Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin (Amazon link), reinvents work by challenging everyone to be an “Artist” now! (Check out the Linchpin manifesto graphic above for a gist!) This is something most designers should already do well, and then again for some of you maybe do better?

Now, if the man on the street is encouraged to work with passion and artistry, how is a designer, whose work is about passion and artistry, going to do one better?

In a recent interview on the local Chinese CCTV, Chen Dongliang, Director of the Beijing Industrial Design Center, has highlighted the tremendous economic value of Industrial Design to China’s economy.

The output value of industrial design in Beijing reached 80 billion yuan in 2008. Now around 250-thousand employees are working for nearly 20-thousand design companies in the city. Beijing is also expanding technology service and high-end manufacturing industries, both of them can help boost the industrial design sector.

That’s just in 2008! While the job definition of an Industrial Designer in China is pretty broad, even if we discount their statistics, it is still a lot of people and money.

What is more interesting is their next set of statistics.

The global financial crisis has made more and more companies realize that it’s not sustainable to depend on cheap and low-end products. They must think more about added value. The central government has also called for more attention on industrial design, pledging to change “Made in China” to “Invented in China”.

Chen said, “Industrial design is the key point of the value chain. Figures show that in Britain, 100 pounds of investment in design can yield 225 pounds of output. According to our survey, in China, one yuan investment could bring 13 yuan of output. This is on average. The contribution rates are different in different industries.”

Those are some impressive numbers! If we consider these statistics as ratios, we can get a good insight on the amount of value-add a design investment can give to a product.

In detail we have:

In the UK, Design’s output is $1 invested is to $2.25 British Pounds.

In China it is $1 to $13 Yuan.

Of cause these are averages and possibly skewed, and I believe when we start bringing in buying power and exchange rates the numbers start to change. Regardless, this is something to ponder about when you next have to convince a client if he or she should invest in design.

Anyone else have some good statistics on the how much ROI you can get from investing in design?

Our industrialized economy, founded on mass manufacturing and economies of scale spurred by consumerism, is the greatest enemy of remarkable products.

Of course many products will come close, in fact many will be hailed as fantastic or even great, but the truly remarkable will be few and far between.

People striving to create awesomely remarkable products can do so because it is actually quite straightforward. Unfortunately it rarely happens, as making remarkable products is a constant uphill battle against the basic machinery that makes it all happens.

Lets take a look and see why.

1) Manufacturing bland
The whole objective of mass manufacturing is to get economies of scale when you manufacture large volumes of product. So what does this means?

You build standardized products with as many common parts as possible. Or take this to the next level by making products with as many off the shelf components as possible. Take a look at the computer industry and you can see this glaring problem. Pretty much everything looks the same and differentiation ends up being very superficial.

2) Race to the bottom
One of the big advantages of economics of scale is a product made as cheap as possible by a repetitious and standardized process. Why is this important?

It is a big race to the bottom in terms of price. Contract manufacturers are pressured to reduce their cost by ensuring pricing efficiency and sufficiency. Products are built to a level of specification that most consumers are willing to pay. This is then balanced off with the cost and margin a brand is willing to accept.

This is to avoid situations, for example, where groups of people will not be interested to pay more for, say, a mobile phone with camera when all they need is a straight forward phone.

So in a product creation process like this, why then anyone go the extra mile for an awesome function or spec when it will be just considered a nice to have or not appeal to the market majority?

3) Products that do too much
On the other end of scale from the previous point, designers often get sucked into creating products, designs, forms, or shapes etc. that try to appeal to as many people as possible.

In essence, we end up with products that try to be everything and the kitchen sink. This is also often comes as a response to unfocused marketing stories that try to unsuccessfully satisfy as many consumers’ needs as possible.

4) We threw out the baby with the bath water

Gordan Ramsey said (via Contrast):

“It doesn’t matter how amazing the steak is, if it’s served on a cold plate it’s crap. If it’s served with a dull knife it’s crap. If the gravy isn’t piping hot, it’s crap. If you’re eating it on an uncomfortable chair, it’s crap. If it’s served by an ugly waiter who just came in from a smoke break, it’s crap. Because I care about the steak, I have to care about everything around it. “

These days it is getting extremely difficult for designers to manage the entire design development process because organizations decided (about 10+ years ago) not be vertically integrated and outsourced much of their (lower value) down stream development processes. This helped organizations reduce overheads, costs and increase efficiency, especially if the process moved outhouse was manufacturing.

The net effect of contract manufacturing or contract “everything” for that matter, is the loss of control. It is hard, not impossible, to regain this control and ensure the integrity of a design solution through out the development process, but you need extremely passionate, dedicated and persistent team that don’t come a dime a dozen

———-

So I hope we can now see that the environment we design products in, leans towards encouraging the creation of watered down products with little innovation and poor differentiation.

What do we do now?

I’m not asking you to go against industrialization or the contract manufacturing process as it has many benefits, what we need to change is our mindsets and decide if we are happy with acceptable products that just meets everyone’s requirements, or strive to create remarkable products that go beyond what people expect and accept that it will appeal to fewer people.

If you ever had a doubt about designing fewer, focused, but exceptional products. Check out this quote by Apple’s COO Tim Cook (via Seth Godin):

“This is the most focused company I know of, am aware of, or have any knowledge of… We say no to good ideas every day.” Cook then pointed out to analysts that every single product the company makes would fit on the single conference table in front of him. “And we had revenue last year of $40 billion.”

Ahh…is it not great how design can do so much more when design is doing less?

A Lifehacker reader, frustrated with every headphone wire management solution in the market, decided to design his own dead simple solution that I dare say rivals any professionally designed consumer solution! I do wonder why designers can’t seem to get away from reinterpreting the dog bone, fish bone or donut?

Charles Kim found that by reusing a vinyl badge clip, (found on those old conference badge tags) he could keep his headphone wires cleanly wrapped up, knot and tangle free. Furthermore, this metal clip also allows the device to be attached to objects like a shirt or bag, so that the wrapped headphones can be easily accessible if necessary.

What a wonderfully clean and simple solution to an age-old problem! Has it been that long since portable music players were introduced?

Via: Lifehacker and Instructables.

A colleague recently shared with me an interesting product proposition he purchased. It’s not really a product proposition as such, but an interesting mix of different electronic components slapped together in a “why did I not think of that” manner. It was purchased for under USD $50 from the back streets of Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po electronics district.

This sound system, has a simple pair of unadorned speakers, shocking neon colored LCD display, volume dial, and a radio antenna. What is interesting is the built in MP3 player that plays media from a ubiquitous SD Card or USB thumb drive slot housed on the top. Best of all this MP3/USB player cum radio, can be operated by the power mains or by its built in rechargeable battery. What more would you need for a portable entertainment system?

This product will likely not win any beauty contests or design awards. However if this was hacked together by an entrepreneurial electronic shop owner, there must be a market for it. Strangely, I can’t think of any brands that actually offer a product similar to this. (Please let me know if you know of any?) I wonder why is that so, as I would imagine (research data aside) it would be a quick sales kill. Then again this product would not be something consumer research will tell you. It probably took observation and a good understanding of consumer behavior and purchasing habits, something a shopkeeper would be in a perfect position to obtain.

What I also find particularly refreshing, is the lack of serious graphic user interfaces we have come to expect in such digital media players. I believe the MP3 playback in this device runs in a folder/alphabetical order. These days the man on the street has come to a level of computer literacy, that dragging and dropping MP3 files on to a SD Card or USB Stick is not an issue.

It is interesting to ponder what happens to high tech electronics when they become commodities.