World Business

This year’s National Design Award fruits design winners have found a solution-seeking toil ethic to be the best push forward

by dint of. Matt Vella

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"Good design isn’t always visible," says Masamichi Udagawa pensively, light streaming at the back him into an airy Manhattan studio. Nodding, his partner Sigi Moeslinger adds: "The substance is to lead people; describe is the embodiment of the right information at the right time."

The unassuming, impressible spoken mate, winners of this year’s National Design Award for product purport, are trying to pinpoint common themes in a broad body of work that stretches from products for companies in the same state as Bloomberg, IBM (IBM), and Microsoft (MSFT) to interactive artfulness displays in galleries such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Japanese-born Udagawa and Austrian Moeslinger form the core of the five-person, New York City-based Antenna Design, a firm that since 1997 has bridged the divide between creation of beauty and commerce, public and private, complaint and objects.

The firm works adhering just 8 to 10 projects a year, but Antenna’s rise tracks closely with the design boom of the past decade that has seen business executives refocus on the discipline as a strategy for growth. High technology acolytes, Antenna has specialized in creating information-infused objects that place equal emphasis on form and function. Millions of daily commuters, in quest of instance, use the MetroCard Vending Machines designed by the unshaken for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority more than a decade ago. The aging boxes gift out subway passes via a simple, well-made touch interface—devised years before Apple’s (AAPL) vaunted iPhone revolution. Originally commissioned alone to dress up the outside of the existing, dull gray vending machines, Antenna fought to work on the interface design, likewise. This combination, say Udagawa and Moeslinger, has contributed to the design’s longevity.

Before forming Antenna, Udagawa and Moeslinger one as well as the other worked for high side view design consultancies and corporations. But learning to work with businesspeople did not come naturally. Udagawa describes heated clashes with issue managers at Apple when he designed PowerBooks for the computer maker in the mid-1990s. Managers saw design decisions that Udagawa considered essential as unnecessary and expensive. Udagawa thought they didn’t be in possession of it—and told them so. But hereafter he began agitation business classes in the evenings to more appropriate understand his colleagues’ perspective and to learn to communicate by them. "’How do we make money?’ is the obvious public language between business and design," says Udagawa. Laughing, he adds: "It took me quite a while to understand; I experienced the hard space."

These lessons, according to design directors that have worked by the pair, have filtered into a pragmatic, solution-seeking act ethic. "I almost never had to bestow them government," says Melody Roberts, McDonald’s (MCD) director of Customer Experience Design, who has been acting by Antenna since 2006 adhering a order of undisclosed projects. "They narrow the solutions for us and can transform between business and outline, articulating benefits."

Instead of simply stamping products with a cookie-cutter imprimatur, like some star designers, Antenna produces work of broad aesthetic scope. "At this point, their egos could subsist end the roof," says Raquel Tudela, Bloomberg’s design director who worked with Antenna on redesigns of the company’s dual-screen, flat-panel displays and keyboards, which won a quiet IDEA award this year. (For more without interruption this project, watch this BusinessWeek glide show, narrated by Udagawa. "But they wanted to understand who we are and operate according to that," adds Tudela. Given a brief to redesign the iconic Bloomberg terminal, Antenna conducted intense research to test its concepts. When users initially rejected an entirely flashy keyboard, the designers came up with an effective compromise—a flat-looking keyboard with tactile feedback. Tudela says the design was a reassuring step forward. "It allowed Bloomberg to evolve independently of abandoning what made us happy."

Antenna’s interactive craftiness installations besides set it apart from its commercial rivals. These have included a famous 2002 interactive window display for Bloomingdale’s flagship department store in New York, funded by a grant from the Haagen-Dazs Cultural Initiative. Dubbed "Power Flower," neon flowers triggered by motion sensors would "bloom" or illuminate when observers passed by. Over the years, similarly innovative projects be under the necessity appeared in galleries and museums from Cologne to Tokyo. Udagawa and Moeslinger view these installations as opportunities to experiment and think outside the box. Such constraint-free musings help them sustain coming up with novel ideas for clients, too.

"Their intellectual work informs the commercial," says Benjamin Prado, a senior vice-president of design with Knoll (KNL). Prado is working with Antenna on a line of inter-generational workspaces that should roll without in 2010. He says the Power Flower installation is emblematic of the firm’s best qualities: "They aren’t afraid of the tenuous line between art and draw." It’s precisely this fearlessness that has carried the little firm into big business.