I have just finished reading Adam Greenfield’s Nokia: Culture Will Out. It is an informative insider’s take on what went wrong at Nokia.
“Nokia’s problem is not, and has never been, that it lacks for creative, thoughtful, talented people, or the resources to turn their ideas into shipping product. It’s that the company is fundamentally, and has always been, organized to trade in commodities.” – Adam Greenfield
The key point that Adam makes is this ”that, at Nokia, engineering has been allowed to displace what is properly the company’s design prerogative almost entirely“.
Which I find interesting. In as much as the Design Cycle is generally considered and taught as an activity that is central to profession of Engineering. Therefore how can it be that Good Design and Good Engineering have evolved within Nokia to become mutually exclusive concepts?
I would suggest it is simply because Design has become something of a “Catch-all” word that can be used everyday to describe many activities, ideas and concepts. Be it “Good Process”, ”Good Taste”, “To Create, Invent, Pattern or Devise” .
It has become a word of split personalities.
As a result the word as lost its impact. Its ability to cut through the noise. When we say “Thing could be a lot better by Design” we are in reality mouthing the words of a generation from another era. Thanks to the explosion in University design courses across all sorts of disciplines the word Design is now more about thinking style than substance.
When design is a word of substance it sparkles in the mind with thoughts of Passion, Drive, Brilliance and Tenacity. It takes your breath away. When design is a word of style it fogs the mind with well-worn phrases like taste, look, feel and image. It leaves you yawning.
The simple lesson coming out of the ”Nokia failed by Design” story for all young designers is that when ”Engineering dominates Design” it is because, when the going gets tough, “Substance beats Style” every time.
As I have said my times before Nokia forgot it was in the business of making teenagers, and the young at heart, excited enough about their new Nokia phone to walk into a crowded room and say “take a look at this… now how cool is that?”
The passion for great design must have died within Nokia long before the products ever hit the streets.
I say that because clearly what Nokia lacked is exactly what Apple had in abundance. The passion and the self belief in its unique ability to design and build the world’s best mobile phone.
What Steve Jobs has proven time and again is great ideas are a dime a dozen. What is rare is designers with the vision, the passion, the drive, the entrepreneurial and the communication skills to drive these ideas through the organisation and out into the marketplace.
What Apple has proven time and again is if you design with passion then your customers catch the fever and become passionate about you.
Further Reading
Posted on February 22, 2011
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