Design's strategic role at Herman Miller

Design Management Review, Spring 2004 by Beckwith, Deanne

This is a company admired 'round the globe for its visionary thinking, creative product development, and operational excellence. Don Goeman, vice president of design and development, elaborates on designs role in this success. His conversation with Deanne Beckwith covers many topics-from innovation and the search for new ideas to the role of designers, the make-up of design teams, and the management of the design process.

Herman Miller has consistently delivered design leadership, as well as business leadership, worldwide and is much admired for its visionary thinking, creative product development, and operational excellence. This position of respect has been earned in large part due to its design innovations. What has sustained that capability over so many years?

Herman Miller's design and development processes have always been based on a problem-solving approach. Throughout the history of the company, there has been a proclivity to engage talented designers, who are constantly assimilating and observing change in our world, and translating their instincts about it into problem-solving and provocative designs. As an organization, we are naturally drawn to designers with a passion for purposeful creativity and invention-who are naturally curious, often conducting their own design research, and who provoke us to think in new ways. Even our R&D capability is geared to plug into this formula of externally provoked vision, with internal development strength to achieve whatever's asked for.

Where does that design leadership come from?

Design leadership at Herman Miller comes with a sense of the importance of preserving its history, while striving to always look at the world afresh. It's a matter of maintaining the balance between creativity and discipline.

Last year, Herman Miller won the National Design Award for product design from the Smithsonian's CooperHewitt, National Design Museum.1 On receiving the award, our CEO and chairman, Mike Volkema, noted that "the company is fortunate to be built upon a heritage that puts the human being at the very center of our research-based, problem-solving design." The jury examined not only our products, but also the design of Herman Miller's buildings and publications.

Recently, on the television show Lou Dobbs Tonight, author and business guru Tom Peters claimed that the past three decades have actually seen very little true innovation. He argued that "in order to create a new future, we have to have the courage to give up the old." How does Herman Miller address the conditions of change?

Herman Miller has never been afraid to set reference points in response to change. In fact, in most areas of product design and application, we've innovated through design to lead our whole industry. George Nelson's view, in the 1960s, that "design is a response to social change" is as true today as it was then. The basic knitting of our process is to research and understand change on many levels and from multiple perspectives and vantage points-then to see and think about the areas of life or work that aren't keeping pace with change. That's where we find problems to solve. We enlist a special, external creative voice to give us a spark in response to the problem. Then all we have to do in R&D is execute to the essence of that creative vision. I know that sounds oversimplified, but it's the essence of how we innovate, and designers play a key role in that process. We've followed that process with some good success and innovation, all through the three decades you allude to when you quote Tom Peters.

What is the relationship between the company and its design resources? How did that pattern get established?

There are a variety of relationships that exist between the internal organization and the external design network. For designers who are new to us, it's a challenge that grows with each successive contact. Designers are likely to know Herman Miller from our brand and our impact upon the awareness and importance of design in business strategy. They have high hopes and great expectations that a relationship can grow and flourish, almost past a point of reasonable expectation for outcomes and possibilities. Designers who have long-standing relationships with our company seem to value those relationships like a covenant. They have more routine interactions and connectivity, on a host of issues and perspectives, with the company leadership. Then there are relationships here and there along that spectrum. We pride ourselves in being as adaptive as possible to the nuances and capabilities of our designer partners, who are incredibly diverse.

There's a rich history of how all that started, with DJ. DePree and with designers whose intellect and capabilities crossed over disciplines, such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Gilbert Rhode, and others. They brought special insights and passion for the purity of design vision and execution at Herman Miller. These legends were totally uninhibited in their enthusiasm for problem solving and views of the world at large. More recently, Herman Miller has evolved similar relationships with such key designers as Bill Stumpf, Don Chadwick, Ayse Birsel, Eric Chan, and Jeff Webber.