The success of any project depends on the right idea and the right balance between all goals that are often competing — whether sales goals, manufacturing goals, brand goals, etc. We’ve all seen beautiful products fail due to reasons often hard to identify, and in spite of how beautiful the thing may be.
The first goals set out at the beginning of any project frame up the ‘why’ you are designing something in the first place. Those are clearly identifiable, but the complexity of any product development project inevitably leads to the revelation of less clear and often assumed and unarticulated goals. Those are more difficult to discover and address.
On top of all that are ‘our’ goals — as designers we all have things we look to achieve in every project we work through. These come out of our values and business direction and ongoing brand development.
In recent years, what I find occupying my mind to an increasing degree, is how we balance these goals — Ours, the clients, and all the other stakeholders. How do we tease them out, clarify them, weight them properly and balance them, as they all are made manifest in the product we are collectively working to make?
The weight given these goals varies significantly and differentiates one design group from another — not just visual style, or product specialty but the approach to design process. Stylists weight their goals heavily toward the ‘look’ of the product where engineers weigh heavily toward the functionality and manufacturability of the product.
We tend toward an equal weighting — if it doesn’t look good, no one will be interested, but if it’s hard to make and expensive it will have limits on production and market. The sweet spot is a beautiful product, easy to make resulting in an appropriate price point that works and is fully recyclable for it’s end of life. Easy, right?
Maybe not…..but early in 2016 we began a collaboration with Tayco, an office furniture manufacturer in Toronto. They are in the process of repositioning themselves in the market and Switch is the first major new product introduction to support this initiative. This new furniture system needs to deliver a solid and approachable product for their current dealer network and customer base, while at the same time stretching in aesthetics and planning applications to be more competitive on more design driven projects and broaden the market appeal.
The clear initial goals were that the project needed not only to look great but meet a very aggressive cost point. For a deeper understanding of these goals we began with a thorough review of Tayco’s current market requirements for a product like this. It continued with an analysis of manufacturing competencies and existing supplier base to ease the process of implementation and inform the concept development to ensure the foundational concepts for the system were on target.
At all points the development of Switch involved all key stakeholders from interior designers, specifiers, sales people and manufacturing. This meant that the ‘goals’ evolved through the process. They were clarified and occasionally ‘unpopular’ decisions had to be made (and nice design features and details abandoned!), sometimes as a result of cost concerns and others based on market acceptance of features that may not be overly conventional. These are largely reasons of cost but all of them needed to be balanced with the overall visual and functional character defined at the outset of the project, and that was where we needed to remain constantly vigilant, circling back regularly to assess the reasons for how we got to where we were.
Switch has been a very successful project and it is entirely due to the level of collaboration that evolved throughout it’s development from all parties. The exceptional initial market response is a terrific testament to this process. It is inspiring existing dealers and customers, opening new doors and supporting a new image and vision for the future for Tayco.
