Fork Lift Trucks Company Profile
alongside designers and engineers who regularly get out in the field to visit customers. “I live with the tribe,” she says, “looking at a customers’ environment to understand their culture and systems. I want to discover their unmet needs. “ By observing and talking to operators, Jill
learns about the – often subtle – differences between territories. “Lift truck operators in Europe have more autonomy than in the US,” she says. “It is treated more as a career. We explore the design implications of whether operators feel ownership or not. We look at the implications for the service engineers. A big part is to then make sense of the research with the engineering team, to get people together in a room and identify what’s meaningful and what isn’t.”
QUICKPICK REMOTE
IFOY Award winning QuickPick Remote
DESIGN CENTRE
TSP mast in manufacture
My hosts for a fascinating part of the visit – Crown’s Design Centre – were Jill Lawrence (an anthropologist working on the ‘human’ aspects of Crown products), Philip Swift (an industrial designer by training), and design manager Steve Pulskamp (lead designer for the award-winning WP 3000 Walkie Pallet Truck). You’ll strive hard to find a team more passionate about product design. The room contained a global force of influence and innovation. “The way innovation happens here is extremely unique and certainly unusual for industrial equipment,” says Steve. “In the context of innovation, lift truck design is an interesting area. Crown Design is in the business of user experiences.” “Industrial design used to mean function and appearance,” adds Jill. “Now it’s about solving complex problems, so it’s more about experiences, processes and systems.” Philip says that the design of a lift truck must take into account high levels of interaction in today’s increasingly connected world. That has implications for factors such as the design of the screen. “We have to develop a persona for a product if we want to be serious about interface design.” Model making remains very important - “early and often” says Steve – as is fostering conversations around the prototypes. Jill says this interaction with users or potential users is a starting point, and her anthropological knowledge and training provide a useful perspective
28 September 2014
www.shdlogistics.com
Talking about the design philosophy leading up to the development and launch of QuickPick Remote, Steve says: “We started not with an idea or product, but with deep research into order picking. We essentially lived with order picking operators during entire work day shifts. We documented the operators’ physical movements as well as their comments to understand the day-to-day challenges, and ended up with a ton of data! “We looked at a warehouse layout and traced the travel path. Then we looked at carrying, walking, sitting, picking, changing aisles, data input, resting, loading... The connection was made with a remote control unit moving supermarket trollies – we thought, perhaps we can spin this into a warehouse to solve some of the issues we identified? There was no production objective in mind, before this – we just went out to learn more about the business we’re in. Good design requires good research. Design is no longer about making things beautiful, but rather it’s about making beautiful experiences. Crown Design works in the spirit and context of collaborative innovation. We give customers things they didn’t expect but which they really value. The purpose, of course, is to gain competitive advantage.”
DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
After a very pleasant evening dinner in the Bicycle Museum of America, one of New Bremen’s historic attractions – which at times felt just like that 2006 film ‘Night at the Museum’ – Tim Quellhorst, SVP with
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