A Visit to the Design Center at Delta Faucets Headquarters in Indianapolis
20 August 2010
“The Right Stuff”
Impressions. Patterns. Images. Passions.
I wanted to start this blog in a different manner, because today I want to go into a different realm altogether, that of the human mind, or more specifically, the creative human mind. One of the things people ask writers is where do you get your ideas, the thought being, I suppose, that if others just had the idea they would be able to write things just as fine. But, really, there is so much more to it than that. I guess the wise guy response would be something like, “OK, try this. Man steals a loaf of bread, and a cop chases him for twenty years. Go with it.” And that’s my point. What is important about Les Miserables is not the idea, but what Victor Hugo did with it. The idea does not define ANY product, be it story, woodworking project or anything else one might care to consider. All an idea is. is an idea. What matters most is how one develops the idea, and next week we will get into that, because the trip to Delta Faucet Headquarters in Indianapolis was an eye opener in so many ways. But for now I would like to focus only on the idea.
So, where do you go to get your ideas? Well, in the case of Judd Lord, the Director of Industrial Design at Delta Faucets, ideas are something he works with all the time. But what is even more important than the man’s ideas, I think, is the enthusiasm he has for them and the passion that drives him. Some of the people who have read these blogs have commented on the passion in them, and I am always flattered when I hear such things, but really, meeting someone like Judd was very humbling. This guy makes me look like a cigar store Indian: stiff, tall, and wooden.
Even looking at the man’s title in cold type, as I’m doing now, makes him seem like an conservative old man (actually, now that I think about it, I’m old-but not conservative!), but the truth is he’s a young man who’s worked at Delta Faucets some sixteen or seventeen years. And to tell you the truth, I think he must have started when he was TEN! This man is a human dynamo, he really is. Hearing him speak last week at the Media Day at Delta Faucets in Indiana was to me the absolute highlight of the trip.
So, with that, let’s get into this. I told you I can’t say where ideas come from, and I really can’t, but I now know some of what the creative people at Delta Faucets do to generate their ideas. They begin with the beginning, but also with the ending. If someone gets a bang-up idea for a faucet and whips that baby out on a napkin, it will take a bare minimum of eighteen months for that design to actually hit the marketplace. And what will the world look like in eighteen months? Specifically, what sort of styles and trends will then abound, because if this design is to be worthy of the innovation that is so much of what drives design at Delta Faucets, then the likelihood is large that it will be on the cutting edge. And anytime you do something like that, you run the risk of being either ahead of people’s tastes, or worse, behind them. And how in the world is anyone going to predict something like that?
Well, as it turns out, there is a huge amount of analysis that is done, and not just in current sales. All that does is tell you what’s hot today. The people at Delta want to know what’s going to be hot eighteen months or two years from now. To do this they go to absolutely extraordinary lengths to break down the populace into five major design areas and to then analyze the things these five groups like and dislike. More than that, they try to get a sense of what these people will like in the future, because that’s the entire point of that particular exercise. Along with this they make several trips to Europe every year, not to visit plumbing exhibits, but to get a feel for what is happening in Europe, because Europe often leads the way in modern design.
But all that analysis is, in the end, only analysis, a looking at trends and possibilities. It’s as scientific as any crystal ball gazing can possibly be, I suppose, but in the end, it is still trying to see what will happen in the future. And in the end, it is not the principal driver of the designs Delta has come up with over the years. For that they have people like Judd.
At the end of his presentation Judd took us on a tour of the I3 Design Studio, a place that can only be described as the sanctum sanctorum of ideas, a place for dreams. Judd took us up a flight of stairs, and we saw a sitting-area type room. It was a room with a lot of comfortable chairs and some shelving where they displayed old faucet mockups in clay. Spread out on these shelves, too, were: colors, materials, shapes, forms, textures, fabrics, woods, clays, porcelains. They have clearly gathered these items to inspire, to evoke emotions and new design concepts. There was also a table and a kitchen area, and I found myself thinking that there might well be some food and beer in the late hours when the design team is wrestling with a particularly difficult design.
This room, though, was really just an antechamber, and when I say that, I’m thinking of that marvelous picture of Howard Carter squatting in the antechamber of King Tut’s tomb and peering into the actual burial chamber. But beyond this sitting room was what appeared, at first glance, to be more of the same old same old. It was one of those large floors with room dividers to make cubicles, the kind of place where people go each day to die a little in corporate America. But not so, I am happy to report, not so at all. In fact, those dividers are not dividers at all; they’re connectors.
In explaining these dividers to us, Judd first pointed out that they are actually on wheels, and that they don’t call them dividers, because that’s not what they are. They call them parasails, because they use them to soar. In actual practice, they use magnets to fasten drawings, thoughts, and any and all paraphernalia that one may associate with a faucet design to the divider
-sorry, parasail-walls as they develop their concepts. But at some point in the process, a team member may feel the need of another team member’s contribution, and at that point, they simply wheel the parasail down the way and meet with the other person or persons. It’s an avenue for impromptu jam sessions, which is the very essence of jazz, but also of creative ventures that require, as this surely does, the collaboration of others.
The excitement in this room and this company and in our tour guide Judd Lord, who almost vibrated with it, was absolutely palpable. He told us that when he started at Delta, his first thought was, “how exciting can it be,” but that within a matter of days he knew that the answer was TONS, and that he’d found his calling. Any artist creates for the satisfaction it gives him, for the sheer joy of creating something from nothing, from having an idea and chasing, chasing, chasing it until one has a finished product that pops, that sings. How exciting is it to do something like that? Really, even for a man who has worked with words all his life, the feeling is just damned near indescribable. But add to that one element, the possibility of creating for the ages, and then you know why Judd Lord has the energy he has. What he and his design team at Delta are doing is nothing short of creating a work of art that people touch countless times a day, and he gets to help create it, to make art that can live forever. Sam Spade had it right in the last line of “The Maltese Falcon,” you know. “It’s the stuff dreams are made of.”
Joseph
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One Response to “A Visit to the Design Center at Delta Faucets Headquarters in Indianapolis”
August 20th, 2010 at 8:46 AM
But Joseph, you left out the most important reason that these folks can actually do what they do – they have really good coffee!
The Delta I3 Design Center really was a very interesting part of our tour. It was great to see how the products go from conceptual sketches to mock-ups to prototypes. Judd and the team do a terrific job – and it looks like they have lots of fun.
Joe