Murphy’s Hypotenuse: Evolution in Design

By Patrick Murphy

Design is constantly evolving.

Design is the answer to problems that reside different environments, and environments are always in flux. Along with the development of new technology, new markets, new styles, and the ever-changing tastes of the human mind, design adapts to embody and satiate all of these factors.

The design evolution of a product, or family of products, happens at varying speeds, for various reasons, as these products meet the changing circumstances of environments at their respective paces of change.  It can occur very slowly, or not at all, after its initial conception.  Sometimes a product undergoes a handful of design changes rapidly before settling on the holy grail of its being, where it then remains for quite a long time.

Such is the case with the glass CocaCola bottle. After a decade-and-a-half of filling standard “off-the-shelf” bottles with its product, the burgeoning soft drink company commissioned a more unique container.  Designed by glass molder Earl R. Dean of the Root Glass Company, the bottle went from concept sketch to failed prototype to refined prototype to production bottle in about half a year. And the final iteration remains in production—with very little subsequent adaptation—to this day.

There are many other examples of this kind of design evolution, or more accurately, non-evolution. This kind of steadfast resistance to change is usually the mark of a product whose design has been perfected, and is timeless in appeal. Its design may even carry so much equity for its brand that a change to its nature, even if warranted by the advancement of style or technology, would be market suicide. 

Another such example of this “non-evolution” in keeping with a timeless design is the Bialetti Moka, the iconic stovetop espresso maker designed by Italian engineer Luigi De Ponti in 1933.

The chiseled-looking raw aluminum form is still produced by Bialetti under the name “Moka Express,” having undergone such miniscule changes in design as to be nearly indistinguishable from the first edition. It now has a place in the Cooper-Hewitt, the Museum of Modern Art, the London Design Museum, and the London Science Museum.  But unlike most museum “artifacts,” the Moka finds itself gainfully employed, making coffee on millions of stovetops across practically all of Europe and much of the rest of the world.

Most products aren’t so lucky, however.  For every success story of an unassailably perfect design whose existence has spanned decades of endearment, there are oodles of products that haven’t achieved this level of market acceptance.  Thus, the makers of these products find themselves forced to constantly float the river of design fashion, subjected to re-facings, upgrades, and feature impregnation to remain relevant.

And then there are the few products that evolve rapidly for more obscure, less desperate, sometimes completely unnecessary reasons. But it’s their stories that, in my opinion, tend to be far more interesting and much more awesome. In the coming weeks, I’ll share my thoughts on the evolution in design of several different products, starting with one of my favorites, the Slingbox.

Murphy’s Hypotenuse—The Unmistakable Power of Icons (Part One)

by Patrick Murphy

Out of all the artistic expressions I have the privilege to explore in my world of industrial design, there’s nothing that provides the instant gratification of an icon, whether it’s placed on a product or used in marketing applications to sell it.

 In other words, I love a good icon. I’ve recently been creating quite a few icons to further flesh out Trig Innovation’s brand identity for some of our emerging service frameworks, as well as some work for some really innovative clients. In a short time, I’ve become the icon guy around here, and I love that. Here’s a taste of what I call my “Iconfolio” at Trig (barring work still protected under current non-disclosure agreements, of course):

Icons offer the designer their own unique challenge—icon work essentially takes a complex concept and represents it with a small, simple graphic, a graphic that communicates a ton of information in a very concise way. It’s also a great exercise in “stencil techniques,” that is, posterizing an image into just black and white. A lot of icons out there involve multiple colors, shading and even complex gradients—especially with the recent prevalence of mobile device apps. But I generally guide my work with the the basic graphic design rule of “if it doesn’t look good in black and white then it’s too complicated.”

 It’s difficult to create certain forms or scenes using just pure highlighting and pure shading. Working through sculpting some of the more difficult icons I’ve created has undoubtedly made me a better designer though, especially in the realm of fast-action concept sketching. I usually colorize icons later in the process, sometimes with multiple colors, but generating them in black and white imbues them with extreme flexibility and an inherent striking look that can only come from a “stencil” image. Banksy knows what I’m talking about. I’d like to imagine that every icon I make could be tattooed on someone and still look good in 30 years. Karim Rashid clearly has the same mentality about icons, seeing as he has literally done this:

Icon creation is a skill set that I’m glad to have developed, because icons are now, more important than ever, so prevalent in the product and service marketplace. They are important for a couple of very practical reasons, as well as one that’s not so practical.

The first reason is the perceived increase in value that icons can bring to a product or service. While they may not necessarily bring value in the monetary sense, more value in terms of attributes, features, technological advancements, and benefits. Surely if people took their time to make icons for specific features or advantages of their products, they must be something new or innovative, or just plain better, right? Iconizing these elements, like product attributes, features, benefits, and technology advancements, elevates them from a boring regurgitation into something special that deserves buyer investigation.

A package displaying eight icons of a product’s attributes, versus a competitor’s with only three, may automatically register the first product to a buyer as a better choice, regardless of the validity of the comparison. Granted, there is an upper limit to icon quantity, a point of diminishing returns where a manufacturer plasters a package or product page with so many icons that the value of each is compromised in a sea of multitude (of course, this breaking point varies by product type and industry context).While upwards of 10 icons would normally be too much for packaging, on this website for Canon digital cameras it works quite well. Digital cameras compete within a highly-saturated market for technical dominance. The difference of a single feature or product spec can leapfrog a brand offering ahead of a big pack. So, in this case, the more icons the merrier. The vast iconography actually simplifies what would be page upon page of text into a visual summary of what features and technology consumers are obtaining within the product.

Canon also consistently marks this format and layout of its iconography across its entire product range, so that customers can ascertain differences between models quickly and proceed to making a purchase. Many of these attributes, may, in fact, be standard across the variety of digital camera brands, but when Canon displays them in such a compelling way, it appears that their cameras are even more feature-packed.

Part Two of this series will appear on Friday, June 1. Stay tuned!

The Importance of Visual Scribes in Ideation

By Ty Hagler

Some of the best work we do at Trig involves venturing out to companies and leading innovation teams in ideation sessions. I almost enjoy writing about this service as much as I do deploying it on behalf of clients and partners.

There’s almost nothing more exhilarating than being part of early-stage ideation sessions with organizations that you know have the human and financial capital to exploit the best ideas born from them. While the product design and development process as a whole can take months, sometimes years, depending on the industry and the product, great ideation sessions can provide the vision and roadmap for the product development portfolio. The ideation process itself generates multiple options for product managers to choose from as they plan the next several years of development.

From the time I entered the innovation management profession, I have interacted with many other business consultants and think tanks who also conduct ideation sessions, and I've been amazed at how these firms—many of whom are filled with individuals who inspire me in different ways—under-utilize visual scribes in these sessions.

A large component of industrial design education is learning how to communicate effectively through drawing and sketching.  We know from many scholarly critique sessions that great sketches can give ideas a competitive edge, to the degree where a poor idea with an awesome sketch can win out over a great idea that has been crudely drawn. It’s sad, but quite true, just as some companies with inferior products and services ultimately win deals through better salesmanship, marketing, or packaging.

Visual scribes pull from the industrial design discipline to quickly sketch out an idea during an ideation session. The imputed value of sketch quality simply cannot be underestimated, and it must drive us as scribes to ensure that our work outputs during sessions have a proper, balanced level of influence on our audience.  

As scribes, we have to be careful to evenly distribute the quality of our sketches during an ideation session to not overly influence the group's decision-making process. Thus, not only must we strive for a high level of communicative drawing, but we must ensure we maintain the same level of achievement on behalf of each idea expressed, almost as a lab control, so that our constituents can evaluate each idea within its own merit framework.

Great visual scribes are those who listen well and accurately communicate through their sketches, what they hear. If a scribe has done his job correctly, then an ideation team will be able to hold up the sketch as a rallying cry for the idea as they build critical mass buy-in with other teams and eventually across the entire organization. 

Services Innovation: Visual Tools for Change Management

By Ty Hagler

I was recently invited to participate in a very productive ideation session with a global services company to serve as the visual scribe. The experience was certainly rewarding as it was an opportunity to learn from leaders in a completely new industry immersed in a thick vocabulary of shorthand ideas and acronyms. Given my lack of experience in this industry, it was something of a surprise and relief to still be able to make a contribution to the ideation team using principles from design. 

As designers, we understand that ideas can be fragile things, easily molded and shaped, combined with other ideas or discarded in a flash. Often, companies invest heavily in the front end of innovation to unearth great customer insights, wrestle to solve the most pressing challenges and create fantastic ideas, only to see those ideas fail to be implemented due to a disconnect somewhere along the way.  In truth, large companies have an immune system that is very good at repelling new ideas that could change how the existing business operates. If a great idea is to survive long enough to be adopted, design has several tools to strengthen it to fight the cultural antibodies.

The magic of an ideation session itself rests in the fact that complex problems and ideas are best solved by teams with individuals representing many different areas of the company and its customers. When one person expresses half of an idea to solve a key problem, others filter it, interpret, and then re-express the idea through their unique lens to add richness to the idea. As this ideation process goes forward toward an elegant solution, the team captures complex information in a condensed form – similar in scale to the complexity of information that shapes the company’s stock price.  

Unlike the stock price, however, a great idea at this stage has little ability to shape behavior in the company. If it isn’t accurately recorded and incubated, the idea dissolves as easily as the team dispersing to go home for the day. It was at this point where I found my skills as a designer making an impact. As a ‘visual scribe,’ I sought to capture the gestalt of the idea through rough sketches of the core elements of an idea. For some of the more elaborate ideas, it took 2-3 sketches before the team was satisfied that, yes, they fully captured the idea. Later when each team was presenting their work to the room, I was thrilled to see some of them repeatedly reference the sketches as a tool to succinctly express the idea. In some cases, we used creative metaphors to quickly express abstract concepts and their benefits to the user – perhaps sowing the seeds for future advertising campaigns.    

As the internal innovation team strategizes how to shape and implement the fruits of this ideation session, a long-observed principle from design will apply. Given the nature of the ideation session, the ideas were presented in a rough format – which invited lively discussion from the room. Similarly, rough concept sketches invite more feedback and engagement from others, creating a broader sense of ownership and buy-in to the idea. By contrast, a tightly detailed photo-realistic rendering of the same concept, while it may be beautiful in execution, appears much more static in nature – something that can only be accepted or rejected. 

In the context of change management and the socialization of ideas, design teaches us that the stylistic presentation of an idea can impact the psychology of those cultural antibodies that are predisposed to reject change. First, it is through accurate use of visual tools that the gestalt of the idea can be more quickly communicated, avoiding rejection from an ancillary feature that proves to be a red herring.  Second, stylistic choices can have a powerful signaling effect on whether the recipient of the idea is invited to help shape its success or to make a Go/No-Go decision. Implementing innovation within large corporations is certainly a challenging task that involves a high degree of emotional intelligence, to which design tools can improve the chances for success.

Trig Innovation Announces Launch of SimpliciKey

New Remote Control Electronic Deadbolt Hits Market

May 3, 2011(Durham, NC) — Trig Innovation, a Research Triangle, NC-based product development and design company with expertise in the home improvement products industry, announces the recent launch of an award-winning client product, the SimpliciKey™ Remote Control Electronic Deadbolt.

The launch of SimpliciKey™, winner of the 2010 designSPARK award for industrial design, marks the firm’s latest achievement in delivering innovative product solutions for home improvement. As an alumnus of Home Depot’s corporate innovation team, Hagler has seven years of experience designing new products for the industry, through his first company, the industrial design firm Studio Hagler, and the recently launched full-suite innovation management consulting firm, Trig Innovation. The electronic door lock system, launched by SimpliciKey, LLC of Herndon, Va., features a remote control key fob similar to automobile remote controls, as well as a keypad and traditional manual key option. Hagler and his team provided a number of services to SimpliciKey, LLC during the product’s development; including concept sketches, renderings, 3D CAD sculpting and mechanical design, user experience mapping, rapid prototyping, user manual design, packaging design, and trade show support.

D’Vell Garrison, Vice President of Marketing at SimpliciKey, LLC, expressed his gratitude to Hagler for the results of the company’s maiden voyage in consumer product development.“We really appreciate the collaborative approach taken by Ty and his team,” stated Garrison.“They provided an impressive range of tools to enhance our team through the many twists and turns of developing a new product and launching a brand. We are so proud that our first consumer product is such a thing of beauty—a lock that is worthy of placement on the doors of fine homes across the country.”

According to Hagler, SimpliciKey™ stands out from its competitors due to the enhanced convenience of the remote control and the sleek design developed with the residential front door in mind. “SimpliciKey™ is entering an increasingly crowded market for electronic locks, but I think homeowners will find that this is the best total value product available,” said Hagler. “The safety, security, and convenience of this product—particularly with the remote control aspect—really appealed to many different customers, from young professionals, to busy families, retirees, and people with assisted living needs, making this product a truly universal design. We spent a lot of time making SimpliciKey™ simple to use, but powerful in its application. This product has the potential to help a lot of people, and we are excited to have been a part of its creation.”

The SimpliciKey™ Remote Control Electronic Deadbolt is available for purchase at www.homedepot.com or at www.SimpliciKey.com.

About Trig Innovation

Trig Innovation is a Research Triangle, NC-based innovation management consulting firm dedicated to delivering a toolkit of strategies and expertise for the development of new products and services for inventors and corporate product and brand teams. With practice areas focusing on the development and branding of products for the home improvement, medical device, and housewares industries, Trig Innovation draws upon a well of leading experts in industrial design, intellectual property law, mechanical engineering, and marketing strategy to bring new client products to market. Led by Principal Ty Hagler, a seasoned product developer from his start in marketing and product development at The Home Depot in 2004, Trig Innovation services clients throughout the United States from its base in Durham, NC.