“To survive against them1, we can't just rely on shallow styling. We need technology and design that they don't have. As long as we continue to innovate and produce products that have better features and work better, we can compete. Our only chance for survival is better engineering.”
How do we solve problems? How do we go about examining the facets of the challenges we face? We are not so lucky as archaeologists, who merely need to collect the pieces of the puzzle and glue them back together, Humpty-Dumpty style. Our greatest asset when investigating problems is the great and mighty Question.
Of course, this wonderful tool we have at our disposal is also the most challenging of apparatus to effectively wield. It isn’t merely about asking questions after all; as any conversation with a two-year-old will show, asking why a thousand times will either result in increasingly terse answers, or outright hostility. The finesse, the difficulty in beginning great design, is determining the right questions to ask.
A great example of this thought process in action, and one that is close to, if not my heart, then at the very least my physical body, is the situation Pittsburgh, the Steel City, faced as the end of the 20th century approached. The Seventies and Eighties were rough on a city that had been created from the foundries and the bellows of the steel mills as factories in China produced cheaper steel from cheaper labor and cheaper ore. The problem was one of life or death for a city that apart from an electronics and radio industry that had grown up hand-in-hand with the steel mills (and had likewise moved on), had only the steel industry.
How could Pittsburgh compete with places around the world like China that had nothing in the way of unions, OSHA, and inflated corporate decadence nurtured from nearly 100 years as the leading steel fabrication site in the U.S.? That question, of course, was the wrong one for the city to be asking, but at the time, it seemed like the only question worth answering as day after day, more layoffs and closings swept across the river valley, a malignant cancer with no apparent cure. For a while, Pittsburgh, along with other steel mills across the country tried to make the homegrown case with the tag line “Made in the USA”. The issue, of course, is how heavily commoditized the steel industry was, and had been since its inception. Additionally, the steel produced in the mills was rarely a to-market product: what did it matter if the materials for skyscrapers cars, or even children’s toys were produced in-country as long as the final product was. The steel producers were so far-removed from end-consumers that product differentiation was inconsequential.
A better question, and one that took a long time for Pittsburgh to effectively answer, was “How do we make use of this massive labor pool without the mills?” The solution was anything but obvious. In the case of other, more recent manufacturing diasporas, such as the one in Silicon Valley at the turn of the millennium, the answer was much clearer. Much of the silicon production and manufacturing had been outsourced, yes; but the remaining labor pool was a set of extremely talented and highly skilled workers, who could be repurposed. And so Silicon Valley became a new high-tech mecca, for software development and cutting-edge R&D. This essentially secured Silicon Valley’s long-term future, as their primary function was no longer product manufacturing, it was ideas, processes, and prototypes. These were things that were worth equally as much in Silicon Valley as they were in Singapore.
The same could not be said for Pittsburgh, where much of the fabrication process in the mills was either unskilled labor, or was focused on pouring hot molten fluid into casts; unfortunately, a minimally transferable skill to say the least. It was a serious problem then: how could this labor pool, which was becoming ever-increasingly fallow, be utilized in a way to stem the massive unemployment and poverty the city was facing? Alternate manufacturing avenues seemed promising at first, but that solution certainly couldn’t be permanent - U.S. labor prices were just to high to justify in the manufacturing field.
Of course, the story has a mostly happy ending, as Pittsburgh is once again a quickly growing economic center, albeit in an entirely different field. Finally, someone in the Steel City asked the right question: “How do we retrain and reuse our labor force with minimal time and investment?” The answer, just like steel manufacturing before it, was found in one of the fastest growing industries in the entire world, and one which was of special concern to America as the Baby Boomer generation began to age: healthcare. Of course, the labor pool couldn’t simply be handed stethoscopes and pushed into the waiting rooms of area hospitals to inspect broken limbs, or replace torn stitches. But hospitals and clinics brought with them the good old American bureaucracy of HMOs, Medicare, Prescription companies and the like. There were jobs to be had, if only physicians, drug companies and insurance giants could be convinced to move out into the Steel City. “If you build it, they will come”, as is said; and build it, Pittsburgh did. And the rest, as they say, is history.
How do we ask the right question? Indeed we could be like Pittsburgh, and with Edisonian glee ask ten-thousand different questions until we stumble upon the right one. Unfortunately most of us do not have the practical patience and adorably quaint determination that Edison is so well-remembered for 2. Instead of relying on intuition and serendipity then, we must rely on more precision than trial and error. Do we know for instance, what caused the problem? Or perhaps, who and what it affects? Of course, scientists know this as developing a hypothesis, which is after all, not just a Shot in the Dark, but rather, a calculated expression of what’s being studied based on prior knowledge and understanding. It’s putting to good use this education we pay tens of thousands of dollars for.
And so we come to Dyson. The knight is seemingly an exception to this entire series, so it seems only natural that I end the discussion with him. His products, after all, seem to solve problems that are both boring and impossible. The former, because they don’t truthfully solve anything that vacuum cleaners, or fans, or hand dryers, of the past didn’t already accomplish; there is nothing fundamentally different or revolutionary about the way his vacuums suck, or the way his fans blow 3. The latter, because they are quicksand problems: you could spend decades working on the perfect vacuum, but in the end, does it really matter if it’s one percent more efficient, or it rolls slightly better than a competitor? Dyson himself seems to have failed to do what he asks in his competition: “Design something that solves a problem”.
So is this the exception that proves the rule? I think not. Instead, we see an “exception” to these rules because we don’t realize what problems Dyson is tackling, what fundamental questions the agent of the queen has asked about these problems, and, to some degree at least, the nature of the solution he has offered up as Dyson brand products. We are misled, in no small part due to the seemingly mundane nature, the elegant simplicity inherent of his solutions. The absolute beauty of Dyson’s design skills is that he asks a question so fundamentally different than the one we see, he tackles a problem that consumer, producers, designers and engineers have difficulty even realizing exists.
What is that problem, what is that question? To the first, commoditization in the Consumer Appliance industry. And the Second, “How can we de-commoditize in an industry where differentiation was non-existent from day one?” This is a fundamental rethink of the design and engineering process that boils down to the following, in laymen’s terms:
Every vacuum, fan, and hand dryer in the world looks and functions identically to any other product.
How do we provide an experience compelling enough for people to use or stuff?
Dyson’s vacuums, or fans, or hand dryers aren’t about picking up dirt, or blowing air around, or drying hands. They’re about giving an experience that users enjoy and immediately associate with Dyson products. How many of us can name the brand of our fan, or the hand dryer in our university or workplace restrooms, or for that matter, the vacuum in our broom closet? I doubt most of us can name any of them, with the possible exception of the vacuum cleaner. On the other hand, did you know exactly what I meant when I mentioned the Dyson vacuum, fan or hand dryer, without even referring to the link?
This is the fundamental space in which engineering and design meet and must be intimately cooperative. Engineering allows us to create solutions that work; design allows us to create solutions that work well. And the two must cooperate to make sure that these solutions are immediately identifiable. Without engineering, without design, we won’t survive. And those damn Communists will win 4.
(1) - By "them", Dyson was referring to the Chinese, who had been buying up entire markets in the Consumer Appliance space in 2004.
(2) - Yes, I don't like Edison. Get over it.
(3) - Dyson's fan, to be fair, is very much a marvel of both engineering and design, on top of being super cool. But, it still doesn't do anything fundamentally different than a fan with blades.
(4) - Better dead than Red.
