The Joy of Intelligent Design
As I'm sure you do, I sincerely appreciate something that is well-designed. It strikes a resounding chord deep in my inner engineer. Timeless designs often share simplicity, functionality, robustness, and great value as common traits.
The missus had been asking for a chaise lounge for the pool patio for a while now and her wish is my command.
Eventually.
Last Mother's Day I tried to get by this on the cheap with one of those zero-gravity lawn chairs, a.k.a. the "human mouse trap". It now resides in the garage, inching its way closer to the trash with every passing month. A do-over was in order. A bad chaise lounge is — well, bad, but I am dumbfounded about why it is that a decent chaise lounge costs as much as a couch.
Surely there must be some middle ground. After some internet searching, my daughter Ali and I came upon the KVARNO. What is a KVARNO, you ask? I'll give you a hint, there should be an umlaut over the "O", but blog limitations preclude that. The other hint is that to actually get one, you must first traverse a torturous maze of thousands of other household products that are cutely labeled with similar vowel-deficient names.
A KVARNO is IKEA-speak for one of their chaise lounges.
Given that we happen to have an IKEA within 5 minutes of "Hell's Half Acre" and that it had a price point I could live with made the KVARNO a distinct possibility, so off we went to the Big Blue Box to reconnoiter. Speaking of design, who at IKEA thought that every time a shopper went into one of their stores that we might *REALLY* appreciate being guided past the entire stinking inventory to go get that one specific thing (in this case, by the check-out lanes)? There should be zero-gravity chairs set up in there to catch all the shoppers trapped like rats, trying desperately to find their way back out again. Eventually they would wear down and look for a place to rest. "Snap!" you would have them. There is a reason for the restaurant in the middle — I've known first-timers to have been lost for days.
Back to the KVARNO.
Generally, I'm not a huge fan of Scandinavian design — at least not as an owner. A little too minimalist for my taste, but upon inspection the KVARNO seemed to be just the ticket for Mother's Day. Saturday afternoon found Ali and I assembling the first of two of these in 95 degree heat.
For furniture that "requires some assembly", signs of good design include that there are a minimum of parts that actually must be assembled to begin with (about a dozen), they aren't interchangeable enough to be installed in the wrong way or place, and that things fit together properly. I am proud that my 16 year old girl inherited some mechanical sense from the old man. More than that, I am thankful that all those little wooden slats were already attached to the extruded aluminum frame rails. I am fascinated by the minor design brilliance of the dual-bolt, hex-head stainless steel tension connectors used to attach components like the legs and cross supports at right angles to each other and the frame.
But, the real sign of good design is the end result. The KVARNO is handsome, sturdy, and reasonably comfortable. There are no openings in its aluminum components to invite wasps to take up residence or to fill with rain water. The adjustment plates look like they were Born from Jets. Nothing to rust. This doesn't mean I couldn't wax philosophical on a few improvement ideas here and there, or that I'm ready to cash in my German-engineered Beast for a Saab or Volvo, but all in all, the KVARNO works.
So, by now I'm sure you are thinking I have been blown pretty far off course from navigating the enterprise, but not as far as you think. Whether it is a lounge chair, business process or an application, users appreciate products that are well-designed, easy to use and practical for their intended purpose. Sophistication and complexity certainly has its place, but more often than not the true mark of design excellence is found in the sheer elegance of its functional simplicity. The real beauty of the design of the KVARNO is that it becomes apparent that a great deal of thought and engineering went into it on the front-end to minimize frustration on the back-end (no pun intended). Ultimately, that is what delights the customer.
By the way, hats off to the credited designer of the KVARNO; Mikael Warnhammar, wherever you are.


The end result is a rectangular 2-D model to make it readily digestible, but the concept started out as a 3-D globe — your business world, or "ecosystem" as we are prone to describe it. It is a transformation model that reflects how technology interacts with overall organizational strategy; a mechanism to identify the current state and influences upon it, and how core business processes interact to achieve some future state.





