review and comments on IDEA stage 20 March Presentations

Here is my review:

a paraphrase of Criterion advice,

my points to individual teams

some wider issues to think about and follow up

REVIEW  M305

FURNITURE PROJECT
COMMENTS ON PRESENTATION OF FRIDAY 20 March 2008

M305

FURNITURE PROJECT
GENERAL COMMENTS DAVID WALKER

IDEA PRESENTATION AT FRIDAY 20 MARCH 09

INTRODUCTION

There was not much time or space to comment on the work of last Friday.

It was more important that you heard the views of your clients , Criterion ,rather than  my views. There was also a problem in that I had a lot to say which would not compress into a few minutes. So that is why I have written down my comments here - taken from my notes on the session .

STARTING POINTS

In making the following comments,  I am bearing in mind that most people have not undertaken a project of this kind before.  This is unique ; very probably the first time you have been asked to work in a creative team, on a new product, for a real client with people in your Team who you do not know very well.

So, taking all of that into account, every team has done remarkably well in terms of the progress they have made and the quality of the presentations they have put together. Give yourself a pat on the back!!

This work is more than scratching the surface. Nevertheless, if you have gone a little deeper than the surface well  you now know there is still much to do and much to learn.

DEEP END

You were thrown in the deep end and most of you have  learnt to swim .

We must now concentrate on making you stronger and better swimmers.This means practice and application and more hard work.

This means being a ‘Reflective Practitioner’ ( see Donald Schon’s excellent work)

BRAINSTORM

As you would expect the coverage of ideas is wide . We can think of this as a collective brainstorming session. Some of you will be familiar with Osborne’s techniques and followers like Edward de Bono.

If you want to be systematic in your creativity follow these and other experts (James Adams, Eugene Ferguson , Daniel Pink , Scott Root Bernstein) The first two are engineers
Bernstein is a biolgist.

DIVERGENCE

There is little risk in these early ideas, and I would expect you ,for a time, to be even more divergent

If you go astray it is only a few hours and a few sketches in the rubbish bin. But you learn from the failures. In NPD there is no such thing as an error free process

CONVERGE

In order to converge in the next phase and focus on one or two plausible ideas, you have to  to think about what makes some ideas relevant, beneficial and applicable while other ideas turn out nonsensical

The most difficult thing of all is separating good ideas from the bad. Can you tell the difference?

FIT

In brief, good ideas fit They fit the circumstances of production , the needs of the users and the conditions of the wider environment

Therefore in order to know if  your ideas are  good  or not,  you have to have a grasp of these contextual factors.

CRITERIA

Many of the criteria come from external forces.  Other criteria come from your own ambitions, and what you think is the appropriate language and the right kind of performance .

CONSTRAINTS

The limits offered by the external world are not the end of the story. There is still a lot of room to manoeuvre. A way for your Team through this challenge  is to construct a set of self-imposed constraints, which narrow the field even further.

If you look at the Charles Eames diagram ( in Lecture on NPD)   you can see three overlapping sets of constraints, one from client company; the other from users and society at large; and a third from the internal capabilities of the design team.  This gives you a Venn diagram for thinking about what you need to know in design management. Success is in the overlap of these three fields.

USE

Many of the class teams have begun to think about the uses of their new products, about what benefits they would like see . They conceive their designs as something more than just technical problems.

The technical problems, of course, to have to be solved, BUT they are beginning rather than an end in themselves.

ADAPTABILITY

Some sketch solutions have indicated a form of mobility or adaptability in the products.

All of this is to the good- yet it is technically difficult to achieve. You have to think of the gain from the pain- the real customer benefits from the technical investment in achieving adaptability.

I think the sense of your adaptable solutions lies in the fact that domestic furniture, when it's not being used, is just a nuisance. Furniture is NOT used most of the time .Thus it is mainly an obstacle, a barrier, a pain in the neck . Just think about it.  In many instances, a table or chair is unoccupied for 90% of its life- therefore it would be much better if it was out of the way for that 90%, in some way either compressed and concealed -  made to disappear by the design magicians

TRENDS

If you think about the environment of use, it is inevitable that your designs pre-suppose a lifestyle, and imply a wider set of social issues.  They are conceived within a given lifestyle, whether you acknowledge that , and whether you think about it ,or not. There is always a context.

PERSONAS

It would repay the effort for  you to think specifically about what kind of lifestyle your designs support. More than that you might like to write sketch personas- of the kind of people that will use your furniture.  They may be people just like you, or people not  like you at all:  but you do have to understand them very well. Think of your portraits of them as Atavars or the Sim family.....if it helps personalize them.Give them a life.

NATIONALITY

We have several different nationalities in the class and this is a huge benefit. It extends our thinking.It gives us benchmarks. It gives us ways of shedding more light from different perspectives.

It would be helpful if you self-consciously thought about your region of the world.  Your products are addressing your home country or maybe another region.  Somewhere you are very familiar with.

Normally  in these kind of products, we would expect to see major differences between one country and another. Yet, on the other hand, some companies design universal products for  global sales You may know this is the explicit policy  for example, for Audi , and for Fisher & Paykel  appliances. They do not have local variants, just universally good products.

CULTURE

It also would be very rewarding and fascinating for you to think of a specific culture  , a social group, their needs , their desires, their aesthetic languages, their rituals and habits in relation to furniture.

Just thinking about NZ at large is a beginning but is not really specific enough

NICHE

From those reflections and  concerns, you might define a niche -- an area that has not been explored, which you can make your own territory. Think of the environments of use  which you know well, since childhood. Think of childhood as a niche...or design for the third age..or inclusive design.

CUSTOMISATION

 Customisation is a way of having your cake and eating it.

You have a fairly limited system of production, this can generate lots of variants, which can be tailored and individually customised by end users. Think of how this works in the car industry.

Car specifications can be permed to give one million variants of one model

Talk to Richard Cross at Criterion, if you want to pursue this idea

MODULARITY

There is a strong sense of modularity in many solutions.  This comes I think from a geometric feeling for the spatial problem part of an engineering background, along with a concern for standardisation, for space packing, and with ingenious puzzle-like solutions.  Many of you use, as a springboard, systems like Lego and Tetris.

This is fine-  this is a good beginning and gives you a point of reference for your own design language.

INTERIOR SPACE

Relatively few people were thinking about interior space as a whole, preferring instead to concentrate on one item, a desk, or a shelf, or a chair.  But you could think about this extended family of items, and the kind of interior space, that they create in aggregation.  This takes you into the realm of interior design, but my feeling is that you have to write melodies, rather than just individual notes and chords

UNIVERSAL OR SPECIFIC

You have come across the tension between the universal kind of solutions where objects are multipurpose. But there is a danger here in trying to do too many things but not fulfilling any of them

SUSTAINABILITY

Some teams are thinking about sustainability and things like re use, like packaging.  This is an important direction to take up seriously .You can talk to Manuel Siedel at Criterion about their own progress in these areas

I like the idea of using packaging as part of the design.  You may remember that Henry Ford, in his first specification of the model T used the packing cases around the engine from a supplier to make the floorboards of the car.  So this is up-to-date thinking… that comes from 1910

OUT OF THE BOX

I think everyone has done very well within very severe limits. However, you can push yourself a bit harder, push back the boundaries little bit more, extend the envelope. Think about what you learn from best practices globally and try to apply them in your project

LONG TERM FUTURE

In particular it would be a good thing if some teams took on a longer term strategy, not just incremental innovation, but a response to deeper issues

TECHNOLOGY PIONEERS

For example, it may be that you see a NZ furniture company as a technical pioneer breaking the mould in the following ways 

LASERCUTTING

Computer led manufacturing now allows to explore the sophistication of  lasercutting and complex assembly . As engineers you can take this up with some inner knowledge and enthusiasm

LIGHTWEIGHTING

In the history of materials we see a clear evolution towards lighter and stronger composites

There are huge benefits and making things lighter. If you are smart you can also produce things which are elegant  and delicate

INTELLIGENT FURNITURE

Those of you are close to Electronics might think about how microchips can be embedded in any piece of furniture.  Think about what we would achieve  with an intelligent table or chair . What about  voice-activated furniture ? What about furniture that was nano led, self cleaning, responsive, material that  adjusted at the micro level?

True, these things might be a long way off, but we can prepare the ground.  We can prepare young minds, and so in time generate companies that can position themselves in readiness for the new technology when it arrives.  As it surely will.

DECISIONS

There are tough decisions facing the teams  now.  There is a matrix of possibilities.

1 .You may stick closely to the manufacturing capability of Criterion and its perception of its own users .Just push forward some incremental improvements to their product range

2 .You can accept the boundaries of the market of the current user groups then lean on the technology at little more to answer these defined needs. Stretch the constraints. 

3. You can work within the constraints of manufacture as established. Yet seek novel opportunities, niche markets and groups of users with hitherto unexpected demands

Where will new user and new demands come from?

As Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard said, you can ‘attack the undefended hills’

4. You can be really experimental ,using the project  as a springboard for  free thinking-  deliberately moving away from mainstream manufacturing capabilities, and even away ffrom  typical customers

This could make sense for those of you who are entrepreneurial, who want to set up your own companies, who believe that you are capable of generating product ideas that are leaps outside the mainstream

But you have to ask yourself is this  the right time to make such a leap, or will you learn more by sticking within the parameters of an experienced company.

 Good work everyone

Avanti.

DW

23.03.09