University of California, Berkeley
Graduate Student, Mechanical Engineering
PhD candidate
Engineering
Thesis Title: Effective Framing in Design
About
In May 2008 I graduated from The Berkeley Institute of Design with my PhD. I now work at Jump Associates (www.jumpassociates.com), a firm that uses design, social research and business strategy to help companies invent new businesses and reinvent existing ones.
I have spent the last 5 years trying to figure out framing in design. Now I think I've got a pretty good idea.
My thesis is about how New Product Development (NPD) and design teams can successfully make products that people want. It is partly motivated by the reality of 30,000 new products hitting the shelves each year with only 10-30% of them lasting longer than one year. The vast majority of new products, in other words, fail. If we assume that companies don’t manufacture and release products that simply don’t work, then the major cause of these failures is making products that people don’t really want or need. An NPD team needs to frame the design challenge based around real user needs. That is why I set out to find out how to do this better.
Yet while most NPD and design research focuses on process, I found that process alone didn’t account for the difficulties NPD teams encounter. The second challenge was getting a diverse team of engineers, marketers, industrial designers and more, to agree on what it is that people want; the team needs to be on the same page about what people want.
These two goals, figuring out what people want, and getting on the same page, are intertwined in the design, research and sharing activities that a team performs. In my research I investigate the process of design team framing, piecing apart design practices and activities that both help teams build empathy with their target market, framing the situation based around real user needs, and help teams build shared understanding about this framing.
You can get a copy of my thesis here: www.palojono.com/books.php
A more complete list of my publications:
www.palojono.com/research.php
Contact Information
San Francisco
