Bob Morris on Design Is How It Works: A Book Review

Design Is How It Works: How the Smartest Companies Turn Products into Icons
Jay Greene
Portfolio/Penguin Group (2010)

Jay Greene observes, “effective design in the twenty-first century goes well beyond creating an object that might one day go on display at MoMA. Design isn’t merely about making products aesthetically beautiful. Design today is about creating experiences that consumers crave. The look and feel of a product is table stakes – it can forge the beginning of an emotional bond with customers. The best products and services must deliver singular experiences unobtainable anywhere else. The smartest designs address needs consumers never knew they had.” The challenge, then, is to design products and services that will create experiences that consumers crave.

Throughout his lively narrative, Green focuses on eight exemplary companies (Porsche, Nike, LEGO, OXO, REI, Clif Bar, Ace Hotels, and Virgin Atlantic) and devotes a separate chapter to each. However different these companies may be in most other respects, all of them share a number of common characteristics: There is a total commitment to the design process at all levels and in all areas of the enterprise; bold and counterintuitive but prudent and frugal experimentation is constant within an environment that cherishes each “failure” as a precious learning experience; C-level executives embrace the design process, “trusting their gut and their employees as much as they trust all the data they receive from their business.”;  there is continuous observation of current and prospective customers’ real-world behavior with a rigor of a world-class anthropologist; and designers fully participate in the earliest stage of product development, “rather than getting called in at the end to put a fancy glass on a new product just before it goes to market.”

Here is one extended excerpt, selected from more than 100 that caught my eye:

“It may sound counterintuitive, but LEGO found that design, at least within its walls, thrives with some constraints. That might send chills up the spines of some in the design world. The idea of fencing in designers, forcing them to play in a confined space, runs counter to the notion that design needs to be set free. But the component limits gave designers just enough direction to come up with some of the company’s most successful products to date.”

Previously, LEGO managers had given designers free rein to come up with ever more imaginative new directions. And they took it. “By 2004, the number of components had exploded, climbing from about 7,000 to 12,000 in just seven years. Of course, supply costs went through the roof too.” And profits plunged.

Once the LEGO Innovation Model was formulated and restraints were in place, however, design costs were reduced 55% and sales increased 42% during the next four years. Paal Smith-Meyer runs LEGO’s New Business Group and acknowledged to Greene, “If you put guiding principles in place, you empower people to make the right decision.” Greene adds, “And remember, he’s a designer.”

I wholeheartedly agree with Jay Greene that in months and years to come, human experiences will be of increasingly greater importance to purchase decisions. Design can guide companies to create the experiences that consumers crave. For that reason, I presume to suggest that the “intersection” to which he refers is – or at least should be – an integration of business and design in ways and to an extent that they become interdependent, if not interchangeable.

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out recently published books such as Roger Martin’s The Design of Business, Tim Brown’s Change by Design, Roberto Verganti’s Design Driven Innovation, and Thomas Lockwood’s Design Thinking as well as two “classics” co-authored by Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman a while ago, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm (2001) and The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization (2005).