Is It Good?

ASU students are designing beautiful products that better society with minimal impact on the environment. Best of all, some of them could be coming to a store near you.

Consider the statistics. Currently, there are some two million nursing home beds in the United States. About 78 percent of the occupants need assistance getting on and off the toilet. It is anybody’s guess as to how many others in the general population—young and old alike—suffer similar indignities.

Or ponder these statistics. Only a tiny fraction of the written material in American libraries is readily available to people with serious vision problems. Stephen King’s latest thriller may make it to Books on Tape. Not so the latest research on immunology in the prestigious journal Nature.

Denying access to printed information has consequences for the lives of blind people. Only 45 percent of those with major vision impairments graduate from high school. That total compares to 80 percent of their fully sighted counterparts. As adults, only 30 percent are employed versus 84 percent of sighted individuals.

Or consider this predicament. An estimated 19 million people in the United States suffer from urinary incontinence. Plenty of popular remedies such as disposable pads and diapers exist. But they are so bulky and clumsy to use that many of those afflicted by the problem simply restrict their activities and suffer humiliation in private.

If the students in Arizona State University’s InnovationSpace program had their way, such physical disabilities would present only minor inconveniences, not insurmountable barriers.

InnovationSpace is a product design and development laboratory. The program brings together teams of top students from such diverse fields as business, engineering, product design, and communication design. During an intensive two-semester course, the teams bone up on everything you need to know to get a product off the drawing boards and onto store shelves. Students log long hours. For example, they interview users and craft market analyses. They chart revenue projections and field test prototypes. They also detail manufacturing specifications and develop product identity— complete with a company name.

InnovationSpace is the brainchild of the late Paul Rothstein, an associate professor of industrial design at ASU’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design. He passed away in the spring of 2005 while this story was being written.

At the end of the school year, students in the program are required to showcase models that are convincing replicas of real-life products. They build professional-looking displays that are stocked with everything from a product brochure and packaging to a business prospectus. To top it off, they must pitch their ideas to an audience consisting of faculty, students, local business entrepreneurs, and reporters.

Rothstein founded InnovationSpace on a new model of product design and development called Integrated Innovation. To help guide them through the Integrated Innovation process, students methodically work through a matrix of four questions.

What is desirable? The question asks students to explore the needs and wants of potential users.

What is possible? Answering this question prompts students to seek out the most appropriate technology.

What is valuable? Students seek to identify gaps in the marketplace where their products can be best positioned.

Not just any product makes the Integrated Innovation grade. Students interested in designing a fancy new pair of in-line skates, for example, or a luxury SUV, need not apply to the class. Product ideas must meet a fourth criterion: They must fulfill vital social needs while minimizing their impact on the environment.

What is good? Addressing this fourth question makes Integrated Innovation a unique and sustainable model of new product development.

During the 2004-2005 academic year, three ASU student teams worked on developing products for an underserved segment of the American population—aging Baby Boomers. About 78 million of these folks are now poised for retirement.

The other half of the class worked on developing text-reading aids for people who are blind or seriously visually impaired. Their work was based on a device known as the iReader. Currently being developed by researchers at ASU’s Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC), the iReader can translate printed text into an audio file in a matter of seconds.

Rothstein developed InnovationSpace as a way to better equip his students to meet the practical as well as economic and ethical challenges facing the design profession and society. Product innovation is just one example.

Rothstein routinely told his students that such innovation is no longer the domain of a lone genius sketching a design concept on a café napkin. Instead, consider this nugget from a 2004 article in BusinessWeek magazine. The reporter wrote that the creation of new products now is a collaborative process of “engineers, contract designers and manufacturers, university scientists, and dozens of technology suppliers big and small—all pulled together ad-hoc for a particular product.”

With its segregation of disciplines, however, Rothstein believed that university education did little to prepare students for this real-world challenge. So the ASU professor created an opportunity for students to get their feet wet in the classroom.

To ensure that the experience would be cross disciplinary on all levels, he assembled a team of faculty members to participate in the project. The team includes Mookesh Patel from graphic design, Jim Hershhauer from business, and Mark Henderson from engineering. Program coordination is provided by designer Kate Benjamin.

Senior industrial design student Sergio Baiza says that it was just this chance to absorb lessons from professors in other disciplines and to collaborate with some of the best and the brightest students from fields of study across campus that attracted him to InnovationSpace.

Baiza spent the summer of 2004 as an intern in a local design firm. He watched as engineers and marketing people were frequently thrown together to develop products.

“I knew InnovationSpace would prepare me that much more for the workplace,” Baiza says.

InnovationSpace is helping to prepare students for other demands as well. The manufacture and disposal of products are culprits in many serious environmental problems. As part of the Integrated Innovation process, students devise ways to tackle problems of waste and pollution by creating timeless, classic designs instead of throwaway trendy ones. They learn to minimize the use of materials, find cleaner manufacturing processes, and make products easier to repair or break apart for recycling.

Keeping the social good and a sustainable future in mind makes good business sense. Meredith Holmes is a business finance major. She served as a member of the Boom Design team. The team created a device known as the Assist. It is designed to help people with mobility impairments get on and off the toilet.

“Just look at the sheer number of people who are getting older,” Holmes says. “Problems come along with aging. Many of these areas haven’t been explored.”

Unlike their creators, however, student projects rarely graduate from the classroom to the marketplace. Quentin Smith hopes to change those odds.

Smith is president of Arizona Business Accelerator Inc., a Phoenix-based business catalyst. He attended many InnovationSpace classes and presentations to offer students tips on making their products more marketable.

Christy Sutphen is a graphic designer and Boom Design team member. She says that her experience in InnovationSpace has inspired her to dream of forming an entire company based on products that eliminate societal stigmas such as those attached to physical disabilities.

“I’m thankful for the day that Paul created this class. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she says. “It’s going to affect us for the rest of our lives.”—Adelheid Fischer