ZeroMQ

Trash-Oriented Design

The most popular design process in large businesses seems to be Trash-Oriented Design, or TOD. TOD feeds off the belief that all we need to make money are great ideas. It’s tenacious nonsense, but a powerful crutch for people who lack imagination. The theory goes that ideas are rare, so the trick is to capture them. It’s like nonmusicians being awed by a guitar player, not realizing that great talent is so cheap it literally plays on the streets for coins.

The main output of TOD is expensive “ideation”: concepts, design documents, and products that go straight into the trash can. It works as follows:

• The Creative People come up with long lists of “we could do X and Y.” I’ve seen endlessly detailed lists of all the amazing things a product could do. We’ve all been guilty of this. Once the creative work of idea generation has happened, it’s just a matter of execution, of course.

• So, the managers and their consultants pass their brilliant ideas to designers, who create acres of preciously refined design documents. The designers take the tens of ideas the managers came up with, and turn them into hundreds of world-changing designs.

• These designs get given to engineers, who scratch their heads and wonder who the heck came up with such nonsense. They start to argue back, but the designs come from up high, and really, it’s not up to engineers to argue with creative people and expensive consultants.

• So the engineers creep back to their cubicles, humiliated ...