A Fine Line E-Book

Hartmut Esslinger

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 307

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

For the first time, Hartmut Esslinger, internationally acclaimed designer and founder of frog design, inc., reveals the secrets to better business through better design. Having spent forty years helping build the world's most recognizable brands, Esslinger shows how business leaders and designers can join forces to build creative strategies that will ensure a more profitable and sustainable future. A Fine Line shares the amazing story of Esslinger's transformation from industrial design wunderkind to a global innovation powerhouse, while detailing the very real challenges facing businesses in the new global economy. Offering companies far more than a temporary innovation booster, Esslinger shows how he and frog build creative design into the framework of an organization's competitive strategy, the same approach that has worked so well for leading edge companies such as Sony, Louis Vuitton, Lufthansa, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Microsoft, and Apple. Offering a step-by-step overview of the innovation process--from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace--Esslinger reveals how to arrive at a design that reflects an intensely human experience and will connect strongly with consumers. With Esslinger's unique perspective, rich stories, and global mindset, A Fine Line explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to the future of a thriving and lasting global economy. The blending of design and business intelligence holds the key for shaping a sustainable competitive advantage in the rapidly evolving creative economy. A Fine Line equips business leaders with the necessary tools to thrive in tomorrow's world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 - design-driven strategy staking a claim in the creative economy

° the business of design

° strategic creativity and sustainable success

Chapter 2 - true lies the role of leadership in innovation

° seeing the future and supporting bold initiatives

° building a culture of innovation

° maintaining strategic focus and creative capital

° promoting ethical innovation

° sustaining success

Chapter 3 - designing to win the creative business strategy

° the strategic plan

° the tactics of creative business strategy

° the evolution of successful strategy

° designing the ultimate strategy—with the right creative partner

Chapter 4 - minds beat money the innovation process, step by step

° step 1: groundwork

° step 2: showtime! the creative collaboration

° step 3: marketing (where minds need money)

Chapter 5 - a business design revolution the greening of planet, inc.

°designing early-stage solutions

° developing green business strategies

°monitoring the ecological load factor of new products and technologies

° overcoming the challenges of going green

° triggering a holistic “reboot”

Chapter 6 - design-driven strategies for better business—and a better world

° fusion products: simple, flexible, sustainable

° open-source design: professional collaboration on a global scale

° co-design through social networks: giving customers a say—and a stake

° designing the new industrial revolution

Chapter 7 - the factories

° welcome to the machine

° the high costs of “cheap” production

° smart-sourcing: making the most of outside resources

° home-sourcing: local keys to global rewards

° personal-fab: building our own brands

° the rise of sustainable manufacturing

epilogue already here—and tomorrow

Acknowledgements

Praise

Copyright © 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Esslinger, Hartmut

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-50041-5

1. Industrial design. 2. New products. I. Title.

TS171.E85 2009

658.5’75—dc22

2009011951

HB Printing

With gratitude tomy wife and partner Patricia Roller,my children Marc, Nico, Max, & Anna(she gave this book its title),my teacher Karl Dittert,my first client Dieter Motte,my friends inside and outside of frog design,my world-challenging students,and my courageous clients.

foreword

Decades ago, when the Apple II temporarily ruled the computing landscape, I was in the passenger seat of a Mercedes being driven by Steve Jobs along the hilly roads above Woodside, California. Steve was extolling the virtues of the user interface embodied in the car’s window controls when he suddenly started to talk about an extraordinary industrial designer he had just visited in Bavaria who insisted on driving at break-neck speed. That man was Hartmut Esslinger.

Many years later, through one of those odd quirks of fate, I found myself sitting on the board of Flextronics at the time that it acquired Hartmut’s company, frog design. Yet it was only when I read this book that I came to realize all the places that bear Hartmut’s fingerprints. Many people know of the breakthrough work he did for Sony and Apple. Far fewer know that his mark also lies on the ergonomic design of a line of equipment for dentists’ offices; the first-class compartments of Lufthansa airplanes; the logo for Windows; and exquisite Louis Vuitton goods.

Hartmut’s book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut.

Michael Moritz

Partner, Sequoia Capital

about hartmut esslinger

A native of Beuren, Germany, Hartmut Esslinger founded frog design in 1969, when he was just twenty-five years old, and quickly developed the company into one of the world’s leading strategic design firms. Hartmut pioneered the use of design as a means of humanizing technology. His stylish, elegant, and user-friendly designs revolutionized the look and functionality of computer systems, consumer electronics, and other high-tech products and equipment. His contributions to Apple’s “Snow White” design language resulted in the ground-breaking Apple II computer series, which earned Time magazine’s Design of the Year award in 1984 and established Apple’s identity as a trend-setting, user-oriented brand. Over the past forty years, working with his partner and wife, Patricia Roller, Hartmut has contributed to the success of numerous other global firms, including Acer, Adidas, AT&T, CitiCorp, Dell, Disney, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Honda, IBM, Kodak, Louis Vuitton, Microsoft, Motorola, MTV, SAP, Siemens, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Swatch, Virgin Mobile, Yahoo!, and Yamaha, to name only a few. In 1990, BusinessWeek magazine named him the most influential American industrial designer since the 1930s and the first “Superstar of High-Tech Design.” Esslinger has received several hundred design and innovation awards and an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design. His work holds a place in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institute, and Neue Sammlung in Munich.

Since leaving his role as co-CEO of frog design in 2006, Hartmut has remained active as an educator and innovator. He is a founding professor of the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung (College for Design) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and a professor for convergent industrial design at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria.

Today frog design is one of the world’s foremost global innovation firms, helping companies create and bring to market meaningful products, services, and experiences. With a team of more than four hundred designers, technologists, strategists, and analysts, the company delivers fully convergent experiences that span multiple technologies, platforms, and media. frog works across a broad spectrum of industries, including consumer electronics, telecommunications, healthcare, media, education, finance, retail, and fashion. Headquartered in San Francisco, frog has offices in Austin, New York, San Jose, Seattle, Milan, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, and Shanghai. frog is an independent division of Aricent, a global innovation, technology, and outsourcing company, owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Sequoia Capital, The Family Office, and Flextronics. frog has won numerous awards, including BusinessWeek IDEA, Red Dot Design, I.D. magazine, and IF awards, and its work has been featured extensively by media, analysts, and researchers. frog speaks at conferences worldwide and publishes the award-winning design mind publication. The company has helped launch the Designers Accord, an industry-wide program to establish sustainable principles for design firms, and it serves on the advisory board of Design Ignites Change, an initiative that promotes design thinking among students. frog also partners with Pop!Tech, a social innovation network, to support entrepreneurs with incubating businesses in emerging markets.

introduction

“Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.”

—ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Where does creativity come from? Neurologists, artists, and many others have offered plenty of answers to that question, but I think we are born with the seeds of creativity within us. It’s up to us to discover, develop, and defend our gifts and prove that we deserve them. As a very young man, coming of age during the social and economic upheavals that rocked post-World War II Germany, I had to make some difficult but necessary choices about how I would defend and develop my own creative gift—choices that began with a painful family rift and led to a rich and satisfying career as a designer, entrepreneur, innovator, global business strategist, and educator. Making those choices, I stepped over the fine line that sometimes separates creativity from comfort to found my own firm, frog design, which stands today as one of the world’s innovation leaders. This book explores the adventure that followed, as I learned to navigate and then chart new waters in collaborative business design. I’ve written this book as a guide to that process, with the goal of encouraging business leaders and designers to join forces in building creative strategies for a more profitable and sustainable future.

As the most successful companies and brands know, design isn’t just about making something look good. Design enables a company to invent and project innovative concepts that enhance human interactions and experiences. And, when we design a new and better object or a more inspiring human experience, the design itself becomes a branding symbol. People recognize visual symbols as cultural expression, and we embrace those symbols that reflect our deeper values, such as a delight in simple, elegant usability. In essence, design humanizes technology and helps businesses appeal to the human spirit. And it is the cultural context of design that roots business in history and connects it to a more profound future.

I have been successful in life because I understood very early on that business needs creativity like humans need oxygen, and I was able to convince my clients that they needed to “breathe” in order to flourish. It hasn’t been easy. In the beginning I knew that, as both a consumer and a designer, I wanted technical products that were designed to connect with people on an emotional level, an idea I would later sum up as “emotional design.” Those kinds of products weren’t being manufactured in my native homeland, Germany, nor in many other places back in the 1960s when I started my company. Forty years later, frog design has had an impact on manufacturing and service industry offerings around the world, and the design-driven strategies of global brands such as Sony, Apple, Microsoft, SAP, Motorola, HP, and GE carry the frog DNA.

I am fortunate to have spent my professional life creating successful design-driven strategies with these dynamic corporations. Having learned firsthand how truly great business leaders partner with designers, I have developed a step-by-step innovation process that leverages the power of that partnership. That process is at the heart of the collaborative model of innovation-driven business design that I’ve outlined in this book. Each chapter details a critical phase of the successful innovation-driven business strategy, illustrated with ideas, strategies, and stories aimed at informing designers and business leaders, alike.

First, we’ll examine the role of design in the rapidly developing creative economy and how savvy business leaders cultivate a culture of innovation within their organizations. With the buy-in from management in place, we’ll tackle the real challenges and rewards of forming winning business design strategies before making plans for their tactical implementation. Next, we’ll walk through a step-by-step overview of the innovation process, from targeting goals to successfully shepherding innovations to market, and then take an in-depth look at the tools of innovation and the sometimes counterintuitive process of following a highly technical path to arrive at an intensely human experience. We’ll explore the growing and urgent demand for business strategies based on environmental sustainability, and the role of those strategies in the future of a thriving, lasting global economy. From developing early stage solutions for “green” consumer products and experiences to adopting global collaborative design processes, the examples of frog’s successful design-driven innovations discussed in this book offer critical insights into the process of crafting business models that can establish a foothold in the new, green economy. Finally, we’ll take a long look at the future of manufacturing and how businesses can transform the “cheap, cheaper, toxic” model of production outsourcing into one of mutually beneficial economic and industrial collaboration. Together, these chapters form a working guide to the process of infusing any business with the creative energy of design-driven innovation.

Throughout this book, I’ve woven bits and pieces of my personal and professional history. I’ve included these stories, in part, to offer an insider’s look at the creative life. More importantly, however, I wanted to give readers a rare opportunity to sit around the planning desk with some of the world-class business leaders I’ve worked with during my career—some of the brightest business minds of our age, including Dieter Motte, Akio Morita, and Norio Ohga of Sony, Henri Racamier of Louis Vuitton, Hasso Plattner of SAP, and yes, Steve Jobs of Apple.

Today, the business world is going through a period of profound and massive change that goes far deeper than falling stock markets and drops in consumer spending. The markets of efficiency—based on a ruthless quest for lower costs, no matter the social, environmental, or economic damage—are giving way to a new, creative economy. Customization and niche markets are eroding the demand for mass-produced commodities, and businesses are looking for ways to connect with their customers on an emotional level. Environmental sustainability, once ignored by many businesses, has become the new mantra for any enterprise looking for a secure foothold in 21st century markets. Around the world, business leaders are turning to designers to help create a strategy that will define their brand, by appealing to consumers’ emotions, providing rewarding consumer experiences, and building an environmentally responsible approach to doing business.

In the end, the business-design partnership advances our industrial culture by providing sustainable innovation, cultural identity, and economic consistency. But to accomplish that goal, design must cross the line that separates commercial-functional benchmarks from cultural relevance and spirituality. This book examines that fine line as it courses through our material culture, distinguishing “great” from “good,” creative strategies from imitative acts, and excellence from also-ran mediocrity.

In my experience, true success comes for the designer and the business executive when the two can bridge the artificial lines that too often have separated their worlds. This book also talks about building that bridge—about how creative minds and business minds collaborate, and how both sides of the business-design partnership can prosper within that process. I won’t say that this collaboration is a silver bullet for every problem facing a company, but I do believe it is the best way to develop a better business today and to build a sustainable future for that business. I’ve written this book to promote and inspire a new business reality. The stories and ideas in these pages offer proof that the cultural, humanistic, and economic power of creative design is better for the bottom line, better for business, and better for our planet as a whole.

1

design-driven strategy staking a claim in the creative economy

“To be is to do.”

—IMMANUEL KANT

It’s a big leap for a creative consulting company to grow from its roots in a tiny garage in Germany’s Black Forest to a position of influence with esteemed global franchises, but I see the story of that transition as just one example of the incredible power of the business/design alliance. Today, there’s much talk about the “new” power of this alliance, but the power of design-driven business strategy isn’t a new idea at all. It’s the idea that spurred me to start my own design firm in 1969, and it’s what drove Steve Jobs to hire my firm to join him in building such a strategy for his own company. What’s new is the rapidly growing recognition of this power and the need for cultivating it. A first step toward achieving that goal is a firm understanding of the vital role of design in shaping an innovation-driven business model.