This is a guest post by Judy Endelman.

On May 13, 2009, the “Collecting Innovation Today” team interviewed Chuck Jones at the Global Consumer Design Studios of Whirlpool at their corporate headquarters in the western Michigan city of Benton Harbor.

The Whirlpool Corporation began life as the Upton Machine Company about one-hundred years ago in nearby St. Joseph, Michigan. Lou Upton was eventually joined by an uncle and a brother to produce motor-driven wringer washers. After a manufacturing hiatus during World War II, the Uptons changed the company name to Whirlpool in 1949 to reflect its most successful product.

Today the international Whirlpool Corporation employs 100,000 people world-wide and includes a host of household names, including KitchenAid, Maytag, Jenn-Air, Amana, and others.

From an early age, Chuck Jones knew what he wanted be when he grew up. When he was eight years old, he read a library book about careers and decided he wanted to be an industrial designer. Around the same time, he entered his first go-cart race, igniting a life-long auto racing passion. Chuck still restores and races vintage cars, but overseeing the design and development of home appliances to match our ever-changing lifestyles is how he spends most of his time.

Chuck Jones is a big believer in consumer testing. His design department uses a variety of methods to learn as much about consumer behavior as it can before the company invests millions in a new product. For example, staff ethnographers visit people in their homes and watch them as they go through the mundane household tasks of doing laundry and unloading groceries. They create short films of proposed new products and show them to consumers for their reaction. As Chuck says, they try to “fail fast and fail cheaply.” It’s all about learning to see if the “dog eats the dog food.”

The KitchenAid stand mixer debuted in 1919. Its name came from an executive’s wife who exclaimed, “this is a terrific kitchen aid!” The earliest models, like this one, were developed for use in small bakeries.

A row of competitors’ products, including one that looks suspiciously like the famous KitchenAid stand mixer, in the KitchenAid design lab.

Julia Child autographed this KitchenAid mixer.

In the interview with Chuck, he explained the process of designing the stunning Duet washer-dryer, popular with consumers worldwide, winner of multiple design awards, and nearly twice the price of conventional washer-dryers.

Judy Endelman
Director, Benson Ford Research Center