This past week's Businessweek contains an interesting article about the design process at Bang & Olufsen. Bang & Olufsen: Design Reigns Supreme describes what might be called the "great man" theory of design, where design vision takes precedence over engineering and business, and does not include design research. This "model is a throwback to an earlier time when CEOs worked closely with gifted designers to differentiate their products in the marketplace".
While B&O is clearly a leader in aesthetic design of consumer electronics, they have been failing at making the transition to the digital world (e.g. from CDs to MP3s). And it's evident from reading the article that this is partly attributable to the lack of a research process:
"They don't, for example, do even the basic market research ethnography common among consumer-oriented companies. Sorensen says consumers often don't really know what they want. Instead, B&O designers intuit the products that will fly."
Read between the lines and it's apparent that there's a lack of understanding about design research. Ethnography is not about asking consumers what they want, it's about identifying their unmet needs, a very creative process in itself. Later in the article there's a likely example of what happens when you rely on designer intuition:
"Take the digital music player. Even the company's loyal cognoscenti prefer Apple's iPod, with its elegant design and easy interface, to the $460 BeoSound 2--conceived by none other than Lewis in 2002. BeoSound 2 has been, by all accounts, a dud. Lewis says his mistake was not appreciating how quickly digital memory would grow. He figured with 50 songs on a device, the amount the original memory card would hold, consumers wouldn't need a screen to navigate through their music."
Perhaps if Lewis and his team had better understand their user audiences - typically high-net worth music lovers - it would have been discovered that 50 songs was not going to meet their needs long terms and a different design approach would have been more successful.
Of course hindsight is 20/20 and B&O is shifting its focus to bringing in designers who understand the digital world. Unfortunately, it appears that they're still missing the point - they don't so much need new designers, as a new design process.
. Rob Tannen
