The Industrial Design Society of America held their 2008 western district conference this weekend in Portland. Being an ID grad and IDSA member, this was a good chance to get caught up on what’s happening in the ID industry, and meet up again with some long time friends.
The theme of the conference was “The Bird and the Buffalo” – referencing the “symbiotic relationship between two creatures with little awareness of their mutual dependence – but who benefit profoundly from the partnership they share.”
The conference was held over 3 days at the Art Institute of Portland, and featured a variety of professional speakers, demoes, events, as well as presentations by the student merit award winners from the western district schools.
Dear to my heart and most interesting to me was the recurring theme of convergent design – hardware and software – and how these new emerging experience-design-based roles and multi-disciplinary studios are the next evolution in design.
Portland, OR 97209
Friday | 4.25.2008
Having left Seattle after work at around 5:30, I rolled into P-Town just a bit after 9pm, unfortunately having missed the opening presentation by Max Burton and Howard Meehan. However, I did manage to connect up with WWU ID friends there. Thanks to Proto Technologies for hosting the opening party.
Saturday | 4.26.2008
9:00am
Ken Sprick, IDSA Western Distric VP, and John McCluskey, IDSA Western District Education Representative, kicked off the Saturday morning with welcomes and introduced Tjeerd Hoek, Creative Director, Frog Design, to give an opening talk on “Convergent Design.”
9:25am
After a brief introduction of Frog Design, and pulling himself together from being tired and recovering from being ill, Tjeerd discussed the topic of hardware/software convergent design. At an IDSA conference, this topic was particularly intriguing, especially for myself as an industrial design graduate now practicing as a user experience designer, and as it would turn out a topic that would continue throughout the conference.
“Every tool we design for people is ‘interactive’.” With technology, products today are becoming extremely interactive. In a convergent world, the system is the product.
Speaking from his experience at Microsoft and now at Frog, Tjeerd described the way he’s seen industrial designers and interaction designers work, and how separating hardware design from software design seems arbitrary.
The two design disciplines appear to have some fundamental differences in their approach: Industrial Designers work with shapes and colors of the product – designing the “form in space” whereas Interaction Designers are sketching people in their environment, storyboarding – experience of “use overy time.”
All designers should think of their design work in terms of “flow over time” – noting that many of the important details or exciting aspects of a product are in the transitions or imbetween moments: much like the Muybridge photos of the race horse.
However, beauty in the static exterior form is still important and what captures the eye. But beauty can be even stronger in motion.
The only way to understand and fine tune these moments in motion is to prototype and iterate – “sketching with technology” – proofs of concept and trying out the design with real people – target users.
Also never lose sight of the ‘main’ value of the product – its core value to the user.
Come together as a team: industrial design + interaction design to create great products.
9:49am
Next Jane Savage spoke on her work at Nike Considered.
On the theme of Buffalo & Birds – symbolism of balance and sustainability. Nike is working sustainability in ways:
- community
- LEEDS certification
- renewable energy
- re-use of materials
- organic cotton
- water-based adhesives
- PVC elimination
- reduction / offset of greenhouse gasses
“Nike Considered” is more than just a product line of “hemp-like” shoes and apparel, it’s a well-researched system and index for measuring the sustainability and ‘footprint’ (so-to-speak) of all their products.
Jane presented their multi-point index and scoring system, and several examples of “Nike Considered Gold” products now on the market:
- Air Jordan XXIII
- Steve Nash Trash Talk
- Beijing 2008 sponsored apparel
10:42am
break
During the break a brief video was shown created by the BMW Design Werks, speaking on how they capture the essence of the BMW brand in the form language of their designs. Being a bit of a car buff, I couldn’t help but fire up Sketchbook Pro and try to instill some of what they were saying into some instantly-recognizable BMW design.
10:57am
Next Winston Wang, technology lead of the newly formed T-Mobile Creation Center, spoke on his “Principles of Mobile Design.”
After a career going from Cingo, to Motorola, to Palm, to Adobe, and finally to T-Mobile’s Creation Center, Winston has collected together a set of general principles he feels are applicable to mobile design.
Taking a cue from William Lidwell’s “Universal Principles of Design”, Winston has “a few principles of mobile design.”
Digital / Physical Convergence:
A theme that seems to be recurring, Winston described the future ability of digital/physical convergence: where those worlds are separate in the age of the PC, they overlap and become converged in the world of the mobile device. Mobile devices allow people to pull their digital environment into their physical environment – wherever they go.
Design for Context:
Design for the context beyond just the task between the user and the device. Consider the network, the culture, the social community, the environment, and the surrounding activities.
Augmenting Natural Abilities:
Palm devices were not for people who were naturally organized, they were for people who were not organized – a way for them to have “brain augmentation” to help them keep track of their schedules and remember all those important things they had a hard time keeping track of. In the future, augmented reality will overlay digital information on the real world, and body augmentation will provide capabilities beyond what would normally be physically possible.
Form Factor Diversity:
The form factor is evolving on two opposite paths: convereged devices which bring everything together (a la iPhone), and multi-piece systems which provide highly specialized singular functionality and into separate parts of the system: for example the Jawbone. Along those lines, a new trend of “modularity” is also emerging.
Touch & Gesture Interaction:
Examples of gesture-based interaction include of course the Wii, and Sony Ericsson’s phone which cancels a call just by waving your hand over the screen. In this case, the best interface is the invisible interface.
Touch interaction provides virtual items that feel like the feal object – pressure, patterns, force, morphing interfaces.
Haptics:
Force feedback, haptic feedback touchscreens, game vests, etc.
Appliances, Automation, and Acceleration:
Technologies will accelerate and automate much of the functions of devices.
Location & Proximity:
GPS, Geotagging, RFID
Crowdsourcing, User-Generated-Content, Emergence:
Bring the technology and community together and you get amazing results: shared traffic maps distributed across the network, mobile video capture and sharing, YouTube, creating 3D worlds from crowd-sourced photos (Microsoft Photosynth).
What does this all mean? Become a multi-disciplinary designer. Be a specialist, yes, but open up to multiple roles.
Lunch
2:16pm
Carson Lev, COO Foose Design.
Carson Lev, of TV fame “Overhaulin’,” “Rides,” and “Hot Rod Underground,” spoke on his long, varied career in design and business. Specifically on the topic of symbiosis he spoke of being “aware of the symbiosis in the workplace” looking for relationships that are mutually beneficial and being aware of influences that “begin to turn mutualism into a parasitic environment.”
Carson first worked for Omnimedical and soon discovered the difference between “the business of design” versus “the design business.” Here the symbiotic relationship was of mentor/mentored while working on medical products such as CT headscanners.
While at OMR Medical Systems doing R&D and patent work, he learned the lesson to “learn everything you can about your work environment and the related disciplines” around you.
In design, “passion rules the day” but you still have to present your designs in business language – otherwise they’ll never see the light of day.
After moving on to Del Mar Medical, Carson reached back to his auotomotive roots and worked for Dick Cepeck Inc developing custom offroad automotive parts and design.
Then Pfizer came head-hunting and pulled Carson in to work on implantable technologies within the company as an “agent of change.” He was to use design-based strategies to redesign their processes which he did by “injecting the human element into the linear engineering process” and developing “compression engineering” – a concurrent engineering process.
During his time at Pfizer there was what he called a “CAD War” where those who held on to the old, traditional 2D CAD drafting resisted the change to 3D solids modeling. He described this as an example of “disruptive technology” and reminded everyone to “keep your eyes open” and be ready to adapt to coming changes.
In a similar disruptive way, Pfizer then invented Viagra and other simple “recipe” pills, and subsequently shut down their entire implantable technology division which had become only a small part of the larger company.
Carson then joined Mattel Hot Wheels and was able again to flex his passion for the automotive world, creating a whole new adult-product licensing division (note: not adult products, just products not targeted at kids) for Mattel, inspired by sharing his passion for the cars that made Hot Wheels famous.
3:20pm
Jody Turner, Graphic Design / Visual Communications, cultureoffuture.com
Next, Jody Turner spoke on current and future trends.
Describing the dominant trends, she listed them as:
- Structure & revealing of inner workings of those structures
- Quest – the quest for lives of meaning & value
- Body – body image & healing, Earth as body
- Community – global yet local, “Glocal”, “nearness is hip”, consumer co-creation
- Meaning Arts – redifinition of good living, innovative living, engagement for good
She described our current and coming culture as an “undulating society” – thinking about how trends in society often then lead to trends in the opposite direction, almost an over-correction of the previous generation, then our current generation is doing this oscillation simultaneously – with trends and simultaneous counter-trends. The “sweet spot” in this undulating society is the mixing of these trends and counter-trends.
Examples:
- Raw vs. Roco-glam
- Simplicity vs Multiplicity
- Visceral yet also Virtual – e.g. online + tactile
- Serious Play
- Sexy Commodities
- Beautiful Chaos
- Consumers as Participants
Emerging from this are new disrupters that defy quantification and are constantly evolving and changing:
- Social Networks
- Crowd Spirit
- Ponoko
- Ning
- Sell-a-Band
- Everscape
- Blyk
- Greening
Jody finished with a story about the “Happy End” building in Switzerland designed to make you more aware of yourself, your body, and your existence in life. The irony is that it was built by an insurance company.
4:43pm
Of the student IDSA senior merit award winners who spoke, Gabriel Lam’s work was quite impressive and led him to win the Western District student merit award.
Gabriel began his presentation by stating that his interest and experience in design has been one of “social, interaction, and objects.”
One of the more intriguing projects was the “Miranda Rights Object & Network” – a device that utilizes accelerometer sensors and data network to protect protestors and police who wear it to maintain order and rights during potentially heated protest demonstrations.
Other projects included “Socialites” – tea lights with an affordance for social interaction, the “Roto Chair” which can provide social or private environment depending on the configuration of its assymetric shape, and redesigned luggage that helps keeps things organized while at your destination.
5:29pm
The future is boring.
Wendy March, Researcher for Intel’s People & Practices group, and formerly of IDEO, presented a unique spin on envisioning the future: to look at all the ordinary things in life and understand how they will (and won’t) change in the future, stating that for most of us, “It’s very difficult to imagine the ordinary in the future.”
First is to begin to be aware and see the ordinary in the future – looking at the world and thinking about how things like eating lunch, sleeping, and so on are not things that change over time themselves, but the environment or the ways in which we approach those activities may change. To understand the future in a more visceral way, you have to look at these ordinary things and beging to ask questions about them.
One way of understanding them is to get people to talk about ordinary things:
- have them describe things they do every day
- have them draw maps of their environments – their home, their community, what’s important to them</li>
- have them show you what they always carry around with them
- have them carry journals and record their everyday lives in words and pictures
- pose the reverse question: “What would be the absolute WORST [technology] you could imagine [within this context]?”
- look from different perspectives: 500-foot view versus a 5-foot view
To imagine the ‘ordinary’ future one can create detailed, “true” personas (rather than false, amorphous generalist personas). Describe these people and their activities, for example in “A Day in the Life of” story – where the details are what give rich insights.
Finally, begin to understand the transition of interests and products – what makes junk? Think about the movement from desperately wanting something now, to caring absolutely nothing for it in the future (for example, desperately wanting a minidisc player 5 years ago, and now throwing it away in the trashbin). How does this happen?
6:03pm
Frank Tyneski, new IDSA Executive Director, next spoke on his experience – from Nextel to Motorola to RIM to Kyocera – in design and his thoughts on the upcoming generation of designers.
Specifically, he described traditional industrial designers as “classical” thinkers versus the new generation of designers as “romantic” thinkers and also the evolution of design tools from chalk to marker to digital technology.
How much should design be about chaotic creativity versus logical classicism?
Yet this new generation of designers represents the new generation of IDSA, and is what he will work to enable and inspire.
6:40pm
The speakers from the day gathered on stage for a discussion on “sexy commodities” and whether designing the future is visionary or ordinary.
One interesting comment was Wendy March’s note on young job applicants: “I don’t ever want to see another glowing thing again… a glowing orb. And I never again want to hear a project in a portfolio described with the words ‘It’s kind of like a book.’ Also, beautiful product shots on white paper are nice.. but please show your product in the real world.”
Saturday
9:37am
Breakfast with Ziba
Tom Lakovic, IxD Director and Wibke Fleischer, Insights & Trends lead, of Ziba, Portland presented on the topic “Is ID Dead?”
Before and during the presentation, I was having flashbacks to my presentation to the WWU ID program on the subject “Is Industrial Design Dead” – and was exchanging some knowing glances with a few of the WWU ID students who I had presented to.
Similarly, they framed their discussion around the evolution of products, in their case specifically of the television and the cell phone, and how the ID in these products was quickly becoming an exercise in reduction – down to just the rectangle of the screen itself.
Framing this in the history of design, they spoke of Raymond Loewy and how his famous quote on the value of design could today be translated into:
“Between two products equal in price, function, quality, and attractiveness, the one delivering the most relevant experience will win.”
So how to define relevance?
Looking to Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, they described the evolution of design as working its way up the pyramid, with the designers of Loewy’s time focusing on attractiveness and beauty, and the designers of today adding to that the attributes for self-actualization.
Good examples of products that deliver on the levels of cognitive and self-actualization are Apple and Harley – they work to capture the deeper experience that these customers are looking for.
They next provided an example of Ziba’s work which followed this theme – the Sirius Radio Stiletto.
Simply put, the process to create the product was of Understanding the user, Defining User Profiles, Finding the Essence of the product – “It is a radio” “radio is magic from the sky” “radio is about effortless discovery” “it’s for the iPod fatigued” and then delivering as part of the Brand.
To create great product experiences, it will require good communication and teamwork between multiple disciplines – IxD, ID, Trends, Psychology, Anthropology, Research, Graphic Design, etc…
The connection between the Brand of the product and the Consumer will be collaboration between all these disciplines – whether within a multi-discipline team, or a single designer who is able to incorporate aspects from all these disciplines.
10:11am
A discussion panel followed with a variety of members from Intel, Ziba, and Nike to answer questions from the audience. Frank Tyneski, IDSA Executive Director, moderated.
Q: Good ideas come from different places and different disciplines, as a designer how do you interact with that?
A: Understand that all those disciplines were originally all one: a caveman working by himself to make stone tools. With the complexity of products now, there’s a need for multiple disciplines. But still a singular problem, so there’s a need to work together.
Q: How important is it to go beyond form giving?
A: There still has to be something for the consumer to connect to – something to touch and look at.
Q: How do you deal with the complexities of multi-discipline work?
A: Analogy: the Film Set. Counter-response: Is that actually a good analogy? The traditional film set has defined roles that don’t ask each other for advice. It’s different in a multi-discipline design environment.
To the user it should appear that there was just one master genius who created the product – that’s very hard to do.
Q: How do you handle the differences in speed between disciplines?
A: There are different ‘metabolisms’ of the team – R&D concept design vs product dev team. Mainly it’s a matter of understanding that – I still haven’t discovered a good metaphor for it – maybe gears?
Q: How do you handle the conflict between secrecy & collaboration?
A: At Ziba, the work is project-focused, not designer-focused. Every project is giving a ‘war room’ where everything collected or created for that project is shared.
11:05am
After the discussion, Ken Sprick spoke again thanking everyone for attending, announcing the extra events later in the day, and ending the official section of the conference.
For more information on the event, check the Core77 blog, Seen.Heard.Noticed, and the IDSA flickr feed.
/. Olen Ronning, 4/29/2008