seeing eye to eye

Surprise! An engineer's particular way of looking at things isn't everyone's.

By Paul Sharke, Associate Editor

Asked which of three colanders they would prefer to sell, a gathering of automotive designers, engineers, and marketers voiced strong differences of opinion. Three of three designers chose the metal colander; four of five engineers picked the plastic one. Marketers were split between the two. No one favored the third choice, a two-piece model that had won a design award five years earlier.

What's more, the designers voted in favor of the metal colander for its perceived simplicity, durability, and value. They felt its design was fashionable.

The engineers chose the plastic tool for its affordability and manufacturability. It was practical and cheap.

The designers said they thought the plastic vessel was cheap, too, but with a different connotation. The engineers said the metal utensil looked dated, besides being complicated and intricate to manufacture.

According to Carnegie Mellon University professors Jonathan Cagan and Craig Vogel, the range of opinions on the same three colanders emanate from differences in the personalities of engineers and designers and from differences in their training. Cagan, like most engineers, learned in school to apply math and science to model, understand, and control the environment. Vogel, an industrial designer, learned instead to focus on aesthetics and visual impact. Both professors agreed that engineers see the world in black and white, while designers see it in a range of grays, as evolving and indecisive.

Cagan and Vogel have found a way to exploit these differences in creating "breakthrough" products—products that combine a technological edge with high styling, offering a value that sometimes garners a higher price.

Something for Everyone

Examine an automotive door molding, for instance. According to Cagan, engineers and costing people view it as a simple detail—a commodity—that ought to reach final definition within a design program's first few weeks. But designers resist engineers' efforts to dispatch early what they see as an important finishing touch, one that could open a buyer's eyes. Move the "commodity" 2 or 3 inches higher or make it too large, and you risk ruining the whole car's potential appeal. So designers wait until the end of the design cycle to release details of the part.

ASME Fellow Cagan and associate member Vogel have devised a grid for differentiating the influence that parts, both simple and complex, place on a buyer. Parts that immediately affect the buying decision exert a "primary lifestyle impact," Cagan said. A car door molding is one such instance.

Parts that exert secondary lifestyle impacts are those that play no role in an initial buying decision but could influence a buyer's later brand loyalty. One such part might be an engine component that fails, filling the owner with anger toward the company that made it.

The professors plot simple and complicated parts based on secondary or primary lifestyle impacts. But where a part falls on the matrix spells out to what extent the designers and engineers should interact in its design. Not every part should be priced or designed in the same way.

Complex parts that are strong in primary lifestyle impact inhabit the upper right quadrant of the matrix—a car door, for example. Although a shapely door can nudge a buyer toward a purchase, it must also encompass as many as 15 subproducts, plus glass that must slide past them all, Vogel said.

"Design problems start when each team is assigned a responsibility but they don't get together until late in the program," Vogel continued. So a simple thing like moving a speaker 3 inches forward brings it in line with a driver's knee, which blocks its sound.

"Groups that don't learn to integrate quickly find themselves with competing problems when the package comes together," Vogel said.

The matrix recognizes the importance of linking the individual strengths of marketing, design, and engineering specialties together in product development. Its power comes from identifying those parts for which integrated development will yield the highest return, since it is impractical to do it on every single part.

Pipe Up Pep

Vistalab Technologies Inc. of Mount Kisco, N.Y., has been making pipettes since the days, more than 30 years ago, when most labs were using graduated glass tubes. Recently, the company introduced a new ergonomic design.

Traditional pipettes, manufactured today both in plastic and metal, incorporate syringe-like barrels and pistons for dispensing precisely metered shots. Viewed from a lean perspective, the classic pipette seems completely fit and fully evolved. Its few parts, readily made, can be assembled without difficulty. Understanding its operation appears practically innate. It doesn't care about right- or left-handedness.

Still, standard pipettes look hard-edged and utilitarian—something that more likely developed in response to manufacturability and cost pressures than with much regard for user comfort.

So well is the design established that a casual observer has a tough time distinguishing one brand from its dozen or so competitors.

Neither rendering became finished versions, but they generated questions about the look and feel of controls and displays whose answers did end up in the pipette's final form.

For all its popularity, though, the standard design doesn't exactly conform to a lab technician's anatomy. The long barrel requires that a technician hold the dispenser a fair distance above the receptacle. Wrapping four fingers around the barrel, a technician pushes his thumb down on the piston to dispense liquid from the standard pipette. The design thus forces a user to adopt an uncomfortable posture while asking him to control a fine measurement with a coarse thumb stroke.

That wasn't always obvious to the engineers and designers at Vistalab, however.

To come up with designs for a new adjustable model, first Vistalab "began to question what a pipette would look like if you had the engineer take a step back for a moment," according to vice president of product development Jeff Calhoun. A mechanical engineer, Calhoun said the shape that slowly emerged turned out to have a lot less in common with prior art than had designs that came before.

Vistalab rounded up a team of engineers, marketers, designers, and a lone ergonomist, to figure out their customers' desires. The team traveled to labs to watch technicians work and to talk with them about their instruments, Calhoun said. The process sensitized everyone to the needs of the customer.

Some technicians complained of wrist pain, Calhoun reported. Others said their backs hurt. Some users were perfectly happy with their current equipment.

Of particular interest to some group members were the electronic pipettes that seemed to spend more time on the shelf than on the bench. Some technicians reported battery failure in those instruments partway through long experiments, forcing them back to manual pipettes. Others said the motorized pipettes robbed them of their feel for the process, their ability to aspirate a solution quickly and dispense it slowly. They disliked losing moment-by-moment control, Calhoun added.

The visits and interviews created a tremendous amount of buy-in with team members as to the value of the new product, Calhoun said.

As with the auto door trim example, the designers' qualitative ideas—what the product would do, what it would look like—gradually transformed into the engineers' quantitative, verifiable data. But, that process couldn't be rushed. The process "wasn't pretty" either, Calhoun said.

It never is, he added: "Most really good designs are the end result of some very intense battles."

Cagan and Vogel said that by holding back engineers' natural eagerness to quantify, to get started on six sigma, design for manufacturing, and other analyses, the product remains flexible and focused on customer need. No one buys anything they don't want regardless of how well it's been made.

To manage its diverse group having different agendas, Vistalab managers relied on two documents, Calhoun said. One spelled out qualitative factors, while the other quantified those same factors. Marketing and engineering each reviewed the other's document.

But that's the dry side of it. The blood, sweat, and tears version had engineering, design (including ergonomics), and marketing raising huge objections as the pipette took shape. Some thought users wouldn't be able to adapt to it, that they'd be afraid of its differences. Others feared that technicians would never learn to use it properly, no matter how much training they underwent. Some thought it too complicated to make. And there were cost issues.

A thumb actuates both the aspirate/dispense plunger and the tip ejector. The hook around the back adjusts for right- and left-handed users.

Even at the earliest stages of product development, design and engineering need to join in a chorus with marketing, the professors suggested. The separate voices define products that are useful, usable, and desirable. Useful products satisfy needs, can be made for reasonable costs, and have clear markets. Usable products are easy to operate and reliable. Desirable products combine technology, function, appearance, and market position to create demand.

In their book, Creating Breakthrough Products, published by Prentice Hall of Upper Saddle River, N.J., Cagan and Vogel list seven areas where development teams can seize opportunities to create value, to make useful, usable, desirable designs.

Emotion, aesthetics, and identity they associate with lifestyle. Core technology and quality they tie to features. Another area, impact, involves lifestyle with social impact and features with environmental impact. Ergonomics they let stand on its own.
Cagan and Vogel define breakthrough products as those that are strong in all three categories.

But in creating those kinds of products, you're likely to be asking questions similar to those Vistalab posed. According to Calhoun, "When you really consider the user, the designing is always harder." Dispel any notion that it's going to be easier, faster, or cheaper. "It's not. That's why not everyone does it," he said.

Early marketing research determined that technicians actually enjoyed pushing liquid out manually through pipettes. The new design retains that feature. But they didn't like the numerical interface of previous motorized pipettes. So, the new model uses a motor that adjusts the volume to any of five preset levels at the touch of a button. The pipette uses a battery, but not a rechargeable one, so there's no fumbling with charge stands. The battery powers only the motor that adjusts the volume, so there's no chance of its dying in mid-plunge. Plus, the battery lasts six months.

A hybrid in many ways, the final product scores high ergonomically.

Quality Is Not Job One

Automakers have long called upon designers to heighten their products' appeal. Cars, for many buyers, exude the very traits the professors identify in their value proposition, such as emotion and identity. But for Kumar Galhotra, assistant chief engineer for the Ford Escape line, the job is making sure that form and function collaborate on every design.

"I still run into this," said Galhotra. "If I design a new console, for example, it has to serve certain functions. Cup holders have to be the right size to accommodate the range that customers use. It has to have a long enough armrest so a large percentage of the population can use it effectively, so that a short female doesn't move the seat forward and lose the armrest. It has to have the right amount of storage so you can put away CDs, small purses, stuff like that.

"The engineers, trying hard to meet the customer's needs, will pull together something that the customer will be very satisfied with functionally. But, the moment you show it to the industrial designers—the artistic people—they say, 'This is a horror, visually. Are you kidding? All you did was connect the dots between the cup holders.' And that's where the struggle begins to have an aesthetic sensitivity.

"And the engineer, who is very proud of the right ergonomics and the size of the cup holder and the size of the bin that he's come up with, has to pay attention to aesthetics as well. And the industrial designers have to move from the 'this is going be a pure, beautiful sculpture' to the 'by the way, it has to do a few things also.' "

What would you do? Ford asked a class in integrated product development to identify new interior functions and the markets they match. The class brings together MBA, engineering, and design students.

Galhotra pointed out that it is the healthy interplay between design and engineering that leads to product excellence.
Cagan and Vogel describe a couple of instances in their book where projects undertaken by integrated product development classes have led to patented products for Ford. Another such class is just starting at Carnegie Mellon.

That class, which mixes designers with engineers and marketers, is like nothing that existed when he went to college, Galhotra said. The students have been asked to examine demographics and needs-based segmentation, to come up with ways of using the Escape interior that Ford doesn't envision. "It could be anything," he said. "Interior storage or comfort features, conveniences, safety—anything."

Ford's people are trying to maintain a "delicate balance" for the students, Galhotra said. The company has its own established framework for segmentation, which its representatives give the students while urging them to forgo its limits. "Do not be bound by it," Galhotra tells them. "Look for opportunity," he says, "and we'll go from there to design to meet that opportunity."

Cagan and Vogel call these "product opportunity gaps." Products that fill the gaps successfully are useful, usable, and desirable. But they emerge through an identification of social trends and an understanding of economic forces and technological advances.

According to Mark Dziersk, senior vice president at the Chicago-based design consultancy Herbst Lazar Bell Inc., design, more than marketing, is leading the way to new products. It used to be that focus groups would test an idea, and if 19 of 20 people liked it, then that's what would be made. "If 19 out of 20 people like something, then it's a good bet that it's a safe idea and it probably won't turn anybody on," Dziersk said. "Milquetoast," he labeled it.

Some years ago, Dziersk's firm acted as the research and development arm to Breuer/Tornado Corp. of Chicago in creating a new carpet cleaner, known in the industry as an extractor. Commercial carpet extractors at the time had an institutional look about them—big, bulky, unwieldy. During use, the machine's center of gravity would shift as a tank of clean water emptied and a reservoir for dirty water filled. That made handling more cumbersome still.

According to Dziersk, an integrated development team of engineers, designers, and marketers came up with a single tank system that used a bladder to separate clean and dirty fluids. Halving the number of tanks reduced the machine's size. By switching to plastic from traditional sheet metal construction, the team was able to give the product brand identity.

This "cross-functional participation" produced a product in a tenth the time it might otherwise take. "From start to finish in eight months," Dziersk said.

What ultimately became the Marathon cleaner clearly filled a product opportunity gap, Cagan said. It hit many of the seven factors the professors associate with creating value: aesthetics, identity, core technology, environmental impact, and ergonomics. Plus, it combined styling and technology in a way that hadn't been done before in the industrial cleaners market.

You have to create a reaction in people toward your products—be it negative or positive—Dziersk said. The PT Cruiser, the new Beetle, the iMAC—all of these demand a response.

"Design is driving the market now," he said. Engineers not wanting to be left behind will have to understand design. "Most of them don't," he said. On the other hand, you can find technically competent designers all over, he said. Ten years ago, that wasn't true.

"Engineers have just stayed where they are and regressed in some cases," Dziersk said. "There are exceptions, but the creative engineer is still an oxymoron."

According to Dziersk, "You walk through a major corporation and still have the engineering department, and they still make fun of the design guys who come in in their little black outfits and their funny glasses."

Although Cagan and Vogel may not be voicing this same opinion as strongly, they are saying that technology alone will no longer assure the development of breakthrough products. They recognize the value that all three groups bring to the development process, how important it is to invest the time and effort of these people at the very early stages—the so-called fuzzy front end.

Many companies, they write, "quickly jump to a focus on one product concept that they think will become a marketable concept if it meets manufacturing quality standards." Better to hold off on that leap of faith, they say, and instead climb carefully through the terrain of development, always keeping in sight the peak representing useful, usable, desirable products.

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