In designing and developing consumer products , I have worked in a few marketing departments that have graphic designer staff and no creative director to act as intermediary. I have noticed in my limited experience that the expectations in terms of getting stuff done is extremely, extremely unrealistic. It is almost as if they’re thinking in terms of the time to get 2D printed materials to market. It blows my mind that in the 2000’s a lot of these groups have never heard of “industrial design” and when comes to developing new product, think of it in terms of graphic design and graphic design schedules.
Similar experiences, any tips in dealing with? Thnks.
I have had some experience with this as a consultant. There is an education process and it takes considerable time. The fist task is to divorce their expectations from their experiences with graphic and web, and help them to understand how different physical product development is. Sometimes I’ll make a step by step idea to market chart and print it large fore people’s office walls. Simple artefacts like that help.
Some day I would like to work for a corporation that has never had ID as VP of design. I think it would be a fun challenge and experience to have. I’m sure not without it’s tough moments, but think it would be worthwhile.
I spent close to 6years at a company and in the first 6 months was placed in charge of the ID dept. When I started their the president made the comment that all ID does is add cost with no real value.
One of my fondest memories is after 3 years of working there and pushing the value our office brought, many up hill battles, overcoming classic stereo typing, was to have the President say “we need to displace the competition, and have a wow product without any cost increase. Lets have the ID team run this project.”
I spent allot of time educating the depts we worked with and building relationships, along with showing them that we valued their input and even referenced and gave props during presentations for their ideas and thoughts that were incorporated into the design.
I even spent allot of time walking people through the ID process and helping to educate them on what we do and what goes into it. Publishing time-lines and work flows with set meetings to bring people in… All of this helped them to better understand the work we were doing and the time that was needed to accomplish it. Now I didn’t need to do any of this and I could have had or office work independently without any interaction which is how the company was use to, but the headaches that environment would cause far outweighed the effort of championing ID. But I won’t lie, it took allot of hard work and diplomacy and at times I felt like I was fighting a losing battle.
If you ever want to talk further let me know as I have many things that worked, and many things that didn’t and if I can help you to avoid some of the things that i feel didn’t work i would be more then happy.