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Smart Design is a design consultancy based in New York City.[1] Smart was founded in 1980 by industrial designers Davin Stowell, Tom Dair, Tucker Viemeister, and Tamara Thomsen, with Stowell as CEO.[2][3][4] The firm has been a prominent presence in the design industry since the late 1980s, as design competency increasingly came to be seen as “key to industrial competitiveness”.[5][6][7]

In addition to its NYC headquarters, the company has at various times had offices in San Francisco, Barcelona, and London, and has worked with clients including HP, Johnson & Johnson, Gillette, BBVA, PepsiCo’s Gatorade, and Pyrex.[8][9] In 2012, the company worked with the City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission to redesign NYC’s iconic taxis as part of a collaboration with Nissan titled the Taxi of Tomorrow,[10][11][12] and also developed the now ubiquitous logo and decals found on the city’s yellow taxis and green boro taxis.[13][14]

The firm is best known for its design of the original Oxo Good Grips line in 1989, and longstanding relationship with Oxo, which continues to this day.[15] The Good Grips potato peeler, the first in what would become a large range, was designed with OXO founder Sam Faber’s wife Betsy in mind, who suffered from Arthritis.[16][17][18][19][20] The Good Grips range of products is often cited as an archetypal example of an approach to industrial design involving user-centered prototyping and iteration, and where considerations of human factors and accessibility make a product better for all users.[21][22][23][24] The Good Grips line is represented in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.[25]

In 2010, the company won the National Design Award for product design from the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt.[26]

Smart Design helped popularize design thinking alongside other major design firms. Smart design helped shift design thinking into the mainstream business world by facilitating co-creation and participatory design. Design thinking is commonly visualized as an iterative series of five major stages. [27] While the stages are simple enough, the adaptive expertise required to choose the right inflection points and appropriate next stage is a high-order intellectual activity that requires practice and is learnable. [27] Design thinking asserts that individuals and teams have the ability to build their innovative capacity through various tools and methods, no matter their predispositions to creativity and innovation. [28] The contexts of design thinking attempt to alter the design process towards more innovative ideas. [28] Design thinking is too often misconstrued as an impervious remedy for corporate ill. [29] But Smart design believes that to realize the full value of design, we need to break out of the rigid status quo and embrace rapid, iterative cycles. [29]

References

  1. ^ “Smart Design – About”. Smart Design. Archived from the original on 2021-10-17. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  2. ^ “Davin Stowell”. Industrial Designers Society of America – IDSA. 2011-03-28. Archived from the original on 2019-03-08. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  3. ^ “Interview with Davin Stowell, founder of Smart Design”. designboom. 2014-08-29. Archived from the original on 2017-06-13. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  4. ^ “Tucker Viemeister American Product Designer”. Encyclopedia of Design. 2021-01-18. Archived from the original on 2021-10-17. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  5. ^ Meikle, Jeffrey L. (2005). Design in the USA (Oxford History of Art). Oxford University Press. p. 187. ISBN 978-0-19-151802-7.
  6. ^ Nussbaum, Bruce (11 April 1988). “Smart Design: Quality is the New Style”. Business Week. pp. 102–168.
  7. ^ Giles, David; Maldonado, Cristina; Aaron, Susanna; Candu, Lucia; Dolan, Seamus; Mason, Kevin (2011). “Growth by Design: Snapshots of NYC’S Design Fields”. Center for an Urban Future: 14–22. JSTOR resrep14848.
  8. ^ “Smart Design – Clients”. Smart Design. Archived from the original on 2021-10-17. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  9. ^ Green, Penelope (2010-11-03). “Erica Eden of Smart Design on Pyrex”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-01-16.
  10. ^ “Taxi of Tomorrow”. Design Trust for Public Space. Retrieved 2022-01-17.
  11. ^ Grossman, Andrew (2011-05-03). “New York’s New Taxi Will Be a Nissan”. Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2022-01-17.
  12. ^ Blint-Welsh, Tyler (2018-06-12). “It Was Billed as the ‘Taxi of Tomorrow.’ Tomorrow Didn’t Last Long”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-01-17.
  13. ^ Dunlap, David W. (2012-08-22). “In the City, ‘T’ Stands for Taxi”. City Room. Retrieved 2022-01-17.
  14. ^ Johnston, Garth (2012-08-23). “New Taxi Design Will Kill Last Vestige Of Checkered Cabs”. Gothamist. Retrieved 2022-01-17.
  15. ^ Molotch, Harvey (2004). Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come To Be As They Are. Routledge. pp. 37, 42, 215. ISBN 978-1-135-94635-7.
  16. ^ “Smart Design, New York. Good Grips Peeler. 1989 | MoMA”. The Museum of Modern Art. Archived from the original on 2021-04-23. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  17. ^ Kanbar, Maurice (2001). Secrets from an Inventor’s Notebook. Council Oak Books. ISBN 978-1-57178-099-7.
  18. ^ “Good Grips Prototype For A Peeler Handle”. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Archived from the original on 2021-10-17. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  19. ^ Wilson, Mark (2018-09-24). “The untold story of the vegetable peeler that changed the world”. Fast Company. Archived from the original on 2021-07-26. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  20. ^ King, Simon; Chang, Kuen (2016). Understanding Industrial Design: Principles for UX and Interaction Design. O’Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4919-2036-7.
  21. ^ “OXO International – Case – Harvard Business School”. www.hbs.edu. Archived from the original on 2021-02-03. Retrieved 2021-10-17.
  22. ^ Baisya, Rajat K.; Das, G. Ganesh (2008). Aesthetics in Marketing. Sage Publishing India. ISBN 978-93-5280-096-4.
  23. ^ “Good Grips Prototype For A Peeler”. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Retrieved 2022-01-16.
  24. ^ POV. “Freedom Machines | POV | PBS”. POV | American Documentary Inc. Retrieved 2022-01-17.
  25. ^ Nicholls, Walter (1999-10-27). “Getting a Grip”. Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2022-01-16.
  26. ^ “2010 National Design Award Winners | Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum”. www.cooperhewitt.org. 2019-09-05. Retrieved 2022-01-16.
  27. ^ a b Meinel, Christoph; Leifer, Larry; Plattner, Hasso, eds. (2011). “Design Thinking”. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-13757-0. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  28. ^ a b Plattner, Hasso; Meinel, Christoph; Leifer, Larry, eds. (2015). “Design Thinking Research”. Understanding Innovation. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-06823-7. ISSN 2197-5752.
  29. ^ a b “Design Thinking isn’t Design. Time to shift gears”. Smart Design. Retrieved 2026-04-10.