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Trump

There’s never been so much technology trying so hard to be beautiful. Silicon Valley’s latest hit product, <a href="https://nest.com/?alt=2" target="_blank">the Nest thermostat</a>, is a perfectly round bauble with no buttons. Square, the payment company, sells a sales register that looks like a shrunken Richard Serra sculpture. And Google recently hired a score of artists to make couture outfits for its new line of wi-fi routers.

The tech world's obsession with design runs through Steve Jobs, of course, but it’s too much to give him all the credit. Jobs arrived at a pivotal juncture for both the computer industry and the design industry, as professor Barry Katz explains in his new book, “Make it New,” which tells the tale of how designers became the head honchos of Silicon Valley.

In the 1950s, companies like Hewlett Packard were already employing full-time designers to package their products — things like calculators and tape decks and industrial printers. By the '70s, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were founding Apple, the Valley was already dotted with design consultancies eager to tackle the new challenge of creating a computer that regular people would want to buy.

“Steve Jobs and the people around him show up at almost exactly the midpoint in the story,” Katz said in a recent interview. But it was a pivotal moment, as Katz describes in his book:

Core technologies were beginning to migrate out of corporate R&amp;D centers, university labs, and suburban garages, where they were being met by a new generation of “product designers” who sought to distance themselves from both the industrial designer’s preoccupation with external form, and the engineer’s restrictive focus on measurable performance.

This partnership would evolve over the years into the perfect marriage. Designers taught the tech industry how to make things that people would lust for. And in return, the tech industry gave designers a supply of blank canvasses upon which to project their growing ambitions.

Design hardly began in Silicon Valley, but it discovered new powers there. As Apple demonstrated in the 2000s, good design made products exponentially more useful — and more marketable. Technology could do magical things, but so could designers. The profession has acquired so much cachet that at many tech companies, the old relationships have flipped. It’s the designers who now call the shots, and engineers have to figure out how to make their designs a reality.

These days, some designers have embarked on even grander missions. There are design firms dedicated to combating poverty and saving the environment. One of the latest fads in corporate America is “design thinking,” a term that describes how designers tackle problems by studying human behavior. Banks are hiring designers to figure out how to attract more customers. The Mayo Clinic opened its <a href="http://www.mayo.edu/center-for-innovation/what-we-do/design-thinking">own design lab</a> to study how health care can be improved. Last year, business consulting giant McKinsey bought LUNAR, one of Silicon Valley’s most famous design consultancies.

Bits and pieces of this story have been told, but Katz, a design professor at California College of the Arts, is one of the first to fully explain the dramatic progress of the last half-century. As he describes it, design is the “missing link” that explains Silicon Valley’s success. And the experience of designers in Silicon Valley helps us understand how design became so important — why Google publishes design manifestos, why medical devices look like space jewelry, and why even Army leaders are talking about design as a way to gain “<a href="http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20120630MC_art008.pdf">combat power</a>.”

Recently, we chatted over the phone about what he learned in his research for the book.

Wonkblog: As you describe in your book, design is such a huge part of the Silicon Valley story. And I think maybe people don’t fully understand just how big of a deal it is.

Katz: There has been a tremendous amount of attention paid to the giant tech companies, the universities, the venture capital firms, and so on. The one thing that has been almost entirely neglected — and this kind of astonished me — is the place of design in this entire ecosystem.

What I set out to do in the book was to argue that design is the missing link — design explains how Silicon Valley happened, and how it now operates.

Sometime around the late '70s and early '80s, ideas began to move out of research and development labs and toward the markets. Now, if you’re an engineer building a tech device for other engineers, it's not that design doesn't matter, but it means something very specific. It's all about pure functionality.

But when you’re trying to sell a complex product like a computer or a cellphone or a music player to the general consuming public — how the technology works is not really what matters to them. It’s the design. Not just how a product looks, but the entire experience of using it.

So as this was happening, we saw the emergence of small clusters of designers in the region. They began to work symbiotically with the tech companies forming this very dense network, and it grew from there.

Now, the whole world seems suddenly to have discovered that design matters. Non-designers are trying to learn how designers work and how designers think. We have the rather striking appearance of design-thinking teams showing up in banks and financial services companies and insurance agencies and management consultancies and everything else — even the U.S. Army.

So one of the interesting new developments is how design itself is changing and becoming more ambitious. It transformed Silicon Valley, but it seems like Silicon Valley also had a big effect on design.

I used to have a thumbnail definition of design, which no longer seems adequate to me, but at least it's a start: Design -- the process of making technologies accessible and available and meaningful to human beings.

Thirty or 40 years ago, a design team might have been a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a guy from software (it was always the guy in those days) and perhaps an industrial designer.

Today, those characters might be joined by an anthropologist, a social psychologist, an ethnographer, an MBA, and perhaps even a writer. The circle gets bigger and bigger because designers are now trying to understand people in an increasingly comprehensive way.

I was at Uber a couple of months ago for a talk to their design group. It's 180 people, who call them UX designers — user experience designers. What are they doing? They’re crafting interfaces, conducting research into behaviors. Lots of things that don't look like what designers were doing a generation ago.

We’ve come to realize that creating useful, meaningful and successful products involves a lot more than just mastering some technical skills like drawing or 3-D modeling.

A lot of people think that Steve Jobs was the origin of Silicon Valley’s design culture, but as you described in your book, that’s not true at all.

When I started the book, my assumption was that this whole process began in Silicon Valley in the early '80s. That’s the point when we really begin to see technology products move out of lab environments or business environments and toward the general consumer market.

But when I began to look more closely, I discovered in this was absolutely not the case. Steve Jobs and the people around him show up at almost exactly the midpoint in the story.

That does not reduce his importance; he’s really the pivot on which this whole things turns.

But prior to that there had been some very, very important episodes in the professionalization of design. They had been largely restricted to either highly technical products or products that were intended for fairly limited use by engineering groups or by surveyors out in the field who needed a handheld calculator rather than a big typewriter.

So what exactly was the innovation at Apple?

Jobs told me in an interview some years ago, he had this insight that for every hardware geek who wanted to buy a [self-build computer] kit and put it together, there were 1,000 software geeks who just wanted to take something out of the box and plug it in with the screen and a keyboard on it and see what it would do.

So he made the decision to sell a computer in a sealed box, which does not sound like a very big deal but it's actually the defining moment, I think in the transformation of design and of its role in the Silicon Valley.

Because as soon as he did that, then every question of design followed. What should the box look like? What kind of statement should it make? How should it relate to the other things on your desk, in your office, in your new building and of your company? How should the peripheral devices, a mouse and keyboard and the monitor, relate visually and functionally to this? So it started out really small but with that one decision the whole thing kind of blew open.

I think that Steve Jobs, in my mind, made two slightly different contributions. The stuff that you're describing — I think that was pretty inevitable, would you agree? As computer makers started to sell to a larger market, there really needed to be people there to translate that work for regular consumers. To put it in a box.

But the other thing about Apple is this insistence on creating these beautiful objects and sometimes that gets in the way of their function. I’m typing on a MacBook Pro right now and the keyboard’s actually really crappy. It's not a very comfortable keyboard to type on.

Yeah, but it really looks good, right? (Laughs.) I’ve got one too.

The term “inevitability” makes me nervous but I think I agree with it anyhow.

There were a lot of people clustering around with an ambition that was not all that different from Jobs’s, with some access to resources that were not that different —  some of them somewhat gentler personalities.

Given that we were starting to see a critical mass of emerging personal computer entrepreneurs, in that sense, it probably was something like inevitable one of them would catch fire and really take off.

Why was it Jobs and Apple? Lots and lots of people have explored that question.

But really, I quite agree with you that this needs to be emphasized. There was something called Osborne Computer. A guy named Adam Osborne, who was almost equally flamboyant and full of himself and all of that, who actually produced the first portable computer — all 27 pounds of it. They called it a luggable computer in those days. But it was a portable personal computer.

And if things had gone slightly differently you might be typing on Osborne Book Air or whatever today.

I’m thinking of Jobs's second tenure at Apple, when we really see the explosion of these smooth, beautiful artifacts. The iPod. The iPhone. The iMac with its candy-colored shell. I think Steve Jobs’s other contribution was this obsession with aesthetic beauty, which became contagious and mainstream.

It’s true enough that he was a real perfectionist. I have too many stories about Steve Jobs but here's one. He calls up David Kelley [a design consultant] in the middle of the night and he starts complaining that he wanted nickel-plated screws on the inside of the housing of [the NeXT computer].

And Kelley says, 'Steve, it's on the inside of a product that nobody can even open. It doesn't make any difference. Nobody can see it.'

And Jobs says, 'No, that's the way it's gotta be, and that's the way it will be, because I'm paying the bills.'

So he had this design sense — which, as you alluded to in your comment about your own keyboard, should not be mythologized. But compared to almost anybody else, it was so far ahead of the game.

He brought a fastidious attention to detail to bear on technology products. That’s very much to his credit.

Somewhere along the line — and maybe you can pinpoint the era — we start to see this reversal. Instead of design being something that was necessary to translate technological advances into the consumer market, design itself becomes a feature. It becomes a competitive advantage. It becomes the focus of innovation, and of investment.

I think that behind all of that is what I’ve been referring to as the trajectory of technology products. As they get not just smaller and smaller, but more intimately integrated into the patterns and rhythms of our lives, we don’t put up with too many pain points.

The example that I like to give is email. When it was first introduced, I used to check my email twice a day. Once in the morning, and once before I went to bed.

And it was pretty awful. There was the screeching dial-up modem, and it would crash, and I had to remember lines of commands.

But it didn't really matter for two reasons. For one, it was an exciting new thing. I could send messages to people practically anywhere in the world at any time in the day or night. In addition, I only had to put up with it once or twice a day.

But we are now apparently checking our email approximately every 5,6 minutes. And we’re carrying things in increasingly intimate spaces on our bodies. We have things tucked into our ears or hitched to our waists.

When something is as intimately incorporated into our bodies and the rhythms of our daily practices, we're not going to put up with the equivalent of screeching modems and all of that.

So there has been a growing demand from the consumer side for really smooth, flawless experiences. And not just good-looking things but things that really integrate very well.

There's a quote from Jobs that I actually like very, very much. He also said this to me but it showed up on the web somewhere so I think that it's something that he said frequently. “Design is not just how it looks; it's how it looks and feels, but and mostly it's how it works.” And I like that.

You mentioned this earlier, but there’s a sense that better design is spreading into a lot of other aspects of our lives. In the book, you use the example of Mint [the personal finance tracker] and the Nest thermostat and Tesla’s cars. It almost seems to me like this design-forward thinking that was incubated in Silicon Valley is spreading to artifacts from an earlier time.

The design consultancies and the internal corporate groups in Silicon Valley developed this really, really fast-paced and efficient way of working with other parts of companies to develop products. They were driven by the ubiquity of technology — and frankly the ubiquity of money. But also the pressures of the extremely fast product cycles and the extremely competitive business environment.

The example I like a lot is Tesla. I did speak with Franz von Holzhausen, who is the chief designer at Tesla, and the main question I wanted to discuss with him was what's different about being a designer for Tesla compared to being designer in his previous jobs. (His last job was at Mazda, where he did really great work.)

He answered: The normal practice in the auto industry is that the design group receives its brief from somewhere, does its work, then passes it on to somebody else.

With Tesla, the designer is sitting around a table with the person responsible for the drivetrain, the person responsible for the battery packs, the person responsible for the 17-inch interactive display, the aeronautical engineers who are talking about air flow over the hood — and all of that.

This is a practice that really had its origins, I think, in the computer industry. The designer is involved from beginning to end. Design is not just one stage in a process, as Holzhausen said was his experience elsewhere in the auto industry. It’s not sequestered off in a corner. Design is involved in a comprehensive way.

That story resonated with me because I’ve heard versions of it at so many other companies.

The way I sometimes like to put it is that in the old days, design was a link in a chain. R&D would come up with an idea, pass it on to Engineering (who would build it), pass it onto Design (who would put in an attractive candy-colored box), pass it on to Marketing (who would figure out how to sell it). That's a bit of a stereotype, but I think a lot of people would say that’s about right.

Today what we're seeing is that design becoming an equal partner at the table. Or in some cases, like at Apple, design is the hub of the wheel that integrates everything else.

And now, as your book describes, design’s ambitions have started to grow out of consumer goods entirely, and into endeavors like international development and social change.

In the old days, the job of a designer was the very technical job of stuffing electronic components into a sheet metal enclosure. As it evolved in a more consumer direction, the job was to make things look really cool so when you walked into a store it triggered something in your reptilian brain that made you want to buy.

Then it evolved into something we're calling a human-centered approach. Which is that you start not with external styling but with unmet needs of real people, and you work backwards from that. So it’s kind of a hop, skip and a jump to apply that same kind of thinking to development issues.

We’ve begun to see a couple of things happening.

One is the formation of a number of groups that are applying design methodologies to problems of poverty, of public health, of social justice. And there have been benevolent organizations forever doing that kind of work but what’s interesting here is these are specifically design groups. They are applying the same processes involved in figuring out how to do a mobile audio player or electronic book, now to these large-scale social issues.

And the other interesting development is the incorporation of some of the same processes and mental attitudes into companies and organizations that have never been particularly product-oriented at all.

So we're seeing McKinsey, the global management consultancy, buying a design firm — LUNAR Design. And we're seeing large banks like Capital One setting up design units.

Design thinking is spreading crazily and it's really fascinating development. Those of us who are watching from the outside are waiting to see what will happen, whether this is going to take off in some new and uncharted and unpredictable direction.

Jeff Guo was a reporter covering economics, domestic policy and everything empirical. He left The Washington Post in April 2017. 

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