What can guacamole teach us about product design?

About a week ago, I read my bachelor thesis for the first time after more than a year since I handed it in. I stumbled across a section where I wrote about kitchen tools like pineapple cutters, jive scissors, or garlic peelers. Back in time, I started wondering if we humans really need these products. As designers, we see ourselves as problem-solvers, but our view is sometimes so narrowed down to a single problem that it leads to a blindness in seeing the bigger picture. But does this focussed view also drive us to design 'unnecessary' products?

Let's start at the beginning. While studying product design, we were taught to solve problems and to optimize processes. We do things like shadowing users, watching behaviors, and analyzing workflows to define a problem. We force ourselves to look closely. We dive deep into the topic during this problem finding process because a good problem is not easy to recognize. We basically do all that so that in the end, we design products that create value. But who defines the value of the product? 

How far do we have to zoom-out to be able to judge the amount of generated value?

While writing my thesis, I looked for an easy example to explain our designers' blindness to the bigger picture. As a little wannabe chef with a Japanese knife tattooed on my left arm, I ended up finding the right example in the cooking field. And here we go...

Holy Guacamole

Let's pretend four designers observe you making guacamole using the following five tools: a knife, a spoon, a fork, a bowl & a cutting board. The designers follow every step from your attempts to find a good recipe until serving the guacamole in a nice bowl. After a successful shadowing day, the four designers go back to the office. They're thrilled because each one found a different problem to solve.

1. Onion Cubes - Your onion cubes were not uniform and tiny; your eyes were filled with tears, your fingers smelly, and it took you quite a bit too long to cut it down.
2. Avocado Handling - You removing the seed with a knife looked kinda dangerous. And switching between a knife (to cut), a spoon (to spoon out), and a fork (to smash) seem like an avoidable waste of time.
3. Garlic Peeling - We all know it, and you experienced it too. To remove the skin of a garlic clove, you need quite some patience.

Lemon Squeezing - Your hand-squeezed lemons had some juice left in their flesh, and the acid burned a tiny bit on your pretty fingers.

4 Problems, 4 Solutions, 4 New Products

Some sketches and prototypes later, the four designers came up with four new products to solve your problems and to create value for you, aka the user. Full of excitement, they present you their outcome:

1. Hand Pull Food Chopper - Cuts food into tiny cubes by manually pulling on a cord.
2. Avocado Tool - All-In-One Tool to process an Avocado, opening, seed removal, cutting, and smashing.
3. Garlic Peeler - Removes the skin without harming the clove.
4. Lemon Squeezer - Squeezes lemons properly.

So, each of the four designers solved a problem, and each of the products creates value for the user. If we compare cutting onions before and after having the hand pull food chopper, we must acknowledge that a remarkable advancement can be achieved with this product. The same improvement applies to the other solutions as well. But what happens if we zoom out? What happens if we see the bigger picture? Is it going to have an effect on our perception of the created value?

Cooking is a process - And the world is not your kitchen.

How many times did we find ourselves going to the kitchen just to peel some cloves of garlic or to cut a single onion? Usually, peeling & cutting are just some steps in a multi-step cooking process. So as designers, we have to see the whole process, to judge whether a value is created or not.

Let's put ourselves back into the kitchen. Imagine we're preparing the guacamole again. But this time, we're using all our four new kitchen tools.

1. We're cutting the onion with the food chopper. 
2. We're slicing the avocado in halves, removing the seed, and smashing it with the avocado tool. 
3. We're squeezing the lemon with the squeezer. 
4. We're peeling the garlic with the peeler and cutting it in the chopper.
5. We're mixing everything into a bowl, season it with a little salt, and the guacamole is done.

So how many things did you have to use? Take a guess ;)

(1) food chopper, (2) avocado tool, (3) lemon squeezer, (4) garlic peeler, (5) bowl, (6) knife to cut the lemon and half the onion and to remove the stem, (7) cutting board for the knife.

Cooking is a process...

In a superficial one-on-one comparison between the new kitchen tools' created value and the old solution, the new ones will most likely be the winner. But comparing it while considering the whole process, the advantage might change in favor of the old solution.

Cleaning - We all hate it. Cooking is fun - cleaning is not. Every additional kitchen tool used during the process has to be cleaned at the end. The time you save during the cutting process will most likely be equalized by the additional time you need to clean.

Space -  Most kitchen drawers are full, kitchen cabinets filled with Tupperware, and yet we're adding more products. Usually, owning many products leads to chaos, leading to the fact that we do not really know where our tools are stored. 

Handiness - The more tools are included in a process, the more hand movements are needed to switch between them. This destroys flow and costs time.

... - And the world is not our kitchen.

But it is not just about seeing the processes the products are involved in. It is also about seeing the environment where these processes are occurring. Because a product might create value in your kitchen but might cause a problem somewhere else.

Environmental Damage - Regardless of how sustainable the material is of which the tool might be made of. It still uses energy to be built. And most likely, it will be trash one day. As long we haven't solved clean energy production and designed a full material circle, most new products are a potential threat to our environment.

Social Damage - An often overlooked topic is the social damage caused by a new product. Horrific & unhealthy working conditions, child labor, or modern slavery are just some examples. 

(Substitution vs. Addition) - Not all new products are harmful by default. Sometimes a substitution by a more modern alternative could make sense from a sustainability perspective. But in the kitchen tool example, we're not substituting an old product with a new one. We're just adding another product to our guacamole processes.

So what did the guacamole teach us?

The guacamole example teaches us to reflect on more than just the problem we'd like to solve. When designing the next product, we should think about the processes and routines it will be used in. What are people doing before, after, and while they're using our new solution?

We should try to consider the direct and indirect impact it will have on its ecosystem. Is it substituting an existing product? Or is it just another thing lying around in our drawers? Is it produced sustainably? Is it made under fair conditions?

Is the value my product creates for someone worth the problems it might causes somewhere or to someone else?

Not every consequence might be predictable, but taking a step back and challenging ourselves by considering possible scenarios could guide us to design better products. There's no clear answer if a product is worth to be designed or worth to be produced. But even that there's no right or wrong or a 10 rule playbook to lean on, the more questions we ask, the better designers we will become.

Let's design valuable products.

-mnl