Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz (Part 4)

SM: Did the design tools come about that time as well?

BK: Design tools came just a little bit earlier. I believe IDEO was the first consultancy to make a really major investment in CAD and CAM. They developed a culture of rapid prototyping, which CAD supports well. IDEO policy was such that you never came to a meeting without a prototype. It didn’t matter how ugly it looked, you had to have something in your hand.

IDEO had a history of embracing the best technology. It started by utilizing one of the most expensive pencils in the world. From the $20 pencil it went to the $70,000 workstation. They finally bit the bullet and made a $2 million investment in state-of-the-art equipment for the machine shop. Now when designers developed a design, they could edit it, tweak it, and essentially hit save and print. The benefits of utilizing CAD is that a few hours later the designer had a 3D model. It is phenomenal to watch this process.

SM: So the design tools helped with the evolution of the design profession rather than being developed to support it?

BK: Everything starts with adding industrial design into the traditional design profession, which is by this time a 40-year-old styling profession, although the profession got increasingly sophisticated and interested in ergonomics, making things fit bodies and respond to interaction. The way I like to think of it, if I had 10 weeks and two hours every Friday morning to tell it like I do at Stanford, is that the community began to add one discipline after another to the design process.

What happens when you begin the process of bringing a new product to market? The first designer after the industrial designers and engineers are the human factors designers, who begin to show up in a big way around 1990. A key person in this phenomenon is Jane Fulton Suri, who goes to work at IDEO, and she came at the same time as Bill Morgidge, who was one of the big guns who designed one of the first laptops. He is big on firsts. They had worked closely together prior to that.

Jane brought a background in psychology and architecture to IDEO. At IDEO, she became a psychologist almost exclusively by spending her time thinking about the whole range of problems about usage. For example, she would think about how you use your voice recorder but in ways that don’t have to do with either the internal engineering guts or external appearance. Rather she will sit down and observe you using it; turn it on, pick it up, put it in your purse, and watch 100 variables that would be literally invisible to an engineer and embarrassing or irrelevant to a designer. A designer would probably say you are holding it backwards if you picked it up the wrong way. The engineer would say, “This is how it works,” and try to teach you the right way to use it. She would say, if a user picks it up backwards that is not their problem, it is the designer’s problem. She looks at the real-world aspects of how people use technology.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Design in the 21st Century: A Coffee with Barry Katz
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