r+d

I guess it had to happen. Someone finally wrote an entire book about the phone book. Leave no stone unturned, right? Well as it turns out, there's a great lesson in the history of the phone book for innovators. When asked about innovations that changed the world, most folks conjure up thoughts of things like the light bulb, telephones, cars, etc. But how about the lowly phone book? Actually, it was pretty amazing - primarily for the cultural change it symbolized and helped usher in.

From the article at Reason:

Phone books provided a crucial element to the system: intrusiveness. While many American cities had been compiling databases of their inhabitants well before the phone was invented, listing names, occupations, and addresses, individuals remained fairly insulated from each other. Contacting someone might require a letter of introduction, a facility for charming butlers or secretaries, a long walk.

Phone books eroded these barriers. They were the first step in our long journey toward the pandemic self-surveillance of Facebook. “Hey strangers!” anyone who appeared in their pages ordained. “Here’s how to reach me whenever you feel like it, even though I have no idea who you are.”

Its immediate effect was that it facilitated commerce. For businesses, phone directory advertising would evolve into a crucial business tool. It reached the same mass audiences that newspaper and magazine advertising did, but it was cheaper, more persistent, easier to manage: Place one ad and you got a steady stream of inquiries all year long. For consumers, phone directory advertising was an even bigger boon. It gave them a comprehensive overview of the choices that were available to them for any given product or service, an efficient way to comparison shop. It made commerce more accessible and thus more competitive.

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Filed under // Amazon Facebook culture phone book privacy

Valuing a design decision

As their production costs rise to meet those of rivals, Hyundai is turning to design to generate differentiation from the crowd. However, as is the case so many times, designers are struggling to overcome some hard-baked manufacturing traditions.

From the WSJ:

Inside Hyundai, the designers battled a tradition that gave engineers and factory-process experts the final say in product design. In one recent instance where designers won out at Hyundai, the new Sonata has a thin line of chrome that stretches from the headlights along the hood and top of both doors to the back window. Keeping that lined up in production is a challenge for factory workers and, as a result, engineers resisted it, say company officials.

Now I don't know a thing about car design, but I've been in this same spot in the application development realm more times than I care to remember. However, I've found that one of the keys to being persuasive in these situations is to ensure that the effect of a design decision is measurable if at all possible. Don't just recommend something that's harder to produce, create a plan to ensure its value can be tested and proven. This makes the next conversation you have with that development team much easier (assuming your design was a success).

Benchmarks/accepted research, multivariate testing, usability testing and other persuasive market research techniques are the way to go here as long as you've baked time into the development process to accomodate performing the test and making adjustments from your learnings . It really depends on your specific product and application. The point is, you need data to back up your design decisions or you'll never effect meaningful change toward the acceptance of your design decisions.

In Hyundai's designers' case, it sounds like they really went to the mats for this chrome strip. I'd be curious to know how they are going to show that this strip was meaningful to the market success of the car. Even if that were the only change to the car, you'd still have trouble with making an apples to apples comparison because of the larger macro-economic issues (global recession, etc) at play. But again, I know nothing about car design. All I know is that you have to be able to prove a design attribute's value if you want to make real progress against an entrenched, legacy culture or process.

All of that said, I'm rooting for the design team. They seem to have a clear idea for what they want to accomplish and are crafting an assertive design vision.

In all three vehicles, strong lines emanate from the front center in a way that's meant to represent the aerodynamic flow of an object in motion, a concept the company's designers call "fluidic sculpture." "We want to create some provocative designs," says Oh Suk-geun, Hyundai's chief designer. "We're not going to design clean and simple shapes. We want to say something." By the middle of next year, Mr. Oh says, "We will have a certain face, a DNA."

Filed under // culture design transformation

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Valuing a design decision