Karl Ulrich
Subject: Objects of Desire
Bio: Professor at Penn Specializing in Industrial Design and Author of Product Design and Development
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Objects of Desire.
This podcast was taped at a conference where I hosted several Penn Professors on a variety of topics. The audience included my friends who will join me in asking questions.
Our speaker is Karl Ulrich who is a Professor at Penn specializing in Industrial Design and has written a book entitled Product Design and Development.
Karl will speak about designing an ice cream scooper that is beautiful, sexy, and more useful than any that had been manufactured before. Karl, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Karl Ulrich:
I taught one of the very first MOOCs, massively open online courses at Penn in 2012 and it was called Design Creation of Artifacts in Society. That entire course is now on my YouTube channel for free. So just search for me and you’ll find it there.
In the first week, I realized if I’m teaching a course on design, I better have an example that weaves through the course. I noticed my collection of antique ice cream scoops. And I said, “Everybody loves ice cream. Why don’t I use an ice cream scoop?” I picked an object that is highly evolved and very quickly around the beginning of week two, I realized if I don’t have a better scoop at the end of the course, what’s the point?
The first order of business was to define the job. It starts with the observation that scooping ice cream sucks. You all know that. You’ve got carpal tunnel. How might we create a better handheld tool for creating balls of ice cream from a bulk container? The next step in the design process was to do some observation of users. The only user I had at hand was my sullen teenage son named Nate.
At the time he begrudgingly scooped ice cream for me in front of a video camera. It is immediately evident that ergonomics are all wrong. You have this terrible wrist angle; you’re using the wrong muscle groups. It’s hard to see what you’re doing. As a product designer, I looked at this and I said, “The insight here is the ergonomics are terrible.”
I generated 10 solution concepts, but I fixated on the angle of the scoop head relative to the handle. So, if your wrist is at its natural angle, the scoop is now oriented in the direction of the container and that solves a lot of ergonomic challenges.
I worked out a rudimentary prototype of that concept, 3D printed it. The course ends after 12 weeks with the sullen teen taking dad’s 3D printed prototypes, scooping a scoop of ice cream, smiling and saying,” Nice job, dad.”
Shortly thereafter, I was having dinner with two of my friends. They happened to be the founders of one of the most famous design firms in the world called Lunar Design, now McKinsey Design. I told them that story and I showed them the early prototype and they said, “That’s nice, Karl. Would you mind if we did a little work on this?” I swallowed my pride, realized I was being asked by two of the best industrial designers of the world if they could work on my product. I said, “Of course.”
Now I need to make a slight digression and explain about industrial design. The solution was this angled scoop head relative to the handle and that core concept is patentable. We have a patent. It’s US Utility Patent 9173527.
The claim is more than a hundred words long. I’m going to read you the condensed version.
“An ergonomically designed ice cream scoop comprising a handle and a scoop head having an irregular bowl with a spade-shaped leading edge attached to the handle at an approximately 45- degree angle from a longitudinal access running the length of the handle.”
That’s the legal description of what’s functionally novel about the object. A 45-degree angle. And that functional description describes an object that very few of you in the room would buy. Function of an object is about 5% of what’s involved in creating a desirable and attractive product. In consumer goods and physical goods, the other 95% is industrial design.
What Jeff and Gerard and their team did was work out the awkward interface between the scoop and the handle. The result was the Bellevue ice cream scoop that you have in front of you.
We launched the resulting product on Kickstarter that met with some modest success. Our biggest customer is Jerry from Ben and Jerry. Our scoop is part of the portfolio that Lunar used to win the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. It’s in the SFMOMA Gift Shop and we sell a few of them as well. We were able to create a little business.
Three lessons. First, no product category is so mature that you can’t innovate. The scoop most of you has been around since 1933. The first scoop patents are in the 1890s, and ice creams have been around almost a thousand years. This is a very mature product category and yet we were able to find a conceptual insight that led us to innovate. Second, a great product is often a combination of two things. It’s the combination of some conceptual insight in our case, simply angling that ice cream scooper relative to the handle plus some industrial design. Put together they can create a very desirable product. And then the third lesson is great product does not equal a great business.
We have tried so many things to make this a business. We have many other products. Today, my entire go-to-market strategy consists of giving talks like this, telling you, give one free, and then inform you that if you use the code Karl 25, you get 25% off. That’s the scoop. The question I want to ask is now you held that scoop, before you considered the 45-degree angle of the scoop head to the longitudinal axis, what explained your attraction of that object? And that’s the challenge of industrial design.
Zachary Schur:
I noticed right away the weight of it.
Karl Ulrich:
So, your theory is heavy products are attractive.
Larry Bernstein:
In this case.
Karl Ulrich:
Yeah, but in a camping cup, it might not be attractive. What about the heft of this product that makes it attractive?
Larry Bernstein:
Well, when you show that other ice cream scoop, which so many of us use and it always just feels like it’s not doing the job.
I read your essay. It surprised me that the surface of water is an important and attractive aspect to the design. You said it was because when we’re on the savanna and desperate for water to see it brings us great joy and this object, it’s like when Lawrence of Arabia first saw Aqaba.
There’s the water. It’s reflecting, just the way you wrote in the essay and there’s this sense of wonder.
Karl Ulrich:
The work that underscores that theory has toddlers playing with toys that are finished in matte and gloss finishes, the kids literally lick the gloss products. It’s pretty compelling. Gloss is deeply wired to have positive balance.
David Stellings:
I scoop a lot of ice cream. I don’t like to wait for the ice cream to get soft enough to easily scoop it. So, it’s always very hard. I noticed when I picked this up, it’s rounded on the back, which is the side that you would exert the most force against when you’re pressing against the cold ice cream. And the front side of the handle is flat, which is where you comfortably place your thumb to get better leverage. It provides the perfect leverage experience for scooping ice cream and I’m looking forward to using it.
Karl Ulrich:
They agonized over that because they wanted it flat for aesthetics. It’s not clear that’s what you want ergonomically.
David Brail:
In a fortuitous timing, our ice cream scoop of 30 years broke last week. What I like about this is its solid state. There are no moving parts. Our spring failed and it’s not that useful anyway. This is a single piece; no parts can fail. This will last longer than 30 years. I’m optimistic.
Zachary Schur:
It reminds me a lot of an Apple phone and it’s got the same shiny edges that that thing is made.
Karl Ulrich:
It’s funny you say that because the Apple industrial design comes out of Lunar. Steve Jobs was one of Lunar’s early clients and they did the first Powerbook 100 and the first laser printers. There’s an explicit design language, especially in that early Apple. And if you think about the first iPod you owned, do you remember it had that chrome back? It smudges and shows fingers. They did that very deliberately. Gloss is a cheap trick. Everybody loves gloss, but what we found was that people started polishing their device on their shirt, and that’s magic for a designer.
Ron Bernstein:
Why is it so weighted down? There’s very little weight in the scooper head. And why didn’t you make a thumb depression to help your thumb work the product?
Karl Ulrich:
This is made from three pieces. It’s then welded together. Originally, we made this out of aluminum because of its thermal conductivity. The problem was it was nearly impossible to get this gloss finish on aluminum without using nasty environmental processes, hexavalent chrome-plating. As a result, we went to stainless steel. The problem with that is it weighed like six pounds in stainless. And so, the reason it’s three parts is it’s hollow. It’s much lighter than it would be if it were solid and it’s about as light as it can be given the way it’s made. I have a little stash of the original aluminum ones because they perform and feel the best, but it was a practical concern that led us to stainless steel.
As to the thumb hole, we made at least 24 prototypes and quite a few of them had little thumb do hickeys. And the problem with that is it’s not as forgiving to hand size as a surface and we found it didn’t add that much, but that’s the stuff designers obsess over, iterate, look at variants, watch different size people use it and try to converge on something that works.
Julie Bernstein:
You’re skimming the surface part of the ice cream, which melts quicker. Traditional scoops are round and you must dig in deeper. So, this seems like it would skim more. I would think that you didn’t mention that, but I would think that would be like the primary focus of this design.
Karl Ulrich:
It’s more of a shaving action than a true scooping action. If you’re scooping professionally, you do need to keep this in warm water. That’s what an ice cream shop does.
The Maya principle, which if I get the acronym right, is the maximally advanced yet acceptable design. There’s fair bit of evidence that the ability to quickly process what the concept is important in aesthetics, but having this little bit of tension is also very attractive, but not too much and that’s why it’s called the Maya principle. You see it on the display and you’re like, “Well, I know what that is, but geez, that’s kind of weird. How does it work?” And it seems to hit Maya just about right.
It doesn’t work very well on Amazon where you see this thing.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s one thing to say that something sucks. It’s another thing to solve the physical engineering problem associated with extracting the ice cream from the container. Tell us about your process for fixing a thousand-year-old problem of an easy extraction of ice cream from a container.
Karl Ulrich:
I’ve built my whole career around the idea that you can apply process to get better outcomes in design. The process we teach is called the Triple Diamond Model because each diamond reflects a cycle of divergent and convergent thinking. The three diamonds are a jobs analysis, a needs analysis and concept generation.
What’s the job we’re trying to do here? Are we trying to improve the ergonomics of the scoop or are we trying to enhance access to ice cream or are we trying to provide family togetherness at home? You could frame ice cream scoops in all three of those ways. The first step is that job to be done statement. How might we design a better handheld tool for forming balls of ice cream from a bulk container? That’s diamond one.
Diamond two is understanding the user needs. First, try to exhaustively catalog what are the variables that explain preference for ice cream scoops and that’s things like it’s affordable, it forms an ice shaped ball, it doesn’t stick. It’s usually for most products, 30 to 50 of those variables. More important is the identification of what in design language are called insights. Insights are needs that are non-obvious, significant and authentic, rooted in the actual observations of users. The insight for the ice cream scoop was the ergonomics of scooping are terrible. There was an awkward wrist angle.
The third diamond is to use that insight to pull a variety of solution concepts.
So, once you recognize that ergonomics is an insight, what if I could use large muscle groups? Could I use my leg? Could I use a knife? There’s a nice technique where you cut ice cream. It’s the pyramid method. It’s easy to ideate once you have an insight because that pulls some obvious solution concepts. Those three diamonds are teachable. They’re reliable for a student facing an unstructured problem to know how to get at it. And in the end, they produce something. You look at it, you say, wow, that’s genius. But it’s the result of turning a crank on these three predictable processes.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to bring in some family lore. My wife Julie’s grandfather made a major invention. There’s a mop where you pull a handle, just a little switch, and it would squeeze all the water out of the sponge and dump it in the bucket. He came up with this contraption with a mop. In the old days, A mop had this piece of metal, and you mushed it. That was horrible design. This new mom contraption was great because it would squeeze out the water with a flick of a switch. I don’t mean to brag, but related, through marriage. Anyway, he too struggled in the marketing side of the business. Ron Propeil was one of these great marketers. You’ve probably seen advertisements when you were a kid with the Gizmo knife. Wait, don’t stop there. We’re going to throw something else in. So, he had this very active marketing campaign that went across products. By the time you were through, you were buying all sorts of goods and getting things thrown in for free. Now Julie’s grandfather could invent this mop, but he could not market on a grand scale. There are certain organizations like Oxo. I don’t know if you thought about selling your product to them because they have beautifully engineered items.
We use one for cleaning dishes. It scrubs and you can just push a button and out comes the dishwasher soap. Amazing, really. I bought one for my mom. How do you think about your next steps of taking advantage of a marketing genius with widespread distribution to take this product global?
Karl Ulrich:
Yeah, there’s so much to say there. Does anybody know the scrub daddy? Do you know what the sales of the scrub daddy are? It’s a billion dollars. It’s like the most trivial object imaginable. It was on Shark Tank. It has a smiley face on it. You can hear the bitterness in my voice. So, who knows? I have a little more respect for Oxo.
Oxo started out like the scoop. It was a marketing guy named Sam Farber, lives in New York. And Sam had an arthritic wife and he said, “I want to create some kitchen implements she can use.” His first product was called the Good Grips Peeler, and everyone told him that no one can sell a peeler for $9.99 because peelers are 99 cents at a hang tag in the grocery store. And he said, “Look, it’s only 10 bucks. It’s better. People will buy it.” He came to market with that one product he probably got to single digit millions. And then he was able to fill that product line with the idea of Good Grips, the Good Grips ergonomic angle to be several dozen.
He sold the business I think for $400 million, and Newell Rubbermaid has taken that Good Grips idea and spread it much more broadly. We were able to get meetings with Solatab, Williams Sonoma, those kinds of retailers, which is what you must do for a product because if the product costs 40 bucks, if you’re selling direct-to-consumer, your acquisition cost is 40 bucks. You just can’t make it work on a direct-to-consumer basis. So, it must go through retail. Every one of the buyers said, “We love this product. We need 12 products and we can give you a display.”
So, we designed 12 and we have a couple of others that we still sell. But when we got to three or four, we looked at the prospects of building a consumer housewares brand around these 12 boutique products and it just didn’t pencil out in terms of our effort.
Larry Bernstein:
Steve Zoll, you make chicken sausage and it’s a form of industrial design. You must make it beautiful. You need to make it look appetizing. Tell us about the industrial design of chicken sausage and the challenges that you face to make it appetizing for third parties.
Steve Zoll:
We have a process when we create new products, we’re very focused on what the consumer wants. Our products are designed around high quality, simple ingredients, and taste great. And from there we iterate with different ingredients. As far as looks go, we lean heavily into the package. So, we spend a lot of time thinking about how the package looks, what it communicates to the consumer. When I bought the company, the package conveyed nothing. It just had the name Amylu. She’s the founder of this brand. She was using great ingredients and the products tasted great. Package conveyed none of that. It had a picture of chicken on it. People want to eat products with simple high-quality ingredients and none of that was communicated on the package. We changed the package to white. We have pictures of a lot of the ingredients so you can say, “Hey, this is real food.”
Larry Bernstein:
It’s not every day that you can meet the Sausage King of Chicago. in the audience We also have an investor in sausage casings. Jeff Strong, tell me about the snap. What makes a great sausage casing?
Jeff Strong:
Well, it’s really the snap.
If you’ve seen the commercial with Rodney Savage, you snap into a Slim Jim. It’s the collagen casing that makes the snap and it’s a bit dated, but we had invested in a collagen casing company. It was listed in the UK. It fits our strategy for a high-quality company. It had 50% global market share, but it was mismanaged. They had bad incentives. The incentives were growth over value. We got involved and tried to modify management behavior to focus on value, not necessarily size and ultimately was acquired by a larger industrial food products company at a big premium.
Larry Bernstein:
Steve, we talked about the consumer side of industrial design. Tell us about the making of the sausages. How do you think about the design and the making of mass production of sausage?
Steve Zoll:
It is designed to make the product safe, consistent, eliminating risks, things like foreign objects in our products. Those are the things that we think about and efficiency, of course.
It seemed like aluminum would have been better, right? But because stainless steel was shiny, that’s form. And I’m wondering, form over function in general.
Karl Ulrich:
The aluminum had the same finish. You wouldn’t know the difference. The problem was that finish on aluminum requires three intermediate steps. You must copper plate, then nickel plate, and finally chrome plate it. You can only use trivalent chrome, not hexavalent chrome. And after about a hundred cycles in the dishwasher, we started to get some flaking of that. So, we said, “This isn’t going to work.” Now, we could have just used a bare aluminum scoop. That’s what a lot of a $2 scoop may just be bare aluminum. Problem is that is going to be ugly. By the time it gets put in the dishwasher a few times it’s going to have an ugly gray patina on it. So, if you want to call that form over function, okay, but we needed this thing to feel like an heirloom to have high perceived value and part of that is just pure aesthetic.
Larry Bernstein:
In March of 2020, we had our last Stanford day, which is exactly like this, but at Stanford. One of our guests was Bernard Roth. He created the Design School at Stanford.
This was a completely new school. There are no professors in the Design School. He just grabbed people who were interested and wanted to participate in these new phenomena, and it became a raging success. When I was at the Wharton School, there was no industrial design department. We had no attachment with anyone from mechanical engineering. And the fact that it currently exists is incredible. Design schools as a practical matter offer a completely different creative outlet and is normally unavailable in the Wharton School.
Tell us about design as a school, design as an interdisciplinary effort, what’s it doing in Wharton and engineering and how that has been created? What happened since I left Penn that this is available?
Karl Ulrich:
The Design School at Stanford, so-called D-School is a triumph of branding as there is no school there. It’s an executive education program. It had Bernie Roth, but more significantly David Kelly, who had been the founder of IDEO. For my taste, it was a little too touchy-feely in the sense it was anti-theoretical and anti-process. It was just do it, just iterate, build it, break it, and I think we can do better than that. When we set out at Penn, we started a program called Integrated Product Design and that does offer a degree and it’s a joint program with the School of Architecture, School of Engineering and the Wharton School.
We said, “The Penn way is more process oriented.” The Wharton way is to be more principal -oriented as well. That’s why we have a triple diamond model. We have various tools and methods that we try to teach our students. Having said that, that program has struggled in part because teaching a master’s degree program integrated interdisciplinary masters and to really do design education, it’s hard to scale that beyond maybe 40 students a year and 40 students a year is just rounding error for Wharton. Educational programs are viewed primarily as revenue generators, especially master’s programs at the School of Engineering. So, it’s struggled to get institutional support.
Larry Bernstein:
When I went to see your class in 2019, the auditorium was full. The enthusiasm was high.
Karl Ulrich:
As a master’s degree program, it’s struggled. As an elective that students at Penn take, it’s been fantastically successful. We have seven sections a year now of that course. 10% of all Penn undergraduates take that course. They all learn to use laser cutters and design three-dimensional objects and 3D printing and generally really, really like it. And then some small fraction of students who are exposed to those ideas become entrepreneurs or go to work in product related businesses. But mostly, people just do it because they’re curious and want to learn about design.
Larry Bernstein:
If you were going to design a school of design, how would you do that and how would it be different than what is currently done?
Karl Ulrich:
We have the Weitzman School of Design at Penn. But it’s a school that has landscape architecture, historic preservation and architecture in it. And they just one day decided we’re going to rename our school, the Weitzman School of Design. Design is a fundamental human activity. It is not confined to architecture. The other two domains aren’t even that “designy.” The biggest issue is that design has all these intellectual jurisdictional issues. And when you use that word, you could be talking to someone who designs the M1 VLSI chip at Apple or a fashion designer at Fashion Institute of Technology. They all could say they’re designers. It’s hard to say what would you do if you were to try to find the common thread around all domains of design?
At the end of the day, you must bring students in, give them a coherent professional program to survive as a school. And that probably must be more domain driven. And so maybe design should be more of an interdisciplinary, more of a row of matrices across all the schools.
Larry Bernstein:
Does Penn do too much? Why should physics be with your industrial design? When I was walking over here, there is the Curtis School of Music, and they’re very specialized in a very narrow way. They make music. Why does it make sense for these universities to do everything for everyone? What I found surprising is that almost none of the professors seem to know anybody else in any other department. They know people in their little area, but one of the speakers I invited for tomorrow said that I probably know more people in the various faculties than she does, and she’s been a professor here for 10 or 15 years. What Bernie Roth was doing so well is he was able to tap into faculty across multiple schools that had similar creative desires. Universities don’t seem to be doing that very well. Why is it failing and should it be smaller?
Karl Ulrich:
Bernie was also a polymath. He was interested in all kinds of crazy stuff. Terrific guy. I think you’re asking about organizations more generally. I get it in business because from a human resource standpoint, you need a certain amount of renewal. Growth is important and it’s the overarching logic of capitalism that creates shareholder value. Universities borrow a lot of that logic. We are thinking about getting bigger and richer and at the programmatic level about how can I get another hire in my department? Well, to do that, I need to grow my research program or whatever. I think universities share a lot of the same negative consequences of growth that other organizations share.
As to why the departmental boundaries are so calcified, I think it’s in a lot of domains, they become self-referential guilds without much external validation. I know that was true in my department within Wharton. I would say half the faculty work in domains that are entirely self-referential and they know the rules, they know the other players. It’s got a certain set of incentives and a certain set of performance metrics, and they love playing that game, but that game has no external validation, no external reference.
Jay Greene:
I would always joke that you were far more likely to have an intellectual exchange at Larry’s Book Club than at any academic conference that I had ever attended. I do think that it’s worth worrying a little bit about why universities have strayed from core missions, truth seeking intellectual inquiry. I’m not saying that no one does it. I’m just saying that it should be the lion’s share of everything. It should drive everything and it’s clear that it doesn’t.
Karl Ulrich:
I’m a little defensive about this. First, I totally agree with the academic conferences. I stopped going 20 years ago. With my immediate colleagues. We get along fine, but I’m not that interested in what they’re doing. I don’t feel like there needs to be some mechanism to force me to reach out to meet interesting people, because I feel like I do that a lot. There is a fundamental tension here between people who are more oriented towards real disciplinary and functional depth and people who are a little more eclectic in their interests.
I’m more eclectic, which means I’m not that good at my narrow focus, but I’m pretty good at bridging stuff and I think you need some of both in the university and to say you want everyone to be interested in interdisciplinary stuff, you probably give up the person who goes and invents a new state of matter.
Jeff Strong:
When reading your article about the five principles, I think the entire endeavor of translating a profound design program and answering it with a few principles seems a little hopeless to begin with. And sure enough, I think a lot of design principles over time have proven to be not comprehensive enough or interpreted incorrectly and failed in retrospect. How certain are you in the validity of these principles? How ready are you to tell your students to just throw it out of the window if they feel inspired by something else? It goes against the principles, but I’m going to do this.
Karl Ulrich:
I’m not sure I can really offer comprehensive theory of aesthetics, but these elements seem predictive of what works aesthetically and they provide some explanatory power. In the case of typicality, for example, you can always find counter examples, but that’s an empirical regularity where you look at a lot of people and how they respond to things and try to figure out why they like some things more than others. Typicality emerges out of marketing. Same with gloss. These mechanisms will get overridden for sure. So, if there’s a cultural norm to react against gloss, a trend or a fashion trend where all the youth are anti-gloss, that can override completely the more hardwired preference for gloss.
So, I’d say I’m not sure at all, but I think these are interesting and offer some explanatory value and until we have something better, that’s what we have.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about as it relates to the future of design?
Karl Ulrich:
The AI tools are unbelievable in supporting design. I found myself being able to do much deeper technical design work than I’d done for years because of the tools. I just bought both my kids 3D printers for $300. The tools are unbelievable and they enable and democratize design.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Karl for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was Using Peptides for Medical Breakthroughs.
Our speaker was Cesar de la Fuente who is the Director of Penn’s Machine Biology Group. His team uses AI with biology to create new antibiotics and improve the efficacy of other drugs that hopefully can save lives.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Using Peptides for Medical Breakthroughs, here.
