Design Thinking

by Nigel Cross

  There were innumerable detailed implementation problems with the surface cooling features, and trials soon showed that surface cooling was not going to work. Gordon said, ‘I knew why it didn’t work, but before the first race we just literally ran out of time.’ So a revamped version of the previous season’s car was quickly rushed out. It had been a very expensive failure.

  Another innovative design that failed was the last one Gordon Murray designed for Brabham, for the 1986 season. This car was designed to be as low as possible, with the driver almost lying flat. It involved also putting the engine into a reclined position, and this was the feature that proved not to work. ‘We just could not get the lay-down engine to scavenge the oil properly, and we kept losing a lot of horsepower.’ Later, at McLaren for the 1988 season he was able to develop the same concept more successfully; ‘I did a lay-down McLaren, exactly what we did at Brabham but with a Honda engine that worked, and we won fifteen out of sixteen races. So you do have things that don’t work; but in that case it wasn’t the idea that didn’t work, I just ran out of time and money, and I took on much too much in a very short period to get it to work properly.’

  Design Process and Working Methods

  Although Gordon Murray carried immense personal responsibility for the design work of his racing cars, and of course for his city car, for which he founded his own company, inevitably it involved a lot of teamwork. Clearly he has been successful in inspiring others to work with him. He likes to involve team members in the design problems, and for that reason prefers to recruit all-rounders to his team: ‘I never have engineers that aren’t designers.’ He also likes to work collectively, standing around a drawing board or a mock-up discussing problems and trying ideas. For the McLaren F1 design, he installed a five-metre-long drawing board in the design office, so that the car could be drawn full size, and several team members at once could gather round and contribute.

  As for managing a team, he regards it as treading a fine line between dictator and diplomat. He knows exactly what he wants to achieve, but he likes being able to have people around ‘to bounce ideas off’. He prefers being able to hand-pick a team, and to give his people enough freedom and responsibility to feel that they are really making a worthwhile contribution to the team. His personal motivation manifests itself in a dedication which he also expects to find in the other members of his design team; he expects to appoint people who, ‘if you cut them, they bleed motor oil’. Because everyone is dedicated to the team cause, he finds no need, for example, to run a separate research and development section; everyone is motivated enough to keep up to date constantly with new developments and new technology, and feeding information and ideas into the team.

  Gordon’s personal design process is based on starting with a quick sketch of a whole idea, which is then developed through many different refinements. He said that, ‘I do a quick sketch of the whole idea, and then if there’s one bit that looks good, instead of rubbing other bits out, I’d put that bit to one side; I’d do it again and expand on the good bit, and drop out the bad bit, and keep doing it, doing it; and end up with all these sketches, and eventually you end up throwing ninety percent of these away.’ He also talks to himself – or rather, writes notes to himself on the sketches; notes such as ‘rubbish’, ‘too heavy’ or ‘move it this way 30mm’. Eventually he gets to the stage of more formal, orthographic drawings, but still drawing annotated plans, elevations and sections all together, ‘Until at the end of the day the guys at Brabham used to call them “Gordon’s Wonder Plots”, because they used to say “It’s a wonder anybody could see what was in them”!’

  3

  Designing to Please

  This second case study is based on interviews with another outstanding designer, the product designer Kenneth Grange. As with the previous chapter, the main purpose in making this study is to seek insight into the design thinking of someone who is a successful, innovative designer.

  Kenneth Grange was a founding partner in the world-renowned interdisciplinary design consultancy Pentagram. He is a well-known and highly successful designer of a great variety of products that range in scale from ballpoint pens and disposable razors to taxi cabs and railway engines. His career has spanned more than fifty years, and many of his designs became (and remain) familiar items in the household or on the street – or on the rail track. These designs include food mixers for Kenwood, razors for Wilkinson Sword, cameras for Kodak, typewriters for Imperial, clothes irons for Morphy Richards, cigarette lighters for Ronson, washing machines for Bendix, pens for Parker, lamps for Anglepoise, the front end of the British Rail high-speed train, and the innovative TX1 version of the famous London taxi-cab. He is one of the Royal Society of Arts’ élite corps of ‘Royal Designers for Industry’, and his designs have won ten Design Council Awards and the Duke of Edinburgh’s prize for elegant Design. He has won the Gold Medal of the Chartered Society of Designers, and in 2001 he was awarded the Prince Philip Designers Prize – an award honouring lifetime achievement.

  Background

  A curious thing about Kenneth Grange’s highly successful career is that it appears to have started and developed initially by a series of accidents. The son of a policeman, the fourteen-year-old Kenneth ‘volunteered’ at school to apply for a scholarship to Art School. After four years at Willesden School of Arts and Crafts, where ‘all I really learned was draughtsmanship’, and a short job as a scene painter with BBC television, he was recommended by the principal of the art school to ‘go and see a woman who had been a student with him and who was working in the Institute of Town Planning’. This contact in turn recommended him to some architect friends of hers, who turned out to be the firm of Arcon, a leading progressive architectural firm of that era. Kenneth recalls that ‘I had never heard of architecture, I hadn’t the slightest idea of what this meant, but they gave me a job in what they called their technical publications department’, making presentation drawings for clients.

  Kenneth was then soon after, at age nineteen, subject to two years of conscription into the British Army, where his ‘little portfolio’ of drawings got him allocated, not to painting camouflage on tanks as he might have expected, but as an illustrator producing drawings for instruction manuals. This work involved taking apart, usually by personal trial and error, various artillery mechanisms, and then making drawings to illustrate the parts and their assembly. ‘You had to draw them in such a way, assemble the drawings in such a way, that it was a re-assembly process that you were explaining.’ This self-instruction in the assembly and re-assembly of military machines became Kenneth’s introduction to engineering, and the beginning of his fascination with the way things work, with the necessities of practicality and function that became underlying principles of his approach to design. He says, ‘I think you have it in your genes to be inquisitive – practical I suppose is the word you might use, but there’s a fundamental interest in mechanics and structures and things that you have or you don’t have.’

  After leaving the Army, Kenneth returned to his architect colleagues for work. One of the Arcon partners, Jack Howe, encouraged Kenneth to undertake some independent work of his own. These private jobs were mostly ‘week-ends painting a mural or whatever. But somehow I picked up a little tiny job which was doing an exhibition for the then Atomic Energy Authority.’ This little job was so successful that the client called him again some months later, to say ‘We’ve taken space at an exhibition in Geneva, and would you like to design the exhibition stand for us?’ The new job turned out to be too large for Kenneth to be able to cope with on his own, ‘but within a month I’d got three people working for me full-time, and we were working in my flat, we’d taken over the living-room as well as the little office-workshop I’d got, and with every week the job increased. It turned into a big, big job.’ And so the Kenneth Grange design consultancy was accidentally up and running.

  Product Innovations

  A significant feature of much of Kenneth Grange’s design
work is that it is not based on just the styling or re-styling of a product. His designs often arise from a fundamental reassessment of the purpose, function and use of the product. However, this radical, innovative ability is not necessarily the reason why clients invite him to take on a new job. He says, ‘You are invariably brought in by somebody who has got a very elementary commercial motive in changing the perception of the product. It’s extremely unusual for someone to be brought in to approach it from this usability, this function theme.’ But he feels the need for a ‘secure foundation’ when starting a new project, and that foundation is the product functionality. ‘I am never daunted by the blank sheet of paper because I know I can at least fill in my time by trying to sort out just the functionality, just the handling of it, and by-and-large out of that comes a direction, and then it’s a question of tuning. I think it’s back to what your temperament is, your personality. I think with my background and my own knowledge about my weaknesses I am bound to need to have a secure foundation on which I stand when I am arguing about something, and I am not very comfortable when I find myself required to be the prima donna.’

  His practical attitude towards product functionality also extends into his normal, everyday life. ‘As I get older I get less and less tolerant of things that don’t work easily, and so I think I go around looking for trouble!’ As an example, he recounts a recent experience in a restaurant, specialising in serving mussels: ‘The waiter comes along and dumps on the table a big stainless steel bowl [of mussels] with a lid, and this is hot. My companion’s lid had handles on it, and mine didn’t have handles on it. That made me furious, and I alone in that restaurant – probably they have never had anybody else complain about it – but not Grange – he shouts and hollers and tells the waiter and calls for the manager. I can’t resist it, because I find that so much like a real affront!’

  Frister & Rossman Sewing Machine

  Being affronted by the poor usability of a product means that in his own design work Kenneth inevitably puts usability at the forefront of his thinking. A clear example of this is provided by his design of a sewing machine for Frister & Rossman, a firm based in Germany producing high-quality, well-engineered machines but who were looking for new designs to stimulate sales. Kenneth’s resulting design incorporated the standard machinery, but repackaged it in novel ways that made the machine easier to use and gave it a new and distinctive form and style (Figure 3.1).

  The origins of the new design features lay in Kenneth’s functional, practical approach, and on his personal experience. His starting point was his own use of a sewing machine: ‘I chose to use it, actually making things with a sewing machine, so I did fairly quickly come to understand just fundamental strengths and weaknesses.’ He found what he regarded as a ‘contradiction’ in the conventional design. The sewing machine mechanism is conventionally located centrally on its base platform, whereas the user needs more surface space on their side of the needle than behind it. He explained that, ‘In front of the needle, the longer the table on which you can actually assemble and lay and just get the tension of the fabrics right, the better. Once the work is behind the needle you can do nothing about it, it’s sewn, therefore you don’t need any space for the fabric.’ Kenneth therefore simply moved the sewing machine mechanism rearwards on its base, creating an off-centre layout with more base-table space in front of the needle than behind it. To him, this appeared a virtually self-evident improvement to make: ‘This is such a straightforward thing to do, but the reason it had not been done before was because the sewing machine had been designed as a very straightforward, basic piece of engineering which needed stability. Therefore the mechanism was from the very beginning put centrally upon the base and nobody had thought about challenging the space beyond and the space in front of the needle.’ Once this challenge had been met, and the benefit of an off-centre layout perceived, then ‘the rest of the shape follows, the rest of the shape just absolutely falls into place from that’.

  3.1 The Frister & Rossman sewing machine designed by kenneth grange.

  Another radical change in this particular sewing machine design was also a result of a simple, fundamental assessment of how the machine is used. Kenneth gave the base of the machine radiused lower edges, which might look like a mere ‘styling’ feature, but in fact also arose from function. ‘There was something that they told me, which is that a frequent problem with sewing machines, particularly when you are sewing a new fabric, is that a lot of lint comes off the fabric, loose fibres and so on. This gets down into the bobbin and at worst stops the machine, at best will get itself sewn back into the thing, so you haven’t got an absolutely clean stitch, which affects the tension, the thread, etc. And they said, this is a problem, and their way of dealing with it was to make sure you could open the front and get the bobbin out.’ This was achieved by the user tilting the machine backwards, away from them, into a rather unstable position that only allowed restricted access to the shuttle mechanism in the underside of the base.

  To Kenneth Grange, this was simply inadequate. ‘I thought, that doesn’t seem to me to be very clever, why don’t we make sure we can open the thing and really get at it? So I tilted the thing sideways, I rolled the whole thing back so it stood up and was very firm, and you could get the whole of the guts apart and get at the lint and so on, and that in itself generated a shape because then the back edge of the machine naturally had a roll to it.’ The rolled edge made it easier for the user to tilt the machine, it rested more stable and secure, and the underside was accessible for cleaning and oiling the lower mechanisms. A radiused top front edge was also provided to the base plate, to allow the fabric to slide over it more easily, and various other features were added, such as small drawers for holding accessories. Kenneth’s sketches, illustrating his approach, are shown in Figure 3.2.

  3.2 Kenneth Grange’s sketches summarising some of the principles underlying his design of the sewing machine.

  The sewing machine design demonstrates how Kenneth Grange approaches design from a functional viewpoint. The innovative ‘style’ and features of the new machine were generated from considering and responding to the normal patterns of its use. He says, ‘I think it’s a question of what your attitude is towards anything, any working thing. My attitude is to want it to be a pleasure to operate.’ Another aspect of this approach is that he considers the whole pattern of use, as exemplified by considering the requirements of periodically cleaning the machine, and by considering how the user prepares and introduces the fabric into the stitching mechanism, thus requiring more make-up space in front of the needle than behind it. It is a fundamental part of his interest in how things work: ‘Those are the things that intrigue me, recognising that there is a difference between what happens after a particular process and what happens before it, and so on, and preparing yourself for those two stages.’

  However, it is interesting to know that Kenneth was very unsure about presenting his radical design proposals to his clients. These were actually the directors of the company that owned Frister & Rossman, the Maruzen company, based in Osaka, Japan. After being briefed by them in Osaka, he returned to England to start the design work, and actually developed two different designs. One was the radical design, and the other was more conservative – ‘It created a new form, but followed the brief precisely and did not alter the basic layout of the mechanics.’ Kenneth returned to Osaka with models of both designs. ‘The night before I was due to present my proposal, I looked long and hard at the two versions. I was afraid of looking foolish should some blindingly obvious reason be revealed for not deviating from the original brief. Only when I left my room the following morning did I decide to opt for excitement and take them the non-briefed model. In the event, they were very impressed.’

  British Rail High Speed Train

  Going well beyond the requirements of the original brief was also a major feature of one of Kenneth Grange’s most prestigious and long-lasting designs, the front bodywork of the Hig
h Speed Train introduced into passenger service by British Rail in 1975. It was perhaps surprising for a product designer, usually working on much smaller machines and devices, to find himself involved in the design of such a major engineering product, but again the example illustrates Kenneth’s functional approach and eagerness to do what seems necessary, rather than just what is asked for.

  The High Speed Train (HST) was developed within British Rail as a kind of internal rival to the much-vaunted, radical Advanced Passenger Train (APT) being developed at the same period, which used revolutionary new technologies such as tilting carriages to increase running speeds. The APT eventually failed altogether, whereas the HST, using evolutionary developments of conventional engineering (and some APT innovations), became hugely successful and, in its 1973 prototype version, with the Grange-designed nose cone, set a world speed record for diesel traction of 230 km/h.

  Kenneth recalls that ‘They didn’t call me up and say, We’d like you to design a locomotive.’ It began much more modestly, as a result of some smaller jobs that he had undertaken for the railways, such as re-designing the timetables. ‘I had done a number of jobs for the railways, all quite modest jobs, but one or two of them quite important; like I was responsible for changing the basic format of timetabling. When I was asked to redesign a timetable for them, it was one of those printed sheets that you got, organised from purely the point of view of the driver, which is the way the railways grew up. They were actually drivers’ schedules; they didn’t start by telling you where the train was going, they started by telling you what time the trains went out, and which track, the departure track. Further down was where the thing was going, if you took the time to read it all; it was a list of where the stops were, which is not the way to organise a timetable. The person rushing into the station, the only thing he knows is where he is going, you want to be able to look up your destination and then see the time of the train, but it was exactly the other way around.’ So Kenneth re-designed the timetable so that ‘Where you are going comes first, and after that comes the time the train leaves.’