Claudia Bonifer, Design Director, Tiller Design, Sydney, Australia

Claudia Bonifer looks at the evolving design culture in Australia, where design is increasingly promoted as a strategic tool. She demonstrates how, in the face of competing global markets, Tiller Design has combined design skills with design management to keep a competitive edge.

Australia's economy has a strong emphasis on exporting commodities rather than manufacturing. Surprisingly though, Australia employs a similar percentage of its workforce in design occupations as Germany, with the only difference that industrial designers make up only 5% of people in design occupations, compared with 10% in Germany.*

This article is a personal reflection on the Australian industrial design landscape. Having been trained and worked as an industrial designer in Germany, I moved to Australia more than ten years ago and continued my career in industrial design consultancies in Sydney. I quickly realised that even though the statistics don't differ as much as I suspected, the design culture and design consciousness did; and with it the emphasis in project work.  

Australian product design consultancies are generally distinguished by their expertise in design for manufacture. Australian industrial design consultancies excel in design engineering. In my experience, it appears to be widely accepted that industrial designers in Europe and North America work in sequence with design engineers. In Australia, design for manufacture and design engineering are well-developed skills within industrial design, and design consultancies use these as a key selling point for their services.

In addition, the proximity to Asia and its manufacturing landscape has put Australian industrial designers in a unique position that required an extension of their skills into project and production management. Design management in Australia is currently predominantly characterised by project management and design managers are often seen as facilitators of the design process in a project management sense.  

But... the Australian design landscape is evolving and Australian design organisations are pushing for a paradigm shift in design, promoting design management as a strategic tool.  

Looking through my German glasses, I can certainly see tough challenges that this evolution faces:

• Germany's industrial designers are lucky to be part of the strongest economy in Europe and large manufacturers have long recognised design as an economic factor and are leading the way in this. Admittedly, German designers are still educating smaller manufacturers. For Australian design businesses, however, the education process starts with the small manufacturers that make up the bulk of the potential client base. There are only a handful of big leaders, such as the car manufacturer Holden (GM) and household goods manufacturer Breville, which help pave the way.
• On our doorstep, China is moving from a manufacturing resource to an innovation and development resource. This rapid development of industrial design in Asia will put pressure on Australian design businesses.
• The development of a fruitful business relationship requires personal, face-to-face interaction. And even though Australia is very well connected through the virtual world, geographically it is remote - the tyranny of distance, as it's called here - and our industry needs to be energetic and passionate to engage with international clients and platforms.

As an individual practice, Tiller Design has tackled these challenges through the combination of our specialised skills in design for manufacture with design management and strong and matured processes. An example of this combination can be seen in the Otto project. Tiller Design was invited to work on the Otto three years ago. The project involved the development of an espresso maker that was inspired by the Atomic, an Italian coffee maker from the late 1940's.

The principal challenge of the project was to establish a product strategy for the Otto. The brief of improving the performance of the new product from a classic stovetop mocha maker to an espresso machine, could have been approached as an engineering challenge, with the result of falling into the trap of an automated version of the Atomic. And this could well be what some Australian clients might expect from their local design consultants.


Above: The Otto espresso maker. Source: www.ottoespresso.com

In the case of the Otto, we had an open-minded client with a clear vision who was happy to take advantage of the design methodologies and strategies that we could offer as an industrial design consultancy. We applied design thinking to the project, starting off with the need to understand the audience and the target market for the product to identify the product strategy.

Australian firms are rarely commissioned to conduct elaborate user research. And this was the case in this project as well. Having been commissioned by a sole entrepreneur with a big passion but comparatively small budget, we approached the user research by immersing the client and the lead designer into the vivid local coffee scene. They were also sent off to a barista course, which resulted in starting the actual design development from a point of understanding coffee and what it takes to produce an excellent espresso. Being geographically remote, we also engaged internationally by following coffee blogs around the world.

The result of the research was that the Otto had to maintain the analog characteristics of the Atomic, but with higher specs to produce espresso rather than a drip coffee quality. As one of my colleagues pointed out, a good analogy to use for the development of the Otto would be that of BMW and the new Mini - taking the character of the original and incorporating new technology and features. All the charm and fun of the original is still there, but with high performance and a contemporary edge.

Espresso makers are pressure vessels. The design of a pressure vessel has to be calculated by a specialist engineer. As there aren't any espresso machine engineers in Australia that we could access as a consultancy working for a sole client, we identified an engineer in our network who not just specialises in fluid dynamics and industrial products and processes but who is also a hobbyist in steam trains. Steam trains, espresso machines - they're all pressure vessels. Using our network effectively and making this unexpected link meant that we could manage the development process entirely through our consultancy without losing control of the appearance design, which was driven to a certain extent by the requirements of a pressure vessel.

Another challenge in the design and development of the Otto was faced at the point of prototyping. The cost of prototyping threatened the available project budget. The 3D data pack for prototype release was already close to manufacturing quality, and instead of seeking to reduce the prototyping cost we saw an opportunity in tooling up early. We liaised with manufacturers in China and compared the cost of prototyping with the cost of tooling, which turned out to be only marginally higher. The client agreed to go straight into tooling as this was a potential cost saving at low risk. Design refinements, which were minor, were managed through a series of off-tool samples and by close revision control. This process was only possible due to our proximity to Asia, the well-established relationship with the manufacturer, and because we are in the same time zone as the manufacturer, which facilitated daily communication.

The Otto is now in production and has evoked enormously positive reactions among coffee aficionados around the world. A success story such as the Otto presents evidence for the tangible benefits that the strategic use of design thinking has across entire projects. It shows our clients how industrial design is evolving in our region and the power design and design management can have within their business.

*Data derived from sources provided through the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the DIA (Design Institute Australia), the Federal Statistical Office of Germany and the AGD (Alliance of German Designers). 

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This article was reprinted with permission from DMI, and originally published in DMI News & Views.

About Claudia Bonifer Claudia was trained as an Industrial Designer at the Muthesius Hochschule in Kiel, Germany, with a focus on product functionality and semantics, user experience, and a strong emphasis on formal aesthetics. She has worked as an industrial designer in Germany and Australia, where she continued her career in design management.

Links

• www.ottoespresso.com
• http://yourstorypodcast.com/2009/09/otto-coffee-maker/
• http://www.coffeecrew.com/gear/446-living-with-otto-coffee-maker-for-the-new-space-age