I just finished reading Donald Norman’s new book Emotional Design, and it knocked my socks off.

Read my review at 800CEOREADblog

The d.school now has a website up!  Here’s the credo:

As I wrote about earlier, it’s a remarkable mission, this d.school.  Design is a discipline, not just a profession.  As such, the design process can be taught to people from all walks of life, and applied to their respective domains to help bring about positive change in the world.

"I truly believe in beautiful cars.  The cost is the same.  And they’re better."
— Peter Horbury, Executive Director of Design, North America, Ford

(things that look and feel good work better)

A few days ago I touched on the importance of paying attention to all aspects of your product’s use experience, even to the point of considering the sounds it makes.

Sound character can be a vital element of your entire brand.  Consider the lengths Porsche went to make the new 911’s exhaust note evoke the same intense, visceral reaction in listeners as did 911’s of yesteryear.

To understand why sound is so important to Porsche’s brand, understand that the original 911 was powered by an air-cooled, boxer motor which sounded like nothing else.  Most cars used liquid-cooled motors in a vee or inline configuration, combinations which sound radically different than the raspy banshee wail of an air-cooled 911.  The new 911 uses a liquid-cooled motor, and the cooling fluid muffles the sound of all those whirring chain-driven camshafts, pistons and valves, much as wrapping a violin in muslin would deaden its voice.  As a result, the motor didn’t meet people’s expectation of what a Porsche should sound like when it debuted six years ago.

Porsche carefully engineered the old 911 sound back into the new car.  First, they recorded a sound signature of the 911 using 32 microphones in an anechoic chamber.  The design team used the resulting acoustic fingerprint to help shape the sonic character of the new 911 as heard from the driver’s seat.  They even placed a computer-controlled Helmholtz resonance chamber in the air intake manifold plenum.  The engine control computer automatically adjusts this resonance chamber to tune the sound of the motor in real time, much as trombone player adjusts his airstream to create music.  The result of all this is a car which sounds remarkably like an old Carrera RS even though it share very little mechanical DNA with that car.

The visceral element of a brand can (and should) be a source of intense emotions.  Porsche gets it.

"It’s a bridge with great character.  It tells a story."

— Santiago Calatrava, on his new Sundial Bridge in Redding, California

“You see this? This is this. This ain’t somethin’ else. This is this!”

— Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter

Just read an interesting article, Artisan Bakers Prosper in Low-Carb World.  As people figure out that Bimbo white bread makes them go blimpo, they’re also learning that real bread made from real ingredients by real bakers like Red Hen Baking can be something else altogether.  Something really good, in fact.  Says Gina Piccolino of the Bread Bakers Guild of America:

[Artisan Bakers have] taken the time to educate customers on what it is they are actually buying when they’re buying artisan products… Multigrain, whole-grain, whole-wheat kinds of products are good for you.

There’s a lesson here for all of us trying to create winning products in the 21st century.  Gone is the day where brilliant packaging and glossy advertising wrapped around a mediocre product create winning offerings.  No, now people want Acme Walnut Levain instead of WonderBread.  They want a soulful Mazda 3 instead of a Ford Focus.  They want a burrito from Andales, not Taco Bell. 

The market winners of today are those products which stand on their intrinsic merit alone, not on what their creators say we should think about them.  We the consuming populace are the final arbiters of quality and we want great stuff created by product crazies who couldn’t – and wouldn’t – be doing anything else.