Product Design 2.0 and the
Genesis of Kicker Studio
Dan Saffer
Kicker Studio | dan@odannyboy.com
It’s obvious to anyone paying
attention that the devices we
own and carry around have
changed in a significant way
over the past several years.
Presaged by mobile phones, the
iPod, and Tivo, our devices now
contain sophisticated embedded digital technology. They’re
networked. They are responsive and adaptive to human
behavior. They’re contextual
and meaningful. And the best
of them are cohesive: The hardware and software are created
if not at the same time, then at
least with a deep awareness of
each other.
In other words, objects are
now more than just objects.
Instead, they’re enablers of
behavior. Which, in some
sense, objects always have
been (knives enable cutting, for
instance). But now the behaviors
that our devices can manifest
and facilitate boggle the mind.
Our devices can be “
indistinguishable from magic.”
Products are simply getting stranger. The affordances
we used to take for granted
(handles, buttons, dials, etc.)
may or may not be there. Heck,
the whole interface might not
be visible. There’s a new generation of touchscreen and sensor-driven devices that will number
in the hundreds of millions over
the next few years. Objects that
were previously stand-alone are
being hooked up to the Internet
and can talk to other objects.
Rooms can act like objects, and
objects like rooms. Robots blend
interaction, industrial, and
service design into new forms.
What was once visible can now
be invisible, and what was once
invisible can now be seen and
manipulated.
With all this in mind, it was
obvious to me that most products were being made the wrong
way. The industrial design was
frequently done before the
interaction designer and visual
designers ever saw the device,
so that the device felt slapped
together; what’s on the screen
had nothing to do with the form.
There were (and are) a lot of
phones, for instance, that were
beautiful to hold but frustrating
to use on a daily basis. Or maybe
the product strategy caused the
device to have too many features
until it was overburdened with
unnecessary functionality and
controls. Or maybe the product
seemed lifeless and had little
personality aside from a list of
options. The list went on.
To state the obvious, it’s hard
to make beautiful products
that work as well as they look.
Especially in this new world of
smart, behavior-filled objects
(Product Design 2.0?).
I also knew from looking
around the product-design
landscape that most companies
weren’t addressing the new
challenges, for the simple reason that they weren’t designed
for it. Companies are frequently
siloed. Hardware and software
designers don’t talk, and their
work is often done in different departments, sometimes
in vastly different locations.
And design firms often aren’t
much better. Most design firms
specialize in one design discipline: They are great interaction
designers, or beautiful form
makers, or branding/identity
firms. Then they bolt on one
or two of the other disciplines,
with varying success. It would
be better, I thought, to have a
design studio that shared the
characteristics of the products
we were building: cohesive, networked, smart. Where, from the
start, the disciplines were all
combined and the process would
not have different tracks that
may or may not come together
at some point in production.
Which is why some friends
of mine—Jennifer Bove, Tom
Maiorana, Jody Medich, and Mike
Scully—and I started Kicker, a
new product-design studio. We
all come from different design
disciplines, but we share the
vision that products can be
designed better, and more efficiently, by having hardware,
software, and interface considered together from the start.
“If you are serious about your
