I believe good product solutions begin with observing and fulfilling a vacant niche. My best ideas usually come from a perceived gap in the market intersecting with my abilities and interests. In other words, almost every day I find myself observing a situation and saying “Gee, wouldn’t it be cool if I could make something that does [fill in the blank].”

I try to focus on entertainment products that combine innovation with a touch of subversiveness. In all cases, their common bond is design. In this case, I define design as an overall, intrinsic product concept, not just surface graphics. Such products can take many forms and be expressed in many mediums. And products that mix good communication design with clever audience service fascinate me.

The first step is identifying an unserved customer’s need. Once that is clear, the task becomes a matter fulfilling it with a good design solution. (Yeah, I know, I know. That’s a helluva lot easier said than done). My ideas are almost never born from typical “idea-generating” tools such as panicked flipping through design annuals, regimented brainstorm sessions or mass-market “just-add-water” inspiration books. (Admit it, at one point or another we’ve all resorted to such embarrassing creative crutches.)

For me, I have found that the best design solutions arrive through happy accidents, play or good old-fashioned emotional turmoil. I’m serious. Here’s three product examples that should give you an idea what I’m taking about.

Product Problem: Make a unique new toy
Design Solution: Nickelodeon’s Gak

For many years people referred to me as the “father of Gak.” That’s not entirely true. This toy was the result of a team of talented folks at both Nickelodeon and Mattel. I worked at Nickelodeon Consumer Products as the creative director who guided the franchise through numerous line extensions. More accurately, I guess you could say I was the resident “Godfather of Gak.”

What is Gak you might ask? For those of you who were pre-teens in the 1990s, you already know the answer. Gak was essentially a blob of florescent goo that became a toy sensation and the physical manifestation of the Nickelodeon brand. Gak was a compound that looked a little like “slime” but had a more rubbery, viscous quality. Gak was messy, silly, funny and fun. Like the greater Nickelodeon brand, it appealed to both boys and girls at the same time. Gak celebrated a free-form play experience where there was no right or wrong way to interact with it. Best of all, it was universally loved by kids and hated by grown-ups. Packaged in an amorphous “splat-shaped” vessel, Gak made wonderfully rude fart sounds when pressed back into the container’s crevices. The toy was so popular with the audience that it sold over eight million units in its first year alone. Not only was Gak just a new kind of toy, it was a whole new toy category.

The birth of Gak was the result of two companies sharing a common goal and a happy accident. The time was 1991 and Nickelodeon had decided to get into the toy business by licensing its brand to Mattel. Together, the two companies set out to create a line of “activity toys” that emphasized kid empowerment. When the Nickelodeon executives first visited Mattel, they asked the toy maker to show them “all the ideas the other guys rejected.” (Part of the Nick brand philosophy was to embrace ideas that were quirky, unproven and out of the mainstream. Looking back I realize that was also Nick’s hiring policy as well). That same year Mattel’s chemical engineers had invented a “recipe” for a new colorful compound but couldn’t find an opportunity to deploy it. As a result, the concept was banished to their version of “The Island of Misfit Toys.” When Nick saw this gooey substance they knew they fell in love with it. Coincidentally, Nickelodeon was running a game show called Double Dare that was based on physical challenges and low-brow “pie-in-the-face” stunts. Whenever a messy substance was shown splattering a contestant, the show’s hyperactive host would occasionally refer to it as the nonsense word “gak.”

It was a match made in product heaven: Mattel had the compound while Nickelodeon had the back story. Together we took elements that neither company valued and produced a solid design solution. Gak was a product idea born from serendipity.

Product Problem: Make Disney feel cool
Design Solution: D-Toys

After working at Nickelodeon, I moved to Los Angeles and joined Disney Online. For three years I was the Creative Director devoted to their subscription web site called Disney’s Daily Blast. As you’d expect, it was a site filled with content based on all the traditional Disney characters. However, I soon discovered that the audience (as well as my staff) couldn’t stay healthy on a diet consisting of only Disney saccharine. We all desperately needed some edge and diversity.

The business folks at Disney also concluded they needed to capture an “older” audience of kids to stay competitive in the web marketplace. The problem was, the Disney brand wasn’t considered “cool.” In fact, when we asked any kid over the age of eight what they thought of Disney, they told us they associated the brand with “being a baby.”

With this in mind, I smelled an opportunity brewing and invented a franchise of content called “D-Toys.” The idea was devilishly simple. This was to be a line of small “digital toys” that could be an antidote to the warm n’ fuzzy Disney surroundings. I wanted to provide a home for experimental ideas and diverse illustration styles. The D-Toy franchise became a creative oasis for creating content didn’t follow the rigid Disney mandates.

D-Toys were designed to be small nuggets of interactive fun. They were not exactly games, but rather open-ended toys with no specific play pattern. A little like a slinky or play dough. They were also intentionally small files so they didn’t require a long download. They required no preconceptions or instructions. They were like a humble prize in a crackerjack box. Fun, fast and plentiful. Smart design was the glue that held them all together. Each one celebrated the art of art direction by looking and playing differently than the one that came before. Their consistency was their inconsistency. And that was a paradox that rattled the Mickey Mouse traditionalists.

At first the Disney brass was skeptical. But they soon acknowledged the value of D-Toys once they began to draw rave reviews and increasing web traffic. D-Toys was a product solution initially born out of my rebellion against the Disney system. Ironically, this act of creative subversiveness became a big win for the very brand they mocked.

Product Problem: Make online multi-user gaming possible
Design Solution: MULAN from Mutation Labs, Inc.

Recently I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and teamed up with some former colleagues to open new kind of studio. The mission of our new office is to converge and “mutate” media. It’s a boutique company we call “Mutation Labs.” The business is actually set up very much like a laboratory. Half of our time is spent servicing select entertainment companies, while the other half is spent inventing our own products and bringing them to market. I’d like to think of us as “the Xerox PARC of new media mischief.”

Our lab consists of handpicked talent that blends design, code and entertainment disciplines. A driving goal of Mutation Labs is the creation of multiplayer interaction on the Internet. Specifically, incorporating 3D elements and multi-player capabilities.

Last year, Mutation Labs released two successful multiplayer games to the public, Wave Rave™ and Le Food Frenzy: The Rugrats In Paris Game™. Both were created for Nickelodeon and can be played at www.nick.com. These games were Shockwave-based and utilized a technology that already has a wide install base amongst Internet users. The technical plumbing behind the scenes that linked players together was third party software called POPX. Unfortunately, POPX wasn’t very reliable and it failed more than it succeeded.

Admittedly, creating a web technology that links multiple users together has always been a difficult task. In fact, no one has successfully created a solid solution to accomplish this goal. How do we take two or more machines and get them to co-exist in the same session? And how do we send messages back and forth fast enough to produce a “twitch” action game instead of a slow turn-based like checkers? It isn’t easy, but we realized that if someone could crack that nut, we’d enter web content nirvana. Essentially we identified a hole in the market and then worked to fill that need by creating MULAN.

MULAN (Multi-User Lobbying And Networking) is a new kind of software that combines elegant design and clever coding. It enables developers to easily handle grouping, launching and communication---the three vital elements that make multi-user internet games possible. It also uses peer-to-peer communication thus making better use of bandwidth and end-user computers. Best of all, MULAN will allow players’ machines to communicate with each other without depending on a central server. I know this all sounds like techno-babble so bear with me. Those of you who stay late in your office each night playing Quake or Tomb Raider will thank me later. MULAN is a product idea that came from our first-hand market observations, our love of games and our giddy personal desire to build a better mousetrap.

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David Vogler is a consultant to MTV Networks and is a frequent guest lecturer at The School of Visual Arts and Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Institute.

From The Education of a Design Entrepreneur
Originally published by Allworth Press; Fall 2002

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