Now is the time to plant the seeds for business growth. Our tendency in the current economy is to delay investments, stop initiatives, just wait-‘n-see. But the cost of catching up can exceed the cost of innovating now. Investing in innovation today can bring forth a harvest of new customers, new processes and new capabilities later.

Consider some examples from the Great Depression. Tom Nicholas in the McKinsey Quarterly describes how patent applications during the early 1930s declined significantly. Many companies that chose to bench their innovation efforts didn’t make it to the other side. Yet plenty of companies who invested in innovation not only survived, they thrived.

Take RCA. While its stock price was tanking, the company increased its innovation efforts and shifted from radio to the burgeoning television industry. The company returned to profitability by 1934 and dominated the market soon after.

DuPont saw its prices and sales take an alarming plunge – and yet the company increased its R&D spending to develop its new material “Neoprene.” DuPont took advantage of the pool of unemployed engineers and scientists and the low cost of raw materials. Neoprene became a tremendous success – by 1939 every automobile and airplane manufactured in the United States used Neoprene components.

Entrepreneurial start-ups of the period also invested in innovation. In the mid 1930s, engineers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard self-funded a business in a rented garage. By 1939 the Hewlett Packard Company had created its first product – a sound test device sold to Disney Studios (another Depression era innovator).

My own profession, industrial design, traces its emergence to the Great Depression. Close-fisted consumers were not in the mood to buy, so smart manufacturers hired design consultants to make products better looking and easier to use. Companies saw sales tick up with the new, innovative designs.

Fast forward to 2008, and a comparably lowbrow innovation, Snuggie™, that silly looking blanket/housecoat peddled on TV and friended on Facebook. While the economic bad news poured in, Snuggie sold four million units at $10 each ($20 per pair) – $40 million dollars worth! Snuggie connected with consumers in new ways and succeeded while the economy plunged.

For companies with ideas and cash, an economic downturn can actually become an innovation advantage. Here’s why. Competitors are retreating, leaving gaps to be filled with innovative thinking, while underperforming companies go away altogether. Capital is released from dying sectors. Once the toxic securities of today are cleared out, lending will flow to the innovators of tomorrow. Material costs are down. More skilled workers are available, often at a lower cost. And more consultants are available when full-time hiring might be frozen.

Even cash-strapped companies can use innovation to build their business today. Consider these opportunities:

Tailored Product Innovations. Consumers will be more particular about the products they purchase, paying only for features that provide real value. This presents an opportunity to study users and learn about their needs.

Innovative Touch Points. Social networks and digital media provide a vast, new environment for connecting with consumers and creating “multi-logues” about a brand, product or service.

New Alliances. Expanding networks to share ideas and develop partnerships can create the connections that spawn innovation. Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley wrote in a recent shareholder letter that P&G relies on outside consultants and partners “to turbo charge P&G’s internal innovative capability.” More than half of all P&G’s innovation includes an external partner, he said.

Innovative Business Processes. GM prospered during the Great Depression in part because of Alfred Sloan’s legendary innovations in organizational management and workforce motivation.

A bad economy produces winners and losers, just like a good economy. Investment in innovation can be the difference. So run past the competition while everyone else is running for cover.


A version of this column originally appeared in the Charlotte Business Journal on March 6, 2009.

Monty Montague is a Principal at BOLT. He directs teams of designers, researchers and engineers in Product Innovation programs and has worked with companies ranging from GE Lighting and Ingersoll-Rand to Herman Miller and Coca Cola. Monty holds over 25 patents for product innovations and his work has been recognized with Gold IDEA Awards for design excellence, the iF award for international design innovation and the IDSA Catalyst Award for market success. Monty's writings have appeared in Innovation Magazine, Design Management Journal, and the Product Development & Management Journal. Click here to email Monty.

www.boltgroup.com
www.boltfashion.com
http://blog.boltgroup.com/

Rapid Prototyping (RP), Additive Fabrication, Direct Digital Manufacturing, 3D Printing are just four of the many different ways to describe the twenty-two -year old industry based on technologies that build parts up, layer by layer.  For the designers new to the technology, the promise is the same: 

Everything drawn 3D CAD can be sent to a 3D Printer.

If only product design was that easy.   When your design process involves rapid prototyping, knowing about the materials and process can improve the outcome of your prototype.

There are two equally false thoughts about prototyping materials:

      • RP parts are super fragile and super expensive – DON’T DROP THE PROTOTYPE!

      • RP materials come from “unobtainium” and are a perfect match for all designs and assemblies

Although the first notion was probably true ten years ago, things have improved dramatically.  Materials are stronger and better mimic the engineering polymers intended for production parts.  Also, lower cost processes have reduced the overhead of many suppliers.  For many processes, ordering a second piece only adds a fraction of the cost of the first.  Since your marketing manager is going to keep the first model, might as well order two so you have one to use to communicate with engineering and manufacturing. 

Of course, the thought that RP machines can make everything is equally false.  If your design includes sheet metal, expect to make some thickness changes before sending the STL file to the model shop.  Many assemblies incorporate multiple materials to optimize the design for strength or weight.  Do not expect one RP material to cover that very wide range of material properties. 

So, what is a designer to do?  First, think about your design and product development goals.  Then pick a prototyping strategy that best meets those goals. 

General design considerations:

  • When Outsourcing

     - Match your design with the right process

          • Small medical device?  SLA

          • Color concept model?  Z Corp

          • Over molded plastic/rubber?  Objet

     - Be realistic about lead times

        • Start to finish with shipping time, outsourcing takes a week

        • Give your supplier a heads up when projects are on the way

      - Understand cost and time drivers        • Material Volume

        • Build Envelope

        • Post Processing

  • In House 3D Printing

     - Know the strengths and limits of your process
       • Modify the design to make post processing easier

       • Know when to use assemblies, and when to manually assemble components

       • Use hollow or sparse builds to minimize costs

   - Understand support materials and post processing

   - Determine how to make the build more efficient.  What drives time? 

Just like most other manufacturing processes, RP appreciates good design.  Simple rules like constant or similar wall thicknesses help make growing and processing the parts much more efficient.  Cantilevered beams often need support, and sheet metal features need to be thickened.  Most importantly, using good design sense and understanding how your parts are made will helpyou make better designs in less time with less money.

Bill Watson, IDSA is the managing partner of Anvil Prototype & Design (www.AnvilPrototype.com), a Z Corporation partner and RP service bureau based in Charlotte, NC. 

How long have you been at Sony/Ericsson?
4 years

What is your official title?
Design Producer, Industrial Design

What products do you work on?
A Sony Ericsson industrial designer works on a range of mobile communication products. It consists of mobile phones, phone accessories, and future concepts of how people can use and experience communication and connectivity.

What do you see as being a benefit working for such a large international company as Sony Ericsson?
Sony Ericsson truly has a global design team that works very closely with each other. Even though we are a large corporation, our design team consists of a core group of 120 designers spread across 8 design studios in over 6 countries across the world. Each project we work on generally involves a global team giving us a real global perspective and inspiration. The benefit of having such a close global team is that we really get new, different, and unique perspectives from each and every designer and design discipline.

As a designer at Sony Ericsson, we get to see the product from the birth of the idea all the way to production and sometimes beyond. As a corporate designer you really see the full process and impacts that your decisions make in the development cycle.

What do you spend most of your design time doing? (sketching, research, computer modeling, etc.)
Most of our time is spent balancing conceptual work and negotiating real-world constraints in development with our engineering counterparts.

In the conceptual phase we do sketching to get basic ideas out onto paper and explore a few thoughts. Most of our work quickly moves into 2D CAD renderings done in Photoshop or Illustrator. Because of the size constraints of a mobile product and the characteristics of its form, 2D CAD renderings are necessary, and an efficient way to quickly express the finite detail, size and shape of an idea.

The rest of the project time is working on creative solutions, with our engineering counterparts, on real world constraints of physics, manufacturing, technology, and the logistics that begin to play into a real product. It's not the fun part of design, but here is where the great ideas translate into great products.

We have surface designers that do most of our heavy 3D modeling and translation into 3D. Each individual industrial designer may create some basic form and block out surfaces to confirm an idea, but we leave the surfacing to those who do it 24-7. We create it, they help us build it right.

Can you break down your time use for a typical project for us? (research x%, sketching x%, form development x%, etc.)
It's hard to say. We do a bit of everything all the time and it usually intertwines with each other. When we are refining one project, we will start concept for another. Between concept and development our time is split approximately 30/70 although the fast pace of the industry and need to get product out often makes the concept % lower. Research and trend analysis is just part of the job and is fit into our time and schedule where it's needed and required.

What changes do you foresee happening in your company's industry in the next few years?
This is an interesting question, the iPhone obviously has completely changed the mobile market and turned it on its backside. Now most manufacturers are playing catch up. Because the economy is down, we'll see less products coming to market in the coming years and many of the companies will collect their creativity and innovation and incubate.
I believe within a few years we'll see a new breath of freshness that will come into the mobile industry when things begin to turn around. The economic turmoil now will force companies to relook at their strategies and core values, and rethink how they want to move forward in innovation.

Now for more of the fun stuff:

What has been your most satisfying "design" moment?
When someone has an honest smile of surprise and wow using a product I designed. Nothing can be a more positive reaction than a true honest smile.

What do you want to design, but haven't yet?
True wearable technology. By bringing the innovation in apparel and fabric technology with communication technology I think there is an untapped new opportunity to make something innovative. This is not just attaching your music player into your jacket, but real merging of communication and apparel.

Who/what is your biggest design influence?
I think it is everyday life and dreaming and thinking of what the future holds for us. Wanting to make something new and or solve an everyday problem is engrained in a designer. My influences also come from personal interests in music, art, and culture.

If you weren't a designer what would you be?
I'm actually not sure, I was on a path towards being a doctor before I found out about industrial design.

Thanks Elliot for your time.

Biography:

Elliott Hsu graduated from University of Illinois with a BFA in Industrial Design. Previous to Sony Ericsson he worked 6 years in design consulting at HLB in Chicago. He's now going on strong on his 5th year at Sony Ericsson here in the Triangle area, and lives with his wife who also is an industrial designer. A two designer household makes for interesting debates and dilemmas when picking out furniture. : )

It appears that our top notch team or professional article writers have left early for the Hollidays.  So in lieu of December’s blog entry I’m sending you all to a good article written by a local designer. 

Thomas Parel states that ID is the least defensible field in product development (and that is why design is powerful).

Read the full article and join the discussion at : http://pareldesign.blogspot.com/2008/12/id-is-least-defensible-field-in-product.html

-ryan

Preface.  I have personally had the pleasure of having Professor Bong Il Jin as my professor during my graduate studies at NCSU.  I can remember him telling me in his broken English that my work was "not bad....but it's not good either."  (and then laughing out loud) To his credit, no other professor has ever caused me to work so hard, but none has ever taught me so much.    –ryan Harrison, IDSA

 

Tips for Perspective Sketch

by Professor Bong Il Jin 

A large portion of Industrial Design students have been agonizing their poor sketching skill. There are two types of students. One is they don’t know what’s wrong with their sketch. The other student doesn't know how to fix their mistakes. The biggest problem is not to communicate with client and even themselves with their sketch. Of course I am not talking about several famous design college students or some gifted students. But I’m talking about average students. After years practicing, only a few students can make it. 

What’s the problem?

In most Ideation classes, instructors used to spend many weeks sometimes semester-long to teach the perspective theory. Sketch with a perspective theory makes student use perspective box. And they rely on it too much. Their sketch is away from freeness. This means the perspective study was not working properly having students sketch well. It is a kind of wasting time and ineffective to students in these days.

Perspective theory was very important to ID students when they didn’t have fantastic 3D programs. Accurate perspective drawn by hand is the only way to communicate their design to their boss and client. But time changed.

I’ve been teaching Ideation class for 13 years in college and getting successful results.

There were two ways to make student sketch well with my experience.
One is to give them big assignments like 50 page sketches or 100 page sketches a week. I used this way for more than 8 years since I had started to teach. But I quitted.
Huge time consuming assignments made students sacrifice their life too much.
In the US, this teaching method caused to lose their part time job and friends.
They memorized objects by repetition. In the end, they can sketch with out looking.

The other is to teach them a different discipline and assignments that I found and understood after many year teaching. As I’ve developed this method for years, now with two page sketch assignments I get the better result than 50 to 100 page sketch assignments. 

To fix their perspective problem, I have student use four different step method, such as ‘Observe’, ‘Understand’, ‘Memorize’ and ‘Sketch’. Select one object and do this process.
My understanding is we do not sketch with looking but memorizing.

If we sketch with our two eyes, information is supposed to come from two different directions. It causes us to sketch always wrong but we don’t know it. 

Develop your eyes and you more information and understanding. Observe your item you select focus to shape, proportion, details, material, texture and color. And try to understand what it is and how it works. It makes you memorize item information easily. 

Start to sketch the object with your memory.
At first stage, you can look at the object sometimes when you don’t remember it.
Next time reduce the time to look.
Please disregard the perspective rules at this time.
Sketch item as it looks. After sketching, put it on the wall and find different and fix it.

Train yourself to memorize all the information from your object with sketching repeatedly. Within several weeks, we will see the big improvement in perspective sketch.

Remember we don’t sketch with looking but with memory.

Bio-Associate professor, Bong Il Jin received BFA, MFA from Hong-ik
University in Seoul, Korea. Special Certificate from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Section Chief designer and Chief designer in Kia Hyundai Motors and Daewoo GM in Korea. He worked at Tandem Design Associate as a Director and designed various products. Since 1994 he has taught ID at several colleges in Korea. Year 2000, he moved to the US and he has been teaching Ideation, Product Design, Furniture Design and Transportation Design in Industrial Design Department of North Carolina State University. He was selected as one of Most Admired ID Instructor in the US 2006 by Design Intelligence'. His students' works have won awards every year since 1995. They were awarded 10 big prizes last year in various domestic and international design competitions.

By Banks C. Talley III, IDSA

            On a recent trip to San Francisco, my wife and I met an animator from Pixar Studios through mutual friends. As we sat down for a Vietnamese meal at a local eatery, I was struck almost immediately by the simple fact that Matt and his wife didn’t give me the usual quizzical look that I get when I tell people what I do to earn a living. “You’re an Assistant Professor of what? Industrial Design? What is that exactly? Do you design factories and other industrial complexes? It’s like engineering right? So, where did you go to school for your engineering degree? Gee Banks, that’s really fascinating!” At this point, the conversation usually turns to some other topic or to some other individual at the table (who majored in something much less confusing like business, math, communications, psychology, etc.) and I am left verbally fumbling around; trying in vain to better explain my chosen profession. Well, Matt and his wife didn’t think that my profession or I were strange at all. “My sister is an Industrial Design major at RISD!” came the reply when I described my current job. We then launched into a long rambling conversation about IPods, Nokia cell phones, Adobe Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, the Volkswagen Bug versus the PT Cruiser, Marcel Wanders, Philippe Starck and Eileen Gray’s furniture. It was truly a dream conversation for a “dyed-in-the-wool” ID geek. It was also quite refreshing compared to the responses I normally get in my home state of North Carolina. In my opinion, Industrial Design is suffering from an identity crisis.

 
           My sudden inclusion and recognition as a member of the professional, creative class made me feel good momentarily, but it also caused me to ponder the larger issue at hand with furrowed brow. Why do so many people not know what Industrial Design is in my home state (or in the rest of the country for that matter)? Do they just not care? Are Californians (as it has long been reported) really just hipper and more knowledgeable about design? Are they truly the arbiters of style? Is everyone in my beloved home state actually provincial (me included)? Is design less prevalent in the South? Are Southerners somehow denied privileges and access to good design (unlike our fashion forward neighbors in New York)? Why is it that the Industrial Design program at North Carolina State University (my alma mater) is in its 51st year and yet when I meet someone at the Harris Teeter (a mere two blocks from the NCSU College of Design) I still get the typical quizzical response when asked about my major in college? “Industrial Design? That’s like engineering right? Oh yes, N.C. State has engineering, you must be an engineer.” Do I need to move to another state, preferably one that is more design literate, just to feel comfortable? Why does it bother me that so many people don’t understand what ID is? Lastly, what the heck can I do about it?

 
           Of course, I realize that there are no easy answers to my questions. It seems fair to say that we do take most of the “everyday objects” that make our lives easier for granted, but what of the people who design these objects?  Industrial Designers are now part of a global workforce and if the number of collegiate Industrial Design programs is any indicator, our numbers keep growing. Maybe an answer can be revealed through history.  Perhaps we have become so removed from the Industrial Revolution historically that people have simply forgotten that there was a time when mass production didn’t exist. Conversely, when I tell some people that I teach Product Design they seem to understand exactly what I am talking about. “Oh Product Design, you mean like IPods and cars?” While I always seek to pay my respects to the godfathers, Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, maybe it is time to revise our name and embrace the future. In our technologically advanced society, is our name (with its historical reference) holding us back? I want everyone to know who we are, what we do and that we are a force to be reckoned with. I mean, we all own and use copious amounts of products. Should we all be called Product Designers? Does this name encompass all that we actually do? Are we showing a blatant lack of respect for the past by not acknowledging it by name?  These are questions that I will continue to ponder and I will consult my ID colleagues for further answers.

 
This is Part I of a two part article.

     

Banks C. Talley III, IDSA received all of his degrees from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1992, he received his Bachelor of Arts in English/Technical Writing, from 1992-1994 he pursued graduate work in Graphic Design and worked as a freelance graphic designer, in 1996 he received a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the School of Design with a concentration in Industrial Design and Art & Design and in 2002 he received his Master of Industrial Design from the newly renamed College of Design. From 1996-1998, he served as the Lighting Designer at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC. In 1998, Talley moved to Washington, DC to work for Design & Production, Inc. an exhibit design and fabrication firm based in Lorton, Virginia. From 2000-2001, Talley worked for D/G Washington (formerly Douglas/Gallagher) a private downtown-based and full-service exhibit design firm. In 2002, Talley served as the Director/Program Coordinator of the NCSU College of Design’s Design Camp program. In 2003, Talley served as a Development Associate for the Wake County chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Since 2004, Talley has been an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC