Feature An Incomplete, over-generalized nano-history of design and business

By Patrick Whitney

The history of design in the twentieth century is often

viewed as competing ways of designing, structured as
cycles of fashion rather than as an arc of progress.

An
Incomplete,
OverGeneralized
NanoHistory of
Design and
Business
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Feature An Incomplete, over-generalized nano-history of design and business

Notes
1
Kumar, Vijay, and Whitney, Patrick;
People Not Markets, Journal of
Business Strategy, vol 28, no. 4,
2007, p. 48.

1930s

rom the 1930s through the

1950s, design in the US was
sales-centered. Consumer
goods were styled to appear
modern to persuade the
post-depression, postwar
middle class to buy more stuff.
Raymond Loewy, Norman
Bel Geddes, and Walter
Dorwin Teague were pioneers
at turning otherwise ordinary products into
catalysts for the emerging consumer economy.
By the 1960s, it was clear that being the largest
company in an industry conferred a competitive
advantage. Local companies became national,
and national companies became international.
In some instances, corporate strategy meant
dominating a single industry. In others, it meant
occupying multiple industries with different
financial cycles. The desire to be as large as
possible, as soon as possible, led executives
to grow via mergers and acquisitions rather
than organically. Newly merged companies
frequently operating in different industries and
varied geographiesmay have fit together from a
financial perspective, but they often made for odd
couplings in terms of culture and capability.
Leaders of the huge companies increasingly
focused more on stock price and less on their
products. Business theorists claimed the purpose
of business was to create shareholder value, and
CEOs talked to analysts on Wall Street more than
they talked to the people who used their products.
In this context, design was called upon to create
new names and identity systems. The desirable
appearance of products was now merely the price

2010s
of entry to doing business, not a differentiator.
Massimo Vignelli, Jay Doblin, Ralph Ekerstrom,
and others at Unimark International; Wim
Crouwel and others at Total Design; and Gordon
Lippincott at Lippincott & Margulies set new
standards for creating systems that designed
products, communications, buildings, and
nomenclature systems for everything from
products to the name of the company.
In the 1980s, business challenges in the
US shifted again. Companies had become so
focused on product appearance and financial and
accounting gymnastics to enable mergers and
acquisitions that they neglected the quality of their
output. In the meantime, companies like Toyota
and Sony proved to US consumers that small, lowcost products could function as well as their highend counterparts. In response, industry turned to
design to work more closely with manufacturing
engineers to improve technical quality for basic, as
well as luxury, products.
The 1980s and 90s saw the rise of flexible
manufacturing and global supply networks. These
enabled companies to meet consumers varying
needs and desires by creating an overabundance
of offerings. Companies previously governed
by the rules of the economy of scale tried to
understand the rules of the new economy of
choice. Executives experienced the innovation
gap,1 a situation in which they knew how to make
anythingbut were unsure of what to make. They
turned to people who worked at the confluence
of the analytic rigor of strategic planning and
the exploratory nature of design to help them
define new offerings and new businesses. Larry
Keeley and Jay Doblin at Doblin Group and Peter
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Feature An Incomplete, over-generalized nano-history of design and business

Era Analysis
Schwartz at Global Business Network found
themselves advising CEOs about initiatives that
were traditionally reserved for McKinsey and
other management consulting firms.
At the same time, computing technology
integrated into products and media. As Bill
Moggridge and Bill Verplank at ID2 worked on
the first laptop computer, they noticed the need
to design the protocol between the user and the
machine as a new type of problem and coined
the term interaction design. Hugh Dubberly and
Clement Mok, along with a few other designers
who had been working in print communication,
did the first landmark interactive media projects.
Products and information had become interactive.
Instead of creating final manifestations of
products or messages, designers planned the way
users would interact with them.
The development of each specialty needed
a few visionary designers to create what, at the
time, seemed like a new type of design. Now
we can see that each one possessed specific
knowledge and had ways of working that,
although relevant to the particular situation of
their clients, fit a general informal framework
of the fundamental elements of the field of
design. These elements included understanding
users situations, the context of the business,
how things are made and used, how to redefine
a problem, the use of prototypes as a way of
thinking, and the systemic changes necessary to
create long-lasting value. It turns out that none
of this is new and the field was following an arc of
progress, just not very fast.

What worked?
Each shift in the nano-history depended on
designers who worked differently from the norm.
What is frequently forgotten is that each big
change also required an executive who believed
in design. Loewy could not have designed the
company-saving 1939 Studebaker Challenger
without the trust of CEO Harold Vance. Vignelli
could not have achieved the iconic American
Airlines symbol without the vision of Americans
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Each major era has factors related to how

companies make things, how people use
things, and how companies design and plan.
The current transition period is chaotic
because companies blend the flexibility of
the new technology with the old methods
of setting strategy, designing, and planning.
Viewpoints
Technology

Interrelation of the
arenas of daily life

Users

Design
Competitive
advantage
Products
Planning

Feature An Incomplete, over-generalized nano-history of design and business

Economy of choice Current Transition Economy of scale

(1900-2000)

(1980-2020)

(1980- )

Mechanistic, efficient, specialized for use

IT and communication networks increase
in each industry. E.g. TV, computers, and
speed and flexibility of industrial-era systems.
publishing had no relationship with each other.

IT and communication networks integrated

with physical world. This enables platforms
for tailored products.

Independent arenas supported by

specialized technology. E.g. TV was for play,
computers for work.

Integrated arenas use same information

infrastructure.

Connected arenas supported by

communication networks.

Play
Learn

Play
HOME

Learn

Play
HOME

Learn

HOME

Work Health
work

Health

Work

Health

Users are categorized into segments that are Users are observed so that the company
measured and targeted with products.
can predict what they need.

Users are co-creators who do the final

detailing while ordering from a company.
Or they design it for production in their
home factory.

Styling creates appearance of difference

among products that are very similar.

Designer focus on user experience

in response to the growing power of users.

Designer will focus on the design of

platforms than enable tailored offerings.

Companies build large factories and

control supply chain.

Lean and agile processes increase

flexibility and speed.

Focus on alliances, global and local suppliers,

and long-tail markets. Platforms support
maker society.

Products are as standard as possible.

Try to match needs of people

through excessive production.

Tailored when ordered, purchased, or used.

Long-term predictions about

markets used to make decisions
about production capability.

Know your core competencies and

business goals but be flexible about how
to achieve them.

Plan platforms, not the final offerings.

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Feature An Incomplete, over-generalized nano-history of design and business

Notes
2
Roger Martin eloquently describes
in many of his writings executives
desire for certainty as one of the
main barriers for using design.
The first instance I know of is in a
talk at the 2007 Institute of Design
Strategy Conference
https://vimeo.com/70347222

leader, C.R. Smith. (The minimal AA without

a painted fuselage symbolized a company that
had evolved from the merger of more than 88
companies.) Recognizing that the nature of work
had become more flexible, Steelcase leader Rob
Pew was receptive to Keeleys advice and used
design at a strategic level. Steve Jobs and John
Sculley accorded Dubberly and Mok the latitude
they needed to develop iconic interactive media
projects. Executives who worked with designers
did so out of a belief, even though they had no
proof, that design would benefit their companies.

Prediction and the

economy of scale
Although a few executives believed in the
value of design and worked with designers who
understood the needs of business and users,
the vast majority of business leaders required
more certainty.2 This quest for certainty was
reasonable. As the scope and scale of business
expanded, business leaders had to make everlarger investments, and more was at risk.
Particularly after World War 2, factories,
warehouses, delivery channels, and media grew
to unprecedented scale. To mitigate the risk of
huge investments in production capabilities,
executives needed new tools to predict various
dimensions of their businesses. These tools
included ways to manage money, predict markets,
identify competition, and make the right
investments in factories and other operations.
At the forefront of predictive thinking in
the 1920s and 30s was University of Chicago
professor James O. McKinsey, who pioneered
budgeting as a planning tool (and went on to found
McKinsey & Company). In the 1940s, Columbia
University professor Robert Merton developed
a method to predict a new products success by
listening to a group of consumers talk about the
merits of a prototype of the product. The method
soon came to be called the focus group and became
a standard tool for consumer research. Harvard
professor Michael Porter realized that companies
tended to accept the businesses they were in
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This novel and accurate phrase was, as

far as I know, first used by Paul Siebert,
a designer and strategist at Steelcase.

3 

and usually tried to compete with low-cost and

efficient operations. One of his groundbreaking
insights was that companies should choose which
business to be in and then select the right set of
activities to win in that business. This is now the
core theory of corporate strategy.

The bleeding edge of now3

The advantages of mass production and mass
markets, however, also contain the seeds of their
own destruction. On one hand, companies want
to be large to take advantage of standardization.
Similar offerings mean simpler and cheaper
operations. But, as companies succeed at fulfilling
the basic needs of customers, they have to create
greater variation in offerings to retain existing
customers and to attract new ones. Having more
offerings improves the odds that they will meet
the particular needs of each consumer and make
it easier to sell merchandise and keep profits
high. However, this path increases the cost of
managing overly complicated production systems
and an excessive number of SKUs. In addition to
executives facing increased complexity, consumers
become confused by too many choices and
confounded by too many functions and features.
Sometimes, trying to create the right
offering for each person creates confusion for
every person. Depending on the industry, the
advantages of classic mass production and
mass marketing are reaching their limit. Most
companies that were leaders in the age of mass
production have either embraced transformation
or joined the walking dead.

What needs to change?

We are in the midst of a seismic shift in
technology, society, and the economy that is as
significant at what occurred at the beginning of
the twentieth century. We are leaving the economy
of scale and entering an economy of choice. This
is changing how objects, environments, and
information are made. The economy of choice
changes the way objects and information are used.
It changes the way value is created and measured.

Feature An Incomplete, over-generalized nano-history of design and business

Patrick Whitney is the dean and
the Robert C Pew Professor of the
Institute of Design at the Illinois
Institute of Technology. He
publishes and lectures throughout
the world about design and
business strategy. He has advised
BP, Lenovo, McDonalds, Procter
& Gamble, SC Johnson, and the

The phenomenon of almost everything

becoming digital and networked causes oncedistinctive arenas of daily life to blur. Activities
around managing family life, working, playing,
and shopping can take place anywhere, anytime
frequently at the same time. Innovations usually
start as a simple product or service created to
help in one area of daily life, but over time tend
to diversify in order to fulfill wide variations in
peoples needs.
Today, the primary way companies add
diversity to their offerings is by creating more
versions and more features. It is a situation in
which producers and users both lose.
Despite advances in methods of predicting
markets, the speed of change and the increase
in complexity make it difficult to make reliable
predictions. Information technology is still
added to production systems that are based on
the principles of mass production. The goal is
to create more variety to fulfill the predicted
needs of consumers. But what if instead of being
applied to the context of the economy of scale, the
flexibility that is native to information systems
were applied to the new context of the economy
of choice? What if it were used to create systems
that responded to the needs and desires of users
instead of trying to predict them?
This change will influence different industries
and categories at different times. Offerings based
on information are already changing because of
the ease with which IT can manipulate content.
Reflect for a moment on the way offerings are
made, used, and valued in the music, newspaper,
and television sectors. Which sectors are next?
As 3D printing becomes better, faster, and
cheaper, following the pattern of document
printing, which industries will be disrupted first?
Clothing? Housewares?
In this context, the core skills of design
become more important than they were in the
past century. However, they will need to adapt
to the new faster, flexible context of how things
are made and used. We no longer have time for
design to evolve informally and should have no

governments of Denmark,
Hong Kong, and India about
methods linking design and
competitiveness. Whitneys
research about digital media and
learning is supported by the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation
and the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation.

BusinessWeek featured Whitney

as a design visionary for bringing
together design and business.
Forbes named him one of six
members of their E-Gang of
Internet pioneers for his work in
human-centered design. And Fast
Company named him a master of
design for linking the creation of

user value and economic value.

He is a trustee of the Global
Heritage Fund and was jury
chairman for the 2011 Smithsonian
National Design Awards.

patience for treating design as fashion, where this

years style of working is viewed as revolutionary
and replaces last years style of working. All this
does is let designers feel they are making progress
when they are only rediscovering the past.
Where does progress come from? It starts with
visionary practitioners seeing a shift in context
and creating new ways of working; it is amplified
with academics explaining and experimenting
with the new practices and creating a more
structured body of knowledgewhich is used to
increase the efficiency and effectiveness of design.
This helps educators create assignments
that teach design as principles rather than as an
inventory of historic and current ways of working.
It helps professionals and researchers build upon
the past and avoid creating new ideas that
are actually decades old. It helps the field to be
understood by others and increases the likelihood
of design helping businesses, governments, and
civic organization face the shift from the economy
of scale to the economy of choice.

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