Hasta La Ideas

I stopped pursuing corporate design work years ago, because the lowly rungs I occupied allowed little individual creativity. “If I got hit by a bus tomorrow,” I told friends, “and they replaced me with another designer, the work would come out exactly the same.”

I’ve used and heard the “If I got hit by a bus” metaphor for things all of my life, only recently realizing the phrase was an urbanism; outside New York’s ample opportunities for M16 Crosstown crosswalk calamity, apparently the rest of the U.S. says “If I got hit by a Mack truck.” (For you non-Americans, that’s a brand-name tractor-trailer that crawls our highways, hauling our goods and mowing down unwary pedestrians.)

The Mack truck, like Stockholm, even has its own syndrome. InformationWeek talked to Product Design Manager Christian Feldhake (of Torelli Bicycle) about the “Mack Truck Syndrome,” whereby a small firm can be crippled by the sudden loss of a single member. The solution, as Feldhake sees it, is a system called ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning. It entails a computer-based “dashboard” filled with relevant data points that anyone, theoretically, can use to step in and resume someone else’s role. It sounds more applicable to business than design. At least that’s what we designers, with our individual creative urges, hope.

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