r+d

Burden and Cook added some clever design solutions to control the traffic flow and minimize catastrophes. The subtlest, says Burden, are lane-dividing medians on the tiny roadways that taper to a point from the bottom to the top edge on straightaways, but remain fully vertical in curves. The reason: braking. When the cars enter a curve, the walls of the medians touch with rims of their wheels and the friction slows them down; when they come out of the curve, the tapered medians don't touch the wheel rims anymore, allowing the cars to pick up speed again on straightaways and keep the flow moving swiftly. When they reach the bottom, magnets in the track catch on and pull them back up a slope to the top like a roller coaster, where they are released once again to gravity's pull.

Great find from kottke on how our taste acts as an long-term reference guide for designers as they progress in skill and talent

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

Matt at 37Signals dug this quote up out of a post on Cult of Mac. It recounts John Sculley's meeting with Steve Jobs in which Steve described his meeting with Edwin Land, the inventor/ founder of the Polaroid camera:

Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”

And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.” He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?”

Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed — it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery. 

I think the exchange is outstanding on so many levels, not the least of which in the way it quietly denigrates customer research, particularly customer research, for the purposes of breakthrough products or services. For incremental change, it's great. You're polling the audience for feature enhancements. That's right in the market research wheelhouse. But when it comes to breakthrough change . . . as Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

For revolutionary change, you need someone, or a team of people, who not only understand the specific value denials that need to be addressed but who also have the creative prowess and technical expertise to engineer the right solution. But for people who can do this, people who have been tinkerers and inventors their whole lives, it's not as hard as it might sound. They've been working on turning ideas into real things for years. It's just a part of who they are.

They just know how to make the right thing because they've done it before. Even if it's new to the world, they can see it plain as day right in front of them. Those products have always been there, waiting on their moment to be discovered. And once discovered, all that's left is the small matter of breathing life into them and polishing them for inspection by the world.

image via

Data-driven design is "hill-climbing," a well-known algorithm for optimization. Imagine standing in the dark in an unknown, hilly terrain. How do you get to the top of the hill when you can't see? Test the immediate surroundings to determine which direction goes up the most steeply and take a step that way. Repeat until every direction leads to a lower level.

But what if the terrain has many hills? How would you know whether you are on the highest? Answer: you can't know. This is called the "local maximum" problem: you can't tell if you are on highest hill (a global maximum) or just at the top of a small one.

When a computer does hill climbing on a mathematical space, it tries to avoid the problem of local maxima by initiating climbs from numerous, different parts of the space being explored, selecting the highest of the separate attempts. This doesn't guarantee the very highest peak, but it can avoid being stuck on a low-ranking one. This strategy is seldom available to a designer: it is difficult enough to come up with a single starting point, let alone multiple, different ones. So, refinement through testing in the world of design is usually only capable of reaching the local maximum. Is there a far better solution (that is, is there a different hill which yields far superior results)? Testing will never tell us.

Here is where creative people come in. Breakthroughs occur when a person restructures the problem, thereby recognizing that one is exploring the wrong space. This is the creative side of design and invention. Incremental enhancements will not get us there.

As someone who occasionally dabbles in design, I've always wanted a reference chart like this for international designs. [via flowingdata]

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.

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."

Throughout history design as a verb, also known these days as design Thinking, has created things of enormous value to humanity. The Bill of Rights, the Aravind Eye Care System, Medecins Sans Frontières, and the Marshall Plan will never show up in a Design Within Reach catalog. And yet each of these amazing achievements of humanity was designed. Apple, a company justifiably known for its design, must be applauded for the way it lets its designers and engineers design things to the hilt. But how Apple has created and captured shocking amounts of market value in the music (iTunes + iPod) and telecommunication (iPhone) industries is due as much to skillful systems engineering and infrastructure development as it is to compelling aesthetics.

Success has many parents, and good design is only one of them. For every success like the iPod, there are scores of beautiful market offerings that failed because no one bothered to think about how to manufacture, deliver, sell, support, and retire them in ways that met people's needs.