7.   Product Styling

Now you have made certain decision about the kind of product you are going to design and have done some research into manufacturing processes, you need to work out how you can style this product appropriately to promote sustainable use. Product meanings arise in the relationships between users and products. These relationships are both physical and symbolic—prompted by product 'affordances', tacit user know-how as well as by new meanings promoted by marketing strategies (which we look at in Stage 9).

As contemporary product buyers, we tend to expect products to aesthetically declare their functions and 'performance' (one of the most obvious examples is to be found perhaps in car detailing). As designers, we are often encouraged to style products 'gratuitously', that is, in a way that denies any need to create symbolically commensurate and integrated forms. The principle of commensurability discussed in 'lean design' is therefore also relevant here. Designers are often approached with bad design specs and more or less asked to 'spread some cool design' over the surface of the product*. But the world certainly doesn't need any more iMac-style telephones destined to join the 80% of new products that fail to be wanted, let alone needed. Often, the more 'specific' a product's styling gets, the more limited it will be in terms of usability and desirability. A piece of furniture with fixed shelving dedicated to the sizing of today's technology is an obvious example here, and will find itself unable to absorb the demands of technological innovation. Quite unapologetically, we wish to promote a different culture of styling—one that is about communicating and making desirable more sustainable ways of living and working. The spirit of invention is invited by sustainable design, but it needs to move in a different direction to the current aesthetically driven one. Products need to be styled more responsibly in relation to what they communicate (symbolic meanings) and how they communicate to users (interface semantics); in all, in ways that are more commensurate with their functional lives. This is not to advocate a 'modernist' representational approach, but rather to make the point that styling is, literally and symbolically, the key to a 'successful' product. It is about the ways in which products look, feel and even act toward users. The following questions are designed to help you reflect upon and apply direction to styling decisions you have perhaps already intuitively made.

* From Chris Heatherly, chief strategist at Frog Design, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. which appeared in "Cool Design Won't Save a Dud Product" by Bob Parks posted on ID Forum March 2001.

Considering the styling of your proxy product, ask the following questions: