14.A.I.L. = Fourteenth Attempt In Learning

Hello there, dear reader, and thanks for dropping by.

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Even simple words can cause confusion – especially in multi-disciplinary projects, as the following example will illustrate.

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First, a bit of history. In 2010, the European Committee invited high-ranking representatives of the international design community and asked them: what if designers, both professional and academic, would get their own slice of the subsidy pie for collaborative research projects? Now you might think the answer was “take the money and run!” but that’s not what the design reps said. Instead, their reply was that the EC should fund projects where designers would work together with other disciplines. After all, wouldn’t it give much more “return on research investment” to mix product design with, say, material science?

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You can probably see where this is going…

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After due deliberation, the EC agreed, and in 2011 they published a call for proposals of “design-led, materials-anchored research projects”. Through informal channels, TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering – my employer – was strongly urged to answer this call, and as coordinating partner no less. That ball landed in my court, and before I knew it I was busy putting together a consortium. The call was a “two-stager”, meaning that we would get to submit a draft plan, and if that was deemed to have sufficient potential, we could go on to the second round. Respective deadlines were November 2011 and May 2012 – and would you believe it, my consortium got through!

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Project Light.Touch.Matters was born. The numbers speak for themselves: well over 5 million euro in total budget, 3.5 years of runtime, some 50 project co-workers scattered across 9 EU countries and 18 partners… let’s just say it was a pretty big thing.

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What followed in 2012 was “negotiation”, which, as I would discover, is where you turn your 120-page project proposal into an actual plan, with legally-binding agreements to actually do an X amount of work for a Y amount of subsidy. Suffice it to say that in getting there, I got plenty of opportunity to (i) bone up my project management skills, (ii) cut through bureaucratic red tape, and (iii) learn to be patient. But that phase too was successful, and really not as bad as you might think. Next, we hired the PhD students we had in mind to help with the work and by February 2013 we had our kick-off. Less than three full years after that first EC meeting. And yes, that’s actually not bad at all. And no, I’m not being ironic here.

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3.5 years later…

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Summer 2016 we had the glorious finale of this huge project and got to show off what we had accomplished. We’d jointly made new “interface materials” that combined touch sensitivity with luminescent response – hence the project name – ?all sufficiently well-behaved to allow easy integration into actual products, of which we of course showcased an impressive and innovative range of examples. Plus, we presented our approach for how to pull off this “design-driven materials innovation” in a handy interactive booklet that went on to get an honourable mention in the next round of “Compasso D’Oro” design awards.

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Plus, there was a lot we had learned – a lot that I had learned, often through failure. Fortunately, not the “OMG” kind of failure, but a more gentle form, and often hilariously funny.

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For starters, the word “material” turned out to have VERY different meanings for the product designers on the one side of the consortium and the material scientists on the other. For the former, a touch pad based on piezo-active materials was seen simply as a touch-sensitive material, but for the latter, it was a complex arrangement of different components, jointly delivering a specific functionality – so, definitely NOT at material. Same for an OLED: a nice luminescent material for designers, but a “device” for the scientists, built around an organic light-emitting diode (hence the acronym), deftly wired up and securely packaged for use.

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In other words, the designers looked at materials “outside in”, while the scientists looked “inside out”.

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Meanwhile, the product design professionals and the various design academics were also discovering their differences in outlook. Words like “theory” or “concept” proved to be very good in fostering miscommunication. If this sounds familiar, then please do leave a note in the comments!

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To compound the confusion, the word “property”, in relation to materials, ALSO turned out to have multiple meanings. To start with the material scientists: these folks were thinking of engineering properties, accurately describing a particular aspect of a material’s performance, and referring to an objective test protocol applicable to the property in question. Designers, for their part, often talked about materials needing to be “rugged”, “reliable”, or “cost-effective” – all very nice things to have for sure, but really more dependent on how the material (or component?) in question was integrated into a product than anything else. Quite like “recyclability”, that I talked about in the 5th installment, you may recall: that’s not an engineering property of materials either. And, the designers often spoke of qualities: of the touch sensitivity feeling “surprising” or even “sexy”, and of the emitted light being “pleasant”, “high tech”, and so on.

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As you can probably appreciate, the combined term “material properties” offered even more opportunity for miscommunication. In other words, for failure to communicate about materials.

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They say that sometimes you’ve got to crawl before you can walk: well, for us in the LTM project, we first needed to find common ground to stand on before we could start crawling anywhere. That took about a year. If you are planning to run a multi-disciplinary project yourself for the first time, my advice is to put aside ample time for developing a shared language. Go on, ask me more, I’ll help you if I can.

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For me, if you’re curious, a material is basically “any substance not yet given its final shape and size” – that’s where manufacturing comes in. Of course, materials are always sold in a specific form, with specific dimensions: just think of a coil of sheet metal, or a bag of plastic pellets. So, shape and size are partially built-in – hence the “semi” in the term “semi-finished product” (Dutch: "half-fabrikaat"). From this it follows that engineering properties have to be independent of shape and size, among a few other things. Plus, they should be homogeneous over the material as it appears to you. It’s a viewpoint I don’t think I would have had without that “failure to communicate” described above.

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And I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

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