Art, Science & the Ah-ha Moment
Today’s industrial design combines a wide range of disciplines to create innovative new products that make it easier for users to work smarter and safer.
Does the term “industrial design” conjure up images of your high school mechanical drawing class? In your mind’s eye, do you envision a vast space where industrious designers spend eight hours a day hunched over drawing boards with rulers, triangles and compasses? Or hunched over computers doing the same things digitally? Well, think again. In today’s industrial design world, nothing could be further from reality.
Art and Beyond
At the Motorola Innovation & Design Group, headquartered near New York City on Long Island, the most important task for designers isn’t to design. It’s to think. Motorola designers focus on the science and technology behind the art. They recognize the customer needs and business issues inherent in every product. They then take a multidisciplinary approach to designing products with an overarching objective of making users’ jobs easier. This often involves mixing and matching design components to find out which combination works best, somewhat like a technological Mr. Potato Head.
“I guess you could call us multi-linguists,” says Curt Croley, senior director of the Motorola Innovation & Design Group. “We speak the language of art and design, of course, but we also speak customer, research, industry, engineering, manufacturing, business and a lot more.” At Motorola, industrial design is the convergence of these various disciplines to develop and produce breakthrough new concepts, prototypes and finished products.
The “Ah-ha” Moment
The Motorola process is a true collaborative effort involving teams of researchers and designers. Besides research, physical and user interface designers, the teams include human factors engineers, psychologists and marketing and business personnel. Working with the data and insights gained by the researchers, the team collaborates in search of the “ah-ha” moment, as in “ah-ha, here’s how we can create or improve the product.” It’s the moment when the team’s expertise unites in creating innovative and breakthrough ideas that result in a successful new or improved product.
Motorola’s Innovation & Design Group typically takes on two types of assignments. First, they upgrade, update, refine and re-invent existing products, including creating sets of design components to mix, match and morph into different products. Second, they are charged with envisioning and designing products that have never existed before.
Making the Best Better
To understand the numerous facets of the design process, let’s examine a recent project. The Motorola MC9000 is today’s best-selling handheld computer, setting breakthrough standards of ruggedness and reliability and achieving widespread popularity in numerous industries including public safety, transportation, delivery, logistics, field sales and more. The assignment? Make the gold standard in handheld computers better by creating the MC9500.
The project did not start with designers scurrying to their computers to start designing. This is not art for art’s sake; it’s art for business’s sake. The process began the way most projects should but most often don’t, with design research teams going out into the field, talking to customers and observing how various users in various industries actually use the MC9000. “Our design group is different from many others because we are exceptionally customer- and business-focused. We do an incredible amount of research, and we think of ourselves as consumer advocates,” says Graham Marshall, Motorola’s director of design research. “We don’t talk to a customer just once; we often go back 10 times or more. We make field excursions and ride-alongs that show designers not just the immediate need but the need behind the need.” The result of this research is not only identification of ergonomic and usage issues in existing products, it is also the identification of new products and categories that are waiting to be created.
Identifying Improvement Needs
With the MC9000, the research identified two issues that became the major objectives of the re-design process. The first was simple; customers like the ruggedness of the handhelds, they just wanted more. The first objective thus became to increase ruggedness and reliability in the new MC9500. The second problem detected was not so simple. A great many customers reported issues with battery life.
In reality, because the Motorola computers are so rugged, they continue performing for years… even five years or longer. The problem is that even re-chargeable batteries begin to deteriorate over time, and they rarely, if ever, last that long. That can be a serious issue. If a driver, for example, needs to contact dispatch with a problem and the battery on his or her radio fails, it could be costly or even dangerous. The problem is exacerbated by the way many organizations handle batteries. Many have bins or shelves full of batteries that users slip into the units as they leave for the day. There’s no way of knowing which batteries are good, both in terms of charge level and in terms of life cycle. Solving this issue was a major challenge.
A Design “Bake-Off”
Using the insights developed by the research team’s efforts to develop a strategy, the next step in the process is to begin the actual designing. “At Motorola, we normally issue a set of conceptual directives and give them to a number of design teams,” notes Croley. “We sometimes refer to this as a ‘bake off’ approach.” From this exercise emerge a number of concepts that the department fine-tunes until a product or products are ready for modeling.
Virtual Sculpting
Today’s modeling process is remarkably streamlined and efficient. Gone are the sculpted-by-hand clay models that were, in most cases, time consuming and detail deficient. Today, using the same virtual sculpting software used by the automotive industry, Motorola designers create precise, detail-rich on-screen graphic models. Creating physical models of the graphics is also fast and efficient, making use of special printers that output precise three-dimensional models in about an hour.
Says Mark Palmer, senior staff industrial designer, “You can literally go out on a trip one day, hear something from a customer, come back to the office the following day, and generate four or five concepts on how the problem might be solved. The next morning you pick up the actual physical models and return to show them to the customer. It takes only three or four days; they can’t believe it.”
Faster Time to Market
When the product is ready in concept, it goes to engineering where the technology is added to the design. The process moves along to prototyping, testing and, ultimately, to production. Bottom line, the Motorola design process enables products to be brought to market faster… in many cases providing time savings of up to 30 percent.
Battery Management System
What was the solution for the battery life issue identified as a major objective in the development of the new MC9500 handheld computer? As the design teams worked on ways to provide longer battery life, they realized that the solution demanded more than simply a different battery. The solution that was needed was a true battery management system. Accordingly, the new product was given prominent new features that made it easy to determine two crucial things. First, a meter was added to show the remaining charge on a battery, a feature known as “gas gauging.”
Equally important, a push button feature was added to show the current health and remaining life span of the battery. Users can now be certain that each battery they place in the new MC9500 will last the entire day. Low-charge batteries can be charged before being placed back into use, and batteries in danger of failing can be replaced before they cause major problems.
Designing the Future
As previously mentioned, Motorola’s Innovation & Design Group also has a second mandate. They are charged with envisioning and developing product concepts that not only do not exist today, they have never existed. In the group’s research activities, the design professionals are able to identify opportunities for new products and even new product categories to solve both new and existing problems. The group’s business focus enables them to not only concept, design and model potential new products, it also helps them provide market sizing and preliminary business cases. When the group decides a product is ready to go, the team makes a comprehensive presentation to management that dots all the “i’s” and crosses all the “t’s” both in terms of product and in terms of potential profitability and return on investment.
As is evident, industrial design, at least at Motorola, has come a long, long way from mechanical drawings on paper and hand-sculpted clay models. The results are important because they help Motorola develop and manufacturer differentiating products with exceptional ROI. But they’re even more important because they help make Motorola customers safer and more productive on the job, and more profitable on the bottom line.