JOIN US Former president of Frog Design and Quirky, Doreen Lorenzo, urges the importance of organisational design and leadership. She says product design and engineering are important skills to develop breakthrough products.
In an interaction with Deccan Herald, Lorenzo said her experience with these firms gave her ample exposure to the importance of design.
“Every company wants to deliver great user experience to its customers. As products become more technologically complex, forward thinking design is indeed critical for success,” she said.
Lorenzo said designer community should strive to solve everyday problems. “We should be in touch with the heart and soul of the end user. This is a designer’s holy grail. Most product companies are separated from their end users. Companies rely on their R&D and product managers to produce the next new thing. We rely on the people who would use it to tell us what they want,” she said.
She also reminded that failure is a part of success. “The more you fail, the more you evolve yourself to reinvent,” Lorenzo said.
When designers get ideas they should try to execute them and there should not be any dithering. “There should be diehard motive to evolve his/her idea into designing products at large, and that should have a value proposition,” Lorenso said.
Commenting on Quirky’s association with GE, she said it helped the team garner enough prowess in handling larger and more complex products design capability. “GE is synonymous with invention and it seems right that we should be working together. Our goal is to bring new Quirky plus GE consumer products to the market,” she said.
The association adds additional skill sets, electrical engineering, firmware and quality assurance to produce these products. Quirky as an invention platform connects inventors with companies that specialise in product category. It has built a Quirky “community” of about 6,00,000 members. Besides 300 employees, Quirky also has nearly 1.2 million registered users spread across 165 countries.
Lorenzo said designers should come up with a hybrid model so that they can reach greater heights. When asked about the hype on design thinking by new IT services companies in India, Lorenzo said that there is a need to enhance their productivity and take the company to greater heights while banking on innovation.