Dear Lily,
Thanks for your reply. I agree with you, but I’m not sure it’s a
correction. I agree with you completely, and I cited Design Factory as
one of the rare example in which student projects move into the real
world. I know that other cases exist, but of the hundreds of thousands
of student projects done every year at design schools, only a few move
into real use. I’d doubt that we see more than a thousand or so such
examples a year and I’d be surprised if any school could point to more
than 1% of such examples in any year. Now that’s not terribly bad
compared to the problem that real companies have launching new products
in the real world with the help of professional designers, marketing
groups, and consultants, all supervised by experienced experts.
The rate of new product failure is high. Most new product ideas die in
the proposal stage or the technically feasible prototype phase, and that
would normally be what students generate when they put forward a mature
proposal with some kind of prototype. Mansfield et al. (1971: 57) found
that of those new product ideas that do move beyond the proposal stage,
57% achieve technical objectives but only 31% enter full-scale
marketing. Over 80% of all new products fail on launch, and another 10%
fail within five years (Edwards 1999, Lukas 1998, McMath 1998). The high
failure rate of new products explains why it is so rare to see a company
take a student project to market. The stakes are too high. Museums and
other groups with limited market needs can work to a different basis –
often, they work with one-off projects created only for them. It’s
another world.
Either way, these facts are different to the issues I’ve been
addressing in this thread.
Without repeating too much from my earlier posts, I’ll say again that
I’ve been focusing on policy design. This is something that students
don’t do. The stakes are far too high. Student design activities or
small-scale design projects don’t compare with cases of policy design.
Even large-scale student projects in the real world don’t qualify when
policy covers such large-scale issues as public health systems, maritime
security, or pension indexing. These are large-scale systems involving
multiple actors and multiple overlapping legal or regulatory regimes.
Media Lab is a case like Design Factory, but it’s not policy design.
Yours,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3
9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design
--
References
Edwards, Cliff. 1999. “Many products have gone the way of the
Edsel.” Johnson City, Tennessee: Johnson City Press, 23 May, 28,
30.
Lukas, Paul. 1998. “The Ghastliest Product Launches.” Fortune, 16
March 1998, 44.
Mansfield, Edwin, J. Rapaport, J. Schnee, S. Wagner and M. Hamburger.
1971. Research and Innovation in Modern Corporations. New York: Norton.
McMath, Robert. 1998. What Were They Thinking? Marketing Lessons I’ve
Learned from Over 80,000 New Product Innovations and Idiocies. New York:
Times Business.
--
>>> Diaz-Kommonen Lily <[log in to unmask]> 7/13/2011 8:03 PM >>>
—snip—
I would like to suggest a small correction to your post...
During the past 10 years, I have taught a course on Systems of
Representation at the Media Lab Helsinki that is part of Aalto
University but not affiliated with Aalto Design Factory. As part of the
work done during this course, students develop applications that are
routinely used in real world exhibitions in major museums in Finland.
—snip—
|
