ZIBA Design and the FedEx Project

Abstract

This paper starts with the question of how great products get made. While the question may not be entirely answerable, the exploration provides a useful understanding of how the art of design unfolds in practice. The vital connection between theory and practice is not immediately evident to all in the design community and, as a result, it often has gone unexplored. This paper seeks to rectify the situation, at least in one example. Building upon the model of the case study, which has proved a useful tool in connecting theory and practice in fields as diverse as law, business, and medicine, this paper uses an original exploratory case study on ZIBA Design (a product design company) and a series of projects they did for FedEx as a starting point for thinking about how design works in practice when it moves from traditional areas of communication and industrial design into human interaction and organizational change, what Richard Buchanan calls the thirdand fourth-orders of design.1 Anyone who has had to send a package and waited too late for a scheduled pickup by an express delivery service may have found himself or herself in a FedEx retail center. These centers, which FedEx calls “World Service Centers” (WSC), display the chaotic nature of their business right where everyone can see it. Enter close to cutoff time, and one finds lines of people, questioning looks, hurried scribbling, and stacks of boxes rising towards the ceiling. FedEx was going through a process of updating these facilities in November 1998. The WSCs typically are updated every seven to eight years, and this was the first redesign since FedEx’s big branding evolution in 1994, when they officially changed the name of the company from Federal Express to FedEx and redesigned the logo. As part of a company review, the brand identity group at FedEx was invited to look at the plans. The redesign was spearheaded by the Facilities Division, which put most of the emphasis on logistical and technical updates designed to get customers’ packages to where they were going faster and more efficiently. For a long time, the fact that FedEx could deliver a package overnight was all it needed to set it apart. But in the years since its founding in 1971, the company had seen an increase in competitors such as the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and Airborne Express, as well as changes in the marketplace from new technologies including fax, e-mail, and the Internet. When the brand identity group reviewed the new plans, they were not focused on the myriad of new ways FedEx was improving the shipping business. 1 Richard Buchanan, “Design Research and the New Learning,” Design Issues 17: 4 (Autumn 2001): 10–12.