Dear Gunnar,

True enough.

Design includes many processes, including and not limited to product
development, product design, industrial design, and many design
functions distributed through the firm. These include systems design
and logistics of the manufacturing process, design of sub-components
and assembled parts; and even designing the organization that
manufactures, sell, delivers and services the products.

Research shaped many major products and product production lines
before the Edsel. Not all were commercial, but many were industrial.
At each moment, of course, the conditions of the time and the
conditions of industrial production determined what research was.

Major successful research programs drove progress through much of the
industrial revolution. It is easy to think of a few off-hand
examples. These include the Du Pont plants in Delaware, which in turn
used research results from the French royal powder factories. There
was the "American system" for manufacturing firearms of
interchangeable parts on an assembly basis. Research gave birth to
the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio. Thomas Edison launched a
thousand or so patented products in his laboratory, and most were
successful. Research of several kinds gave birth to the logistical
manufacturing systems of the River Rouge plant and the other great
assembly lines of the early twentieth century. Bell Telephones
massive research program was the foundation of successful industrial
production, including Walter Shewhart's statistical quality control
system where W. Edwards Deming got his start. Think of the
catalogue-order manufactured houses in the nineteenth century. For
that matter, consider the research foundation that gave rise to the
German chemicals and electricity industries of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The British chemicals industries, metals
industries, and other ran major in-house research programs. So did
the superb manufacturing industries of what became Czechoslovakia
when the Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved. All these ran major
research ventures to create, develop, test, and manufacture
successful new products. Many also maintained significant university
relations.

With a bit of time and work, I could probably locate several hundred
examples of important and successful research programs that created
successful products.

Along with their successes, of course, they had failures and they
probably had high failure rates just as we do today. I think the
authors chose the Edsel just because we know it.

It is true that we cannot readily attribute the failure of
contemporary industrial products to any single cause. I simply say
that we do better with research than without, and we learn from our
research how to do better research. Generally, research has been
associated with a reduction in failure rates.

Much of this thread seems to involve teasing out details and
distinctions on issues where we agree.

Best regards,

Ken


Gunnar Swanson wrote:

>Ken,
>
>I don't disagree with your basic point but:
>
>Of course applying numbers to "design failure" is inevitably largely a
>fiction. Categorization of the reasons for "failures" will always be
>crude at best. Products "fail" for many reasons. Some (most?) have
>nothing to do with design unless we expand "design" to cover almost all
>business operations. Many, probably most, reasons are of little direct
>professional interest for a product's designers.
>
>>"Many products have gone the way of the Edsel."
>
>It is worth noting that the Edsel was the result of one of the first
>big attempts at using research to form a product. (Perhaps that is the
>point of the article; I don't know.) That is clearly not an argument
>against design research, just a cautionary consideration.
>
>Gunnar
>