Yesterday morning I heard this interview while I was getting ready for work, and immediately wished I had a transcript. But I did manage to type out the last question and answer. I think Nuovo’s response a good lesson in design: focusing on what competitors are doing, and recycling the same ideas, isn’t how you innovate.

Interview with Frank Nuovo (about a new $700 Nokia phone)

Morning Edition: Is there a moment whenyou take a box full of everybody else’s phones and dump them out on the table and try to figure out what they’re doing right or wrong?

Frank Nuovo: You don’t gain that much from looking at your competitors. You really gain forward momentum from focusing on the end-customer. Knowing where they’re going… Otherwise all you’re doing is following …very brief moments … little leap-frog moments from competitor to competitor. What you have to do is take your eye further forward and understand where the customer wants to go and that’s the real magic.

(From the Site: Frank Nuovo, chief designer for Nokia phones, discusses the company’s new 8800 cell phone. Nokia is betting on the phone to reenergize its sales and compete against Motorola’s hit phone, the Razr. Nuovo has been designing phones for Nokia since 1989.)

Edited to Add:
I’m sure Nokia does plenty of competitive research. I’m positive they rip apart every competitor product and understand its every atom. The point he’s making, though, is that you only get a small, incremental boost from that work. It’s necessary — if you don’t do it, you’re crazy. But it’s just a small fraction of the work necessary to innovate.

In this article, BW has a friendly chat with Michael Graves about his industrial designs. He waxes about how important it is that designs be more useful.
Michael Graves: Beyond Kettles

I realize Graves’ designs are a lot of fun. I realize his work with Target brought an awareness of beautiful (or at least whimsical or interesting) everyday product design to the middle class.

I also realize that he’s now in a wheelchair (because of a sinus infection? damn, that’s scary … I’m stocking up on decongestants) and is a very nice man.

But I’ve had several Graves design items from Target, and I’ve never liked any of them. For example, the clock-radio. The button functions are simply bizarre. They’re labeled so subtly (so as not to interfere with the sleek look of each part) that one has to lean a few inches away from it in order to read their functions.

The one under the minutes adjusts the hours, and vice versa. The pretty little semicircle of buttons under the display controls the two different alarms, but it’s really hard to tell how they work. They’re too small and hard to press without pushing the clock off the endtable. The sound of the radio is mediocre at best. And there’s little rhyme or reason to much of the design in general.

But it is definitely cute.

Newsday.com: Synthesizer innovator Robert A. Moog dies at 71

I remember when I first encountered a Moog synth. My grade school was hosted at a huge suburban Christian church around Atlanta, and the music minister there was also our music teacher. One day he took us into the cavernous “sactuary” and pulled the vinyl cover off of a space-age contraption with knobs and plugs and dials and what seemed to me an absurdly small keyboard — somehow the smallness of the keyboard next to the piano beside it registered just how futuristic and new-paradigm this thing was. I must’ve been eight or nine.

The teacher went on to play with it and show what it did. I was blown away. Since then I’ve been fascinated with all such things, though I’ve never bought one or even played one. Still, it was one of those childhood moments that’ll never leave me.

Once I heard an interview with Moog on NPR and jotted this quote down:

I don’t design stuff for myself. I’m a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.

This seems to me to be quintessential Design thinking: the fact that a guy who innovated something so futuristic and unconventional managed to remain committed to the principle of “use by others.”

Sleep well.