Addressing the why not the what, Smart Design transcends brand, received wisdom and status quo to create new paradigms in usability in which objects are the conduit to experience.
If good design is often overlooked in improving our day-to-day lives, then static, or even bad design may have escaped a similar scrutiny in not really being very helpful at all.
Consider surgical scrubs, those professional pyjamas cut from the same cloth and standard size: Mens XL. Bandages that demand ambidexterity to self-apply and OSFA thermometers that service both ends of the human scale unchanged in shape since mercury was banned. Even stationery with flying file tabs that refuse to remain well, stationary; kitchen utensils that can’t get a grip on themselves; spatially challenged taxi interiors and extremely inconvenient public rest rooms.
Dan Formosa is a founding partner of international design consultancy Smart Design whose mandate is to “design for people not things.” Designing for and around human interaction and behaviours, the Smart method speaks up for people in speaking to the DNA of design in unexpected - maybe long overdue - ways. In the field of product and industrial design research, they are wise receivers forgoing set plays and protocols, focusing instead on directives from the sidelines.
Smart Design, for the eponymous company, is about mapping mood and mien, creating emotional connections between person and product through design and to do that they explore the very essence of who we are, from gender to habitat, age stage, ability and handicap, through biomechanics, ergonomics and cognitive psychology; asking the right questions in design research that is user focused on any and every stage of our quotidian lives, whatever they may be. It’s less about pushing the envelope for momentum’s sake and more concerned with who’s using the postal system and why.
Originally founded in 1980 by recent college graduates Dan Formosa, Davin Stowell, and Tom Dair with Tam Thompson and Tucker Viemeister, Smart Design now has offices in New York, San Francisco and Barcelona evolving a multidisciplinary practice that employs over 120 design practitioners and has grown to become one of the world’s leading consultancies. Fired by the de rigueur radicalism of the times, they put their idealism to work through design, taking the ethos and transforming it into tangible solutions for a range of needs.
Whether originating brand new design or reinventing an existing model to exact simple makeovers with extreme results, the mindset has not changed. It’s a goal-based philosophy that identifies a problem or unfulfilled need, converses, observes and examines, incubating ideas out of left field that address design challenges for the everyday through the deployment of smart design solutions.
A recipient of dozens of awards for successful innovations, a consultant and a keynote speaker on design research, methodologies and social responsibility around the world, Dan also has a PhD in Ergonomics and Biomechanics, which informs his process to as large a degree. His work has been widely exhibited and is in permanent museum collections around the world, and he and Agnete Enga, (Femme Den/Smart Design) were even featured in a documentary ‘Objectified’ which discusses our relationship with the manufactured environment and its design auteurs.
Since his first foray into practice as part of the team that designed IBM’s first PC in 1977, Dan has had a hand in redressing scores of the familiar foibles that we simply take for granted as well as prototypes for the bold and the new. Creating a new counter-culture for Corning Ware. A best practice Band-Aid for Johnson & Johnson that gives the finger to conical bunching and can be applied one-handed; the MOMA-awarded OXO Good Grips line - re-hafting utensils for arthritic hands but universal in appeal; surgical wear that accounts for the 75% of women that comprise operating theatre staff; self-administering syringes that speak directly to the user who really may not want to take his/her medicine; a satellite radio interface that became the US standard, helping Hewlett Packard to humanise its interactions, and the Life Stages digital thermometers for Vicks in three different sizes and shapes to accommodate mouths, underarms and rear ends respectively.
The SmartGauge LCD, an instrument panel that talks back when your driving behaviour takes the low road and maximises fuel efficiency in the process proved that responsible design and performance were not mutually exclusive. The Ford Fusion hybrid won North American Car of the Year 2010 voted by a panel of 49 veteran automotive journalists whose green preferences traditionally tend to the British Racing variety.
He’s even tackled Baseball in a field guide viewed through information design principles, intended to provide user-friendly solutions to some of the more obfuscated rules of the game. A philosophy that reflects Smart’s general approach when design comes into play.
Their design research methodologies tend to difference as the new norm. Rather than preach to the choir, Smart devised the Six Real People who might dwell on the margins, linger on the extremes of the spectrum either by choice or design, the abstainers and anomalies, the iconoclasts. The real decision makers perhaps, whose very disparity is the filter for universal application of the design outcome.
In researching the design for the Omron Pedometer, Dan and his team took the focus out of the group and back into the social network. Smart thinking considers not what we say when we’re directly quizzed; it’s what we don’t. It’s what we tweet, write to each other on Facebook, and post on Amazon, how we view and review the world via neighbourhood bark and online byte. Even the information we might have forgotten we know. In observing our experience they look to design its improvement.
Next, on the draft board, Dan wants to rethink how we see music; de-plinth the museum - he re-imagines them as contemporary showplaces of socially responsible design thinking rather than archives of a decorative past; and continue to articulate the essential distinctions between design and market research and build a design capability culture firmly on the former. Then, there’s the trail-blazing Femme Den, an inhouse task force of design savvy innovators charged with re-examining just who females are, what they require and how they communicate necessity in an effort to better service what we all need through thoughtful, Smart design.
Design Victoria’s Lani Steinberg spoke with Dan Formosa about battling the “Hundred Years War” against reactionary design, the gender agenda and object lessons in good and bad design.
Your philosophy for the last 30 years has consistently been about designing for people, not things. Removing the object from the plinth. What was the original context of the idea?
Well, when we initially started Smart Design, it was a group of people who went to college together; all born in the 1950s and we came through with this 1960s generation train of thought… that whole counter culture wave, and you know, I still feel that way! So, when we graduated college in the 70s, it was all about how are we going to change the world - a common thread for the whole Baby Boomer generation, and we were looking at the way to do that through design which was our niche.
Now, design itself was not in a great state in the 1970s. As a matter of fact, ‘design’ was sort of a bad word. If you saw something that was ‘designed,’ it was probably more suspicious than it was attractive just because of the way it was being viewed or treated in the 60s and 70s. And we had this thought that we should not work for the big design companies which tended to have very traditional approaches to design and started our own company just a couple of years out of college.
What did you really feel you needed to address at that time and what were some of the impediments?
Well, at that time, it was a very rare event for a designer to leave the office and go out into the field and talk to a person, talk to a consumer, a customer. That had been appropriated over the years by marketing groups, which in many companies carry a lot of weight, whilst, designers tend to be lower on the totem pole, especially during the 60s and 70s. It was an affront to them for us to say we’re going to go out and do our own market research, which is how we referred to that information gathering in college and in our earliest project plans as Smart Design.
Eventually, we realised we had to use the term ‘design research.’ We didn’t coin the phrase, it existed, but it wasn’t really in common use. If someone asked us what it meant, we didn’t really know how to define it, but at least it started with the word ‘design’ and it gave us some room to play, to go out, explore and experiment.
I suppose it also legitimised it in some other way, gave design a different strata, a different perception of what it could be.
Yes. And we’ve had the luck of a couple of champions within specific companies like Johnson & Johnson and Corning Glass to follow that with us. At the time, design research and understanding people were focused on either cognitive psychology or physical ergonomics. And that was basically from the military, an outcome of World War II, the Korean War and an understanding of how to design military systems. There was a lot of work done into the ergonomics of jet fighters, for example, whilst the cognitive psychology aspect broached how you would understand how to fly and operate these military machines. Anthropometry was also studied – the measuring of people. And it was all coming from these huge military databases. So, we knew how big or small male soldiers or female WACS were in WWII, and for a very long time, when people were doing design research in the US, it either meant they were going to the library to just literally look up these physical sizes of people, or they were looking through design magazines, which was more ‘inspirational’ material. So when people said they were doing their research they were literally just consulting these archaic anthropometric data sources, which were the best resource at the time, but even so, there wasn’t a whole lot of working with people directly.
Given the times, why would these established companies have chosen this young ‘radical’ group, fresh out of college rather than an established design company?
One of the ways it started was through Davin, even when he was still in design school. He comes from Corning, New York and was an intern within Corning Glass. During his internship, he had leeway to design a bowl using an aesthetic, which we employed a great deal in school; we just used to call it ‘clunky,’ a little out of proportion, a little in ‘your face.’ So Davin designed the ‘Grab-It’ bowl made from a ceramic glass material called ‘pyroceram’ that Corning Research developed in 1953 and had been used in ballistic missiles, which could withstand huge extremes in temperature. The bowl could go from the freezer to the stovetop without cracking which means that you can cook something in there, eat out of it and then put the leftovers in the freezer.
Now, this failed miserably in Corning’s market studies, largely because nobody in the focus group wanted to admit that they would cook and eat out of the same pot. As an idea, this was seen as crass, crude, you wouldn’t admit that in a group in 1976 – even to yourself. But Davin had been asked by the Product Manager to design something he would use and his thinking, being a college student was: ‘this is brilliant, I can empty a can of soup in here and get the whole thing figured out in one pot.’ There were a couple of champions in Corning that, even though it was a dismal failure in initial focus testing, the concept survived. They actually re-phrased the questions and ran a different group and the Grab-It bowl became the highest selling single product that Corning has ever made and it’s still on the market.
GLASSES MORE THAN HALF FULL
The sunglasses line you did for Corning was also an early example of adapting new technology to the end user rather than the superimposing existing design parameters that may not have maximised the benefits of the new product. You considered the person not the thing.
Corning had developed a new glass technology that could make lenses go darker or lighter depending on the UV exposure. In developing these photochromic lenses, they had consulted many eye experts who understood how colour affects vision, how, for example, yellow can brighten lenses, reddish colours can sharpen acuity, all this fascinating physiological material. When they approached us to design for the new sunglasses division, one of the things we proposed very early on was an ergonomic study on head, face and nose sizes, eye heights and ear lengths, because, whilst there was some data out there from the military information, there wasn’t enough information to broach the subtleties of things like cheek interference and nose angles…
We also proposed that not only do we undertake a study that would allow us to determine how glasses would physically fit, we should do a perception study because we may know how wide someone’s head is but we don’t really know what feels too tight or too loose. What’s too high, too low, where’s that ‘sweet spot’, where it both fits and feels right.
Now this was not a huge project, just over the course of two months or so, but by the time we had finished, we were able to fit 7 out of 10 people whereas all other sunglass companies were fitting 4 out of 10 people. So that’s a huge differential. And if we did large and small, or male and female glasses it would be 85%. It fit as many people as possible. Comfortably. So, we were golden. There were no other design companies out there doing things quite like this. Typically, a design company then, would have thought about physical aspects of design and not perception... We did it probably because we had nothing to lose.
Does some of the best and most enduring design then come out of identifying and addressing basic need? How is that need determined?
Sure. Sometimes that need is observed as opposed to vocalised so I think that a fundamental difference between marketing and design [research] is often that marketing techniques are based on that vocalisation. I don’t want to generalise because that’s not true all the time, but design groups should have a different perspective on possibilities and looking at needs that are not necessarily explicit, vocalised or obvious. And we do that here all the time. We’ll watch people do something that they won’t verbalise. For instance, we worked recently with Cardinal Health [on the Endura Scrubs] who makes surgical attire. Now, you’ll see medical personnel walking down the hospital corridors with a funny gait because their pants aren’t fitting properly.
We asked one of the doctors: ‘What can we do to improve your scrubs?’ The response, was, ‘Nothing, what do you mean?’ And we countered with, ‘What if we made them fit better?’ The surgeon looked over her glasses at us in amazement and said: ‘You can do that?!’ The product has been around so long in its generic form that it’s just not on anyone’s radarscope to think about it anymore.
We actually did an exercise a while ago whereby a group of designers went out into the world, to stores like Target and Home Depot, and we told them to look for things that have not been redesigned in decades.
What sort of items were they looking at and what was the hit rate for ‘redesign required?’
Anything from office supplies, file folders with the little plastic tabs, for example; a lot of things in gardening are very traditional; plastic forks, knives and paper plates… many, many aisles of stuff, that has been around us for so long and has looked the way it has forever, that we don’t even think there is an improvement to be had… With the scrubs for example, some of them were literally designed like envelopes. Cut a pattern and sew front to back like paper dolls and, of course, they just don’t fit or move appropriately: they’re not comfortable.
It actually goes to workplace safety and patient care too – if the sleeve is too long, it can drag across the patient on the operating table.
Not a good thing, right? Most health care workers would say: I’m a professional, and here I am walking around the hospital hallways in my pyjamas. But while they had been reduced to commodity items, the lowest cost thing a company can make and sell in bulk to a hospital, we looked at the whole system, even though our scrubs themselves take more work to craft, they have more seams and different cuts that are actually performance based, we can use a material that saves energy because it washes at lower temperatures and dries faster. So, if you take the whole system into account, we can now tell the hospital that in the long run, this is the way to go.
Does an item have to have quantifiable inbuilt value now given the broader consumer dialogue around social responsibility, and is that in turn obliging companies to think more about ROI for the long term gain where in the past they may have opted for the ‘ain’t broke don’t fix?’
A lot of consumers will appreciate design and spend money on it. General trends indicate that the consumers who tend to do this are the people who need that assistance. For instance, with a product like OXO Good Grips range, it is especially loved by the people who need the physical help. Anybody could use it, but people who require the enabling they can get from the product will spend the money on it because it makes them feel better; the outlay is absolutely worth it to them, whereas the people who don’t need that help may choose to get by with a less expensive, generic product. So there is value in design and people willing to pay for it and it is not always the people you think. This is why when we look at defining consumers; we don’t always like to look at the people in the middle. There are so many opportunities at the edges.
EXPERIENCE IN THE FIELD
You’ve been forthright about the “cringe” factor inherent in employing certain marketing techniques and ethnography to determine consumer driven data for design research. Smart has evolved a different sample in the Six Real People that takes into account the margins. What was this in response to?
We’ve used the [Six Real People] idea a lot but have really consolidated our description around it more recently. It’s very interesting in terms of design research much of which is now just routinely, ethnographic research. Go out in the field and watch people, but often it’s go out in the field and talk to people. We have always done that at Smart Design; and I’m a big proponent of it but today, some design research is reduced to those very short sessions that are called ‘ethnography,’ because it is a very impressive word.
If you’re an anthropologist, ethnography means going out to Zambia and spending 6 months to 2 years in the field. In the design world, ethnography can mean, ‘I’m going out to do an ethnography, I’ll be back in an hour.’ What gets lost in these very short sessions is the ‘expert audit’: about biomechanics, ergonomics, psychology or perception. In many cases, they have been reduced to interviews and opinion-taking which is conducive to the way a marketing group would conduct their research. So while there is an overlap, a common ground, there are so many things you would do in design research, which would be out of the scope of a marketing group.
What designers are doing then, and I think it’s unfortunate, is they’re depending on market research techniques to feed the design process, to feed their design ‘heads.’ There’s very little cognitive psychology; exploration going on in design, very little understanding of basic biomechanics, essential physical issues, task analysis, all these things that simply don’t fall into the scope. Not to mention the fact, that market research fundamentally, evolved from the investigation of things that already exist. There is such a quantum difference between investigating, for instance, three things that exist, as opposed to design research where you want to investigate three things that don’t exist. They’re not in competition with each other, they can borrow and choose from each other, but in design, you want to know why not what. Ultimately, design is not really about the thing. It’s about the experience it enables.
Does every design business that wants to grow and expand, take advantage of global opportunities, necessarily have to be a hybrid think tank or multidisciplinary today?
Our projects proceed best when, rather than think about and from their discipline, the team sets up a vision of where this ‘thing’ wants to be and everybody works toward that which means that the boundaries between all these different disciplines become a lot more blurred. Everyone is thinking about everything, at least to some extent. So, the engineers are thinking about interface and the interface people are thinking about manufacturing, and so on. When those discussions are not discipline based, when the group is thinking considering how we are going to get to this end, those projects proceed extremely well. It’s not about my task; it’s about getting that collective goal achieved.
For instance, we designed the [UCB/OXO Cimzia® Prefilled Syringe] in conjunction with UCB and OXO for self-administering arthritis medication. We set our goals, not on the syringe itself and not on the package, which was a second project, but on the idea of compliance with the medication. Now, this medication was in development for years and the underlying principle from the pharmaceutical company was that of course, the patient will take it, it’s good for them; they need it. That isn’t always the case.
Our goal in designing both the syringe and the packaging was concerned with how to get this medication into someone’s body. Once you’ve set compliance and not box or delivery object as the goal, all the day-to-day discussions in the office around it changed radically. It was a much more holistic approach and collaborative with both the client and our team. People were thinking about what was possible… It was more about end-user behaviour in a way, than it was about the physical design.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Is there a universal language that is still absent in terms of iterating the real not just aesthetic value design can add to a company in terms of competitive advantage?
What I see as changing rapidly is that while companies may not ‘get’ design, and are very protective and understanding of their brand, brand itself is not what it was; it’s going through a revolutionary change because ‘brand’ as we knew it, is essentially losing its meaning. For example, you may be in a store looking at 10 different digital cameras of companies that you know very well, but before you make that purchase, you go home and check the internet. And people are doing this not just with electronics, but also with shoes, kitchen tools… with big and small items now, because that information is so accessible. When you are looking at those reviews, you’re not looking at company web sites; you’re consulting a person-to-person assessment. It’s very personal… it’s about people’s real world experiences.
So, it’s very clear now, that a company’s brand is not what the company says it is; it’s what all those people online are saying it is. And that person-to-person communication carries so much weight, that the traditional allure of brands is becoming less and less meaningful. You may ‘jump ship’ really easily regardless of how long you have subscribed to that brand.
There’s no brand loyalty any more?
It’s very, very volatile because brand loyalty is based on confidence in a purchase… With the dominance of social networking, it’s the internet data combined with what my neighbour is saying that informs decision.
Brand is now defined by the experience and in order to maintain any equity in a company’s brand, and there is a lot of money associated with that brand, companies now need to focus on the experience, which is design. The experience is design from start to finish. This, in turn, is giving design the opportunity to elevate to a much higher level. To talk to different people within a corporation because design will become important to them, whether they realise it now or not.
As a consumer you can quietly do that research at home alone in front of the computer, and also give your opinions without the pressure of group interaction and interrogation, in a focus environment.
Another really interesting aspect of that is that on Amazon; if the product you are looking at has 200 glowing reviews and 4 negative reviews, guess what you’ll read first? You’ll go straight to the negatives because you want to be warned about what’s wrong. So, whilst there’s a minority negative, quantifiably they carry a lot of weight. The other interesting thing is that you don’t know anything about the person writing that review: you don’t know their age, background, abilities… for companies, that means they have to think extremely broadly, widen their own views, not to be defensive about ‘the four’ and try to cater to everyone.
So the Six Real People are reflective of these internet reviews, the weight they carry, and a need to have the ability to appeal to every individual. And if, when we look at Real People, we see 1 person out of 20 say something critical, a traditional approach might rationalise that that’s only one lone voice out of a majority. We’ll look at the one and say, ‘Brilliant, we’ve got it!’
To me, the significance of the individual, the importance of social networking, my 1960s distrust of big business anyway, is all very intertwined. That power to the people ethos relates to the internet directly because now it is unifying people for the purchase of coffee cups [as well as social good]. And clients are getting all this data for free.
Is it more difficult to deal with and design for a company that has an iconography; a product that is part of the popular culture and more resistant to change?
Well, I did change the Band-Aid for Johnson & Johnson [The Finger Wrap Bandage]. It’s one of my 100 Years stories. For 100 years, Band-Aid’s were designed with the pad in the middle of the adhesive strip. Most wounds happen on the fingers, which means you have to apply a Band-Aid with one hand. If you move the pad to the end of the strip, it’s much easier to peel and apply and you don’t get that dog-eared seal. It’s so simple. But no one had done it before because it had been around in its same form for so long. That’s why it’s fun to run through Target and point out potential ‘targets!’
What design ‘paradigm’ would you like to have a shot at redesigning?
There are many: it depends on the scale we are talking. An example would be this. And this is a really grand scale thing. (Draws a musical scale on sheet music…). Most people would say: ‘That’s music,’ if asked. It’s not music. That’s music notation. That’s an awful system developed by monks in the 15th Century - it’s a blight on society, the most cryptic system you could ever imagine. If you hired one thousand graphic designers to create musical notation from a blank slate designed from an information design point of view so that people can learn it, you’d fire the person who came up with this. But this system is so etched in our brains, society and culture that it is very difficult to deviate from. I want to write a book on this actually. Or at least lecture on it extensively.
IDEAS DRIVEN FEEDBACK
Your recent work with the SmartGauge LCD panel for the Ford Fusion hybrid car extends the design benefits of the instrumentation to actually addressing and positively adjusting driver behaviour behind the wheel. How did that come about?
We were contacted by the hybrid team at Ford: it was the first time that they were incorporating LCD screens as opposed to mechanical gauges into their vehicles. And our design brief called for the creation of an interface that would have an emotional connection. In one of those ‘side’ conversations, we heard two things. One: is that one of the problems with hybrid vehicles is that buyers are disappointed because they don’t get the mileage they anticipated. We know that in order to have a good product, you actually need to exceed expectations. A product that meets expectations is okay, but it’s not exceptional. Your product must be better than people thought it would be. And that goes from shoes to cars and everything in between. The second aspect was that driving style makes a huge difference.
So, knowing that our process is to set an ideal goal, and that design is more powerful than one may think, we responded in our follow-up meeting by addressing the possibility that we could save fuel through the interface, which was a completely odd thing to suggest.
Did you actually know at that point that you could use the interface to minimise fuel use?
No! And here’s another of my ‘100 Years’ stories: For 100 years, the instrument cluster has been telling the driver about the car’s performance and the car’s computer also knows what the driver is doing, so, for the first time ever, why don’t we also feed the driver’s performance back to the driver and consider the car and the driver as a unified system? We know that there are a number of reasons why people might buy a hybrid - to save money on gas, it could be political – lessen dependence on foreign oil, or it could be environmental – we don’t want to pollute, or it could be a combination of all three. So, if you want to create an emotional connection between the car and the driver, you should not disappoint them on these issues. What we should really do is to see if we can surpass that goal.
There were two other elements we really wanted to address. Ford’s information was that some of their drivers buy a hybrid and they feel they’ve done their duty – they just drive it like any other car. Other hybrid drivers are ‘hyper-milers’: they’ll buy a car, go home and write down every mile on an excel spreadsheet. They’ll coast downhill, and follow trucks so they won’t get the wind resistance… all to maximise their tank of gas. Ford had worked with IDEO on ascertaining that upfront information, we came in afterward.
Not long into the project, however, I was driving into the city and I was passed by a Prius doing 70 mph in the slow lane. My first thought was: he’s late for something. So, we decided that every once in a while, even a hyper-miler is late for a meeting, or has to catch a plane and they just have to floor it. We also thought that even commuters, who don’t have time on a daily basis, take the weekend to bond with their cars. So, we took this coach-and-athlete point of view and just considered the information flow as a cycle. We did all our usability, testing ergonomics and information design, visual attention and by the time we had it done, we had a system that was returning really good information to drivers.
Since then, Ford has used the term ‘driver behaviour’ in its press releases where they had never done it before. So a lot of things we had said in our first meetings about influencing driver behaviour were coming back to us. And that implies a real shift, which is necessary for the automobile industry.
THE GENDER AGENDA
Femme Den is largely about addressing quantifiable physical, emotional and psychological difference between the genders. Removing the politics from the physiological divide. I’m looking around your office and seeing different varieties of chairs, for example. Does actually accounting for gender distinction mean that finally, we have to admit there just can’t be one perfect chair for all?
In Japan, there are chairs that are designed specifically for women. They’re not only smaller, they’re proportioned differently and account for the fact that females will want to sit – and work - differently than males. They’re just more appropriate. So there are definitely gender differences in those body types. Now, how you convince a company to buy gender specific chairs is another issue. Or whether or not you can understand using females as the filter for designing chairs that work for them, would they also automatically work for males?
It’s a very interesting topic. [Historically in the US], with the advent of the women’s movement, came the concept of equality in gender. Accompanying that came some things that possibly should not have come along with it including the idea that males and females were equalised or the same. Now, companies are finding themselves in a situation where it is politically incorrect for me to say: ‘You think differently than I do because you are a female.’ I would be sent to diversity training for being sexist.
But if you really look at the way females think or males think, it’s not a better or worse thing, but it is definitely different. So the question is, how can you actually introduce the idea that well, ‘you’re female, you get that chair?’ Although that chair can be brilliant for you, you’re broaching a very dicey area. Even to the point where it may be politically incorrect within companies to even suggest a topic that could raise the possibility that males and females are quite different. And that’s about a chair. So the idea of Femme Den is to say: ‘Yeah. The sexes are different.’
But, not withstanding your own place in the Femme Den, it had to be a group of women who said it.
It had to be women who said that females are different and to point out the documented sources of information about how brain patterns, as well as their attitudes, motivations, shopping and spending habits are different. But it also took males to say that design and engineering historically, since the 1930s, has been a male dominated profession. So the things that we do here on a daily basis, what we invite women to do when we hire them, is to really join ‘the boys club’ – to hunt, not gather, if you like.
Because even the way we run projects – Phase 1, 2, 3 – a very linear way of thinking, may not be conducive to the way females think. And the way we conduct meetings; select things, even the way we sit around a table, and everyone tries to dominate the selection process, can make many females either play like a boy, or retreat. One of the consequences can be that you see lots and lots of females in design school, but you don’t see as many of them in practice. Perhaps they feel they don’t fit. So what the Femme Den is doing, and what the challenge is, is to rethink everything. Start from a blank slate.
Additional to the traffic school of thought and its PC regulation, there’s also the gender stereotyping issue.
For a decade and a half, there was this ‘female soccer mom’ we had to make it work for. Now, first of all, we couldn’t find a female soccer mom who would say she was one, and secondly, not all females are soccer moms. When we brought these findings up with clients, they would say, ‘I’m so glad you say that.’ So these rigid categorisations of women are pretty obsolete. Erica [Eden, of Femme Den] always questions: Why are females a ‘niche?’
In fact, I remember this story of a car that was made in the 50s especially to target women - called the Dodge La Femme. It was pink, very cosmetic and I believe it even came with an outfit you could wear in it… It was a dismal failure. So, I was thinking of instituting the Annual Dodge La Femme Awards for the absolute worst incarnation of a female product. I think I’d get a lot of entries.
More
Dan Formosa and Agnete Enga will be speaking at the agIdeas 2010 International Design Forum 27 -29 April 2010.
Related Links
Smart Design — www.smartdesignworldwide.com
Dan Formosa — www.danformosa.com
agIdeas — www.agideas.net
24 March 2010