The students in the Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course are now interacting with guest lecturers, reading and discussing chapters of my book, and submitting examples of good and bad products on the topics of the book, beginning with Chapter 4, Human Fit.
Recent Guest Lecturers were Dave Franchino, the President of Design Concepts, Inc, and Matt Lonoci, Founder and President of Matteo. Franchino founded very successful design firm in Wisconsin after an equally successful career at General Motors, and is one of the more eloquent and thoughtful designers around. Lonoci, after briefly working in the financial arena, founded a company that makes high quality fabric products, in particular bedding. He is not only a fascinating story teller about quality in a product area that stdents in the class are typically not familiar with, but also a strong proponent of local manufacturing and treating employees well.
A word about the student examples. At the end of the quarter there will be presentations on each of the book topics, beginning with Chapter 4. The first three chapters have been read and thoroughly discussed, but because of the time constraints of the class, the students will only submit examples for chapters 4 through 9. Students will be giving more formal presentations in the form of media-based cases at the end of the quarter. There will be four presentations on each topic by groups of four students. As part of their preparation, these groups will read all of the student examples on their topic, evaluate them, and prepare summaries.
The best way I can describe the student work is to show you examples by linking you to four pages concerning human fit. The first one is an overview from one of the student groups on the concerns appearing in the student examples of good and bad human fit. The second contains three examples considered to show good and bad human fit (students were limited to a paragraph on each example). The third a list of products considered good by the students of last year's class, and the fourth a list of the those displaying bad human fit by them. I include last year's because I have not yet compiled the overall lists for the 2012 class.
Of course, I would expect different populations to submit different types of products. Perhaps home owners would nominate more appliances, pieces of furniture, and yard equipment, and older people might have more concern for comfort and more difficulty in seeing tiny print from a distance and folding their bodies into small volumes. And incidentally, we told last year's class not to include Apple products, and software of any sort, because they are so central to the life of students that they would have dominated the lists. Of course some of them disobeyed us.
The reason for these exercises is to cause the students to do some hard thinking about issues of quality—in particular to practice applying the material in the book and other readings, and that they have picked up by interacting with the lecturers.
Recent Comments