Interactions - January/February 2009

sections of the designer’s concerns, the client’s concerns, and society’s concerns. The designer can work with conviction at the overlap of these concerns: This is called informed intuition. The important part here is that the designer starts with his own set of subjective concerns and is not simply a corporate mercenary.

Was the iPhone conceived through “user observation”? Doubtful. Designers lead the public imagination with new proposals. Designers provide visions of what could be. Informed design experiments make sense of modern change and are risky because they propose new behaviors, not just cater to observed, existing ones.

more processes and methods, our work becomes easier to plan for, and thus easier to buy for managers.

Q: What is the future of
American design?

Jeremy (IIT): If designers just design for other designers, we will end up with an oversupply of beautiful, expensive, and mostly useless products. Overvaluing intuition leads to the star-designer phenomenon, which is bad for the profession. When there are a few high-paid designers who are admired for their seemingly infallible intuition, we end up with a lower class of designers left to implement their ideas for much lower pay. This income distribution resembles the music industry and the crack-dealing industry— new recruits are lured by a few successful examples but will likely never achieve a living wage.

When we create processes and methods that deemphasize intuition, we create fewer star designers. Instead, we create more designers who can operate in a competitive, profit-driven environment alongside marketing and finance folks. With

ative, contrarian point of view that often leads to great design innovations. It’s important to recognize our role in the future of global design. At the moment, the U.S. is known for great brands, great firms, and great schools. But our position in the future is not a given. There is an amazing amount of design talent being developed in India, Korea, China, and Taiwan. They have sent students to our best schools not to become American designers, but to go back to their home countries and improve both practice and education. Many of these countries also have national design policies and strategies (which we do not, for better or worse, in the U.S.). We need to act now, since we do not want our role to have been only to educate these competing national economies; we need to think about how to partner and collaborate with them to build

American business.

Scott (Cranbrook): While working at IDEO, I experienced projects that integrated the efforts of Cranbrook “designers” and IIT “innovators” within the same team. It was a friendly balance of heart and mind, form and strategy. I think this balanced approach to design process will represent the new state-of-the-art in the American profession. Successful teams will be comfortable with the give and take between design and innovation. Understanding the line where design ends and innovation begins will be an ongoing question. Experts in both methods will continue to be in demand.

As “things with attitude” come to center stage in more markets, American design will need a more sophisticated way of discussing connections between form and attitude to build meaningful products and brand stories with a POV. America needs more laboratories for experimental thinking and making. As a profession, the “art” of design must be supported and encouraged as much as the business of design. Designers with a sophisticated critical framework for evaluating form, in all its complexities, will build a better American, and global, design.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Product designer and educator Scott Klinker heads the graduate 3D design program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he also received his MFA in 1996. He has worked in-house for IDEO (Palo Alto) and

Sony/Ericsson and later chaired the design program at the Kanazawa International Design Institute in Japan. He currently runs Scott Klinker Product Design, developing licensed designs for contract furniture, household goods, and toys, with clients including Steelcase and Burton Snowboards. In 2006 he was featured as one of Newsweek’s annual “Design Dozen,” a selection of the best new designers.

Jeremy Alexis is an assistant pro-
fessor and assistant dean at the
IIT Institute of Design. He holds
both a bachelor of architecture
and master of design from the
Illinois Institute of Technology. He
currently teaches the research
and demonstration (yearlong cap-
stone) class, as well as classes on economics and
design, concept evaluation, design decision making,
and problem framing. Before IIT, he worked for
Doblin, Gravity Tank, and Archideas. He has worked
with clients such as Unilever, Motorola, Citibank,
Pfizer, American Express, and Target.

January + February 2009

Jeremy (IIT): I agree with Scott’s vision of the balanced approach. We recognize that if we overrationalize the design process, we will miss out on the cre-