Design and Quality

Years ago, I used to interview some of the world’s top product and graphic designers. When he was visiting England late in life, I caught Raymond Loewy, the man who designed the Gestetner duplicator and the Greyhound bus. In his studio on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, I talked to Saul Bass, who invented the film title and laid it on the line in the opening credit sequences to North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). Back in London, I also questioned Dieter Rams, the man who gave Germany’s Braun its post-war shavers and its stereograms.

None of them ever talked quality

Although most of my work now concerns the future of technological innovation, I still work with designers. Naturally, as in the world of quality professionals, both the practice and the vocabulary of design have changed. Instead of product and graphic design, professional designers talk and do product, interaction and communication design. There is a strong environmentalist ethos, an emphasis on users, user testing and usability, a heavy orientation to IT, and a growing rhetoric of design for services.

Yet still the design profession very rarely talks about quality. It rarely evaluates its work, being too avid to begin the next project.

One can understand that. Design can be a profitable business, but in the product side of it, at least, margins are low.

There is a sin, however, much less forgivable than being in a hurry. For the fact is that a legion of design boosters and cultural critics, unfamiliar with the realities of, say, 3D printing, now likes to show its hipness by suggesting that technology, and in particular IT, has solved most of the functional difficulties that beset products – and even, potentially those that attend services. In this diagnosis, design need now only concern itself with users, the environment, branding and aesthetics. The basic engineering problems around systems have largely been solved. We’re supposed to be in a world where brains, creativity, customisation and different forms of play – by the designer, the engineer and the consumer – are the key dynamics, not down-home performance.

I don’t believe that. So I was struck to see David Hutchins note (QW, December, p4) that, in the car industry, he expects ‘a steady rise in product recalls worldwide’. Recall of defective vehicles has certainly been the pattern in recent years – with even Toyota, the pioneer of quality, failing to pass muster on several occasions. One wouldn’t wish the pattern to continue, but the suspicion must be that it will.

In services, after all, quality problems are mounting. If you don’t believe me, try to leave an airport on time, or to get utilities and a TV easily installed when moving house. Yet if services, the chief business of the West, turn in a sloppy game, a culture of slip-ups in manufacturing can all too easily follow.

No, the great designers of the 20th century never talked quality much. In 2015, though, those concerned about quality might do well to open a dialogue with designers. Their prestige, and their influence, has never been greater.

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I will be speaking at the Chartered Quality Institute Conference this April – book your place today.