Designing for your dislikes
By Tom Foth on May 19, 2010

I am delighted to say that I’ll be tweeting and blogging from the World Innovation Forum (http://us.hsmglobal.com/contenidos/wifhome2010.html) on June 8 and 9th.  I am looking forward to Robert Brunner’s presentation on innovation and design.  Mr. Brunner has a distinguished career having designed the Apple II, Macintosh, the original Macintosh PowerBook and Newton.  In addition, he’s served clients such as Dell, Nike and Hewlett Packard.  Some of his work is on permanent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Harvard Business Review interviewed Mr. Brunner in January of this year (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/three_tips_for_innovators_from.html).  In that story, Mr. Brunner offered three tips for innovators. I was most struck by his non-obvious tip #1: “Look at a successful product you dislike, and identify the (non-technology) innovation behind its popularity.”

There is a maxim that good innovators are those with a wide breadth of experiences.  I think Mr. Brunner offers us an important counterpoint: our experiences, no matter how broad they are, can act as a gilded cage to our innovation.

An example came from Mr. Brunner’s observing the contradiction that while he disliked the design elements of the Toyota Prius, the car was very successful.  He asked himself “why?” What he found was that the design elements he saw as “ugly” the owners wore as badges signaling their concern for the environment.

Mr. Brunner took from this is is that products sometimes serve more than their purpose: sometimes they serve as icons.  He then reasoned that if one knows that one is designing a product that will also serve as an icon, one can make it a beautiful and appealing icon. (Note: that being said, the shape of the Prius has actually grown on me…)

The moral of this story is simple: find the appeal that others see that you don’t. Doing so will free you from the cage of your microcosm and allow you to see design and innovation through the eyes of others.