Design Planning

Over the past year, there’s been no shortage of press surrounding Peter Arnell’s failings with the Tropicana and Gatorade brand redesigns at Pepsi.  I just read Fast Company’s Masters of Design feature on David Butler, head of design at Coke, and was impressed by the stark contrast he represents to Arnell’s approach. David Butler’s philosophy (not to mention personality) certainly sounds markedly different from Arnell’s “purveyor of pop culture” approach which found him on a “five-week world tour of trendy design houses” as a major source of inspiration for the Pepsi assignments:

“It’s great that when David speaks, he doesn’t speak in the language of design,” says Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola’s global marketing chief. When he talks to folks on the manufacturing side, to the bottlers, to the retailers, Butler’s message, Tripodi says, “is very simple: Here’s what I’m going to do to help you sell more stuff.”

Contrast that with his counterpart, Pepsi’s design consultant, Peter Arnell, who titillated the blogosphere last spring with a 27-page memo he wrote called “Breathtaking,” defending his new logo design. He cited inspiration from da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to his Vitruvian Man, and described the “gravitational pull” of a can of Pepsi on a supermarket shelf. That was before he compared his genius at creating a 3-D Super Bowl ad to Thomas Edison’s invention of motion pictures. Many designers were mortified, fearing Arnell had discredited the whole tribe with his claptrap.

In many ways, Butler is the anti-Arnell, a first-class designer who shuns the latest trendspeak. “I read all the journals. I love design theory. I’m a junkie for that stuff. But that’s at home,” he says. “At work, I don’t use the phrase ‘design thinking.’ Here, it’s about creating more value. How do we sell more of something? How do we improve the experience to make more money and create a sustainable planet?”

David Butler is inspired by design theory and pop culture as much as the next designer, but his real drive comes from approaching big problems through systems thinking:

[Butler's experience at Studio Archteype] and a run-in with Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization changed the way Butler thought about design. He saw how systems thinking could be applied in a more holistic way. In the past, he says, design had been focused on straightforward problems: Come up with a drinking vessel, say. But now it was being asked to solve multipronged problems: How do we get clean drinking water? “We’re moving from linear problems to wicked problems,” he says, and the old default solution — hire a rock-star designer — no longer works. “The model of a master of design creating that magical object that is going to change the business is an old way of thinking. I can’t use it to work on wicked problems. I need to have capability internally.”

Side note: This trajectory was pioneered by Esslinger at frog design and is a major focus of his new book, A Fine Line: