Design Language

Artful Communication or Wasted Words?

Reiser's example aside, consumer product conveniences don't often backfire, and the reason is found in the evolving world of industrial design.

Part artist, part engineer and part entrepreneur, the industrial designer has become a consumer advocate who provides the link between technology and the consumer. Teamwork with engineers, manufacturers and marketing experts is rewarded with useful, manufacturable, salable, price-competitive products.

Gavin McCalla, ID '78, president of McCalla Lackey Associates, built his design firm on that premise.

"I found when I got into the field that a lot of consultants were guilty of creating products that looked very nice, but as far as being user-friendly and easily manufactured to meet a price point--that's where the normal design consultant fell down."

To avoid those pitfalls McCalla and his associates, who design a variety of products that include hardware, housewares and small electrical appliances at four nationwide offices, established an all-encompassing philosophy for product design that summarily describes the characteristics of good design: make it user-friendly, with features that differentiate it from the competition, and manufacture it to be cost-competitive.

Good design often goes unnoticed by consumers as good design. We only know the product is a pleasure to use and it serves our purpose perfectly. But when we've purchased a badly designed product, we notice. The manifestations are many and maddening: The instructions are complex or it may be impossible to assemble ("This darn gwidget doesn't quite fit into the hole it's supposed to. Get me a sledgehammer.") Maybe the "start" button is in an inaccessible place ("Try holding this back and flip it up with your nose.") Sometimes tiny parts are flimsy or not solidly attached ("Whoa! It went that way! Check under the sofa.")

We've all been there before, and usually the irritation level is directly proportional to the purchase price. There's no getting around it. Design is a pervasive force in our lives that puts us at the tender mercy of its creators: industrial designers.

In intrinsic ways, we are all designers--of our day, of our very lives. How many times have we adapted an appliance or an object in our homes or offices to better suit our needs? We "drink in" design with our morning coffee from the package it comes in to the pot we make it in to the mug we drink it from. Our cars, our clothes and our furniture are the offspring of designers. Most everything familiar moved from idea to design, then to manufacture and finally, to our environment. We're surrounded by design.

It's how we respond to those designs that determines future permutations. For industrial designers, however, we're just one piece of the puzzle.

ndustrial designers render products from our needs. A synonym for "art in industry," industrial design is a term coined by Americans in 1913. During the Depression, manufacturers tapped the creativity of designers from theater, advertising and engineering to boost their beleaguered business by offering the public eye-catching products.

As the country recovered, sales rang up. The United States in the '50s continued to acknowledge the value of design. Americans expected sturdy products with bold, imaginative lines.

The next two decades saw the emphasis in this country shift toward marketing. Advertising and promotion took the spotlight, turning designers into little more than stylists.

At the same time, design was surging on the other side of the Atlantic. To rebuild their post-World War II continent, Europeans were relying on Italian, German and Scandinavian industrial designers who gave ordinary products simple, yet extraordinary appeal--appeal that caught fire, and customers everywhere.

By the early '80s even the Japanese, whose manufactured goods of the '60s and '70s were typically cheap and shoddy, embraced design's new direction after a businesswide survey of design management in their country revealed that poor design was a competitive obstacle. Japan's quick turnaround also challenged the U.S. market.

Time and rapidly changing technology have expectedly transformed the anima of industrial designers. Factor in our global economy, our growing appreciation of cultural diversity, and burgeoning environmental awareness, and it's no surprise that the industrial designer has become the master of the balancing act.

ost designers agree that creating products which are user-friendly has become Job One, especially in the high-tech realm where success now relies on simplicity.

How do we recognize a user-friendly product?

"It should be intuitively obvious how to operate it," explains Lee Payne, president of Lee Payne and Associates and a former industrial design professor at Georgia Tech. "You'll find that most designers never read the directions when they operate something. We always figure we know intuitively how to operate it. I guess it's because we feel that's the way products ought to be designed."

At the forefront of products that test our intuition are what Payne calls "lifestyle" products--a category well-represented in his Atlanta company's repertoire of products and packaging. Lifestyle products are tributes to high tech--those advancements in microelectronics that bring us a wide assortment of telephones, radios, calculators, tiny televisions, "pocket" everythings.

Your home VCR is the classic example of high tech gone wild. Are your friends and neighbors really impressed by a multitude of bells and whistles on your videotape deck if the LCD time read-out is still flashing "12:00"?

"The average consumer is made to feel very stupid by a lot of these products," admits Bill Bullock, director of the industrial design program at Georgia Tech. He calls these products "made to sell and not to use. They've got all these whoopee features on them that the salesman can wow you with, but you don't need them. It's like your blender that has 10 speeds. It hums louder at number 10 than it does at number 7, but it makes very little difference in what you're doing."

s consumers become better educated, excess in design is breathing its last. Designers are aware of our changing needs and attitudes, or more accurately, they make themselves aware through their most valued tool--research.

For Adrian Lee, ID '81 and a senior designer for Colgate-Palmolive in New York, this first stage of research is key. Lee's Manhattan office is personalized by an array of awards on the walls and some of her packaging designs on the credenza behind her desk that attest to her affinity for research.

"You have to know what's out there already, what's available to the consumer," Lee points out, "because you don't want to re-invent what's already out there--you want to exceed it."

McCalla agrees. "If you want to be better than your competition, look at their product and analyze what they've done and find out where they've made their mistakes."

Once an idea for a product or product improvement is certified "unique," the next wave of research reaps for the designer an understanding of the market. This research is conducted via focus studies, mall intercepts and informally.

Focus studies are qualitative and use small groups up people who, depending on the product, might reflect a particular profession, like doctors or homemakers.

Most everyone has been solicited by market researchers during a day's shopping. These are "mall intercepts," a quantitative method of research that requires much larger numbers, at least 50 to 100 interviewees in no fewer than three markets such as New York, California and Atlanta.

Informal research is all it implies--casual questioning of friends, colleagues and clients on a non-paid basis. This delving into the minds of the public takes place at several stages in the concept-to-consumer process McCalla contends that "market research has become as important as the original industrial design: market research, design, market research to check the design, then further market research before we actually enter the marketplace."

ven with every precaution, there's still room for glitches. Consider voice-activated answering machines that don't invite your message with a "beep." Some people are still waiting to give their messages. And the jury's still out on automatic seat belts in cars, where there's danger in failing to buckle the seat strap. One consumer who requested anonymity jumped on her soapbox when it came to some less-than-successful products. First came a short diatribe about pour spouts on detergent or rice boxes that open only after at least one broken nail and a knife attack, only to rip clean out of the box.

Then she took on stoves that have impossible-to-clean nooks and crevices. Next came a product that she says falls into the category of "a good idea at the time." Behold the mini-chopper, not unlike those products advertised on late-night TV for only $19.95. But wait! There's more! The attraction of this mini-chopper is its ability to chop small amounts, a half-cup or less. First she peeled an onion, then she had to quarter it so the pieces would fit into the device. After it performed an adequate wash it. Finally came the realization that it would have been faster and easier to chop the onion with a knife.

he conceptualization phase begins after the initial research--sketches and models by the dozens as the idea takes shape. Narrower here. Lose a line there. "On" switch here. Add a curve. Start over.

Industrial designers are often their own most severe critics. Adrian Lee says, "When you create a design you have to play your own devil's advocate and ask what's wrong with it. Why doesn't this work? Why is it this shape? Why isn't the control button over here instead of over there? If you can pick it apart like that and it holds up, then it's a good design."

With so many parameters--function, technology, manufacturing, market considerations, cost, color trends--pure creativity might seem to suffer. On the contrary, most designers feel it's the parameters and the problem that provide the inspiration.

For Bill Bullock, a creative solution is "taking known things, known pieces and putting them together in a unique way."

Sometimes one of the "known things" is a human being who has requested a customized product from a designer, as is usually the case for Tarik Omari Kenyatta, ID '72, owner of Kenyatta Design Corp. The furniture Kenyatta creates is a reflection of both himself and his client. After familiarizing himself with his client, Kenyatta turns inward.

"I try to feel what the spirit of the product should be, functionally and aesthetically. I try to tap into that energy and create from there."

Whether designing for one individual or millions of individuals, Kenyatta believes that distinction in design comes from "a philosophical approach, and that's influenced by your experiences in life. Not only your spiritual, mental and physical development, but the way you're nurtured."

Ultimately, the industrial designer, after many variations on a theme, after hours of consulting with researchers, engineers, manufacturers, marketers and consumers, arrives at the culmination of the work at hand--a product, or perhaps a package in which to put another product. That sweet rush of success and satisfaction is tempered by the knowledge that "your best design is always your next one," as Lee Payne notes, with a ditto from Gavin McCalla.

"There's no perfect product," says McCalla. "There never will be a perfect product. There is always room for everything in this world to be improved."