Design Matters

Vibratory plow circa 1980

I’ve said it often, but it’s worth repeating. Design is much more than a styling exercise. Design solves problems. Understanding what problems exist, however, can be a challenge for the designer. We’ve all read market research reports, peered through the two way mirror at a focus group, or talked directly to customers. These are all great tools, but in the world of design research, more is more. One of my favorite methods for gathering insight is good old fashioned field work. The power of direct observation is enormous.

Years ago I was working on the design of a underground trencher manufactured by a company in Perry Oklahoma. It was a curious walk behind device that sliced a narrow slit in the ground to bury television cables. It was powered by a gasoline engine that spun a large eccentric weight that caused a huge sharpened blade to vibrate wildly slicing through the Earth like butter. The designers involved, including myself, were invited to meet with the engineering team. They were a friendly bunch and quickly showed off their thinking about how to improve the efficiency of the mechanism while saving cost. Our challenge was to bend metal around the innards and make it look “presentable”. The customer for these machines is actually the cable television installers who lay the cable through your backyard. My immediate question was where can we see these machines in use or better yet use one? We were quickly offered to test drive one of the earlier generation machines in the field behind the plant, which we did. It was challenging to use but we certainly learned a lot. I wanted more.

I suggested that we meet with a real operator of the current machine. We called the local cable television company and  to our surprise were granted an audience with a experienced operator, Larry. We met Larry in the equipment yard near the end of the day and were prepared with pads and pencils to record the feedback we were expecting. During the interview he nearly immediately told us that the design of the machine was fine, in fact he liked it. We kept pushing on him for more insight, but got the same answer over and over again. It was fine. Finally I asked him if we could see the machine in question. Larry happily led us to a tin shed at the back of the yard and opened the sliding door to reveal a well worn mechanical marvel. Immediately I spotted three modifications that had been made to the machine by someone. Was it Larry? It really didn’t matter, this was exactly what we were looking for!

The most obvious modification was a  make-shift support structure that  had been welded to the outside of the machine to hold the battery. The machine as manufactured hides the battery inside a steel enclosure with a snarl of  hydraulic valves, hoses and assorted wiring. It was crude in execution, but appeared to substantially made. I immediately asked Larry why he moved the battery.  His response was that the machine is not used  in the winter because the ground is too hard to slice through. Every spring when they fire it up the battery is dead from sitting dormant. With the battery buried behind an access panel and 8 bolts it is a huge pain in the neck to attatch the jumper cables. “Much easier to jump the thing if the battery is on the outside” , quiped Larry.

We also found a hole cut into the side of a shroud to peek through and see hydraulic levels, and a  crudely  crafted cable spool holder that used a cast off broom stick as an axle. Without the spool holder they had to employ another operator to hold the spool on the broom stick above his head while walking backwards. I can only imagine what that must have been like. 

The lesson here is that asking questions only goes so far. Nothing can beat field observation when it comes to uncovering innovation opportunity. In case you’re curious,  we made battery access  far easier and built in a cable spool holder on the design concept we created.

David Hill