A FOCUS ON USE

Mechanical Engineering, Feb 2008 by Thilmany, Jean

SOMETIMES IT SEEMS AS IF INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS AND ENGINEERS ARE WORLDS APART, BUT WHEN THEY WORK TOGETHER, PRODUCTS WILL FIT THE PEOPLE WHO USE THEM.

Search the Web enough and you can find anything, including a site devoted to poorly designed products. Called Bad Designs (www. baddesigns.com), the site is dedicated to outing products that, according to its author, Michael Darnell, haven't been created with their human users in mind.

In a recent entry, Darnell, a usability engineer at Microsoft, writes that though his cellphone displays the time, checking it involves a small annoyance because a pop-up message occludes the numbers for a couple of seconds each time he lights the display. He offers a simple design solution: Make the pop-up a little smaller.

Darnell, of course, isn't alone in his everyday frustrations. We can all come up with examples of our own.

In the past several years, however, more and more companies have begun making concerted efforts to design their products for the humans who actually use them. That means studying how people interact with products and technology, and designing products that at best facilitate, and at least don't hinder, that interaction.

Products have to meet several criteria. To have wide market appeal, they need to be sleek, stylish, almost sexy. Companies want to tout them as innovative. What sometimes can be overlooked, as Darnell points out, is that they also can be made easier to use-the better to serve the people that they are made for.

According to engineers and others at the forefront of product development, to do the job right requires a collaboration involving design engineers, industrial designers, manufacturing engineers, and a number of other players, like marketing people, all of whom have important knowledge that needs to influence a design.

How can engineers and industrial designers best work toward innovative design that brings the human into the equation? If you ask Bill Dresselhaus, who thinks about this kind of thing for a living, he will answer: Focus on the product development process itself.

It may sound simple, but it's a rare practice in companies today, he said. Dresselhaus, chief executive of the consulting firm Dresselhausgroup of Clackamas, Ore., helps companies implement product development processes for themselves.

Ensuring close cooperation between the industrial designers, who shape the external package, and engineers, who design the workings inside, isn't always easy. We spoke to experts, who told us that, to find their way to innovative products, companies must step up their focus on product design and strengthen the link between industrial design and engineering. They said there is even software that can help strengthen the bond.

Companies like Trek Bicycle Corp. and Empire Level Manufacturing Corp. have developed practices that foster innovative, human-centered product development.

According to a couple of experts, the product-development process itself needs to be taught and emphasized in both undergraduate and graduate programs.

Schooled on the Subject

Dresselhaus should know about innovative product development. He worked at then-fledgling Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., and followed that up with a stint at InFocus Corp. of Wilsonville, Ore., which makes projectors for computers, VCRs, and DVD players. As a consultant, he's seen hair-raising examples of products flawed by poor collaboration among the key players-industrial designers, design engineers, and the manufacturing crew.

"For me and for a lot of my colleagues in the product development business, we're constantly shocked at how badly American companies do in product development when it's not that hard a process," he said.

From his files, he pulled one story of his work for a never-to-be-named successful company that puts out a well-known fine of products. Executives at this business had such problems coming up with new products and seeing them to market that they called him in. Dresselhaus said he quickly isolated one problem. Upper managers didn't exactly get how the product development process itself worked. They weren't sure how to usher an idea through design, engineering, and manufacturing.

"I was shocked. They were still struggling with a process that had been worked out for 20 or 30 years now," he said.

It was this company's practice that marketing and business people kicked off the design cycle by deciding upon a product that, Dresselhaus said, was often less than stellar.

"If you haven't done homework at the beginning, then when the engineers and designers get the design, they're going to find all those problems not found in the front and it will slow everything down," he said.

He sees this kind of flailing all the time, he said. He puts it down to upper managers who quite often have a background in business rather than product design. Many such managers hold master's degrees in business administration. And M.B.A. programs are known to stress the financial rather than the product development aspect of management, Dresselhaus said.