Back to the Stanford Good Products Bad Products course (ME 314)

Since I have written a post about it, the course has had two more guest speakers, Kirk Hawkins, the co-founder of ICON Aircraft, and David Franchino, the head of Design Concepts. The web-site for ICON is here, and that for Design Concepts is here.  You can also find information on Hawkins and Franchino on the web. The students have also been viewing the discovery videos made by various student teams, which are oriented toward gaining new and hopefully surprising insights into product quality.  The assignment for these videos is here.

 Readings have included one from Diane Ackerman’s book Natural History of the Senses, and Chapter 6 from my Good Products, Bad Products book.  If you are not taking the course and have not read the book, the Chapter title is Products, Emotions, and Needs — Love, Hate, or Blah.  The sub sections are How Emotions Play a Role, the Complexity of Human Enotions, Diversity in Emotional Responses, The Mechanisms of Emotion, Human Needs, Needs and Emotions, and Need Finding,

 Emotion is obviously key to the subject matter of the course, although as I explain in the book, it is difficult to discuss in words and rigorously analyze. It is, after all, about feelings, and how do you describe or measure what it feels like to be disgusted, anxious, or joyous?  I at one time considered beginning the book with the topic of emotion, but decided that I would expend too much energy explaining why I had written a book on emotion to some of my colleagues in the Engineering School. But believe it, the emotional response to a product is a major component of quality.

 Diane Ackerman’s book uses written descriptions of experiences to explain the senses, as do many good writers explain emotions.  One of my favorite books, which indirectly treats emotion, is Making Comics, by Scott McCloud (Harper Collins, 2006, New York, NY).  The author draws and writes comics and books, and is an expert on comics,  According to the back cover, Sin City creator Frank Miller called him "just about the smartest guy in comics". The book utilizes a comic-book  approach to explaining them.  In the process, the reader necessarily receives an insight to how emotions are dealt with in comics.  The book will also make you better understand graphic novels and wonder why you never followed your early instinct to draw and write comics. More details can be seen by clicking on the cover icon on the right.