Smart Design
American industrial design company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Smart Design is a design consultancy based in New York City.[1] Smart was founded in 1980 by industrial designers Davin Stowell, Tom Dair, Tucker Viemeister, and Tamara Thomsen, with Stowell as CEO.[2][3][4] The firm has been a prominent presence in the design industry since the late 1980s, as design competency increasingly came to be seen as "key to industrial competitiveness".[5][6][7]
| |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Design firm, industrial design, interaction design, branding |
| Founded | 1980 |
| Founder | Davin Stowell |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Davin Stowell, Richard Whitehall, Tucker Fort |
| Website | smartdesignworldwide |
In addition to its NYC headquarters, the company has at various times had offices in San Francisco, Barcelona, and London, and has worked with clients including HP, Johnson & Johnson, Gillette, BBVA, PepsiCo's Gatorade, and Pyrex.[8][9] In 2012, the company worked with the City's Taxi and Limousine Commission to redesign NYC's iconic taxis as part of a collaboration with Nissan titled the Taxi of Tomorrow,[10][11][12] and also developed the now ubiquitous logo and decals found on the city's yellow taxis and green boro taxis.[13][14]
The firm is best known for its design of the original Oxo Good Grips line in 1989, and longstanding relationship with Oxo, which continues to this day.[15] The Good Grips potato peeler, the first in what would become a large range, was designed with OXO founder Sam Faber's wife Betsy in mind, who suffered from Arthritis.[16][17][18][19][20] The Good Grips range of products is often cited as an archetypal example of an approach to industrial design involving user-centered prototyping and iteration, and where considerations of human factors and accessibility make a product better for all users.[21][22][23][24] The Good Grips line is represented in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and New York's Museum of Modern Art.[25]
In 2010, the company won the National Design Award for product design from the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt.[26]
Smart Design helped popularize design thinking alongside other major design firms. Smart design helped shift design thinking into the mainstream business world by facilitating co-creation and participatory design. Design thinking is commonly visualized as an iterative series of five major stages. [27] While the stages are simple enough, the adaptive expertise required to choose the right inflection points and appropriate next stage is a high-order intellectual activity that requires practice and is learnable. [27] Design thinking asserts that individuals and teams have the ability to build their innovative capacity through various tools and methods, no matter their predispositions to creativity and innovation. [28] The contexts of design thinking attempt to alter the design process towards more innovative ideas. [28] Design thinking is too often misconstrued as an impervious remedy for corporate ill. [29] But Smart design believes that to realize the full value of design, we need to break out of the rigid status quo and embrace rapid, iterative cycles. [29]