Design critic Stephen Bayley, on the current crop of just plain hard ugly (not even jolie-laide) cars coming out of Maranello:
"Even Ferrari has its problems… if you want to know what God thinks about the Enzo, just look at the people he gives them to."
Tenacious D may be able to rock 24x7x365, but I can’t. I found this out last week with the public launch of a weblog for the product I market. All my creative energy was consumed in a tremendous endothermic blogging reaction, hence the content drought at metacool.
The blog is getting good reviews from highly connected blogging mavens like Anil Dash and Robert Scoble, but most importantly, customers love it. And I love doing innovative marketing.
“Life is once. Forever.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
This week’s New York Times talks about how wet suit makers are moving beyond addressing only the Behavioral elements of their products to embrace the Visceral and Reflective aspects as well. Instead of cranking out old-style suits that make a surfer’s bottom look like a tube of dried chorizo, manufacturers like O’Neill are making sexy new products out of new materials and shapes designed to flatter the body.
John Hunter, designer at O’Neill, says it best in this quote from the article:
You’re inside a super-hip, state-of-the-art, rubber human-body girdle, looking cooler and stronger and slimmer and better and feeling it, too. If, as a result of that, you get some extra love, we’re fine with that.
When offerings in your industry start to deliver more functionality than users need, it’s time to take a deliberate approach to differentiating your product by paying attention to its Visceral and Reflective components. You need to design the whole burrito and put some love into it.
I thought it would be worthwhile to talk a bit more about the Donald Norman thought I provided on Friday. Taken out of context, this quote would seem to imply that an iterative design methodology is a sure prescription for mediocrity. That would be an incorrect, and unfortunate, takeaway.
In order to understand Norman’s quote, we need a quick outline of his model of human cognition. First, we take in our external environment using two channels, one Visceral, which is the realm of things like looks, feel and smell; the other Behavioral, which is what allows us to create movement and take action. Operating on top of those channels is our Reflective processor, which Norman describes as the “… level that conscious and the highest levels of feeling, emotions, and cognition reside.” Most of what we call “branding” happens at the Reflective level.
Take the iPod. Viscerally, you love the shape, the heft, its intense whiteness, the chromed back, the feel of the controls – even the look of the advertising and packaging delights you. Behaviorally, the Click Wheel functions so intuitively that you can get to any of your 20,000 tunes in three clicks or less. Finally, at the Reflective level, you can’t imagine life without all that music on your hip, and the iPod fits your self image in a deep way. Norman’s Visceral-Behavioral-Reflective model of cognition explains nicely why Apple’s products just plain rock and we love the brand: great products fire at all levels of cognition.
What Norman is saying is that to create a product that works from a Behavioral standpoint, you must engage in iterative process of testing and revision. But if you apply that same iterative process to the Visceral and Behavioral components of the design, you’re mucking about with art and mystery, and at that point you’re well on the road to mediocrity.
If you want to create remarkable stuff, test test test to make sure it works, but leave the Visceral and Reflective elements up to your artists from Design and Marketing.
Hugh Macleod at gapingvoid has assembled a nice How to Be Creative tip list. I’ve pulled his headers into a list below, but it’s definitely worth clicking through to his site for the full commentary. I especially like his “Keep Your Day Job” dictum, which is great advice for all those investment bankers out there who plan to quit and become painters. Not that they shouldn’t, but if you’ve got a good job you can afford to buy paint. And healthcare. But I digress:
1. Ignore everybody.
2. Creativity is its own reward.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
“If you want a successful product, test and revise. If you want a great product, one that can change the world, let it be driven by someone with a clear vision. The latter represents more financial risk, but it is the only path to greatness.”
— Donald Norman, Emotional Design
Yes, it’s true: I’m guilty of a heavy reliance upon automobilia to illustrate my thinking in this blog. But, lest you dismiss me as a dumb motorhead (which is a false stereotype, by the way), let me explain why cars happen to provide so much fodder for my musings:
1) Cars are the Third Space in Our Lives: Home. Work. In our society, when you’re not in one of those two spaces, you’re probably in your car. Automobiles are a huge part of our built environment.
2) Cars are Computers: With a LAN, multiple processors, and complex human interface points, a modern car is the other computer in your life. It may be the only computer you ever love. Or lust after. Granted, I haven’t touched on this subject area at all in this blog, but I will.
3) Car Forms are Difficult to Design Well: Ever wonder why not every car comes out looking as gorgeous as a Ferrari Daytona? Or as honest as a Toyota Sienna? It’s because shaping sheetmetal to trigger positive visceral reactions is about heuristics, the realm of mystery and art. As such, cars make for compelling discussions about aesthetics.
4) Getting Cars to Function Well is Hard: Why does a BMW M3 steer so well while the steering on a Ford Taurus lacks the sophistication of my 1974 Big Wheel? It’s really hard to get the functional aspects of automotive design right, and it’s fun to talk about things when they go right.
5) Automotive Marketing = Cubic $$$$: Creating meaning around the most visible and expensive machines we ever own is a big, competitive business. And it’s one where product goodness drives brand image drives product goodness. As such, cars represent a reflective design challenge of the highest level of difficulty.
6) They’re Familiar and Fun: You want I should gossip about urine analysis machines?
Porsche’s management is planning to add a four-door, front-engine sedan to their lineup. I find this rather painful, as Porsche is all about – and only about – two doors and rear engines. To be clear, it’s not about having just two seats, as the 911, and the 356 before it, proved that four-seat cars can be real sports cars.
So why roll out a four-door sedan? Well, automakers like multiples of ten, and some MBA-type at Porsche wants to be able to grow sales to the 100k mark, something not likely with only a lineup of pure sports cars. Porsche Chief Executive Wendelin recently stated in BusinessWeek that the key to creating shareholder value “… is to avoid a quarterly [earnings] orientation,” but it seems to me that by floating this four-door concept, Dr. Wendelin isn’t practicing what he preaches. Shareholder value is defined as the present value of all future cash flows; if you believe, as I do, that creating a four-door Porsche will erode the brand’s hard-won equity, then it’s bound to erode long-term cash flow as well, for in an automotive landscape where a $30,000 Subaru can run with any Porsche 911, what else is there besides brand image? No, a four-door Porsche is just a play for short-term earnings.
If they were really serious about long-term growth, Porsche the company would keep the Porsche the brand focused on making tasty sports cars, and then find another brand whose name could be used to rollout sedans without dilluting Porsche’s heritage, much as Ferrari is doing with Maserati.
Next thing you know they’ll be talking about introducing a SUV.
Oh.