We Could All be Wrong About This

Already this century, we’ve become used to deep user research as a foundation for innovation.  The conventional wisdom is that you listen to what your customers say but more importantly you listen to what they don’t say. Apple thinks different and doesn’t seem to need to listen at all.  

There are some well-worn stories about how tightly knit and cloistered the Apple design team is. BusinessWeek has pointed out how carefully these designers ply their craft. They consider the production process, the materials and technology and so on. In short they sound like a solid, old fashioned industrial design team. Nothing unusual or new there.

The intensely customer-centered design processes of the 21^st century product company are absent from Apple’s press about it’s innovation methods. That’s a bit odd because they’re so central in current design thinking.  Contemporary designers are supposed to be studying customers furiously and hunting for nuggets of insight to fuel innovation. The idea of a designer as a person whose superior sensibilities allow him to judge what others should desire is kind of, well, distasteful in our egalitarian and open-source age. The more palatable thing is seeing the designer as a facilitator who unleashes the inherent creativity of a group of ordinary people, including other designers.

Apple’s ranking in several lists of the world’s most innovative companies suggests otherwise. Maybe Apple’s designers are so tightly hooked into the zeitgeist that they don’t need to observe people to understand them deeply, at least not in the ways that are so trendy now. If so, it certainly seems to be working for them.