Hasta La Ideas

Reviewed by Ray Jepson

GM has routinely been singled out in the last two decades as an example of a bloated enterprise that is so focused on maximizing today’s profit that it sacrifices its very future to do so. According to Bob Lutz, that is a fairly good description of GM when he arrived in 2001 as Vice Chairman in charge of product development. In his book, Car Guys Versus Bean Counters, he chronicles the very wary GM of 2001 through it’s first still-born turn-around, it’s acquisition by the American and Canadian governments and it’s new born success since 2009.

It might seem that a book written by a businessman about how to turn around a business would have little to say about design. In fact, it is clear that Lutz has only a small understanding of design. However, he consistently argues for its position at the front of product development through-out this book, from the horrible failures of the ’80′s and ’90′s to GM’s incredible success of the last few years.

Page Left: GM’s product development hit its stride in 2007, winning double honors: both the North American Car and Truck of the Year awards for teh Saturn Aura and Chevy Silverado. Page Right: (top) Chevy Malibu, 2008 North American Car of the Year and (bottom) 2008 Cadillac CTS, Motor Trend Car of the Year

To start with, Lutz reminisces on the some of the early super-star designers that GM made: Harley Earl and Billy Mitchell. Earl is responsible for creating the GM styling department. After working as a coach builder for years, Earl was hired to design the 1927 LaSalle (a now defunct GM brand). It was such a success that GM president Alfred P. Sloan decided to create the GM art and color section with Harley Earl as its chief. Earl’s success and brilliant work got him all the way up to a Vice President in GM, the first designer to become a VP in a major corporation.

Billy Mitchell took over from Earl in 1958. Mitchell continued a GM prominence in automotive styling, as well as design’s leadership role in defining products. Lutz recounts the story of Mitchell sending a man to Ferrari in Italy, buying a brand new Ferrari for list price, flying it back to Detroit where Mitchell instructed GM engineers to remove the Ferrari V12 and put it in a new Pontiac Firebird concept car he was working on. Mitchell then called the chief engineers down to the GM proving ground. As the Ferrari Firebird V12 circled the track, with it’s engine screaming, Mitchell told the engineers, “That’s how the car should sound!”

However, as GM continued to evolve, the design department lost it’s flamboyant leaders, with Mitchell retiring in 1977. After which, inspired by the successes of Toyota and Honda, GM leadership became obsessed with efficiency and repeatability. In the 1980′s, executives with a purely business background were placed in charge of development projects. All decisions started to be based on metrics and complicated mathematics rather than the emotional touch that successful products always use.

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Luke Williams’ new book Disrupt opens with a quote from Jerry Garcia, so you know it’s going to be different: “We do not merely want to be the best of the best. We want to be the only ones who do what we do.” That said, Williams’ core thesis is not a new one: The only way for a business to succeed is to cultivate disruptive innovation, even if it disrupts their existing business.

The strategy of incremental improvement used by most major companies is virtually guaranteed to paint them into a corner because real change happens not only in increments but also in sudden fits and starts. Williams refers to the late Stephen J. Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium and he’s right. Much like Steven Johnson’s recent book Where Good Ideas Come From which would serve as a nice companion, Disrupt observes that innovation continues at a gradual pace and builds upon the work of others, but once sufficient structures are in place (often from other fields) to enable innovation, change happens disruptively and is virtually assured.

Like most other business books on the shelf, Williams uses examples drawn from today’s business world along with his experiences consulting at frog. Usually after an assortment of anecdotes the reader is left with a set of scattered conclusions and no easy means for putting those conclusions into use. In Disrupt, Williams not only connects his mode of thinking to entrepreneurs who have successfully turned disruptive ideas into profitable businesses, but he also leaves readers with future references and templates for executing his methods. If Disrupt represents a disruption to the way of doing business, it does so not by aggressively changing the nature of a business book, but instead by clearly enumerating the tools that entrepreneurs need to craft their own disruptive hypothesis.

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“Each Under a Fiver item is a testament to an un-global culture, a testament to local needs and interests. Communities around the world continue to require things that serve their local needs, and often design plays little to no part at all.”

In Usefulness in Small Things, Industrial Facility’s Kim Colin and Sam Hecht share their “Under a Fiver” collection, first presented at London’s Design Museum alongside “Some Recent Projects,” an exhibit of the firm’s own work. The premise of the collection is simple. As Hecht puts it in his introduction, “As I continued to travel, I made sure to wander through any local hardware stores, pharmacies or supermarkets I came across, finding low-cost objects (all are under five pounds) that told me something about where I was.” The resulting array is a delightful antidote to the image-based work so popular on the Internet, a real force in the decline of attention paid to the experiential elements of objects and spaces.

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Rian Hughes’ new book Cult-ure is bound in faux leather and gold trim. The biblical references don’t stop there, as the author handily provides a fabric page marker for the reader to keep track of what page/psalm they’re on. Interestingly, the yellow and black dust jacket barely covers the front. On the back of that caution-strip, explanatory prose clarifies the allusion, stating that Cult-ure is meant to be “Gideon’s Bible for the boutique hotel.”

Positioning the strip one way presents the reader with a fragment of the title “CULT,” followed by the phrase “IDEAS CAN BE DANGEROUS.” While he spends very little of the book addressing the Bible itself, the rational free-wheeling fount of ideas spilling from this book could easily be taken as an affront by people with religious memes. Indeed, even the word meme (which Hughes uses a lot) was coined by atheist commentator Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, and refers to the survival of the fittest of ideas in the forest of the human mind. When Internet entrepreneurs refer to ideas spreading virally, they’re talking about memes, and they, along with Hughes, owe quite a debt to Dawkins.

Hughes is a former comic book artist currently practicing in graphic design, but what makes Cult-ure relevant to design readers is not Hughes’ background, but its connection to non-hyphenated “culture.” Hughes references Tim Hewell’s comment that, “the battle for ideas is far more complex than the battle for territory — and likely to last even longer.” Culture is where it will take place; every product designer thinking about market share should be thinking about share of mind. Especially in the wake of recent events in Egypt, new media resources allow for the spread of ideas faster than ever before.

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Gestalten released Staging Space a compilation of the ‘scenic interiors and spatial experiences’ late last year. It’s quite a thorough volume, covering a broad cross-section of categories, split into many sections including office spaces, exhibition design, scenographic environments and spatial explorations.

Chapters begin with a short forward, putting the work in context in a general sense, and each following entry is left open to the readers interpretation with a short, easily digestible description.

Michael Johansson

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