190: Ethnocentric Design for Your Invention

Thomas Ask is a Professor of Industrial Design at Penn College, which stands as a sibling institution to Penn State. With extensive experience spanning over three decades in the realm of hardware product development, he has also played pivotal roles in nurturing two hardware startups. Thomas's academic journey culminated in the acquisition of a PhD in Industrial Design, further enhancing his expertise. Today, Thomas is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what ethnocentric design is, why it is valuable for a hardware startup, and the process to ensure you do a great job at getting inside the mind of your customer so that you can best achieve both design and sales success for your invention product.

Today you will hear us talk about:

• Defining what ethnocentric design
• Different cultures
• Different demographics
• Subject matter expert
• Inventing something and inventing something for someone
• A lot of design and invention has ego, but you should take out the ego. Instead, look at data.
• Identify the problem.
• Develop empathy for the user. What is going on in their life.
• Interview your customer, or prospective customer types.
• Formal ethnographic techniques.
• Processes, understand the user, ideation, feedback.
• Ideation is where you create ideas to match and infuse them to what you have learned from your customer.
• Cultural consensus questionnaire
• First, ensure your end customers are the correct people.
• A structured questionnaire.
• Human observation.
• Many people don’t want radical change from traditional methods, even if it is better.
• If it doesn’t work well and it is not intuitive, people will not use it.
• A dynamic feedback loop ensures success.

Thomas Ask Links:

LinkedIn | Penn College

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

https://www.ProductStartup.com/

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Mako Design Links:

https://www.makodesign.com/

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Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter

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