The real secret sauce is cultural history - I doubt you'll hear about any design technique at Apple, B&O, BMW, Google* or Pixar that you haven't heard of before. What's different is most of these companies were born with quality design as a central value, were led or run by people who highly valued design and those values influenced every ordinary decision made at the company, from who they hired, to how business and engineering decisions are made. Those techniques reside in an environment accepting and supportive of the idea of good design, have a track record of success from design, and a corprate identity based heavily on aesthetics or some aspect of design quality. That kind of culture is almost impossible to copy if you're thinking just about design meetings or mirroring how they make prototypes.
The best recipe for radically improving the design quality of a project is simple: the person with the most power, on a project or for the company, must be someone that highly values design, not necessarily being designers themselves. E.g. not sure we'd call Steve Jobs a designer in the traditional sense. The rest will take care of itself over time as their influence will shift the balances of power towards design quality. But without this, the talents of designers will always be working uphill. How steep that hill is can vary, but it will be an incline :) But since designers rarely get to choose their managers, and few have the patience, skills, or motivation to lead the creation of a new culture around them, it's much more tempting to seek out secret sauces. -Scott *Google at least has design minimalism as a goal, not necessarily design or aesthetic quality ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joel Eden" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Dan Saffer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "IXDA list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 8:28 AM Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Design at Apple > So then the real secret sauce is still secret. I guess I won't see > those brainstorm sessions on youtube until the iPhone gets better > video recording and they just can't help themselves. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
