Design influence

When Thomas Watson Jr. told Wharton students that good design is good business, the idea seemed quixotic, silly even. To many people, design still meant the superficial polish of nicer homes and cleaner graphics. But Watson had earned the right to his beliefs. The recently retired IBM CEO was a business oracle, having grown the company tenfold during his tenure by transforming its signature product line from cash registers to computer mainframes. Along the way, the perception of IBM had changed irrevocably. Once rooted in the grime of cogs and springs, they had become the face of a new computer age. And as IBM transformed, it became synonymous with the rise of modernism. Logos and buildings, nice as they were, weren’t central to how IBM actually made money--not compared with the engineers who were figuring out how to build ever more powerful mainframes. Back then, design was marketing by another name. The design and business symbiosis that Watson was advocating at the time was more prophecy than reality.

The design and business symbiosis was more prophecy than reality.

Only now, 19 years after his death in 1993, is Watson being proved right. Innovation today is inextricably linked with design--and design has become a decisive advantage in countless industries, not to mention a crucial tool to ward off commoditization. Companies singing the design gospel range from Comcast to Pinterest to Starbucks. You will see dozens of them in the pages that follow. But why now? What makes this moment different?

Apple’s rise offers a few important lessons about today’s connection between design and business. The easiest is that design allows you to stoke consumer lust--and demand higher prices as a result.

That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who owns a $600 iPhone, but Apple’s model suggests some harder-to-digest lessons. One is the value of thinking of product systems rather than solely products. An instructive example comes from Frog, the design consultancy that fashioned the case for the legendary Apple IIc. Today, one of its marquee clients is GE. You might wonder what design can possibly have to do with the success of a jet engine or an MRI machine. But hospitals and power plants are now linking their machines into ecosystems. And well-designed iPad apps are the simplest way to manage them. Our hypothesis is that we can build a better solution. Designers are the ones best situated to figure out how a kit of parts can become something more--they’re the ones who can figure out the human interface for a vast chain. If they do their job right, the result--a working ecosystem--is a far better platform for innovation than an isolated product. Just think about Apple and how its products have expanded from iMacs to iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and iPads, all linked via its iCloud.

 

Commoditization Pushes Designers to the Fore

 

 

Innovation usually cycles between periods of raw, technical inventiveness and the finer task of packaging it for mass adoption. In personal tech, for example, we’re in an integration phase that comes on the heels of fundamental advances such as the Internet and mobile computing. With back-end magic becoming a cheap utility, user interfaces are now a startup’s best chance to break out.
Consider Bump, an app that lets users swap data between phones simply by bumping them together.  In our app economy, everything has changed. Bump had 1 million users before it spent $4,000. It didn’t need infrastructure, thanks to Amazon’s server-hosting service; it didn’t need advertising because of social media; and the App Store solved any distribution problem. Development was a breeze, too, because of Apple’s software developer’s kit. "These are all things that used to cost millions.
Although these dynamics seem specific to the tech business, they’re analogous to what happens in any maturing industry. The back-end nuts and bolts eventually fade as a competitive advantage: Your manufacturing prowess, once a reliable bulwark, moves to China; your distribution channels, once the best, are now beaten by the Internet. When that happens, how can you sell anything--from a new thermostat to a new passenger plane--without fundamental design improvements that prove their worth to consumers with every use? And whom do you trust to cultivate that relationship between your product and your customer? An engineer? Or a designer? Silicon Valley is currently engaged in an all-out talent war over designers
"Product guys," rather than engineers, steer many of the startups that draw the greatest buzz. "The market for engineers is always white-hot. But for designers, it’s hotter,"

When designers lack influence, superb products become almost impossible. Good designs seldom stay good for very long if they must navigate a gauntlet of corporate approval. That’s because the design process is as much reductive as anything else--figuring what can be simplified and taken out. Corporate approvals are usually about adding things on to appease internal overseers. When something has been approved by everyone, it may be loved by none. Just look at what happened to Microsoft in the 2000s and how only now is it trying to redefine itself by building a more design-driven culture. That culture spawned Windows 8, whose design intent has remained remarkably pure from beginning to end.

If Design Leads, Then Relentless Innovation Is the Norm

The main question remaining for VCs and old-line companies alike is whether design can deliver a sustainable edge. There’s reason to think that it can. Unlike a few more features or marginal increases in computing speed, a better user experience can mean everything. VCs are starting to see that having designer founders pays off in the long run. A reliance on design-driven innovation poses a challenge for the companies that live by it: You can’t easily patent how something looks, or the feel of a user interface. Features, subtleties, and finishes spawn imitators with unprecedented speed. That means that design-led companies must innovate constantly to maintain their edge.

Microsoft, having stagnated as Apple turned the vision of perfectly integrated software and hardware into an ocean of cash, now has its own road map in place, aimed squarely at the evolving future of mobile computing. The central plank of that strategy is a radical redesign of Windows 8, built for the touch-screen revolution and ready to power Microsoft’s first major foray into hardware, the Surface tablet. For Microsoft, the question is, how intuitive will users find Windows 8? Natural enough that it won’t suffer the disastrous fate of Vista? Strong enough to withstand the critiques that inevitably follow from rethinking one of the most heavily used products on the planet?

Design isn’t being looked at as a solution to only business problems. Its practitioners are now taking up roles that used to be dominated by not-for-profits and governments, seeking new ways to raise the fortunes of the developing world.