there’s nothing at all like this available”, said one of them, studying the bowl in his hands.

The man who had made the items that so captivated these people couldn’t have known less about how his work was affecting them. His name is William Maseng and he lives in a squatter camp incongruously wedged between one of Africa’s most impressive church campuses and one of its most upmarket shopping malls. The village has been neatly laid out by a local charity with a grid of wide dusty streets, dotted with a few above ground water tanks. Its 800 houses are mostly made from tree branches wrapped with thick plastic film salvaged from building sites and billboards.

William’s own house used to be an ANC election billboard and fragments of its message overlap at comically XXL size. Outside his front door, William has placed a salvaged wooden table where he does his work assembling slivers of wood into the decorative bowls, vases and lampshades that made such an impression on those décor experts in Europe, South Africa and the USA.

William is not a craftsman, he’s a construction laborer. He arrived in Pretoria in 1981 from Kuruman, a pretty town of 12 000 inhabitants on the edge of the Kalahari Desert several hundred miles away. Faced with few opportunities for work, he did what hundreds of thousands of South Africans do every year and moved to the city to look for a job. Nearly three decades of part-time work and countless hard knocks had left him homeless, penniless and out of luck. He found himself living in the long grass and dense bushes in a green belt lining the wealthy end of Pretoria, together with several hundred people with similar stories. All of them virtually invisible to their neighbours whizzing by a few hundred yards away in their cars.

In many ways, William’s story represents the heartache and hopelessness of almost half of South Africa’s people. While half the population attends good schools, earn a trade or graduate from university and go on to comfortable middle class lives, the other half is stuck on the wrong side of a growing income gap. For every story of promise and hope, often because of angelic NGOs like Tswelopele which formalized William’s village, plucking it’s now residents from the urban veld to give them a better chance, there is a story of incompetence and failure such as the 27 000 dysfunctional schools in the country, still paralyzed after 14 years of democratic freedom.

The bowls that William assembles started life as a short conversation with Professor Neil Gershenfeld under the cavernous glass and steel of Cape Town’s slick new Convention Centre during the 2007 Design Indaba conference. Professor Gershenfeld runs the Centre for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A bearded man with a bush of graying black hair, Neil is a constant blaze of energy and intelligence; attributes that contributed to his being named one of the Prospect/FP top 100 public intellectuals in the world.

He has a vision of the future. He believes that our world needn’t have huge factories making millions of widgets which are transported around the world in huge ships and into warehouses and trucks that all spew out smoke and carbon.  Prof. Gershenfeld says that this almighty expense to deliver a single widget to the store shelf on the day that we choose to buy is composed mostly of wasted energy. He says in his book, FAB, and in his popular talk on www.ted.com that instead of transporting tons of matter around the world we should simply transport the information because that travels around the world in a millisecond and at almost no cost.

This vision is encapsulated in the term personal fabricator, which Neil uses to describe the future invention that will make this all possible. You or I will sit at home, order a product online and a cabinet-sized machine in the basement will make it for us before our eyes. This technology is at the mainframe stage of development according to Prof. Gershenfeld and just as some people once said that there was no use for a personal computer; it may be hard to believe that we will one day each own a personal fabricator.

To prototype the idea, Prof. Gershefeld has created over 60 fabrication laboratories around the world, including in South Africa. These Fab Labs are crude versions of the personal fabricator consisting of a room full of laser cutters, micro milling machines, plasma cutters and so on. Any person can walk in off the street, learn a little CAD software and start making things.

What Prof. Gershenfeld has been looking for is a way to commercialize the work of the Fab Labs so that the prototyping of his vision of the future can go beyond technical feasibility and into the commercial realm. That prompted the team at Readymade, an industrial design company, to design products that could be made in any Fab Lab and sold around the world. If successful, a good candidate would be able to be made at the Fab Lab closest to the customer that ordered it.

The peculiarity of this task wasn’t lost on Readymade whose daily work consists mostly of designing technological gadgets for large multinationals like Motorola, Philips and Mitsubishi; things like digital pocket radios, mobile phone headsets and remote controls. Despite not being known for creating decorative home wares on a pro bono basis, the PR allure of working with MIT and the chance to burnish the artistic side of the portfolio held sway.

The first result is the decorative wooden bowl made by William Maseng that so captivated the experts on three continents. It is constructed from laser cut pieces of wood which are interlaced to create the impression of a bird’s nest.  When holding the product, one is aware of several apparent contradictions; it is complex for something with such a simple function, it is striking, beautiful even but by no means pretty; it is delicate but at the same time rough and it is organically random but also precisely ordered.

These contrasts are perhaps explained by Readymade’s unusual situation as an African company designing techno-gadgets for first world corporations which are sold around the world. They are also possibly explained by the bowl’s attempt to answer the question of what it means to be a 21^st century African.

For William Maseng it (at least partially) means earning some money making bowls, which if they become popular, could mean his first regular income for a long time. For others, the Fab Labs in South Africa provide the chance to experiment and make with greater dexterity than before. For Readymade it could be bridging the gulf between thinking global and acting local when you’re sitting at the far end of Africa.

The idea of employing homeless job seekers like William to assemble the bowls was serendipitous rather than planned but has allowed very careful assembly of a delicate product in a way that mass production cannot reproduce.

The combination of living close to the elements and having plenty of time can be life-threatening for people like William. In another context, in a busy world momentarily sick of artificial excess, touching the elements and having enough time are warm, real and luxurious. Maybe some of that warmth is captured in the bowls that William makes.

It’s probable that the nest bowl will not create the new world economy and that it may not dent South Africa’s towering unemployment. If homeless South Africans make the bowls, they will still be shipped around the world creating carbon dioxide; they currently consist of American Walnut that has already made one very long trip. It is possible that the nest bowl represents little about beauty, warmth, reality or commercial sense. Nonetheless, there is still something beautiful about an idea that by its very existence allows wealthy connoisseurs of design across the world to choose a bowl made by a man sitting outside a shack in South Africa and to pay him for the privilege.

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Designing the Innovative Enterprise

 Thinking like a designer can unlock innovation by understanding people

The rate of change in the world and in the lives of both customers and staff are seldom matched by the rate of change in organizations. This is logical because companies need stability to measure improvement, but it also creates hidden inefficiencies in the gap between customer needs and company processes. Fortunately the field of design offers some tools to bridge this gap and unlock innovation.    

Human centered design is a term used to describe a designer’s focus on the person. This designer need not be an art school graduate; rather they are any person creating a new process or structure within a business. This act of creation is design. In human centered design, the needs, dreams and behaviors of the people a designer wants to affect with his solution are examined. This means listening to people. It means understanding and respecting what motivates and captivates them. Once the designer knows what a person finds desirable, the solution that is created can then be looked at in terms of technical, organizational and financial feasibility.

Experienced designers also understand that people often fail to recognize their own true motivations; they are often hidden from the person’s own view. To overcome this, designers don’t just ask, but also use direct observation of behaviour. Designers also make sense of their research by looking for patterns, themes and larger relationships between the data. Designers aim to extract key insights from the data; unexpected revelations that allow them to see the problem in a new light.

The simple term for this approach is empathy. Empathy enables one to imagine the world from another person’s perspective; or in fact from multiple perspectives.  Thus the designer goes beyond thinking of customers in terms of demographics and LSM splits to identifying with their personal needs and desires. It is a way of putting people first when coming up with solutions.

As Procter & Gamble have shown, when the employees of an organization have a widespread sense of empathy for their customers they often see new opportunities faster than their competitors and possess an intuitive feeling for what is going on in their industry.  This process re-orients the staff view of company values externally in a way that is both measurable for the company and meaningful to customers.

A human centered mindset can easily be incorporated into an organization’s culture by making it a daily part of the way employees work. At P&G for example the paintings on the wall have been replaced with photographs of consumers.

Holding up the mirror of empathy inside a corporation towards its own employees can also unlock underlying opportunities. It will increase awareness of the unique, personal company style that can then be leveraged to inspire great ideas. It will highlight obstacles to greater efficiency and give employees the permission to find solutions for the things that need to change.

There are specific areas in a corporation where innovation can be accelerated by using a human centered design approach.

It is clear that the design of spaces in which employees work and meet affect productivity. It does not take a professional designer to observe the watercooler effect; how some areas encourage casual discussion that cross-pollinates ideas. Just as importantly, customer spaces can frequently be improved by observing how customers use work-arounds to accomplish their tasks.

Some businesses have an integrated plan for technological efficiency tools, but there are also simpler low cost tools that can help employees to increase their effectiveness. For example, a simple graphics database can allow managers to make their presentations more understandable, shortening meetings and decision times.

Many companies have a poor correlation between financial incentives and performance. The same is true for non-financial and informal incentives. Several tools exist to discover hidden staff motivations and correct incentives.

Team members often adopt multiple roles besides their official job descriptions. Recognizing these can improve teamwork as demonstrated by the famous design company IDEO.

Most managers tend to think of events as one-off occasions, but leading business thinkers now advocate a project-based approach to work routine since it creates dynamism and deeper satisfaction for employees. This can be extended to creating an event-based calendar that ebbs and flows with projects.

Finally, business processes often allow inefficiencies because they simply do not change as quickly as the needs of customers. The inward-focused company thus creates a gap between its view of “the market” and the reality of a customer’s needs. This not only hinders innovation, it is capitalized on by smaller and more agile competitors. Structurally, therefore, the business requires the ability to design and improve processes from the point of view of employee usability and customer experience in addition to the ususal efficiency imperatives.



Design for future business

 Thinking like a designer to solve problems and create new solutions

Organizations everywhere are recognizing the need to change radically in a rapidly changing world. Unfortunately many of these attempts fail because traditional management systems lack the tools to innovate in complex environments and much less so when faced with wicked problems.

However, some businesses have solved this dilemma and are able to consistently innovate and grow over the long term, despite temporary setbacks during economic downcycles. These include Apple, Dell, GE, P&G, Infosys. Tata, Toyota, Amazon and ebay. What these organizations all have in common is that they have used design thinking to help guide their traditional business processes. This has allowed them to concentrate on the factors that improve competitiveness rather than doing the wrong things very well.

Design thinking can radically change organizations by embracing complexity and constraints, working collaboratively and iteratively and using expanded logic to achieve this. Inherent in this approach is the ability to see issues as part of a system, with all of its components, relationships and maintaining a view of the overall context. Design thinking also is adept at cultivating a deep understanding of customers and using this together with the factors above to create synthesis, or resolution rather than compromise.

Design implies something creative but this is not some sort of art school freeform wackiness, this is creativity in its true meaning as the act of creation. In that sense, design can be thought of as the careful conception of a plan and the disciplined execution of that plan to create something new.

In fact, design has a process as structured and rigorous as anything in business. It is a process aimed at solving problems by using our ability to create new solutions. This design process consists of several phases. Firstly, creating common understanding by analyzing data and research. Secondly, creation, where the data and insights drawn from research guide the creation of new options. Thirdly, filtering, using critical thinking to select the most promising options. Fourthly, validation, where fieldwork is done to test assumptions. Fifthly, synthesis, where options are drawn into a business model and assembled into the strategic plan. Sixthly, engineering, which develops the idea technically. And finally, implementation where the chosen solution is built in totality.



Local Style for Global Products

Should a company use local decoration and pattern on their consumer electronics products when selling them in a strange and far away land?

Designing a product to look area-specific makes some cultural assumptions. Especially when the people doing the designing are not indigenous to that area. It's easy to assume that far away consumers are somehow inherently different to consumers near you but that's not necessarily true. I'll get to that in a minute.

First let’s get to why and when culture-specific design is a bad idea. Firstly there’s fairly convincing evidence that the fundamental values of all cultures are similar. In addition, consumer electronics are seldom conceived as indigenous items, they’re usually a global phenomenon. So why are we trying to decorate appropriate to indigenous culture? People buy consumer electronics predominantly as utility items but they also associate status and aspiration with the product. It's also easy to forget that users everywhere have access to information and expect to be able to get the same products available elsewhere.

There are two risks that one runs when designing in a culture-specific style. Firstly, there’s the risk of misunderstanding tacit cues in regional decoration. For example can one be sure that there's a common set of decorative features that would reinforce the brand message of the product for everyone that may buy it? Secondly there’s the risk of being perceived as patronizing or fake.

Consumer electronics are global products. That’s part of the value they carry even in highly localized settings. Showing respect for a foreign consumer sometimes means assuming they're a global citizen.

Sometimes cultural-specific design does work, especially when, although it references local style, it is aimed at consumers around the world. This means that local pattern and decoration is elevated to the role of a global influence. This is appealing to foreigners because the products look exotic and it appeals to local consumers because such a global influence is aspirational, rare and highly valued.

Of course it’s essential that the design work is well executed. Interestingly, outside designers sometimes reinterpret local decoration and style in a fresh way which also resonates with local consumers. Often though, the involvement of local designers may add the local savvy that allows local adoption of the products. In our studio, our most successful cross-cultural work has been collaboration between locals and foreigners.

Locals add the savvy, foreigners add the twist.