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Special Report June 12, 2007, 11:56AM EST

Pushing the Boundaries of Design

Innovation often arises out of crossing disciplines and combining technologies. That's the focus of our look at ten cutting-edge designers

by Jessie Scanlon

The Frisbee. The escalator. Reinforced concrete. These very different inventions share one thing in common: They weren't invented exactly—each was borrowed from an unrelated field. The flying toy was inspired by the metal pie tins of the Frisbie Baking Company that college students of yore tossed for fun. The escalator was originally conceived as a Coney Island amusement ride. And reinforced concrete was first patented in 1848 by a French gardener trying to develop a better flowerpot.

These stories of productive serendipity sound almost unbelievable—the urban legends of the inventing world. Even if they are true, you might think they're nothing more than dumb luck—as relevant to business strategy as a winning lottery ticket. Yet such examples are less rare than you might think. In his 2005 book The Ten Faces of Innovation, Ideo general manager Tom Kelley gathered these examples and more recent ones in a chapter on "cross-pollinators," those who "create something new and better through the unexpected juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts."

In the new book, Sketching User Experience (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/18/07, "Why Products Fail"), Microsoft (MSFT) researcher Bill Buxton also hits the theme of cross-pollination, arguing that the field of industrial design was actually established by people who "transferred skills from established disciplines, and adapted them to the demands of product design." He cites Walter Dorwin Teague, founder of the eponymous Seattle-based firm, who was trained as a graphic designer, and Raymond Loewy, whose famous Coca-Cola (KO) bottle followed an early career in fashion illustration and window displays. Both men were key figures in the birth of the field.

Liddle's Recycling

Then, as now, the most exciting work in design happened at the intersection of two or more disciplines, where knowledge from one finds relevance in another. Many designers might say, quite rightly, that they always work at the nexus of disciplines—synthesizing the demands of engineering, business, and human factors, not to mention style. Yet some designers still push beyond the expectations of their profession, breaking down more boundaries.

In the work of Richard Liddle, founder of the British Cohda Design, recycling melts, quite literally, into furniture. At New York's recent International Contemporary Furniture Fair (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/23/07, "Tomorrow's Furniture Today at ICFF"), the designer showed his new RD4 chair, a seat formed of old plastic bottles.

The combining of traditional furniture or industrial design with advanced technologies or manufacturing processes is a fruitful one. A team of product designers and engineers at the San Francisco-based Lunar Design pushed that boundary in its design of the Novint Falcon, a video game controller based on haptic (tactile) technologies, allowing players to experience the sense of touch—and also turning the video game peripheral into a training tool for medical students.

Networking for the Public Good

Similarly, Hilmar Janusson, a vice-president of research and development at prosthetics maker Ossur and lead designer of the company's motion-sensing Proprio Foot, draws on artificial intelligence in the design of Ossur's bionic products. And although he works in a very different medium, Web designer Jeffrey Zeldman's efforts at the forefront of the standards-based design movement—which has pushed for the use of common protocols that make Web sites far more usable—similarly interweaves graphic design and software code.

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