by: David Armano
Terrific interview with Jim Wicks, Vice President of Motorola's Consumer Experience Design group. The interview goes on in some detail to lay out how Motorola's culture has shifted due to an influx of creative thinking and innovative product design.
Jim doesn't give the latest products like RAZR or SLVR all the credit—but it's clear that the impact the breakthrough products have had are difficult to ignore. The interview is fairly comprehensive—but if you value Experience Design, it's very much worth the read. Here are a few choice highlights:
“The product is the brand. You build brand in our industry through the product and the experience. Those manifestations are tangible evidence of that change. It shapes what people internally and externally think about the company.”
“To me, innovation comes from a lot of different things. It could come from something completely unstructured or something structured.”
“A product by itself can't change a company. But, a product and a success can change a company. A product can start the change and can make people feel a part of that change.”
“Brand management is another example of where design is addressing complexity. We launched RAZR with the intent of it becoming an icon–not that I'm saying it is. But you can use the 'halo effect' of that kind of a product.”
“The design group includes the disciplines of advanced mechanical, user interface, industrial design, research, material sciences, and more. In the past, this group was integrated with a lot of our businesses, and it was about inventing things.”
“We have this diversity, we behave differently, and we design differently now versus three years ago. We don't think of design as a group out in an ivory tower that conceptualizes things and then figures out how to make them. Nor is it, "We've got a strategy, and we're going throw the technologists at it, and then we're going try to wrap it up and make it look good.”
Original Post: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/03/motorolainnovat.html
