Viewpoint

Design, innovation, agility

Bruce Archer

This paper was prepared as the opening address also very active members of the Design
to the Design Research Society’s conference, Research Society, so that what I am about to say
Quantum Leap—Managing New Product Inno- is as familiar to them as it is to me.
vation, held at the University of Central England
in Birmingham, September 1998. Professor Bruce 1 Quantum leap
Archer is President of the Design Research Society. The term Quantum Leap, borrowed from par-
ticle physics, implies, for me, a jump to a higher

I
n welcoming you to this Conference, let me energy level. It also contains something of the
try to interpret its title for a moment. In their notion of a ‘Paradigm Shift’ as described by
Introduction to the preprint papers, the Con- Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, The structure
ference organisers, Bob Jerrard, Myfanwy True- of scientific revolutions, published in 1962. I
man and Roger Newport equate the term ‘Quan- shall be saying more about paradigm shifts as
tum Leap’ with the term ‘a breakthrough in my argument develops. The second part of the
product development’. They ask the Conference title of this conference—Managing New Product
to address questions such as: ‘How do successful Innovation—indicates the field in which this
companies use design in order to reduce risk and Quantum Leap, or paradigm shift, has to occur
uncertainty in developing innovative new pro- or is occurring. Actually, the term New in the
ducts?’ and ‘To what extent can design be used title is tautological. Robert L Charpie defined the
creatively to make a major breakthrough or term ‘Innovation’ for the US Department of
quantum leap in successful innovation practice?’ Commerce in his influential report Technologi-
These questions clearly lie in the domain of cal innovation: Its environment and manage-
design practice and design management practice. ment in 1967, as ‘The successful bringing to
Let me, in my role as President of the Design market of new or improved products, processes
Research Society, also try to place them in the or services’. So the term ‘New’ is contained
context of Design Research, and in the climate within the term ‘Innovation’. Thus, we are asked
of ultra-fast moving product development. I to address the issues in the management of the
hasten to add that Bob, Myfanwy and Roger are task of bringing about paradigm shifts in the
www.elsevier.com/locate/destud
0142-694X/99 $—see front matter Design Studies 20 (1999) 565–571
PII: S0142-694X(99)00025-3 565
 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain
design and marketing of new or improved pro- cesses of matching a perceived need with a pro-
ducts. This is the very stuff of the Design posed configuration were the same, or similar,
Methods and Design Research movements. Let whatever the field of application. This notion in
us remind ourselves of the way in which it has 1966 was, in part, a reflection of the intense
developed. interest that had been generated during the late
The first Design Methods Conference was ’50s and early ’60s by the release of historical
held in London in 1962, thirty-six years ago. details about the successes and failures of cross-
The second was held here, in Birmingham, three disciplinary teamwork in war-time enterprises of
years later, in 1965. Unusually, the Organising the Second World War. The optimisation of
Committee of the 1962 conference, under the food production and distribution; the develop-
chairmanship of John Page, then of the Depart- ment of weapons systems; the search for means
ment of Architecture, Sheffield University, and of defence against the enemy’s weapon systems;
the secretaryship of Peter Slann of the Depart- the development of new materials; the formu-
ment of Aeronautics at Imperial College Lon- lation of new approaches to war-time logistics,
don, remained in being for several years after notably the organisation of convoys of shipping
the 1962 Conference had finished. It was this across the oceans and the hunt for U-boats; the
1962 Organising Committee that announced in development of computer systems; even the
March 1966 a decision to form a Design search for strategies for the conduct of military
Research Society. We called a First Meeting of operations: these had resulted in the evolution
Founder Members for 2 February 1966, later of a new discipline, Operational Research, orig-
postponing it to 27 April 1966. So the Design inated on this side of the Atlantic by Professor
Research Society was formally founded on 27 P M S Blackett, who was Chief Scientific
April 1966. The list of the names of the 167 Adviser to the government of the day in 1941.
Founder Members reads like a roll call of the Operational Research, we learned, was charac-
great and the good of the design methods move- terised by the cross-disciplinary collaboration of
ment of the 1960s and 1970s. teams of scientists, engineers and others, of sur-
prisingly diverse backgrounds, in attempts to
2 The systems approach solve pressing, practical wartime problems.
The interesting thing about the membership of Importantly, the experience of the Operational
the Design Research Society, then as now, is the Research teams also consolidated a new
eclecticism of its composition. It included, and approach, the Systems Approach, to the analysis
includes today, architects, computer scientists, of problems.
engineers, ergonomists, industrial designers, The systems idea is usually credited to Lud-
planners, cognitive psychologists and systems wig von Bertalanffy, a biologist, who published
analysts. Its membership was then, and is now, a book The organism considered as a physical
drawn from industries as diverse as advertising, system in 1940. He later went on to publish
aerospace, building construction, civil engineer- another book, General systems theory, in 1956,
ing, computing, consumer products, health care, but many later systems analysts had misgivings
ship building and textiles. The driving idea about this attempt at postulating a generalisable
behind the formation of the Society was an inter- theory of systems. Ken Boulding tried to do bet-
est in the things these practitioners had in com- ter in his General systems theory—the skeleton
mon, rather than the things that distinguished of a science, also published in 1956, but was not
between them. We felt that the cognitive pro- until people such as Herbert Simon published,

566 Design Studies Vol 20 No 6 November 1999

for example, The new science of management limitations to, your proposition. Hence Popper’s
decision in 1960, that it was generally accepted title Conjectures and refutations. Or, to put it
that systems analysis was not so much an more precisely, real science proceeds by the
explanatory theory as a useful methodology. C postulating of informed conjectures, followed by
West Churchman put it all in a nutshell in The systematic attempts at the refutation of these
systems approach, 1968. The Design Methods conjectures. The impact on the infant discipline
Movement was a child of the post-Operational of Design Methodology was immense. Conjec-
Research era, and systems analysis dominated ture, exploration and refutation (or, more popu-
our early thinking. larly, proposition, development and test) is
exactly what designers do! Design activity was
3 Conjectures and refutations scientifically respectable! More than that, in the
But if operational research was the mother of light of the Popperian revolution, we can assert
Design Research, Karl Popper (spiritually, at that research can just as properly be conducted
least) was its father. In 1959, just when the through the medium of design activity itself, as
Design Methods Movement was beginning to it could by orthodox scientific enquiry! The
establish itself, Karl Popper’s seminal book The Design Methods Movement had matured into
logic of scientific discovery was translated into the new discipline of Design Research.
English and published in London. The original
had been written in German. This was followed 4 Paradigm shift
in 1963, the year after the first Design Methods Both this new insight into the nature and status
Conference, with his even more influential book, of design activity, and the Popperian revolution
written originally in English this time, entitled concerning the nature and status of scientific
Conjectures and refutations. The essence of activity which brought it about, are examples of
Karl Popper’s message in Conjectures and refu- ‘Paradigm Shifts’ as described by Thomas Kuhn
tations was that we should reject the old Bacon- in The structure of scientific revolutions pub-
ian principle that the true scientist should arrive lished, not at all coincidentally, in 1962, the year
at a scientific theory through inductive reason- in which the first Design Methods conference
ing. He argued that we must accept, instead, that was held. In The structure of scientific revol-
most, if not all, scientific discovery is based on utions Kuhn acknowledged that throughout the
the positing of an insightful tentative expla- history of science the great majority of workers
nation about the meaning of the evidence. This, in any field accepted that, if they were to be
said Popper, was followed by an exploration of taken seriously by their peers, they had to
the implications of such an explanation. But present their evidence and conduct their argu-
most importantly, argued Popper, this had to ments in ways that were considered respectable
take the form of serious, comprehensive, sys- according to the canons of their time. But Kuhn
tematic attempts to find any flaws in the theory also pointed out that, every now and again,
posited. You can spring from your bath shouting someone would publish a serious scientific
‘Eureka!’, or wake up in the morning with a account that offered a new and revolutionary
conception of relativity, or visualise the struc- explanation for existing phenomena. Or perhaps
ture of the double helix. You do not, said Pop- the new explanation would demonstrate a new
per, have to prove whence these conceptions manner of reasoning. In such an event, scientists
came. What you do have to do, is apply every everywhere would look again at their own data,
test you can think of to discover any flaws in, or and test the consequences of using this new

Viewpoint 567
manner of reasoning. If it seemed to work, then war-ravaged countries of Europe and the Pacific.
soon everyone would recognise this as a new As elsewhere, Japanese manufacturing industry
canon of good practice. Kuhn called this a ‘para- was offered the opportunity to nominate any
digm shift’. Darwin’s The origin of species expert advice they chose to receive. It is hard to
caused such a paradigm shift, as did Newton’s remember that before the Second World War,
Laws of mechanics before him and Einstein’s Japanese goods were famous for being shoddy.
Theory of relativity after him. Not surprisingly under those circumstances, the
Let us look at some of the paradigm shifts Japanese industry bosses therefore asked,
that have occurred in the short history of Design amongst other things, for expert advice on pro-
Research. We have already come across the sys- duct quality control. The army generals and the
tems approach, which galvanised and transfor- civil servants who were running the Marshall
med the academic side of the Design Methods Plan turned to the American academic world to
Movement in its earliest years. In reality, this recommend a quality control expert. They were
only became a practicable aid for professional offered the name of the American production
design activity when Peter Checkland published engineering theorist, Professor W Edwards
his Techniques in ‘soft systems’ practice in Deming.
1979. Another, lesser, paradigm shift came with What the generals and civil servants did not
the growing recognition in the scientific world appreciate was that to a production engineer the
of ‘Action Research’, usefully summarised by M word quality has a meaning different from that
Foster in An introduction to the theory and prac- to which the man in the street is accustomed. To
tice of action research in 1972. Action Research a production engineer, the word quality means
recognises that sometimes it is impracticable for the degree of adherence of an item to its speci-
the investigator to maintain the traditional stance fication. Or more precisely, the amount of vari-
of objectivity and non-intervention. In some cir- ation between one exemplar of the item and the
cumstances, the investigator (say, a surgeon) next. Thus high quality means there is very, very
may of necessity be an actor in the situation (a little variation between successive items. This
need for surgical intervention in an unusual has little to do with the specification level of the
case) under investigation. In Action Research item concerned. In quality control terms, one can
the investigator takes some action in and on the choose to manufacture high quality (that is, very
real-world in order to change something and highly consistent) exemplars of a product,
thereby to learn something about it. A great deal whether that product is at a high, luxury specifi-
of real-world design activity takes the form of cation or at a low, cheap and nasty specification.
Action Research and this experience represents Similarly, one can choose to manufacture low
a useful bridge between design practice and quality (that is, very variable) exemplars of a
design scholarship. product, regardless of whether it is at a luxury
specification or at a cheap and nasty specifi-
5 Quality assurance cation. Deming’s pet theory was that, contrary to
There was an even more significant paradigm the beliefs then current world-wide in industrial
shift that also occurred in the 1970s. After the practice, overall manufacturing costs could be
end of the Second World War, the US govern- reduced rather than increased by working to
ment of the day adopted a far-sighted and mag- closer and closer dimensional and materials tol-
nanimous policy, known as the Marshall Plan, erances. No one in manufacturing industry
calculated to help rebuild the economies of the believed him. As a budding young mechanical

568 Design Studies Vol 20 No 6 November 1999

engineer, I was certainly brought up in the Ford– 6 Concurrent engineering
Taylor tradition that, for the sake of economy, A means for achieving ever-shortening lead-
one should work to the coarsest tolerances one times was the introduction of the practice called
could reasonably get away with. The first piece ‘Concurrent Engineering’. Concurrent Engineer-
of writing I ever had published, in 1957 I think ing describes the compression of research,
it was, extolled the advantages of specifying design, development, production and marketing
coarse tolerances. In Deming’s revolutionary processes by, as the term implies, conducting
view, if all parts production was geared to the them simultaneously, using mixed discipline
closest possible tolerances, and if all parts were teams, often on the basis of a common computer
thus guaranteed to be very highly consistent, model of the emerging product requirements,
there was much money to be saved by omitting product form and manufacturing processes.
interprocess inspection, reducing inter-process Before this, for much of my professional life-
piece-part stocks and eventually by automating time, the traditional way of conducting a product
assembly processes. Not only that, according to development project was in the manner of a
Deming, one could then guarantee the perform-
relay-race. Market researchers produced
ance and durability of the assembled finished
research reports and handed them to the design-
product.
ers; designers prepared design concepts and
The Japanese industrialists of the time were
handed them to the development engineers;
predisposed to believe him. It chimed with the
development engineers produced piece-part
Japanese approach to the arts. Consequently,
specifications and handed them to the jig and
within the framework of the Marshall Plan, one
tool designers, and so on. ‘Throwing the pack-
Japanese industry after another adopted the
age over the wall to the next department’ is how
Deming Quality Assurance principles and found
management commentators described it. We all
that his theories did indeed deliver lower costs
know the story. It would take several years to
and better performance. Then, with Deming’s
get a new or improved product to the market.
direct assistance, Japanese firms pushed Quality
Assurance downstream to the component sup- By contrast, under the Concurrent Engineering
plier phase, to achieve yet more cost savings and principle, a product development team of all the
yet shorter lead-times. This combination of relevant disciplines (research, design, develop-
price, quality and speed of delivery revolution- ment, tooling, production, distribution, market-
ised Japan’s position in world markets, and very ing and after-sales service) would work together
nearly wiped out whole industries in the West. from the outset with a common goal. Dramatic
Eventually, of course, European and North shrinking of lead-times resulted. Market compe-
American firms overcame their prejudices and tition expanded to a global scale. Oddly, the
they, too, adopted the Quality Assurance prin- implications of Concurrent Engineering have not
ciple. In the meanwhile, flushed with their suc- yet been fully appreciated in general design
cess, Japanese manufacturers extended the practice and design education. Some industrial
Deming theory by pushing Quality Assurance design schools and engineering departments
principles upstream to the design phase, and remain unsure as to the knowledge bases their
went on from there to develop a system of mar- students are expected to acquire, and the skills
ket-led product innovation techniques that went they are expected to develop. Some schools, per-
to the heart of delivering to consumers the pro- haps unconsciously, still promote the role model
duct attributes they really valued. of the sole designer rather than the role of a

Viewpoint 569
member of a joint product development team. It ducts to customers are Quality Assured and
is one of the function of this Conference to clar- delivered ‘just in time’. It expects to cover the
ify such questions. costs of any new product launch quickly.
A company exhibiting such responsiveness is
7 Agility described as ‘agile’. At the limit, the agile com-
If the design schools have not yet fully come to pany almost disappears. In their book Agile com-
terms with the implications of Concurrent petitors and virtual organisations, 1996, Gol-
Engineering, manufacturing industry and the man, Nagel and Priess describe this as ‘the
business schools have gone some way towards disintegration of manufacturing’, and they ident-
clarifying the context. Towards the end of the ify many well-known brand suppliers as ‘virtual
1980s, articles appeared in the general business manufacturers’. In 1997, the Management Best
journals and on the business pages of the daily Practice Directorate of the Department for Trade
press describing the turbulent state of the mar- and Industry sponsored a mission by a represen-
ket, the speed with which competitors were able tative group of industrialists and academics to
to bring new and improved products to market the United States, with a view to visiting leading
and the implication for organisational change. In manufacturers and business schools and to
1989, the Department for Trade and Industry bringing back intelligence of the most effective
commissioned P A Consulting to prepare a corporate strategies. ‘Responsiveness’ was the
report, Manufacturing into the 1990s. They have message and ‘Agility’ was the key. There are,
found that many firms had concluded that the in fact, many agile companies and virtual manu-
only answer to shrinking lead-times and global facturers in Britain today. In a Workshop organ-
marketing was the restructuring of corporate ised by the Institution of Electrical Engineers on
organisation. Market and technological change 23 February 1998 at Savoy Place, a number of
must be detected earlier, and product, process such companies reported their progress. One of
and marketing responses must be introduced them, Raleigh Industries, reported a reduction in
sooner. In 1991, J D Blackburn published a book manufacturing lead-times from 42 days in 1987
in the United States under the title Time-based to 4 days in 1997. Another, Van den Bergh
competition, in which the term ‘responsiveness’ Foods Limited, reported a reduction from 3 or
was attributed to companies who were able to 4 days production lead-time to 15 hours!
counter competition with speedy and appropri-
ate action. 8 Robust design
It was not long before ‘responsive’ companies Why am I making such heavy weather of this?
were being described as ‘lean’ companies. The Because it has a significant bearing on the two
term ‘lean’ has a deceptively docile ring about questions with which we began: ‘To what extent
it. In fact, it is intended to describe the leanness can design be used creatively to make a major
of the panther: fast, agile and deadly. A ‘lean’ breakthrough or quantum leap in successful
company has shed all its surplus fat. It has few innovation practice?’ and ‘How do designers
levels of command in its management. It does and design managers deal with the problems of
not carry the burden of more fixed assets than ultra-fast moving joint product development
can be helped. To this end, it engages in wide- teams?’
spread subcontracting. It carries minimum In respect of the first of these questions, ‘To
stocks. It ensures that both incoming materials what extent can design be used creatively to
from subcontractors and outgoing finished pro- make a major breakthrough or quantum leap in

570 Design Studies Vol 20 No 6 November 1999

successful innovation practice?’ it becomes clear market competition with minimum upset. A
that agile companies are far less constrained by robust design is one whose subsystems have
existing technologies and by investments in minimum interdependency, so that any subsys-
plant than were their less agile counterparts of tem can be replaced with a revised version with-
the past. Since most of the manufacturing is sub- out encountering knock-on effects in other sub-
contracted, then a design incorporating new systems. This is a design principle that is more
technology or which demands new manufactur- radical than it may sound at first hearing. For
ing processes is not ruled out by plant invest- generations of designers, it has been a matter of
ment problems. Nor must it be obscured by limi- fact that an integrated design is smaller, lighter,
tations in the knowledge and skills of the design cheaper than one which is composed of subsys-
team. The design and development team must tems bolted together. An unfortunate conse-
be as versatile and agile as the company itself. quence for consumers in past decades has been
It must have at its fingertips a wide range of that if anything has gone wrong with a product,
knowledge about appropriate technologies, and the whole thing has had to be thrown away.
rapid access to a comprehensive database on Nevertheless, for the sake of cheapness, light-
materials, processes and available ready-made ness, compactness, manufacturers have gone for
components. To a great extent, under these cir- integrated designs and consumers have bought
cumstances, as the Japanese example has shown, them. The paradigm shift we are now addressing
the design driver must be inspired insights into will do little to change the experience of the con-
customers’ real needs and values. The com- sumer. The decoupling of subsystem interdepen-
pany’s existing plant and technology count for dency in design terms does not necessarily mean
very little. What the customer perceives as bolt-together subsystems in manufacturing
attractive count for everything. terms, and does not make it any easier, per se,
This brings us to the second question with to carry out repairs. It does, however, represent
which we began: ‘How do designers and design a paradigm shift in the practice of design.
managers deal with the problems of ultra-fast
moving joint product development teams?’ Not
10 Flash of light
To return to our examination of the title of this
every new product launch has to be radical. Cus-
Conference, it appears to me that any Quantum
tomers’ real needs and values are not always
Leap in the management of new product inno-
answered by fundamentally new products.
vation is contingent upon recognition of the nat-
‘Innovation’ includes ‘improved’ as well as
ure of corporate agility. Corporate agility has
‘new’. In finding an ultra rapid answer to a com-
major implications for interdisciplinary product
petitor’s move, the company will often decide
design teamwork, and requires a closer look at
to take advantage of their existing position in
the subtle nature of robust design. To my gener-
the market and in the supply chain by offering
ation, in a certain sense, the advocation of robust
a ‘new, improved’ model rather than a totally
design looks like a quantum leap backwards. If
new one. If this is to be easily achievable, exist-
I remember rightly, in my second year introduc-
ing designs have to be ‘Robust’.
tion to quantum mechanics, I learned that a
return of a sub-atomic particle to a lower energy
9 Sub-system decoupling level results in a brilliant, but fleeting, flash of
A robust design is one that will accommodate light. Let us all watch out for that flash of light
changes in user requirements, technology or in the course of the next three days.

Viewpoint 571