工业产品设计外文翻译参考文献
工业产品设计外文翻译参考文献(文档含中英文对照即英文原文和中文翻译)
Design Without Designers
I will always remember my first introduction to the power of good product design.
I was newly arrived at Apple, still learning the ways of business, when I was visited by a member of Apple's Industrial Design team. He showed me a foam mockup of a proposed product. "Wow," I said, "I want one! What is it?"
That experience brought home the power of design: I was excited and enthusiastic even before I knew what it was. This type of visceral "wow" response requires creative designers. It is subjective, personal. Uh oh, this is not what engineers like to hear. If you can't put a number to it, it's not important. As a result, there is a trend to eliminate designers. Who needs them when we can simply test our way to success? The excitement of powerful, captivating design is defined as irrelevant. Worse, the nature of design is in danger.
Don't believe me? Consider Google. In a well-publicized move, a senior designer at Google recently quit, stating that Google had no interest in or understanding of design. Google, it seems, relies primarily upon test results, not human skill or judgment. Want to know whether a design is effective? Try it out. Google can quickly submit samples to millions of people in well-controlled trials, pitting one design against another, selecting the winner based upon number of clicks, or sales, or whatever objective measure they wish. Which color of blue is best? Test. Item placement? T est. Web page layout? Test.
This procedure is hardly unique to Google. /doc/f51636438.html, has long followed this practice. Years ago I was proudly informed that they no longer have debates about which design is best: they simply test them and use the data to decide. And this, of course, is the approach used by the human-centered iterative design approach: prototype, test, revise.
Is this the future of design? Certainly there are many who believe so. This is a hot topic on the talk and seminar circuit. After all, the proponents ask reasonably, who could object to making decisions based upon data?
Two Types of Innovation: Incremental Improvements and New Concepts
In design—and almost all innovation, for that matter—there are at least two distinct forms. One is incremental improvement. In the manufacturing of products, companies assume that unit costs will continually decrease through continual, incremental improvements. A steady chain of incremental innovation enhances operations, the sourcing of parts and supply-chain management. The product design is continually tinkered with, adjusting the interface, adding new features, changing small things here and there. New products are announced yearly that are simply small modifications to the existing platform by a different constellation of features. Sometimes features are removed to enable a new, low-cost line. Sometimes features are enhanced or added. In incremental improvement, the basic platform is unchanged. Incremental design and innovation is less glamorous than the development of new concepts and ideas, but it is both far more frequent and far more important. Most of these innovations are small, but most are quite successful. This is
