Frugal Engineering vs. Overengineering

In their piece "The Importance of Frugal Engineering", Sehgal, Dehoff, and Panneer highlight the importance of frugal engineering in addressing consumer needs. Per their definition of the term, frugal engineering is central to human-centered design, as it involves a completely different approach to product development than is conventional for large mature-market corporations. Essentially, they suggest that designers throw out their preconceived notions as to what product features are necessary, and instead look to actual use cases to engineer products optimized to actual human needs rather than maximizing features (often at great expense).

Coming from a private sector background in the contact lens industry, I have seen cases of overengineering being more the norm than the exception. The technological push within the contact lens industry has long been (and continues to be) to fashion lenses with ever-higher oxygen permeability. Unfortunately, the oxygen permeability of contact lenses surpassed the oxygen permeability of the human eye about five years ago, meaning that lens manufacturers have been engaged in an arms race wherein returns for patients have gone from diminishing to nonexistent. Here you have a case where a more human-centered approach would be focusing first and foremost on comfort and affordability - things that matter most to patients - as opposed to oxygen permeability, an area where medical necessity was surpassed years ago.

As noted by Sehgal, Dehoff, and Panneer, the profit structure in existing markets reduces the incentive for substantive change. This is doubly true in an oligopoly like the contact lens industry, with four major players accounting for upwards of 95% of total business. All four of these players historically geared their R&D towards increasing oxygen permeability, as this represented a real medical issue until relatively recently. Now that these companies have largely met initial permeability targets, it is difficult to shift gears in terms of developing new products. Moreover, the standard within the industry is to choke off supply of older products so as to push doctors to prescribe newer lenses and in turn pay for ongoing R&D. Essentially, the profit structure pushes these corporations to continue along the road they have long been on, even when it is not medically necessary for them to do so.

It bears mentioning that the challenges of shifting gears often go well beyond R&D. In the case of the contact lens industry, companies have spent decades pushing the necessity of oxygen permeability. They have invested countless hours and dollars in training optometric students of this need, in having salespeople reinforce its importance to practicing doctors, and to both consumer and doctor targeted advertisements. And for a long time, they were right to do so - lenses did need higher levels of permeability. But now, in order to change course, these companies are tasked with not only reorienting their internal R&D, but also their external marketing efforts, sales training, and doctor education. In other words, a new approach requires shifting the entire organization, something that is challenging even for smaller organizations and nearly impossible in the short-term for large ones.

All of this begs the question of how large companies in mature-markets can address these internal pressures while shifting to a more human-centered design approach. Other than the suggestions provided in the article, how do you think organizations could go about making their product design more human-centric?