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."

“Life is once. Forever.”

– Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Bimota Tesi Millenium

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.

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?

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.