Aesthetics and Concept Design
Last week, I was chatting with Develop3D’s Al Deanabout the Freestyle tool in Creo Parametric, when he asked me whether I’d rather drive a Tesla or a Ferrari… Wait, maybe I missed a few steps there. Actually, we were talking about the importance of aesthetics in product design, and the relationship between form and function.
I proposed that there’s a lot of hype around “revolutionary” product design – the first smartphone, the first hands-free gaming device, the first consumer applicable hybrid car… And let’s be honest, that hype is, for the most part, well warranted. Revolutionary design changes industries – it changes lives. But that level of innovation is also statistically very rare, and often means a substantial investment of time and resources in ideas that may never make it to the shelves. In my view, where the real battles for consumer mind share are being fought is in “evolutionary” design – incremental improvements, big or small, to existing products.
How does this tie in to what our products look like? Let’s get back to the smartphone example. The first smartphones were revolutionary – and functionality was front and center. Consumers tend to be a bit more forgiving about aesthetics when it comes to revolutionary design (want a starker example? Think back to early “mobile” phones…and their bags). But what was revolutionary quickly becomes evolutionary – manufacturers capitalize on their initial development effort through new versions and iterations of an existing product type. Think about how many smartphone options we have today – the average consumer would be hard pressed to explain the functionality differences between the multitude of options in any given cellular provider’s store. And sure, while you can argue the point that there ARE differences in functionality, I would counter that they are not significant enough to drive the majority of consumer choices. Admit it, you bought that phone because it looks cool.
I will admit that “looking cool” isn’t only about aesthetics – there’s also brand association and what it means to use a certain product. At this stage of the conversation, Al started ranting about “corporate types who drive massive trucks but hire someone else to change their light bulbs” (I may be paraphrasing)…and I realized we were way off topic. But the point remains that looks are a big part of brand association, even when there are other factors at play. How something looks has a big part in how something makes you feel – which this Product Design Show does a nice job of highlighting. And when you reach competitive parity in functionality, looks become pretty important.
So if you’ve accepted the premise that looks are a key part of design, especially evolutionary design, in the consumer market – how different is the non-consumer market? Al sent me this picture of a stylized forklift. Does how your warehouse looks affect how your customers perceive you? How they perceive the products you produce? There’s a reason that when I walk the floor of the Digital Factory at Hannover Messe, I’m surrounded by smooth-surfaced orange factory robots swaying to German techno. There’s a reason that when choosing between comparable options, that you might buy a better looking forklift, especially if it does everything a forklift should do. There’s a reason that the Maserati repair shop has floors that are cleaner than my kitchen table (this is just about where we got to discussing fantasy sports car preferences).
The moral of the story is that aesthetics, whether you’re making smartphones or forklifts, are more important to design than ever before. How a product looks isn’t something that can be left to an afterthought. If you’re an engineer, thinking about concepts, you need to give a higher priority to aesthetics then you would in the past – even if you don’t have an industrial designer on staff. And why fast, agile tools for freeform surfacing, like the Freestyle capability in Creo Parametric, are so important to concept design.
If you want to explore more topics related to concept design, check out the new Concept Design Resource Center at http://www.ptc.com/solutions/concept-design/
