Platforms and Icons: Corn

In the brief record of Dan Williams’ interview, he raised a crucial point, “that if you keep an archetype elegant as it evolves, you can keep it iconic.” This idea, that certain design decisions can help preserve the identity of a product as it evolves, is one which will be considered here. Specifically, Williams’ idea hinges on the suggestion that there are key properties that can persist in a product over time, and that this continuity is achievable through maintaining certain high-level design goals. Williams’ imperative parallels the description of platform planning given by Robertson and Ulrich in many ways, not least because they are two parts of the same whole of platform planned development. Platform processes are attractive from a manufacturers perspective because they can systematically reduce costs and simplify production, but they also offer powerful benefits to designers, as noted by Williams. Once consumers have accepted a product, their attachments to that item, and the identity they have generated in relation to it, inherently resist change. Instead of unnecessarily forcing an entirely new product on customers to generate sales, platforms allow designers to both materially and psychologically leverage past investments to simultaneously keep customers comfortable yet intrigued. By generating acceptance based on the familiar and the promises it has upheld, platform-based designs are able to map increasingly closely to the true nature of a problem. This method of design not only allows for an iterative cycle of improvement based on an increasingly well-characterized problem, but it does so with lower associated costs and risks than many other design practices would carry. In many ways, the modern American industrial diet is a feat of platform planning on the grandest scale. At the heart of this platform lies corn, with its cohort of derivative ingredients coming together in myriad combinations to produce an astounding portion of the seeming

diversity of the American supermarket. Corn has in fact adapted so well to us, that corn is not simply what we buy in the supermarket, but it is the fuel used to carry our food, and the very adhesive of the walls to which our cornmobiles deliver our culinary masquerade. Michael Pollen, in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, does a frighteningly good job of making clear the reach of corn, and the intricate web it weaves throughout our lives. But corn’s influence would not be possible were we not able to apply the yearly overabundance to every problem that we have. Corn lies at the heart of products across diverse industries, but it fails us, in the context of design, in one crucial way. Corn is a fantastic tool to the manager, but it is the definition of generic. If the goal of the designer is to foster identity through iconic, functional-emotional offerings, the commoditized ocean of grain rolling out of the Midwest each year is a poor subject. Corn, through our efforts to appease everyone at the lowest cost possible, has no identity from which to be known. Granted, perhaps the whole ears of corn just inside the supermarket’s front doors retain some of their original identity, but this is a vanishingly small portion of the corn consumed by US eaters. At its peak, corn was an enabler of freedom and exploration. Corn permitted relatively small plots of land to produce abundant harvests, feeding growing families and newly settled towns. Corn was part of a powerful story, and it was in this context that it was sold and understood. Today, corn has little to offer when it comes to the job of being elegant or iconic, or having any sort of persistent identity at all. In large part, the façade that corn wears has probably lasted this long not just due to the protective actions of its owners, but because of its enormous historical identity. People remember and accept corn for what it was, and have little reason to reinvent corn in their minds. Corn serves them quietly and fails them invisibly. The long-term

costs and realities of modern corn are a mystery to most Americans, and so they are happy to remember it as it was last presented to them. Unfortunately, the medical, environmental, political, and economic costs of corn will not be able to hide forever. Corn will need to undergo the design process eventually, but its lack of identity at that time may be its downfall. To use March’s metrics, when the cognitive and emotional aspects of corn come back in to play, corn will face a serious challenge. That is to say, that if corn as it exists now were the subject of a design project, its thousands of faces would hamstring any attempt to understand and improve it. Corn as a platform for manufacturing has been a magnificent success, but corn as a mental archetype has no substance with which a designer can work. All design around corn must be in the past tense; corn’s success as a commercial platform has left behind corn as able to have a living identity, since it is almost exclusively consumer as derivatives. Corn is at risk of drifting away from how it has been remembered, the platform of corn having been hijacked to serve the goal of short-term monetary gain instead of supporting a long-term cultural icon. The way in which corn has been made into a commercial success has diluted beyond recognition any higher-level identity. While corn’s success in the laboratory has been near infinite, it has come at the cost of decentralizing its essence and its existence as a platform for design. Corn is not sold to consumers as itself, but as beef, fuel, glue, sugar, and preservatives, among many other things. The marketing and sale of corn has been outsourced to the point that corn itself is nothing more than a platform for feedstock. Corn is everything, and so it is nothing.

Works Cited Burrell, Lisa. "Smart Product Design." Harvard Business Review. HBR, 31 July 2014. Web. 28 Jan. 2017. March, Artemis. "Usability: the new dimension of product design." Harvard Business Review 72, no. 5 (1994): 144-149. Pollan, Michael. The omnivore's dilemma: A natural history of four meals. Penguin, 2006. Robertson, David, and Karl Ulrich. "Planning for product platforms." Sloan management review 39, no. 4 (1998): 19.