I received a lot of emails regarding my post yesterday on “Super Normal Design”, I thought we should explore this topic a little more. There’s a good interview on the latest Business Week of Richard Sapper (the 75 year old designer that is till playing with new ideas). His famous designs including the ThinkPad and the Tizio Lamp for Artemide. Both were once my favorite items. I have 8 Thinkpads and one old broken Tizio in the basement. His signature is usually consists of advanced technology, simplicity of form, and surprise. According to Sapper "The most important thing for me is to give everything I do a form that expresses something, it's not neutral. It has a point of view and a personality."
Over a career spanning 50 years, he has designed more than 200 products—everything from the rearview mirror on the 1956 Mercedes 300SL Roadster to the 1998 Zoombike foldable bicycle for Elettromontaggi. According to Sapper, "I think that I have proved through my work that you do not need big teams to create innovation. As a matter of fact, big teams often act as brakes to innovation," he says. "However, you need big teams to translate innovative ideas into mass-produced products."
Here’s an interesting question: Is great design a one person journey or a team sports? What are they teaching at D-Schools? Is there enough balance between “design thinking” and “design doing”? For design to be truly useful as a profession and as a discipline, designers can’t just use “design thinking” to come up with strategies and concepts. It is much easier to come up with big ideas than overcoming different kinds of hurdles to bring a design to life. I found many D-school graduates are lacking on product development skills. In order for MFAs to play a key role in powering up the future of business, they do need to learn the logical decision making skills of product development.
Are we going to end up with a generation of so called “innovators” who are basically MFAs that can talk business or MBAs who can draw? What about those anthropologist and social scientist? Shouldn’t they be part of the team? Or designers or market researcher just continue to pretend that they can do the job of a trained anthropologist which requires years of training to do what they do? What about those product engineers that lacks design sensitivity? Bringing new ideas to life is a team sports. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a star in your team. Relying on a star to be win a name is a risky business. I think I’ve answered that question.
With all respect Mr. Sapper, I have to disagree with your statement "big teams often act as brakes to innovation”. Your thoughts please.
