Observe. Learn. Invent.
Late in the morning of Feb. 15, 1995, an
elderly Boston woman was extolling to
visitors the virtues of her vacuum
cleaner when she noticed a smattering
of coffee grinds on her kitchen floor.
She stopped mid-sentence, set the
vacuum cleaner aside, reached for a dust
pan and broom, then leaned over to sweep up
the grinds and launch a revolution in home foor cleaning.
The woman remains anonymous.
The visitors were from Design Continuum, Inc., a consulting
firm that studies human behavior in hopes of designing a
better consumer product. Why, they kept wondering after the
fact, was the favorite vacuum cleaner — in hand, no less — forsaken
for the dust pan?
Questions need not be profound in the marketing business.
For Procter & Gamble, Continuum eventually created the
Swiffer, a light, mop-shaped tool for small jobs that is earning
P&G well in excess of $500 million annually.
“Opportunity. We are always looking for opportunity,” said
Harry West, Continuum’s vice president of strategy and innovation
who witnessed the vacuum cleaner slight a decade ago.
“Often, consumers don’t even know what they need. They are
quick to point out what’s wrong with something. It’s our job to
find the solution.”
Design Continuum, located in a brick building at 1220 Washington St. in the village of West Newton, is headquarters for 75 graphic and industrial designers, electrical and mechanical engineers, marketing strategists, and business professionals -- but anthropologists all. They work -- some might suggest play --behind a modest front door sign that defies the impact that the company has had on products we use.
Hatched at Continuum were the Moen Revolution shower head, the Oster In2itive Blender, the Cambridge SoundWorks T-300 Tower speakers, the titanium series padlock for MasterLock, the graphics on Atomic skis, the newest Anderson window, the redesigned line of Ekco cooking utensils, the slow-closing lid for the Toto USA toilet, and the Reebok pump sneaker, to name just a few of the 2,600 projects tackled since the company's inception in 1983.
''In design, they are considered the thought leader's thought leader," says Robert E. Johnston Jr., coauthor of ''The Power of Strategy Innovation," a book that looks at new ways to link creativity and planning with business opportunities. ''The company lives on the leading edge of design."
But before you design the better mouse trap, you have to be convinced it's needed, Daniel Buchner was explaining the other day, dressed in a bathing suit. Buchner, vice president of innovation and design, was offering a tour of the company's shower laboratory, a studio-sized room outfitted with a variety of water-squirting devices that led to the creation of products including Moen's latest shower head.
''Wait a minute. You've got to feel this," Buchner cooed as he positioned himself and his visitor under a wastebasket of water suspended from the ceiling. Where the ''dump bucket" idea goes if anywhere at all has yet to be determined.
He pulled a rope. A deluge followed. ''Neat, isn't it!" the 49-year old executive exclaimed.
This is work?
Typically a client will come to Continuum for an answer to a basic question.
Moen: ''What makes a great shower experience?"
Reebok: ''Can we design a sneaker that jumps higher?"
MasterLock: ''Our products are getting copied. How can we set ourselves apart?"
Continuum adheres to a simple theorem, according to Harry West. If something is really important to at least one-half of the population, the chances of not finding it after closely interviewing seven people is less than 1 percent.
To protect trade secrets and client confidentiality, West declined to offer many details about strategies and current projects. But good design, West and others pointed out, begins with good observation.
For Moen, Continuum placed an advertisement in The Village Voice offering $250 to New Yorkers willing to be interviewed, then videotaped and photographed in their showers (in bathing suits). A placement agency selected 25 people, based in part on the passion they had for the shower experience. The two-hour session included camera set-up and dismantling time. During the first interview, Continuum discovered it had a big problem. Cameras fog in a shower, so mechanical engineers had to design special lenses for the project.
Be the investigation about showers or barbecuing, test subjects have only a general idea why they are being observed. This keeps them from trying to steer the process. It can be problematic even when the client is too specific about where the solution may lay. For example, when P&G came looking for a new floor cleaning market, the company arrived with a bias and shared it with Continuum that the P&G marketing staff believed the best new product was probably some sort of detergent.
A recruiting agent for Continuum located 18 self-described neatniks and offered them $25 apiece to spend an hour or two discussing the job.
''We need to walk into each situation pretending that we are from Mars. 'They' are the experts. We are simply there to observe," West said. But it's not beyond him to tweak reality. When the elderly woman (all interviewees are promised anonymity) went to the closet for the Oreck vacuum cleaner that she said answered all her cleaning needs, West surreptitiously sprinkled a few coffee grinds on the floor to see what might happen.
The task back in the office becomes one of going over notes and repeatedly watching videotape to the point the experience becomes surreal.
''It can get crazy. You look at an action time and time again and wonder if you're going nuts. It's like writing ''CAT" and wondering if you spelled it correctly," West said.
Continuum prides itself by being, as Buchner put it, a relatively flat organization. Everyone affiliated with a project -- be they designers, engineers, or business-degree holders -- works together as a solution evolves.
Just the observation phase of a project can bring surprises:
When it comes to audio systems, men buy speakers and women try to hide them.
The users of conventional floor mops spend about as much time cleaning the mop as they spend cleaning the floor.
People under showers spend most of their time with their eyes closed. From start to finish, only about 60 percent of a shower is spent in the water stream, with the rest of the time actually devoted to avoiding the water for chores such as soaping and shaving. Given the choice, people prefer the sensation of larger water droplets enveloping them, but they believe such a nozzle would waste water.
In Germany, BMW drivers were wired with blood-pressure monitors and then put through tests that included driving on autobahns where there is no speed limit. The most stressful situation? Parallel parking.
The speaker Continuum designed for Cambridge SoundWorks could double as a piece of contemporary furniture. For P&G, Continuum created a tool that uses disposable sheets of electrostatically charged dry wipes. For Moen, Continuum created a shower head that delivers big drops in a spiraling action that consumes one-fourth less water than is used in a conventional shower head. And for BMW, Continuum created sensors that alert the driver to parking obstacles.
Reebok's quest for a ''higher jumping sneaker" back in the early 1990s initially had Continuum stumped. A consistent complaint in interviews was imperfect fit; the conventional half-size shoe increments might be inadequate, Continuum concluded. So mechanical engineers outfitted what Buchner describes as ''sneaker-like contraptions" with the inflatable bladders used by medical personnel to constrict blood flow. Then the rigs were taken over to a Newton High School basketball practice.
Players donned the shoes, reluctantly. Then the bladders were inflated, and by the end of the practice the kids were raving about the safer feeling they got from a tighter fit.
''And I feel like I can jump higher," one player crowed.
