The Mac Mystique

I had an interesting conversation with the bossman at work today. We were discussing the exasperation that fills a designer every time he or she is told by a client “you know, just make it look like a mac”.

My boss shared an interesting anecdote. Yves Behar was once asked by a client “Can you just make it look like a mac?”. Yves brilliantly replied, “Well, sure, we can do that… but are you Steve Jobs?”

Goddamn, Yves Behar is one smooth cat. I hesitate to sing his praises too enthusiastically– I’ve met about ten people who’ve worked for fuseproject, and when asked about their time with the firm they’ve all winced and hastily changed the subject– but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever heard a better answer to the question “can you just make it look like a mac?”

I don’t think it’s wise for industrial designers to talk about apple products as much as we do. The enormous success of apple is due only in part to the product design. Yes, the iPod is beautiful. But after seeing it on every single image board and inspiration wall and project brief and design magazine for the past ten years I’ve begun to wonder: Is it really that beautiful? Is that white box really worth wetting ourselves over?

Of course not. The product design is nice, but it’s the idea, the brand, and the aura of mac products that make them so appealing. Apple has spent the past quarter century and god knows how much money carefully crafting and placing their brand. In my opinion the success of their products has more to do with innovative services, aggressive marketing and prohibitively expensive manufacturing methods than the product design itself. Go ahead. Take the CAD file of the MacBook Pro. Now try injection-molding it out of ABS. Put that on an image board and see where it gets you. Plastic ≠ machined aluminum.

Thus lies the brilliance of Mr. Behar’s comment: the ipod is only as good as the company that created it; the company bold enough to take the risks it has taken with new services and new platforms; the company wise enough to throw down the cheddar for choice materials and the development of new manufacturing methods; the company ballsy enough to launch marketing campaigns in which they openly defecate all over their competitor without looking like complete douchebags.

In 2004 Read Montague, Director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, performed an experiment that investigated the neuroscience behind brand preferences. Montague had participants undergo a blind taste-test between Pepsi and Coke while their brain activity was monitored via fMRI.

Prior to being told which cola was which, the majority of participants preferred Pepsi. “On the scan images the ventral putamen, one of the brain’s reward centers, had a response that was five times stronger than for people who preferred Coke.”

When the experiment was repeated, however, and participants were told which brand they were tasting, nearly all subjects said they preferred Coke. “Moreover, different parts of the brain fired as well, especially the medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with thinking and judging. Without a doubt the subjects were letting their experience of the Coke brand influence their preferences.” 1

“The investigators concluded that there are two different brain systems at work. One is based on taste buds and the other is based on cultural conditioning. These systems help determine our preferences for food and drink.” 2

If we want to evaluate the response of one brain system we shouldn’t reference content that will trigger another. We need to be careful to understand what we are evaluating when we put an inspiration image up on the wall, especially if we show the image to an individual with a background other than design.

A client’s preference for apple products likely stems from an enormously wide array of biases, most of which we have absolutely no control over. A designer’s preference for apple products is every bit as biased, and we’d do well to keep this in mind when we find ourselves aspiring to a culturally significant product or brand. We should be neurotically suspicious of these biases when we establish expectations with a client.

Loaded Images, or images that are likely to increase activity in parts of the brain associated with cultural knowledge, memory and self-image, should only be used if the scope of the project encompasses things like cultural knowledge and self-image. (And sorry: I know we designers like to think that all designs encompass these things, but most of the time they don’t. Ain’t nobody defining their self-image with an air-freshener. Get over it.)

If the task at hand is defining company direction– if meetings include marketing and business and innovation leaders– then apple’s success is an important case study to consider. However, if the task at hand involves skinning a low-cost device in two and a half weeks time, which always seems to be the case with anyone who asks that you “just make it look like a mac”, then you should take those pictures of your beloved iPhone and magic mouse and you should burn them. By failing to do so you’re setting expectations you can’t meet and you’re implying results you can’t deliver. You’re talking about apples but you deal in oranges.

Ask yourself why you printed out a picture of the iPad. Which best practice makes this product worthy to join your esteemed platoon of inspiration images? Is that best practice relevant to your efforts? Is it possible to find an image that illustrates the core concept without the cultural baggage?

And really: are you that fucking unoriginal? The iPad? Really? That’s your brilliant inspiration? Come on. You and the rest of the world, buddy.

1 “The Science of Branding” by Edwin Colyer http://www.brandchannel.com/features_effect.asp?pf_id=201

2 “The Real Pepsi Challenge” by James Flanagan http://bullandbear.musonline.com/?p=82

Great Expectations

While browsing the excellent neuroscience blog Mind Hacks I stumbled upon the fascinating video about the strange powers of the placebo effect. It’s a well-produced video that I’d recommend to anyone with three minutes to spare. The basic concept of the placebo effect (a perceived or actual reaction to a substance containing no medicine) is nothing new, but I never realized the severity of the effect can increase or decrease due to the number, size, branding and even packaging of the pill taken.

“A plain pill works worse than a branded one, a discounted pill works worse than a pricey one, and a pill in a plain box does worse than one that’s all shiny and shit” (I hereby reward the video’s creators’ bonus points for using the awesomely scientific term “shiny and shit”).

I’m officially intrigued. Not only does fancy packaging do wonders to the perceived value and performance of a product, but nice packaging can actually solicit a greater physical reaction from a sugar pill. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, packaging designers.

What should designers know about the psychology of expectation?

I’ve often marveled at the droves of people willing to throw down $300 on a pair of Beats headphones despite, you know, the product’s penchant for snapping in half and not working all that well. It isn’t too wild to think that the pretty box, celebrity endorsement and compelling design causes these consumers to perceive the sound quality to be better than it truly is, but is it possible that they actually hear the music better? Could the expectant mind compensate the same way it does when it encounters a sugar pill in a well-designed box?

“Sensory experience and thoughts can affect neurochemistry. The body's neurochemical system affects and is affected by other biochemical systems”. Neurochemistry plays an important part in auditory processing, so perhaps it’s possible that our sensory faculties improve when we’re expecting premium sensory experiences. Beats products do everything they possibly can to convince us that they offer better sound. Perhaps, by virtue of their persuasion, they do.

The actual medication in a pill isn’t the only thing that determines its effectiveness: shiny packages make them work better, apparently. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter whether or not Beats are the top performers in the audio market (they’re not: Sennheiser for life, yo).

Obviously this isn’t a very scientific discussion about the placebo effect– my sources include the ever estimable wikipedia– but it certainly makes a strong argument for investment in branding, product design and packaging. What we expect influences not only what we perceive but what we actually experience. Our expectations are defined by every detail and impression we associate with a product: not only the form and materials we interact with but the reputation of a brand, reviews, and random past experiences that have formed our biases.

The Beginning

In 2009 while interning for Intel in Portland, Oregon, I was handed a copy of The Female Brain. My dear friend Abhinav– a chemical engineer who, like myself and the rest of Portland, worked for Intel– insisted I read the book. Two years later his book still sits by my nightstand, each page wallpapered in tabs, scrap paper and my handwriting. Returning this copy to him would be a bit of a joke, I suppose, seeing how it’s now unreadable to anyone but myself. I’ll have to remember to buy a new one and send it to him.

Abhinav probably doesn’t realize what a profound impact the book had on me. He had lent me the book to help guide a freelance job I had just undertaken, which involved designing consumer electronics specifically for the female consumer. The text proved to be more of a hindrance than a benefit, really, given that I became so consumed by the concepts discussed in the book that I had a hard time focusing on what I was being paid to do. When I finally decided it was time to stop musing about progesterone and start sketching I had to banish the book to my storage closet to fight the distraction.

The book ignited an explosive curiosity about Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology. I stand convinced that these sciences have much, much more to offer my field, Industrial Design, than the design community currently acknowledges.

The text explores the female brain throughout the various events and stages of life–birth, childhood, puberty, adulthood, and menopause– and investigates neurobehavioral systems to explain how and why the female brain functions the way it does.

The text answered questions I've had about myself for years: why I function and behave differently in different situations, why I seem so adept at certain tasks and so utterly hopeless at others, why I communicate and solve problems the way that I do. After reading the book I felt I had a deeper understanding about myself as a woman, as an individual, even as a consumer.

I can’t even begin to explain my excitement and amazement– teen girls get the same kind of dopamine rush when bonding with friends as heroin addicts do when they shoot up? Say what?­– and with each page I became more convinced that designers should be privy to this type of information. Men and women use different brain areas and circuits to solve problems and process language? Huh. Wouldn’t someone charged with the task of designing a product for a specific gender want to know about things like this?

My affinity for this topic continues to grow and extends past gender differences. More and more often I find coworkers, peers, blogs and design magazines discussing how to establish an emotional bond between consumers and the products they use. Despite all of this talk about the paramount significance of emotion, few designers’ make efforts to understand the science behind human emotion. With all of the time we spend frantically waving our hands around the squiggly arrows on our sketches denoting the material or detail or surface change that will make the product “delightful”, or “calming” or "exciting”, I’m surprised we don’t ever google what happens, biologically and neurologically, when a human being feels delighted or calm or excited.

Surely a deeper understanding of the people we design for can only result in products that better serve the consumer. In all of the established and developing methods that exist to provide this deeper understanding why do we so rarely consult the hard sciences? Why do we settle for mood boards, poorly constructed personas and image searches? As designers we constantly find ourselves scribbling statements such as “The large proportions of the temperature knobs connote robustness and solidarity” on our sketches, but do we even know what this means? When did we decide the best way to make something feel robust is to make it enormous?

A quick google search reveals that there is a lot of information about what makes an object “feel” a certain way that we designers aren’t utilizing. Take, for example, this fascinating article about how an object’s weight, texture, and hardness influences social judgments and decisions. “Participants completing a jigsaw puzzle covered in a rough material perceived the situation as being confrontational and more competitive than those completing the same puzzle made of a smooth material”. What do studies like this mean for the material choices we make?

This blog will attempt to link Cognitive Science and Industrial Design. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no scientist– in three months time I’ll be graduating with my BS in Industrial Design from the University of Cincinnati– but I’m curious, eager to investigate, and convinced that science has a lot more to offer design than most realize.