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Industrial Design Hungers for Conviction

by Ko Nakatsu

Isn’t it so easy to use the words “product designer” to explain to our mothers and our left-brain-business partners about what an industrial designer does? But alas, it may be easy, but it does an injustice to the profession. “Product” implies anything you can sell, like electronics, software, service, cocaine. “Product design” is not befitting for even a subcategory of industrial design and it’s also an ill-fit categorization for an academic field.

“Product Design” is off the mark, as a definition. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not even related to design. It’s evolution came from business – not design. Mutated by the radioactivity of commerce “Product Design” is just a business theory that’s engulfed/embraced/consumed Design to make it a part of it’s DNA. It’s not a subclass of industrial design, but it’s actually a subclass of business.

If you’re not selling it, it can not be a product, but it can still be industrial design.
If you’re selling it, it must be a product, and it can also, still be industrial design.

“Product Design” is therefore determined by the object’s role in business, not design. Product design will always steal methodologies, processes, and the skills of industrial design for its own benefit. Industrial design must not be tainted by it’s financial lure. This carrot on a stick is the trap which has caused Industrial Design to lose its identity. Chained and bound by a master, ID has become an obedient slave. Having lost dignity, itself is now trying to engulf other professions, namely Research, Service Design and Interaction Design in its struggle to regain it’s own independence, it’s own definition. Those professions however, aren’t mindful of industrial design’s needs; they are freely roaming the uncharted waters – exploring, experimenting and growing. They don’t need industrial design, but industrial design is pathetically looking like it needs them. Industrial design needs more than a definition, it needs to answer what it stands for – with conviction.

Conviction means:
1) Advancing the field in its own right and not being swept up by emerging fields or trends (service, interaction, etc.)
2) Stop appropriating methodologies from other fields and keep developing and inventing its own
3) Participate in the larger design dialogue with its unique perspective on the built environment
4) Stop trying to define industrial design based on what it makes (furniture, automobiles, etc.), because it is irrelevant
5) Focus on a singular vision and only then relate it to its context
6) Disregard the industrial design process to define it. Every creative field goes through some form of process in the act of creation and none of it is unique to this profession.

My own definition with definitive conviction would be: Industrial designers plan the creation of objects-in-multiples through the consideration of human needs.

Simple, straight-forward and completely open to criticism, although I stand by it with conviction. Once we’ve defined it, is when we can start to pursue and develop things like process, dialogue topics, and methodologies, which is ofcourse very important and have become branches of the field in its own right.

I write this in hopes that the field keeps maturing and the branches keep evolving and the vision (definition-with-conviction) for the profession grows stronger and clearer until it gains the respect-level of ancient and historical professions like fashion and architecture.

written in response to the question Is it time to update the definition of Industrial Design? If so, what should it be? by E. Anderson

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
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Wanting Means Nothing Without Doing

by Ko Nakatsu

Whatever you’re thinking, someone’s already thought it.
Whatever you want to do, someone’s already doing it.
Whatever you do, you’ll beat them to it.
Whatever you finish, it’ll be worth it.

Monday, August 30, 2010
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Design Your Time

by Ko Nakatsu

How we commonly determine a person’s expertise is through a persona’s past “Experience”. If we make a formula on how you gain experience, it would look something like this:
Experience = practice x time

If we then breakdown “practice”, it’s the added components of Skill 1, Skill 2, Skill 3, etc. As an example:
Experience = (sketching x time) + (CAD x time) + (public speaking x time) + ….

The other component that is needed to determine expertise is to look at our level of knowledge:
Knowledge = study x time

Study is the bits of information that’s relevant to our area of study. And so the knowledge formula would look something like:
Knowledge = (design history x time) + (current trends x time) + (brainstorming methods x time) + ….

Experience and Knowledge are the two distinguishing characteristics to determine the progress of the design-expertise.

The goal is to maximize productivity so that experience and knowledge is gained at the quickest rate possible. We need to keep a few things in mind to do this.

The Only Constant is Time

If I want to be a great designer, then there are few things that we can control: what we practice and what we study. I do not have control over time as it’s an unchangeable constant. Of the things we do have control over, it is essential to create a diverse list of topics to practice and study, and then devote the time necessary to achieve a level of expertise.

Knowledge Fuels Experience. Vice Versa.

Knowledge and experience should not be pursued separately. The information topic studied at the same time as when a topic is being practiced enhances that area of study so that the time is significantly reduced. Reading a sketching book and sketching at the same time, going back and forth creates a supporting role by knowledge and experience of each area. When I’m drawing, sometimes the drawings look off. With knowledge I can consciously and deliberately look at my work and point out why (perspective, proportion, mismatched colors, etc.) and adjust accordingly. Without this knowledge, I may feel that something is wrong, but I won’t have the knowledge to change correctly or will just have to try a few hundred more times until luck takes me to a solution that I can analyze.

Identify the Missing Pieces

Ericsson in the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance points out that a deliberate practice” is necessary. Deliberate practice is to actively seek out what is missing in our repertoire of skills and information. We then need to incorporate those missing pieces  into our practice and study. This is not necessarily “fun” because they are things that we do not know and does not create comfort.

Including Modifiers to Increase Experience Output

By adding modifiers into the formula we can increase the quality of our experience or knowledge, or reduce the time associated with it. Some examples are below:

Knowledge = (study x time) + mentor/tutor
Knowledge = (study x time) + social
Knoweldge = (study x time) + notebooks + portable ebooks
Experience = (practice x time) + coach
Experience = (practice x time) + motivation

These added modifiers change, manipulate our experience and knowledge. We have to be aware however, that they could be changing it for the worse as well as toward the good.

Becoming an expert in a field requires quite a dedication to time and to the conscious pursuit of practice and study.

Sunday, August 29, 2010
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Design the Language In Your Mind to Be More Creative

by Ko Nakatsu

When Buckminster Fuller was 32 he started the practice of consciously choosing every word he used. The deliberate analysis of each word seemed to free him from the cultural boundaries created by the limitations of language. It allowed him to rethink and reanalyze common words and change it’s use to effectively communicate his ideas. If such a word didn’t exist, he simply invented new ones.

I’m learning the Korean language now and have been speaking Japanese since I was a kid, the sentences in these cultures are structured so that the environment is described first, then the subject and then the action. (“Movie theater I will go”) Yoda’s first language was probably Japanese. Whereas in English we speak in the order of Subject>Action>Environment (“I will go to the movie theater”). My theory for the reason behind this language structure is that the Korean and Japanese language places the environment as the most important piece of information when telling a story. It first builds a mental image in your mind of a given place, and then introduces the subject taking an action. In English, it’s all about independence and the importance of the individual. And so the subject is emphasized first, followed by the action he is taking, and lastly given the context of the environment. I believe this emphasis and thinking process affects how we approach solving a problem when we have our internal dialogues.

Even concepts like “the future” is difficult to think about if you did not know it existed. Phrases like “I will go to the movies” is packed with a prior understanding of the concept of that something called a “Future” exists. That understanding can be deepened with an understanding of the existence of something called “time”. Imagine if you didn’t know what a “future” was, or better yet, imagine if you didn’t even know any words to describe anything. How would you think differently? A recent radio program by Radio Lab on the conceptualization of “words” really touched my soul because the beginning piece is about a deaf 27 year old man who didn’t know that “words” existed. The radio piece is accompanied by a video by Everynone on “words” and it’s various ways it is conceptualized in our culture.

Another common way we think is in relation to the context of a direction and location. We use egocentric descriptions when we describe the relationship of objects in our environment. “Where did you put the keys?” It’s behind, front, left or right of you, the table, the chair. Guugu Yimithirr the Australian aboriginal language uses geographical descriptions for describing location and directions. Since the age of 2 they practice describing, sensing and communicating based on North, South, East, West and can tell you the definitive direction by the time they reach the age of 7. This article by the New York Times points out that if they are shown two identical hotel rooms but ones facing different directions, they would experience and perceive every object in that room in a completely different space, whereas we might just see two identical rooms with identical objects. They fundamentally see and experience the world differently than the way you and I might.

The focus and approach completely changes when our internal and external dialogue changes. The creative thinking process changes based on how, what, why, we think, and in what context, relationships, and prior knowledge we decide to associate in that dialogue.

Suggestions to increase our Design “language” and vocabulary is to:
1) Invent new words or use common words uncommonly to increase our level of conceptualization
2) Filp the emphasis upside down and approach problems from different angles
3) Practice thinking in other forms like visualization techniques used by zen masters, tactile techniques used by craftsmen, or emotional techniques used by therapists
4) Broaden our relational approach to language outside of our egocentric contexts

Saturday, August 28, 2010
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Adopt Ideas like Puppies and Babies

by Ko Nakatsu

In response to Don Norman’s Article

Hi Mr. Norman,

Your article led me to your recent piece on the research-practice gap and as a practicing “translational developer”, your focus on that gap is spot-on crucial.

Coincidentally, I just wrote a quick piece on what I was calling the Translation of Abstraction with an example project and may serve as one potential method for creating that bridge between research and design.

In response to your column, some visionary ideas for products 10 to 20 years out for the auto industry have seen a number of success. When the output is a singular representation of a project (often labeled as a “concept car”) without a direct expectation of definitive financial results, it was easier for us to get consensus on decisions. Rather than jumping to a full-blown mass manufactured product, creating a visionary representative of a product-direction (that is believable and achievable) seems to fill in the-idea-to-product-realization-gap. Everyone from marketing, researchers, CEOs, engineers, and designers rally toward it as it becomes a beacon of light. These are developed by dedicated exploratory groups with a tangible deliverable, not necessarily a skunkworks project. The fashion world’s Haute Couture is also a catalyst for inspiration and serves the same purpose. Their work even goes to transcend the entire industry.

I’d like to make a proposal of a few ingredients to tweak those skunkworks programs out there to generate a higher success rate. These still won’t make paradigm shift as you’ve said, but it may help speed up the decade-long-adoption-rate.

1) Public Commitment (helps your ideas be earnest)
Release ideas from skunkworks project out to the public in a tangible form. With a concrete representation of an idea, and a fair amount of financial investment, every department will be vested in its success. Try not to let the internal discussion on idea-propriety hinder you. If no one hears the fallen tree, it is meaningless. The public-showing will generate excitement and the company will commit from social and market demands.
As you’ve pointed out:
FAIL = skunkworks projects > into company culture
but with an intermediary step:
SUCCESS = skunkworks projects> public (consumers) acceptance> back into the company culture

2) Kiss on the First Date (helps your ideas be heard)
Consultants at larger firms generally have a high degree of confidence. This attitude is necessary because they have to wear the badge of an ‘expert’. Though many claim it, few can own up to it. Some consultants bust-in with gun-blazing-criticisms, some come in quiet, disguising their fear with buzz-words and a success-formula. This attitude is countered by the client’s own what-do-they-know-we-know-best-attitude. Both parties live in delusional ignorance, the egos butt-heads and ideas get crushed in between. If it was a date, no one’s calling each other back. The ideas that gain momentum seems to be ones where both parties deeply understand each other’s philosophy, openly criticize each other’s shortcomings, and then cordially kiss and make-up. This seems to create avone-voice and an authentic vision for both parties. Although the thought is kind of obvious, it’s rather difficult to do with finesse.

Step 1:Openly criticize the client’s delusions
Step 2: Openly criticize the consultants ignorance
Step 3: Kiss and make-up
Step 4: Start the relationship

3) Scalable Vision (helps your ideas to cultivate)
The foundational vision of a company can be the ground which ideas are built. Employees accept ideas if it is connected or associated with a piece of an existing structure. If that basic vision has consensus and is ingrained in the mindset, anything that branches from it seems to have a much easier time resisting turbulence. Sometimes it’s difficult to create this foundation because it requires the involvement of the CEO and branding groups. If the foundation is built by the top execs though, regardless of an individual employee’s opinion, they will make it work. Eventually the hope is for everyone to fully embrace the new mindset and create a wider adoption of ideas.

Thursday, August 26, 2010
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Design is the Bridge Between Research and Reality

by Ko Nakatsu

To conduct an ethnographic study, hire ethnography firms, not design firms. Would you go to a firefighter to sequence DNA to check for mutations? No, you go to a geneticist. When I was at Nissan, we hired the best design firms and the best qualitative research firms in the country. It made designers look like idiots when they didn’t know their place and presented laughable research papers. In design’s myopic understanding of research, we tend to think we can conduct it, let alone conducting it well. We invent jargon like “design research” to give ourselves a false sense of credibility. “Design research” is far too young to have the level of credibility, originality, or relevance compared to other sciences. (Don’t get me wrong, we DO need to keep developing this so that within the next hundred years, we can have that credibility). Our appropriation of methods from other fields is disingenuous to clients who can have better results hiring actual statisticians, anthropologists, astronomers, firefighter, geneticist etc. Design firms are only trying to take a piece of their pie, when they should be expanding the pie.

How designers can add what’s missing in research

Our advantage-one for a designer is when we use our area of expertise in research. I want to point to “Translation of Abstraction” as an area where designers can shine the most. The role of a designer helps us absorb the research (from credible research and datasets) and translate it to the application of that research. Research is often filled with abstract descriptions like “consumer wants a sense of elevation” or “the brand is trying to relieve a tortured soul”. The results of research serves as a catalyst for the designs, but rather than taking an immediate leap toward sketching and prototyping, there is an incremental step that is necessary and crucial for the success of a design.

The presentation above is a research on mobiles in relation to echo boomers and luxury that I executed last year. There are four components that are key for a design firm or a freelancer when executing research.

1. Opportunity Finding: Research
If you want more insights into real research Doing Anthropology by Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland is a great start. I’ll talk about specifics research tactics in a future post so subscribe to the rss feed if you want to stay posted.

2. Synthesis: Findings
Let’s face it, we’re all busy people, dumping raw research data onto some one’s lap and expecting them to find the patterns is just mean. The experts do it best, because they’ve seen hundreds and thousands of different types of patterns.

3. Analysis: Insights
This is where you hire the best-of-the-best. They take the research findings and apply it into the context of the real world. The more they know about how this research fits into the whole scheme of things, the better the insights become.

4. Translation: Implications
Lastly, this is much more strategic in nature and requires a contorting of the research, empathizing with the user, considering economic, technology, and social trends, to output a visionary plan for the design. Designers have an uncanny ability to take research and convert it into a relevant direction and vision for a solution. This uses neither the left brain or the right brain, but the neural pathways of the gap between the two halves.

Thursday, August 26, 2010
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Design Me an American Hero

by Ko Nakatsu

I made a comment on Design Observer on “Design Loves a Depression” in 2009 which got reposted on the furniture society‘s website with the editor of Dwell. Looking back, I’m still waiting for my American designer hero. I hope that some of the writing in this blog can help you become my American design hero. (Continued)

Tuesday, August 24, 2010
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Designers’ Role

by Ko Nakatsu

Design takes you to some place better than a negative world of problems and take you to a world of happiness.

Industrial designers do not solve problems though we sometimes solve annoyances. In the name of business and monetary success, industrial designers have made prolific statements that we are problem-solvers even though the only real problems left to solve in the world with any immediacy are things like climate change and economic crisis, along with the usual fare of war, famine, and genocide. (Continued)

Monday, August 23, 2010
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Design the Design of Design (3-Orders Above)

by Ko Nakatsu

The only commonality of all design is that it has intent. You can take any man-made-conception, and create a design for it, as long as it had intention.  Marketing can be designed, but no one calls it Marketing Design because we don’t like to think of it as design. They lust for cash \m/($_$)\m/ and we’re above that right? The intent though, is for them to spread the word with the hopes of $$$$~~~~. They’re in cahoots with Advertising who are much closer to the world of what’s traditionally labeled as “design”. However you feel, it’s all design, and they all must have intent, good or bad.

This leads to my categorization of the three orders of design

First order of design is the intention of the thing itself
Second order of design is the intention of human actions (some call it “behavior” but that’s being ingenuous to the power of design)
Third order of design is the cyclic loop of intention of designing of the intention (think of it as “philosophy design”)

Some examples from the first order to the second order is below:

First order (park design, interior design, design of families)
–>
Second Order (Communitycation Design)

First order (product manufacturing design, electronics design, object design)
–>
Second Order (Production Design)

First order (poster design, commercial design, marketing design)
–>
Second Order (Communication Design)

First order (kitchen gadget design, shovels and tool design, art supply design)
–>
Second Order (Conversion Design)

and so on.

If your intent is to communicate, interact, convert, produce, and you are designing a method to do that, then the success of your design is only good as your predefined intent. Does your first order of design successfully complete your second order of design? If we take the idea of intent further and design the concept of the action themselves, that’s when really intersting stuff starts to happen. You’re not designing the communication itself, but you’re designing the intent to communicate. The higher order of magnitude that you must approach it is at a philosophical, spiritual, ethical level. What is your intention of communication itself? Perhaps your evolutionary need to ensure success for generations you’ll never meet. Perhaps it’s for the preservation of the species.

Even something like “intention”, which is still a human-made construct, can be designed at the third-order. “Intent” is just another concept, “intention design” is possible. How do you design someone’s intent? Something along the same vein is “Motivation design”. A humongous industry with tons of how-to books already. It’s next to the Resources and Sex section of your local bookstore. Maybe T. Robbins can give some insight.

I’m not sure what the fourth-order is yet. Perhaps conception itself. “Conception design” might help us if our intent was to design the defintion of existence. (PS not to be confused with the ridiculous naming by an industry which makes futuristic-imaginary pictures who labeled themselves as “Concept Designers”, a silly notion as there is nothing conceptual about their work.)

Friday, August 20, 2010
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Alternative Categories for Design of the Decade

by Ko Nakatsu

Bush. War. Recession. What a shitty fucking decade. When I saw those planes on the news, flying in New York. I vomitted. I was sick. Then I was reminded the dark side of humanity for the next 8 years with the word “terrorism” beaten into me. 8 years of shit, then we spent the next two digging ourselves out. In that digging process, we seemed to have unearthed a few gems belonging to the 80’s. Design of the decade should be representative of what this means. It’s not about commercialism. It’s not about sales. It’s about designs that are a representative of what 2000 to 2010 meant. All the tears, the hope, and the laughter. Below are my alternate proposal of categories for IDSA’s “design of the decade” competition. Examples are in parentheses.

PROPOSAL FOR A NEW SET OF DESIGN OF THE DECADE CATEGORIES
[1] Obsolescence: New designs that replaced or will replace an old paradigm (Kindle)
[2] Cultural Emergence: Underground design that emerged to the surface to pop-status (Hipsters)
[3] Not for Nerds: Design that introduced technology to the masses (Wii)
[4] Industry-Beacon: Designs that created an entirely new industry (iPhone)
[5] Hopeness: Designs that was the light at the end of the tunnel (Prius)
[6] Came and Went: Design that was successful but was born and died this decade (Palm Pilot?)
[7] Destructive Force: Design used for evil, the most harmful designs (IEDs)
[8] Undesigned: WTF!? (Snuggies)
[9] Failures: Designs that was loved by none, hated by all. (Pontiac Aztec)
[10] Hype: Design that created an intense excitement, then a bubble-bursting sensation (Segway)
Bonus
[11] Most Personal: Designed object released this year, that you purchased, that you’ll probably keep for the rest of your life (Adidas 1 shoes designed by John Whiteman!)
[12] Most Influential: Design that was in every “imageboard” slide of your presentation at work or school (Front Design’s furniture)

Leave your comments with your nominations! or better yet, add your own categories!

Thursday, August 19, 2010
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