Name: The greatest designs of modern times
Uploaded: 2020-03-16
Duration: 19 min 29 s
Description: And what they say about how design is evolving in business.

[ MUSIC ] The Sony Walkman was really one of the first personal devices that people owned. It was the ultimate portable music machine. The Sony Walkman is number five on this list. It was a huge, huge product for its time when it came out. I personally did not get a Walkman. My parents got me a Toshiba I really coveted the Walkman. I remember that Debbie Gibson, and the fight my sister and I would have a one Sony Walkman. You could walk around with a small thing in your hand and headphones on. Do listen to music that no one else could hear. It was subtle. It was elegant and most importantly it fit into pockets if that person is or into the palm of your hand. [ MUSIC ] 100 greatest designs of modern times is an update of a list at fortune published six decades ago. The exciting thing about the original list that Fortune published with the Institute of Design back at the end of the 50s was it was an exciting time in America and the Global Economy and design was having a Golden age. There were all kinds of incredible product designs, consumer goods Transportation. And so it was really a perfect time to step back and look at this phenomenon of design that was really transforming the way that people looked at the world. And companies presented their products to the world. I discovered the 1959 list while looking in our archives. And I just find it the most fascinating document. It's just perfect encapsulation of mid century design thinking and aesthetics. And I thought this is 60 years since we published this. And I really wanted to see what that list would look like in 2019. [ MUSIC ] I mean, there are so many chairs on the web. There's so many chairs. [ LAUGH ] In the 1950s, design was better understood as How something looked rather than the function of it, yeah. So Fortune approached us about a little bit over a year ago and asked us if we would be interested in rerunning this research on 100 best design products that was done by the director at the time, Jay Doblin. In 1959, we had a lot of healthy debate over the list and what should be included and what should not be included. I was thinking about it more from a product perspective because I, at that time, didn't know that much about design. Yeah, this is a dilemma today. This is like indicates everything that's going on. Because for me as I like A product designer all my life, the designer of things that criteria have changed from 60 years ago. When we were talking with Fortune, we were concerned that they would want a list to be a 100 % product and we really felt like. The design industry had moved forward where it didn't make sense to just limit it to to just products. The world used to be I think more about just individual objects. And now you've got products that learn products out of that. So we expanded the criteria to include services and systems. And we limited it to 100 years. Those were the main criteria. This is a very interesting project that demonstrates the change and design, the view of design in the world. I think a fundamental aspect of this new age of design And why people are so fascinated by design and the great companies that are being driven by design, is that design is no longer being thought of as just designing a physical product that I will put on a shelf and you will buy. It's creating a ecosystem. It's creating a service. It's anticipating how customers are gonna interact with you. 60 years ago, the design of something was much more than afterthought. It was very much synonymous with the style of the products and how it looked rather than how it performed. Now we think of design as a verb, we design something to fit its purpose. Entire companies are built on this. Facebook is on our list is one of the great designs. It's created the social media network. You know, it's not an object. It's the app you have on your phone, but it's the experience. Sometimes the design is a little insidious but it's brilliant in terms of how it anticipates what you as a customer wants and interacts with. [ UNKNOWN ] [ MUSIC ] Welcome aboard. Welcome aboard to spacious cabin, attractively decorated air conditioned but [ UNKNOWN ] Newly designed individual overhead light units are an innovation. Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet was really a marvel of its time and through Epitomize the post war jet liner age. Vertical walls, open spaces, allowing more people to sit becuase it was wider. The ability to move that amount of people on one vehicle across continents. For barely any money in those days. Boeing 747 has been instrumental in making the world a much smaller place. The plane that changed the entire travel Industry as we know it today. [ MUSIC ] When Doblin did the original study, design as a discipline was really quite young. Culturally you can look at Mad Men, for instance, as evocative of the kind of nostalgia we have for that expression of design in that time. But it was a very biased design period to I mean, it was mostly the point of view of white men and predominantly reflective of Western European values. There was a narrow definition of good design. So we really tried to cultivate a list that We felt spoke to the diversity that's characteristic of the design industry today. So the first thing we had to do was compile a list of everyone that we wanted to reach out to. People who've been working in the design industry as it's evolved, now list was pretty diverse. We surveyed Professional designers and educators and influences Each nominator was asked to dominate ten products. So we asked them to give us the criteria on which they chose might employees make a good product? And then we did a word analysis to actually didn't distill out of the 300 nominations we got, what were the main criteria used? We found these common traits to a lot of the designs that were submitted, and those designs were adaptable, that were equitable, that were usable, that were impactful, and that were transformational. So what this allowed us to really do is give a quantitative weight to qualitative assessment. Out of the top 100 products that ended up being 24 industries in there. And that compared to 17, 60 years ago, the new industries that were added to by far the biggest one is internet services. The second key shift we saw more day to day products so closing there was no closing 60 years ago. Third is services. So it's the first time to healthcare, logistics. Those are all that are new. And then lastly just emerging but really the new growth area for design is more science. So biotech, bio design, pharma, those are the new coins which are all in there. And that speaks to the diversity of the people we've surveyed compared to 1959 and just how much design has influenced other parts of our world. And the categories that got dropped off tended to be very high ticket items that weren't really broadly available. Cars, there's 14 cars on that original list. And that was a big boom in the 1950s. They were kind of upper middle class products, but they weren't like daily life items. There were a lot of guns on top ones list, which I thought was interesting. Kitchen devices big boom post war in refrigerators and stove top appliances. Just from the industry point of view, it's interesting to see how design has spread to everyday life we see a clear democratization of design. So that also indicates how the value has shifted or the definition of good design. [ MUSIC ] The poster now is one of the most beautiful pieces of design on the list. There was a scientist who was looking for a very super form of glue, who ended up finding a glue that did the opposite. They stuck some of this newly discovered Sticky but not damaging glue two pieces of paper and who doesn't use it post it now. Since its inception is now everywhere and it's the most useful thing and that's really what makes great design. It is no bigger or more complex than it needs to be. Accidental discovery, Amazing design. 1959 styling was a big part of design and design was transactional and it came at the end of the process. Now designers are navigating so designers work in organizations at the front end of the process, particularly in tech companies to actually identify what should be built identifying gaps. To find an unmet need, need that people don't know they have, versus pushing a need onto people by saying you need newest model of the car. Yeah, I mean, Uber is a great example. It's a service design. We can think about the design of the app. But from a total end user perspective [ MUSIC ] From the moment that you tap to summon a taxi, and the driver receives the notification to come find you. Everything about that is designed and everything about that has a purpose and is as simple as possible. The fewest possible steps which is the beautiful part of the Uber design. The most obvious example of a company that has transformed the world with design is Apple. And that's why you're gonna see seven products out of the 100 top designs from Apple. Number two on the list is the Macintosh computer. It really transformed the way people thought about computers and And a computer being a personal device that you can easily use in your home do stuff with and not just be a giant room for server stuff that you had to be an expert to use. So that was really a transformative moment and that was driven a lot by Steve Jobs, saying we need to have like a user friendly device. In the great tradition of startups, we started Apple because we wanted the product ourselves. So gradually we were pulled into business. It wasn't. We didn't start out to build a large company. We started out to build a few dozen computers for us and our friends. They are a technology company, but they always saw almost from the beginning that design. Was really, in some ways, more important than their bread and butter. This involves some really far out thinking. The whole process, before technology, before anything. The whole origin point of a project is with the design team. 10 years ago, design was talked about but I don't think anybody was particularly interested. That is not the way that a lot of companies are running their organizations. Today Design is being recognized and understood as seen as playing a contribution. So I think a perfect way to understand that shift and design philosophy is with the number one product on our list which is iPhone. iPhone is on there not just because it is a beautifully designed piece of Aluminum and glass. But because of the things that it enables us to do. Watching Steve Jobs climb up on that stage with his black turtleneck. This is a day. I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. A nd very, very elegantly talk about how his team had been working on this amazing product. Today Apple is going to reinvent. [ APPLAUSE ] The phone. And we are calling it iPhone. We were expecting something great, but not world changing, life changing. And for every single human being on this planet. It's our interaction with it. It is the way that it connects us to other devices, whether it be to the internet or other iPhones or the people in our lives. That's why it's on the list, not just because it's a beautiful object. It raised the bar when it came to expecting our devices to provide all of our needs. Needs. From music to media to communications to the news. It's created new industries, it's changed industries, it's royal politics. A simple phone is what we were expecting. What we got, was a revolution. [ MUSIC ]. I think we've just seen a trend Towards design being more disruptive. I actually also think it's a response to our times. Because a lot of the problems that were facing are systemic, and the only way to intervene is through different systems levels approaches. So a lot of these new innovations I think are actually a response to problems we want complicated. So for example on the list there is service and a product. Based on drones delivering medical supplies to remote villages in Africa. The great green wall of Africa, what I really liked about the project was it was really just a community led response to the impending threat of climate change. It's a designed intervention intended to combat desertification. That's just the great example of how designers changed and Now it's just more than a single product. It's an entire system to solve a problem, and I think if we were to do this list again in 50 years, we'll see a lot more projects like that because that's I think, truly where a lot of innovation is happening right now. I think it's really significant that we are thinking about design For longevity and designed for the future. I think Bosworth sort of reflect the priorities of the day. So, the things that we use most in our lives are Internet services. Whereas in the 1950s people drove sports cars or they Bought a suburban house. Right and filled it with beautiful things. Yeah. The AIRBNB is a great example of design thinking and an organization. That really started with this sort of spontaneous idea of creating a place for people to stay is allowed people. To leverage their homes, to get a bit more extra cash. The house became the feedback chain to the employees were part of the design thinking process. And that feedback along with the user feedback really redefined the way Airbnb designed their experiences. Airbnb has revolutionized how a lot of people travel. They took design and applied it to a concept that was 400 people. People didn't want to go and stay in other people's apartment, and then it became appealing. That's a really fascinating triumph of design. One reason it's really important to look at design right now is there's a growing body of data that shows that design really drives Performance of companies and you can see it anecdotally with companies like Netflix, Google and Apple. They're incredibly valuable, but it's much broader than that. McKinsey and Company has done some research a few years ago that show that publicly traded companies and better design practices outperformed in growth in terms of revenue. And shareholder return. And I think that really got a lot of people's attention. Good design is good business. There's a direct correlation of good design, having a direct connection to the bottom line. And when that connection is clear to both parties in the C suite, Sweet. And in the design community, that's when you start getting amazing innovative products that can redefine industries, redefine the bottom and the top line of companies and really change the way we look at the world and live in this world. At the same time McKinsey has done some more recent research that shows they surveyed 1700 companies and They found that only about a third of the CEOs really had an idea of what their lead designers do. And only 10 % said that the design team is involved in setting strategy. So I think there's still a lot of progress to be made for a lot of companies to figure out how to better integrate design into their strategy and to really take advantage of the boosts that you've got from grades. Design thinking. [ MUSIC ] , So, Jay Doblin he was still strongly enough to believe in 59 that commercial design was still not good, design was underutilized and our headline for this report is that JW won't be happy. To see this report 60 years later, because design has become better utility, better social impact, and better aesthetics, or individual joy and use. Products are becoming less important to us in our daily lives. And Uber being on the list is a perfect example of that. There's only four cars on the list in 2019. But Uber ranked higher than all of them, which speaks to this sorta idea of we put less emphasis on the ownership of a car and the ownership of a beautiful car. We wanna get from A to B. I think this list is crucially important to fortune because there's a huge movement in the business world around design and understanding the value of design. And it's transforming the way companies think about reaching their customers and working with their customers. And that's the kind of thing that we of course want to understand explain to our readers. We have at least close to half of our students now who come in with a purpose driven idea of looking at design as a way to build Better, more intelligent futures futures that are sustainable, responsible, equitable, and value generated. I think that this list points toward a potential future but it still shows where we're coming from as a discipline. I can only hope that. It will continue to to provoke conversation and lead us to question the values that we as a discipline, observe [ MUSIC ]

The greatest designs of modern times

Magazine

The iPhone, Sony Walkman, Uber, and many more made the cut.

And what they say about how design is evolving in business.