Design and Strategy - Apple vs Alessi - DT09

Our ninth talk in the Design and Technology series was from Proffessor Tom Inns, who is the director of the Glasgow School of Art. His talk was about strategy and the role of design within a company. For example, he gave us the example of Zara, which employs a designer to monitor catwalk trends, which are then quickly made into high-street fasion items. Here design plays a critical role, and understanding a companies interaction with designers, and the wider world of design is important for both the employed owner to understand, and for the management to understand and take control of.

He then gave us some papers to read on specific companies in order for us to analyse a stituation ourselves. I read Innovating Through Design, a Harvard Business Review paper by Roberto Verganti. The paper talks about several companies such as Alessi, Artemide and Kartell, based in northern Italy famous for their products, which often come as collaborations between these manufacturing companies and celebrity designers and architects. The Michael Graves Kettle is perhaps the most famous work of any of these companies, and is specifically called into consideration in this 2006 paper.

The paper shows how Alessi is characterised by a 'dialogue' between itself and 'the design world' In the case of the Michael Graves Kettle, this started as an 'Absorb' and 'Interpret' stage in a project called the 'Tea and Coffee Piazza ', where a number of famous designers were invited to reimagine kitchenware as postmodern architecture. The Interpret stage had these items both exhibited at cultural venues, and sold at high prices to collectors.

Gives designers an opportunity to express themselves with full freedom this freedom alows alessi to be purely on the cultural pulse without any distractions. After this stage had been done (Alessi attempts to explore new themes about once every 10 years), a chosen design such as the Michael Graves Kettle is selected and chosen for mass market introduction. Here, a further stage of detailed design in carried out to make sure all practical and functional considerations have been fully taken into account, along with ensuring an efficient manufacturing process.

One observation that I have tried to include in my venn diagram however, is that the majority of Alessi's clientele, even those in the 'mass market' are pretty much part of the design bubble themselves, or at least part of an initiated middle-class. This is not a problem in itself, If this market exists, it deserves to be exploited, but that's what is is and it should be respected as such.

I also read Apple Inc, a 2017 paper by Frank T. Rothaermel and David R. King, which spoke about the Apple of today and the challenges that Tim Cook has in progressing this large moneymaking machine.

Apple is characterised by the internal nature of it's R&D operations, hiring talented designers to work on products internally in total secrecy for years until a product is launched and released within the space of a few months. 

“Steve and I spent months and months working on a part of a product that, often, nobody would ever see, nor realize was there,” - Jony Ive

Apple also is seen as an example of a company which has properly bought design to the masses. I don't think that this is a coincidence.

Apple used to be a niche design company, back in the nineties when it was producing computers for a small number of graphic designers. When Steve Jobs was looking for ways to revive his company, he looked at and spoke to several design consultants - including the man who did so much for lombardy himself, Richard Sapper; and car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro. Jobs had also previously worked with Frog Design, who designed the original 1984 Macintosh;  and car designer. Instead, he decided to do design totally in-house, giving design responsibility to Jony Ive. This meant that design functions could be fully integrated into overall development processes, but also gave Steve greater personal control over matters if he felt like staging an intervention (which i'm sure happened often).

This integration of internal fuctions happened not only in design but also in technology, when developing the iPad, instead of using Intel processors, Jobs puchased a Palo Alto silicon company and moved microprocessor design in-house.

"It was another example of Jobs's desire, indeed compulsion, to control every aspect of a product, from the silicon to the flesh."

This is highly egotistical and vain, but it leads to products that are totally self constrained and a company and a product line whith a consistent opinon. For this reason, the holistic, self contained approach is likely better for marketing in general. In addition to this, integration with serious advances in technology and work on unknown new problems needs collaborations between designers and engineers, this is specifically of importance at apple where designers are working on completely new technologies and have one shot at getting it right for public release.

The Lombardy, dialogue process is good, but specifically good for selling to 'initiated' design-and-culture focused middle-class buyers, and unless something 'catches on' it has limited scope. The dialoge allows for objects which do not intitially take the most practical aspects of a design too seriously, which puts them in a position to become pure objects of aesthetic contention, but does not guarantee that they will be strictly any better than any other product.

In this comparison we can find our strategic conclusion -

Alessi uses good design to make products, Apple uses design to make good products.