Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz (Part 3)

SM: Is that how they got the idea for the roller ball itself, or were they prototyping an existing concept?

BK: The idea for the roller ball preceded them; they were just trying to figure out how to make it work. Back in the 1960s, when Doug Engelbart was working for SRI, he built this computer which was about the size of a large office desk. He then faced the challenge of getting data into the computer, so he began to experiment with different ways of entering data.

The first idea was a head-mounted display. I hesitate to tell this story in class because there is always some protest. Imagine the male engineering culture of the Valley of the ’60s. Every time one of their secretaries would walk by, these guys would look over at her butt, so all kinds of strange data was getting input with the head mount display.

They tried some other concepts, but finally, Engelbart decided to explore some device that just moves around on the desk. He carved the prototype out of a block of two by fours. Fifteen years later, David Kelley adopted that idea via Xerox.

SM: This brings us to the mid 1980s.

BK: By the middle of the ’80s we were starting to see a flourishing design culture. There is IDEO, there is Frog Design, there is a company called Lunar founded by an industrial designer Jeff Smith. There were several other smaller firms as well. Business was there, and they found themselves creating new products as well as new business models for the design profession. Design had been operating since the 1930s on a time and materials model. At the end of the day they added up all of their balsa wood, model clay, secretarial time, some extra for lunch, and they sent the client a bill. The client turned around and sold 50 million of those products.

That model worked in the early days, but the consultancies here began to innovate within their own practice. They created a dozen different business models, including the old time and materials mode. One of the most unusual was a joint ventures model used by Palo Alto Design which, for a while, was the most profitable design firm in the world. Their business model was design services for free in exchange for equity in the product. Many designers felt that was sending a bad message, feeling that giving away services devalued the profession.

These were all part of the circumstances that led to the rise of the Valley design culture, which is now overwhelming the global epicenter. You can stand on University Avenue and take out a good population of the world’s designers.

The next thing that began to happen was a new practice that combined industrial design with electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Designers take a concept, figure out what the placement of the buttons will be, where will the display should be, what materials should be used for the finish, and how to manufacture it. It became a competitive industry, and as it became more competitive the impulse to greater and greater innovation in design practice became important.

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