Agate Design - Design Blog » Blog Archive » Innovation And Boundariless Design

"Innovation often arises out of crossing disciplines and combining technologies".*

Cross pollination is a technique industrial designers are expected to excel at. In my view, this can mean different things:

Leveraging existing references and new concepts coming from unrelated designs or areas of study
Working with cross-functional teams involved in the end-to-end of the value chain
Developing multi-disciplinary skills and identifying a meaningful intersection across disciplines
Giving technology a social role, becoming a cultural exponent of innovation and not just a technical achievement
Addressing design requirements for a product to interact with its context in a range of scenarios including both typical or atypical use cases
Looking for adjacent and new application areas beyond the initial focus of the study
Looking at unconstrained scenarios where a number of things come together, just to dream of what's possible in a boundaries fashion, and only then applying a reality check to figure out what's doable in today's terms and the road map to the future

When we look at the early history of industrial design in Europe, there was a clear expectation for designers to "humanize" the new products the industrial revolution was delivering in the XIX century. Mass production had been able to democratize products at the expense of craftmanship's quality.

Many companies willing to fix that problem got things wrong by placing designers at the receiving end of the work flow. Engineering for manufacturing was first while human factors and design had more to do with cosmetic adaptations to the source blueprints. Some other enterprises applied the opposite work flow, making engineers scramble with unrealistic requirements from design divas.

Making a difference in people's quality of life involves well thought out products (quality) that become widely available (quantity). Tight collaboration between engineers and designers in the ideation process is a better practice. However, embracing business and marketing in that mix is the best practice.

All of us admire designs that have become classics by enjoying some timeless appreciation, which is known to be the benchmark for "good design". However, it is "continuous improvement" the driver behind innovation. Many designers have been occupied figuring out whether form follows function or whether it should be the other way around, when what really matters is whether a design delivers value to society, meaning to those who are going to use it and to the supply chain that brings it to market.