Transcriber: Antonio Cuerpo-Sánchez Reviewer: Cora Liu
Hi guys, I've got a question:
Who of you knows an industrial designer?
Hands up, anyone? Ok, there are a few...
What do you think they do for their jobs?
What is the thing that they do as daily course?
Drawing? Like Ralph said? Anything else? Scream.
Experiencing, oh that's good!
Actually look around: we are in this amazing, amazing cinema.
Every single thing here has been designed. Everything.
The chairs, the walls, the lights, this big light above your heads,
the stage, the screen.. everything was designed.
But is it really the job of an industrial designer
to make it all look nice and feel nice?
I would say no.
Ok, these are the things we do as a daily job.
But what really is the job of an industrial designer
is to envision an experience for you guys
- to experience when you are here -
and to design everything,
every single detail of everything that surrounds you,
to lead you into this particular experience.
So if you think about the cinema,
this experience is getting you immersed in a movie, right?
This is: make you be part of the movie.
Which actually you know you can sometimes see how design clashes with business,
and allowing popcorn in a cinema is sort of this kind of thing:
they earn more money but they destroy the whole experience.
That's more or less it.
So basically when you think about the job of an industrial designer
you should think about a guy
whose job is to envision an experience his or her users should experience,
design elements of that experience, build these things, test them,
and see whether this experience has been achieved.
Let me tell you a story.
A number of years ago I was hired by
an Intelligent Lighting Institute in the Netherlands,
as a design researcher, or research designer,
and we were invited to a large project, which was done with a local hospital,
it was a huge ten year grant
where the hospital wanted the designers to come into the hospital
and to redesign a number of things that were going on there.
So I ended up at the project which was designing a solution
- a number of solutions - for a local mental crisis centre.
This mental crisis centre is a place where a person who had a psychotic attack
- either depressive or maniacal attack - is brought,
- often by the police, sometimes by the family -
they are put there, in a pretty safe environment, for three months.
They stay there for those three months with a lot of therapy and group activity,
and you know kind of trying to bring them back to their normal life,
and if they are able to go back to that normal life they go back home,
and if they are not able to go back to the normal life
then they go to a mental hospital.
So this place they are brought to is supposed to be like a safe place.
A place where they can be themselves.
They stay there - imagine that it looks sort of like a pansion, so you know,
they have a number of rooms,
they have their own bathrooms in the rooms, and they stay there,
they have a kitchen, a living room, a smoking place,
and they have a lot of group activities,
and during those group activities
sometimes they are in a state where they really want to be again alone,
- so you know like everyone of us has it, right?
sometimes you really have this feeling
that you want to be out of all those people around you?
So they have exactly the same thing -
so in this place there is a room, which is called the comfort room,
where they can go for about an hour, they can stay there, relax,
and then they can go back to the group activities.
So we, as designers were invited to design something that helped these people
to get more comfortable and get more relaxed in this comfort room.
We got there - you know you go and experience, you talk to your users,
you see what sort of environment you are designing for -
we went there, we saw the room,
and it was like a regular room with a carpet and a sofa and a chair,
strip lights, which is not the most comfortable lighting for a room,
a TV, a DVD - with a number of movies, and these were not romantic comedies -
and a game console - with games,
which were again not little [unclear] world they were shooting games -
So, imagine: you go into this room, you lock yourself there,
and everything that is supposed to help you relax
is TV, DVD with thrillers and kind of excitement movies,
and a game console with shooting games... not really relaxing.
So we were there and we were thinking: ok, we have to do something about it.
We went back, as a bunch of designers, to the university;
we sat together and we started thinking: ok what is this thing that relaxes us?
We were thinking and thinking, and then we thought:
ok there is this whole story about yoga
and about breathing exercises as something to relax us,
so how about trying to think whether there is an ideal breathing pattern?
So we went to the internet, we started looking,
and we found out that there actually is something like an ideal breathing pattern.
It's something like this, so basically it's like a rhythm:
you go 1-2-3 for breathing in, then you stop,
then you go 1-2-3-4-5 for breathing out, and then you stop.
Shall we try it?
Ok: 1-2-3. Stop.
1-2-3-4-5. Stop.
And again: 1-2-3. Stop.
1-2-3-4-5. Stop.
Relaxing? Yeah? Yeah you know that was the thing
that I was doing just there, just a moment ago.
Ok so we though: fantastic, we have something like a rhythm,
which can be visualised, which is a good thing for a designer,
so we thought ok, we will build a lamp.
We will build a lamp, like this, it was supposed to be 1m tall,
we built a prototype which was a bit smaller,
it had three LED lights going all the way up
and we though we can link these lights in this ideal breathing pattern.
So it can go lighting up from the bottom to the top: 1-2-3,
then it stops and then it goes all the way down:
1-2-3-4-5 and it stops for a moment, and so on.
So we built a lamp, we thought, cool, this is a really nice thing,
we brought it to that hospital, we got this lady
who was supposed to do the test for us,
she was almost on her way to recovery - but actually when we got there
we had to spend about 10 minutes trying to drag her out of her bathroom,
because she didn't want to leave the bathroom to do the test with us -
but ok we got her out, we put the lamp in from of her,
we were so proud, because we loved our design,
she looked at it and she said, "I don't like it, I don't like it".
And we were like, "Why? What happened?".
And then she said, "I don't like it because this lamp doesn't listen to me."
"This lamp is doing something that is not helping me breathe."
"This lamp is working on its own,
and I'm doing something on my own, and I don't like it."
We took the lamp back to the university
and we thought ok, we have to do something about it.
We went back to do some research,
we figured out that this breathing pattern that I was just showing you
is not really the same for everyone,
so the rhythm is the same, but the pattern is different for every single person.
So we said ok,
we have to translate this breathing pattern of this person to the lamp,
so we designed another thing, which was a belt.
It's a belt like this,
it had a sensor which was detecting the breathing pattern from your belly,
and translating that breathing pattern into the lamp.
Ok, perfect: we'll put that belt on the lady, we will figure out her rhythm
then we will translate it into the lamp,
and it will lead her to the ideal breathing pattern.
We designed everything, we built it, brought it back to the hospital,
got the lady again, put the belt on her, we showed her the lamp, proud,
we said ok try it, she tried it, and she said, "I don't like it".
And we were like, hell, you know, what else is going on?
And then she said,
I don't like it because this lamp is still not listening to me.
And we were trying to understand what the hell is this not listening thing.
We didn't get it so we started talking to the nurse,
and the nurse told us something which was extremely important:
he told us that people with mental problems,
they've suffered a lot of failures in their lives,
so basically whenever they start interaction with anything else
they feel that they are very likely to fail.
So they approach the task with the feeling that they are going to fail it.
So basically when we put the belt on the lady,
when we put the lamp in front of her,
and she couldn't make the lamp listen to her,
she felt that she failed at her task
of breathing in synchronization with the lamp.
So we took it back to the university again,
we thought again about what we are supposed to do with it,
and we basically designed a solution where whenever you start using the lamp
the lamp first follows you, so it's your servant,
the servant of your breathing,
so if you want to hyperventilate, the lamp goes all the way up and down,
if you want to stop breathing then the lamp goes off,
and only after there is a complete synchronization
between the lamp and the person,
only then the lamp slowly takes over, almost invisibly,
and leads it towards this ideal breathing pattern.
And finally this solution worked, and it was really quite successful.
So what we did really was:
we envisioned this experience
of a relaxing exercise through breathing patterns,
we built a solution - a number of them - we tested them,
failed miserably at the first two,
which was the best thing we could have gotten,
and then we could go back, redesign the whole thing,
and get the experience we imagined, we wanted to do.
This is actually something that industrial designers, do a lot.
We are trained this way.
We are trained to come up with a vision of what we want to achieve,
design the elements, test it, go back and so on,
but in fact this is not something that only we are skilled to do,
it doesn't involve drawing or anything else,
this is something that every single person,
everyone of you, can do in your daily work.
So whenever you approach your next task, either at work or in your private life,
try to think about it: instead of just going there and doing the thing,
try to think what sort of vision for your task you can have,
and then try to reach towards that vision.
If you think about simple things
like booking holidays, that can also work, you know,
you can think of some vision of the experience you want to have
and you might end up at the North Pole instead of the sunny beaches of Turkey,
but it can be something that will surprise you and make you excited,
and make you feel that you did something
which was perhaps surprising but certainly worth it.
Thank you
(Applause)