Business and management literature generally expresses understanding and acceptance of the truth that industrial design drives innovation. The final ten years have observed many companies thrive that have achieved design excellence – just a few of the more prominent examples include Apple, Palm, and BMW. However, understanding how to attain design excellence, and specifically how to connect industrial design and other corporate disciplines, remains unclear. The literature usually cites exchanging products attractiveness or desirability, but how do one realise such attributes? Even for the oft-referenced iPod aesthetics represent the cream on the surface of the design story and only certainly one of a deal of parameters.
The corporate world needs to explore just how to employ industrial design as an instrument to deal with such specific business needs as establishing relevant product specifications. The textbook says a whole set must be established before starting a product development programme. After 20 years in the market, I’ve yet for a whole set of specifications before starting on a new product. Typically someone provides a short brief, but it becomes history when the very first design deliverables come in. Establishing product specifications using a rational, analytical process never captures the entire picture.
The industrial design stage generally serves as the phase when different disciplines consider the product for initially holistically and begin to keep in touch with one another. The various functions see the effects of some components of their brief, start to know the trade-offs, and realise the implications of constraints from another disciplines — the implications of which often remain murky before designer puts something tangible on the table. Such design deliverables become a common language where finance, research and development, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and management can start to talk and interact.
A window for complete and reliable specifications beforehand opens only in the redesign cycle of a preexisting product – added features, updated aesthetics, better performance, and implementation of improvements centered on customer comments – clearly a small product development stage, not disruptive innovation. In an innovative situation, an iterative process is needed in the holistic industrial design phase to be able to get all parties into productive exchanges about that product. In fact, the majority of the merchandise specifications for some innovative projects are established and finalised throughout the industrial design phase, but rarely the designers get credit even though the right product specifications probably remain the key success factor for a new creation.