Playing with DESIGN

"There is no such thing as a wrong answer," Gavin Proctor, design director for Asia at Phillips Design Singapore, tells KMUTT students during a recent one-week workshop.

If so, take heart. The industrial design students at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) are hard on the case. Forty, third- and fourth-year students from King Mongkut, along with six students from various other Thai universities, recently partnered with IBM, Mentel and Phillips Thailand in a weeklong collaborative workshop about the cultural dimensions of product design.

Associate Professor Nigel Power believes the next generation of Thai industrial designers will have a better understanding of a customer's personal and cultural needs.

Gavin Proctor, design director Asia at Phillips Design Singapore, and KMUTT Associate Professor Nigel Power teamed up to put on the workshop aimed at studying a major aspect of Thai culture: sanook, or fun. They hoped to inspire students to study the concepts of Thai fun and play, and help them use their findings to create innovative design ideas. This gave learning post a chance to look into the idea of culturally inspired product design.

Students were encouraged to think of normal, everyday products that might be considered boring and then find ways to make those products fun or enjoyable.

"The goal is to make these products not only functional, but also enjoyable." Power said.

First, students were told to think of a product and then think of real people. They were then told to forget about the product and focus on real people they know. Students then thought about all aspects of these people's lives: who they are, what their life is like, what their likes are, what their dislikes are. "We want them to think about how the product and the person will interact," Power said.

Students then created storyboards and profiles of their characters or consumers. This is done to better understand the people that products are made for. "First and foremost design is about people," Proctor said. "It's about merging people with technology. Designers start by trying to understand people. Through understanding the differences between people we can give shape and form to products."

An idea for a culturally appropriate toothbrush begins with a storyboard depicting a possible end-user.

And the students' products did take unique forms. One group of students decided to look at ways to make the everyday task of brushing one's teeth more enjoyable. Through their storyboard, they came up with two model consumers. One was an old Thai village grandmother who is unaccustomed to brushing her teeth. The other was a young child for whom brushing his teeth is an unpleasant experience.

For the grandmother, the students envisioned an old women who likes to chew betel nut, but who doesn't like to brush her teeth. Rather than the traditional toothbrush, students thought the woman would be more likely to use a sponge-like device she could chew — in much the same manner as betel chewing — that would slowly release a cleaning agent to cleanse her teeth.

"We thought of this woman as accepting of new ideas, but also wanting to keep to her traditions," said Kanarak Isarankura Na Ayudhya, a KMUTT student.

She said this same product could also be applied to a hectic younger person who often forgets to brush their teeth, or brushes their teeth too quickly. The slow chewing of the product could be done anywhere, or at any time.

For the second consumer, the young child, the group thought a brush-like device shaped like a lollipop would be perfect. Add to that a specially flavoured toothpaste, and the students felt they had a winning product.

Another group was working on a way to design a better alarm clock. They found that many people find the process of being awakened by loud bells unpleasant. They also found that people don't like waking up in the middle of night and seeing that it is very early.

To fix this, this group decided a better alarm clock would wake a person up with a slow, gradually increasing series of lights that would simulate sunrise. The same clock, instead of telling the actual time, would show how many hours a slumbering soul had left until it was time to wake up.

Yet another group was looking at ways to make the perfect toilet for Thais. The traditional squat toilet, they found, could be uncomfortable for older people. But the western toilet was also strange for some Thais. They mentioned the fact that often times you could see footprints on the toilet seats in a Thai restroom. This they said was a result of Thais being uncomfortable with or unaccustomed to western style toilets.

They didn't have the perfect solution worked out, but they were working on several sketches of wild looking contraptions.

This, Power said, is exactly what he wanted to see. "I told them to think about the idea first and not to worry about the technology to make it happen," he said. "We are trying to encourage students to learn and to give them the confidence to try new things and ideas. There is no such thing as a wrong answer."

One may be left wondering what these ideas and cultural explorations have to do with making consumer products. That is simple, Proctor said. "If design is about people and about creating value for people, then it has to start with understanding people," he said. "That means a huge number of us on this planet are of different cultures. So with this human focus we have, it also has to be about understanding cultural differences."

He said that the typical breakfast tray is a great example of cultural differences. "For a northern European on a lazy Sunday morning, or perhaps on your mother's birthday, you would prepare breakfast in bed," Proctor explained. "If you show that to an Asian audience they start weeping. They think these people must be so sad or that they must be ill. They must be hospitalised or that they can't get out of bed because they are too ill."

Understanding these differences is a key in doing business globally, he said. "If you can only tap into those types of cultural insights, that might trigger new opportunities for new products or services sensitive to their culture."

Proctor said the cultural aspect of design is important for all businesses, including high technology companies like Phillips. "It's about localisation," he said. "With high technology, it will one day very soon enable greater degrees of personalisation and that will offer manufacturers like us to move away from globalisation towards greater degrees of customisation. That's when it becomes important to get back into the cultural side of technology."

The idea of a creating a fun product is just as important as designing a culturally sensitive product, Proctor said. "A typical consumer — when we purchase products — is like a child — we're all children at heart," he said. "You never pick up the user's manual. You've got to play with the object first."

Good designers should look to use the four principles of pleasure, Proctor said. First is the physiological aspect, the way a product looks or feels. Second is the sociological aspect, how the product can help a consumer interact with other people. Is the product a conversation piece, or will it help people meet other people?

Third is the psychological aspect, that the consumer can recognise the product easily. What is it? How will it be used? And finally there is the ideological aspect, why the consumer purchases the product. This can vary from environmental concerns to national pride or any other number of reasons.

If a designer thinks about these values, the product is likely to be enjoyable, and that is good for business. "Why any product should be pleasurable is because we are all human beings and if a product can evoke an emotional response — have you ever smiled at a product that made you laugh? Did you enjoy using it? Has it ever caused you to create that thought, 'Wow that's real cool, I've got to have it no matter what'? — if you can invoke that kind of response from a consumer, it is undoubtedly going to be good for business," Proctor explained.

In this age of increasing global competition, Power said there is a future role that his 120 industrial design students can play in helping Thai businesses differentiate themselves from other companies in the region. "Thailand doesn't need to mimic other countries," he said. "It needs to make it's own model of making industrial products. I think the differentiating factor might well be an area of Thai entrepreneurial small-scale companies that have got a local, regional and maybe even international identity. We need to find a national expression on a small scale."

Power said that understanding the cultural side of product design is one way to move along this path. Proctor, Power and his students all said that one Thai company is already proving that this can be a route to success. They cite the quirky Thai design firm Propaganda, with its unique gift and housewares, as a shining example.

"They are doing something on the surface that looks quite international, but deeper they are uniquely Thai," Power said.

His students agree. "A lot of Thai people bought their products because they are Thai," Kanarak said. "Thai people like it because they feel like it is expressing our ideas and personality."

Their products also have a very human, personal feel to them, students said. This human feel in product design is something that Thai companies could use to make their products stand out regionally, Power said. "We are different from our neighbours and different from our competitors because there is a consideration of people. For instance who people are, where they live, how they live, what they want and need," Power said theoretically. "To take all of those things into account is a way of adding value to products and differentiate them in a really super-crowded market."

A workshop like this is also beneficial for foreign-based companies such as his, Proctor said. He said the major focus for companies in this region is understanding China and its culture, but this workshop has given him the opportunity to gain insight into an important regional country.

"Thai culture is very different and unique," Proctor said. "As a result of that it is interesting to get into the culture and understand why people in this country should perhaps behave differently than our understanding of Chinese culture."

"And through a collaboration such as this, working together, we give a lot to the students, but in return we get some insight into how they think and how people live, how people behave and what their beliefs are."

Currently, most design firms in Thailand don't work with the personal or cultural needs of consumers in mind, Power said. He said that could change with his students and the next generation of Thai industrial designers.

But the students themselves aren't so sure of the effect that product design might have on the way average Thai people perceive their products. "I think sometimes the average person doesn't think like us," said Chotirat Sangkaew, a KMUTT student. "When I buy pants I like to think about the design because I study it. But my mother and father don't think about the design. If they can use it they buy it."

This is a common theme among the students. They said most of the people they know don't really care about the design of a product, just so long as the product is usable.

"When I use my mother as a source of information for school, she always tells me, 'It's fine, it's fine already.' But for us here the product can never be perfect," Kanarak said. "They keep adapting themselves to the product instead of asking questions why the products are the way they are."

Another problem with the future prospects for local design, the students said, is the Thai fascination with foreign products and styles. But even this isn't insurmountable, they said. "I think Thai people are a little bored of Thai products," Chotirat said. "But if it is an original design and it is still Thai, I think people will like it more."

Foreign businesses could also learn a thing or two by studying Thai culture and in the end that would help their products sell in Thailand, students said. "We don't have the same culture, so we have different ideas of what fun things are," Kanarak said. "I think they could learn that."

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Last modified: April 21, 2003