Teaching Business in Colleges and Universities
In the course titled as Teaching Business in Colleges and Universities, Professor David Dunne and Professor Uli Menzefricke taught how to teach business from course development and teaching methods to teaching devices, student assessment and feedback.
“Dieter Rams”
Braun products by Dieter Rams (above) and Apple products by Jonathan Ive (below)
What is good design? Dieter Rams might be one of few who could answer to this question. He is a legendary product designer who has designed products for Braun and is still influencing our life through Jonathan Ive’s Apple products. The above image comes from a Guardian article.
Dieter Rams listed 10 important principles for good design and
“Industrial Facility”
What is good design?
Various design awards have their own answers; a product must be original, it must be aesthetically appealing, or it must be useful for consumers. Marketing researchers have collected various factors that contributes to the newness, beauty or usefulness of a product.
Interestingly however, most awards and research papers have focused on the product itself. Product usage context or the “outer space of the product” has attracted little attention.
I found an example which shows that the outer space of a product matters. Designers from Industrial Facility, a UK design studio, design a Bath Radio for Muji. It is a radio and looks like a set of shampoo and rinse. This example shows that when the form of a product matches the outer space of the product, consumers will value the product more.
[Visit] “Jump Associates”
Last summer, I visited two leading design/innovation consulting firms located in California: IDEO and Jump Associates. Visiting them inspired me many interesting research topics as well as convinced me that design/innovation is absolutely interesting field.
One thing that I was impressed by Jump Associates is its “smart space.” As it is well described in BusinessWeek, Jump Associates occupies two floors in one building. Interestingly, they are connected by a steel stair inside the building and designers freely go up and down without using the elevator (picture).
Besides, Jump Associates has a wide variety of uniquely designed rooms. The most interesting room is a small room called “Zen Room” (picture). This room has a relatively low ceiling and is full with cushions. According to a designer who gave me a guide, the Zen Room is used for consumers to express their needs and ideas in a warm, comfortable setting. This is interesting particularly because no marketing research has ever identified the value of low-ceiling space. Instead, prior marketing literature shows that high-ceiling facilitates creativity.
Now, I can find that rooms (or their ceiling height) are smartly chosen for different stages of product development process. Designers prefer a low-ceiling room when collecting needs from consumers, but they may need a high-ceiling room when creating solutions for consumer needs.
[Visit] “IDEO”
prototypes have various forms. According to an article written by two apple computer employees, Houde and Hill (1997), prototypes prototype the “role,” “look and feel,” or “implementation” of the final products. This suggests that designers should be able to make different forms of prototypes for one product idea (i.e., 3D space planning application).
One step further, prototypes serve different objectives. Last summer, when I visited IDEO, I found a series of boards which describe why designers build prototypes; they do so for “inspiration,” “experimentation (evolve),” or “validation (specify).” This further suggests that different forms of prototypes serve different purposes for one product idea (i.e., Swiffer cleaner).
Given that there are different forms and different objectives of prototypes, do designers need different forms of prototypes for their objectives? For instance, are the “role” (or functional) prototypes more appropriate when designers “think” about their final products but less appropriate when designers “specify” their final products, compared to the “look and feel” (or aesthetic) prototype?
