Design and Marketing
Soren Petersen and I wrote articles about how we see each others’ areas to clarify our misunderstanding and hope to find any solutions to close the gap. They are published on the Huffington Post.
Behind story
At first, I did not like the Touch Wood phone by DoCoMo. However, an ad introduced by the Core 77 website changed my view completely. In the ad, a wooden ball plays Cantata 147 as it rolls down the wooden xylophone in the forest.
Interestingly, I found this product more special after watching the video about how the ad was made (http://answer.nttdocomo.co.jp/touchwood/?banner=dcm3#making). People may consider a product special when they know of any behind story about the product; how it was developed (e.g.,Wii Balance Board), how its ad was made, or how people work together or compete against each other to develop it (e.g., Social Network). This suggests that the process that designers go through for developing a product, if released appropriately, may be able to benefit the market performance of the product.
Problems with design education
Don Norman said in Technology Review that designers need to go beyond their purview and learn something such as (social) science. I can’t agree with him more.
The first thing to do is ask: “What is the purpose of all the technology we are developing?” And the answer is, obviously: “To help people.” But the understanding of “people” is in a different school—the social sciences—than the school where the understanding of technologies are taught. Right now, people in one area don’t understand what someone else in their own department does, let alone what is being done in other departments.
Integrating material and form
Neri Oxman gave a talk, “Mediated Matter,” at Ontario College of Art and Design. She argues that material should not be secondary to form. Instead of separating fabrication from concept modeling or data analysis, she proposes, designers should create a seamless object by integrating these tasks. She presented interesting projects in which she used a single material to perform multiple functions. Her work is mostly inspired by nature.
One of her interesting projects is a medical device for those who suffer from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. This syndrome is a medical condition in which the median nerve is compressed at the wrist, leading to numbness, muscle atrophy, and weakness in the hand. At present, most patients are recommended to wear gloves that are composed of two separate materials which perform different functions; a soft cushion and a hard metal (see left). As an alternative, she developed a “skin” with a single material by mapping the pain-profile and distributing hard and soft materials to fit the patient’s anatomical and physiological requirements, limiting movement in a customized fashion (see right). Her project is called as Carpal Skin.
Overall, her argument is interesting; designers may produce a better product when they perform a series of design tasks simultaneously (e.g., selecting a form and materials together) than when they go through the same tasks sequentially (e.g., selecting a form and then selecting materials).
As design has attracted increasing attention across multiple academic disciplines, interdisciplinary design workshops have been hosted by the universities that have established their interdisciplinary design programs, including Stanford University and University of Michigan. In April 2010, the Segal Design Institute at Northewestern University hosted a workshop under the title of “Driving Innovation through Design — Engineering in the 21st century.”
Sustainable growth in the 21st Century requires technological and social innovations that effectively address the complex, interdependent problems that we face as a nation and throughout the world. Design research and education provides the intellectual underpinning and offers knowledge and experience to serve as a foundation for this endeavor. However, establishing interdisciplinary design research and education programs requires institutional transformation to overcome the current system that is structured around traditional disciplines with little cross-connection. This two-day workshop, supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), brought together a group of university administrators, faculty and researchers, and industry practitioners, to discuss the role that Design may play in helping universities transform their educational mission and practices to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.
- excerpted from the executive summary, NSF workshop report
I was invited to attend this workshop as the only student at a business school. I was fortunate to discuss a wide variety issues with established researchers, teachers, and practitioners working in design. We worked in groups discussing interdisciplinary design research and nurturing design faculty, and presented the summaries (click here for the team presentations).
In particular, recommendations on design research are worth sharing (click here for the final report).
A large-scale, sustained education agenda must be supported and complemented by a research agenda that studies the pertinent questions and develops the knowledge and methods to address them. While interdisciplinary education is readily understood, interdisciplinary research is much less so. Rather than perceiving design research as an interdisciplinary area, it is more advantageous to view Design as a discipline in itself that can combine knowledge from other disciplines, akin to our concept of medicine as a discipline. Examples of design research topics include:
- Exploration of the intersection and interaction of people, products, and systems;
- Reconciliation of the creative, holistic thinking of the arts with the analytical, decomposed thinking of the sciences;
- Methods to enhance interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, knowledge capture, and reuse across disciplines;
- Design innovation of complex engineered systems;
- Identification of the characteristics of innovative teams;
- Exploration of the intersection of computing and human systems and how this supports the design process;
- Methodologies for the design of emerging systems, such as medical and health care systems, energy related products and services, and multi-scale devices and systems;
- Design of completely new products, services, and systems yet to be conceived; and
- Interdisciplinary design education including innovation, creativity, teamwork, leadership, entrepreneurship through curricular and extracurricular learning.
