America’s Sense of Design Finally Starting to Take Shape

Good news and bad news about the future of industrial design in America: The good news is that corporate America is becoming more aware of the growing importance of design. The bad news is that the Harvard Business School recently announced that it wants to be a leader in this area.

Now I have nothing against business school elites (some of my best friends are MBAs), but they have about as much to do with great design as weasels do with animal husbandry. As the 1980s amply demonstrated, most MBAs would rather leverage value than design it.

Great design is what you find in the boxy appeal of a Saab; the heft of a Braun razor; the touch of an Apple Macintosh mouse; the snug acoustics of a Sony CD Walkman; the fit of a Smith & Hawken garden tool. It’s intriguing ideas hardened into accessible forms that create experiences that the user actually enjoys. It’s not the pain-in-the-neck challenge of programming a videocassette recorder or the fingertips-at-risk mechanics of electric can openers.

And it’s certainly not something that comes out of the mouth of a business school professor. Great design isn’t taught; it’s felt.

Unfortunately, the greater awareness of design is not yet matched by a greater commitment at most American companies.

“It’s not that these guys are anti-design,” says Peter Lawrence, president of the Boston-based Corporate Design Foundation. “It’s that design isn’t really a part of their vocabulary. They don’t really know what it means.”

“Americans and industrial design really got off on the wrong foot,” says Bill Stump, an industrial designer in Minneapolis who is a consultant to Herman Miller, the office design company. “Design was never seen as intrinsic to the product development process. Businessmen treated it as three-dimensional advertising, as ornamentation. Changing the design was like changing the icing instead of the cake.”

This tailfins-and-chrome-grill approach dominated America’s postwar product design sensibility and suffocated the idea that design also had a role to play in research and development and the factory floor. The Fortune 500 managed design roughly the same way they managed quality control--as a department off in a corner somewhere rather than as a core value of the enterprise. The results were predictable: products that captured neither market share nor the imagination.

There have been notable exceptions. IBM’s relationship with Eliot Noyes and Paul Rand gave the world’s largest computer company superbly designed products and graphics. Edwin Land’s Polaroid featured a strong design ethic; Steve Jobs’ design obsession animated Apple’s Macintosh and has given his NeXT workstation a fighting chance in the marketplace. Of course, the role of design in Ford Motor’s recent multibillion-dollar Taurus-led turnaround is now the stuff of legend.

But as design critic Ralph Caplan points out: “The design successes of the past have been based on personal relationships. Clients like Frank Stanton of CBS and IBM’s Tom Watson were compulsive about design excellence and friends with the designers. It always comes down to the clients.”

“The impetus for great design in America came not from the designers but from entrepreneurs,” agrees Hartmut Esslinger of frogdesign, one of Silicon Valley’s most creative industrial design boutiques. Esslinger has worked intimately with entrepreneurial companies such as Apple, Sun Microsystems and NeXT to devise “design languages” that convey a unique sense of the company’s style. The idea is to treat design not just as a way to “make it look good” but as a medium to communicate the values of the product.

As the chairmen of the design department at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy point out in the book “New American Design”: “As microelectronics have dematerialized technology and given it an intelligent presence it never had before, designers are forced to confront meaning rather than simply package machinery in the most efficient way.”

In other words, fundamental changes in materials and technology have given companies and designers greater opportunities--and responsibilities--than they’ve had before. As technology increasingly becomes a commodity, great design becomes a chance to stand apart from the competition. Unfortunately, says Esslinger, a German immigrant trained in the European tradition, too few American companies have risen to the challenge.

“The big questions are not asked yet in America and that is a very sad thing,” he says. “The fact is American companies could move much faster because of their short-term goals, but my fear is that they don’t have the guts to take chances.”

By contrast, leading Japanese and European companies such as Sony, Toyota, Philips N.V. and Siemens have made strategic design a central part of their successful product strategies. They consistently outspend and out-staff their American counterparts. Indeed, only when Ford Motor started drowning in red ink did it grasp at the design straw.

“Detroit got scared,” says Lisa Krohn, a highly regarded New York-based industrial designer who won the Forma Finlandia international design competition at age 24. “It’s too bad that companies turn to design out of a fear of losing market share as opposed to the thrill of creating something more valid. . . . There are a lot of missed opportunities because companies assume good design is not going to appeal to a mass audience. That’s just crazy--everybody loves jeans and VW Beetles.”

Although innovative design must keep the ability to be manufactured in mind, Krohn argues that American companies too frequently prefer to “tart something up” rather than “start from scratch” and design with their own special sensibility.

“A lot of companies don’t think what they make is very important and that shows,” Stump says. “The notion that you have to go to New York or London or Milan for good design is ridiculous. Good design isn’t something you go out and hire--it is something that grows from the inside out. Companies need to look within themselves.”

Because competitive pressures are forcing a self-examination, observers such as Caplan and Lawrence say they’re optimistic about the future of American industrial design--if for no other reason than that U.S. companies have little choice in the matter; it’s either design or die. More inspiring, perhaps, is a growing subculture of first-rate designers with an American sensibility that can win in a global marketplace.

“The prospects for American design are very rich right now,” says Stump. “I really like what’s going on in California--this ‘temporary contemporary style’--casual, non-precious, no pretense at classical form, a straight shot and use of vernacular materials.”

“What’s great about American culture can inspire great design,” says Krohn.

The culture and resources for uniquely great American design are out there. It’s time our companies took advantage of them.