Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz (Part 2)

SM: While you were going through your career transformation, design was also transforming. I am not going to ask you to go through 20th-century design in two seconds, but what was going on with design at that time?

BK: Good, because that would take at least four seconds! Design has been meandering for about 120 years. Around 1980 it meandered to Silicon Valley.

Around 1980, we started to see products moving out of research and development environments at the Intels and the HPs of the world and into the market. I won’t say that engineers become irrelevant at that point, but you can imagine the difference between products made by an engineer versus a designer. Designers don’t necessarily understand how things work, but supposedly they do understand how people work things. The first mouse produced at Xerox Park was a $400 piece of apparatus and had to be taken apart at the end of the day and cleaned with specialized tools. This is something that engineers would not think twice about, but for most mortals that was unacceptable.

All of this corresponded, in part by sheer historical coincidence, with a migration of three or four rather luminary individuals to the valley. One was Hartmut Esslinger from Germany, who came to work for Steve Jobs on Snow White, on a top-secret job.

SM: How did Jobs find him?

BK: He staged an international competition. Jobs’s idea was that he wanted to look beyond what he regarded as very, very mundane American industrial design and started to pick up on some of the European styling sensibility. The condition that Jobs laid down at the time was that Esslinger would leave his German base and set up an office in Silicon Valley, which became Frog Design.

Around this same time, David Kelley had come out of a master’s program in Electrical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon and gotten his first job right out of school. It was designing the circuitry for the “lavatory occupied” sign of the Boeing 747. He spent three years designing the circuitry for that, at the end of which he said, “I am out of here.”

SM: I would be, too!

BK: He had heard about an innovative program at Stanford and he went into that program. It was a program that produced a generation of people who are significant players in the Valley. Kelley came out of that sometime in 1980. He started a company, hired all his best friends. First it was called Kelley Design, then it became David Kelley Design, then it became IDEO when it merged with the other firms.

Kelley’s company was an engineering-driven small consultancy. It was half a dozen guys in studio above a dress shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto. They got the job of designing the mouse for the computer that Frog was working on. That was a technical problem suited for their engineering background. They took this $400 apparatus from Xerox, disassembled it, and examined it. They wanted to knock it down to a $20 product.

The team walked down to Walgreens and purchased a 79-cent plastic butter dish and a tube of Ban underarm deodorant. They took the roller ball out of the deodorant, glued it into the butter dish, and prototyped the first mouse. There are now an estimated 500 million of these scattered around the world.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8