What happens when you’re in the process of perfecting a design and you’re thrown a curveball? As creative consultants, we face this all the time: client needs change; we run up against technology hurdles; timelines and product costs are cut. To actually get a product out the door, you must nimbly respond to the things you couldn’t begin to anticipate or plan for at the outset.
LUNAR sponsored a senior-level Industrial Design class at the Academy of Art University with this reality in mind. The initial assignment was to make the perfect object – a teapot, iron, or alarm clock. We intentionally made the brief deceptively simple, and the students actually balked at the brief and asked us for a more challenging project. We insisted, and any one of them would tell you now that it was much harder than it sounded. Inherent in the brief is the pesky need to define perfection: for whom, for what, and why is it perfect? We pushed the students to articulate their reasoning, to translate clear inspirations into insightful concepts. The initial project was tough enough, but mid-semester, after the student presented their “final” perfect design, there was more…
Our brief was inspired by the film The Five Obstructions, in which Lars von Trier approaches Jorge Leth to remake his 1967 short film The Perfect Human in five different ways, with von Trier assigning Leth an escalating set of obstacles for each remake. If you haven’t seen it before, watch the full film on Hulu, and watch Leth’s original here:. It’s incredible to see how the strength of the same short film continues to shine through the evermore twisted obstacle course of demands von Trier throws at Leth. Despite the deep transformation in each clip, there is a strong essence that remains fundamentally unchanged – this is what we hoped the students would grasp.
As the students presented their “final” projects, we pitched the curveball: take your perfect product and infuse a layer of inspiration from another classmate’s work to deeply change your product while retaining its essential DNA. We selected three particularly strong projects – one teapot, one alarm clock, one iron – and we assigned each student in the class one of the three projects from which to draw inspiration. Some students found it painful to let go of their “perfect” product, but the most successful projects followed Leth’s example: boil your work down to its fundamentals and ask yourself what is vital, and what can change? Build upon the product’s DNA to play with the same essentials in a new and inspiring way.
It’s the same set of questions we so often face: What elements do we push to keep amidst the need to adjust the game plan? What can be changed or let go of to surmount a new hurdle? The more we are clear about a product’s DNA and build consensus with our clients around these essentials from the get go, the less we have to fight for features or expressions and the more we collaboratively find ways to ensure the fundamental elements continue to shine through.
