the rivals that had once rejected them. The aesthetics and functionality of the design help to keep sales growing in spite of a higher retail price. To Dyson, good ‘is about looking at everyday things with new eyes and working out how they can be made better. It’s about challenging existing technology’.
Dyson engineers have taken this technology one stage further and developed core separator technology to capture even more microscopic dirt. Dirt now goes through three stages of separation. Firstly, dirt is drawn
into a powerful outer cyclone. Centrifugal forces fling larger debris, such as pet hair and dust particles, into the clear bin at 500 Gs (the maximum G-force the human body can take is 8 Gs). Second, a further cyclonic stage, the core separator, removes dust particles as small as 0.5 microns from the airflow – particles so small you could fit 200 of them on this full stop. Finally, a cluster of smaller, even faster cyclones generate centrifugal forces of up to 150,000 G – extracting particles as small as mould and bacteria.
Figure 5.2 The design activity is itself a process The design activity is one
of the most important operations processes
Concept generation Screening Preliminary design Evaluation and improvement Prototyping and final design
The design activity is itself a process
Producing designs for products, services is itself a process which conforms to the input–
transformation–output model described in Chapter 1. It therefore has to be designed and managed like any other process. Figure 5.2 illustrates the design activity as an input–
transformation–output diagram. The transformed resource inputs will consist mainly of information in the form of market forecasts, market preferences, technical data, and so on.
Transforming resource inputs includes operations managers and specialist technical staff, design equipment and software such as computer-aided design (CAD) systems (seelater) and simulation packages. One can describe the objectives of the design activity in the same way as we do any transformation process. All operations satisfy customers by producing their services and goods according to customers’ desires for quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.
In the same way, the design activity attempts to produce designs to the same objectives.
Concept generation
The ideas for new product or service concepts can come from sources outside the organization, such as customers or competitors, and from sources within the organization, such as staff (for example, from sales staff and front-of-house staff ) or from the R&D department.
Ideas from customers. Marketing, the function generally responsible for identifying new product or service opportunities may use many market research tools for gathering data from customers in a formal and structured way, including questionnaires and interviews.
These techniques, however, usually tend to be structured in such a way as only to test out ideas or check products or services against predetermined criteria. Listening to the customer, in a less structured way, is sometimes seen as a better means of generating new ideas. Focus groups, for example, are one formal but unstructured way of collecting ideas and sugges- tions from customers. A focus group typically comprises seven to ten participants who are unfamiliar with each other but who have been selected because they have characteristics in common that relate to the particular topic of the focus group. Participants are invited to ‘discuss’ or ‘share ideas with others’ in a permissive environment that nurtures different perceptions and points of view, without pressurizing participants. The group discussion is conducted several times with similar types of participants in order to identify trends and patterns in perceptions.
Listening to customers. Ideas may come from customers on a day-to-day basis. They may write to complain about a particular product or service, or make suggestions for its improvement.
Ideas may also come in the form of suggestions to staff during the purchase of the product or delivery of the service. Although some organizations may not see gathering this information as important (and may not even have mechanisms in place to facilitate it), it is an important potential source of ideas.
Ideas from competitor activity. All market-aware organizations follow the activities of their competitors. A new idea may give a competitor an edge in the marketplace, even if it is only a temporary one, then competing organizations will have to decide whether to imitate, or alternatively to come up with a better or different idea. Sometimes this involves reverse engineering, that is taking apart a product to understand how a competing organization has made it. Some aspects of services may be more difficult to reverse-engineer (especially back-office services) as they are less transparent to competitors. However, by consumer- testing a service, it may be possible to make educated guesses about how it has been created. Many service organizations employ ‘testers’ to check out the services provided by competitors.
Ideas from staff. The contact staff in a service organization or the salesperson in a product- oriented organization could meet customers every day. These staff may have good ideas about what customers like and do not like. They may have gathered suggestions from customers or have ideas of their own as to how products or services could be developed to meet the needs of their customers more effectively.
Figure 5.3 The stages of product /service design
Reverse engineering Focus groups
Ideas from research and development. One formal function found in some organizations is research and development(R&D). As its name implies, its role is twofold. Research usu- ally means attempting to develop new knowledge and ideas in order to solve a particular problem or to grasp an opportunity. Development is the attempt to try to utilize and opera- tionalize the ideas that come from research. In this chapter we are mainly concerned with the ‘development’ part of R&D – for example, exploiting new ideas that might be afforded by new materials or new technologies. And although ‘development’ does not sound as exciting as ‘research’, it often requires as much creativity and even more persistence. Both creativity and persistence took James Dyson (see the short case earlier) from a potentially good idea to a workable technology. One product has commemorated the persistence of its develop- ment engineers in its company name. Back in 1953 the Rocket Chemical Company set out to create a rust-prevention solvent and degreaser to be used in the aerospace industry. Working in their lab in San Diego, California, it took them 40 attempts to get the water-displacing formula worked out. So that is what they called the product. WD-40 literally stands for water displacement, fortieth attempt. It was the name used in the lab book. Originally used to pro- tect the outer skin of the Atlas missile from rust and corrosion, the product worked so well that employees kept taking cans home to use for domestic purposes. Soon after, the product was launched, with great success, into the consumer market.
Open-sourcing – using a ‘development community’4
Not all ‘products’ or services are created by professional, employed designers for commercial purposes. Many of the software applications that we all use, for example, are developed by an open community, including the people who use the products. If you use Google, the Internet search facility, or use Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, or shop at Amazon, you are using open-source software. The basic concept of open-source software is extremely simple. Large communities of people around the world, who have the ability to write software code, come together and produce a software product. The finished product is not only available to be used by anyone or any organization for free but is regularly updated to ensure it keeps pace with the necessary improvements. The production of open-source software is very well organized and, like its commercial equivalent, is continuously supported and maintained.
However, unlike its commercial equivalent, it is absolutely free to use. Over the last few years the growth of open-source has been phenomenal with many organizations transitioning over to using this stable, robust and secure software. With the maturity open-source software now has to offer, organizations have seen the true benefits of using free software to drive down costs and to establish themselves on a secure and stable platform. Open-source has been the biggest change in software development for decades and is setting new open standards in the way software is used.
The open nature of this type of development also encourages compatibility between products. BMW, for example, was reported to be developing an open-source platform for vehicle electronics. Using an open-source approach, rather than using proprietary software, BMW can allow providers of ‘infotainment’ services to develop compatible, plug-and-play applications. ‘We were convinced we had to develop an open platform that would allow for open software since the speed in the infotainment and entertainment industry requires us to be on a much faster track’, said Gunter Reichart, BMW vice-president of driver assistance, body electronics and electrical networks. ‘We invite other OEMs to join with us, to exchange with us.
We are open to exchange with others.’
Research and development
Concept screening
Not all concepts which are generated will necessarily be capable of further development into products and services. Designers need to be selective as to which concepts they progress to the next design stage. The purpose of the concept-screening stage is to take the flow of concepts and evaluate them. Evaluation in design means assessing the worth or value of each design option, so that a choice can be made between them. This involves assessing each con- cept or option against a number of design criteria. While the criteria used in any particular design exercise will depend on the nature and circumstances of the exercise, it is useful to think in terms of three broad categories of design criteria:
● The feasibilityof the design option – can we do it?
– Do we have the skills (quality of resources)?
– Do we have the organizational capacity (quantity of resources)?
– Do we have the financial resources to cope with this option?
● The acceptabilityof the design option – do we want to do it
– Does the option satisfy the performance criteria which the design is trying to achieve?
(These will differ for different designs.) – Will our customers want it?
– Does the option give a satisfactory financial return?
● The vulnerabilityof each design option – do we want to take the risk? That is, – Do we understand the full consequences of adopting the option?
– Being pessimistic, what could go wrong if we adopt the option? What would be the con- sequences of everything going wrong? (This is called the ‘downside risk’ of an option.) Figure 5.4 illustrates this classification of design criteria.
It sounds like a joke, but it is a genuine product innovation motivated by a market need. It’s green, it’s square and it comes originally from Japan. It’s a square watermelon! Why square? Because Japanese grocery stores are not large and space cannot be wasted.
Similarly a round watermelon does not fit into a refrigerator very conveniently. There is also the problem of trying to cut the fruit when it kept rolling around. So an innovative farmer from Japan’s south-western island of Shikoku solved the problem devised with the idea of making a cube-shaped watermelon which could easily be packed and stored. But there is no genetic modification or clever science involved in growing watermelons. It simply involves placing the young fruit into wooden boxes with clear sides. During its growth, the fruit naturally swells to fill the surrounding shape. Now the idea has spread from Japan. ‘Melons are among the most delicious and refreshing fruit around but some people find them a problem to store in their fridge or to cut because they roll around,’ said Damien Sutherland, the exotic fruit buyer from Tesco, the UK supermarket. ‘We’ve seen samples of these watermelons and they literally stop you in their tracks because they are so eye-catching. These square
Short case
Square watermelons!
5melons will make it easier than ever to eat because they can be served in long strips rather than in the crescent shape.’ But not everyone liked the idea. Comments on news web sites included: ‘Where will engineering everyday things for our own unreasonable convenience stop? I prefer melons to be the shape of melons!’, ‘They are probably working on straight bananas next!’, and
‘I would like to buy square sausages, then they would be easier to turn over in the frying pan Round sausages are hard to keep cooked all over.’
Design criteria
Feasibility
Acceptability
Vulnerability
Source:Getty Images
The design ‘funnel’
Applying these evaluation criteria progressively reduces the number of options which will be available further along in the design activity. For example, deciding to make the outside casing of a camera case from aluminium rather than plastic limits later decisions, such as the overall size and shape of the case. This means that the uncertainty surrounding the design reduces as the number of alternative designs being considered decreases. Figure 5.5 shows what is sometimes called the design funnel, depicting the progressive reduction of design options from many to one. But reducing design uncertainty also impacts on the cost of changing one’s mind on some detail of the design. In most stages of design the cost of chang- ing a decision is bound to incur some sort of rethinking and recalculation of costs. Early on in the design activity, before too many fundamental decisions have been made, the costs of change are relatively low. However, as the design progresses the interrelated and cumulative decisions already made become increasingly expensive to change.
Figure 5.4 Broad categories of evaluation criteria for assessing concepts
Figure 5.5 The design funnel – progressively reducing the number of possibilities until the final design is reached Design funnel
Balancing evaluation with creativity
The systematic process of evaluation is important but it must be balanced by the need for design creativity. Creativityis a vital ingredient in effective design. The final quality of any design of product or service will be influenced by the creativity of its designers. Increasingly, creativity is seen as an essential ingredient not just in the design of products and services, but also in the design of operations processes. Partly because of the fast-changing nature of many industries, a lack of creativity (and consequently of innovation) is seen as a major risk. For example, ‘It has never been a better time to be an industry revolutionary. Conversely, it has never been a more dangerous time to be complacent . . . The dividing line between being a leader and being a laggard is today measured in months or a few days, and not in decades.’2 Of course, creativity can be expensive. By its nature it involves exploring sometimes unlikely possibilities. Many of these will die as they are proved to be inappropriate. Yet, to some extent, the process of creativity depends on these many seemingly wasted investigations. As Art Fry, the inventor of 3M’s Post-it note products, said: ‘You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince. But remember, one prince can pay for a lot of frogs.’
Not everyone agrees with the concept of the design funnel. For some it is just too neat and ordered an idea to reflect accurately the creativity, arguments and chaos that some- times characterize the design activity. First, they argue, managers do not start out with an infinite number of options. No one could process that amount of information – and anyway, designers often have some set solutions in their mind, looking for an opportunity to be used. Second, the number of options being considered often increasesas time goes by. This may actually be a good thing, especially if the activity was unimaginatively specified in the first place. Third, the real process of design often involves cycling back, often many times, as potential design solutions raise fresh questions or become dead ends. In summary, the idea of the design funnel does not describe what actually happens in the design activity.
Nor does it necessarily even describe what shouldhappen.
Critical commentary
Even at the chic and stylish end of the hairdressing business, close as it is to the world of changing fashion trends, true innovation and genuinely novel new services are a relative rarity. Yet real service innovation can reap significant rewards as Daniel and Luke Hersheson, the father and son team behind the Daniel Hersheson salons, fully understand. The Hersheson brand has successfully bridged the gaps between salon, photo session and fashion catwalk. The team first put themselves on the fashion map with a salon in London’s Mayfair followed by a salon and spa in Harvey Nichols’s flagship London store.
Their latest innovation is the ‘Blowdry Bar at Top Shop’. This is a unique concept that is aimed at customers who want fashionable and catwalk quality styling at an affordable price without the full ‘cut and