Design has historically held a high priority within Xerox, says Les Wynn, Xerox’s Manager of Industrial Design & Human Factors, but in recent years there has been a significant programme aimed at improving both the breadth and scope of design input into new and existing product development and of the design function’s ability to respond appropriately to specific internal product programme needs.
Led by Wynn, Xerox has moved away from a very formal approach in which the design team was handed a specific brief and brought in to work on a project for a short, defined period of time between engineering prototyping and final production. The disadvantages of this method of working were two-fold, says Wynn.
Firstly, key design elements could be lost in the downstream manufacturing engineering process, and secondly design options were limited by the advanced state of mechanical design at first design input. There was a need, he points out, for designers’ inputs to extend both upstream and downstream in the product development process.
To tackle problems further down the development stage, such as during manufacturing, Xerox has increased the manufacturing capability of its design team, allowing it to work much more closely with manufacturing engineering, and increasingly with external tool makers and injection moulders. This ensures that tolerance and manufacturing issues are accounted for in the design stage.
Design’s movement upstream to strategic planning of product development has been less formal, but just as important. By integrating the design function into product engineering and eliminating the formal briefing and handover processes, the design team has the opportunity to input much earlier in the process.
The uses of this input, however, depend on the design team’s ability to demonstrate that its input will be valuable during early project phases. This has been aided by the professionalism of Wynn’s design team, and the injection of business acumen and expertise.
In more depth Find out how working in
multi-disciplinary teams can mean design is not isolated from other business processes and how designers need to interact with commercial functions, with manufacturing and with product or service support
Currently, Xerox has a Design Research Group based in the US. This group carries out design research and focus groups, and engages design consultancies from around the world in this process. Examples of work conducted here include colour research and trends.
From this work, the team generates stylistic ideas, which are successively narrowed down to three or four key ideas that form a guideline of what the next product will be like. The directions and information gathered includes input from global design teams within Xerox, who will all participate in a workshop with the Design Research Group and present their findings together with external design consultancies. The final guidelines apply to product development activities for the next two to three years and beyond.
In more depth Read more about how design can apply
brand power and
design research groups have helped companies that took part in our study bring design thinking closer to new business areas, product opportunities and user needs
Unfortunately, says Wynn, this process is time consuming and difficult to properly integrate with activities in ongoing product programmes. The result is often that the guidelines are out of sync with the product programmes’ activities and different products in the same line are designed using different sets of guidelines.
Wynn is advocating that the company adopts a bottom-up approach to design process, driven by product programme needs. Design standards should continually be evolved and tested by the company’s Industrial Design and Human Factors (IDHF) function. This type of approach to design process, says Wynn, would mean that establishing design guidelines could take as little as two weeks, rather than two years.
As Xerox changes from being a integrated designer and manufacturer of equipment to being an integrated business services organisation, the role of design is changing too.
In the new environment, non-core activities are likely to be outsourced. Wynn believes that design is, and should always be, a core activity which sits at the centre of the organisation and advises on product strategy. To do this, however, design's role in the organisation must change from being a function which plays a limited role at selected points in the product engineering process, to being a function which lies vertically through the organisational hierarchy, informing all of the company's activities, from board room to delivery of product.
Wynn says, ‘the whole aim at the moment is to drive design earlier in the process, and then to drive it outwards towards and closer to product launch.’ In order to achieve this, Wynn has had to change the structure of the design group and ensure that design receives support and buy-in from vice-presidents, some of whom are direct sponsors of the design function. ‘Quite a few key people, including the CEO, are recognising that user experience drives a lot of decisions about what a commodity and core activity is,’ says Wynn.
He hopes that the design function, through its increasingly important role in the business, will continue its journey towards a key role within the organisation.
In more depth Find out more about how successful design processes require good
leadership