RESEARCH General Arts

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Students, experts join to solve real product-design challenges

Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

4/1/02

Photo by Bill Wiegand William Bullock, right, and other team members of UI's Product Interaction Research Laboratory, listen to Jeff McFarland, manager of design research for Samsung Design America.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — What do you get when you put industrial designers, graphic designers, business and marketing specialists in the same room with, say, an anthropologist or a statistician?

The answer, according to University of Illinois industrial design professor William Bullock, is likely to be a better consumer product.

This integrated, user-centered approach to product design and development is being put to the test at the UI's Product Interaction Research Laboratory. Bullock organized the lab last fall to give advanced industrial design students the opportunity to team with engineers, technologists and other specialists campuswide in an effort aimed at providing corporate partners with solutions to product-development challenges. Students receive course credit for their participation.

The first challenge for students working in the lab last fall was to help a client develop a better baby bottle. While the client already had a patent on the baby-bottle design, Bullock said the PIRL students "were looking at a way of humanizing it, making it easier for the parent and baby to use. Mechanical engineering professor Michael Philpott co-directed the project with Bullock.

This semester, another group of students is working with Samsung Design America. Because of proprietary agreements, Bullock can't say much more about the specifics of the project, except that the design and business students are "investigating product needs and new market trends and working in the research and development phase to uncover user needs and potential market areas."

Each PIRL lab is custom-designed to meet client needs in three distinct phases: research, development and finalization. "If it can be picked up, sat on, wiggled, jumped on or otherwise used to help someone do something beneficial, if the human interface is there, we have a role to play," Bullock said.

As the UI professor sees it, both groups – the student-and-faculty teams and the corporate clients – benefit immeasurably from the experience. "For students, the opportunity to work in teams, to learn from others and see what others bring to the experience gives them a taste of how things work in the real world. And it gives students the opportunity to work with Fortune 500 companies and clients."

In turn, he said, "one of the things we try to bring to companies is an independent, fresh perspective. Since we’re not tied to the day-to-day business, since we're not tied to the product, we can give them independent views from experts from different fields. And we provide that perspective through three different lenses: the business lens, the design lens and the technological lens."

While other schools offer programs that pair industrial design students with business partners, Bullock said PIRL's integrated, interdisciplinary approach sets it apart. And while that approach is still rare in industry, "more and more, companies are moving toward that model of doing business."