Design: The Secret Ingredient

Looking at Universal Design, emotional design - and just plain excruciatingly bad design Mike Drummond demonstrates that, "If design is not part of your initial development plan, you're doomed."

For product developers and inventors, design is an essential ingredient that needs to go into the mix early - it's the flour or the water or the egg in the cake, not the frosting spackled on at the end.

"When I hear 'dropping in design' at the tail end (of a new product development project), the hairs on the back of my neck stand up," says [Tom]  Kubilius, an engineer and industrial designer.

"If you're going to 'drop in' design," he adds, "it should be the 101^st Airborne and be the first in."

Design is "an argument for doing something or not doing something," Kubilius says, while engineering is an argument for how that something works. Design poses the question: "Is this even the right thing to do? Having design answer that can inform whether you even make a product."

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