Design Decisions (III) - The (history of the) Telephone

Earlier today, I was reading an article for my history class today, which was talking about the history of the telephone industry. To summarize the article, it starts off by talking about how the industry originally thought of the phone more as a tool for businessmen and marketed it as such. They emphasized how helpful it could be when it came to planning, as well as keeping in contact with the office while away on a vacation. They also saw social conversations as “’frivolous’ and ‘unnecessary’[1]”, and even changed their system to deter this kind of usage, such as changing payment from an annual flat rate to a metered system. After several decades of this, the companies decided to accept the social uses of their services, and started to change their marketing techniques to reflect this.

The obstacles faced by the phone companies reminded me of a question repeatedly asked in class - what is a good design? Sure, we can go on gut feeling, or even use a matrix to decide for us, but ultimately, what determines what a good design is? If one were to ask anyone in the western world about the phone, most would say it’s a pretty useful, well designed piece of technology. However, if phone companies continued their marketing strategy as they did by ignoring the social aspects of their services, they could have very well gone bankrupt. Shouldn't the best designs be at least remotely successful? If so, then why is it that some of the best designs never get off the ground, while other less impressive ones managed to succeed?

During the Engineering Science Education Conference, Hadi Dowlatabadi from UBC gave many examples of great ideas and designs that would help reduce energy usage, yet, many haven't been doing well in the market. Reasons? They included poor marketing, opposition being too strong and shutting down the idea, etc.

All in all, this just shows that regardless of how good a design is, it won’t get really far if it’s poorly managed, or not very marketable. This raises an interesting question – when designing a solution, should the engineer factor in these considerations when designing a solution? Of course a lot of research would be needed to be done to create the necessary metrics to evaluate the how marketable an object is. However, if everyone sticks to the safe side, and designs solutions that everyone has already seen and accepted before, what progress could be made?

I suppose this one's not as focused on comparing/contrasting design decisions, but reading this article brought to light something I didn't seriously consider before when making a design decision. Of course, I would like to think my solutions would be good enough to convince people that my way's the way to go, but it appears that sometimes that's not the way it goes sometimes - it doesn't matter how good you think your design is if no one else agrees with you (espcially the one's you're trying to sell your idea to).

"The story of how and why the telephone industry discovered sociability provides a few lessons for understanding the nature of technological diffusion. It suggest that promoters of a technology do not necessarily know or determine its final uses; that they seek problem or "needs" for which their technology is the answer; but that consumers may ultimately determine those uses for the promoters...In promoting technology, vendors are constrained not only by its technical and economic attributes but also by an interpretation of its uses shaped by its and their own histories, a cultural constraint that can be enduring and powerful.[1]"

[1] C. S. Fischer, Touch Someone: The Telephone Industy Discovers Sociability. The Johns Hopkins UNiversity Press, 1988, p. 32-61.