Hasta La Ideas

Interview by Will Evans, Semantic Foundary

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Ted Booth, Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design in New York. Smart Design got its start more than 30 years ago as an industrial design studio creating consumer products for clients such OXO and HP. Today, the company has studios in San Francisco as well as Barcelona, and designs for industries as diverse as entertainment, healthcare and consumer finance.

In anticipation of the upcoming DMI Design at Scale conference, Ted and I took the opportunity to talk about the expanding scope of design capabilities at Smart, the increasing attention being paid to design, as well as how design leaders can scale that capability both within design firms as well as other organizations. Ted will be participating on the panel, “Building and Fostering a Design-Driven Culture From Scratch.”

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Will Evans: How did Smart Design expand beyond industrial design for consumer products?
Ted Booth: We had a really deep expertise in large-scale consumer products, and a lot of technology companies started to come to Smart when they realized that they weren’t just selling bits of technology—they were selling consumer products. So HP is one whom we continue to work with. And through that the natural evolution of designing a product and then the packaging and then how it’s presented in retail, the capabilities of the company really expanded. So as new types of requests have come in, as the role of design has shifted particularly in the last ten years, we’ve started to add a lot more strategic capability.

So how have you handled that challenge over the past few years?
What I’ve been doing at Smart for the last four years is really building up the specific practice of interaction design and then the overall digital offerings. So, as I sometimes ask, “What do carrot-peeler designers have to say about financial services websites?” And we actually have a lot to say because of what we did with OXO. We took a commodity product that was 79 cents, the most everyday thing, and turned it into a $6 product designed in a human-centric way that met a real need in the marketplace.

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