Yesterday at MEX, one of the speakers showed an industrial and interaction conceptual design from many years ago that was remarkably similar to confidential work I’ve seen created during the same timeframe. Two different companies, two continents, similar results. The only reason the speaker was able to show the work was because the client finally agreed to submit the concept into competitions, but that’s only because a big part of their concept looks a lot like something that is in the marketplace: Apple’s Coverflow (album & image interface invented by Andrew Coulter Enright).

Consumer electronics (CE) companies are trying so hard to keep everything confidential and proprietary and yet I continue to see design concepts from the same point in time, emerging from different teams, working for different companies and sometimes even in different cultures. How is that possible? How can designers who’ve never met design a similar product? My colleague, Dan Saffer, pointed me to an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker that speaks to this very thing. Ideas are “in the air. … The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.” 

From my perspective, I’ve seen that design teams, working in separate silos, look outward to color and form trends, natural behaviors, and historical and cultural context for inspiration (let alone consumer ethnographic research). Each team internalizes the information as inspiration to inform the product designs. Because the designs are influenced by outside forces of trends, culture and human need, they end up very similar across many separate teams. Essentially, if we are doing our jobs as designers, our work is going to be representative of our surroundings at a moment in time. This then begs the question: Why bother with the confidentiality agreements?

I’m so f*^#ing tired of not being able to share the work I’m most proud of with my peers. There are so many lessons to learn from past work and yet it’s all wasting away under piles of NDA’s. It’s even more frustrating when we extrapolate just how many other designers worldwide have concepts that will also never see the light of day.

What I find fascinating about this is CE companies think that somehow ideas can be contained within confidentiality agreements, but in actuality the ideas are coming from outside influences that reach beyond any contract. 

As design becomes a bigger part of product differentiation for CE companies, we designers, as the creators of these innovations, need to work harder to 1) keep ownership of our unused concepts and 2) to show the concepts to the design community in a timely manner. I believe that true design innovation will occur at a much faster pace if conceptual designs are shared. And if we’re designing products from a human-need perceptive, we can make improvements to the world at a faster pace too. Imagine that.

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