Rotman Excellence in Teaching Award
I taught Principles of Marketing in 2007 and in 2009, and thanks to my students’ generous evaluation, I received the teaching award in both classes. This taught me the value of ”following my own voice” rather than “listening to others’ voices.”
While I taught the courses, I often looked back on my undergraduate days. I did what I liked and I avoided what I hated about my teachers when I was a student. Although I did not completely ignore “the voice of my students,” I placed greater weight on my own reflection.
I wonder if designers may, sometimes, follow their own thoughts rather than what they believe consumers want. Recently, Don Norman posted an interesting article on his blog about this issue. If this conflict exists in designers’ mind, I wonder how designers resolve the conflict between their inner voice and consumers’ voices. For instance, although no one explicitly wants 3D-TV, a cone-shaped kettle, and or an ergonomic chair, designers at Samsung, Alessi, and Herman Miller made them.
TED talks
My supervisor distributed an email with a TED talk about “the value of intangible utility” by Roy Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man.
After watching this talk, I realized that there are tons of interesting TED talks that are worth watching such as, for instance, Don Norman’s Design and Emotion, John Maeda’s Journey in Design, Paola Antonelli’s Design and Elastic Minds, Yves Behar’s Designing Objects that Tell Stories, etc…
Food shaped product
There are many products whose actual functions are not consistent with how they look. Examples include the donut shaped tape made by 3M, the burger shaped/fries shaped/coke shaped USB memory stick promoted by Burger King, and chocolate shaped mirror promoted by Meiji, a Japanese chocolate company. After discussing why they have shapes of food, my Japanese friend pointed me a website in which a Japanese designer keeps posting his/her design prototypes (Prototype 1000). Worth a visit.
Do consumers like a product when they find a gap from a product between its actual function and its function inferred from its design? Or, do consumers simply want to be different from others by carrying those unique products?
Harmony
My observation suggests that some consumers, sometimes, do not make a good design decision. They buy fake paintings, choose unsophisticated wines, strange interior products, and ugly clothes. I might be one of them. I wonder if education or training could improve their tastes or their ability to identify better-designed products. Psychologists (Reber, Schwartz, and Winkielman 2004) suggest that when people are exposed to many objects, they are better able to distinguish good and bad products. Sometimes, I want to test if a critical skill is to appreciate the (positive-negative) value of an interaction between more than two components within an object. For instance, they must know whether a diamond shape goes well with a triangle shape in a painting, whether bitterness goes well with sweetness of a wine, and whether a red button goes well with brown boots.
Indeed, people evaluate a product highly when it has a positive interaction. For instance, when consumers buy a stereo, they consider whether it goes with other interior products that consumers previously purchased (Bell, Holbrook, and Solomon 1991; Holbrook and Anand 1992). Consumers also prefer a product when its form features are matched each other (Veryzer and Hutchinson 1998).
Then, how do we test whether consumers distinguish between a good interaction (harmony) and a bad interaction, and how do we train them to distinguish them?
Designer salary
Coroflot released its annual report about designer salary (See the coroflot’s 2009 designer salary survey). Although the sample size is small, it shows that academic research does not seem to be a smart choice, at least, financially. However, it is also true that more academic approach is needed for design. Please see below someone’s comment (I am sorry to forget who posted this note) on the PhD design mailing list.
“Teaching by showing is normal; teaching by explaining the way of thinking is the next step forward. An excellent designer with superimposed doctoral training can be a real treasure. It is a pity that so many good designers do not actualize themselves to their full potential both as designers and as professors just because they hate that bookish staff. It is high time that design academia rethink their way of creating new professors.”
World’s Best Design Schools
I served as a panelist for the 2009 World’s Best Design Schools in Business Week (see the panelists). They are listed in an article in Business Week.
Designers’ theme
Consumers have a difficulty in evaluating objects when they are composed of multiple components. One example is interior which consists of furniture, clocks, wall, window, etc.
Prior works suggest that when consumers need to evaluate holistic objects, they should break them down to a list of components. Doing so helps consumers identify how much each component contributes to its holistic object. This suggest that, for instance, if consumers find the relative value of furniture, clock and wall, they will evaluate the interior. Therefore, “learning” is suggested as an important topic. If consumers are exposed to multiple interiors, each of which has its evaluation score and various interior components, they will “learn” the contribution (or importance) of each interior component and other interior rooms. In sum, “breaking down holistic objects” benefits consumers.
However, I believe that consumers can benefit by “putting together components” because doing so helps consumers infer the theme that designers create. Note that when designers design an interior, they generally set up a theme and then choose approrpriate interior components. For instance, if the theme is jungle, designers may choose brown desks and green chairs to represent trees, paint walls with red dots to represent bugs, and place a round-shaped yellow clock on the wall to represent sun. If consumers identify the theme, they will evaluate the contribution (or importance) of holistic objects more accurately without breaking them down into components.
I believe themes explain why designers choose specific shapes and specific colors. I wonder if consumers identify a designer’s theme when they see an interior? Put differently, are consumers able to reversely engineer the designer’s message? If not, how can I help consumers find the designer’s theme?
Play with diabetes
Half an year ago, a friend of mine asked me if I am interested in joining her work for a design contest, 2009 DiabetesMine™ Design Challenge. It was an online competition about how to improve the life of patients who have a diabetes. I asked my another friend to join us and we discussed how to help them.
It was a great opportunity for me to work with two professional designers. They constantly generated interesting ideas. I was impressed by their passion for the work as well as the quality of the final outcome. I found that “business people seem to talk a lot, but designers may want to make a lot.”
Curiosity
Some products serve surprising functions with unexpected forms. For instance, 3M’s scotch tape looks like a doughnut but works as a tape dispenser. It can be divided into two parts and combined with differently colored parts such as chocolate-brown, strawberry-red, and cream-white. There is a cell-phone shaped lighter which lights up the fire when its slide opens. There is a wine-bottle shaped umbrella. A small umbrella can be carried by a wine-bottle shaped container.
Why do people like a product when its form has nothing to do with its function? As far as I know, most prior works on product design suggest that match is always better than mis-match between from and function. When the perceived function (inferred from a form) is inconsistent with the actual function, does it positively surprise people? Or, are people curious about the product when its function is not inferred from its from?
Design consulting firm
I wonder if design consulting firms use different approaches (e.g., different research methods, different ways of data usage, different ways of idea generation, etc.). If so, why and when different approaches are used? I believe this is an important question that needs to be answered because, for now, there is no guidance that (non-design) managers use when they look for which design consulting firms they need to contact initially. (IDEO may not always available, isn’t it? 
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Imagine that a hospital manager wants to make the experience of the patients better in his hospital. Then, the designers from a design consulting firm uses one type of market research (e.g., interview rather than survey), collect one type of data (e.g., “Parking lot is dirty” rather than “nurses are not friendly”), and suggest one type of solutions (e.g., “cleaning up the parking space” rather than “educating nurses”). This sequence of design activity shows that even before designers identify problems (data) and generate solutions (ideas), the initial moment of the design process (e.g., choice of research methods) determines the overall design process. Therefore, I believe, if the pattern of the design outcome of each design consulting firm, we might be able to tell which consulting firm fits which projects, which will be of great help to managers to find their right consultants!
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