Friday, October 17, 2008

Inside Product Design & Development

Collaborative product design meets customer demands

By Dann Anthony Maurno, Special to Mass High Tech

“A camel,” states an old adage, “is a horse designed by committee.”

“Design by committee” implies a lack of vision or discipline, while “design by collaboration” relies upon crystal clear vision and multiple disciplines. It has to — market pressures demand that a company gets first to market and “right to market,” winning brand loyalty and not letting it go.

A company hasn’t the luxury of finessing a stellar design over time. It needs to be good, first and fast, industry experts say.

“Look at high-tech household appliances,” says Stacy Graiko, a Boston-based ethnographer and brand strategist consulting to Sentient Design Science (SDS) in Portsmouth, N.H. “There are always new companies coming onto the scene, creating a frenzy of competition. It drives those product design and manufacturing timeframes shorter. Another influence is the Chinese market, which can manufacture quicker and more cheaply than lots of other countries.” In 15 years of consulting to clients such as Snapper and Novartis, Graiko has observed product development timeframes to have shrunk by about half.

So star designers are still at a premium. But they are now part of design teams of, among others, project managers with an eye on timelines; engineers who can predict material failures; and behavioral scientists who can predict what will and will not resonate with users.

Given the time pressures, the market is unforgiving of missteps.

“A recurring theme we see is companies get into that product that’s set to launch in six months, four months, yesterday,” said Mark Manasas, project manager of medical devices for Cambridge Consultants. The consultancy, with offices in the U.K. and Boston, finds itself consulting as project managers.

Wayne Booker, the consultancy’s U.S. head of business development, says “We look at what risks will cause that last 5 or 10 percent (of the process) to be insurmountable or difficult, and what can we do proactively to contain or retire those risks?”

Perhaps the most common pitfall Cambridge Consultants sees is function creep. “It sounds extremely obvious to know what you’re going to build before you build it,” says Manasas. “But if you haven’t sat down between sales, marketing, engineering and surgeons and said, ‘this is what we’re going to build — agreed?’ then people will say ‘my feature wasn’t there.’”

Into the psyche
Continuum, a design consultancy with offices in Newton, Seoul and Milan, tested shower heads for Moen Inc. and found something strange. When asked how much users keep their eyes closed while showering, respondents estimated as low as 10 percent. Continuum built a “test shower” and observed that figure to be as high as 80 percent. The users were truthful, but didn’t know themselves.

Some elite design consultancies delve into “non-conscious behaviors,” which help companies hone product designs. “The focus is turning back to the consumer, to creating products and enhancing brands so they resonate better by creating a better consumer experience,” says Aaron Reid, a psychologist and chief behavioral scientist of SDS.

“There is a great deal of research in neuroscience,” says Reid, pointing to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). FMRI uses neuroimaging to study consumer reactions to products and brands. “That tells you a lot about what is resonating, things you won’t get from traditional methods.” Thus design teams that have stretched themselves to include cultural anthropologists will stretch further to include neuroscientists.  Companies will be hard-pressed to create that  expertise in house.

Nor should they want to, suggested lead designer Alexandre Hennen of Continuum. “The danger of internal design groups is that they are really specialized. The value we bring is cross-pollination from a variety of industries.” Continuum’s award-winning Reebok Pump design was born out of their experience with inflatable bladders in medical products. And a consumer-focused design must please the customer on all touch points. Hennen describes sitting on multidisciplinary teams of designers, product managers, brand experts and packaging engineers.

Such deep collaboration calls for “democratized” design technology, found in 3-D CAD software from SolidWorks Corp., based in Concord and Santa Monica, Calif. The company has developed eDrawings Viewer, a no-cost tool that allows anyone with a PC to interpret and understand 2-D and 3-D design data.

SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray said this allows all stakeholders to access design. “The engineer who designs a tractor is in the best position to provide the right design data to the person in marketing, documentation, and to the ultimate user of the product.” Such virtual and collaborative design has created a demand for product data management. 

Despite the depth of collaboration, the star designer is hardly defunct. Hennen has participated in creating designs for Nokia, Pfizer and Ekco among others, but says those challenges required more variety of expertise than one person can possible have. Hennen is as much a team leader as a lead designer.

Interestingly, the “camel” quote comes from  a star designer who acted largely alone; Sir Alec Issigonis, who designed the best-selling BMC Mini automobile in 1959. While a hump-backed slow-running camel may be no horse, cowboys are not the customers. To the Bedouins who have sworn by the camel for millennia, the horse with its shorter lifespan, lesser carrying capacity and which needs to drink every single day, is no camel.

 

Dann Anthony Maurno is a freelance writer in Salem.