A day with Dan Formosa of Smart Design

Design Droplets is an AGIdeas 2010 Media Partner.

It’s certainly not everyday that you get an opportunity to spend the day with one of the worlds most respected Industrial Designers and a small group of young, eager and talented Australian designers, but if you were able to attend AGIdeas Workshops 2010 program (running each year at the AGIdeas International Design Week) thats exactly what you get to do.

I was privileged enough to spend Monday doing just that at an AGIdeas workshop run by none other than Dan Formosa of SMART Design and hosted in building 9 at RMIT University.

While you may often find that successful designers come across as a bit full of themselves and altogether too arrogant for their own good, Dan was as far from this stereotype as possible. He proved to be an extremely personable and engaging presenter who spent the majority of the workshop addressing the myriad of questions that cropped up during the course of the day while still covering a vast array of topics within the realm of design, more specifically the realms of Industrial & Product Design, that ranged from cats & dogs, Queen Victoria, Guinness, happiness and ergonomics to biomechanics and more.

Like you are probably doing now, at the beginning of the workshop I was wondering what all these had to do with design. While ergonomics and biomechanics are possibly quite obvious. Ergonomics and biomechanics are of interest to design because of the relationships between design and the human body (Dan’s position on this is that all designers should have at minimum a basic understanding of the human body), other areas may not be immediately apparent. So let me give you are really quick run down of the workshop with Dan.

The workshop started out with a basic exercise to show us that a huge amount of knowledge that we have can often be difficult to express. The exercise centred around the idea that we needed to explain only by mobile phone (a basic mobile phone with voice capabilities only, none of this smart phone stuff) to a friend of Dan’s on a desert island who had never seen an animal of any kind what a cat and dog are and how to distinguish them from one another. So of course we broke into groups and worked on this problem. It was a particularly interesting exercise that really broke the ice and got us into the discussion and engaging with one another. An interesting side note here: Dan had us introduce ourselves to the group, after he had done a quick run down on himself, just before the exercise began instead of the customary everyone intro yourselves at the beginning.

The remainder of the day was centred around many similar exercises and discussion that looked at breaking down assumptions, expressing and bringing to light hidden knowledge, problems with market research and in design research, ergonomic studies, design process, designing for real people, the challenges of introducing design research techniques into the Australian design consultancy market and design and gender.

The basic points of what Dan covered and what was discussed included:

Problems with traditional questions we ask in relation to design – we often ask questions like – Which design do you like the best? Pick one. As Dan pointed out the problem with this question is that it assumes you like at least one of the designs. Dan suggested that a better way of finding out what people really like is to ask them to actually rate the design options on a scale of 1 to 10 which will give a more holistic view of what people do and don’t like.

Queen Victoria was a pretty left of field reference but lead to John Snow, her medical physician, who was pivotal in solving Soho’s (England) 1854 Cholera outbreak through very basic mapping techniques. This lead into further discussion on the topics of design research techniques and more specifically to Guinness and the Student’s t test, developed by William Gosset at the Guinness brewery in Dublin in 1908 to solve quality control issues. The discussion that followed may be of interest to many designers are it covered statistical sampling and study group sizes for design research.

Dan and the group went on from this to discuss many areas of design research and the following points are a short distillation of the discussion for your benefit, hopefully they will help you to spark, ideas, ways of doing, debate and discussion amongst you and your design colleagues:

• Use small group (sample) sizes to do research as large ones cost a lot of money for things like prototype testing, although in particular cases like online studies it is possible to use large ones.

• 6 – 8 people in a room is a good manageable size for research groups.

• As a basic rule of thumb, for each question you want answered you need to double your sample size. e.g.: 1 question ask 6 – 8 people, 2 questions ask 12 – 16 people etc…

• Many designers shy away from quantifying things, but quantifying design can make it easier for you to present to a client as it gives them hard data.

• Actually observing a customer is something many companies just do not do. One participant in the workshop told a story of presenting a video to executives of a client company of an older customer attempting to open the companies new fangled cheese packaging with a quick lock mechanism (they had spent millions developing this technology). After 10 minutes struggling to open it the customer grabbed a knife and opened it in seconds. The executives were dumbfounded. The lesson here is observe the customer, have conversation with them and find out what they really need.

• Look at the extremes, don’t spend your time looking at the average like market research companies. Look at individuals who occupy the extremities of bell curves and there you will find rich insights and rich data to mine.

• The average is easy to design for. While designing for say 6 individuals is really hard because it is difficult to design something six people will all really love.

• Move from large Design, Research, Validate cycles to quick, short fluid ones – Design, Research, Validate, Design, Research, Validate, Design, Research, Validate,Design, Research, Validate.

• Starting with small, quick and fluid studies, observation and quick & dirty prototypes. These can lead to larger studies. It is better than trying to start small rather than with one huge study.

• Designing for real people makes the project real, tangible and personal.

• People will often blame the themselves for problems with products, but in reality, more often than not, the product can be to blame. It was most likely that the product was badly designed.

• Other things mentioned in the workshop you may wish to check out include SMART Design’s website and videos including The Day in the Life of a Smartie if you are interested in working there.

The final exercise to wrap up the workshop was one looking at gender and design. SMART Design, through their Femme Den Unit, has been doing some interesting work looking at gender in design.

Two really interesting examples of this that Dan mentioned are looking at Flat Screen TVs and how women and men perceive them. In an informal cocktail party style study the SMART Design Femme Den invited around 20 – 30 women at a time to cocktail style functions that focused on the topic of Flat Screen TVs. The informal nature of the study uncovered interesting insights on how women view Flat Screen TVs. Dan also mentioned that SMART are doing work in the surgical field for women surgeons as surgery is a male dominated field and as such the tools and implements are designed specifically for men.

The exercise conducted in the workshop focused on breaking down how we view objects on a male vs. female level. So the group split into smaller male groups and female groups to write two lists. One was what we looked for in an object and the other was what made us miserable with an object. Since Dan loves baseball he threw a curve ball in half way through the exercise and had several groups switch to describing the two lists not in reference to objects, but in reference to personal relationships, without the knowledge of the other groups (Which meant that a lot laughter and confusion occurred at the mini presentations at the end of the exercise). Basically this exercise was fun and allowed everyone to relax a bit more before the workshop wrapped up. However it did show some insights into how males and females perceived products and what they actually want in products (and relationships).

While the conversations and presentation shifted across many topics and many levels of the design area, from high level to more basic design principles (overall it was at a more fundamental level, I assume so anyone even without extensive design experience or a design background can attend – there were high school students, university students from Industrial Design and other design disciplines and professionals from a variety of disciplines) it was informative, engaging and, most of all, inspiring. Thanks to Dan Formosa and everyone else who was there.

Overall it was fantastic to attend the workshop with Dan and I would recommend that if you ever have a chance to see Dan Formosa speak or meet him then take it. And if you want to spend the day with a design great like Dan in 2011, grab a ticket and head along to AGIdeas Workshop sessions 2011 as they are fantastic and highly engaging.