A Rant on Design Concepts and Confidentiality
by Kim
Yesterday at MEX, one of the speakers showed an industrial and interaction conceptual design from many years ago that was remarkably similar to confidential work I’ve seen created during the same timeframe. Two different companies, two continents, similar results. The only reason the speaker was able to show the work was because the client finally agreed to submit the concept into competitions, but that’s only because a big part of their concept looks a lot like something that is in the marketplace: Apple’s Coverflow (album & image interface invented by Andrew Coulter Enright).
Consumer electronics (CE) companies are trying so hard to keep everything confidential and proprietary and yet I continue to see design concepts from the same point in time, emerging from different teams, working for different companies and sometimes even in different cultures. How is that possible? How can designers who’ve never met design a similar product? My colleague, Dan Saffer, pointed me to an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker that speaks to this very thing. Ideas are “in the air. … The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.”
From my perspective, I’ve seen that design teams, working in separate silos, look outward to color and form trends, natural behaviors, and historical and cultural context for inspiration (let alone consumer ethnographic research). Each team internalizes the information as inspiration to inform the product designs. Because the designs are influenced by outside forces of trends, culture and human need, they end up very similar across many separate teams. Essentially, if we are doing our jobs as designers, our work is going to be representative of our surroundings at a moment in time. This then begs the question: Why bother with the confidentiality agreements?
I’m so f*^#ing tired of not being able to share the work I’m most proud of with my peers. There are so many lessons to learn from past work and yet it’s all wasting away under piles of NDA’s. It’s even more frustrating when we extrapolate just how many other designers worldwide have concepts that will also never see the light of day.
What I find fascinating about this is CE companies think that somehow ideas can be contained within confidentiality agreements, but in actuality the ideas are coming from outside influences that reach beyond any contract.
As design becomes a bigger part of product differentiation for CE companies, we designers, as the creators of these innovations, need to work harder to 1) keep ownership of our unused concepts and 2) to show the concepts to the design community in a timely manner. I believe that true design innovation will occur at a much faster pace if conceptual designs are shared. And if we’re designing products from a human-need perceptive, we can make improvements to the world at a faster pace too. Imagine that.
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May 29th, 2008 at 7:01 am
It’s even more fun to be part of a research organization with heavy NDA’s. On top of other issues mentioned, you are not only restricted from showing what you are working with but you can’t even show the many binned concepts that just were never productized. Works so very well with portfolio-based career opportunities.
May 29th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Great post, and can concur with your points.
We normally hear about “Darwin’s theory of natural selection”, but the correct form is actually the “Darwin-Wallace theory” as Darwin and Wallace came up with it independently at almost the same time.
Our website in many respects resembles Adaptive paths (the green horizontal towards the top). Even the global navigation is very similar - I remember the Web standards/CSS tutorial we originally took it from.
Lar
May 29th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I know it’s shitty.
At the agency where I work (www.mbdragan.com) we are allowed to publish the various design proposals AFTER the project is complete.
We even want to publish the PSD’s as tutorials
May 29th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
These companies should learn from enterprises that are encouraging the open sourcing of much of their code. The more you contribute, the more you get back. If it wasn’t for open source, we’d have to pay MSFT for the most basic of bottom of the stack server software. How many times do you have to recreate lower order aspects of your design because there isn’t a freely available open source repository of design out there? Similarly, open source projects help developers get noticed and would do the same for designers.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
There are 6.5 Billion breathing souls on this planet… so there is a strong possibility that 2 different persons living on opposite sides of the planet are think the same :).
It happened couple of times in my career that designs I did were almost identical to other websites although I’ve seen them when I already finished the mockups.
It’s not the question if you are better or more talented but quicker!
May 30th, 2008 at 7:40 am
A Rant on Design Concepts and Confidentiality…
“As design becomes a bigger part of product differentiation for CE companies, we designers, as the creators of these innovations, need to work harder to 1) keep ownership of our unused concepts and 2) to show the concepts to the design community in a …
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:14 am
Go ahead and share them anyway. There are lots of ways to sanitize the designs. If something is truly new and clever, it can be boiled down to something very generic. Then, find a forum to tell everyone about it.
Self-serving plug: we host this mobile design wiki http://patterns.littlespringsdesign.com/index.php/Main_Page expressly to share and gather ideas exactly like this. A few times since it launched I have taken the core of some idea for a project, and made sure it was reflected in the appropriate design category page.
And yeah, we are under serious NDA in the same way; I often can never talk about exactly what we did, or for who, with anyone.