An artist?s muse is more than a model?she feeds his sensitivity with her mystique. ?A muse?s job is to penetrate the male artist and bring forth a work from the womb of his mind,? says radical feminist Germaine Greer. If we were to superimpose this metaphor in business, designers of all kinds of products, from food to automobiles, can make the customer the muse.
We?ve heard ?customer is king? often enough. Perhaps, the mutual distance one keeps from a monarch has prevented most industrial designers from taking the customer as inspiration. If you, as the designer, consider the customer your muse, your design work will become a piece of art reflecting the latent desire of the customer.
The customer?s contribution will then become real, the caring for the customer?s feeling will form the industrial designer?s mode of working, just the way an artist has a symbiotic relationship with the muse.
This caring factor somehow seems to be at a discount these days. One day at work in London, an English client had expressed interest to experience something Indian. Luckily, an inner hall of Wembley had a Hindi songs? function with singers from India. So I took my client there, where, naturally, the audience was largely Indian; Europeans were just a handful. One thing bothered me a lot here. Appreciative spectators were rushing up to give flower bouquets to the artists on stage, but the artists did not greet them with care or receive the flowers graciously. A few even publicly threw the bouquets behind, instead of delicately putting them in some part of the stage in response to the audience?s affection. These artists totally lacked in the artistic understanding of human behaviour.
Another set who lack a caring attitude are Indian politicians. The more famous they get, the larger becomes the size of the garland they receive. The politician seems to be in a great hurry to take off the huge garland, passing it on to someone behind in less than a second. How terrible the large group of his cadre of followers and voters must feel; even worse are the maker of these fabulous, humongous garlands?the receiver does not appreciate their carefully crafted artistic work.?If politicians considered the crowd and garland maker as their muse, perhaps they would have reacted with more sensitivity instead of just hankering after power, counting heads at the gathering or worrying about whether all the TV channels are covering them.
In the service business, aside from those who interact with customers, the company also has to be sensitive in approach. Travelling in a big-size business-class chair on a domestic flight, the stewardess gives you a cup of tea in a beautiful bone china set, but she carries that in a horrible plastic tray that looks like it?s come from the prison canteen. It?s not her mistake, but that of the management. Those who designed the service looked only at consuming elements, there was total neglect of aesthetic sense in matching the tray with the high-class crockery and cutlery. India?s service industry has a lot to learn on how to embellish a service by taking the customer as the reference of a muse.
In engineering products that are handled by the masses, the engineer-designer has the huge responsibility of creating an incredible ergonomic relationship between the product and all its customer touch and visible points. Ergonomics is human engineering, the study of our relationship with our working environment with special reference to anatomical, physiological and psychological factors. In my training sessions with engineer-designers of different Indian companies, they understand ergonomics in a very technical way; they pay little heed to how human beings love to touch, an instinct that nature provides. You?ll never find sharp edges in trees and human beings?nature?s creatures. This deficiency of not inviting the ergonomic way into industrial design gets reflected in most Indian engineering products like automobiles, consumer electronics and white goods, among others.
The attraction to become an artist?s muse is the artistic, tangible embellishment that the artist bestows in the painting from the inspiration he receives from the muse. In analogy, you as an engineer-designer have to do something to your customer, your muse, so that he or she inspires you to create humanised ergonomics in your design. For example, in every electronic machine there?s technology and material. What?s important is creating an ergonomic distinction that induces a psychological involvement in terms of looks and functions. Your humanised product has to evoke a feeling that?s higher in the customer?s mind than competitor?s products. You will find this sense of humanised ergonomics in products of Apple, Samsung or Sony where the touch, look or features have some distinct psychological appeal, but may not find it in Philips, although it is a very inventive company.?
I?ve observed luxurious residential buildings costing crores of rupees having artistic deficiency in the finish. A 10th-floor balcony had straight metal railings like forging in a factory and floor tiles corrugated in the sunlight. There?s an 18-inch wall to cross over to the balcony from the living room, so the apartment owner put an ad hoc plastic stool as a step for the convenience of elderly persons. When you approach the lift, there?s a two-inch granite step in front which a newcomer invariably stumbles over. Having money to spend randomly does not guarantee a quality lifestyle. Unless an artistic sense seeps into urban and industrialising society at large, these superficially designed living spaces of modern India will deteriorate into garbage after 20 years. Obviously, unlike an artist, the builder felt nothing for the muse, the customer.
Artist and artist?s muse can make powerful contributions to society. Money alone cannot create the social dimension. When Americans come to France, we?ve heard of them enquiring how much it cost to make the Eiffel Tower, Versailles Palace or Louvre Museum. French people laugh and don?t know how to respond.
Shombit Sengupta is an international consultant to top management on differentiating business strategy with execution excellence (www.shiningconsulting.com)