If you're an industrial designer working U.S. corporate, you've got at least two nemeses: engineers and marketers. Sure we're all supposed to be working together, but when Engineering puts red pencil marks on your CAD drawing overlaying a ridiculously large component that's never gonna fit, and Marketing sends you an e-mail saying you've gotta make the logo bigger, it's enough to drive any man or woman mad.

So we found elements of the following rather interesting: The tale of Lenovo's ThinkPad X300, which reads like a design version of the movie Friday Night Lights. The players are Peter Hortensius, senior veep in charge of laptops and a man who "often backs designers and engineers in their wilder ideas," and Arimasa Naitoh, the "father of the ThinkPad" and the man in charge of engineering.

Naitoh believes there should be creative tension between designers and engineers. "We encourage [the creatives] to design something that's not too real," he says. "If they stick to superreality, nothing will be fun, nothing will be new."

The full tale (read it here) follows the team's struggles to bring a well-designed ultralight notebook to market, one that will put Lenovo firmly on the design map with a solid-state drive and LED backlighting. They consult Richard Sapper, try to revitalize some unconventional design elements (remember the "butterfly" keyboard?), and send drawings flying back and forth between the U.S., Japan, Italy and China. Brick walls, engineering vs. design compromises, supplier hassles and innovations abound.

And after two years of struggle, what happens at the end? The superthin X300 becomes ready to ship on February 26, 2008--upstaged by mere weeks by the announcement of the high-profile Macbook Air at Macworld 2008.

After the announcement, Hortensius took a working prototype of the X300 to see if it, too, would fit in an interoffice envelope. It did. And he remains undeterred by the competition. "It's a continuous search for perfection," he says.

via businessweek