1. Get insight
Albert Einstein said, “If I were given one
hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one
minute resolving it.”
Understand the essence of the design problem.
Insight doesn’t come from a customer statement or data—it comes from
understanding the desired final result.
2. Take risks, develop extreme designs, and
retreat as needed
Develop
extreme designs—push the envelope of what can be done. Think broadly, then come
back to the real world. You will not be respected as a designer if you proffer
some small evolutionary tweak and never mention radical ideas to transform the
product or entire market.
3. Identify deal breakers
Recognize foundational issues that will make
your proposed design fail. The high temperatures produced at Mach 3 prevented
aluminum from being using in the Blackbird.
4. Make decisions quickly
Identify
baseline decisions required for your design. These are the big decisions that
let you start. In addition to being fast, the SR-71 was recognized as needing
to be a flying fuel tank.
5. Think of your design as part of a system. Be willing to change the
system.
Does the
system that supports it have to be changed or should a new one be created? Remember
the SR-71 could not achieve its missions without aerial refueling. The F-117
could not be flown by a pilot; a computer operated the actual flight controls.
6. Trust your gut and chase your hunches
Design is
not analytical or linear—it is something else. Trust your hunches. You are a
creative beast. Your computer is not. You can process information and do
magical things. Human insight is the spark we bring to design and engineering
analysis.
7. Design by building
Move quickly from mental concepts to sketches
to rough prototypes—at home if necessary. Flesh out concepts in a no pressure
environment—not at work.
The SR-71 engineers were a short walk from
the shop floor, so they could try out ideas quickly. Making an object real
reduces dumb mistakes and helps you work more communally.
8. Design for 99% of optimal
Who wants to be 99 percent excellent?
However, approaching perfection takes time. It can drain every resource
available and the somewhat less than perfect answer may be the most efficient.
Ben Rich, one of the Cold War presidents of
Skunk Works, put it this way: “The only areas where the final result must be
one hundred percent are safety, quality, and security. That final ten percent
striving toward maximum perfection costs forty percent of the total expenditure
on most projects.” Skunk Works required that a design only be “80 percent
effective” and look at what they designed!
9. Don’t be a zealot
If something can’t be made to work, redesign
it. Don’t fall in love with your design. The fighter/interceptor (YF-12) role
was not a good one for a Blackbird and was discontinued (although it would
serve as a flying wind tunnel for NASA for many years).
10. Champion your design
Groups of people are good at generating ideas
and providing helpful contributions; however, communal decision making can lead
to bad things as you try to make everyone happy.
11. Share ideas
Make sure
you bounce problems off of coworkers and anyone else who will listen. The
solitary genius makes a great movie or magazine article, but this is rarely the
case.
12. Use existing designs where you can
Keep the
big picture in mind and use products or systems that have had commercial
success. You don’t want to reinvent the nut and bolt—or the wheel. The SR-71
cockpit is a tried and true oldie with nearly no innovation. However, it worked
and could be trusted.
13. Don’t be enslaved to procedure
This
comes right from Johnson. The design is the goal, not the procedure.
14. Test until you can sleep soundly
Your tendency will be to achieve a good night’s sleep by developing
designs that are ultraconservative or overbuilt. It is easy to overdesign
things and make products that are too strong or have too much redundancy. You
need to fight this tendency. Overdesign increases embodied energy,
environmental impact, and cost, among other things.
Design Efficiency
It seems hard to be a non-zealous product champion who takes risks,
offends friends while seeking their input, and strives to design something less
than perfect. Welcome to the world of professional design.
However, let’s not be melancholy. You know how to aim for perfection,
how to create something radically new, and how to love your design. You just
elect not to do these things for the sake of time and efficiency.
This is
an excerpt from my new book, "Intense Design: Product Design
Lessons From Cold War Era Skunk Works" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1986573974
Image Credit: By Paolo Villa - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51243514
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