Todays news article from  The Wall Street Journal Online  

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121372804603481659.html?mod=2_1585_leftbox

Denmark's Bang & Olufsen AS, a maker of luxury home-entertainment systems, is known for unusual design and an even less common approach to it. The 83-year-old company based in Struer, an isolated town in rural Denmark, has never employed full-time designers, instead drawing on a pool of free-lancers.

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The company's chief designer, David Lewis, has free-lanced for the company since the early 1960s, and is responsible for most of its famed designs, such as the BeoSound 3200 stereo/CD player (wave your hand and the glass doors glide open), and the six-CD player BeoSound 9000.

The 69-year-old Mr. Lewis, a U.K. native, graduated from London's Central School of Art and Design in 1960. He had aspired to be a furniture designer, but when the class was full he turned to industrial design instead. Three of his B&O creations -- the 1991 Beocord VX 5000, the 1993 Beovox Cona and the 1993 BeoLab 6000 -- are part of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection in New York.

The Wall Street Journal spoke with Mr. Lewis at B&O's flagship store in Copenhagen about his approach to design. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

MODEL APPROACH David Lewis says each design is like starting all over

A Fresh Eye

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: You spend just two or three days per month at B&O headquarters in Struer. Doesn't this slow the design process?

MR. LEWIS: It's a great, concentrated way of working. I come fresh and clean every other Friday all the way from Copenhagen and see things in a different way, because I am not at all part of the system there. I sit down with the engineers and go through 10 or so projects in various stages. There are thousands of things to discuss -- the minutiae of angles, coloring, buttons, graphics and more.

This is not just my way of working. All designers for B&O -- not just me and my team of six -- are external. The company believes in it. My six-member team aside, designers for B&O don't ever meet, we don't have any cooperation with one another at all.

WSJ: How does the design process work when you are rarely on-site?

MR. LEWIS: Every time we design a new product, it's like starting all over. Time frames, technology and demands are different each time. So we don't have a process per se.

My designers and I do have an approach, though. Whether we are given a brief for a new product or we come up with an idea on our own -- and it's a fair mix of the two -- we don't sketch it. We model it out of cardboard, pieces of paper, little bits of plastic, whatever's on hand.

FINAL FORMS The BeoCenter 6 television with BeoLab 8000 speakers

We build it up little by little, the way a sculptor does. We stand around the object, have an open dialogue and modify it as we go along. Then, I bring that same model along when I go to Struer. That way all sides can see what the design is about and why it's essential to do it this way and not another.

WSJ: How much does the final product depart from that cardboard version?

MR. LEWIS: Hardly. When it comes out unpacked at the shop, usually it's exactly what was envisioned. One example: In 1993 B&O management said, "Make us a new speaker." Just that. I had the idea to make something less present in a room, something that could offset the bulky television sets that still existed back then. Essentially, a loudspeaker that you could hear, not see. So we modeled ultra-slender column speakers with cardboard and plastic. Once it was in three dimensions that way, we could see all the details and really feel the design.

WSJ: You didn't think about how all the components would fit into that column?

MR. LEWIS: I knew there would be trouble, but engineers love a good challenge. The result was the BeoLab 8000 loudspeaker: a very thin aluminum column that reflects its surroundings in such a way that you don't see much of the speaker itself. It was a big technical challenge because good sound has always meant large, massive volume. But with newer technology, it was possible to put extra power into the drive so that we could arrange the sound within one column.

SOUND IDEAS: A SPEAKER THAT WAS DECADES IN THE MAKING

 

Imagine sound without noise. In the early 1980s, Bang & Olufsen did, and delved into a decades-long acoustic research project to make such "natural sound" a reality.

More than 20 years later, B&O made a splash in the acoustic and design worlds alike with the result. Combining its own findings with those of U.S. music producers, B&O introduced the BeoLab 5 loudspeakers in 2003. Pianist Hélène Grimaud lauded their perfect sound, while audiophiles dubbed them the most radical, complex and elaborate speakers ever made.

Bricks and Clay

It all began when B&O mulled the relationship between loudspeaker, room and listener. With a grant from the European Union, engineers from B&O, the Technical University of Denmark and a British loudspeaker maker analyzed the human perception of sound reflections in a given space. B&O carried the research further, spending the years calculating individual sound fields and experimenting with bass controls.

But the real breakthrough came unexpectedly, at an Audio Engineering Society convention in the U.S. in 1996. Two B&O employees attended a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's "The College." The music filtered through loudspeakers using a fledgling technology called acoustic lens, which had been developed by two American music producers.

Both the technology and its design were primitive, but the B&O engineers were intrigued. "Within a minute I realized we were listening to something quite exceptional," recalls Poul Praestgaard, who attended the performance and until recently was an acoustic-technology manager at B&O.

The loudspeakers, made of bricks and lumps of clay, with hand-shaped acoustic lenses on top, looked bizarre. Whereas other companies had turned their backs on the new technology, at a loss over how to handle the odd design, B&O saw it as a challenge. Mr. Praestgaard invited the Americans to B&O's headquarters in Struer, Denmark.

Missing Link

The acoustic lens was the missing link. After refining the technology, B&O was ready for the design. "Horizontally, we couldn't do much," chief designer David Lewis recalls. "So we vertically extended the speakers like a cone instead."

With a 15-inch base, each speaker weighs 124 pounds and stands 38 inches high. Shaped conically in matte black and brushed aluminum, with three circular discs that jut out like flying saucers, the BeoLab 5 conjures thoughts of Star Trek just as well as sounds of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. The technology is activated when you press a silvery button at its top. A tiny microphone, previously invisible, suddenly protracts from the base and measures the room's bass properties within minutes. In essence, the speaker self-equalizes, ensuring optimum sound in a room regardless of surrounding clutter.

The years of development work are reflected in the price. A pair of BeoLab 5's will set you back $19,950.

--Deborah Steinborn

The final product looked just like our model. And it has lasted so long, with just two or three technical updates since. It shows our design approach is a good one.

WSJ: How important is it to make a design that lasts?

MR. LEWIS: The whole scene has changed. Ten years ago, a 20-year-old television was still fine. Today, technology ensures that a TV that old is totally outdated. Even so, for a company B&O's size, products have to last long. B&O can't afford to make such a product and discontinue it a few months later. We wouldn't dream of doing something that wouldn't hold. This is part of the culture.

Today there's too much pressure, not just for designers. It's disappointing in a way. You can miss cool things -- afterthoughts, great little ideas -- in the design process because it goes so fast.

In Search of Crazy Ideas

WSJ: Bang & Olufsen's incoming CEO, Kalle Hvidt Nielsen, believes strongly in customer feedback, focus groups and the like. What do you think?

MR. LEWIS: I think you can't go out and ask people what they need or want because they don't know. The whole trick is to come out with a product and say, "Have you thought of this?" and hear the consumer respond, "Wow! No, I hadn't." If you can do that, you're on.

WSJ: Could you draw on an example?

MR. LEWIS: Apple's iPhone is the perfect example. It can do so many things no one had really thought of. You can't contrive good ideas by going out and asking one hundred people. It's really one man thinking a crazy idea. This is the sort of thing that Steve Jobs does.

WSJ: How do you get your inspiration, your crazy ideas?

MR. LEWIS: I often just sit and look out my office window for a long time, thinking. Why does this look so terrible, why can't we do this or that?

I also visit art galleries and museums as well as Danish antique dealers with architectural furniture and the like, from the 1930s to '50s. I have a lot of it at home. It interests and inspires me.

The BeoCenter 6, an LCD television, draws some inspiration from art. To house the technical stuff, the TV billows out at the bottom rather like the tutu in Edgar Degas's painting "Ballerina in Red." I remember standing in the drawing office and saying that the TV needed a bit of volume, like the skirt in that Degas painting. And there you have it. You can even get the television in red.

Change at the Top

WSJ: A lot of changes are under way at B&O after a rocky fiscal year. CEO Torben Sorensen was fired in January. How much rethinking has this meant for design?

MR. LEWIS: Our whole board of directors has been fired, which means that the advisory board just wouldn't accept the results. Fair enough. And I could add a lot of things to that but I won't, because we are waiting for new managers who have new ideas and, I hope, a vision of where they want to place B&O in the global market for home entertainment.

The field is enormous today. You can diversify into small digital devices, telephones, many areas. But B&O cannot do it all. Today we probably do too much, which strains the design process and the company.

Every 10 years or so at B&O, new managers come in with a new approach. As a designer or an engineer, you can only be open-minded and flexible and ask how we can best realize the ideas these people have. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong.

All I can do is keep making good design in every respect. For B&O that's integral. It's a good company, and they appreciate good design. And we get all the leeway we need. To prove my point: Practically everything in this store is designed exactly as it was envisioned.