Forget Needs. Design for Wants.

Your thoughts remind me of a problem I’ve always had with the Left in the West (even though I’ve voted in that direction for about 40 years): they always think they know what’s best for you. It’s a leap of faith, to be sure, but we have to let people decide for themselves what’s best for them. Let THEM decide, in other words, through their wants, instead of US deciding what they need.

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This question can get sticky awfully fast. Yes, to have a successful product people must want it, so your design had better appeal to your customer. But I would say that means your marketing should address their wants, not their needs. Marketing can be backed up by design features, but it can only be one of many considerations in design decisions.

As engineers, we have a responsibility to design considering environmental and social impacts that typically don’t have much influence in an individual’s purchasing decision. For example, it’s easy to conceive of a design for a stove that cooks twice as fast, but also uses far more fuel or produces more pollution, and likely costs less. If you’re designing solely for stated wants, what’s to prevent you from choosing that design?

Or, we get into the situation where the designers decide which wants will be met, and which will be ignored. So we will build stoves but not cars, water pumps but not guns. Then we must deal with the question: Why is it OK to want a stove that cooks twice as fast, but not OK to want a car that goes twice as fast? In the North American market, we’ve certainly met the want for all sorts of larger, more powerful, but extremely wasteful vehicles. Was that good design? Perhaps some greater needs should have been considered (well, I suppose the profit need was met for a while, at least.) And if it’s OK to choose between wants, because we think some are better or more valid than others, should we then spend effort in trying to change people’s wants? In North America that would often be called consumer education…

Of course, Practica and other development organizations choose products to develop based on how well they will achieve various benefits, or “needs”, defined by Practica. These needs may not be how you sell your product to the final user, but they are important design criteria - your product will not meet your goals, even if they’re the hottest item since overblown SUVs, unless you achieve these benefits as well.

So, while it’s important to be aware of your customer’s perceived wants, and design with those in mind, I think it’s a dangerous, overly simplistic statement to claim that you design for wants, not needs.

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jackie Reply:
August 18th, 2009 at 4:33 am

I think that this is a very interesting take on the issue. I agree that we need to take a pull approach rather than a push approach regarding our designs, but this approach can be applied to many aspects of the whole project. For example, we can design using the pull approach, as Brendan seems to suggest is the way to go, and try to hide our own perceived needs into that. But, as Selena said, it doesn’t make sense to make a stove that cooks twice as fast but uses twice as much fuel and produces twice as many emissions simply to address the consumer “want” of a faster stove. I like the idea of applying the pull approach to the marketing to make up for what cannot be achieved in the design. Obviously we must take consumer wants into consideration when designing so we’re in the right ball park (there’s no point in building a school that will never be used, for example), but it seems like these wants are more applicable to marketing. If you can design something that fits the needs of society and is marketed to fit the wants of the consumer, then you’ll be well on your way to a successful product.

Then, of course, the wants of society say a great deal about its needs. There is no black and white.

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Brendan Reply:
August 19th, 2009 at 11:01 am

Great thoughts from Selena and Jackie. I’ll get to them when I have a second…

B

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