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& Notable> Local Designers Speak Out
Local Designers Speak Out on User Experience and Intellectual
Property
The Oregon chapter of the AeA recently sponsored a roundtable
discussion, “Protecting the User Experience: When Look
and Feel is the IP.” The panel included strategic advisor
Chris Tacy of Pop Art, designer Nick Oakley of Intel, IP attorney
Julianne Davis of Nike, and designer Harry McVicker of White
Electronic Designs. The discussion was moderated by Joe Makuch,
who is an IDSA member and an intellectual property attorney
at Marger Johnson & McCollom.
Here's a sampling of the issues the participants grappled
with.
What is design?
o Creating differentiation.
o Making sure the product is
usable to the customer.
o Enabling customers to experience
the product.
o Giving meaning to a technology.
o Creating an incarnation so
that when people touch it seems real - they can grasp and
understand it.
o Design can be embodied in obvious
things that meet the eye -- like the wheel on an Ipod -- just
as much as design can be reflected in something less tangible
-- like a website. Craislist.com and angieslist.com are great
examples.
o It's the entire experience
from the very front end to the very back end - from the experience
of the employees bringing it to market, to the customer seeing
the ad, to shopping, to picking it out, to buying it, to opening
it, to using it for the first time, to the user interface,
to the customer service.
What defines design language?
o It's just a tool that helps
define the species of design.
o It helps us to recognize the
product, to identify and categorize its elements.
o It extends from graphic to
tactile to visual - it covers all the senses.
o It's not just describing the
overall form, it's about the emotional content of what you
want the user to experience.
What makes a good design?
o It must apply to the real world.
It must be usable and appealing to the market.
o In many cases, it solves a
problem.
o It must work within the related
constraints, whether they're about size, energy usage, manufacturing
limitations, price point or whatever.
o Good designers use the constraints
to the benefit of the design.
How are designs created?
o Hard work, research, iterative
testing, reviewing existing designs.
o The process is both solitary
and collaborative.
o Each designer develops his/her
own signature style that's both functional and visual.
o Some enlightened companies
are sending designers off to remote locations - like the jungle
-- for two weeks at a time to get inspired by colors, nature,
people, and the experience. They come back with wild inspirations.
The process grows as an image in their head. It comes together
and evolves.
o Sometimes design is not a flash
of inspiration, though, it's the result of concerted research.
And, it's often not the big ideas, but the little details
that really make the difference.
How is the design function integrated into today's companies?
o For years, design has been
involved at the very end of the product development process.
o Designers have fought hard
to be involved at earlier stages in the process.
o Designs are always developed
within constraints. The struggle is a healthy part of the
process.
o The most design-centric companies
know their brand and their own unique design-functionality
personality so well, that it's easy to decide which products
to focus on and bring to market because all other ideas fall
by the wayside.
What is the value of patenting designs?
o The value is less about the
money you can make and more about protecting an experience.
You must protect it from being copied by a competitor, and
from the resulting experience being compromised.
o Although some companies think
that with short product lifecycles they'd rather put their
money into developing the next generation product than into
patenting, they don't necessarily realize the hazards of not
patenting.
o One hazard is becoming a victim
of foreign knock-offs. Even if the U.S. company has moved
on to other products, the knock-offs being manufactured and
sold overseas still undercut the U.S. company's sales and
market share. And because of their lower quality, knock-offs
also dilute the brand image.
o Companies that decide not to
patent also risk losing ownership over design elements that
carry over into the next generations of products.
o Because the costs of innovating
designs are so much higher than the costs of copying designs,
companies that don't seek protection for their designs may
find that it's tough to justify the cost of creating innovative
designs.
How does the process of patenting designs work?
o It's important to integrate
the people who design with the people who obtain the patents.
Companies who take this seriously are beginning to make the
patent process part of research and development - not part
of the legal department. They all sit and work together from
the beginning.
o Smart companies not only incentivize
employees to file for IP protection, they encourage them to
make note of every element of their inventions that might
be patentable - everything that is unique and protectable.
o Sometimes, a patenting strategy
is specifically designed to combat copyists - to focus on
patenting all elements of design incorporated in products
that will be alluring to the copyists. Patenting the entire
product and all elements of the design is important because
copyists often combine elements of various products into a
single product, claiming it is unique.
o Acknowledging that designs
change so quickly, the U.S. Patent and Trademark office is
making a concerted effort to examine and issue design patents
more quickly than they used to. Ideally, it now takes about
seven months, but it can be up to a year.
o Some companies think that designs
are not worth patenting because they've already moved on to
a new product by the time the patent issues. In reality, if
the company works on patenting as soon as the idea is generated,
the patent can be issued right about the time the product
goes to market.
Article
contributed by Joe Makuch, Intellectual Property Attorney,
Marger Johnson & McCollom - www.techlaw.com
