Hasta La Ideas

Would you rather be an industrial designer or a comedian?

Silly question, I know, but here’s what I’m getting at: Comedian Louis C.K. performed several bits on a 2003 comedy album, and strikingly similar bits showed up in Dane Cook’s act around 2005. Fans cried foul, controversy was born. Louis subsequently squashed their “feud” (which was really fed more by the media than the comics themselves) by having Cook appear on his FX show. When comedians develop similar bits and are charitable with each other, they explain it away by citing “parallel thinking.”

Parallel thinking exists in the design world too, of course, and the more minimalist an industrial design becomes, the higher the chances you’ll see similar work elsewhere. Culpability becomes a tricky issue, particularly when designers hew closely to the Form Follows Function rule. When you have an uncomplicated design that’s boiled down to its pure essentials, you approach a kind of universal perfection, and that universality is the tricky part in a world filled with designers.

Case in point, the cable-holding button above that we posted on earlier. It works as a shirt button and it works to hold a cable. There’s nothing else, no clutter. Shapeways user Egant designed it and began selling them for under $5 each when we first heard about them. By the time our post went live, the buttons were no longer for sale.

Why? Turns out prolific entrepreneur Rob Honeycutt, a former bike messenger turned designer, had earlier patented the button design you see here:

Honeycutt contacted Egant, and while we’re not privy to the discussion, the end result is Egant pulled the buttons.

This post is not about leveling accusations of piracy, as we see something larger happening here. If we charitably assume Egant had not seen Honeycutt’s designs, we’re looking at parallel thinking. And I believe that as 3D printers enable more of us to design simple, small objects, we’ll see a lot more of this in future, as talented designers start converging on minimalist-driven perfection.

So the question is, what do we do about it? It’s not practical to pore through millions of patent filings to see what has and hasn’t been done. An author can type a search phrase into Google to see if his/her work has been plagiarized, but industrial designers have no such recourse. Someone could attempt to organize an easily searchable database with built-in growth capacity, but it seems a massive and expensive undertaking without any promise of profitability.

Earlier this year Louis C.K. had another well-known figure on his show, Tonight Show host Jay Leno. Years ago, when Leno was a working comedian, a reporter asked him how he dealt with other comics borrowing his jokes. “You just have to write ’em,” he said, “faster than they can steal ’em.” If only that were possible in our field.

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I’ve been living in Kampala, Uganda, for the past month now, and it’s truly been a treasure trove for design observations. From the city’s many tech incubation hubs to the wide variety of formal and informal solutions to everyday challenges, creativity can be found everywhere. In the spirit of Tricia Wang’s Instagram ethnography, I post many of my field observations on my own account. This is not just for convenience; Instagram fosters conversation that helps me clarify my own thinking around the things I see. Here are a few field shots, with some notes I’ve added for context.

A stereo outfitted for a memory stick. The stereo reads the music files and displays the song artist and title from the meta data while playing each song. I’ve not read much literature on this, but I’ve now seen USB stick music players in Kampala, Beijing, Manila and even Los Angeles. Enabled by a stereo, the sticks act effectively as a portable music player without the cost and risk associated with a pricier MP3 player. As with iPhone decks, USB-ready stereos also enable a social experience, as people swap in their own sticks with their own music mixes.

I spotted this two-way calculator in Fort Portal, in the west of Uganda. Big calculators like this are quite popular in places like Beijing, as they ensure clarity of price and can even be used for haggling between two people who don’t speak the same language. It was common in China to see the shopkeeper type in a calculation and turn the calculator around to face the client. The client then takes the opportunity to enter a new price. With the calculator above, the opportunity to haggle is lessened.

The famous Kampala stage, where a vast number of the city’s minibuses, called “taxis” locally, take off to locations far and wide, both inside the city and into other parts of the country. From above, it looks like a vast mass of white cars with no particular rhyme or reason. But as soon as I descended to the staging floor, I realized it was no more or less complicated than Penn Station. Signs clearly indicated where each minibus was going, and locals easily directed me to the minibus I needed. And as in Penn Station, vendors wandered the grounds and set up shop on the periphery, ready to feed hungry travelers.

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The role of European design should be enhanced on the global stage, and top expertise in design should be supported. Cooperation between strong design competencies, companies and the public sector should be developed to produce better services. Design should be embedded in innovation programmes and business incubators across Europe. Harnessing design as a tool for innovation processes will boost prosperity and wellbeing across the continent.

These views were included in the Design for Growth and Prosperity report (pdf) by the European Design Leadership Board. The report contains 21 concrete policy recommendations to the European Commission on how to make better use of design as a driver of growth and a tool for competitiveness. [Ed Note: How should European countries leverage this report in local/national policy?]

> Press release

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I’ll begin my fourth and final installment of my long essay addressing the debate on “design imperialism” by admitting that it doesn’t take much effort to find something about globalization to be incensed about. Starbucks is pricing your favorite coffee shop out of the neighborhood; riots in Indonesia were triggered by the Asian financial crisis. Apple imposes its corporate values to the worldwide availability of adult content on their application platform**; Coke and Pepsi logos have been painted onto remote pristine mountain ranges.

Or perhaps you prefer to take the profit-at-any-cost argument to the next level. You can cite Nestle’s aggressive sale of milk-powder in markets where doing so is likely to inhibit the lactation of mothers; Facebook and Google endlessly exploring and re-defining privacy in their race to monetize you through new services; Monsanto’s development and apparent halting of sterile seeds to force farmers to make repeat purchases every year; the very visible suicide rate of Foxconn factory workers in China (most likely some of you will be reading this on a Foxconn assembled device); companies that are benefitting from the sale of monitoring equipment in countries like Syria or Egypt; and accusations of racism in the advertising of Unilever’s Fair & Lovely Skin Whitening creams. (For a good background on the latter read this paper.) Make no mistake—governments***, BigCorps, organisations, agencies need watching, need to be held to account, and in many markets there are players that hold a disproportionate amount of power.

But as consumers, employers and employees, I, you, we, they are complicit in this relationship in the products we make and consume, as well as in the lifestyles we aspire to and the moment-to-moment decisions we make in how the products we buy are used. Sure, we demand privacy, but we are willing to let personal ethics slide when a photo worthy situation presents itself. We have grown used to free e-mail, but (momentarily) rally against our e-mail being read by an algorithm so that Google can serve us more contextualized advertising. We roll up to a remote mountain village and mutter expletives at being woken by a ringtone—but get the jitters at the mere thought of giving up our own connectivity. We complain of global warming and then jet-off to another conference that espouses amongst other things sustainable living. We are highly vocal about the price of new electronics but vote with our wallets when it comes to disposing of them in an slightly-more-costly but environmentally less impactful manner. Or we fly half-way around the world to conduct business but not track every source of income that enables that business to occur, the many different players in global network that allows us to get there, stay there, communicate with collaborators and loved ones while we are there.

I conduct a fair amount of community facing activities—from spending time in universities to doing talks around the world, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share and learn from the intellect in the room. But on occasion the assumptions behind the questions miss the mark to the point where a step back is necessary. There are a number of misconceptions about consumers in highly income/resource constrained (or “poor”) communities that seem to repeat themselves with a depressing regularity and is often directed from passionate minds with a particular, accusatory venom:

• Consumers on low levels of income are incapable of making rational or “right” choices for themselves
• These same consumers are duty bound only to make rational choices (“rational” as in on things that have an immediate benefit to their current socio-economic situation, as defined by the person making the argument)
• Any time a consumer makes an “irrational” choice the “fault” lies with the company providing the products
• Companies that target consumers in countries with very low levels of income are inherently evil

Let’s go through each in turn:

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Photo by Jan Chipchase

At the Pop!Tech conference last fall, I gave a talk that focused on the social tension that occurs with the introduction of new technologies, including turn-of-the-second-to-last-century portable cameras, and could have applied equally to the Walkman (remember them?) and mobile phones. My talk touched on technology use and whether “adoption” is pro-active, passive or even conscious. I also discussed the consequences of near-time facial recognition; how DNA testing reveals parental discrepancy and will for many change the notion of “family,” how public displays are increasingly monitoring the world around us, and what all this means for designers who are creating products, services and systems in which consumption, use and adoption is sometimes conscious, sometimes not. A central tenet of the talk was that as more of what we design is jacked into our social network, the option of whether to use or opt-into a technology or service becomes one of opting into or out of society. (Download my entire Pop!Tech presentation here [PDF, 12MB].)

The talk prompted questions related to the design imperialism discussion that has preoccupied some in the design community, and a rally against globalization (for a related interview, click here). In previous instances when I’ve been asked questions along these lines, the motivation for asking was driven by an anger against the all-trampling BigCorps and me as an agent of the BigCorp, a fear/recognition of not being in sufficient control, and on occasion also guilt (where the person asking the question has trouble balancing their own consumption habits with the injustice of other people not having the same economic opportunities).

Whereas the design imperialism debate honed in on local interventions, this essay will focus on my experiences working with multi-national corporations and organisations. I’m not suggesting that the lessons outlined here are the same as for more local initiatives, nor am I making a judgment on the pros or cons of local or global design solutions—that would need to be visited on a case by case basis. And yes, I recognize that the international aid / donor community has for many years overlooked locally sustainable solutions often at the detriment of communities that they were there to serve—this imbalance has been a personal driver to understand for myself for much of my career. I do assume that the benefits of globalization in the short term (~20 years) outweighs the costs and the opportunity costs.

In this second installation of my “Imperialist Tendencies” essay, I’d like to present a backgrounder on the role of design research / ethnography that was referred to in the talk and some of the nuances of the approach that I think make the process one that is rewarding for the individuals concerned, their communities, our teams that conduct the research and employer, and ultimately the client.

Research for Design

The basic premise of design research is that spending time in the contexts where people do the things that they do can inform and inspire the design process with a nuanced understanding of what drives people’s behavior—which can then be used as a foundation for understanding and exploring the opportunities for new products and services.

More often than not the process leads to innovating on what already exists. The practice is mostly associated with up-front research at the beginning of the design process, but in my experience it is valuable to think of it as a state of mind that can infuse, inform and inspire across and often beyond the project. Often researchers get ahead of themselves and talk about the opportunities they perceived after uncovering unmet needs. The fact is in many cases needs are being met, just not particularly well. The process assumes, of course, that the project is aligned to the client’s organisation and goals, and that the team knows how to apply the right mix of methods, understands how to make sense of what they are collecting and can articulate the opportunities that comes from this. Some people and/or agencies are good at parts of the process, far fewer can carry off the whole. Just as there are many different ways to design, there are many ways to run design research. For my clients, design research is particularly effective when it explores the collision of people, technology, culture, and business models to inform what, when and how to make something and understand how best to get there.

Corporate research studies are often about a 2-month sprint: a week or two to ramp up; a week each in two or three research locations; two weeks of pure synthesis; and two weeks to write and deliver a report. Most projects have some form of hand-over workshop with the client, and for a larger consultancy like frog, this is usually the bridge to a design phase—where the ideas/concepts are further explored and evaluated, before being refined with increasing levels of fidelity. A research + design project can run for 6+ months, but I’ll focus on the research phase here since it is most relevant. The client often wants the research yesterday and it is common for the team to be working 24/7 with only a couple of days break over the course of the research—stepping back only after its all done and dusted.

Common criticisms of this format of corporate research include: the time on the ground is so limited that the breadth and quality of the data is likely to be suspect; that the incoming team is insensitive to how things are done locally; that the broad range of locations and limited total time span doesn’t allow for building meaning relationships with local partners; that the team suffers burn-out; that engagements with participants and local partners is at best superficial and at worst disrespectful; and that the opportunity areas/concepts/ideas that come out of this process bear little or no acknowledgement to local needs.

All are valid concerns.

All can be mitigated.

Mitigation is not always the smartest move.

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