Design Thinking

by Nigel Cross

  After a few such ‘little’ jobs, Kenneth was approached by his British Rail client representative, James Cousins, Head of the Design Department, about ‘a paint job, the painting of the outside of a train’. This train was the new HST. ‘So I went in to see him and he had a model there, and it was a model of a very crude bullet-nosed train, and he said to me, This is being produced by the Engineering Department at Derby, this is the train they intend to make, but I can’t possibly let them get away with this awful paintwork. It had zigzags on, and so he said, Please come back with a proposal for the painting of this train. I went away and I did that but I also thought, I could improve the shape of this.’ The brief, therefore, was for a styling contribution – a paint livery that might improve the appearance of the train. But Kenneth was not satisfied with such a restricted ‘styling contribution’: he wanted the style to emerge from the function, and so, without telling Cousins, he found an aerodynamicist, and managed to get use of a wind tunnel test facility at Imperial College, London, and began to make a series of models of the front of the train, gradually developing a better, more efficient, overall shape.

  ‘So bit by bit we developed an evolution of the shape of the train, based upon wind tunnel testing. I then went along to Cousins with this information and I said, Here’s some photos of a shape that’s not your bullet-nose, but it’s a shape that I think is much more elegant, and by the way, here’s the paint job. And he went into a meeting with the Board, and when this thing came up on the agenda he said, Here’s the model and here’s the livery I propose, but we have taken the liberty of doing some preliminary work on the shape; we believe that the shape proposed – nothing to do with the [engineering of the] running gear, with the actual motor, and so on – but we believe the shape actually could be more efficient. And he had wind tunnel photographs and the Engineering Department had never been near a wind tunnel! I wish I had been in the meeting, I’m sure it was a real landmark meeting, when the Board was persuaded by these photos in the wind tunnel. Then afterwards he came out of the meeting and came back and said, Well, we have a job to do! But the rest was then relatively easy.’

  A successful prototype was developed to Kenneth’s design, but the story did not end there. ‘I had kept strictly within the technical terms of the brief. This dictated a window made of exceptionally strong flat glass, which severely limited its size, and a single driver’s seat positioned centrally. But instead of production going ahead with my design, a disagreement arose between the union and management which resulted in a decision to position a driver and co-driver side by side. This had a profound effect on the design, since our aerodynamics, vindicated by the speed record, relied on a smooth flow of air to left and right of the front window.’ There was a number of interrelated problems raised by the necessity of providing for two side-by-side operators at the front of the cab, instead of the one central operator. The central, relatively small window in the prototype would have to be replaced by two windows with a central bar, and the extra window width inevitably flattened the front profile, thus reducing the aerodynamic efficiency. Even when the glassmakers found that a larger, single sheet of the toughened glass could be produced, the aerodynamic problem was still there.

  One way of regaining the aerodynamic efficiency appeared to be to elongate and lower the rake of the cab-front, so as to direct more air up and over the top rather than around the sides. But this option was denied by the technical requirement of providing the engine’s buffers at the front, which were located in a fixed position relative to the wheel bogies, and could not be fully enclosed. Train buffers are necessary not, as is often thought, to cushion the train’s stop at the end of the track, but to assist the engine to shunt carriages around in the assembling of complete trains.

  Kenneth was unhappy about losing the aerodynamic efficiency, and pursued the matter with the railways’ Chief Engineer. ‘Credit is due to the Chief Engineer, because I wasn’t welcomed by these guys, but to this man’s everlasting credit I was sitting in a meeting with him, going over this fact that this new design was not as efficient as the one that they originally bought, and which had already set a world record. But there is no way you can have the geometry and have the wide window and get the same effect, and we were backwards and forwards over this. I suppose I knew that if we didn’t have buffers I’d get a different shape, so I said to him, Tell me again, tell me about buffers, how they work; thinking there might be some way I could sleek them in somehow or other. But you see, you’ve got this great plate and you’ve got probably fifteen inches of movement on the springs because of the shunting, and all that’s got to be on its own stalk, you can’t have that inside a housing, really it’s got to be outside of the housing. And he said, Well, it is true that with this vehicle, which we’ve never, ever made before, we’ve never, ever made a train where the coaches are always attached, with this, of course, they’ll always stay coupled. And he said, So if it’s always coupled, it can’t be used for shunting, and therefore the only thing we need is a hard link. And so he said, So really we don’t need the buffers. To his credit he was prepared to say, We’ve overlooked it. They’d never, ever made a complete train like that before – they made locomotives, and they made carriages.’ The evolution of the HST design is illustrated in Figure 3.3.

  3.3 Development of the nose of the High speed train to improve aerodynamics: (a) rounded nose with buffers; (b) raked nose without buffers.

  Kenneth’s perseverance had led to the vital breakthrough. The buffers on this locomotive for a new, permanently-coupled train, could be dispensed with. The aerodynamic efficiency could be retained by diverting the airflow from around the sides to over the top of a sleeker, more stylish, cab front. British Rail had a completely new, modern image, arising from its original request for ‘a paint job’.

  Learning from Failures

  Like Gordon Murray, Kenneth Grange is also ready to admit that he has produced some designs that failed, and to hope that he has learned from such failures. One example comes from his design for the Channel Tunnel Eurostar train, running between Britain and continental Europe. Kenneth was one of four designers invited to submit proposals, and he felt confident of winning the competition, given his previous experience with the High Speed Train. He worked on two designs, one with a ‘bubble’ windscreen for the driver, and one much closer to the HST shape. He says that, ‘Because I thought the train was a sort of natural son of the HST, I abandoned the bubble idea.’ But he lost the competition to someone who produced a design based around a ‘bubble’ windscreen! Kenneth suggests that ‘The real blunder for me was to have even thought of a reference to the HST. Clearly the French and the Belgian partners must certainly not have wanted a son of the British national train on “their” railways!’

  Another railway-related design failure for Kenneth was the ‘net chair’ he designed for British Rail. The goal was to produce a very lightweight seat that would make a significant contribution to reducing the overall weight of a railway carriage. Kenneth found a net fabric used in spacecraft design, and produced a highly ergonomic, comfortable and very lightweight seat in which the net fabric was the primary support for the user. But unfortunately the seat was highly vulnerable to vandalism. ‘We had reckoned without the spite of the travelling yobbo who, with one quick slash of a knife, destroyed the seat.’

  Design Process and Working Methods

  The examples of the Frister & Rossman sewing machine and the British Rail High Speed Train illustrate Kenneth Grange’s approach to design, which seems predominantly to be based on generating style and form from function and use. This seems to be the natural way for him to work, even though his clients sometimes do not realise this, and approach him as a ‘stylist’. ‘They think,’ he says, ‘We need a new design, we need a new style. They’re sharp enough to realise the style is outdated or whatever, and they assume because of what they have seen that it’s a purely artistic thing, it’s a fashion thing only to do with style. I can’t get to a solutio
n from that beginning, so I start entirely from the point of view of, can I make the use of the thing better. Eventually, by some extraordinary piece of good fortune, I wind up with a style that they think is terrific and how it got there they are not interested. It does become interesting when we then start to develop it because I find I’m defending bits of the mechanistic process and they don’t want me to, particularly the engineers don’t want me to!’ He says he always has a concern with ‘the nitty-gritty’ of products and their use, including not only their primary function but also secondary aspects such as their cleaning. And yet he rejects what he sometimes sees in others as ‘a highly moral stance where function is all.’ There has been a temptation, he says, for some designers ‘to scorn the elements of style, fashion and pleasure. That, in my view, is the road to righteous boredom.’

  In addition to this personal commitment, however, he frequently refers to the ‘happy accidents’ that seem to have dominated his career. ‘I keep saying accident, but it is – I happen to be on the scene when people need a particular skill, and I am of the good fortune to be on the doorstep, passing the front door when that particular skill is needed. An example of this casualness, as I call it, is in both the train and in the design I did for the Chef [the Kenwood Chef food mixer – one of Kenneth’s earliest and most well-known designs], which eventually led me to 35 years of working with Kenwood. I got the job of designing the Chef because I said I’d do it in three days, and my money was probably the least of the three people they were talking to. And the casualness, by which the thing was accepted, and then goes into production, and my whole life opens up, is that with only three days in which to do it, I had three days and two nights, and the only method I knew, because I’d never had any training as a designer, although a good draughtsman I’d never had any of the skilful training about presentation drawing, so I wasn’t good at flashy drawings and things and I did everything with model-making, every single thing I did with model-making because I could do it, personally do it. I didn’t have enough time, I only had time enough to make half a model, just could not make a whole model, so I made a half and I took a mirror with me [to produce the effect of seeing the symmetrical whole]. Now it wasn’t artifice on my part, at least it wasn’t a trick, it was just a practical way of showing them a whole thing with half the effort. Kenneth Wood loved it, and I think he loved it because he thought it was salesmanship. For me, it was a pure bit of good luck.’

  4

  How Designers Think

  This chapter will summarise and compare the observations we can make and the lessons we can draw from the two case studies of outstanding designers, Gordon Murray and Kenneth Grange. Although they stem from very different domains of design – racing car, city car, sewing machine, locomotive – the examples in our two case studies can be seen to have similarities in the approaches taken by the designers. Some of these similarities seem to stem from their backgrounds and personalities, and they obviously share personal, highly motivated attitudes towards their work and the achievement of success. We can also compare their approaches with those of other successful designers, by drawing upon some of the other studies that have been made of such designers. And we can begin to generalise about what can be learned from these designer studies in terms of aspects of design thinking that they all seem to adopt.

  Motivation and Attitude

  Gordon Murray thinks that innovative design, certainly in motor racing, starts with ‘a certain type of person’, like himself, who has a strong desire to beat the opposition: ‘All you want to do is go back next time and blow them all into the weeds.’ Not all racing car designers are like that, he agrees, but he has always had that strong competitive urge. The strength of his personal motivation cannot be doubted; it would have been essential to carry him through so many innovations, through failures as well as successes, in such a highly pressured environment. He has also had a strong personal interest and involvement in motor racing and car design throughout his life, including designing, building and racing his own sports car as a young man. The novel three-seat driver/passengers layout of the McLaren F1, used again in the city car, in which the driver is central and two passengers are side-by-side slightly behind the driver, is something that featured in his design sketchbooks as a teenager, and he says that other ideas are still there waiting for an opportunity to be realised.

  Kenneth Grange’s approach to design also seems to be rooted in his early experiences of ‘learning by doing’ – of learning to take apart and re-assemble artillery mechanisms so that he could make the drawings to allow someone else to do it. Another relevant aspect of his time in the Army, he believes, was that it helped develop his physical health and strength, which he regards as a key to the hard work and long hours he later put into building and running his design practice. This physical aptitude is part of the strength of leadership, he believes: ‘I think a large part of the ability of any team to achieve anything is a mixture of resources – obviously intellectual resource is a very important part, but then there are resources which are simply to do with whether you can stay awake, and stay awake at a keen, high, top level of concentration. So I think inevitably there’s a question of teams following the physical and behavioural examples of the leader.’

  Kenneth also has strong personal motivation and what he calls an ‘I can do it’ attitude: ‘I think there’s a bit of me that is a commercial animal I suppose, a bit of me that’s certainly an “I can do it” man, under any circumstances. I always say yes, and of course it gets me into trouble!’ This personal commitment also helps in the leadership of his design teams, he believes. ‘I think that’s what builds the team; they know back at the ranch that this man Grange is out there saying, “Yes we can do it tomorrow!” And the likelihood therefore is that they’re not going to see the girlfriend tonight, and they know every day might be the same.’

  As chief designer, it seems necessary to have a lot of self-confidence to carry-through new ideas in a highly pressured environment. It involves taking risk, and shouldering a lot of responsibility. Gordon Murray finds that this personal responsibility naturally brings intense psychological pressure: ‘There are patches of loneliness really, when you sit there and think, I’m committing all next year’s budget, there are all the mechanics relying on me, all the team, all the sponsors, all the drivers, friends, family – I mean, the car’s got to go well, and I’m committed to this loony idea, you know?’ Even he admits to feeling sometimes very nervous about the risks he was taking: ‘Occasionally you wake up in the night and think, phew, maybe I’ll do a normal car!’ But for him, that risk-taking is the difference between the innovative and non-innovative designer. The speed and pressure and commitment of racing car design are such that adrenaline and an almost physical exhilaration kept him going: ‘It’s like surfing on top of a wave, and you know you can’t get off.’ It’s clear that he also carried this attitude through into designing the city car, self-imposing the pressure to produce a radical new concept of personal transport.

  In explaining his approach to innovative design, Gordon Murray stresses the need constantly to work from ‘first principles’. In Formula One racing, he was often surprised to find that other teams were not taking such a basic approach, and that they would frequently merely copy the successful innovations of someone else. Working from first principles, and working in a highly organised way seem to come naturally to him, but his personal design process is much less structured than the results might suggest. Although he can tightly organise his team and run a complex racing organisation, his personal ways of designing are relatively unstructured, based on annotated, thumbnail sketches. ‘I don’t sit down and say, OK, now I’ve had the idea, let’s see, this is a solution, these are the different ways to go, if I do this, and do that; I do lots of scribbles just to save it, before I forget.’

  For Kenneth Grange, his innovative design work often stems from going beyond the original brief, and that experience helped form his sceptical attitude tow
ards developing and following a tight initial specification. The designer’s job, he says, is ‘to produce the unexpected’. And that does not happen by trying to ‘get the brief right, go through the process in an orderly fashion, check that you have done what you have been told to do’. Instead, ‘It’s the little bits of inspiration, the little sort of byways and the unlikely analogies and things that eventually produce what you recognise as being the right thing to do.’ He suggests that ‘No brief of itself ever produced an unexpected market leader. Success lies in finding the chinks in the specifications and reaching through to the concealed plums.’

  It is as though his ability is primarily perceptual, a way of seeing; not something that he has to work and worry at until he gets an idea, and not something that emerges in the process of designing so much as the process of initial problem formulation. He agrees with this interpretation: ‘You do have to ferret around, which is like an intellectual bit of it, to see, to find that which is then suddenly obvious to you, and I think that has happened very often. Sometimes you almost have to fabricate the problem.’ He reinterprets, or brings a fresh perception to the design problem so as to establish a new concept, and the rest is working this through; the perceptive insight gives ‘a direction, and then it’s a question of tuning’.