A design philosophy

In the past, people expected to buy what the market had to offer them. But today times have changed. In today’s marketplace, companies from all around the world must sell products and services that consumers want, need or wish for. Everyone, including you, me, teachers, business CEO’s, employees, and even the more humble people, are all consumers. So, how exactly do companies know what their consumers want?

That’s what my marketing Customer Insight’s class is teaching me at the Mc Combs School of Business. Nowadays, companies have learned to observe people’s everyday actions in order to understand their needs and design new products; not only have they learned this, but they know it’s an essential strategy for surviving in the marketplace.

Recently at our class we have talked about certain design philosophies, and how these philosophies have helped designers/engineers develop many innovative products. But, what exactly is a design philosophy? A design philosophy is sort of a personal point of view of the way you believe things, such as products, should be designed in order to function accordingly.  Jeff Mulhausen, an industrial designer who works for Upstream, was invited as a guest speaker to one of our classes. He showed us some important industrial designers and the design philosophies each one of them followed. The designer who interested me the most was, Dieter Rams. He is a German industrial designer who in his time worked for the German-brand Baun. As opposed to the other designers, Rams believed that a good design is a design, which is as little as possible. So, he simplified products so that people wouldn’t have a hard time understanding and using them. He designed for example, a simpler version of the radio than the one that existed in the late 1960’s. So, these philosophies each designer followed influenced on the way they saw new opportunities for design and the kind of products they created.

I can say from my own experience as a customer, that a product which I find really innovative in terms of its design, is the hands-free can opener (see figure below).

Before I owned one of this, I used to have a regular can opener, and I tried to use it as little as I could, since I’d get finger cuts, or I’d had a hard time getting the can opener attached to the can. But, I think whoever came with the idea of designing this new and improved version of a can opener really thought of an easier/simpler way to get cans opened. All you have to do is simply place the device at the top of the can and push the button. And, now I just realized that the hands-free can opener may be connected to Ram’s design philosophy of developing a design as little as possible.