 Welcome to this episode of Door Hardware Nerds. I'm your host, Mia Merrill. Today we're going to be doing a special interview on design and I have two guests with me. Can you please introduce yourselves? So my name is Paela Munoz. I am the Global Head of Product Design. I'm based in Sweden in our headquarters in Stockholm. And my name is Joe Marton. I'm the Senior Manager of Industrial Design for North America. I'm headquartered here in New Haven, Connecticut. And I have a small team of industrial designers here to help support our efforts. Perfect, well, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so you both have design in your title. Can you tell me what the difference in your roles is? Yes. So I am based in Sweden working with all the divisions in my subloy, which means all the brands and all the colleagues worldwide. And I work with our businesses in North America to help all of the different groups develop the best products in our region. So how can design help a company get to market faster with their products? I mean, there are actually many ways that design can do that. The first is to help to align the company, their strategy with what our end users and our customers are looking for. So, although we may not be doing a lot of the research directly, we help to ask questions about what people's needs are. And then we take that feedback combined with our capabilities for manufacturing to create a solution, again, that will be appealing and profitable for the company. And just understanding the needs makes everything more simple, not only for us working with design, but with the teams working with the product development and the product management. So as long as we understand customer needs, everything is smooth and design is a part of that. Absolutely. Okay, so what skills would a designer need to bring to an organization? So typically, somebody who has been to a school for industrial design has learned about mechanical systems, how machines work, how to design those things, similar to an engineer, but maybe a little bit with a less focus on all of the physics and so forth. But that's also combined with the ability to do some market research, the ability to create illustrations and designs, both manually with paper, but also using digital formats like touchscreens and illustrations. And CAD systems to conceptualize solutions to those problems. So again, a student will come to us or a new employee would have to be able to visualize new ideas, communicate those new ideas, and be able to collaborate with engineers and teams within the company to create a focused solutions. A designer can be involved in many aspects of product development. Can you give an idea of some of those things? The designer will collaborate with a team of engineers to understand like our capabilities are the limitations of a system. In the case of hardware, there are a whole set of government regulations about how something must be designed for the safety of all of our community. So a designer will take their understanding of the aesthetic, okay, as well as the needs of these mechanical legal systems and combine those together. And in a company like Asa Abloy and in all of our brands, the designer also needs to consider how to apply our brands in a consistent way so that when people do have a positive experience with our products, they can then associate them with our brands. Which is very, very important when it comes to customer experience. So understanding the brand, what the brand stands for and understanding even how to translate an idea to, for example, a physical product with all what it means, the legal requirements, but also the needs from a customer wanting to have something either appealing, functional or both, it's very, very important. Can you give an example of a time where a company didn't value design properly? I think as a designer, that seems to be the way we feel a lot. But in reality, design is largely about compromise. You're trying to create the best solution that you can in the context of these other limitations. And so rather than give you an specific example, I'd rather say that an effective design team tries to cut the best compromise that satisfies the consumer desires, needs, legal requirements, maybe even excites them about that new product and its association with the brand, but that also leverages our strengths as a company in our manufacturing capabilities in the technical nuance of digital communication and things that help to achieve our goals. I think as a designer, we need to know that we have deep expertise in creating a user experience, but that we all, there are many people with deep expertise that we need to leverage in order to be successful and to create the best solution. And I think that sometimes people value design, but they are not realizing that it's design they are valuing because there is not an understanding about what design is. That's true. And as to follow up on this, usually when things are very well designed, they actually kind of disappear. Exactly. You don't recognize design until it's bad and until you've had a negative experience. If things just work well, you're just a happy customer. And depending on who is talking about a product, design can get other names, many names. It could be something that is engineered or it could be something that, because design, first of all, design is not only the aspects. Design is everything related to a product, a product touch point in how the customer or the user perceives that. That's right. Design is about the user connection to our company and in all levels. And I should mention that, although we're talking about industrial design today, design is executed in many, many ways, even at an artistic point of view in our graphic communications and print and online exercises like this today, Mia, with our video capabilities, those are all things that need to be, we need to be thoughtful in how we execute them and to the best of our ability, kind of be aligned in speaking with one voice as a company so that when we execute something with excellence, we're doing it together. Well, thank you both for coming on today. If you wanna see examples of design, I will put a link below for the Good Design Studio. I'm also going to include links for Asa Aboy Global, as well as some Asa Aboy local sites and some industrial design links if you wanna learn more, if you're curious about what you've heard today. Thanks for watching.