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JUNE 19, 2006 
Sam Lucente: The Ethnographer Among the paintings of Van Gogh and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection in New York City sits the work of an artist named Sam Lucente. It is IBM's Leapfrog computer, which Lucente co-designed with Richard Sapper in 1993. Lucente has been an artist since early childhood. At 5, he was taking adult drawing classes at the Dayton Art Institute, training his eyes to observe the people and world around him. Ponytailed, soft-spoken, and always clad in midnight blue or black, Lucente is still an artist. But now he also leads the turnaround in design at Hewlett-Packard. For Lucente, the ethnographer, consumer observation has been a big route out of HP's dilemma. Until recently, HP's merger with Compaq Computer had produced an unintegrated company with hundreds of isolated businesses and thousands of products. To help build a unified, creative culture and reconnect with HP's customers, Lucente launched a major research project. He involved members from all departments -- design, marketing, R&D, even outside consultants -- to immerse themselves in the lives and homes of 28 families around the world. The goal was to make sure that HP was "living and breathing with the customer," Lucente says. What the trips showed was that families across the globe were deluged with information from their phones, computer screens, cameras, and social networking connections. They were lost, with no idea how to navigate through the information. To Lucente, the obvious answer was a steering wheel. Lucente's design team came up with Q control. This standardized start-button-cum-steering-wheel, which looks like a backwards Q, is in the process of being attached to all of HP's products. Not unlike the dial on an iPod, it's intuitive and simple to use. It requires no owner's manual. It has a quick and dirty "savior" button so consumers can go back. Lucente is effective inside HP because he doesn't "talk design." Rather, he speaks the language of business. Observing how people work, socialize, eat, cook, even sleep shows Lucente where the gaps are: what people need and what they don't have. He then maps out these findings on an algorithm-enhanced database that identifies which areas present the biggest opportunities. He made the case for Q control by showing the financial and marketing benefits of using a common design device that could be replicated across all of HP's products. Next up for Lucente: helping people organize a personal library of digital photos. Lucente plans to do for photos what Steve Jobs did for music.  Sam LucenteVP, Design
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