Viewpoint

Design, innovation, agilityBruce Archer

This paper was prepared as the opening address

to the Design Research Society’s conference,

Quantum Leap—Managing New Product Inno-

vation, held at the University of Central England

in Birmingham, September 1998. Professor Bruce

Archer is President of the Design Research Society.

In welcoming you to this Conference, let metry to interpret its title for a moment. In theirIntroduction to the preprint papers, the Con-

ference organisers, Bob Jerrard, Myfanwy True-man and Roger Newport equate the term ‘Quan-tum Leap’ with the term ‘a breakthrough inproduct development’. They ask the Conferenceto address questions such as: ‘How do successfulcompanies use design in order to reduce risk anduncertainty in developing innovative new pro-ducts?’ and ‘To what extent can design be usedcreatively to make a major breakthrough orquantum leap in successful innovation practice?’These questions clearly lie in the domain ofdesign practice and design management practice.Let me, in my role as President of the DesignResearch Society, also try to place them in thecontext of Design Research, and in the climateof ultra-fast moving product development. Ihasten to add that Bob, Myfanwy and Roger are

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also very active members of the DesignResearch Society, so that what I am about to sayis as familiar to them as it is to me.

1 Quantum leapThe termQuantum Leap,borrowed from par-ticle physics, implies, for me, a jump to a higherenergy level. It also contains something of thenotion of a ‘Paradigm Shift’ as described byThomas Kuhn in his famous book,The structureof scientific revolutions,published in 1962. Ishall be saying more about paradigm shifts asmy argument develops. The second part of thetitle of this conference—Managing New ProductInnovation—indicates the field in which thisQuantum Leap, or paradigm shift, has to occuror is occurring. Actually, the termNew in thetitle is tautological. Robert L Charpie defined theterm ‘Innovation’ for the US Department ofCommerce in his influential reportTechnologi-cal innovation: Its environment and manage-ment in 1967, as ‘The successful bringing tomarket of new or improved products, processesor services’. So the term ‘New’ is containedwithin the term ‘Innovation’. Thus, we are askedto address the issues in the management of thetask of bringing about paradigm shifts in the

design and marketing of new or improved pro-ducts. This is the very stuff of the DesignMethods and Design Research movements. Letus remind ourselves of the way in which it hasdeveloped.

The first Design Methods Conference washeld in London in 1962, thirty-six years ago.The second was held here, in Birmingham, threeyears later, in 1965. Unusually, the OrganisingCommittee of the 1962 conference, under thechairmanship of John Page, then of the Depart-ment of Architecture, Sheffield University, andthe secretaryship of Peter Slann of the Depart-ment of Aeronautics at Imperial College Lon-don, remained in being for several years afterthe 1962 Conference had finished. It was this1962 Organising Committee that announced inMarch 1966 a decision to form a DesignResearch Society. We called a First Meeting ofFounder Members for 2 February 1966, laterpostponing it to 27 April 1966. So the DesignResearch Society was formally founded on 27April 1966. The list of the names of the 167Founder Members reads like a roll call of thegreat and the good of the design methods move-ment of the 1960s and 1970s.

2 The systems approachThe interesting thing about the membership ofthe Design Research Society, then as now, is theeclecticism of its composition. It included, andincludes today, architects, computer scientists,engineers, ergonomists, industrial designers,planners, cognitive psychologists and systemsanalysts. Its membership was then, and is now,drawn from industries as diverse as advertising,aerospace, building construction, civil engineer-ing, computing, consumer products, health care,ship building and textiles. The driving ideabehind the formation of the Society was an inter-est in the things these practitioners had in com-mon, rather than the things that distinguishedbetween them. We felt that the cognitive pro-

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cesses of matching a perceived need with a pro-posed configuration were the same, or similar,whatever the field of application. This notion in1966 was, in part, a reflection of the intenseinterest that had been generated during the late’50s and early ’60s by the release of historicaldetails about the successes and failures of cross-disciplinary teamwork in war-time enterprises ofthe Second World War. The optimisation offood production and distribution; the develop-ment of weapons systems; the search for meansof defence against the enemy’s weapon systems;the development of new materials; the formu-lation of new approaches to war-time logistics,notably the organisation of convoys of shippingacross the oceans and the hunt for U-boats; thedevelopment of computer systems; even thesearch for strategies for the conduct of militaryoperations: these had resulted in the evolutionof a new discipline, Operational Research, orig-inated on this side of the Atlantic by ProfessorP M S Blackett, who was Chief ScientificAdviser to the government of the day in 1941.Operational Research, we learned, was charac-terised by the cross-disciplinary collaboration ofteams of scientists, engineers and others, of sur-prisingly diverse backgrounds, in attempts tosolve pressing, practical wartime problems.Importantly, the experience of the OperationalResearch teams also consolidated a newapproach, the Systems Approach, to the analysisof problems.

The systems idea is usually credited to Lud-wig von Bertalanffy, a biologist, who publisheda bookThe organism considered as a physicalsystemin 1940. He later went on to publishanother book,General systems theory,in 1956,but many later systems analysts had misgivingsabout this attempt at postulating a generalisabletheory of systems. Ken Boulding tried to do bet-ter in his General systems theory—the skeletonof a science,also published in 1956, but was notuntil people such as Herbert Simon published,

for example,The new science of managementdecisionin 1960, that it was generally acceptedthat systems analysis was not so much anexplanatory theory as a useful methodology. CWest Churchman put it all in a nutshell inThesystems approach,1968. The Design MethodsMovement was a child of the post-OperationalResearch era, and systems analysis dominatedour early thinking.

3 Conjectures and refutationsBut if operational research was the mother ofDesign Research, Karl Popper (spiritually, atleast) was its father. In 1959, just when theDesign Methods Movement was beginning toestablish itself, Karl Popper’s seminal bookThelogic of scientific discoverywas translated intoEnglish and published in London. The originalhad been written in German. This was followedin 1963, the yearafter the first Design MethodsConference, with his even more influential book,written originally in English this time, entitledConjectures and refutations. The essence ofKarl Popper’s message inConjectures and refu-tationswas that we should reject the old Bacon-ian principle that the true scientist should arriveat a scientific theory through inductive reason-ing. He argued that we must accept, instead, thatmost, if not all, scientific discovery is based onthe positing of an insightful tentative expla-nation about the meaning of the evidence. This,said Popper, was followed by an exploration ofthe implications of such an explanation. Butmost importantly, argued Popper, this had totake the form of serious, comprehensive, sys-tematic attempts to find any flaws in the theoryposited. You can spring from your bath shouting‘Eureka!’, or wake up in the morning with aconception of relativity, or visualise the struc-ture of the double helix. You do not, said Pop-per, have to prove whence these conceptionscame. What youdo have to do, is apply everytest you can think of to discover any flaws in, or

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limitations to, your proposition. Hence Popper’stitle Conjectures and refutations. Or, to put itmore precisely, real science proceeds by thepostulating of informed conjectures, followed bysystematic attempts at the refutation of theseconjectures. The impact on the infant disciplineof Design Methodology was immense. Conjec-ture, exploration and refutation (or, more popu-larly, proposition, development and test) isexactly what designers do! Design activity wasscientifically respectable! More than that, in thelight of the Popperian revolution, we can assertthat research can just as properly be conductedthrough the medium of design activity itself, asit could by orthodox scientific enquiry! TheDesign Methods Movement had matured intothe new discipline of Design Research.

4 Paradigm shiftBoth this new insight into the nature and statusof design activity, and the Popperian revolutionconcerning the nature and status of scientificactivity which brought it about, are examples of‘Paradigm Shifts’ as described by Thomas Kuhnin The structure of scientific revolutionspub-lished, not at all coincidentally, in 1962, the yearin which the first Design Methods conferencewas held. InThe structure of scientific revol-utions Kuhn acknowledged that throughout thehistory of science the great majority of workersin any field accepted that, if they were to betaken seriously by their peers, they had topresent their evidence and conduct their argu-ments in ways that were considered respectableaccording to the canons of their time. But Kuhnalso pointed out that, every now and again,someone would publish a serious scientificaccount that offered a new and revolutionaryexplanation for existing phenomena. Or perhapsthe new explanation would demonstrate a newmanner of reasoning. In such an event, scientistseverywhere would look again at their own data,and test the consequences of using this new

manner of reasoning. If it seemed to work, thensoon everyone would recognise this as a newcanon of good practice. Kuhn called this a ‘para-digm shift’. Darwin’s The origin of speciescaused such a paradigm shift, as did Newton’sLaws of mechanicsbefore him and Einstein’sTheory of relativityafter him.

Let us look at some of the paradigm shiftsthat have occurred in the short history of DesignResearch. We have already come across the sys-tems approach, which galvanised and transfor-med the academic side of the Design MethodsMovement in its earliest years. In reality, thisonly became a practicable aid for professionaldesign activity when Peter Checkland publishedhis Techniques in ‘soft systems’ practicein1979. Another, lesser, paradigm shift came withthe growing recognition in the scientific worldof ‘Action Research’, usefully summarised by MFoster inAn introduction to the theory and prac-tice of action researchin 1972. Action Researchrecognises that sometimes it is impracticable forthe investigator to maintain the traditional stanceof objectivity and non-intervention. In some cir-cumstances, the investigator (say, a surgeon)may of necessity be an actor in the situation (aneed for surgical intervention in an unusualcase) under investigation. In Action Researchthe investigator takes some action in and on thereal-world in order to change something andthereby to learn something about it. A great dealof real-world design activity takes the form ofAction Research and this experience representsa useful bridge between design practice anddesign scholarship.

5 Quality assuranceThere was an even more significant paradigmshift that also occurred in the 1970s. After theend of the Second World War, the US govern-ment of the day adopted a far-sighted and mag-nanimous policy, known as the Marshall Plan,calculated to help rebuild the economies of the

568 Design Studies Vol 20 No 6 November 1999

war-ravaged countries of Europe and the Pacific.As elsewhere, Japanese manufacturing industrywas offered the opportunity to nominate anyexpert advice they chose to receive. It is hard toremember thatbefore the Second World War,Japanese goods were famous for being shoddy.Not surprisingly under those circumstances, theJapanese industry bosses therefore asked,amongst other things, for expert advice on pro-duct quality control. The army generals and thecivil servants who were running the MarshallPlan turned to the American academic world torecommend a quality control expert. They wereoffered the name of the American productionengineering theorist, Professor W EdwardsDeming.

What the generals and civil servants did notappreciate was that to a production engineer theword quality has a meaning different from thatto which the man in the street is accustomed. Toa production engineer, the wordquality meansthe degree of adherence of an item to its speci-fication. Or more precisely, the amount of vari-ation between one exemplar of the item and thenext. Thushigh qualitymeans there is very, verylittle variation between successive items. Thishas little to do with the specification level of theitem concerned. In quality control terms, one canchoose to manufacture high quality (that is, veryhighly consistent) exemplars of a product,whether that product is at a high, luxury specifi-cation or at a low, cheap and nasty specification.Similarly, one can choose to manufacture lowquality (that is, very variable) exemplars of aproduct, regardless of whether it is at a luxuryspecification or at a cheap and nasty specifi-cation. Deming’s pet theory was that, contrary tothe beliefs then current world-wide in industrialpractice, overall manufacturing costs could bereduced rather than increased by working tocloser and closer dimensional and materials tol-erances. No one in manufacturing industrybelieved him. As a budding young mechanical

engineer, I was certainly brought up in the Ford–Taylor tradition that, for the sake of economy,one should work to the coarsest tolerances onecould reasonably get away with. The first pieceof writing I ever had published, in 1957 I thinkit was, extolled the advantages of specifyingcoarse tolerances. In Deming’s revolutionaryview, if all parts production was geared to theclosest possible tolerances, and if all parts werethus guaranteed to be very highly consistent,there was much money to be saved by omittinginterprocess inspection, reducing inter-processpiece-part stocks and eventually by automatingassembly processes. Not only that, according toDeming, one could then guarantee the perform-ance and durability of the assembled finishedproduct.

The Japanese industrialists of the time werepredisposed to believe him. It chimed with theJapanese approach to the arts. Consequently,within the framework of the Marshall Plan, oneJapanese industry after another adopted theDeming Quality Assurance principles and foundthat his theories did indeed deliver lower costsand better performance. Then, with Deming’sdirect assistance, Japanese firms pushed QualityAssurance downstream to the component sup-plier phase, to achieve yet more cost savings andyet shorter lead-times. This combination ofprice, quality and speed of delivery revolution-ised Japan’s position in world markets, and verynearly wiped out whole industries in the West.Eventually, of course, European and NorthAmerican firms overcame their prejudices andthey, too, adopted the Quality Assurance prin-ciple. In the meanwhile, flushed with their suc-cess, Japanese manufacturers extended theDeming theory by pushing Quality Assuranceprinciples upstream to the design phase, andwent on from there to develop a system of mar-ket-led product innovation techniques that wentto the heart of delivering to consumers the pro-duct attributes they really valued.

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6 Concurrent engineeringA means for achieving ever-shortening lead-times was the introduction of the practice called‘Concurrent Engineering’. Concurrent Engineer-ing describes the compression of research,

design, development, production and marketingprocesses by, as the term implies, conducting

them simultaneously, using mixed disciplineteams, often on the basis of a common computermodel of the emerging product requirements,

product form and manufacturing processes.Before this, for much of my professional life-

time, the traditional way of conducting a productdevelopment project was in the manner of a

relay-race. Market researchers producedresearch reports and handed them to the design-

ers; designers prepared design concepts andhanded them to the development engineers;development engineers produced piece-part

specifications and handed them to the jig andtool designers, and so on. ‘Throwing the pack-

age over the wall to the next department’ is howmanagement commentators described it. We all

know the story. It would take several years toget a new or improved product to the market.

By contrast, under the Concurrent Engineeringprinciple, a product development team of all therelevant disciplines (research, design, develop-

ment, tooling, production, distribution, market-ing and after-sales service) would work together

from the outset with a common goal. Dramaticshrinking of lead-times resulted. Market compe-

tition expanded to a global scale. Oddly, theimplications of Concurrent Engineering have not

yet been fully appreciated in general designpractice and design education. Some industrialdesign schools and engineering departments

remain unsure as to the knowledge bases theirstudents are expected to acquire, and the skills

they are expected to develop. Some schools, per-haps unconsciously, still promote the role model

of the sole designer rather than the role of a

member of a joint product development team. Itis one of the function of this Conference to clar-ify such questions.

7 AgilityIf the design schools have not yet fully come toterms with the implications of ConcurrentEngineering, manufacturing industry and thebusiness schools have gone some way towardsclarifying the context. Towards the end of the1980s, articles appeared in the general businessjournals and on the business pages of the dailypress describing the turbulent state of the mar-ket, the speed with which competitors were ableto bring new and improved products to marketand the implication for organisational change. In1989, the Department for Trade and Industrycommissioned P A Consulting to prepare areport,Manufacturing into the 1990s. They havefound that many firms had concluded that theonly answer to shrinking lead-times and globalmarketing was the restructuring of corporateorganisation. Market and technological changemust be detected earlier, and product, processand marketing responses must be introducedsooner. In 1991, J D Blackburn published a bookin the United States under the titleTime-basedcompetition, in which the term ‘responsiveness’was attributed to companies who were able tocounter competition with speedy and appropri-ate action.

It was not long before ‘responsive’ companieswere being described as ‘lean’ companies. Theterm ‘lean’ has a deceptively docile ring aboutit. In fact, it is intended to describe the leannessof the panther: fast, agile and deadly. A ‘lean’company has shed all its surplus fat. It has fewlevels of command in its management. It doesnot carry the burden of more fixed assets thancan be helped. To this end, it engages in wide-spread subcontracting. It carries minimumstocks. It ensures that both incoming materialsfrom subcontractors and outgoing finished pro-

570 Design Studies Vol 20 No 6 November 1999

ducts to customers are Quality Assured anddelivered ‘just in time’. It expects to cover thecosts of any new product launch quickly.

A company exhibiting such responsiveness isdescribed as ‘agile’. At the limit, the agile com-pany almost disappears. In their bookAgile com-petitors and virtual organisations, 1996, Gol-man, Nagel and Priess describe this as ‘thedisintegration of manufacturing’, and they ident-ify many well-known brand suppliers as ‘virtualmanufacturers’. In 1997, the Management BestPractice Directorate of the Department for Tradeand Industry sponsored a mission by a represen-tative group of industrialists and academics tothe United States, with a view to visiting leadingmanufacturers and business schools and tobringing back intelligence of the most effectivecorporate strategies. ‘Responsiveness’ was themessage and ‘Agility’ was the key. There are,in fact, many agile companies and virtual manu-facturers in Britain today. In a Workshop organ-ised by the Institution of Electrical Engineers on23 February 1998 at Savoy Place, a number ofsuch companies reported their progress. One ofthem, Raleigh Industries, reported a reduction inmanufacturing lead-times from 42 days in 1987to 4 days in 1997. Another, Van den BerghFoods Limited, reported a reduction from 3 or4 days production lead-time to 15 hours!

8 Robust designWhy am I making such heavy weather of this?Because it has a significant bearing on the twoquestions with which we began: ‘To what extentcan design be used creatively to make a majorbreakthrough or quantum leap in successfulinnovation practice?’ and ‘How do designersand design managers deal with the problems ofultra-fast moving joint product developmentteams?’

In respect of the first of these questions, ‘Towhat extent can design be used creatively tomake a major breakthrough or quantum leap in

successful innovation practice?’ it becomes clearthat agile companies are far less constrained byexisting technologies and by investments inplant than were their less agile counterparts ofthe past. Since most of the manufacturing is sub-contracted, then a design incorporating newtechnology or which demands new manufactur-ing processes is not ruled out by plant invest-ment problems. Nor must it be obscured by limi-tations in the knowledge and skills of the designteam. The design and development team mustbe as versatile and agile as the company itself.It must have at its fingertips a wide range ofknowledge about appropriate technologies, andrapid access to a comprehensive database onmaterials, processes and available ready-madecomponents. To a great extent, under these cir-cumstances, as the Japanese example has shown,the design driver must be inspired insights intocustomers’ real needs and values. The com-pany’s existing plant and technology count forvery little. What the customer perceives asattractive count for everything.

This brings us to the second question withwhich we began: ‘How do designers and designmanagers deal with the problems of ultra-fastmoving joint product development teams?’ Notevery new product launch has to be radical. Cus-tomers’ real needs and values are not alwaysanswered by fundamentally new products.‘Innovation’ includes ‘improved’ as well as‘new’. In finding an ultra rapid answer to a com-petitor’s move, the company will often decideto take advantage of their existing position inthe market and in the supply chain by offeringa ‘new, improved’ model rather than a totallynew one. If this is to be easily achievable, exist-ing designs have to be ‘Robust’.

9 Sub-system decouplingA robust design is one that will accommodatechanges in user requirements, technology or

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market competition with minimum upset. Arobust design is one whose subsystems haveminimum interdependency, so that any subsys-tem can be replaced with a revised version with-out encountering knock-on effects in other sub-systems. This is a design principle that is moreradical than it may sound at first hearing. Forgenerations of designers, it has been a matter offact that an integrated design is smaller, lighter,cheaper than one which is composed of subsys-tems bolted together. An unfortunate conse-quence for consumers in past decades has beenthat if anything has gone wrong with a product,the whole thing has had to be thrown away.Nevertheless, for the sake of cheapness, light-ness, compactness, manufacturers have gone forintegrated designs and consumers have boughtthem. The paradigm shift we are now addressingwill do little to change the experience of the con-sumer. The decoupling of subsystem interdepen-dency in design terms does not necessarily meanbolt-together subsystems in manufacturingterms, and does not make it any easier,per se,to carry out repairs. It does, however, representa paradigm shift in the practice of design.

10 Flash of lightTo return to our examination of the title of thisConference, it appears to me that any QuantumLeap in the management of new product inno-vation is contingent upon recognition of the nat-ure of corporate agility. Corporate agility hasmajor implications for interdisciplinary productdesign teamwork, and requires a closer look atthe subtle nature of robust design. To my gener-ation, in a certain sense, the advocation of robustdesign looks like a quantum leap backwards. IfI remember rightly, in my second year introduc-tion to quantum mechanics, I learned that areturn of a sub-atomic particle to a lower energylevel results in a brilliant, but fleeting, flash oflight. Let us all watch out for that flash of lightin the course of the next three days.