CHAPTER 5

How Design Does It

The role of the designer, as the humane and aesthetic conscience of industry, is that of a surrogate for the consumer. He senses the pattern of evolutionary factors in manufactured products and directs the object toward the perfection of its typeform.

—ARTHUR PULOS

You are a 32-year-old scientist, jobless, broke, and considering suicide. A pandemic is growing across the country and around the world. Your daughter is a victim. You blame yourself for your child’s death. No doctor or researcher has yet found a cure. When you consider the state of the world and your failure to protect your child’s precious life, you begin to drink heavily. You are living in low-income public housing near the shores of Lake Michigan. One day you decide you have had enough and begin to walk out onto the beach and into the water. You are chilled but just keep walking. As the waves break across your chest, one last idea occurs to you. As a scientist you can’t stop teasing at this idea and soon have formulated an experiment. It will be the next and last one you will ever run.

You decide to run an experiment to find what a “human of average size, experience, and capability . . . could effectively do [to] . . . lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives. . . .”

Your name is R. Buckminster Fuller and you will ask that your epitaph read, “Call me Trimtab.” But the headstone will have to wait more than 50 years because you’ve got an experiment to run.

Buckminster Fuller, scientist, engineer, architect, futurist, and designer, was born in the waning days of the nineteenth century and would live to the age of 83. During his time he would focus on the challenges facing all of the inhabitants of Spaceship Earth. A structure that he designed to shelter humanity, the famous geodesic dome turned out to embody a design pattern identical to that found in a particular molecule of carbon whose atoms are arranged on a perfect sphere (Figure 5.1). When scientists in the late twentieth century discovered these surprising nanoscale soccer balls, they officially named them buckminsterfullerene, and universally refer to them as “buckyballs.”1

Figure 5.1 The Montreal Biosphère, a geodesic dome originally built as the United States Pavilion at Expo 67, designed by R. Buckminster Fuller

While patterns found in Nature inspire us and give us ideas for how to build things, they are not the end but rather the beginning of the story. Design, as a practice, continues the tale.

Bucky’s phrase “Call me Trimtab” refers to an elegant piece of nautical engineering based on an understanding of fluid dynamics. A giant ship like the Queen Mary has a rudder to help it change directions, but on that rudder is a small device known as a trimtab—it is the rudder’s rudder. By changing the angle of that little device, just enough turning force is created to counteract the direction of the ocean current and keep the ship moving at the intended bearing. The realization that he was just one small part of a very large system, but that he could change the world by consciously applying design techniques to solve problems at the point of greatest leverage, was profound, and for Fuller, life saving. When asked what he was, rather than answering with a typical discipline descriptor such as engineer, or architect, he liked to say, “I am not a noun, I seem to be a verb.” These two quotes begin to explain the value of design as a practice.

BIRTH OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Soon after Buckminster Fuller walked the shores of Chicago contemplating the future, the world was plunged into the Great Depression. One little-mentioned factor that helped America emerge from the devastating downward spiral was the emergence of the profession of industrial design.

The industrial designer emerged out of the financial chaos to become a consumer advocate with a carrot rather than with a stick—representing the consumer’s interests in the corporate boardrooms, and rewarding the attentive industrialist with increased market share and increasing profits.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s a few dozen men (they were virtually all men)2 more or less drifted from other careers—mostly in various of the visual arts—to meet the demand being created among manufacturers by advertisers and economic recovery theorists for help in creating, through an essentially craft tradition, aesthetically and functionally improved products. A smaller number proved to possess the right combination of skills—technical, aesthetic, diplomatic, organizational and promotional—to build large nationally known design organizations. Most prominent of the latter group were the big four designers: Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, Raymond Loewy, and Henry Dreyfuss.

It is notable that “fine” artists founded none of the early full-service industrial design organizations. Bel Geddes and Dreyfuss were successful stage designers, while Teague and Loewy had had careers in commercial art. Goaded by their advertising agencies, who felt increasingly helpless in attempting to convince depression-weary customers to purchase tired old merchandise, and encouraged by enthusiastic articles in trade and business journals—most notably Fortune—manufacturers increasingly sought out designers, whose employment started out as something of a fad and eventually became institutionalized as a part of standard business practice in many industries.

The personalities of these early designers, and their views on the relationship among technology, design, and society, were markedly diverse. Bel Geddes (Figure 5.2) was a showman and a visionary, with a reputation as “the man who, when asked to redesign a product, went on to design its factory.” Consistently ahead of his time, he was the least successful of the big-name designers in terms of commissions actually produced, but he excelled at promoting industrial design as a consequential and glamorous profession and at popularizing streamlining as a uniquely American design style.

Figure 5.2 Norman Bel Geddes with a model of his ocean liner concept

Source: Courtesy of Edith Lutyens & Norman Bel Geddes Foundation and Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

In contrast to Bel Geddes’ flamboyance, Teague (Figure 5.3) was by temperament reserved and understated, more the businessman than the artist. Politically conservative, he was trusted and liked by the businessmen who were his clients because he was like them and trusted in their enterprise and the cumulative wisdom of their enlightened self-interest to bring about social progress.

Source: New Yorker, 1932. © Kemp Starrett/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com.

Figure 5.3 (left) Walter Dorwin Teague in his New York City office. (right) The Kodak Bantam Special Camera, designed by the Teague office in 1936, part of a long-term designer-client relationship with Kodak

Source: Courtesy of TEAGUE. Copyright TEAGUE.

Raymond Loewy had a simpler view of the role of design in human affairs. Eschewing the more extreme claims of functionalist determinism, and avoiding, for the most part, extravagant visions of technological utopias, Loewy’s passion as a designer was simply to make the technological world, and the lives of the people who inhabit it, less abrasive and more pleasant. Loewy (Figure 5.4) characterized his early efforts to sell his design services as a personal crusade to convince America’s industrialists that improving people’s lives by improving the design of the products they used was not only possible, but was also profitable. Although Loewy was temperamentally reserved, throughout his long career he was an indefatigable promoter of himself and of his profession, and was by no means hesitant to stretch a fact for the sake of rhetoric. However, there is no reason to doubt that a modest quest for elegance and style was the motivating force in both his personal and professional lives. Loewy coined the acronym, MAYA, that we use as our company’s name, for that optimal zone that balances the Most Advanced design that is Yet Acceptable for normal consumers.

Figure 5.4 Raymond Loewy posing with a Studebaker of his design

Source: Bob Landry/Getty Images

Most modest of all in his aspirations for the profession, Henry Dreyfuss (Figures 5.5 and 5.6) devoted his career to an effort to mold the products of technology to the needs of people rather than the reverse. Dreyfuss was educated in the tradition of the Society of Ethical Culture to the belief that the highest moral imperative was to direct one’s efforts toward the improvement of society and to a broadly conceived concept of “progress.” Claiming no mystical wisdom and embracing no grand designs, Dreyfuss believed that the role of the designer was simply to, first, understand the needs and characteristics of users as individuals and as groups and, second, to make products more useful—and therefore more saleable—by applying such understanding to improving their usability, safety, and aesthetics. As part of its product design regimen, the Dreyfuss office accumulated voluminous statistical data about the physical and perceptual characteristics of the population. As a result, Dreyfuss became recognized as one of the founders of the discipline of ergonomics.

Figure 5.5 Hand anthropometrics from Dreyfuss’s The Measure of Man, a landmark compilation of human factors data for designers, stressing usability

Source: Courtesy of Henry Dreyfuss Associates. Copyright 1960 Henry Dreyfuss.

For all their diversity, these and other successful early designers evolved remarkably similar methods of operation and, by the end of the 1930s, represented a genuine movement in the annals of American industry. Teague once accounted for the fact that all of the well-known designers developed such convergent methods by observing that “those who did not, simply did not last.” More explanatory, however, are a number of common themes that emerge from an examination of their careers and of their writings.

One such recurring theme in each of their stories was a rejection of superficial “surface” design. In the pre-industrial design era manufacturers often hired artists and craft-oriented designers to “beautify” products by applying surface decoration prior to mass production.

Source: U.S. Library of Congress, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Historic American Engineering Record.

In contrast, the founders of the major design offices unanimously rejected this approach in favor of an “inside out” functionally driven approach. Dreyfuss often repeated the story that early in his career the Bell Telephone Company selected him as one of 10 commercial artists to be offered a thousand dollars each to provide sketches of an improved telephone set. Dreyfuss declined the offer, insisting that a successful product design could not be completed under such circumstances, but must rather be carried out in close collaboration with the company’s engineers. A year later, Bell returned to Dreyfuss, admitted that the submitted designs proved impractical, and hired him in a consultant relationship that lasted throughout the rest of his career (Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6 Dreyfuss (L) and William H. Martin (R), an engineer and Bell VP, with studies from their work with ATT

Source: Eric Schaal/Getty Images.

NOVELTY, BEAUTY, RITUAL, AND COMFORT

Soon after design was recognized as a profession, it was further specialized into narrower concerns—product design, graphic design, communication design, interior design, sound design, fashion design, and even further specialized into product categories such as automotive design, furniture design, and, more recently, interface design and web design.

These specialties were born of the human love of novelty, beauty, ritual, and comfort; they were raised in the arts and enabled by engineering and technology. They have grown to be powerful resources employed in the service of building brand, stirring desire, and “fitting” products and services within our human-scale world.

For a brief period there was uncertainty whether the teaching of design belonged in schools of engineering or schools of art. In our opinion, it should have remained balanced precisely at the intersection of the two. But Academe is notoriously bad at such interdisciplinary balancing acts, and, so in the event, it ended up for the most part in art colleges or university departments of art or architecture. Graphic design typically grew out of painting programs, industrial design out of sculpture programs, and interior design out of architecture. And the method of instruction was typically through the imitation of masters, with scant analysis or reasoning to back it up.

Over time, the various flavors of design have evolved significant methods and rationales. They have been enormously successful at tapping the cultural streams that determine human reactions to our designed and built environment—reactions of desire or satisfaction; a sense of beauty, of pride, of place, of ownership. Structured methods have been developed for sensing problems, defining problems, and solving problems. But they also help us with elements of drama, surprise, and satisfaction. And because many of these specializations rely on the visual language of design, they are spatial and holistic at their core. Many of the methods and techniques used in these areas have proven to be effective at describing design problems between and across diverse disciplines beyond their traditional borders—tapping into the perceptual powers that all players in the product development process—engineers, mathematicians, social scientists, writers, business executives, financial analysts, and policy specialists—bring to the table.

HEARING HISTORY RHYME

There have been three fundamental technological revolutions in human history. Eight thousand years ago was the agricultural revolution. Roughly 200 years ago the industrial revolution began. But then, no sooner had that revolution run its course than we found ourselves in the midst of the information revolution. In human history, only these three developments have made a fundamental, permanent difference in the lives of ordinary people. And of course the increasing time-compression of these periods—8,000 years, 200 years, and 50 years—has been remarked upon countless times.

The industrial revolution brought unprecedented, world-changing power but it also foisted unspeakable mechanized ugliness and brutality upon human beings—not to mention on the landscape, the natural world in general, the planet itself. The so-called machine age crushed people both figuratively and literally. In its final stage, its technology impinged on the everyday lives of people in the form of inexpensive mass-produced products intended for mass consumption. But it also produced a transformation of the average person’s daily environment from a pre-industrial state of relative order and integrity to an early-industrial state of noise, danger, squalor, and ugliness. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” as Mark Twain allegedly put it, “but it does rhyme.” We founded MAYA Design because we heard history rhyming. The information revolution was echoing its predecessor.

Today, we are arguably on the cusp of a fourth revolution: the age of Trillions. No one disputes the evolving phenomenon itself, though some argue that it is merely a continuation of the information revolution. We think that pervasive computing represents a profoundly different relationship of people to information, and that eventually it will be understood as a distinct epoch of human history. As an intrinsically networked phenomenon, it will also continue the historical trend of acceleration. A decade in the era of pervasive computing will bring unimaginable changes.

The Great Exhibition

By Joe

It is the middle of the nineteenth century, and Great Britain is feeling its oats, being the dominant world colonial power and the leader in the industrial revolution that is sweeping the world. Queen Victoria has convened a Royal Commission, with Prince Albert as chairman, to oversee the planning and implementation of a great international industrial exhibition. It would come to be regarded as the first of a century-long succession of events that came to be known as World’s Fairs.

On May 1, 1851, it opened in London’s Hyde Park as the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations to the accompaniment of cannons, fanfares, cheers, prayers, and a performance of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” It was immensely popular right up to its closing in October 1851. In those six months, it became a benchmark of industrialized design and has remained so ever since. The nearly 15,000 exhibitors and their products—over a million of them—were certainly responsible for the Exhibition’s popular success, but so was the Exhibition building itself—The Crystal Palace (Figure 5.7).

Figure 5.7 Original Crystal Palace of 1851

A closer look at the Crystal Palace and its contents provides insight into the recurring paradox of great technological revolutions: increased productive power coupled with a seeming loss of judgment about how to use that power—about making the right products. It’s the historical theme we hear rhyming as we near another revolution.

The exhibition building itself, at least from today’s perspective, was the brilliant breakthrough of the Exhibition. After months of bureaucratic delays with unsuccessful proposals from all the “proper” people, and with only 10 months to go until the scheduled opening, Joseph Paxton, a landscape architect with extensive experience in building greenhouses, stepped forward with plans for what would become known as the Crystal Palace. It is regarded as the first modern modular building, consisting of glass plates glazed into a framework of cast iron modular columns and just four types of support beams. The final building covered over 19 acres and was 65 feet high, with a 108-foot high cross vault that enclosed three ancient elm trees. Paxton avoided traditional Victorian decorative elements; the building was meant to serve a specific function for a limited time. The visual impact was the result of only material, color, light, and, of course, sheer size. The building was so successful that, after the closing of the Exhibition, it was dismantled, enlarged by nearly 50 percent, and moved to South London’s Sydenham Hill, where it served a variety of public purposes until it was destroyed by fire in 1936—a temporary building with a life of 85 years. Many of the details of the Crystal Palace can be found in a comprehensive book published by John Tallis and Company.

By comparison with the building, the contents of many of the exhibits are remembered as being somewhere between crass and silly (Figure 5.8). Granted, the exhibits of industrial machinery and manufacturing processes showed the best engineering and machine design of the era. In contrast, the products of that manufacturing—what we would call consumer products—amounted to a compendium of Victorian excess. Even given the prominent legitimate role that surface decoration played in Victorian sensibilities, the amount of decoration was excessive and lacking in sophistication. The focus of Victorian pride had shifted to an ability to industrially imitate—at low cost and high volume—traditional decorative themes, but in the materials of industry. Floral and animal motifs had for centuries been painstakingly refined, by hand, in materials like wood and stone. Now they were being copied in cast iron and machine-loomed textiles without regard for appropriateness or the relationships among material, process, and form.

Figure 5.8 A work table displayed in the Crystal Palace

The mid-twentieth century designer, Charles Eames, accounted for this problem—an eternally recurring problem in his mind—in terms of constraint and restraint. He believed that one or the other was a necessary condition for good design. With Paxton’s exhibition building, there were so many constraints—short time, immense size, construction difficulties, and so on—that there was no creative energy to be wasted on pointless decoration or empty symbolism. But for the manufacturers displaying their wares, constraints had been removed. Productivity was up, dependence on human skill was down; it looked like an unbounded variety of goods would be available to all. The problem now was to find a substitute for scarcity as a source of value. They settled on unconstrained decoration. This is the point when, as Eames argues, restraint must enter into conscious design problem solving. When the question of “how to make” has been answered, the important question becomes “what to make.”

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INSTABILITY AS THE STATUS QUO

One of the changes that we—business people, designers, consumers—are already dealing with is the recognition that good design decisions are increasingly influenced by the need to be context dependent and dynamic. Context dependency has always qualified the “goodness” of design decisions. The addition of dynamic considerations, giving us a dynamic context, makes for a tricky scenario—an inherent and persistent instability.

Experts who deal routinely with potentially dangerous dynamic situations have evolved elaborate procedures and protocols that are worthy of study as examples of complexity design. Rock climbers employ highly structured sets of telegraphic calls and acknowledgments for reliably communicating the state of a climb to the belaying partner on the other end of the rope. Similarly, military pilots and astronauts revert to a highly drilled set of terse commands and responses when communicating on noisy channels under the pressures of flight.

Space flight provides an interesting example of how dynamic systems can require constant reevaluation in light of new circumstances: Throughout the American space program and up until the Apollo moon landings, the act of deciding whether to continue or to abort a mission was termed a “go/no go” decision. However, just a few months before the Apollo 11 landing, mission planners realized that this term, which had served well in all previous circumstances, suddenly became ambiguous and potentially confusing once the lunar module touched down on the surface of the moon. As a result of this insight, the terminology was quickly changed to “stay/no stay.” What constitutes “good design” is always contextual, and never more so than in the case of complex, rapidly changing systems.

The above examples—climbers, pilots, and astronauts—all share the common characteristics of operating in highly dynamic situations involving limited bandwidth. That is, compared to most human communication situations, the quantity of information that can be passed back and forth in a given amount of time is limited. This is true both because verbal communications is often carried out over noisy or otherwise “weak” channels, and also because such situations are often impoverished in terms of the various nonverbal cues that are so important in more normal human communications. Both of these same impoverishments—limited bandwidth or attention span and lack of nonverbal cues—also characterize the kinds of human-machine communications that are the essence of user interface design.

Design has consequences that can go far beyond matters of appearance and personal preference. The annals of technology are littered with examples of disasters attributable directly to designs that inadequately coped with dynamic complexity.

POST-INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

From today’s perspective, the early pioneers of industrial design might seem to have been pursuing a shallow and sometimes crassly commercial role in industrial America. But they were on the right track. They learned how to learn. And many of the major elements of a post-industrial design were there: an integrative position situated between industry and consumer, the collection and application of explicit design data and design methods, the persuasive power of aesthetics, and collaborative methods for integrating the expertise of a broad range of disciplines.

When we founded MAYA Design in 1989, the basic idea was perfectly simple: We proposed to do the same thing for post-industrial design.

We were hearing in the burgeoning computer industry the unmistakable echo of the industrial revolution’s impact on human beings. The information revolution wasn’t spewing smoke and steam from “dark satanic mills” or shattering tranquility with the cacophony of heavy steel, but it was placing significant stresses upon people—all the more insidious, one could argue, for not being ear-splitting or suffocating or glaring.

Computers were by then well into a metamorphosis from rare and precious tools for trained specialists to a major constituent of the everyday environment. For the first time in human history, highly complex systems were in the hands of ordinary people—systems that had nothing to do with natural human life. Their complexity stemmed directly from the ultraminiaturized electronics they were built from, a profound mismatch with human senses and cognition and interests. This was something genuinely new in the world. It demanded new approaches to design. But for the most part, the computer industry was making no real distinction between design and engineering. Indeed, engineers often were the sole designers of computing machines intended to be sold to and used by people who knew nothing about engineering.

Post-Industrial Design = Complexity Design

Humanizing technology, shielding ordinary people from the inhumane impacts of machines, creating and expanding markets for well-designed products—this was what industrial designers were supposed to do. But the profession was not rising to the challenges of the information age as it had risen to the social and business needs of the machine age. There were certainly specific individuals with vision in this regard, but in the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial design (ID) as a whole had abdicated its leadership in the development of usable, safe, pleasant, attractive, and otherwise marketable high technology products.

The vacuum created by this abdication of responsibility by the ID profession was certainly recognized at the time. In an effort to fill it, a new discipline came into existence, calling itself Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Unfortunately, with only a few important exceptions, its early practitioners were trained either as engineers or as academic psychologists—both highly relevant disciplines, but ones that almost entirely lacked access to the 50 years of accumulated methodological wisdom in human-centered design that formed the foundations of the profession of ID. As a result, the HCI community was attempting to reinvent Design out of whole cloth.

No one involved in high-tech product design was addressing or even talking about the central issue raised by the proliferation of computing and electronically transmitted information: the collision course of ordinary people and complexity.

It is significant that the icon of that moment in American technological history was not a computer per se, but an inexpensive computerized device that could be found in almost every home—the VCR flashing “12:00” in red LED numerals all day. This ubiquitous machine had become so commoditized that you could buy one for less than $100, yet it was so complex to operate that most owners could not figure out how to set its clock.3 The few who managed it probably went on to learn how to program the machine to record a TV show unattended—one of the primary reasons for owning the device (and something you couldn’t do if you couldn’t set the clock). But in the end their VCRs flashed “12:00” too, because the stupid things lost their hard-won settings with every power outage, and it just wasn’t worth the effort to constantly re-figure-out how to fix them.

It did not take a genius to see that the day would come when every home in the United States would contain 10, 15, 20 such devices, each of them a source not of pleasure and satisfaction but of frustration and anger, even fear (Figure 5.9). And then there was the personal computer. PCs were young adolescents at that point, still a special, expensive purchase, hardly found in every household. That would take another decade or so. But it was pretty clear that we were soon going to have a mess on our hands.

Figure 5.9 April 29, 1991: Usability awareness makes the cover of BusinessWeek

Source: Used with permission of Bloomberg L.P. Copyright © 1991. All rights reserved.

A world full of microelectronics was going to need design redemption in the worst way, but it wouldn’t come from any community of designers already in existence. Once again, a new profession would have to tame the beast of a new era. If Industrial Design humanized the Industrial Revolution, it stood to reason that the Information Revolution needed Information Design. In the end we chose the even more encompassing term complexity design, but information design is a big part of what you do to achieve complexity design.

The need to humanize information technology wasn’t apparent to most people back then, and a passing glance at computer culture today will confirm that for the most part it still isn’t. Like fish that can’t see the water that surrounds them, we aren’t fully conscious of the milieu we live in. Computing today (by some measures, but not others) is the best it’s ever been, so we have nothing to compare it to. Nothing high-tech, that is. We certainly do have something non-high-tech to compare computing to—namely, the long stretch of human life before computing.

But many technologists treat all of that as if it were now somehow completely irrelevant. Their implicit assumption is that people—after eons of adaptation to the physical world—should now completely change their behavior to accommodate machines that are based upon developments five or ten years old. If users want to benefit from the brave new world of cyberspace, they are expected to pull up stakes, sign onto a wagon train to the life digital, and wave goodbye to their old lives. The designers of the new world force technical complexities upon users, burdening them with the intricacies of whatever arbitrary designs pop into their heads and forcing them to suppress their natural gifts for functioning in the real world—the accumulated endowment of a million years of evolution.

Becoming “Human Literate”

When Nintendo designed the controller of its Wii game machine to be swung through the air like a golf club or a tennis racket, they may have been leaving hard-core gamers behind, but they were embracing real human beings. We can’t overstate the importance of that lesson.

Like anything else immature, high technology tends to be amazed by itself and to want to call constant attention to its own wondrous powers. The powers are wondrous, but they are also supremely ugly—ugly because they continue to demand that human beings become computer literate when, by all that is right and just, computers should be becoming human literate.

What is technically possible is virtually always attempted sooner rather than later. Thus the early tangible result of new technologies is inevitably chaotic, unplanned, and often counterproductive—almost by definition not-by-design. Such times of revolution must equally inevitably be followed by more deliberate, more evolutionary periods during which the technologies are tamed, the possibilities are explored and sorted out, and mastery is sought and attained. It is during such periods that design assumes center stage.

Taming complexity will always increase the size of markets for the simple reason that frustratingly complicated products are just not salable to a significant segment of the population. For every early adopter who prizes the aura of the Next Big Thing and revels in mastering a challenging new interface or platform, a hundred ordinary people4 will give wide berth to digital products if perceived complexity even slightly exceeds perceived value.

The Interdisciplinary Dimension

There may still be people in the world who can claim the title of Renaissance Person, but there are certainly not enough of them to save us from the deluge of the coming revolution. The necessary disciplines have become far too numerous and demanding for us to expect even exceptionally talented individuals to attain adequate mastery in more than a few. Rather, design today must be seen as fundamentally and essentially a collaborative enterprise.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone—engineer, designer, or business leader—who has ever seriously attempted to create a powerful product or service with ease of use as a primary goal. Our understanding of the process has increased dramatically in recent years, yet there are few great success stories of brilliant usability design in the computer industry. This helps to explain why the few that exist—Apple products being the obvious recent example—make worldwide headlines, and drive new forms of value.

By now, the notion of interdisciplinary design has become commonplace. Interdisciplinary and innovation are often heard in the same sentence. But sadly these ideals are more often than not honored in the form of faddish, cookbook exercises or, worse, as bureaucratic hoops to be avoided when possible and jumped through otherwise. Sometimes a group of engineers—mechanical, structural, civil—is called interdisciplinary. Perhaps that’s strictly true, but functionally it’s not much of a stretch. Sometimes the group’s work is passed sequentially from one specialist to the next—procedurally, that’s not very inter. So, after the first blush of enthusiasm, we hear such groups expressing something less than excitement for their interdisciplinary experiment. Not surprisingly, real interdisciplinary practice is hard, and the reason is simple: The specialization of professional fields, while essential to their mastery, militates against such an overarching vision of design.

Draw What You Mean

A truly interdisciplinary approach to a problem will not be the most apparently “efficient” one. Further, few businesses possess the means to build, nurture, and support interdisciplinary teaming. However, one of the most effective methods is almost too simple to be taken seriously—draw what you mean. If you are, say, an interaction designer and you ask, say, an engineer to draw, rather than tell you, what is in his head, you can decode the jargon almost instantly. Drawing can serve as the lingua franca of thinking. You can immediately map what the engineer has drawn into your own worldview, you can see how the engineering discipline structures the problem or solution, you can note what isn’t drawn, you can treat the drawing as a communications medium by adding your own parts to the picture, and most importantly, you can identify critical gaps in your collaborator’s thinking that your discipline can fill in. We often wonder if a simple metric based on the number of square feet of drawing surface (in the form of papers pinned to walls, whiteboards, etc.) in use between disciplines within an organization would be a reliable indicator of true interdisciplinary teaming, collaboration, and innovation. Effective teams share images. If a day goes by where you don’t hear “draw what you mean” at least a few times within and between teams, it’s likely that deeper sharing and integration is not happening either. Our prediction is that on Trillions Mountain everyone involved in building new experiences, new services, new connected things, and new business models (not just designers but business leaders and even customers) will draw as a basic literacy of collaboration (Figure 5.10).

Figure 5.10 An interdisciplinary session in action

Only one of the original founders of MAYA, Joe, has a traditional design background. Pete is a cognitive psychologist who would not be thought of as a designer by most people. Jim Morris, the third founding partner of MAYA Design, is a computer scientist who played a role in the birth of the modern PC at Xerox PARC; he typically wouldn’t be considered a designer either. But by insisting upon a fusion of traditional design, the human sciences, and engineering, we have been consistently able to practice design in a rigorously interconnected manner.

When we started MAYA in 1989—one computer scientist, one cognitive psychologist, and one industrial designer, and with yet other disciplines entering the mix—we set aside time to explicitly break the disciplinary barriers. We tried explaining design concepts in each other’s languages. We summarized for each other the classic works of our individual fields. We shared each other’s reading lists. In short, we committed time and money to making interdisciplinary collaboration work. And over the decades of MAYA’s existence, we have developed other practices and traditions that continue to contribute to the richness of our process.

The Value of Real Estate

One example of our cultural practice in this regard is something called MAYA Neighborhoods. Our workplaces are arranged, not by disciplines—an engineering section, a marketing section, or a visual design section—but rather in interdisciplinary groups of six to eight people. These neighborhoods do not represent fixed teams that necessarily work together on the same project. A given client project will most often draw from a number of neighborhoods. But avoiding clumping neighbors by discipline has both symbolic and practical impact. In addition to being a constant reminder of what we value, maintaining intimate physical proximity among disciplines leads to uncounted serendipitous synergies as eavesdropping neighbors chime in with unexpected contributions of data and ideas. By recognizing the high price we pay for such real estate, and the high cognitive and perceptual value we can receive by sharing it across disciplines, we increase the bandwidth, the agility, and speed of collaboration (Figure 5.11).

Figure 5.11 An impromptu meeting in one of MAYA’s neighborhoods

People, Things, and Information

By Joe

Though I, like all of us, live and work in a technologically intensive world, there is something about my early life5 and interests that attracted me to a more “craft” view of design. I don’t mean craft as a focus on the things of craft such as pottery or jewelry, but on the ways of craft, the essential nature of “making” and the intense concentration on the properties of materials, the integrity of joints between parts, and the subtle trace of the process by which a designed thing comes into being. And the big payoff is that things that are designed and made in this craft-conscious way provide immense satisfaction, both for the maker and, more important to this discussion, to the people who own, use, and live with the designed thing.

When we began the company, I expected that the things we designed, the projects we worked on, would be about equal parts material objects and immaterial information. Though materiality has always played a part in our work, it soon became clear that the hard problems, the interesting problems, the added value we were positioned to give were all dominantly immaterial or at the intersection between the physical and digital world. In spite of the clear understanding that craft wasn’t just about stuff, I experienced a dissonance between design as I had known it and design as it was coming to be. The guiding notions of craft, while not overtly threatened, were certainly under question—by myself if by no one else. Even though those notions felt comfortable and natural to me, I began to be bothered by them. “Am I becoming a closet Luddite,” I wondered, “just an old fart”?

I’ve come to understand that something entirely different, something unexpected is happening. As the objects of design become increasingly dematerialized and share richer connections between people and information—as we find ourselves designing software objects, or processes, or experiences—we find ourselves discovering higher principles and find that, in part, they are derivatives of principles we learned and internalized as designers in the traditional material world.

The basic human urge to design, to shape one’s environment in a way that favors desirable outcomes, is certainly as old as humanity itself. But unlike the other traditional liberal arts and sciences, design was not quick to be singled out as a field of study, or what we would today call a discipline. The earliest conscious attention to design occurred in the context of building, or of making or crafting things.6 But even there it is subsumed under a focus on the thing being built: a mason’s structural guidelines for a building, a potter’s proportions for a storage vessel. During the European renaissance we begin to see the emergence of artists, like Leonardo da Vinci, or builders, like Filippo Brunelleschi, who gained fame for their ability to generalize and apply design principles across a broad spectrum of the built environment. Then eventually in the early twentieth century we see experiments in formalizing and explicitly teaching design—its principles and application—as a professional discipline.

The downside of this coalescing of a discipline with abstract principles was a very gradual retreat from the intimate association with making concrete objects. Soon there was a fascination with design theory and design methodology, which, though it tried to stand on its own, got pretty wobbly in the knees when the act of making was sidelined. Furthermore, as we began designing dematerialized objects we inevitably trod on the turf of other arts and sciences. For example, in designing a user experience, we draw methods and principles from the long-established practices of religion, the theater, tourism, business organization, and even politics.

We are finally seeing a turn to the aspects of design that we hold dear: In essence, they are interdisciplinary experiments in making. It isn’t what you could call a movement yet, but the most advanced schools of design and the most successful technology firms are re-immersing themselves in the challenging but satisfying discipline of making, and using this experience as the glue that bonds the interests of people from across a variety of disciplines. I attribute this to the leap in scope and interconnectedness that is being recognized in contemporary design problems combined with the radically lowered costs of prototyping complex products—and not just the form, but prototyping those actions, behaviors, and component relationships that represent the joint efforts of several disciplines. Achieving a fleet of fuel-efficient cars requires not only new automotive design, but also a new fuel supply infrastructure, new legislation, and, as we’re experiencing presently, a reorganization of the businesses needed to realize our desires.

Making Things Out of Atoms and Bits

As the circumstances we design for and the materials we design with become increasingly blended between the physical and the metaphysical, between space and cyberspace, it at first seems inevitable that an environment of making will become harder to achieve and less important to achieve. Well, perhaps it will be harder—our cognitive wiring may be less well-suited for modeling formless information than it is for making physical models of material objects—but it is definitely not less important. The virtues and flaws of a material object—a new item of furniture, a new communication device—are at least partly understandable through direct manipulation (does my back feel well supported, do my fingers find the enter key?). But immaterial objects usually don’t give us immediate feedback through sensations such as the fear of falling or the threat of pain. Instead, the immaterial design reveals its virtues and vices through the experience of use or through exposure over time. Only then do we come to realize our sense of confusion, our vulnerability, or our loss of privacy. So we have rediscovered making; we have made iterative prototyping, and testing those prototypes, and simulating the intersection of people and information, into an essential part of our design process for the trillion-node network.

It is essential that prototyping not be put off until the conceptual design is complete. Fortunately it is possible to partially isolate some aspects of a design solution—the appearance of a graphical user interface from its behavior, for example, or the development of back-end capabilities. We call this method parallel prototyping, and it works marvelously well as long as the designer remembers two things: that parallel prototyping is iterative with incremental gains in knowledge and understanding, and that, eventually, parallel prototypes have to give way to a holistic prototype of the entire designed experience (Figure 5.12).

Figure 5.12 Stages in the design process from sketched prototypes to a production prototype

Does It Fit?

We have acknowledged for a long time that the forms that objects take are a mirror to the culture—beliefs, values, technologies, and enterprises—that created them. Were that not true, the reconstruction of history through the analysis and understanding of artifacts would be impossible. One indicator of good design is a sense of wholeness or integrity in the experience. That sense comes with the realization that, in many ways, the whole experience “fits.” It fits with the values of the individuals who own it and use it. It fits with the collective goals of the culture in which it was made. It adheres to contemporary notions of beauty. It makes good use of the technology of its time. And, most importantly, it fits with itself; its various parts or aspects are mutually informative; the whole has integrity.

We have to re-learn this concept and apply it anew to the things we design in the age of pervasive computing.

For many years Bob Lepper was a fixture of the industrial design program at Carnegie Mellon University—and Carnegie Tech before that. In my many years there I never actually took a course from Bob, but everyone there learned from him indirectly. In the 1960s and 1970s, when industrial design was working out its present position vis-à-vis other creative, constructive disciplines, there was a lot of talk—if not thought—given to defining industrial design, or design generally. “What is industrial design?” Many of the definitions grew into convoluted, intractable pseudo-philosophies. In the midst of these circular discussions, one of my colleagues passed along Bob Lepper’s refreshingly simple way of thinking about it: “If it’s about the relationships of things to things, it’s engineering; if it’s about the relationships of people to people, it’s the social sciences; but if it’s about the relationships between people and things, it’s design.”

So when we get into the new area of designing for the trillion-node network, problems look new in some ways—mostly in ways having to do with scale or connectedness. But in other ways it’s the same old problems and questions: Does the form of the solution grow naturally out of the materials and processes of the solution? Is the design sustainable, and are valuable resources preserved? And mainly, are people better with or happier having the design at their disposal than they were without it?

Reflecting on the way we built MAYA, there was an essential understanding of who we are and what we do, and that each contributes out of his or her own particular expertise. We draw a three-ring Venn diagram to denote our intersecting disciplines and often look for people to hire that are at the edges rather than the centers of those rings. It is a realization of our corporate concern for the wants and needs of people. Those wants and needs are multifaceted and subtle. The engineering tribe, the human (social and cognitive) sciences tribe, and the visual (product, graphic, film, brick-and-mortar architecture) design tribe all sit together, work together, depend on each other, and rub each other’s corners off, and sharpen our collective wisdom.

Violent Agreement and the Opposable Mind

I’ve often been asked, “How do you create a culture that is actually conducive to innovation?” While that topic deserves a book in its own right, there is one aspect that I believe deserves particular attention at the dawn of the pervasive computing era. You have to begin by recognizing that different views of reality can be simultaneously valid and must be allowed to jostle each other and intersect. This is not something that happens once a year at a corporate retreat. That doesn’t create a culture. It’s something that needs to happen every day, backed up by the unyielding resolve to believe in the process and stick to it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Business, has noted the same quality in great leaders. He called this sort of ability the Opposable Mind and noted that just as humans evolved to have an ability to grasp things more dynamically with opposable thumbs, some people have evolved the ability to grasp new ideas with opposable minds.

When it comes to collaboration, it would be hard to do better than Star Trek’s Vulcan method of sharing thoughts. So you might think of this theory applied to teams as the Opposable Mind-Meld. Having a team prosper under this sort of relentless pressure is hard, and it never gets easier. Practitioners often gravitate toward a given field of study in the first place because they have a very specific cognitive style and perspective. You can imagine—and may have even experienced—an example of a time in which two strong-willed innovators are at each other’s throats. They encode and process and present information differently. But what you discover when you work at this form of collaboration is that those supposedly great differences are actually superficial. If the group acknowledges that interdisciplinary collaboration is just going to be hard, they almost always find their way to a deep, fundamental agreement that has been masked by different languages and descriptions. Once they get past that, their underlying concepts are compatible and often mutually enhancing. They find they can combine their ideas to make a deeper, rounder, and more enduring worldview. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen time and again, but it demands an investment. Interdisciplinary teams will argue about something for hours, days, or even weeks, and then suddenly one of the team members will say, “That’s what you meant? Of course I agree with that!” We think of this as “having a violent agreement.” Analogues to such moments are also found in the actions of great leaders, whose actions usually lead, not to the dismissal of one view or another but the discovery of a third way.

The most important (and perhaps least obvious) benefit of this cathartic process is that those seemingly impossible meetings of the minds very often produce unique and unexpected value for customers.

When smart people from different disciplines hang around with each other, share ideas, teach each other, and solve problems together, it exercises collaborative muscles and creates a professional context that you learn, over time, to trust—because it works. A rigorously interdisciplinary setting gives people the potential to detect valuable patterns that more vertically oriented teams might not see. One reason is simply that they experience and learn to appreciate many points of view and are thereby exposed to many more samples of reality. This form of pattern recognition will become increasingly important as the amount of noise in the world increases exponentially.

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The Future Is Already Here

William Gibson—our cyberspace prognosticator from Chapter 2—once quipped, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” No one understood this better than Raymond Loewy. He loved to tell the story of redesigning the Sears Roebuck Coldspot refrigerator.

For this assignment, he ended up using a new material for the shelving—sheets of perforated aluminum—that he had discovered in a previous project involving the design of an automotive grille. It would never have occurred to anyone inside the refrigerator industry to use that particular material for shelves. No one in refrigeration was aware it existed. But it had precisely the right combination of light weight, durability, good looks, and resistance to corrosion and rust. The perforated aluminum shelves became a marketplace differentiator and a selling point for the new Coldspot design. The product sold nearly five times as many units as its predecessor.

Nothing could have made Loewy happier. He was famous for insisting that his work be not only elegant and innovative, but also attractive to consumers and commercially viable. The purveyors of locomotives, automobiles, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners needed him, but he needed them too, and he worked for them with affection and respect. Some of his more theoretical (and briefly more famous) counterparts eventually went out of business by conceiving futuristic designs that couldn’t be built, but Loewy’s firm prospered for many decades thanks to his insistence upon measuring his own success by the success of his clients in the marketplace. If a Loewy design failed to inspire consumers to buy, he had failed. In many particulars, the design industry has left Loewy behind, but in terms of basic goals and motivations, the underlying patterns remain. The designers who will really matter in the age of Trillions are the ones who figure out how to apply Loewy’s commercial sensibilities in the context of a thoroughly decentralized world—a world in which commercial transactions will be absurdly numerous and yet seemingly just out of reach.

1 In 1996, Robert F. Curl, Jr., Sir Harold W. Koto, and Richard E. Smalley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of buckyballs in 1985.

2 In 1959 Cary Grant famously fell in love with a female industrial designer while traveling North by Northwest in an inspired bit of scriptwriting meant to hint at a certain élan and untapped resourcefulness.

3 In fairness to those owners, it is probably less accurate to say that they couldn’t figure it out than that they found it just too ridiculously complicated to be worth the trouble.

4 Let us be clear here: The segment of the population in question does not comprise the “dumb” ones—people too slow to cope with innovation. Quite the opposite, these are the people smart enough not to waste their precious time with tasks that insult their intelligence.

5 I was born before electronic television was first demonstrated at the New York World’s Fair and, while we did have telephones and airplanes, the first telephone I used was one where you picked up the receiver and waited for the operator to say, “Number, please,” and I remember the day during World War II when my Uncle Frank showed me the first picture I ever saw of an airplane without a propeller! He said it was called a “jet.”

6 The earliest reference to a specific designer that I’ve found is in the Bible, Exodus 31: 1–5. After God has given Moses the specifications for the tabernacle in the wilderness, He says “I have called Bezalel … and I have filled him with divine spirit, with ability, intelligence and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic ‘DESIGNS’…” in order to make all that He had commanded.”