When business is good for design

Designers and executives need not be like oil and water as Hartmut Esslinger sets out to show in "A Fine Line". This founder of a leading design firm, frog design, shares his views on how designers can and must work with the C-suite

	Title:	A Fine Line
	Author:	Hartmut Esslinger
	Pages:	208pages
	Publisher:	Jossey-Bass
	Price:	$29.95

Hartmut Esslinger is the founder of frog design, a famous design firm behind such products as the Sony Trinitron or Apple’s MacIntosh SE. In A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business, he argues that designers can benefit from executives’ strategic prudence, while executives can profit from designers’ emphasis on sustainable quality.

Esslinger’s professional life has been marked by an insistence that designing must see itself as a strategic profession wedded to business and industry. It follows that he has little sympathy for two kinds of designer. The one designs heedlessly of the manufacturing and financial constraints. The other caters heedlessly to business that produces shoddy, environmentally-unfriendly products.

Esslinger wants designers to be able to think like business managers and he wants business managers to show respect for the designers' attempt to contribute to a product's success.  In such a relationship, as exists at firms such as Esslinger's, design becomes elemental to the strategic process. “Creativity is the new major-driver and a multi-billion dollar segment of the new economic order, “writes Esslinger,” and design is the means by which companies apply creativity strategically to their business purpose.”

Esslinger calls designers who are conversant with technology and business, strategic designers. Strategic designers who work from outside a company are more able to bring a fresh approach than are the designers who work within a company. As insiders these are often overmanaged and underappreciated. Two other classes of non-strategic designers are the artistic designer and the classic designer. The artistic designer creates visual masterpieces which might be short on functionality. Classic designers create more functional products but lack the strategic focus of the strategic designer.

Innovation

To be a strategic designer who helps create successful products there's a need to get to know what makes a company successful. After thirty-five years of work with large companies such as Sony, Apple and Disney, Esslinger has found that most follow some steps in common. He identifies three of these: groundwork, creative collaboration and marketing.  Doing the groundwork means understanding, and then doing, what is needed to market strategically. 

In explanation he cites Apple's formula: create meaningful experiences for your customer, use technology for human benefit, rather than for its own sake, and insist on high-quality. Proper groundwork also means building the right team to do it. This may involve inspiration. Esslinger offers the example of a medium-sized Germany company (part of the Mittlestand) that contrived to make a lowly cafeteria worker part of the groundwork team.  The company correctly intuited that she was the one person who knew everyone else and thus a requisite cog in the wheel of creative collaboration.

The second step is creative collaboration, for which frog has developed an ideation process called frogTHINK. Though not graven in stone, there usually are three stages to the frogTHINK process. In the Alternatives stage, participants start from what they know and explore associated ideas. In the Randomization stage, participants move out of the comfort zone and explore surprising ideas. Finally in the Provocation stage, participants project these ideas to extreme and unexpected conclusions.

Esslinger has a practical exercise that helps people attain the creative mindset: he smashes a teapot and asks participants to make an entirely new object by gluing together the shards. He also insists that the flow of ideas in this process is intermittent and  patience may be required. That's because you don’t get ideas but they come to you. (Put differently, one doesn’t have ideas, ideas have you.) Moreover, remember that ideas come in bursts. Parts of the bursts must then be correlated and composed into a great new strategic design.

In the third step, the strategic design team must factor in the exigencies of marketing. Here the business mindset must supervene and guide the team to design into the financial exigencies, as Esslinger asserts.  One way for the team to do that is by imagining that it will be submitting its design to venture capitalists, as part of a start-up proposal. Design into the answers to the financial questions that venture capitalists typically pose, counsels Esslinger.

One famous designer, Mies van der Rohe, stated that “God is in the details.” Esslinger prefers to think that God is in the implementation. Innovation doesn’t implement itself. Rather, it is the spirited innovation team that makes it happen. To illustrate, his book  renders an account of his work with Lufthansa which heeded and melded, even as it designed, the perspectives of suppliers, flight crews, ground personnel, passengers and airport employees in line with Lufthansa’s goals and business model.

The factory

Esslinger insists on the importance of linking the design office with the factory. Designers need to step out of their studios and onto the factory floor. By way of encouragement he says, “I love factories”. For him, the factory is where design springs to life. Think of design as a musical score with the factory in the role of the orchestra making the score come to life. A lot of brain-power and creative thought is cached in the people working on and around the factory floor. Designers need to think of the factory as a resource rather than a hindrance or irrelevance.

This links to two concepts, smart-sourcing and home-sourcing. Esslinger relates them  to cost-based offshoring and outsourcing. To him, much cost-based offshoring (moving the factory to a foreign country) has failed because companies neglect to take into account the costs associated with operating in a foreign culture (expatriation, cultural misunderstanding…). Outsourcing (buying from a foreign factory) eliminates many of these cultural burdens, but the hidden cost of operating in a  low-cost  environment may be just as onerous (tedious management control, the deleterious effect on home-office morale) .

Outsourcing becomes smart-sourcing when the focus is not on cheap labor but on smart labor. The emphasis here is less on minimizing cost than on benefiting from know-how. Esslinger gives two examples from the computer industry. Apple set up partnerships with Sony, Samsung and Canon to compensate for its own lack of production savvy. More recently the Swiss firm Dreamcom, designer of an ergonomic notebook, partnered with a Taiwanese electronics giant, Winstron, so as to benefit from Winstron’s engineering experience. To drive home the value of smart labor, Esslinger recounts the reaction of a competing notebook manager to the Dreamcom product: “How did you get the Taiwanese to produce such a cool product?” Esslinger’s answer: “Nobody but the Taiwanese could have done it”

Home-sourcing can be a competitive strategy for SMEs. In home-sourcing the smaller firm combines its knowledge of local customers, the know-how of its local work force and the recourse to some globally available components to produce unique products. Though these products are designed for local use, they can often attain success elsewhere. Esslinger offers as an example, Miele, the German white goods manufacturer. It used its German designers to come up with a washing machine that would satisfy a large segment of the German population, the ecologically conscious who want a device that uses as little water, detergent and energy as possible. That machine has met with success in other green-minded parts of the world, such as California.

Esslinger’s dream of marrying design and strategy, sustainability and profitability, leads us back to one of the framers of the modern economy, Adam Smith. Esslinger reminds us that Smith wrote two masterpieces, not just one, and that both should be read. Designers need to remember the lessons of Smith's Wealth of Nations; businesspeople need to return periodically to his Theory of Moral Sentiments.