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august 26, 2018 - Whirlpool

Whirlpool Creating a Winning Vision Through Storytelling

Aug 23, 2018 | Our People

What exactly is an industrial designer?

“Generally people don’t know what that means,” said Whirlpool Corporation Global Brands #design Manager Jason Tippetts. “An industrial designer has a Fine Arts background in basic #design, sculpture, model-making, usability, color theory, and some graphic #design,” he explained, “in addition to manufacturing, marketing, and engineering training as well.”

Industrial designers straddle the space between #design, engineering and marketing—looking at a product through the lens of the consumer. “In our training a lot is based on observing people’s behavior, needs, usability and interaction, which informs an understanding of the consumer and lets us be the advocate for the consumer experience in the product development process,” said Tippetts.

Telling a Good Story

“You’ve got to have a vision and a story to begin with in order to sell,” said Tippetts. “It is up to our cross-disciplinary teams to create a vision and a story. People get inspired because the stories are effective. They’re powerful. When they feel an emotional connection to a story, they’re going to use it.”

When telling these stories, designers use the home as a filter to establish how we as a company want to integrate appliances into consumers’ homes and remove chores from their lives. But there’s more to it than that, said Tippetts. “We also want to make the products more relatable; more humanized if you will. Those tenets drive a lot of our decisions, no matter what category, no matter what brand. Having a set of beliefs really helps our designers focus, and it also helps sell our philosophy to the industry.”

Thinking Like a Consumer

The #design team’s empathy for the consumer goes deeper than just how a product is used. It can filter all the way down to an emotional level. “It’s not only about creating a beautiful object,” said Tippetts. “It’s about bringing #design to everyday problems in a way that industry can leverage beautifully. The business of it is just as important as the art of it. Also, that #design philosophy can be applied to both marketing and engineering by understanding how form, proportion and interaction affect whether or not people will buy a product.”

Ideally, by trying to work with cross disciplinary teams, designers gather several points of view. “We connect the dots between what we observe, what people want, and what we can make,” Tippetts says. “Because of this #design skill set, we use the same methods employed to empathize with the consumer to understand an engineer (what we can make) or with marketing (what people want).”



Further information in the press release to download