Design Thinking

Dev Patnaik's recent post at Fast Company.com about reinventing the MBA caught my eye this morning. In an interview of Roger Martin, of the Rotman School of Management, they discuss the idea of bringing Design Thinking into the mix of what a business degree should include. The discussion is an excellent one, and if you don't have the time to listen to it in the video, at least read Dev's summary at the Fast Company site.

This idea, Design Thinking (which I define as the sort of creative problem solving / lateral thinking / & so forth taught in many—but most definitely not all— design schools), looks like the new darling of the business press, and I welcome that. The more we can integrate this sort of thinking into all of our problem-solving processes, the better off we will be. But when I reflect on what's missing in today's business management, I see another, perhaps more important omission.

I think we're long overdue for a renaissance of the ideas of Peter Drucker. On my drive home yesterday I caught the public radio program, Marketplace, and heard Kai Ryssdal's interview of Harvard Business School's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who has written an article about the continuing relevance of Drucker's ideas in this month's Harvard Business Review.

This week we are celebrating (along with the 103rd birthday of Eva Zeisel, of course) the 100th anniversary of Drucker's birth. Most will know about Drucker, who was considered the father of business management. I found this short interview an excellent review of Drucker's ideas, some of which we are in sore need of today:

As Kanter says, "First was the importance of a company having a sense of mission or a purpose, and that's not identical with its strategy, it's not identical with its business model, it's why it exists and what social good or greater good that it's serving." Most important, he did not hold that management should concern itself solely with serving shareholder needs: " He talked about all the responsibilities of management, so shareholders were certainly one for businesses but also employees, customers, suppliers, and society in general.

Ryssdal: what Drucker would say about "the context that a lot of businesses find themselves in today of really having to cut their costs and get their share price up, maximize their profitability?"

Kanter: "Peter was a very big believer in management by objectives. ...you know what your goals are and then you organize to get those goals met, which means to that you do have operate efficiently. But it also means that you don't sacrifice the long term for the short term. So ever since he started writing about high CEO compensation in the 1980s, he said that companies were often not fair. They often did have resources, but they were concentrated at the top. And that letting the shareholders, but also executives, walk away with the lion's share of the profits rather than reinvesting them, that would not create a productive future for business."

So my question is, who is enacting Drucker's ideas today?

This Is Brilliant

You can accuse me of living under a rock because I haven't seen one of these before, but this is absolutely brilliant. I just bought a new contact grill and take a look at the plug on the cord set. For all of you designers out there who bemoan the "stupidity" of consumers, how they won't follow directions, bla bla bla, take note of this simple design solution. 

The problem is as old as electric products themselves. People grab the cord rather than the plug to unplug an appliance, eventually ruining the cord. 

The conventional solution: warn people not to do this. Put it in the instruction manual. Get irritated at them and call them stupid for ignoring this warning.

The brilliant solution: Breville's designers designed the plug with a convenient hole to hook a finger into. Yes, I know there are plugs with flanges that provide good affordances for pulling. My Dyson has one of these:

Sure, either of these affordances could be ignored, but the shape of the Breville plug, top, invites us to use it in the way the designers intend. It's a message from the designer: "Here's something helpful. I'm thinking of you."

Moral of the story. Design things to accommodate what your customer actually does, rather than what you think they should do. Give, in a spirit of generosity. Remember Eva Zeisel and her message to us: Design is a gift across time from the one who made it to the one who receives it.

Objects of Affection, Part 6

This is the last part of "Objects of Affection," a short piece I wrote about my first meeting with Eva Zeisel. I hope you have enjoyed it.

Jeannie came up the stairs. “Mr. Swan is lonely.” She reminded us that the driver is still waiting in the kitchen. We had reached the limit of his patience.  When we came down to leave, he knew that something of great importance had happened. He asked us for our names, so that he could tell his wife where he’d been and who he’d met. We each wrote down who we were, each protesting that the other was more of a luminary. I put an end to the gentle contest. When Eva wrote down her name, I said to Mr. Swan, “Do you see this tableware?” taking in the overloaded shelves of the kitchen with a sweep of my hand, “This woman designed all of these things.” He looked more closely at Eva, and looked at the stacks of dishes. That settled it, in his eyes. He put the paper with our names on it in his pocket.

Sara was my tour guide to Twentieth Century culture on the ride back to the conference. She interpreted the significance of everything we had seen. Turning to me in the darkness of Mr. Swan’s immaculate car, she said, “I suppose you know that this means we are meant to become friends, you and I. This sort of experience does not just happen.” God’s finger.

Coming back to the conference where just hours ago, things of utmost importance were being discussed, nothing seemed as crucial as before. In the treehouse, Eva Zeisel had leaned forward and said, “We are makers of things, not thinkers of thoughts.” Making things, talking with wise people, using the tools my father used, surrounding myself with affectionate objects - these are of life-shaping importance. 

The designed object is a vessel of communication, from the one making it to the one holding it. The message can be thoughtless, or it can be infused with meaning that speaks across time. This is my first lesson from a master of the wordless, magic language of design.

Objects of Affection, Part 5

I walked over to the shelf and picked up the Halls refrigerator pitcher ...

When you see a painting in an art book and then see it on the gallery wall, it is transformed. It comes alive. Time falls away, and you see the canvas fresh from the hand of the painter. The image bypasses the intellect and shoots straight to the instinct, speaking from the painter’s heart to the viewer’s, a one-on-one conversation in the wordless language of the soul. 

A great work has the power to stop me in my tracks. But nothing prepared me for the electricity of holding that form in my hands. You can’t tell in the photograph that it starts out a rounded square at the base and tapers into a trapezoid, squeezed not by geometry but by the shape of the hands which hold it. The fluid curves are made to be held. The sides give inward to form a place to grip and pour. The spout pulls slightly downward in a petulant lip. The lid sits softly on top, following the undulating line of the pitcher’s upper edge like a well-rehearsed tango partner. You don’t see these things in a photograph.

We sit, encircled by a life’s work. Sara against a backdrop of iridescent glazes, Eva with a vase beyond, glowing dull and luminous in the darkness. The quiet voices of the master-women...and the quiet voices of the objects shaped by the gesture of dancing hands. Created as gifts to the world. I sit, absorbing a steady radiation of love.

I had described in a letter to Eva my idea of "objects of affection." She talks about these now, referring to them as "affectionate objects." I try to correct her until I realize the meaning revealed by the transposition of those words. My objects of affection are things that I take pleasure in. Passive things. Eva’s affectionate objects speak actively. As I sit in that room listening to Eva and Sara talk, I am struck with an overwhelming, palpable affection from every thing surrounding us. That forms can be created which speak so eloquently – I never knew. The experience of it sinks home to me the active power that an object can project, if it is from the hand of a master of expression. We sit, surrounded by the quiet, lively chatter.

to be continued ...

Objects of Affection, Part 4

... continuing where we left off—Sara Little Turnbull and I are sitting down to tea with Eva Zeisel:

Eva will not let us help. She carries in a table to hold a tray of food. Tomatoes, a couple of cheeses, boats of French endive, mayonnaise. A late-night feast. The light from the lamp shines through the translucent yellow-green of the lettuce. Everything put in place. When she is ready to sit down, Eva stops at my side and says with a quick sigh of accomplishment, “Now. Let me look at you.” She holds my eyes for a long moment. I let her. I am in safe company. I have never seen eyes like hers – completely brown, but with a narrow border of blue at the outside of the iris. Her daughter Jeannie joins us. She has the same eyes. 

Sara and Eva talked about people they have known over the years. Their friends were, to me, the protagonists of art history. I had moments of desperation that I wasn’t grasping what was being said. That things of utter monumental importance were sliding by without sticking, and then I remembered. Relax. I absorbed the conversation through my pores. My soul has heard and has remembered. The message is in my bones, and will speak when I sit down at my work table to create my next humble offering to the universe.

I drink in the things on the tea table. I had poured over the pictures, but the pieces themselves are alive. I had no idea that a shape could be so vocal. Teapot, pitchers, cups, bowls, saucers - nothing out of tune, no line that is not absolutely of the master’s hand. 

“There is no way to hold this that is not graceful,” Sara remarks, holding the bowl of cherry tomatoes towards us with a smile. There is a moment that I can not pass without picking up the pitcher of milk, holding it at eye level, burning the image into my retina, and putting it back. Eva watches me do this. We are designers. She understands.

We climb to Eva’s “treehouse,” her studio at the top of the stairs. We pass through the workshop, trade opinions on power saws. She shows us photos of current projects. Climb another flight to the top. To the room of affectionate objects. 

The treehouse is a sanctuary that displays all the pieces that Eva has designed on lighted shelves. I spot the refrigerator pitcher she did for Hall kitchenware in 1954. My good sense leaves me and I blurt out, “I would kill for one of those!” She smiles at me like an indulgent grandmother and says with kindness, “You may touch it.” 

to be continued...

Objects of Affection, Part 3

Part three of my story of meeting Eva Zeisel...

Albert Swan, owner and sole driver of Albert Swan’s Limousine Service, owns a spotlessly kept, gold-colored car. He was the carriage driver on our magical journey through the wooded drives of Rockland County. Off we rode into the dark countryside, as Sara talked about Eva Zeisel’s impact on the design world.

We found the address in the darkness of a winding road, turned into a short drive and pulled up behind a stable of Volvo station wagons. Eva came out of the house to meet us, standing on the flagstones paving the tree-shadowed entry. Gurus eventually become human, this one a woman with white hair and kindness in her eyes,  waiting to greet us. We asked Mr. Swan to wait, and we went to meet her. 

She has the grace and manner of an earlier time, another continent. Old world. I remind myself that the Europeans defined Western hospitality. The house is one of those old, northeastern country houses. Originally very small, and added to over the years, an assembly of rooms following rooms. Settling with great age, the furniture settling with it, standing in place longer than several lifetimes. We pass through the hallway into a sitting room. There are two very small upholstered chairs, armless with heart-shaped backs and flowered covers. Little Miss Muffet chairs. There are two larger wingbacked chairs. I choose one of those; Sara puts her tiny form on one of the tuffets. Each has a chair that fits perfectly. 

There are low bookcases along one wall. A lamp stands on one and reminds me that Eva is a designer who is not afraid of ornament. The lamp base swells into a curving volume, white porcelain covered with a repeating design of small gold medallions. In front of us is a low round table filled with teapot, cups, saucers, plates and bowls. All her designs. I can not pull my eyes away from it.

To be continued...

photo: Hallcraft Century in a sublime yellow pattern, photographed at the Mingei Museum, San Diego. For designers like me, raised in the Modernist tradition, the thought of applied decoration gives us pause. Not in this case. The total effect of this display was breathtaking.

Objects of Affection, Part 2

photo courtesy of  Eva Zeisel

Continued from yesterday's story, picking up where I left off: looking at Eva Zeisel's work in the book in the library.

I came away changed to the core. Would it be possible to have this designer come and talk to my students? How do you get in touch with a guru? I dialed Manhattan directory assistance. 

The voice on the answering machine was right - the right age, the right accent. The tone was genteel, encouraging. I offered a message to the electronic ear: would Eva Zeisel like to come to Los Angeles to talk to some design students? Two weeks later she called me back. The genteel voice with the European accent said yes, she would come.

Eva Zeisel spoke to me across the timelines of the Twentieth Century, across the boundaries of inhibition, across the limitations of the ego. Designer to designer, speaking the same language. Teacher to student. I wanted my students to have the experience I was having, to learn at the knee of the master. There were many months of preparation. Schedules to be coodinated. Everything must be perfect. A date was set; travel arrangements were made. 

A few months later, I was at a conference in New York. I tried to get in touch with Eva, who lived nearby. I finally got through, but it was late on the last day – and I was leaving the next morning. We agreed that I must come over right then and have tea. I told her I had met a friend of hers, Sara Little Turnbull, the Director of the Process of Change Laboratory at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Eva said, “Bring her along.” She ended the conversation with, “You know, I think that our meeting like this, it has God’s finger in it.”

Sara is another luminary. She had a line of people waiting to talk to her at all times during the conference. But an invitation like this is not an everyday thing. I interrupted her at dinner. I apologized to her companion and whispered in Sara’s ear, “Do you want to go to Eva Zeisel’s house for tea?” She looked up with wide eyes and said, “Now?” I said yes. She rose from the table, saying to her dinner partner, “I hope you understand, but something has come up which I must do.” She walked out of the restaurant, down the corridor and to the front portico of the conference center, and stood poised on the curb like a figure on the foredeck of a seagoing ship. She stood there like that until the car came to take us away.

There are people who stand, killing time. Sara stood, running through the camera of her mind: what she felt when she thought of Eva’s work. Her magnificent ability to question the rules of the world. The designer who refused to use the term “Good Design.” When questioned about the subject at a Museum of Modern Art symposium, she replied, “Love is a very personal matter.” The next day it was headline news in the New York Times: “Eva Zeisel Says Love Is a Personal Matter.” A designer who challenged convention. 

Eva at her one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art, 1946, a few months after MoMA's exhibition of the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames.

To be continued...

Objects of Affection, Part 1

The past few days I've been emailing back and forth with my new colleague, Julka Almquist, who will be teaching a new course in design ethnography at Art Center. I find we are both Eva Zeisel fans. I was reminded of a piece I wrote back in 1996 for presentation at the IDSA National Education Conference. It describes, in a very personal way, my first meeting with Eva and the impact this meeting had on me. I met her in the early 90s, at the start of a renaissance of interest in her work. Today, of course, she's the talk of every design magazine and newspaper. It was a night to remember, as I was not alone—with me came Sara Little Turnbull, another giant figure in design. I will post the piece that I wrote about our meeting—Objects of Affection—in several episodes over the next few days. I hope you enjoy it.

Once upon a time in a library, I found a book which changed my life. It is called Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry. I like the sound of that. Inside, there’s a photo of Eva, suitcase in hand, just arrived at a small midwestern train stop, setting off across a field towards a factory in the distance. The Designer for Industry, come to do her job. 

The front cover shows a nested group of serving dishes, the shapes splashing outward in a corona of liquid white. The curving edges of the platters unfold upward, tapering and thinning as they stretch toward the gripping-places, inviting the touch of a hand. 

I paged through the book to find shapes I had known all my life: the salt and pepper shakers nestling together like mother and child; glassware remembered from a thousand neighborhood dinner tables. Table furnishings from my childhood, looked at with my designer’s eyes. I had no idea shapes could be like this.

Eva Zeisel worked and lived through the flash points of the modern movement. A journeyman-potter with a studio in her parent’s garden in 1925 Vienna, when young women from well-to-do families didn’t do such things. A studio in Berlin in the 30s, when the design world was being set afire, and Berlin was the place to be. Art Director of the china and glass industry for the Russian Republic in 1935, when Russia was an exciting but dangerous place to be. Falsely accused of plotting to kill Stalin, imprisoned and interrogated for months and then miraculously released. She escaped from Austria the day Hitler invaded. She eventually settled in New York, set up a studio and taught at Pratt for many years.

Throughout this explosion of living, Eva created many, many designs of tableware for manufacturers here, in Europe and Japan. At the height of her popularity from the 40s to the 60s, thousands of her designs were selling successfully all over the world. I studied the photographs in the catalogue. The shapes full of life, expressive. Astonishing. The curves seemed to extend beyond expectation in a multi-lingual vocabulary of expression from one pattern to the next – here friendly and informal, there sophisticated and crisp, elegant and fluid. I was looking at the work of a master.

To be continued...

Art That Makes You Think

I ran across this quote on John Massengale's blog (New Urbanist architect). He's commenting on the waterfall art installation in NYC.

Eliasson Waterfall at Brooklyn Bridge from rsguskind on Vimeo.

He says, "Art like this is supposed to make you 'think.' I don't think it makes you think anything worth thinking. I wish art schools would go back to teaching the transcendent power of beauty."

Heads up: teaching the transcendent power of beauty, in fact, has migrated to industrial design. It did this midway through the twentieth century. Case in point: Eva Zeisel.

Eva was the first to teach an industrial design approach (design for mass production) for tableware at Pratt in the late 30s. Here she is, above left, with some of her students' work. She arranged for them to design products for the Bay Ridge pottery in New Jersey. The dish on the right is from her "Classic Century" pattern—a combination of two of her most popular designs, "Tomorrow's Classic" and "Century"—now sold by Crate and Barrel.

When she visited Art Center in the 90s, Eva took a tour of our gallery. On the wall in the fine art side was, if I remember, a large crucifix made of what looked like scrap wood. There was also a structure the size of a small hut, built of the same sort of wood. Zeisel is an opinionated woman. She stopped dead in her tracks and demanded an explanation. I told her that I didn't think I had one. I could only observe that it seemed to me that creating something that was accessible, something that an average viewer would find beautiful, was now forbidden in fine art.

Zeisel stood near a display of orange juice squeezers. They were designed by early-term industrial design students in beautiful, curvilinear shapes and vibrant colors. She wondered why it was that here [with a wave of her hand taking in the ID side of the gallery] where there are so many limitations—constraints of technology, function, user need and business realities—was where the beauty lay, and not there [in the fine art gallery] where there were no constraints.

As she has said to me more than once, "That's a very good question!"

Day 3

Hello and welcome to day 3 of the conference. We're watching PechaKucha presentations by eight Art Center department chairs right now. We have altered the format slightly, though (being Art Center), from 20 slides in 20 seconds to a super-charged 15 slides in 10 seconds. A challenge, but worth it.  Above, Environmental Design chair David Mocarski holds forth.

I ran into Eames Demetrios again, and he showed me his new book, hot off the press, of quotes from Eames in several languages. I am thrilled. It contains two of my favorites, "The best you can do by Tuesday is a sort of best you can do," bringing to mind the short stop-action film the Eames Office whipped together over a weekend because Charles never liked to show up empty handed (he was scheduled to appear on a TV show early the following week), and my other all-time favorite, "Innovate as a last resort," which always can be counted on to shock my students. What? Eames? The innovator, saying that? Yes indeed, grasshopper. Innovate as a last resort. Why use a wild new process / technology / idea when there is an existing one that will do the job as well? To do so would be doing something new for "newness'" sake. And to paraphrase another of my all-time heroes, Eva Zeisel...

... many times when a designer creates something different solely for the sake of doing something different, the result can be actually quite hideous. Eva is a strong advocate of the playful search for beauty, and maintains that in instead of continually searching for novelty, designers should value the search for simple variety. Her life's work is testament to the fact that creating variety is a noble occupation.