> A design that is not a redesign: The
> Segway Personal Transporter is not a redesign of any previous form of
> transportation unless you consider roller skates in its league.
The Segway is a great example of what my biases
and deficiencies as a design studio teacher make
me worry about Mackinnon's research.
If Kemper's journalism is to be believed, Dean
Kamen (inventor of Segway) does appear to be
quite an egomaniac: http://tinyurl.com/md9643 .
(See also Hayward's less careful:
_Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking
Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap_
http://tinyurl.com/kvxxcq )
That 'entrepreneurship as media entertainment' is
certainly what got the product to market. But many
of the diagnoses about why it has become an icon of
a design failure (though it seems to have found a
less spectacular niche in the sustainable markets
of security patrolling, particularly of sprawling
retail and light-industrial sites) have to do with
the fact that it could not be positioned. Because
it claims not to be a redesign, its function is
not easily recognizable. This is not only the
case for the consumers, but also for all those
committees of mediocrity like local councils, who
decide what can and can't go on a sidewalk, or
need registration as a road vehicle (hence its
primary market running around less regulated
private property).
I am paraphrasing a boxed insert into the 5th
edition of Everett Rogers _Diffusion of Innovations_
page 148, called 'Classifying the Segway'. See also
this paper in the International Journal of Product
Development:
http://www.systematic-innovation.com/Articles/05/Oct05-Defining%20%60Breakth
rough%27%20Product%20Design%20Solutions.pdf
And see also the 'Restrictions on Use' paragraphs in
the Segway's wikipedia entry [which is a good time to
mention de-individualized creativity: wikinomics,
wisdom of crowds, here comes everybody, WeThink, etc]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_PT#Restrictions_on_use
The point is that creativity is all well and good
unless that outcome makes a difference, and to
make a difference you need to be able to negotiate
current socio-materialist inertia, which it seems
is best done by observing and listening to others,
or better collaborating with others, and their
existing functional categories, in order to work
out how to redesign them. What fan groups are now
doing for the segway - laboriously hoping to transi-
tion out of niche-dom by creating diverse socio-
technical networks that would appropriately position
this innovation - is what Kamen should have done at
the outset, had he not had the personality that made
him insist on his independence of thought and action.
My bias, in studio teaching, is therefore to help
students become socio-technical networkers - the
personality for which is a certain capacity to
tolerate enslavement to petty constraints and
impovershing inhibitions.
If you share my prejudice, I cannot recommend enough:
THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN INNOVATION* PART I:
THE ART OF INTERESSEMENT
MADELEINE AKRICH, MICHEL CALLON and BRUNO LATOUR
International Journal of Innovation Management
Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 2002) pp. 187206
THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN INNOVATION* PART II:
THE ART OF CHOOSING GOOD SPOKESPERSONS
MADELEINE AKRICH, MICHEL CALLON and BRUNO LATOUR
International Journal of Innovation Management
Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 2002) pp. 207225
Cameron
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