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
