At the time when I grew up in the quiet town of York, Pennsylvania, the manufacturing industry still employed a large share of the area’s workers, but the once premiere industry now suffers steady decline. By the time I headed off to college I had been in contact with enough disgruntled, jobless production line workers to last a lifetime and I knew this trend would continue. York is not alone. All over the country manufacturing jobs are disappearing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1950 the manufacturing industry contributed close to a third of the gross domestic product in the US, but today this number is quickly falling past ten percent, being replaced by the service industry.

This would not be so much of a problem for me if I had not grown up in York County, grown up on a path to becoming an engineer, spending much of my time at now dead production facilities. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if I had not chosen to go to college to study mechanical engineering, with the service industry little more than and evanescent thought. Wyatt and Hecker state in their article, “Occupational Changes in the 20th Century” that the service industry has nearly tripled in size in the last ninety years. This does not seem like much of a change (from about four to thirteen percent of the total workforce), but when service work in the clerical, managerial, and sales areas is taken into account, the data collected by Wyatt and Hecker shows that over fifty percent of the current US workforce is employed in service type jobs.

I assume that, as a child, I just stepped across the problem of declining manufacturing jobs like one steps across the cracks of a sidewalk. The realization that change was already happening as I was growing up hadn’t occurred to me in the way it does today, or maybe I just didn’t care. Either way, the manufacturing industry is indubitably following in the footsteps of Prince, and becoming the now more successful industry formerly known as the manufacturing industry: the product design service industry.

It’s a trend pervading the US, driven both by customers hungry for products with individuality, uniqueness, and enhanced functionality and by increasingly experienced, cheap foreign manufacturing production facilities. Product design is the old manufacturing industry transformed to fit the service world. And while it leaves behind most high-school and Bachelor of Science degree lacking line workers, engineering has found a new calling, with more and more companies consulting with design firms like IDEO, Lunar, and M3 or even starting up their own design branches. Product design is the new ‘in’ thing, spurred by materialistic customers looking for the best experience possible.

In a sense, product design has always existed in the form of innovation, from inlaid wood to the wireless card, but the artistic nature of product design has been overshadowed by the concrete, logical manufacturing ideals. Because of this, it has been difficult for companies to justify design costs that would not necessarily yield profit for physical beautifications that were just for looks. Bill Breen talks about Whirlpool’s design chief, Chuck Jones in his article, “No Accounting for Design?” and his idea for the addition of injection-molded ornamentation to spruce up a Kitchen-Aid refrigerator design. The suggestion would add about $5 to the unit cost of the refrigerator, and there was no way to prove that this would bring increased revenues to the company, so the company’s resource-allocation department shot the idea down. Jones, in the wake of this rejection, created a formal evaluation process to apply a quantitative value to aesthetic improvements, but the growing trend among companies is to trust designers when they tell their clients or employers that the product looks good, and will therefore sell well, mainly because designers are gaining a larger percent of control of the industry – a result of manufacturing leaving the country.

Alessi, a Milan design factory specializing in relatively low-tech home furnishings, has taken the design-for-looks approach to a new level. The unique designs featured in their products help keep a strong customer following. In his article, “Innovation through Design,” Roberto Verganti describes Alessi’s more isolated approach to design. Unlike the high profile firms of the US, Alessi designers – who are generally chosen world-wide by Alberto Alessi depending on the project – are told to forgo the limiting ties of customer needs and purpose and focus solely on the looks of the product. Designers for Alessi also generally work alone, each generating his or her own take on the prompt given by Alessi. The results of the individual design process are generally publicly announced before the final design is chosen. High class boutiques around the world put the designs on display and public feedback is analyzed to help choose the design that will go into production.

Companies like IDEO follow a very different method of product design that is very structured considering that the result is an innovative take on the problem at hand. In order to fulfill their client’s needs, IDEO engineers from vastly different backgrounds begin by working together in small groups, observing and researching the project. This observation could be anything, from pretending to be a patient at a hospital (with a hidden video camera) to following users around and watching them interact with a product. After information is gathered, the group participates in brainstorming. A good ideation session will yield a hundred ideas per participant in an hour. Prototypes of the ideas are created to help identify how the solution might work, and are generally no frills, quickly made prototypes. Pethokoukis talks about a session with Gyrus ENT in his article “The Deans of Design….” IDEO was getting nowhere in their discussion with the medical engineers from Gyrus about the surgical tool they were attempting to improve. An IDEO engineer left the room briefly and returned with a whiteboard marker, film canister and clothespin stuck together. The simple prototype crystallized the idea that the people at IDEO were trying to get across, and progress immediately resumed. This and following sessions yielded many prototypes. The prototypes were slowly refined into a single product, taking into account customer needs, and the is was finally implemented.

When I first learned of the Milano and Western schools of design – that is, Alessi and IDEO – I assumed they were in conflict, one very nearly the opposite of the other in methodology. It is important to discern which works better and which allows for freedom and creativity while still yielding progress. I began to investigate the end products of Alessi and IDEO and I quickly realized that they are not conflicting at all. In fact, they tend to compliment each other.

While IDEO tends to innovate through design, Alessi designs – or re-designs – products whose components are tried and true. One immensely popular product by Alessi was a tea-kettle (Verganti). The kettle sported a bird-shaped plastic widget on the spout that whistled sweetly when the kettle began to steam. Aside from having beautiful curves and ingenious metaphoric undertones of morning and wakeful activities, the kettle was simply a kettle, and even kettle whistles have been around for a very long time. On the other side of the planet, IDEO engineers innovated a new way to get dirt and crumbs out of carpet. They worked together, on their hand and knees – as Pethokoukis relates – playing with things until something worked. The idea was made into a manufacturable product and sent to market. The non-electric carpet cleaner is not a new idea, but the way IDEO engineers decided to do it is.

I took a class in college called ‘Product Design Processes’ which taught relatively standard industrial design methodology, very similar to the methods IDEO and companies like it uses. In the class, there was no attention paid to getting outside visual consultation on the final prototypes. This seems to be the case with most US design firms as well. Generally, the innovative work a firm does on a project is transparent to the end-users. The company that hired the firm takes credit for the project, and rightly so, as they have paid for the consultation with the design firm, but as the product design service industry becomes more developed, I wonder if the transparency that currently exists may change to something with a bit more color.

Alessi’s design success works simply because he has cut out the real industrial design work and deemed it trivial work given to engineers behind the scenes. The visual aesthetic of the product is the main focus, and this is something that a creative, visual designer can handle on his or her own. In reality, it would be better to stack the two on top of each other, innovate first, design aesthetically second. Use the IDEO process to get a product that works on a functional level, then consult with architectural types who don’t necessarily work for the company about the look of the product.

As the new, changed manufacturing industry becomes larger, it will be important for competing companies to stand out against one another. The easiest form of mass advertisement is a strong customer following, something Alessi currently has, while IDEO and other industrial design standard based firms do not. Because of their transparency, IDEO and firms like it are known only among product designers and companies who consult with design firms, but if a company like IDEO put its reputation on the line with end-users, it could stand to gain much more attention, and therefore much more success, especially if ideas from the Milano method of design were involved.

There is one small problem currently stopping design firms from becoming recognized by consumers. IDEO, Lunar, and M3 do not market their own products. They are consultants only. Firms of the future will either need to produce their own product lines, or coax their clients to credit them on the design contributions the firm provided.

Along with find new ways to gain attention from end-users, new design firms will need to carefully consider things like employee composition and location. IDEO actually offers classes on industrial design in order to help other companies design on their own, but I think the firm realizes that no matter how many other companies it teaches the basics of design, the people at IDEO will always produce superior results. Companies like IDEO employ the most diverse backgrounds possible, from biologists to anthropologists to artists in order to attack problems with as many different approaches as possible. Alessi, on the other hand, uses mostly architects for inspiration of its decadent creations, yet the creativity in products is very diverse (Verganti). Since the Alessi process seems to work best as a post-innovation technique, however, it would make sense to go with IDEO’s approach of varying backgrounds.

Varied backgrounds are key to the success of any up-and-coming design firm, and the location of the firm is important not only to attract many different types of people, but also to provide a creative living environment, or is it? IDEO is in sunny California. Alessi is in beautiful Milan. What if a company were in York or Boston? Living environment can have a large effect on how people think, especially if they do not what to live there. One unpromising region that comes to mind is the finger-lakes region of up state New York. With one of the slowest growing economies in the US, and a relatively high unemployment rate, nearly a third of its new residents over the past ten years have been prisoners (Verganti). Yet this region has been home to big names like Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, and Eastman Kodak.

So, how will the product design industry look years from now? We can’t be certain, but the general trend among design firms like IDEO is to have few rules about the innovation process itself. The same goes for Alessi, which gives its designers free rein within the always loosely given design parameters. It seems to just make sense to throw rules out the window as well. The very essence of innovation is a challenge to the normal rules of what can and cannot be accomplished. This is true not only for products, but for entire industries as well. When socioeconomic conditions change, companies must innovate to stay in business. The manufacturing industry has innovated for itself a position on the top of a rising wave of success in the service industry. Where it goes from here, we can only guess.

Date: Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 15:00 Category: School, Writing, Design.
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