inSTUDIO
Karten Design

Stuart Karten, principal of product innovation consultancy Karten Design, is full of focused and forward-thinking energy. He is thoughtful, yet confident about the philosophy and approach around which his 25-person team executes projects. His is a framework that places high value on research driven, paradigm shifting and company building design: values that Karten believes are at once central to his team’s work and set them apart. With a focus on melding functionality and aesthetics, Karten and his team have been creating products that maximize functionality and create desire for their users. In essence, Karten Design believes in creating positive experiences between people and products.

Karten Design is unique in more than just its design approach. Karten often infuses fun into the work environment to maintain a strong creative energy, running concept project days and arranging inspirational outings for his office to visit the beach or museum exhibits. The office environment reflects the company’s emphasis on creativity. Lime green accents, an array of amusing light fixtures and rounded, semi-opaque partitions add character to the office. Workstations are situated close to one another to encourage collaboration; the library is stocked with an array of magazines and books for creative inspiration; past products are arranged at table-height throughout the office to be picked up, touched and played with; and staff are encouraged to pin up interesting finds in the sample library. The emphasis on inspirational elements seems to engage creativity and produce unexpected results: none of Karten Design’s products are dull or ordinary. Rather, they are engaging, forward thinking objects that are clearly defined and thoughtfully developed.

-Kana Hammon

I noticed that your web site promotes three facets of your company: research driven, paradigm shifting and company building. Tell me about these three different areas of your work. To what extent do they work together?

Those three terms represent the value that Karten Design brings to our clients. They aren’t necessarily what we do, but why we do it. We believe that successful products need to take into account the needs and desires of the people who use them. That’s why we are Research Driven. Every project that we do involves some amount of research. The depth of the research varies, but we’re interested in learning about the people who are going to be the users of the product. Paradigm Shifting refers to the innovative, creative element that we bring to the table. We believe that design has the power to change, and relish the opportunity to redefine a product category or industry. Finally, we believe that good design will lead to market leadership. Company Building is the net result of our efforts. If we do our job right, we are going to help our clients grow and be financially successful.

Most of your projects are in two industries: healthcare products and consumer electronics. How did you begin these areas of focus?

Before I started the firm, I had previously worked in healthcare, developing medical devices for Baxter and Gould Medical, which gave me knowledge of the industry. Healthcare represents approximately 30% of the work that we do. It’s work we feel good about because we’re helping people save lives and improving peoples’ ability to heal. Because we’re based in Southern California, the next biggest industry [after entertainment] is healthcare.  As for consumer electronics, we became experts at designing products that created emotional connections with their users. Consumer electronics put advanced technology into the hands of many people. We enjoy the task of commercializing new technology, and humanizing technology by reconciling it with people’s needs. 

Explain what it means to reconcile technology with needs.

Just because somebody develops a specific technology doesn’t mean that it’s being presented in a way that people can actually connect with it, and that they get it and they could use it. One of our roles is packaging that technology in a way that makes it meaningful to the end user.

How would you describe your research approach?

In any product, there are multiple people engaged. Let’s take our Zyliss kitchen tongs, for example. A cook will most likely be the end user. For us, it’s all about finding that person who is using those kind of adjacent tools, and spending time with them. We perform what we call contextual inquiries, where we’ll go to a kitchen and interview the respondent and ask them about how they cook, what do they like to cook, what problems do they have with cooking. Another technique we use is ethnography, where we observe end users over an extended period of time. We watch them cook multiple meals throughout the day, and we note if they did or didn’t use tongs, and we extract information from there.

Once all of the research data is collected, the next step is analysis. We have multiple tools that we use to examine the research and find insights that can inspire design. These insights are developed into what we call “Design Drivers” -- a driving mantra that a designer could use to inspire meaningful concepts as (s)he puts pencil to paper. For example, a Design Driver for the bag clips could be “let’s create a way so that people don’t lose their bag clips in their junk drawers.” Then a designer can take that and start with, “that means we can anchor them together,” and generate concepts.

When a client comes to you with a project, how do they present the problem?

Broadly speaking, our clients are either looking for functional innovation or aesthetic innovation, or some combination of the two. Clients interested in aesthetic innovation come to us wanting to address a product’s styling and appearance. We’re trying to create forms and colors and materials and finishes that people look at and think, “I want that.” On the other end of the spectrum, functional innovation involves delivering something that no one has ever developed before. We’re redefining product categories, or creating new features and functions that meet consumers’ needs and desires in ways that no other product on the market has accomplished. Clients come to us with a variety of challenges, but we believe both functional and aesthetic innovation is really the winning combo.

Tell me about the Epidermits toy.

Epidermits is a great conversation starter!

We often do our own, in-house conceptual projects. It’s a great way for us to stretch our creative muscles. These projects don’t have cost or production constraints. We start by writing a brief for the project, and then we’ll dedicate a Friday to work on it. Often, we’ll purposely create some creative friction by teaming up people with different strengths. They have to design, execute and present their concept at the end of the day. Epidermits started from a brief that said, “Your goal is to develop an example of technology gone bad.”

Epidermits is inspired by emerging capabilities in genetic engineering. A kid would scrape the inside of his cheek, send a DNA sample into the Epidermits company, and they grow a critter and deliver it back to the kid who is in charge of keeping it alive. It’s like a freakish Tomagatchi. The idea is that you do everything to it that you might not want to do to yourself, from coloring your hair, to tattooing, to piercing. Of course, we made it look like “something gone wrong.” Several months after we publicized it, the Museum of Modern Art was doing a show, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” which focused on designers’ responsibility in implementing new technologies. The curator saw our Epidermits and said, “I love this thing! Can you make a model?” I said, “Sure. We’re in Hollywood, we can do that kind of stuff.” Now it lives as part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art.

Why is fun important for your work environment?

In essence, fun is the ability to let your guard down and actually laugh and have the ability to take away preconceived notions. I also think creativity is born out of fun. It’s important to me to foster an environment where people feel safe to throw ideas out there, and not feel like they’re going to be judged. I’ve always thought we’re really lucky to be in a business where people pay us to be creative. We often invite clients to come have fun with us and engage in the creative process collaboratively.

Your work combines areas like branding, product development, design and market research, in product categories as wide-ranging as hearing aids, paintball helmets and cooking tongs. How do you connect all of these different would-be specializations? What do you think is the value of interdisciplinary work?

One unique thing about Karten Design is a term that we’ve adopted called “marbling.” It came from the idea of a marble cake, where all of the flavors meld together into a delicious, homogeneous dessert. Our “flavors” at Karten Design include design strategy and research, industrial design, and engineering. In a worst-case scenario, these disciplines would all work independently and the project would be passed along progressively from one department to the next. Insights and empathy would likely be diminished as a project passed through different hands. But the way we work, each project team has a researcher, a designer and an engineer, and they’re working together. Everyone is looking at a project through their own lens, bringing diverse expertise from sociology, anthropology, product design, business management and engineering. Working in this marbled fashion leads to more creative, human centered and ultimately implementable solutions.