software,” says Alan Kay, “you should design your own hardware too.”

The best products of this new era will start with a strong product strategy, then design devices from the inside out, focusing on the behavior first, with all three design disciplines—interaction, industrial, and graphic—working together to create more-holistic products that are driven by the behavior they enable, not just mechanics and engineering. We consider the actions that the product needs to support, then make the functionality (the inside) as pleasing to use as the device’s look and feel (the outside).

This is not really new thinking, of course. We were surprised to find out the late, great industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss basically said the same thing in 1955 in his seminal book Designing for People: “An honest job of design should flow from the inside out, not from the outside in.” (It would be interesting to see what Dreyfuss could do with Solid Works and a mobile phone.)

Another surprise in setting up the new studio was how wide the gulf really is between industrial design and interaction design. Even though the two disciplines share much philosophically, in general, the two sets of designers for the most part don’t really know what the other does. There’s a lot of mystery around the industrial design practice, I’ve found, and very few books to try to debunk it, unlike interaction design, where tons of books and blogs scour over every bit of minutia in the interaction design process. Industrial and interaction

designers speak a different language, attend different conferences, read different magazines, obsess about different topics. It’s not much better with the visual designers either, with their arguments about type and color, the emotional palette they work with so foreign from the often logical, reasonable world of interaction design.

As it turns out, the blend of the three disciplines is mostly a good thing. We each bring a perspective to the table and a way of thinking and working.

We don’t complete each other; we refine each other.

Suddenly, making the product the best it can be is everyone’s job. We can’t blame the industri-

al designer or the visual designer, because that is us. We have to work around our discipline-spe-cific constraints and emphasize the strengths and cover the flaws of the other.

This is how the best products are made.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dan Saffer is a founder and principal at Kicker Studio. He is an international speaker and author of Designing for Interaction (New Riders) and

Designing Gestural Interfaces (O’Reilly). He holds several patents for his innovations and his products are used by millions every day. He has a master’s in design from Carnegie Mellon University.

January + February 2009

DOI: 10.1145/1456202.1456213
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0100 $5.00