Hardware design isn’t old hat

Engineering should come before the user’s experience of IT

To Montreal, for a conference on brands and experience held by America’s august Design Management Institute. First on the platform is a charismatic Darrel Rhea, co-author – with Steve Diller and Nathan Shedroff – of Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences (New Riders, 2006). For Rhea, marketing has transcended promotion, product development and brands. Instead, it’s about confirming the value of people’s lives – reinforcing their identity with opportunities for meaningful consumption. Starbucks, Harley-Davidson and Apple, he says, have made good money from the co-creation of meaningful experiences with consumers.

So: IT departments shouldn’t just support production or finance, Making Meaning argues, but rather the ‘experience innovation process’. They should give innovation teams real-time information about customer needs and desires, and provide them with searchable archives, digital prototypes and rapidly rendered concepts (Making Meaning, p52)

From Walt Disney Imagineering, R&D chief Orrin Shively has a similar message. In queuing areas, sensational rides and in the Web follow-up to those rides, Disney tells stories – and one at a time, too. To shorten queuing times, its ‘guests’ can now book their time of entry; alternatively, Shively tells me, Disney might one day send videoclips to their mobile phones, so long as these too follow the story of the show.

Fine; yet I worry when Lars Engman, design director of IKEA, takes the floor. Invoking the unread but oft-quoted US Cold War psychologist Abraham Maslow, Engman announces that the 21st century is not about fulfilling basic customer needs, but rather helping shoppers happily fulfill themselves, or engage in what Maslow called self-actualisation.

Checking the IKEA UK website, I’m aghast to find that this is the company’s official view. There is plenty about the IKEA ‘concept’, or about how to create the right mood in the bedroom (‘don’t be afraid to experiment’). But instruction manuals, the widely hated but functional items that are also vital to, er, the IKEA brand experience? They are nowhere online.

At the conference, it is left to Kevin Clark, director of brand and client experience design at IBM, to bring us back to reality. For an extra 30¢, Clark reminds us, Big Blue added a little lamp to the ThinkPad laptop, so making its screen much easier to use.

Naturally, this innovation was partly inspired by watching users in action – or ethnography, as designers nowadays like to put it. Yet without some cheap but effective engineering, the experience of using a ThinkPad would not now be what it is.

Product design, in IT as elsewhere, still has functional, engineering-based aspects. Yet just when product design skills have begun to migrate to China, we hear a new Western rhetoric of meaning, storytelling, ‘narratives’ and customer delight.

There is a comparable dissembling afoot in Western interior and graphic design. Like China, IT has helped proletarianise these disciplines. The response of Anglo-American practitioners, however, has been to downplay tricky issues such as heat management in data centres, or the basic but often neglected elements of good layout on a screen, and instead play up reception areas, and websites, as deeply meaningful brand experiences.

Western designers today know more about IT than their forebears. But since the keyboard for my Apple G4 gathers dirt like a miner’s fingernails, I still fly a flag for function, not fantasy, in design.