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THE SOUL OF DESIGN

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................ixPART ONE Non-Ordinary Products (and Services)......................................................1PART TWO The Component Parts of Form...............................................................27PART THREE Qualities of the Soul (of Design) and Their Consequences................................51PART FOUR Makers and Creativity: Toward Commercial Success with Special Things.....................81PART FIVE Closure..................................................................................123Glossary............................................................................................137Cases Examined......................................................................................145Research Approach...................................................................................147Notes...............................................................................................157Bibliography........................................................................................167Index...............................................................................................173

Chapter One

NON-ORDINARY PRODUCTS

(AND SERVICES)

1

An elegant woman, slight of stature, apparently in her fifties, stands at the front of a class listening as a twenty-three-year-old poses a question that's actually a veiled criticism. Responding, the woman repeats something she said earlier. She struggles with a remote control, moving back through four or five PowerPoint slides to show something she's shown before. She apologizes for her English, which is in fact eloquent. When she chooses an unusual word, or constructs a sentence oddly, you recognize a better expression of her ideas than anything you thought she might say. But some in the room don't hear the poetry, or it doesn't persuade them. A murmur ripples through the crowd as young people shift in their chairs.

Jette Egelund, chair of a company called "Vipp," has accepted an invitation to lecture to "Managing in the Creative Economy," a class at the Copenhagen Business School, about her experiences growing the company. But now the students—some of them—have begun to lecture her. They hasten to offer Ms. Egelund their wisdom, gained from instruction in business school as well as from their twenty-something experiences. She listens politely, but she's got fire in her eye and steel in her backbone.

In a way, she's invited this onslaught: she's told the class that she, unlike them, has no training in business. She's told stories that profess an innocence of conventional business logic (actually, a reluctance to accept it, but the students don't notice that). She's disagreed with the students on such questions as whether she ought to think about customers in distinct segments (she prefers not to). She's spoken proudly of introducing products that, according to conventional business wisdom, should never have been launched (although these products have been successful); of disregarding customer feedback in order to pursue personal notions of design integrity in her products (although this practice doesn't seem to have prevented their success). She professes ignorance on important topics and, disturbingly, appears pleased about this. The students' questions have a subtext: it's only a matter of time before such commercial misbehavior will catch up with her. One student finally says it out loud, not bothering to disguise his opinion as a question.

Vipp sells "designer" trashcans and toilet brushes. The bin (trashcan) is the company's iconic product (Figure 1.1). It's featured in the collections of design museums. It's been on display at the Louvre. The very idea of a museum-worthy designer trashcan or toilet brush raises eyebrows.

But customers appreciate these products. And they pay high prices for them. The floor-standing 30-liter Vipp 24 bin, for example, sells for €350 or $400 or even $500, depending on the market. The company's celebrated toilet brush sells for €129, or more than $200 in some markets. These price points, in combination with the firm's rapid growth rate, constitute a business triumph. Most people think about trash cans and toilet brushes in purely functional terms, but functionality alone can't justify these prices. Vipp products function well, but not that well. Product profit margins are, well, huge.

Jette's father, Holger, made the first Vipp bin in 1939, and the bin itself, the physical object, hasn't changed much since. In those days the bins sold in modest volumes, at modest prices. Not until Jette took over, in the early 1990s, did the firm begin to grow. Holger, an artful soul who loved ballroom dancing, could not delegate, and thus never expanded the business beyond a few employees. Production-oriented and practical, he never imagined the bin as anything other than a better-than-average refuse receptacle. He priced it by estimating production cost and adding a small percentage. When Jette, forced to take over the company after her father died, looked at the bin, however, she experienced much more than a functional relationship with a reliable garbage can.

She saw the story of her parents, Holger and Marie, a young couple struggling to make a life together in the years just before and during the Second World War. She saw a stylish home furnishing, a finely designed and sculpted form that reflected her father's aesthetic sensibilities. She saw a beautiful object worthy of placement in a museum, a thing that she'd lived with all her life, and that she had, with her own hands, made, again and again at her father's side. This bin, in her eyes, in her memory and imagination, seemed special.

In the years since, she has made it special for others as well. In 2006, Vipp bins decorated or reconceived by famous designers filled the windows of Copenhagen's posh department store, Det Ny Illum, alongside arrangements of clothing and accessories by Armani, Prada, and Donna Karan. A few months later, the Louvre displayed ornamented Vipp bins as objets d'art. By 2009, Ms. Egelund no longer made bins with her own hands, but she gently broadcast the confident authority of someone who knew her business in every detail—even when confronted by twenty-something B-school hotshots.

Standing before that group, she explains her novel conception, an idea more expansive and interesting than will fit into these students' broad mental boxes. The issue of the bin's qualities comes to a head when a student offers a conjecture: if Vipp becomes too successful, he says, if the company sells too many bins, it will become difficult to keep prices high. When everyone has a bin, he opines, the product will lose its cachet; it won't set the owner of a Vipp bin apart from other people.

Ms. Egelund answers simply, "Do you think so?" Then she explains (again!) why she thinks people buy the bin: They like it. They find it beautiful. The student thinks she misunderstands and repeats the question. Ms. Egelund shrugs and disagrees with his premise. She does not think there is danger in the Vipp bin being everywhere because, as she puts it, "I have looked at it my entire life, and I...