Thinking Design

Thanks for Visiting -- I'm on an extended blogging hiatus.

2010-12-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

Check out past posts for interviews with interesting folks from LEGO, IDEO, Design Continuum, Frog Design, Project H, DripTech, Stuart Karten Design and others...

Small By Design: Entrepreneur-Designer Stuart Karten Talks Shop

2010-10-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

For those that follow the design consulting field, Stuart Karten Design feels like a larger firm than it is. With only around 28 employees, it's like the little munchkin stepchild to the larger design consultancies of the world -- size-wise at least.

But the firm, and its namesake and founder Stuart Karten, have been at it for almost 27 years. Success has been building slowly but steadily for the company, which is transitioning to the name SKD. Says Stuart about that move: "I mean, Stuart Karten Design could be two people, and it’s much bigger than me at this point."

Much bigger, and much more successful. In 2008, Stuart and team won their first National Design Award for innovations in the hearing aid market.

I recently talked with Stuart about his firm, his "Dear Stuart" column in Fast Company, and how he's become one of a truly rare breed -- a successful designer and entrepreneur. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:

ThinkingDesign: Are you small by design? And if so, why?

SK: Yes. For a number of reasons. For one, I’m still pretty involved with most of the work. So, I like to be involved with projects. I’m also a big believer in providing high-level service. The way I tell it to potential clients is that we don’t have a "B" Team. You don’t come in and meet me and a couple of other people, and then we introduce you to the people who are going to do the work. Lately we’ve been taking work from firms that are three and four times our size.

Another reason is that I like to work with people that I like and projects that I like, so I can be selective.

ThinkingDesign: Sounds like a good philosophy. What gives you the most satisfaction?

SK: From a project standpoint, it’s the work we’ve been doing with Starkey with hearing aids. I’m very proud of the work from multiple perspectives. One is that I believe we’ve done some great work in terms of functional innovation for them, and using all the dimensions of my business – the research, design, and engineering. We really brought it all. We did great research, and it led to very good short-term solutions and very innovative long-term solutions.

For more about that project, take a look at the talk I recently gave on the topic:

User-driven Innovation from Kicker Studio on Vimeo.

I’m very proud of what we’ve done for Starkey and the partnership that we developed. Also, the work we did led to nice recognition and it allowed me to go to the White House to meet Michelle Obama, so that was a real career high. We won a National Design Award for it.

Sexiest hearing aid out there...

ThinkingDesign: Congrats! Tell me about your “Dear Stu” column in Fast Company. Were you trying to create some notoriety for yourself?

SK: Well, I was asked to be an expert design blogger by Fast Company, and I didn’t want to do the same kind of blah blah blah about products or complain about design thinking, like the stuff that’s going on right now. And I thought that no one had played the humor card, so I decided to play the humor card.

I had some fun with it, and now I’m posting more traditional blogs and have kind of steered away from it, but it was fun.

Dear Stu -- Can you help me be more innovative?

ThinkingDesign: Playing on that theme, I’m an MBA graduate from a year ago. I’m looking to get into the design field. How do I get a second look from a company like yours?

SK: What do you do? You call people up and invite them to be on your blog and make friends that way. That kind of stuff.

ThinkingDesign: Thanks for that... In the world of design for social impact and humanitarian design, how do you stand on design’s ability to save the world?

SK: I don’t think I or my firm can personally save the world. But we can be responsible about the kind of clients and the kind of work we take on. We’ve always had about 30-40% of our work focused on the healthcare and medical world, and that gives us a lot of psychic income and makes us feel better about the work we do day to day.

In terms of the other question about using design and design thinking as a way to solve bigger problems, I think it’s great and there’s potential there. I think what we’re really talking about is just looking at problems more creatively. And that’s what designers do, and we have a process for doing it, which allows people to accept it more easily.

ThinkingDesign: What kinds of jobs won’t you take on?

SK: One filter is just understanding that what we’re going to be working on is something that people want and need. Inherently, you know what categories you’re in and what’s going to be the outcome.

We won’t do things that hurt people – guns or weapons or things that will hurt people or affect people negatively.

ThinkingDesign: You’re one of the well-known design shops around, but you’re also an entrepreneur. To what extent are the skills that make you a good entrepreneur the same that make you a good designer?

SK: You learn lessons. I’ve been through three recessions. The first one I was totally blindsided and the business almost went under as a result. The second I was a little smarter about it and got us through it. But this time, we’re actually thriving.

There are also external forces that lined up that allowed us to be more successful this time. Design is in a much better place. But we’ve also engaged in a lot more PR this time. We used to get most of our work through referrals, but I amped up the promotion this time.

I also recognized that engineering and that level of production was going to be outsourced and be done for free, so we really amped up the front end of the business and invested in research and understanding how research worked in conjunction with design. We’ve always done it, but we never spoke about it, formalized it, and had people that specialized in it.

ThinkingDesign: How do you approach research?

SK: Our tool is called “mode mapping”. It’s a tool that allows you to visually represent ethnographic research so that designers can get engaged, and the benefit is that you can explain to clients where you found your unmet needs and where you found your potential new solutions.

The Y axis represents emotional states and the X axis represents time.

Mode Mapping 101

We birthed it here on one project, then started using it on other projects and it’s really started to take on a life of its own.

Mode Mapping 202

ThinkingDesign: What else has affected your ability to be successful as a small firm in a space of growing gorillas?

SK: One of the things that lined up for us is that we’ve always been a hardcore product design firm, but with added value because of our ability to do high-level research and use it to get to really good solutions. On the spectrum of other industrial design firms, a lot of them haven’t embraced or raised their level of research capability, at least in our sized firms.

The bigger firms were strong in that area. Then, because a lot of hardcore industrial design was able to get farmed out and be produced for free. If you need an MP3 player, you can get someone in Asia to, not only make it, but also design it for your for free in exchange for making it.

So, the big firms went for greener pastures. They created the term "design thinking" and started applying it to service design and these larger humanitarian efforts. And as a result, it left a gap. We were able to slip right in there and give people, in essence, somewhat of the same quality level of what they were receiving from these larger firms, but with a singular focus, which was to get to a product.

ThinkingDesign: Tell me about your concept designs. Why do you do them?

SK: The broad stroke is to flex the studio’s creative muscles, without the constraints of a client or budget. Then, in essence, it becomes a PR tool for us, and we’ve had a lot of success with it. One of the projects is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

That's right -- you can find this beauty at the MOMA, forever...

The projects are really fun. Did you see the chandeliers? We have people calling all the time wanting to buy them. I wish I could make them.

I mean, I guess we could make them. They’re durable and all, but that’s not really the business we’re in. I tell people that we would make them one, but they would have to supply the bills, and $10,000 on top of that. No one has taken me up on that yet.

Using Leadership to Drive Innovation with Design Continuum's Dan Buchner

2010-10-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

Dan Buchner, VP of Design and Innovation at Boston-based Design Continuum, will be the first to tell you that there is no silver bullet to transform a company from cost-cutter to innovator. It’s much more nuanced than that, with enlightened leadership being perhaps the one necessity.

I first met Dan when he came to Cornell to run a design thinking workshop for the second meeting of “Creative Design for Affordability” in March of 2009. Dan grew up and spent his early career in Canada, and I was immediately drawn to his cool, laid-back approach to driving innovation and creativity in business.

Aside from his role at Continuum, Dan is also “Innovator in Residence” at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in Greensboro, NC. With the CCL, Dan has unleashed Continuum’s innovation process to try and help leaders understand that process first hand, and then assess what concrete actions they must take to drive behavior change throughout their organizations.

All of this is much easier said than done, as Dan will readily admit. Edited excerpts of our recent conversation follow:

ThinkingDesign: So how did you make the leap from product design to organizational design and leadership?

Dan Buchner: Within two years of graduating from design school, I got put in charge of the design team of a small Canadian manufacturer in Ontario. It was pretty naïve on their part, and for me it was a baptism by fire. I’d never managed anyone in my life, and suddenly there were people that had been with the company for 30 years who were reporting to me.

I got really interested in why really good designs never made it to market. When you look at it, you realize that much of it is because of organizational dynamics. Lots of decisions get made for good reasons but they water the idea down. What makes it to market in most cases pales in comparison to the original idea.

ThinkingDesign: So what are the key pieces to leading/managing design effectively?

DB: I got a job with Moen and helped set up the new product development process. At the time, they were essentially a manufacturing firm, and about ¾ of the revenue was from products designed 25 years earlier. They were essentially cost reducing, making the same thing over and over again, which was fine in that industry at that time. But with the advent of Home Depot, and the consumer coming in and starting to make decisions about what kinds of faucets they wanted to put in their homes, the owners of the company decided we needed to become a consumer products company.

The first thing was becoming concerned about what the consumer might want. At that time in the early 90’s, if you wanted a faucet, you phoned the plumber, and they put in what they wanted. But when the consumer gets involved, we had no capability to understand what they wanted. So that was the first step – a consumer research capability.

The second was the ability to actually design and prototype and put into production new products. We had a system at that time that was in place, and everyone was spending time trying to take a few cents out of here or there. So I set up the new product development process, the design department, and the market research department. I also helped set up an innovation incubator there.

ThinkingDesign: How does the leadership part play in?

DB: Leadership is huge. The company had been a private company and had been quite happy to be #2 in the marketplace and they made lots of money. Then the company was sold to a public company – the precursor to an organization called Fortune Brands. And they came in and said, “You’re not going to be a sleepy little manufacturing firm. You’re going to be a consumer products company, and you’re going to be #1 in the market. You’re going to grow at 10% a year in an industry that grows at 1 or 2 % a year.” We got a new CEO, a phenomenal leader, and that was his charge.

ThinkingDesign: What behaviors did you see in him that drove your later work?

DB: Intense focus on the customer. He spent huge amounts of time talking to plumbers, retailers, and homeowners. He was out there in the field. He also had an amazing ability to communicate to all different kinds of people. He could talk to truck drivers one day and then come back in and talk to Wall Street analysts the next. And he’d be compelling to both audiences.

The other thing he did was set the strategy for the company. He came in and said, “We can’t be world-class at everything.” All the ownership and everyone thought we could do everything, but he focused the organization and said we’d be the product innovators in our category, and that we'd have to say no to investments in other areas.

ThinkingDesign: Isn't “Innovation Lab” just another way of saying R&D?

DB: Most of the time, when you say R&D, people think about basic science. The innovation lab I set up and ran was about exploring consumer context in a much broader way. It was about exploring trends that may affect consumers or the industry well into the future, exploring emerging technologies that may be applied in some way to create whole new categories. We looked at the future of piping in the home and the effects it might have on faucets and shower experiences going forward. It wasn’t about basic science, though we had a technologist involved in it. It was about scanning for technology and looking to see if there were interesting ways to apply it.

ThinkingDesign: You know what’s funny? The first time I ran across you and Continuum was in a clip from the Today Show segment when you were in the shower.

DB: I was actually the client on that shower research. We brought Continuum in for it. I was their biggest client for six years. I brought them in to design a new line of products, and part of the deal was that they had to help us learn the product design process ourselves.

ThinkingDesign: As we know, you eventually did make the jump over to Continuum. Were you successful in helping Moen master the product development process themselves?

DB: Absolutely. They grew from $240 million to $1.1 billion in eight years, and only some of it was acquisition. A lot of it was the new products – about 20-25% of the growth came from new products. It was a pretty phenomenal experience. It was really fun and exciting to be part of the transformation, and once all those capabilities were in those place, it got kind of boring for me.

I’d always wanted to try consulting, and one day Continuum called me and asked me to come over.

ThinkingDesign: What’s the value in your relationship with the CCL, and partnerships like that in general?

DB: I got involved with the Center For Creative Leadership and ultimately became their “Innovator in Residence,” so I became an advisor to the EVP of research and innovation to try to find ways to make the center more innovative. I eventually worked on a really interesting project to bring their really expensive leadership training to rural India in low-cost ways. That was a really fun project that we did with them.

At one point, they were getting lots of requests for some programming in innovation and leadership, and they asked if I would be interested in developing something with them. One of the big hurdles to innovation is that a lot of leaders kind of get the idea that they need it and they like to talk about how innovative they want their organization to be. But they don’t behave or make the necessary changes for that to happen.

Leadership can be either a barrier or catalyst for innovation in organizations. So we co-developed a two day program that mashed up Continuum’s approach to innovation and the CCL’s approach to leadership, and it’s aimed at upper middle managers inside organizations. What we do is have them experience parts of the innovation process, then have the reflect on what they as a leader are going to have to do to foster a climate where it can happen.

ThinkingDesign: Is there a silver bullet there? And if a company goes from 0-60 in the innovation space, how long might that take?

DB: It all depends on the size of the organization, how committed the leadership is, the availability of the necessary resources to do it. Some of the companies I work with in developing countries just don’t have access to basic prototyping stuff. So there’s just basic infrastructure that needs to be in place. Generally, what happens is that some smaller group within the organization decides that, as a group or department, that they need to become more innovative, and they’ll undertake it themselves. For me, that’s one of the most successful models, because when they show success – drive growth, increase profits, whatever – the rest of the organization pays attention and starts to put some of that in their group, or the leadership says, "That’s really cool. We need to have some of that in the rest of the organization."

But it can take years. I think it takes longer in successful organizations, actually, because you don’t want to mess with success. When people are under particularly high levels of stress, they can be more willing to change.

We’re seeing a lot right now in organizations who have gone through the downturn and downsized and realize they can’t go back to the way they used to do things. So our business is booming right now, and I think that’s a large part of it -- people aren’t going back to the way things were before the downturn. They’re actively out getting new ways to do things.

ThinkingDesign: Any examples you can point to of that?

DB: Well, most of it is proprietary, but if you look at Indra Nooyi [of Pepsico] talk about "performance with purpose":

There’s a very enlightened leader that’s going to take Pepsi from a snack food company to a nutrition company, so that means you have to change a lot about the way you do things.

The Pepsi Innovation Fellowship Program is a component of a project we’re doing with them. To help Pepsi change the fellowship program is used to bring in young innovative thinkers. It’s a very enlightened program.

"The Intersection of Design, Public Education, and Community" with Project H's Emily Pilloton

2010-09-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

Emily Pilloton is the founder and executive director of Project H Design, a non-profit team of designers, builders, and teachers with a current focus on using design to re-envision public education. She’s also the author of Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People.

Emily says her twin goal for the book was to make sure people know that humanitarian design isn’t just about products, and that it’s not just about the developing world. To illustrate her point, she uses examples like the Brita water filter and WalkScore.com (a great website for promoting "walkable" neighborhoods) alongside more traditional humanitarian design products like Kickstart's water pumps in Africa.

In the book, she also points to some of her group’s own creations, like Learning Landscape, a grid-based playground system using reclaimed tires for elementary math education, as examples of designs that empower people.

(The Learning Landscape in action)

Emily has been spreading the word about humanitarian design through public appearances at conferences like PopTech (she was one of their 2009 Social Innovation Fellows), and (not kidding) the Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Emily Pilloton

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

2010 Election

Fox News

I recently spoke with Emily about her work with Project H, and how its scope has expanded recently. She’s highly ambitious in her attempt to use design thinking and problem-solving to tackle some huge issues, like rural poverty, education, and community development through Project H's work in Bertie County, North Carolina.

But first things first...

ThinkingDesign: How’d you get the invite to Stephen Colbert? That must have been something.

Emily Pilloton: They just asked me. It was totally surreal. He’s such a ham. I totally have a non-romantic crush on him.

ThinkingDesign: You handled him really well.

EP: Thank you. I totally blacked out. I brought a posse with me, and afterward, I had no idea what I said and I asked them and they said, “I don’t know, but it was totally great!”

I was terrified. I made the mistake of watching a bunch of different ones, and he just slays some people. I think it helps to have props, though, like the landmine shoes I brought.

ThinkingDesign: How’d you get the idea to put your book together, and what was the process like?

EP: In hindsight, when I was putting it together, Project H was not even a year old. For us, the book was an exploration of what was out there, and we used it to sort of benchmark what had been done within humanitarian design.

As a product designer, I sort of hate products. And obviously there are products in there, but I wanted to show that humanitarian design is not just about products. There are a lot of things in there that are websites or systems or just ideas or initiatives, and that they all came from a very specific design process.

I also wanted to make the case that humanitarian design is not just about the developing world. There are a lot of things in the book that you can go out and buy at Target. It’s not about the poor as much as it’s about smart, creative initiatives that came from the design process for a variety of markets.

ThinkingDesign: Why do you hate products?

EP: It’s not that I hate products; I love the idea of a product. A thing that you can hold in your hand can have so much personality and impact on your life. What I don’t like about products is how designers think of them. A lot of times that’s the goal of a designer – it’s all about these artifacts that you can make a million of that you can sell and make money.

I’m much more interested in design as a process, and whether you come out of that process with a product or a house or a website or a business plan, that doesn’t really matter. It’s the process that got me into design in the first place.

"Product design" just feels very outdated to me. I’m interested in different models. Like, if someone commissions me to design a chair, why would I design a whole new chair when I can design something like craigslist, where people can go out and buy chairs in their neighborhoods, or get used ones for free? Why do we always assume that the solution is a new product?

ThinkingDesign: Okay. Fair enough. So you’re now working in education. What’s meaningful to you about your current work?

EP: More than a year and a half ago, we were approached by the superintendent of the Bertie County School District in North Carolina. He asked us to come down here and build the learning landscape playground. It’s made out of reclaimed tires, and you use it in combination with this whole series of games that we wrote that are in line with public school curricula.

He wanted us to come down and build one for each of his elementary schools. His district is falling apart at the seams. It’s the poorest county in the state, with 17 people per square mile. In the whole county, there are three restaurants. Up until a week ago, you couldn’t get Internet. In many ways, it feels like the developing world. It’s very rural.

So that’s how the relationship started. We built the playgrounds and discovered that the superintendent was this amazing visionary and was brought in to fix the district. As part of his strategic plan, he wanted to bring in young, innovative thinkers, and I guess we fell into that category.

So, learning landscape was the first project. And we found out that he was this kindred spirit who really believed in design in a place where not many people even know what that word means. He basically said, here’s my credit card. Here’s your budget. Go build three computer labs that will help get kids excited about technology.

(Coolest computer room in the county)

That led into a bunch of other projects. We built a new weight room for the football team, then a big campaign for the whole county with this big green dot to try to get free broadband, which now we have. Well, it’s not exactly free, but we now have cables that come out here now, which is the first step.

ThinkingDesign: Do you live there now?

EP: Yes, I do live here now. We moved here, because we were doing all of these projects, working with the superintendent. But we got to the point where we still felt like consultants. We were still doing projects and leaving. We felt like we needed to be more a part of the community to get to the next level. These things were having impact, but they were still sort of viewed as like things from the beyond that were being dropped here.

And during the course of the year, we’d gotten to know a lot of the students and a lot of teachers, just by bringing them into design brainstorms or whatever. We figured what better way to take the design to the next level than become teachers ourselves. We believed that design could become more than something you hire consultants for, but something that could be bred from within in the public school system.

ThinkingDesign: How have the students reacted?

EP: It’s going to sound terrible, but the teachers here are not good, and the students haven’t ever been challenged. I don’t think that anyone ever believed in them. There’s just not a lot of pride in education.

What design has offered to these students is not only something hands-on – like our first project was to build corn hole boards.

(I never thought I'd use Corn Hole and Design Thinking in the same sentence.)

Now we’re doing graphic design on them to auction them off to raise money for our next project, which is public chicken coops. It’s not a text book to memorize for a test. It’s something that these kids can pick up and understand, and it’s really challenging. It applies all of their core subject learning.

ThinkingDesign: Do you teach this stuff as individual skills, or as a design thinking toolkit?

EP: Both. In the wood shop, they need to know how to use a router, a table saw and a chopsaw. But we went into it and started at high-level design thinking. We started with discussing the strategy they should take when they enter this space.

We made a list of all the ways we could build the corn hole boards and ended up with four different ways. The process helped them problem solve their way through it. It’s important for them to take that problem-solving approach, and then learn tools like Illustrator so that they can go produce it.

ThinkingDesign: To what extent are you trying to incubate ideas, processes, and solutions that other places can implement or learn from?

EP: It’s really tough. We get asked all the time -- like with this curriculum -- about how we’re going to scale it. Of course I want to do that. But one thing I’ve learned over the past two years is that it’s really dangerous if you celebrate too early. I wanna make sure these things work first. Even with the computer labs- they’ve only been built and in use for a year now. It’s an architectural solution, and we know it’s going to stand up, but it takes a long time to measure its effect on the students’ test scores and overall engagement.

With this one-year curriculum, I’d love to see it in other communities, but it takes time, and I’ve learned to take things sort of slow.

The other thing, with the Studio H program, we wrote it as a one-year program that you could conceivably drop into any rural school district. But instead of scaling it that way, we’ve started looking at it from another way. Could you take this program and turn it into an entire charter school? Because right now, it’s only available to the junior class, so they spend the other three years doing the same old thing. So that might be a different approach.

ThinkingDesign: Now you’ve gone from small-scale projects into huge, daunting community development and education projects. What's your end game?

EP: With Studio H, this not about us teaching design. I don’t care at all if any of these kids go to design school. That’s not why we’re in it at all. But by the end of the year, they will have the creative and critical skills to call themselves designers. They’ll have the construction skills to call themselves industry-relevant contractors. And so over next summer, we are going to hire them as our construction crew to build a farmer's market downtown. So there is a community development angle here. We’ll spend the summer practicing pouring foundations and actually building.

I’m really interested in that intersection between design, public education, and community.

Design for the BoP: Irrigating the "Perfect Solution" with DripTech's Peter Frykman

2010-09-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

Peter Frykman is founder and CEO of DripTech, a low-cost drip irrigation company based in Palo Alto, CA. I first met Peter when I moderated a “Design for Affordability” panel at last year’s Net Impact National Conference at Cornell.

I've since learned how extremely affordable DripTech's product is, and how important that is to the company's value proposition. Says Peter: "A small system could cost as little as $5, but typically farmers will invest $100 or more for a larger installation. This is almost always purchased without any formal financing, though we look forward to adding this option in the future. The purchase price of the system is usually paid back with 6 months in savings and gains."

A lot has changed in Peter’s world since last November, so I thought now would be a good time to catch up with the mechanical engineer-turned-start-up CEO.

I wanted to ask him about how design and the design thinking methodology he learned at Stanford has helped fuel DripTech’s growing success, and also how design thinking expands into business model development as Peter and Co. begin to scale DripTech in India and China. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:

ThinkingDesign: How did your business idea come about?

PF: Driptech was founded out of a course called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability at the d.school at Stanford. The d.school is an interesting organization -- it’s an example of the benefits you get when you cross-pollinate and collaborate in different fields.

(Pollination or cross-pollination? That's for Peter to know, and for you to find out.)

We were the only three-person team in the class: one business student, one mechanical engineer (my background is in mechanical engineering – I studied that as an undergrad and stayed on to do masters degree), and one designer from the masters program in product design. I had been familiar with the Stanford methodology for user-based design for some time, but that was my first experience working with business students.

Our product designer had a good business sense, and I was good at product design. Our business student was really good at corralling us. We were prone to getting wound up on tangents and going crazy with some of the design, so she did an effective job at managing our progress.

ThinkingDesign: How’d you go from taking the design from class to actually starting the company?

PF: The best advice I ever got was from a mentor and advisor. I told him I thought I was entrepreneurial and wanted to start a company or join a start-up, and could he give me any advice? He said that, every year, about 50 people came into his office and told him the same thing that I had just told him. The only difference between them, he said, was the ones that started a company just did, and the ones that didn’t didn’t. They were all smart motivated people. He said: “If you want to be entrepreneurial, you just have to go do it.”

ThinkingDesign: How do you design differently for the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) than for the developed world?

PF: To me, design thinking has to be user-focused. It comes down to whether it’s participatory, whether the user is at the focal point of the design process. In many ways it’s even more important that you involve the user heavily in the design process when you’re targeting the product or service towards an emerging market or BoP customer, because there’s less wiggle room in getting the value proposition right. If you don’t get it perfectly right, it’s not very forgiving, because these customers don’t have a lot of capital. They’re unable to take lots of new technology risks, so you need to make sure it’s the perfect product for the customer before you sell it to them.

You and me buy all kinds of junk that’s not perfect because we have money and it’s not important. We can buy something with three features that we like but five that don’t really fit because we’ve got that luxury of those extra financial resources, but that’s not necessarily the case for a farmer that earns $2/day. They have to get what they need and nothing more.

(DripTech's "perfect product" in India)

ThinkingDesign: How did you get to that “perfect product”?

PF: We were very fortunate that the product we were looking at – affordable drip irrigation – is a good product for lots of farmers. If you’ve got an enormous market, then finding a niche that your product really fits can be easy. And when you’re a start-up, you need to focus on getting those first customers and finding the farmers, in our case, for whom the product is a perfect fit, then branching out from there and adding additional products and configurations. That's what opens up new markets and new market segments.

So, you go out and you meet with farmers, you design your product, and then you come back and deliver it to them and the farmers that are like them. There’s no such thing as a product that will fit everybody’s needs, but you have to pick somewhere to start.

One of the main challenges is that you have to pick your ideal customer, and then, when you go to market, you have to target that ideal customer. Because ultimately, if you’re going to be sustainable and scalable, you have to get the ball rolling and start getting some volume. That starts with your early adopter customers.

ThinkingDesign: Where did you do your research? And did you go back to them for feedback once you’d done the initial design?

PF: We did our initial user research in Ethiopia and sent some of the product back to them once we had produced it. But when we went to start the company, we needed to find a place that could be a little more welcoming in terms of market infrastructure – democracy and banks and the ability for us to come in and out and operate, and shops where people buy things – so when we looked at that, we saw that India is really the easiest place for us to start. There are more subsistence farmers in India than there are in all of Africa.

After we had done our initial product testing and shown that the product worked in the lab, we needed to show that it would work in the hands of actual customers, so we went and did a pilot study.

ThinkingDesign: What did you find when you commissioned the pilot?

PF: We had a small team and very limited resources, so we tested it with about 15 farmers, and they all said that this saved them water of course, but also time and labor. And that was a big surprise for us, because we didn’t know how much labor flood irrigation requires. And these farmers were quite happy that they didn’t have to do all this backbreaking work. They could just turn the drip irrigation on and have their elderly father watch it and turn it off when it was done and go do other work.

People will always say that BoP customers won’t pay to reduce their labor, because it’s a sunk cost and their own time that they’re not paying for out of pocket. Sometimes that’s true, but they certainly appreciate it when you save them hard labor. They might not pay much to forgo it, but they are certainly happy when it happens.

(Some very appreciative Indian farmers)

ThinkingDesign: So you’d proved that the product worked. How did you prove the business model from there?

PF: We knew the product was good, but we had to show that people were willing to buy it at a price we could make money on and scale with. We started looking at where we could make our first sale, so we actually got connected with somebody who introduced us to local government officials in China. They wanted to buy our product for local farmers, and that was how we made our first commercial sale to 200 farms through a local government in China. We went over and installed those at the beginning of this year.

Now, the farmers have been using the system for at least six months and we’re getting great results back.

ThinkingDesign: Have you found any unintended uses of the product, or people imitating it yet?

PF: No imitators yet. Of course, there are lots of commercial drip irrigation companies out there. Our system have these little micro-jets of water, which are really neat because you can see them squirting up at the same height if the holes are facing up. We always install them with the holes facing up as a technical test, but what we realized is that, usually when we do an installation like this, it looks really cool. So all the kids in the area come out into the field and sort of play in the system. So that’s been an unintended use for our product – as entertainment for the local children.

(An unintended but wonderful use for DripTech's design)

ThinkingDesign: You have to design the whole business spiel -- the supply chain, the business development and sales infrastructure and all that. Do you revisit the design thinking process at all from here on out?

PF: I think the concept of rapid prototyping and iterative design is really ingrained in our company culture, so even when we’re thinking about business model and marketing materials and anything that’s sort of customer –facing, we go through the same process and we get a lot of quick ideas and test and refine them. And that’s kind of who we are.

We’re very methodical about testing things out, and of course, there are lots of good examples of models that have started to work in this space for distribution and marketing, so we can borrow from other peoples’ success as well.

Eating Should Be Simpler -- Thoughts on Michael Pollan and "The Omnivore's Dilemma"

2010-08-31T08:33:00.000-07:00

I just finished Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and am grateful to him for removing yet another of the veils that industry attempts to cast over us through clever marketing: that all eggs are the same, that all meat is the same, etc.

The design of food systems that are hurting (some might say destroying) the health of a civilization that lacks a consistent, traditional food culture (i.e. the U.S.A) is surely design -- and power -- placed in the wrong hands. What the book did for me was to deliver the design of my own eating and drinking and consuming back into my own hands.

I marvel at the widespread impact Michael Pollan's work has now had on our society -- the benefits that thoughtful journalism can still provide. And yet, after all his work and all his reporting, one of Pollan's most lasting contributions for me is his newer book, "Food Rules", in which he summarizes his philosophy on food and eating in 7 words: "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much."

Here's a really entertaining, short interview from the Daily Show that encapsulates much of what's both wrong and right with food today:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Michael Pollan

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Open Innovation at Frog, IDEO, and GOOD

2010-08-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

I'm sure there are plenty more, but IDEO, Frog Design, and GOOD are really darn, uh... excellent at doing open innovation and crowdsourcing. Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure if I can call them excellent at this, since I don't know the actual outcomes yet. But here's some info on them:

OpenIDEO sources ideas from the crowd on how to make the world a better place:

Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

FrogMob solicits ethnographic data from the crowd to "gather a quick visual pulse on behaviors, trends and artifacts globally." It aims to give a rich visual description of how products are used globally.

GOOD gathers ideas and content for their magazine issues from the crowd on topics ranging from Work to New Orleans to Water. Fascinating what they come up with.

Who else does this well? I'd love to hear about the groundbreakers in this space that I'm surely not aware of. Thanks!

Design and "The Art of Living Close To Each Other"

2010-08-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

Valid vs. Reliable -- thoughts on Roger Martin's "The Design of Business"

2010-07-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

Most who follow the development of the field of design thinking know Roger Martin, the dean of the University of Toronto Rotman School in Canada.

I was recently given his book, "The Design of Business," to read by a friend. It came with an endorsement of Martin's balance of creativity vs. analysis, exploration vs. exploitation, "madness vs. measure." Sure, I thought. Everyone in their right mind supports that balance, to one degree or another.

But about halfway through the book, I understand why Martin is one of the leading thinkers in the field. His discussion of reliable vs. valid is pretty fascinating. Martin defines reliable as "consistent and predictable" and valid as "producing a desired result."

Here's a piece of the argument (directly from the book, with some bits removed for brevity):

"What organizations dedicated to running reliable algorithms fail to realize is that while they reduce the risk of small variations in their business, they increase the risk of cataclysmic events that occur when the future no longer resembles the past and the algorithm is no longer relevant or useful... Such organizations inevitably come to see the maintenance of the status quo as an end in itself, short-circuiting their ability to design and redesign themselves continuously."

If you're interested, here's a talk he gave on the topic at the New School in NYC.

Random Aside: Infographics are pretty wonderful...

2010-07-09T07:59:00.000-07:00

As a former journalist, I understand the acute challenge of presenting information in the most accurate, digestible way possible (especially in short attention span era). As hard as it might be for writers to swallow, sometimes infographics are kind of the best way to present complex or data-rich topics in a readily understandable way.

Here are a couple I found through Fast Company. They show something pretty basic (the most common kind of restaurant by neighborhood), but in a way that's illustrative of more complex societal dynamics at work in America's greatest city, especially in the Queens example. For more infographics, check out GOOD magazine's site for a whole bunch of fascinating ones.

Barefoot Running (Less is More)

2010-06-30T09:04:00.000-07:00

I just finished a pretty incredible book by Christopher McDougall called "Born to Run," about ultramarathoners, a tribe of Mexican Indians called the Tarahumara, and the lost skill/art/practice of distance running. The book is all about why (when humans have actually evolved to be distance runners) we are constantly getting hurt and have largely stopped enjoying what should be a healthy and liberating activity.

The short answer: it's in the shoes. In fact, McDougall says that "running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot." As just one small piece of backup, he cites a 1989 study that proved that the greater the padding in the shoe, the greater (not less) the impact on the runner.

In the name of profit, McDougall says, Nike, the inventor and designer of countless running shoes since the early 1970's (and the rest of the running shoe industry), promotes more and more "advanced" shoe designs that are worse and worse for your feet.

It leads me to a conflicting conclusion: that better, or at least more "advanced" design can actually be worse for the end user. In this case, more padding and support actually inhibits development of muscles and other structures that are protective of the foot.

So who's to blame, and how can design come to the rescue? I think it's safe to say the blame can be spread around; this isn't about Nike. After all, I'm responsible for my running technique and the impact it has on my body. But from a design perspective, McDougall and others say that we already have access to the best design, which is to say no design at all, other than our foot itself. He says that running barefoot actually promotes a correct and healthy running style.

Check this out:

But of course, business has the ability to capture value from "barefoot" running. Take a look at the below from Vibram, which is the latest in running shoe design:

For the last two weeks or so, I've been running barefoot and in the barefoot style (for the record, I don't own the above shoes). And though it's still early in my experiment, it's so far been a tough design lesson I'm happy to have learned.

Design Thinking vs. Design Action

2010-06-15T13:52:00.000-07:00

I recently read an interesting blog post by Idris Mootee, the CEO of idea couture, an innovation and design consultancy based in Toronto. "What is design thinking?" Mootee asks in the post. "Design thinking is not about design. It is about helping companies and individuals to think differently about strategic options and system impact."

Mootee worries that companies won't reap the benefits of design thinking if it's viewed simply as a buzzword and is "over-theorized" (his word) and under-acted (my word).

To avoid this over-theorization of design thinking (at a time when, it can be argued, companies need it more than ever) Mootee recommends three design techniques -- observational research or ethnography, visual sense-making, and rapid prototyping -- that he says are "most powerful if you combine them with strategic context..."

These, he says are "where D-school meets B-school" -- and how we can keep our hands busy creating and our heads out of the over-theorized clouds.

Education+Business+Design = A Conversation with IDEO's Ryan Jacoby

2010-06-05T16:48:00.000-07:00

Ryan Jacoby studied Systems Engineering at the University of Virginia, then spent four years as a Deloitte consultant before attending business school at Stanford.

Before the Stanford d.school was officially official, Ryan studied and prototyped there under the likes of IDEO founder David Kelley, among others. After graduating, he joined IDEO full-time in the Bay Area for about two years before helping open the company’s New York City office and co-founding its Business Design practice with several others.

Ryan and I chatted a while back about business and design and education and how the three are interrelated – or should be. Here’s an edited excerpt of our conversation:

ThinkingDesign: How’d you get into all this business design stuff?

RJ: When I went back to business school, I really wanted to get back into sort of how things are made. My background was about understanding systems, and I knew enough about business to be dangerous. My first design class was called “Interdisciplinary Design and Innovation,” and it hooked me.

Our team was made up of a computer science guy, a mechanical engineer, a product designer, and me – we decided to design next-generation user interfaces for teen girls. That’s a dumb idea, right? Four guys that know nothing about being a teenage girl.

People were betting about how bad we’d flame out. But we did amazing work by sticking with the process we learned. Because we were so outside of our element, it gave us an entirely different view.

(It's not always a bad thing to be out of your element)

ThinkingDesign: how did you go about it that time?

RJ: The way the d.school teaches it. Basically hanging out at shopping malls and just trying not to get arrested or kicked out. I remember one day with my teammates going to a high school girls’ basketball game and sneaking a video camera to act like we were shooting the game but actually shooting this gaggle of teen girls, doing these amazing behaviors with their cell phones and communicating with each other at the same time. Just seeing all of this playing out in front of us and thinking about it. We talked to an expert in teenage girls, and we talked to an expert in language.

(A unique place for design research)

I remember one of the professors agreeing with one of our findings -- that information is power in these collectives [of teenage girls]. And he actually encouraged us to attempt to change that. As a team, we sat around and had to decide whether to design for the behavior, or whether to take on the mantle of trying to change teen girlhood forever.

ThinkingDesign: What’d you decide?

RJ: We totally tried to encourage the behavior. We did flash prototypes of interfaces and designed a whole system around it. We showed models of our interface designs at a table during high school lunch until security guards kicked us out. We got away with a lot by saying we were a Stanford student and doing it for class.

As an experience, it was really inspiring. I really got into it. It was a blast and a different way of thinking which I certainly appreciated, because it was a nice complement to the systems thinking and business background that I’d developed.

ThinkingDesign: How did the "Business Design: The Curriculum of 2012" idea come about?

RJ: It was one of the easiest [blog] posts I’ve ever written. I did it on a flight from New York to Florida, actually. I’d been thinking about it and started playing around with it, because I do a lot of hiring for the business design discipline at IDEO. As a student in many business programs, you have to cobble together and approximate the kind of experience we’re looking for.

(A Cobbler Cobbling)

So, it made me ask the question, “Why isn’t there something else that is preparing people to do what we do here [at IDEO]?” Business design is a craft and approach. If you believe in that craft, then where’s the educational support system to create those craftspeople? And what should it look like? I knew it would be hands-on and action-oriented and hard, but hard in the way that something that’s extremely rewarding is hard.

ThinkingDesign: Are business schools getting better at combining business and design?

RJ: I think there are a couple of professors at each school that have picked up the mantle of design thinking. But we’re still in the very early stages. Most programs are still rooted in the traditional institutions. It’s not taught as craft, but more of a mindset. That’s a big deal in itself, but I’m still waiting for someone to close the gap with a start-up mentality.

There are a lot of prerequisites that people think you need to have before doing this stuff. You can worry about that and wait to get that experience, or you can dive in. Business schools teach people to do the right thing, but innovation and design asks you to do something different than that. It’s about being stupid as much as being smart. It’s helping people get over that scary feeling of being wrong and looking stupid.

(A Diesel Jeans campaign that Ryan blogged about not too long ago -- so appropriate and so funny)

Imagine going into a business school and promoting my curriculum – you’d get thrown out on your ear. I was really trying to figure out how to give people experiences in this way while waiting for these institutions to change?

ThinkingDesign: You mentioned before that business design is a craft. What do you mean by that, and how do you know you’re good at it?

RJ: When you call it a craft and not a skill, you realize you can always get better at it. And you realize there are tools and methods in the world that you can acquire that can inspire you to get better.

If I were drawing it for you, I’d draw a smooth curve with a pencil and then zoom in on it. When you see it closer, you realize it’s not a smooth line but more of a jagged line. A craftsperson can see the jagged elements of it. So, one of the ways I think you know you’re really good at business design is that you can see the underlying assumptions in these business models and communicate them in ways that people can understand.

You’ve kinda got a quiver of things you want to try and a quiver of ideas that you’re constantly working on. It’s different than saying I’m really good at math, for instance. It’s saying that I can work my way through these problems and constantly staying inspired around these business issues and business models.

ThinkingDesign: Do you still do as much prototyping in business design as you do in product design?

RJ: We use discovery-driven planning a lot. You basically start with the result and work backwards. So, if you start with a scenario of a $10 million a year business situation, then what needs to be true to make that happen and what are the assumptions that underlie that outcome? What are the prototypes, pilots, and tests that we can put into place to learn into that plan? It’s like options thinking. People that can think in options in the world of business are few and far between. A lot of business design is how you can think about generating, evaluating, and learning into options – if you see what I mean.

ThinkingDesign: Okay. I’m kinda confused. How else can I think about business design?

RJ: Another belief I have is that when you’re designing the experience, you’re designing the business and vice versa. They are intertwining activities. If you look at the web 2.0 space generally, a lot of folks are figuring out the online experience at the exact same time they’re figuring out the business model. If they are creating a great experience, then a business model can come out of that. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in that approach.

Another way to look at it – I sometimes say business design is a mix of entrepreneurship, commerce, and art – it’s a pragmatic mix of those things. It’s not business + design or design + business. It’s a craft and it’s something different.

IDEO's Ryan Jacoby Prototypes a Business Design Curriculum

2010-06-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

Last May, IDEO's Ryan Jacoby made a posting on his blog that got a lot of people talking. It was his vision of what a Business Design curriculum would look like. Ryan helps run the business design practice for IDEO in NYC (and is considered the first graduate of the d.school at Stanford) so has the credibility to put this curriculum idea out there and stimulate some spirited discussion.

When I found the posting last summer, I'd just launched Creative Design for Affordability at Cornell, and I was seeking kindred spirits and potentially more training in design thinking when I found Ryan's curriculum and a flowing discussion in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

I wanted to do my part to continue the conversation sparked by the post, so I've included a snippet of his posting here to pique your interest (sorry it's a bit fuzzy -- please make sure to check out his whole post here). I also had the opportunity to chat with Ryan recently -- about the posting and his work in business design. That conversation will follow later in the week...

The Building Blocks of Creativity at LEGO

2010-05-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

If there was a hall of fame of household names, LEGO would have its own wing. But success is about more than just being well-known. LEGO also has some of the most dedicated customers around. That helps Cecilia Weckstrom, who heads up the Consumer Insight & Experience Innovation area, run some pretty cutting-edge efforts to customize products and involve LEGO fans in the process of developing new businesses.

I connected with Cecilia through Kursty Groves, who I interviewed for this blog and who wrote the book “I Wish I Worked There”. Cecilia and I talked about how LEGO uses culture, space, and ravenous customers to stay a household name. Here’s an edited excerpt from the conversation:

ThinkingDesign: Do you use space differently for toy designers and for corporate types?

CW: At headquarters (in Billund, Denmark), we have lots of old factory buildings that have been converted to office spaces. Being a Scandinavian company, open floor plan thinking is a big feature. I guess the common thing is that there is a lot of openness – lots of bricks and toys everywhere. It’s a very family-friendly company, so people bring their kids to work and they’re all running around and playing in corners.

You might see people in suits now and again, but it’s only because we have to meet external people and have to look remotely respectable. It’s less corporate than you might find in many places, and it’s because kids create that kind of informality.

ThinkingDesign: How do you involve your customers in the design process?

CW: If you’re totally at the front end, you’re trying to scope out the opportunity areas – looking at trends, competitors, and the like. For example, the whole social and community aspect is becoming such a large part of being into LEGO. People aren’t just interested in LEGO for building and being creative themselves anymore. People are sharing what they’ve created online. YouTube is filled with LEGO videos that people have made, and then there are lots of fan sites where people post photos of the things that they’ve built.

(Here's a funny example of LEGO on YouTube)

It’s a whole movement and almost like a language, where people build something and are so excited to share it with people who are into the same stuff. And that’s why we work a lot with our community – to do things together with them but also ways to make the types of experiences or business opportunities to be more conducive to that side of socializing and connecting to others. It gives a lot of personal meaning and is more emotionally engaging that way.

ThinkingDesign: Cool. So, once you’ve found a trend like that, how do you then start to turn it into a business?

CW: Eric Von Hippel at MIT has developed what he calls a “lead user method,” and we use that when working on products by identifying users in the community who are sort of experts in a topic and work with them all the way throughout.

We also just launched a concept store where we have master builder bars and sections where people can learn tips and tricks on how to make crazy stuff. We developed all those things through co-creation – kids, parents, teachers, and the like have sat down with us and done brainstorming to come up with ideas on what the experience could be like, prototyping it and illustrating it and trying to get to the bottom of what could be a relevant value proposition for something that we aren’t doing today.

That’s the fun part – learning what it is our customers want, and seeing how excited they get when you involve them in the creative process. It’s inspiring to do things in collaboration, rather than isolation, with the people who you intend to have as your customers.

ThinkingDesign: How else do you co-create with your customers?

CW: We have an internal incubator team that deploys a sort of venture capital model when we develop entirely new business opportunities. We try to start small and prototype and pilot the project to gauge demand and play with the business model – but we do it live in the marketplace. That’s a technique we can use for entirely new businesses.

We’re also doing something called LEGO Cuusoo. It’s a Japanese platform (it means “I wish” in Japanese), where people can sort of wish for what they’d want out of a LEGO product and vote on other people’s ideas. When something gets 1000 wishes or votes, we will manufacture it for them.

In the act of voting for something, users create a profile. That gives us a lot of insight into who these people are. Are they kids or adults, and what are their profiles? It’s a low-risk way to get really deep insights, and we’re piloting the site in English now. It’s a way of fishing for ideas and gauging demand for them.

ThinkingDesign: How does the company philosophy influence the way LEGO operates?

CW: It’s a family-owned company. The Kristiansen family – now in its third generation of LEGO leadership – is very passionate about the cause of LEGO, which is essentially equipping people around the world with the ability to give form to their ideas and improve and grow their own creativity through a platform that is open-ended and isn’t complete until you put it together.

We’re incredibly successful, but it comes as a by-product of staying true to creativity, innovation, and fun. Because we’re family owned, we can allow ourselves a long-term view, instead of the desperate short-term focus. We see turning a profit as the oxygen. We all need to breathe to stay alive, but we’re not here on this planet to breathe. Similarly, profit allows us to be here but it’s not why we’re here.

Ghana Think Tank -- Turning Aid and Innovation on their Heads

2010-05-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you’ve heard of “trickle-up innovation.” My friend and former colleague, Reena Jana, has written extensively on the topic. According to Reena, it's the process where companies create "entry-level goods for emerging markets and then quickly and cheaply repackage them for sale in rich nations, where customers are increasingly hungry for bargains."

Okay, well you’ve also obviously heard of international aid, where well-intentioned people from the U.S. and other well-to-do countries undertake projects designed to help poor people in developing countries.

In a completely novel way, Christopher Robbins, John Ewing, and Matey Odonkor (Carmen Montoya also joined the project in 2009), all graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), have somehow simultaneously combined these two concepts and turned them on their heads. Their project is called the Ghana Think Tank, and it’s been nominated for the Cartier Award for creating a kind of reversal out of the international aid process, where they say the people being "helped" are rarely involved in the process.

Here's how it works. The Ghana Think Tank takes problems sourced from communities like Providence, Rhode Island in the U.S. and Liverpool in England, and seeks solutions from the think tank participants in Ghana (of course), El Salvador, Cuba, Serbia, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Iran.

At this link, you'll find a good video that provides an overview of the process.

(Members of the Ghana Think Tank -- El Salvador)

The truly novel part? They actually force the folks who submitted their problems to enact the solutions. Says Robbins of the concept, “Originally, it came out of a nasty place. It was a way of making stereotypes and cultural misunderstandings into physical experiences."

Now, Robbins sees the project as less nasty and more of an earnest way to help enable cross-cultural understanding and develop completely unexpected solutions to problems. Perhaps that’s because some of the solutions the think tanks have uncovered have worked remarkably well. For instance, a dog in the U.S. had been barking incessantly, but when the Ghanian think tank recommended changing the dog’s name to “Love” to quell its barking, guess what happened? That's just one example. Check out more here.

"Even though some of the outcomes may seem silly, it is because we take it seriously that we force ourselves to implement solutions regardless of how we feel about them," says Robbins.

(A member of the Ghana Think Tank -- Ghana)

The project continues to morph, as Robbins is now seeking to transform the organization into a formal non-profit organization, and is also considering how he might apply its way of sourcing solutions to business and other problems.

Robbins has a penchant for using creative means to make a point. Over the next four months or so, he is working to restart the Works Projects Administration (FDR’s New Deal public works program designed to pull the U.S.A. out of the Depression), or WPA, in communities in Jamaica, Queens and in the rural hamlet of Wassaic, New York. Though the WPA doesn’t formally exist, he’s encouraging community members to dress like the WPA and work like them, too. Robbins couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t enacted a similar initiative during the current recession, so he’s trying to do it himself. If you care to learn more – or lend your support – check out this video or go to Kickstarter.

WPA is also a finalist for a $50,000 Public Art Award from the Cambridge Arts Council to open an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Many thanks to Kursty Groves, who I interviewed not too long ago about her book, “I Wish I Worked There,” for connecting me with Christopher.

Design for Surfing Fun -- and Conservation -- in India

2010-05-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

Just saw this at the Patagonia blog and thought it was too amazing not to pass along. As a surfer and a fan of design, this is something I hope will spread to many more locations (maybe it already has and I just don't know about it).

India's First Multi-Purpose Reef Goes Off from ASR Limited on Vimeo.

Coachella and Creativity

2010-05-04T05:34:00.000-07:00

Coachella, the much-publicized 3-day music festival in the desert near Palm Springs, was everything I hoped it would be and more. I hoped it would be a chance to see a number of current bands that I like all in one place, to hang out with friends, and to enjoy the incredible desert venue (the entire event takes place in a huge polo grounds) that I’d heard so much about. I’d also held out hope that the weather wouldn’t make it too hot to enjoy the above elements.

The “more” was the unexpected part – the creativity I saw not just in the festival organizers but the culture it encouraged in its participants. That’s what made it such a special time for me.

Its full and official name – the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival – does a much better job describing the scene, since everywhere you look, creativity and art are on display.

Take this contraption, for instance, which inspired numerous passers-by to ask the guy who built it where he had bought such a novel-looking tent/lounge. I did the same, and he told me he had built it out of PVC pipe and unwanted fabrics he'd bought on the cheap -- very cool-looking creation! He said he's considering making more and starting a business selling them...

At the “Coachella Art Studios,” there is a wide variety of free creative outlets for any attendee to enjoy. You can do a stranger portrait, where you sit across from a total stranger and draw them as they do the same to you.

You can paint a paper mushroom, or design and make a mask for yourself or your friend.

At this booth, professional hair and makeup people spent upwards of 20 minutes per person to outfit the group of wannabe punks to look like the real thing.

And that was just the arts and crafts area. The more official “Arts” part of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival lived inside the polo stadium grounds, where exhibits like this huge model of an origami crane, “Ascension” were flanked by “Golden Shack-Easy Time,” an alter made out of trash and repurposed materials.

One of the funniest artistic creations were the “landsharks,” which spent their festival chasing attendees around but never coming close enough to hit one (unfortunately, they moved too fast to get a solid photo of them). We couldn’t tell if they were remote-controlled or powered by some sort of sensor. But let me tell you – an encounter with one of them in the latter part of the evening was a site to behold, as much for peoples’ bewildered reactions to them as for the sharks themselves – a nod to the role of the participant in a work of interactive art…

Notice that I spent this whole post discussing art and creativity at the festival, not the music, which happened to be incredible – the sound, the performances, the crowds that would often lounge on the grass 40 feet from the stage even during big-name acts like Vampire Weekend and MGMT. And the fact that top temperatures remained a relatively mild 90 degrees made the incredibly well-designed and well-executed festival seem even more than that.

Design Continuum Venice -- Too Good to be True?

2010-04-25T16:56:00.000-07:00

It's been well over a year since I first encountered the good folks at Boston-based Design Continuum. As I've noted in an earlier post, two long-time Continuum people, Gaurav Rohatgi and Dan Buchner, delivered a great design thinking workshop to our Creative Design for Affordability class at Cornell last spring.

And though that workshop helped cement much of my blossoming understanding about the actual practice of design thinking (getting dirty brainstorming and building small prototypes of an innovative cell phone packaging system was a lot of fun), the conversation with Gaurav and Dan afterward was also memorable. We discussed how to apply design thinking principles to business models, cultures, and even models of leadership. I also learned about Continuum's involvement with the Center for Creative Leadership, and how the company encourages such partnerships as a means to expand not just their market share, but also their mind share.

I was pretty blown away by just about everything I heard about Continuum and began to fantasize about working for them sometime down the road. And when Dan and Gaurav mentioned that they had just opened an office in Venice Beach, CA, my immediate reaction? Too good to be true...

(Aaah...Venice.)

Fast forward to last week, when my wife and I were on vacation in L.A., visiting friends and family, and also attending the Coachella Music and Arts Festival (incredible -- more in my next post on Coachella and creativity). My curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to pop in on Continuum Venice to investigate.

I called and made an appointment with Theresa Chiueh, the managing principal of the L.A. "studio." Theresa is a graduate of MIT's undergrad engineering program and MIT Sloan's MBA program and a nine-year Continuum veteran. With only one day's advanced notice, Theresa agreed to spend some time showing me around.

And so it was that my wife, my sister-in-law, and I set off from Redondo Beach toward Venice, riding cruiser bikes along the paved path that stretches from Redondo in the South Bay all the way north to the star-studded beaches of Malibu. I only hoped my hosts wouldn't be put off by my appearance in shorts and a hooded sweatshirt.

(Here's a photo I took on the way from my bike. That's my wife, Shannon, and sister-in-law, Erin, in the background.)

(My gracious host, Theresa Chiueh, who definitely didn't seem put off by my attire.)

Once I arrived to the studio on the fashionable street known as Abbot Kinney, Theresa showed me around the place, including some of the exhibits that dot the place.

(Perhaps Continuum's most famous contribution to design: The Swiffer)

Theresa showed me the other parts of the studio, which included the workshop, where Continuum Venice builds their product prototypes and models.

(This is why Continuum Venice is called a "studio" and not an office.)

She also showed me the library, where they keep reference materials, and also some artifacts from important projects of the past.

(Pictured here, you can see several of Continuum's other famous contributions: the early-stage of "One Laptop Per Child," the Reebok Pump, and others.)

And finally, Theresa introduced me to the majority of the Venice team, which is made up of only 10 people.

(With such a small team, people work closely -- literally and figuratively. Good thing they seem a friendly lot!)

Theresa told me how Continuum used to have a West Coast office in San Francisco but found the design consulting market there to be saturated. After about an 8 or 9-year hiatus, they opened the Venice studio and are finding their primary challenge in establishing a market in L.A. The design consultancy industry is new to the City of Angels, where companies are more accustomed to doing their innovation and creative in-house.

Continuum, therefore, has the task of educating an already creative population about a relatively new value proposition. That's why the Venice studio sometimes plays host to events like a recent panel discussion on the topic of consumption in modern society, and it's why Theresa says she's keen to develop a design community that encompasses and includes the universities and design schools in the area -- so that Continuum can shape the design conversation in a market so far untapped by their peers/competitors.

This all seemed very cool. So, I broached the question with Theresa. What, I asked, would you be looking for in an MBA hire?

Her answer: "We look for someone who gets design, who is an expansive but practical thinker, is interested in people, and is passionate about why things happen."

Does this sound like you? If so, can you picture yourself in sunny California, working in a small design studio with interesting, friendly people, three blocks from the beach? Nah, that would be too good to be true.

Where the innovation (and job growth) lies...

2010-04-12T17:17:00.000-07:00

I just picked up a valuable tidbit from Bruce Nussbaum's BusinessWeek.com blog, NussbaumOnDesign. In it, he quoted economist and former BusinessWeek writer Michael Mandel, who asserts that the coming economic recovery will be fueled by "the communications sector, broadly defined." Of course, as someone who has been known to dabble in communications, this came as a welcome surprise.

Here's what Mandel wrote on his blog:

"Broadly speaking, the communications sector, broadly defined, seems to be recovering before the rest of the economy. This may be telling us something about the shape of the coming recovery."

(image courtesy: http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/the-two-track-economy-the-coming-communications-boom/)

Internet Publishing and Search is clearly the sector where innovators and designers have been, and will continue to, create and grow new business models and bring the power of design thinking to the masses. And with the continuing adoption of Web-based applications and mobile devices, the sector seems to be as close to recession-proof as anything out there.

More Mandel:
"I’m going to put myself out on a limb here. I think that this coming recovery will be driven by a communications boom, including a media boom. This includes everything from Google, to Apple, to Facebook, to mobile payment, to health-related applications, to my new company Visible Economy LLC (I am putting my money where my mouth is!)

That suggests we may have a two-track economy for a while. Communications and related areas may have good times, adding jobs and growing. But the rest of economy may bounce along the bottom for a while, especially if local and state governments have to start tightening their belts several notches.

Web Usability Aside -- Important stuff on the left, please

2010-04-06T06:33:00.000-07:00

I do some work on my company's corporate Intranet, and usability is paramount, especially if you're looking to drive engagement and productivity across a population of users.

Of course, we all know that the most important elements of any page should go "above the fold," i.e. where people don't have to scroll down to see it, but perhaps we're best served by placing the revenue-driving, engagement-promoting, productivity-increasing elements on the upper left.

Just a note from usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, on his usability blog:

"Web users spend 69% of their time viewing the left half of the page and 30% viewing the right half. A conventional layout is thus more likely to make sites profitable."

Nielsen takes time to discuss how this finding breaks down in "right-to-left-reading sites" like in Arabic or Hebrew, but I can't help but wonder whether culture, gender, or age plays some role in how folks dally on sites.

Creative Spaces -- "I Wish I Worked There"

2010-03-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

I got hold of Kursty Groves, author of the new book, "I Wish I Worked There: A Look Inside the Most Creative Spaces in Business", through ?WhatIf!'s Lisa Buckley, who I interviewed a couple months ago for this very blog.

In the book, Kursty looks inside 20 well-known companies, including the LEGO Group, Oakley, Bloomberg, and Urban Outfitters, among many others, and gives us some insights into how these folks use space in ways that promote creativity and collaboration, increase satisfaction, and decrease employee turnover.

Before I share our discussion, have a quick look at this teaser for the book:

Kursty spent about six years with ?WhatIf! and has just stepped away from her full-time gig there to write IWIWT, and she'll continue to focus in on the area she calls “space innovation”, or how physical and cultural environments affect people and creativity.

Find out more about the book here, and find out more about Kursty here. She's also recently started a business called spacehopper to help people and companies find the most creativity-inducing spaces for off-site meetings and workshops.

Kursty and I had a great discussion by phone, in which she filled me in on how she conceived the book. She also threw in some tips on how to change my workspace -- and my company -- to make it more conducive to creativity.

ThinkingDesign: How did you choose which companies to focus on?

Kursty Groves: When I first started the project, I thought I’d do 100 companies, but I quickly realized that that was way too ambitious, because one of the main things I wanted to do was really get behind the scenes and visit all of the companies.

We wanted them to be well-known so they would capture peoples’ imagination. You could imagine that people would like to see behind the scenes at places like Nike or Oakley – places where you know the product or service.

We started with the big and the well-known, and then we whittled it down to 20 to get a range of industries. We deliberately decided not to choose creative agencies or advertising, because you kind of expect those companies to have great creative environments.

TD: What were some of the most out-of-the-ordinary, wacky, or extreme things that you saw?

KG: Extreme? Without a doubt, the most extreme would be Oakley. I absolutely love Oakley because they are so provocative. Not everybody “gets” Oakley, but if you do, you really get it.

The way the Oakley brand personality comes across, for example, is the outer part of the building has three-foot deep windowsills, which are clearly not needed, but it adds to the scale and drama of the place. And it has huge buttresses and spikes on the outside. It basically gives people the impression that it’s a huge fortress, and they call it the “design bunker,” because they’re so protective of their ideas and the next innovation that is coming out. And that comes across in this extremely provocative physical space.

‘Photograph copyright Edward Denison’

What’s wonderful is that the armor enables a much more free-flowing culture on the inside. You have everyone from the CEO to the receptionist wearing what they want all year round, and it’s highly collaborative.

TD: Oakley is obviously on the extreme side. Can you give us the Cliffs Notes for creative spaces?

KG: Sure. There are four main types of creative space that support different types of creativity. For one, there are “Stimulating Spaces” that tell stories or enable people to access different information.

There are “Reflective Spaces,” where people can go to focus or relax, as an individual or as a team.

There are “Collaborative Spaces” – not just your plain old meeting room. These could be spaces where people casually connect with one another. Lots of companies use free food to lure people into a space where they can casually connect with their colleagues.

And finally, there are “Playful Spaces,” which aren’t just about game rooms or having foosball in the middle of the office, though those are devices that lots of companies use. Play can be a way to get people to connect on a deeper level, and it allows them to relax. But there’s another element to play – experimentation. That could be in the form of a room where people can be messy and not have to worry about tidying up at the end of the day.

There are also some basics that come with building creative spaces. Light can play a huge factor. But interestingly, it’s not just about having lots and lots of natural light, but about understanding the interplay between light and the task at hand. For instance, Electronic Arts does a fantastic job with light. There are lots of people who have almost completely blocked in their areas to make them like a cave, and it’s really, really dark. And that’s so they can focus in on their computer screens. So natural light is not what they need.

But they also have huge, open communal spaces that are flooded with natural light, which allows people to balance that focus with the ability to open up and collaborate and communicate with other people.

TD: The book is called “I Wish I Worked Here”. Where do you wish you worked?

KG: It’s a great question but very difficult for me to answer, because every company featured approaches their space in ways that I appreciate. They’ve each got their own way of dealing with creative space, and they’re all interesting in their own way.

TD: Aaah. So you’re obviously sidestepping the question. What about for individuals? If I’m working for an average mid-sized company in cubicle-land, how can I change the culture to make it more creative?

KG: Great question, because obviously not everyone can go in and completely overhaul their entire office space, even if you wish you could. All of these principles are applicable to medium-sized companies, and also if you work at home. For instance, if you think about trying to make your working space a bit more stimulating, you can think about changing it on a regular basis, maybe depending on what you’re working on. Or, layer in lots of things that you’re really enthusiastic about, because that will put you into a very happy and creative state. The more at home you feel at work, the more you’ll be yourself. The more yourself you are, the better you’ll think.

If your boss is saying they’re not sure it’ll work, put my book under their nose and show them. There are metrics that evidence the importance of environment to help increase morale and decrease turnover.

A really good point on that is Virgin UK, who acquired about 90 different call centers in an acquisition they made. Call centers are notorious for having very high staff turnover. But, at Virgin, they did two things: one, they focused on making the communal spaces really exciting, homey places to be. And they also allowed people to work on their own individual spaces, gave them a small budget and a bit of time make some changes. An independent survey then found that the environment made over 80% of the workers want to stay. That’s absolutely huge for a call center, and evidence that space matters!

Want to blend design with business strategy? Think like a frog

2010-03-24T08:50:00.000-07:00

John Goyert is a principal strategist at frog design in New York, one of the top design consultancies around, with over 40 years in the business of creating new products, services, and experiences for clients.

Goyert’s background, like many in the industry, is diverse. He grew up mostly in Latin America – Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay – then went on to study a blend of Physics, Theatre, French and Spanish at Middlebury College in Vermont (full disclosure: Middlebury also happens to be my alma mater).

After working in a variety of Internet strategy and advertising roles, John attended the Lauder Institute at Penn, earning a masters degree in international studies and a Wharton MBA.

I recently caught up with John by phone to learn how he’s fusing business strategy and design at one of the top design firms around. Here are some edited excerpts from our discussion.

ThinkingDesign: How did you start to make the connection between business and creativity?

John Goyert: Before business school, I worked for Modem Media in San Francisco, which was one of the first digital advertising firms – some even claim they invented the banner ad. That was the most creative and innovative role I’d had to date.

Over time, I got frustrated because it was a very specific kind of creativity. What seemed to work in that atmosphere was spin. It was a sales-y kind of charismatic approach to selling ideas, which I didn’t feel like I wanted to compete with. I wanted to be grounded in something factual.

ThinkingDesign: Then you ended up doing the Lauder Program at Wharton. How’d you choose that program?

John Goyert: I grew up in South America – in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay. So it was in my blood – being international. I was only looking at MBA programs that had dual programs with international studies. I also looked at schools like Thunderbird and the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

In the end, I had to choose between affordability and reputation; at Thunderbird, I would’ve learned what I needed to know. It was kind of rare for me, but I decided to go with the big brand name. And I wanted to have the opportunity to be thrown in with lots of business sharks.

I thought, “I’m going to go to this finance-oriented business school, and I’m going to completely reshape my career around strategy.” It’s directional for companies in the same way marketing can be, but it’s grounded in facts, and analysis and numbers are what drive your decisions. That was the kind of environment I wanted, so that was what I studied, and that’s what I did after Wharton.

ThinkingDesign: You’re at frog now. So that means you went from advertising to operations and somehow ended up in design? How’d you manage that one?

John Goyert: I worked for a small operations consulting firm for private equity investors, so it was very heavy on analytics. It was a lot of looking at cost saving activities and best practices that could be implemented to get companies up to speed with where they should be performing. It was about identifying performance metrics for them and getting them to focus their efforts on those metrics.

I was there for under two years, because it got really boring.

ThinkingDesign: I was about to ask – did you miss the creative element of advertising?

John Goyert: Absolutely. But I have to say it was not boring for the first year because everything was new to me. But as soon as I had a similar client challenge a second time around, I wanted to answer it in a different way, and I was hired to repeat the same way. And that wasn’t working for me.

Working always on best practices can be very limiting for companies. But a lot of companies have to get those things in place before they can really move forward and grow, so I’m not knocking it. But for me, I’d rather focus on companies that have their best practices in place and are stuck because they have optimized their system to death and are not sure what to do next. They want to grow in new areas. They want to try different things. They want to differentiate in ways people can’t copy. That’s the kind of stuff I want to work with.

So I started looking around for companies that I could do this full-time – the more innovative approach – and I found frog. I had always known frog as product design company with 40 years of history doing this stuff. But it was a lot more recently – the last five to ten years – that they had begun deliberately hiring business strategists and thinkers to answer different kinds of questions.

ThinkingDesign: So what stood out to you about frog?

John Goyert: frog’s approach is grounded fundamentally in design research – in facts. It’s not necessarily quantitative facts. And it’s not incremental innovation like you’d find in management consulting. But it’s grounded in observed and repeatable behaviors and tastes and needs.

And the second thing about frog is that frogs want to change the world. I feel like I’m in this cultural place that fits for me. And sometimes I think that makes it difficult for us to embrace all the client opportunities that we’re faced with. There are cases where we’ve turned down work, and there are cases where some of us frown at the projects we have. And I’m proud to be in a place like that – I think that makes the work more legitimate.

The other thing is that frog still feels like a small company. Fit is a stronger component at a small company, because there’s a bonding thing that happens.

(Frog's Mission Statement)

ThinkingDesign: What role do you personally play for clients?

John Goyert: I represent the business lens of design and innovation challenges, which means different things at different times.

At the up-front phase – the discover phase – I’m responsible for figuring out what the status quo is in the business world. frog is talking to the end users and figuring out what they want in an ideal world. And I have to figure out how the industry works and if there’s even an industry around the needs that we’re targeting at all. If there is, how does it work, who are the companies involved, how do they play with each other, how do they create value and how do they share value?

After we’ve figured out multiple possible opportunities or concepts to solve these problems, then that’s when we get into the design phase. My job is to design around the business hurdles and obstacles to bring it to market – to make it work.

That could mean a creative team developing a new solution from scratch. But without a business person in the room, you’re at risk for proposing a solution that is completely out of left field, over-costed, or is completely redundant with what’s already there. So I like to look at it as designing with existing things in the marketplace as my toolkit.

I think that’s part of the story that frog is telling the marketplace in general: that when you’re confining your design efforts to a specific product, there are very few design elements that you can really change that will dramatically improve the experience and value of the product. So when you can look beyond the product and look at where it fits in terms of how it’s sold, how people learn about it, what other products it works with, then you can make big changes for companies.

ThinkingDesign: That’s an interesting role you’ve carved out for yourself. Do you consider yourself more creative or more analytical?

John Goyert: Some people would say that I over-analyze everything. I would say I’m highly analytical but I like to surround myself with creativity.

I think that people in my position have failed when they have applied structures that weren’t creative. Part of what strategists are doing is applying frameworks and helping people prioritize different elements. And you can do that exercise right out of business school, but many of the frameworks are so tried and true that when you apply them you can destroy innovation in some cases.

I think the best way to do it in a place like frog is to re-create new frameworks for every single program, based on new research findings. It’s still highly analytical, but it’s creative in coming up with frameworks that are uniquely suited to the business challenge, to the brand, and to the customers.

ThinkingDesign: If you were going to go back to business school hoping to land where you are now, what would you have done differently?

John Goyert: I think about that a lot. If I had been seeking this kind of opportunity when I was at Wharton, I would have spent more time in entrepreneurial classes, perhaps taken more classes outside in the engineering school or design school if I could. There is a lot of interesting change management and organizational thinking out there, with more of a sociological element that is close to design thinking. I would have thought more about that.

I was thinking a lot about quant, and I was aggressively going toward operations. I would do less of that now. I like operations and am glad I have those tools, but it’s not as much of what I’m using day to day. I would go toward more design thinking.

ThinkingDesign: How has the growth of design thinking as a management practice affected frog as a company?

John Goyert: I have a friend from business school that went to work at IBM in consulting. I used to think that I couldn’t be doing anything more opposite than what he’s doing in consulting.

Six months ago, I was surprised to learn that he’s on a big usability project where he is doing design research. I’m sure it’s very different from what frog and other companies that have been doing for decades, but it’s just indicative that the most traditional and analytical consultancies are finding ways to think about design thinking and to embrace some design tools.

It’s a little dangerous for us, and it’s a little dangerous for them if they misuse the tools. But it’s great overall that people are getting used to thinking this way.

ThinkingDesign: So how can frog continue to differentiate itself?

John Goyert: Five years ago, we had to tell people what design thinking meant. Now, you tell people and they say, “We get it, but how are you different?”

We have to be more transparent about what we’re doing that’s different. We have to be clear about sending cross-functional teams to do this work that include technologists, business people and trained sociologists and anthropologists. The IBM’s of the world are sending businesspeople – three or four of them. That’s a very different value proposition from frog’s, because you’re going to get different results and you’re going to use different techniques, even if you’re calling it the same thing.

We are All Designers

2010-03-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

I've been blown away by the clarity of thought with which a piece by Laura Seargeant Richardson, a designer for frog design in Austin, TX, was presented on the website of GOOD Magazine.

Richardson presents a two-part series, each of which detailing "Ten Steps to Becoming the Designer You Want To Be". Normally, I'd expect a piece like this to be fluff, or at least removed from how I look at the world (and my work). But it's clear and cogent and precious.

Some highlights (bold are my emphases):
3. Choose a topic that fascinates you and learn it inside out
This is how you become an expert. Your topic might be as broad as sustainability, or as narrow as a specific method like body storming...

4. Write, blog, and speak on that topic
You’re an expert once you feel comfortable calling yourself an expert...

9. Choose variety over anything else
I turned down an offer that paid more to come work at frog. I’ve never regretted that decision. If anything, frog has made me crave variety in such a way that I doubt I’ll ever be able to commit to just one industry. I’ve done everything from cell phone interaction design to social networking strategy, and from the future of electric vehicles to emotional medical identification. I would recommend to anyone that when you stop learning, it’s time to move on.

At the end of her second post:

"P.S. One final, but important note: We are all designers. Without taking anything away from the design industry, we need more people in all industries to recognize the impact that comes from their “designs”—whether it’s a doctor’s diagnosis or a teacher’s curriculum or a government employee—every human is a designer. As a discipline, we are trained to creatively solve challenges, to consider the future implications, to consider those other than ourselves. Our world is by design and we need more designers than ever before to handle the evolving world. I ask one thing of you in closing—teach one child design thinking or empower an adult by telling them they are a designer. We can all make a difference."

**note: I'll be posting an interview I did with John Goyert, another frog, in the next few days, so stay tuned.

ReGenesis -- Design Lessons from Holders of 50 Patents

2010-03-13T10:51:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, I attended the first of a two-day workshop in my hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. Called "Innovations in Product Development," the title itself initially piqued my interest, since the talks were to be led by the co-founders of ReGenesis, a local New Jersey company that owns more than 50 patents, mostly in Consumer Packaged Goods -- cleaning, personal care, and drug delivery.

Even after 30-odd years of doing this work, the passion and excitement displayed by founders Betty Jagoda-Murphy and Jim Smith was pretty remarkable.

Though the ins and outs of Mop and Glo's chemistry or the Jet-Dry delivery system aren't necessarily riveting to me, I took away some interesting lessons from the session.

The biggest: that user-centered design has been around for a long time, and there are a million ways to approach it. For its part, Regenesis has always gone to three cities around the country and interviewed 30 people in each about their product concept before going through the development stage. After they feel they have something with legs, they start the process all over again, this time with the product in hand. Their 30 interviewees try the new product out for a few weeks, then report back on their experience.

Most of the time, the product or concept has some kind of flaw. Some of the time, it's fixable. The following comment by co-founder Betty Jagoda-Murphy sums it up well: "You want to know what's NOT good about it."

That perspective says a lot. Design is fundamentally an iterative process. By getting out there and prototyping and testing ideas with potential customers, you give yourself a much better chance at success. I think that's why these two have had such a long, successful career.

Here are some of the many household products that Jagoda-Murphy and Smith have created over the years since 1979 when they got together.

Design and Engineering (BMW)

2010-03-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

Please take this with a grain of salt. Even though this advertisement has little to do with BMW, it's an astonishingly beautiful example of the fine lines that can exist between art, design, and engineering.

Take a look:

"Learning to See" like a designer

2010-03-10T09:23:00.000-08:00

I'm continually pleased as I watch the development of the Cornell class, Creative Design for Affordability, from afar. I wanted to share some information and photos from the first assignment for the class: "Learning to See".

In a nutshell, the recent assignment was designed to encourage students to look at objects around them in a different way. The end goal: to provide 26 photos of "found" (i.e. not adjusted or moved in any way) items, each representing a letter of the alphabet.

The students recently displayed their work in a common area. I just love how these assignments -- and the ones we completed last year -- each subtly change the culture of the business school.

Aside from the obvious culture change around the business school, I'm just amazed by the new language of creativity students are learning. Here is an excerpt from the assignment (bolded letters are from the assignment):

“Learning to See”

Creative Problem-solving is a process that begins with vision and ends with reason. Creative vision searches beyond the obvious, beyond the surface of common existence to discover hidden potential - in people, materials, objects and strategy. Only after potentials are clearly revealed, can reason effectively examine and discern appropriate courses of action.

When we were children, a twisted branch became a dragon, a set of keys became a musical toy, a chair became a fort. The world and all the things in it held infinite potential. As adults we have lost out ability to think flexibly and explore. This exercise is about retraining ourselves to see things as they might be- as we did as children - rather than to categorize them prematurely as we have been taught. An adult might see only clouds, but a child sees dreams coming alive. Only with eyes that can see the potential in ordinary things and experiences, can a person be truly innovative.

In order to improve your creative abilities, you need to practice “seeing possibilities.” This project was “designed” to force a reflective process and evolve awareness over time.

It's hard to imagine that the process of completing such an assignment wouldn't have a noticeable impact on individual awareness. I'm excited to see how that evolved awareness informs the projects developed in class.

?WhatIf! Innovation's Lisa Buckley Interview -- "Being a Creative MBA"

2010-02-24T14:35:00.000-08:00

I first met Lisa Buckley in 2005, when she wrote a great “Day in the Life” piece for me about her post-MBA advertising work for Saatchi and Saatchi X , the shopper marketing arm of the large New York-based advertising company.

Not too long ago, I noticed (in the virtual world of my LinkedIn contact list) that Lisa had left the glamorous world of Saatchi for a company called ?WhatIf! Innovation . When I started poking around, ?WhatIf! struck me as something akin to design consultancies like Design Continuum and Frog Design but more focused on helping companies discover their own latent creativity and innovation to drive growth. A slightly deeper probe revealed a long and diverse client list .

My interest officially piqued, I decided to reconnect with Lisa to ask her how she went from the MBA program at Texas A&M in College Station, TX to an innovation consultancy in the East Village of New York City.

When I arrived at the ?WhatIf! offices at 2nd Avenue and St. Marks Place, Lisa showed me around the beautiful old building, which is home to (count ‘em!) 0 offices and 0 cubicles.

(The cubeless world of ?WhatIf!)

Pointing out the configuration of the couches in the large, open first floor foyer, Lisa proudly declared that on no two days have they ever taken the same shape (just of one of the ways the company physically embodies their values). The couches represent the value of “Freshness.” The other ?WhatIf! values: Passion, Action, Love, and Bravery.

Lisa then showed me where the inventing (and eating) happens, before introducing me to “Super Cow,” ?WhatIf! New York’s unofficial mascot.

(Lisa with her friend, Supercow)

After the tour, Lisa and I sat down for a little chat about life as a creative MBA.

ThinkingDesign: Good old-fashioned herd mentality and groupthink are pretty common at most MBA programs. How did you assert your creativity during and after business school?

Lisa Buckley: I’m kind of the poster child for a non-traditional MBA at A&M, one because I’m a woman, but also because my undergraduate degrees were in psychology and musical theatre. Everyone else was, you know, business, law, marketing, finance, and so on and so forth. So right away, they [Texas A&M admissions] were like “Yes, we’re going to take you because you’re going to give us some diversity.”

I think I really had to work hard to seek out people who were living life more creatively than your average person. At A&M, I found two professors who were sort of doing that on the fringe a bit, so I formed relationships with them. They were also really encouraging about my odd choice to go into advertising. Because everyone else was like, A) You’re not going to make any money. What are you doing? And B) You’re not really going to use your skills, so what a waste.

But I had to be doing something creative. I figured advertising was as close as I could get to that with a psychology degree, an MBA, and the [musical] theatre thing. And I thought it would be this creative Mecca and amazing and all about bouncing ideas off of people.

ThinkingDesign: Tell us a bit about why you chose Saatchi?

Lisa Buckley: When Saatchi hired me, I thought, “Oh my god, I’ve made it!” because I wrote my MBA application about Kevin Roberts. He’s the Global CEO and he wrote Lovemarks . I was obsessed with this framework and thought that this is the place I have to be.

As it turns out, it was a bit stifling for me. It was much more staid than say a Crispin Porter Bogusky, which is a lot of razzmatazz but also some method to the madness.

I still did well there, because I’m just a hard worker – that’s how my parents raised me. But I wasn’t happy. I was there almost four years. Then, I found a recruiter that only hires for creative companies. I didn’t even know that existed, but here in New York, it does.

ThinkingDesign: When they brought you in here to ?WhatIf!, was it with the expectation that you were going to be an Excel jockey?

Lisa Buckley: Here? Noooo! I am one of three MBAs here (out of 40 in the New York office). And there are maybe 10 in other parts of the world (out of about 250 worldwide employees). And in fact, ?WhatIf! used to advertise that they didn’t hire MBAs, because they were the ones that were going to bring in the fresh thinking, different from the MBA analytical thinking common at many companies.

But now, I’m recruiting from Stern at NYU, because if I can do it…

We used to be very anti-MBA, but as we grow up as a company, we’re figuring out that there is a place for that.

ThinkingDesign: Cool. So what are you looking for in an MBA hire? It’s obviously not about having the best finance skills, right?

Lisa Buckley: No, we’re just looking for MBAs that are like me basically. Okay, they have all that [business] background and can do it, but they don’t want to.

The anatomy of people I’m hiring now are things like the right blend of playfulness and gravitas, naturally good at having ideas, inspiring, engaging, and superstar communicators.

ThinkingDesign: Who are some of your clients? And what do they come to ?WhatIf! looking for?

Lisa Buckley: We train some of the most regulated industries out there. Our number one client base comes from pharmaceuticals. We work with some of the biggest pharma companies in the world [here she rattled off a list of 10 or 12 of the biggest names in the industry].

We train cross-functionally – R&D, marketing, manufacturing, operations, and others. And that’s one of our philosophies – if you just sit in marketing, or you just sit in R&D and you get the training, then there are innovation “haves and have-nots.” And sure, you can have ideas, but if the people that need to get it out to the market aren’t part of it, they have no ownership. They haven’t been on the journey so they don’t have the same understanding of the ideas.

So, we’ll go in and we train them in our behaviors and the way our inventors behave, so they can set up their own little shops.

ThinkingDesign: A bit more of a personal question for you. Do you do the work more for the way it makes you feel, or to make a lasting impact in organizations you serve?

Lisa Buckley: When I first came in, it was definitely for selfish reasons. I was like, “I will thrive in this environment. I’ll be challenged every day. It will be all me me me me me!” To this day, this place is still what I’ve been looking for. I’m constantly surprised and amazed at the opportunities that exist here. And the working relationships I have are just phenomenal. We love and adore each other. Clients are drawn to it and want to be a part of it.

So it started off inward-focused, but it’s so much more. For example, the first thing we do on day one with a client is we put a group together in a room – the traditionally “creative” people alongside folks from departments like finance and operations – and actually knock all of that down and explain to everyone why they’re all massively creative. Some of them just forgot how to do it. When you were a kid, you lived in this amazing world of possibilities and there weren’t rules...

We get feedback from every client interaction we have, and the number one takeaway people have is that they realize or remember that they are a creative person. They thank us for helping them remember how to build creativity back into their lives. That’s massive! That’s huge! On an individual level, it’s the most rewarding career thing I’ve ever done.

On an organizational level, we’re working with a CPG company that a year ago didn’t know how to do innovation, didn’t have anything in their pipeline. On our last day of our workshop with them, we gave small teams a project, with an executive sponsor, and we coached them through three or four months on these projects that are all uber-successful. And these aren’t small projects. The goal of one of them was to come up with some $300 million ideas, which they’ve done.

ThinkingDesign: What advice do you have for other creative MBA types?

Lisa Buckley: I would say to find a company that has an innovation program and a training around it, and also systems that give you freedom within a gilded cage to go innovate, to do whatever you want within confines that are pretty loose within a big, bureaucratic organization.

Or, be someone that is more of a catalyst that goes into these companies and helps them.

Or go to a really small company that, by the sheer nature of the small entrepreneurial culture, will allow you to be nimble, try stuff out and fail, and rip it up and start over, because that’s what’s going to make you happy.

Creative Design Lives On!

2010-02-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

As I've noted previously, the course I co-founded at Cornell called Creative Design for Affordability has now entered its second iteration. The biggest change between year 1 and year 2? It's gone from a quarter-long class of seven weeks to a full-semester offering.

Last year, I reached out to some Ithaca-area companies and non-profits to partner with. We settled on designing a human-powered corn grinder and protective gear for a local green skateboarding company.

Sally Park and Jenn Li, the two second-year students who have carried the torch this year, have done a wonderful job of moving the class forward from its humble beginnings. This year, Cornell teams will be paired with students in India to form bigger teams that will design viable business solutions that provide “energy for cooking” for underserved populations in India. Each team will identify the business opportunity, design a solution, and create a viable business plan to compete in The Acara Challenge, which has a pretty simple yet cool mission:

"Engage students in a multi-discipline, multi-country collaboration to develop sustainable solutions and business models to challenging global social issues."

...and...

"Incubate and implement the winning plans into successful sustainable social businesses."
Each Cornell team will work with their team's counterparts in India to design a product or solution and create a sustainable business plan/model to deliver it. Teams are judged on a variety of factors and can generate "returns" that aren't only financial but potentially social. However, measurability is key.

I'm looking forward to seeing what teams develop in conjunction with the Acara Institute.

In case you're looking for more information, here is a veeeeerrrrryyyy detailed video with contest details, rules, etc.

Design Thinking at Business School Continues to Spread

2010-02-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine just passed along this blog posting from NextBillion.net, which details another step in the spread of Design Thinking at business schools around the country. This time, it's at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

The blogger, Moses Lee, and Nick Tobier, professor at the School of Art & Design, started a course called Social Venture Creation through the Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan.

Here's a look at the kind of thinking they're doing:

It's quite similar to the second iteration of Creative Design for Affordability at Cornell, which I will detail in my next posting. Stay tuned...

Most Influential Designers (for social/environmental impact)

2010-02-03T14:11:00.000-08:00

It seems that most times I find something of interest on the topic of design and design thinking, Helen Walters has something to do with it...

I like her BusinessWeek slideshow on The World's Most Influential Designers, particularly for the folks dedicated to social impact that she promotes. Thanks, Helen. Another nice piece!

                                                                                            (photo by Participle)

Hilary Cottam

U.K.-based Cottam, 43, has become one of the most important figures in public service design and innovation. With a PhD in social sciences and a former life as an urban poverty specialist at the World Bank in Washington, she researches the emotional, social, and economic effects of design. Through her current organization, Participle, Cottam looks to tackle some of society's biggest issues—ageing or education—and solve them through design. In 2005 she was named U.K. Designer of the Year by London's Design Museum for her work in public service innovation.

(photo by Francine Daveta)
Cameron Sinclair

Trained as an architect in London, Sinclair, 36, co-founded a nonprofit, social, and humanitarian-focused organization called Architecture for Humanity (AfH) in 1999. Headquartered in San Francisco, AfH now has 53 chapters of 4,650 volunteers working on projects in 13 locations around the world. Working to promote the power of design as "the ultimate renewable resource," Sinclair & Co. most recently leaped into action to help in Haiti, mobilizing forces to provide immediate shelter as well as plan longer-term reconstruction after the country's crushing earthquake.

Amy Smith

Smith's philosophy: Low-cost, low-tech solutions made locally can help communities in developing countries address crippling problems. The MIT engineer and professor spent time in India as a child and in Botswana as a Peace Corps volunteer, where she saw the devastation of poverty firsthand. Her inventions include a hammermill to convert grain to flour as well as an incubator that requires no electricity. Smith, 47, was awarded the MacArthur "genius" grant in 2004, and she runs the popular and influential D-Lab class at MIT to teach international development and technology in the developing world

Valerie Casey

Recognizing the challenges of introducing sustainable principles to an industry that quite literally thrives on producing more and more, well, stuff, Casey, 37, founded the Designers Accord. It's a fluid, global coalition of designers and business leaders who are committed to agreeing on and implementing stringent yet practical environmental design policies. Having honed her own design chops at companies such as Pentagram, frog design, and IDEO, Casey now works as an independent consultant, advising clients such as NakedPizza on how, when, and why to use design appropriately and responsibly.

Creative Design for Affordability -- My First True Design!

2010-02-02T13:05:00.000-08:00

As I've noted in previous posts, perhaps the biggest reason I feel qualified to write a blog centered around Design Thinking is that I co-founded a course on the subject. Creative Design for Affordability at Cornell was loosely based around the much-publicized Stanford class "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability," out of which a number of truly inspiring, potentially world-changing companies have been born. The company D.light Design sells low-cost lighting products in the developing world:

And Driptech, founded by one of my Net Impact panelists (I recently moderated a panel on affordable design at the Net Impact National Conference), Peter Frykman, sells low-cost drip irrigation systems, mostly in India and China (so far):

When I decided to attend Cornell's Johnson School, it was my dream to bring such a vision to my new institution. After all, I believed that Cornell had a lot in common with Stanford -- a strong engineering program, a small, intimate business school, and a commitment to sustainability and social change.

Of course, Stanford's d.school was founded by IDEO founder David Kelley and other high-powered professors in Engineering, Business, and the like. And Silicon Valley is, of course, the world's premiere innovation and entrepreneurship hotbed.

Starting something something similar in Ithaca, New York should have been a breeze, right? Wrong. What I failed to appreciate was what a monumental challenge it would be for a lowly student like myself to start a new class -- even after I'd demonstrated demand for it!

But my classmate, Charles Lo, and I just refused to take no for an answer. And eventually our doggedness was rewarded.

*Note: The course is now in its second year. I'll make my next posting about how it's changed (hopefully for the better) in its second iteration.

Here is a description of what the class was last year (written by Jenn Li, one of the great Cornell students that is continuing the class into year 2):

Creative Design for Affordability Class Expands the Boundaries of the Traditional MBA Curriculum

By Jennifer Li JGSM '10

Posted: 4/1/09

A passerby strolling through the atrium on the evening of March 11th might have noticed what looked like a class in session. A charismatic lecturer was leading attentive students in a lively discussion. The passerby, however, might have been confused by some of what he saw. For example, large posters covered the walls. Colorful Post-it notes were strewn across these posters haphazardly. Students huddled around tables, working busily with piles of common household items-bubble wrap, binder clips, Play-Doh, and pipe cleaners. The passerby might have wondered, "Where are the spreadsheets? I thought this was a business school!"

The absence of spreadsheets is exactly the effect Jeff Gangemi and Charles Lo worked to achieve. While they come from very different backgrounds (Gangemi is a former BusinessWeek writer and Lo is a Ph.D. biologist), the two second-year Johnson students found common ground in their desire to bring more creativity into the traditional MBA curriculum. Under the tutelage of Johnson School Economics Professor Alan McAdams, Gangemi and Lo have worked for more than a year to start the class, "Creative Design for Affordability" (CDfA).

The concept for the CDfA class sprang from a similar class at the Stanford Institute of Design called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability. Both classes seek to use the inventive design methodologies used by firms such as Design Continuum and IDEO to design practical and affordable solutions centered on the needs of the user. While the course includes a series of guest lectures to examine the steps involved in new product development, it also enables students to participate in these steps firsthand from inception to implementation.

What the passerby witnessed on the evening of March 11th was a three-hour design workshop led by Daniel Buchner and Gaurav Rohatgi from Design Continuum. Founded in Boston, Design Continuum is a design and innovation consultancy famous for projects such as the Reebok Pump, the Swiffer for Procter & Gamble, and the initial design direction for the MIT Media Lab's $100 Laptop.

Buchner kicked off the workshop by introducing a type of reasoning highly valued by designers: "abductive" thinking. While inductive thinking proves what is through observation and deductive thinking proves what must be through reasoning from principles, "abductive" thinking embraces the concept of what may be. Buchner argued that abductive reasoning is critical to the creative process because it enables designers to think of "what if?" even when they are unable to prove that it "is" or "must be." He also urged the students to doggedly listen to the voice of the customer, in whatever form it takes, and let that voice guide design decisions.

Armed with this crash course in design philosophy, students watched a video showing a typical customer's experience removing a new mobile phone from its packaging and preparing it for use. Then, using insights gleaned from the video, student teams used the bubble wrap, binder clips, Play-Doh, and pipe cleaners to design a prototype for the packaging of that phone that would provide an ideal out-of-the-box experience for the customer. Students quickly gained exposure to both the challenges and rewards of the design process.

In addition to workshops and guest lectures, student teams will be working on a design challenge throughout the semester to provide an affordable solution to an area non-profit and an eco-friendly start-up business. In both cases, the teams will use only easily-accessible, low-tech items to build three successive prototypes that meet the needs of their customer, each one improving on the one before. "Using such simple, common items will allow anyone to successfully engage in the brainstorming and product development process," says Lo, co-founder of the CDfA class.

Some teams will work to develop a bicycle-powered corn grinder for Compos Mentis, an area non-profit farm that teaches life skills to adults with mental illnesses. The remaining teams will work with Comet Skateboards, a local start-up that builds skateboards and apparel with eco-friendly materials. In both instances, the challenge entails developing products that are gentle on the environment and affordable to the consumer or end user.

The uniqueness of the CDfA class has drawn students from across the Cornell Campus, including the graduate schools of business, engineering, sociology, urban planning, public affairs, and biology. Dan Jackson, a second-year student in the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs, says he was attracted to this class because "it's been a while since I've taken a graduate level class that allowed me to be creative, and I wanted to understand the process in which good design is rendered affordable." The multidisciplinary composition of the class enables the teams to incorporate many perspectives into the design process, which is a critical element of Design Continuum's design thinking.

Future guest lecturers include experts in product development and human factors engineering for Kodak, as well as professors from across Cornell University representing Engineering, Industrial and Labor Relations, and Business.

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© Copyright 2010 Cornell Business

"Flow" at Work

2010-01-25T12:56:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, I read "Authentic Happiness" by Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of the field called Positive Psychology. His work was featured in Time back in 2005, but he's been mentioned in just about every other book I've been reading:

He writes extensively about how we can create "flow" at work, defined by his colleague Mihály Csíkszentmihályi as the experience of total absorption in an activity -- positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.

Seligman argues in the book that just about anyone can turn their job into a calling by infusing their signature strengths into their daily routine and thus create more opportunities for flow.

*Sidenote -- I would highly recommend taking Dr. Seligman's VIA Strengths Survey at his website, http://www.authentichappiness.org/ to figure out what yours are.

But that got me to thinking -- if one of your signature strengths is "creativity, ingenuity, and originality," but you're working in an environment that doesn't share that value, might you be fighting an uphill battle?

Unfortunately, the answer happens to be yes. Seligman says that certain industries (think law and banking) are actually set up to discourage the kind of positive mood that favors creativity. For instance, in tasks that require critical thinking, like doing your income taxes or deciding whom to fire, Seligman advises readers to "carry these out on rainy days, in straight-backed chairs, and in silent, institutionally painted rooms. Being uptight, sad, or out of sorts will not impede you; it may even make your decisions more acute." (I added the bold and underline for emphasis)

"In contrast," -- and this is the part we're concerned about -- "any number of life tasks call for creative, generous, and tolerant thinking: planning a sales campaign, finding ways to increase the amount of love in your life, pondering a new career field, deciding whether to marry someone, thinking about hobbies and noncompetitive sports, and creative writing. Carry these out in a setting that will buoy your mood (for example, in a comfortable chair, with suitable music, sun, and fresh air)."

The moral? Before you decide to enter a career (and Seligman spends an entire chapter discussing why lawyers end up being some of the least happy people around) devoted to "win-lose" scenarios where competition and cut-throat tactics are the norm, it pays to consider what kind of environment you want spend your days in...

More personal thoughts on creativity -- subtracting to add

2010-01-19T17:19:00.000-08:00

Creative thinking -- along with a willingness to take risks -- has often been my differentiator in the working world. But these attributes are much more than factors that might land me a job over a similarly qualified candidate, or help me find a new way of designing a program or project. They also give me pride, satisfaction, and an overall feeling of well-being and purpose.

After two years of national service as an AmeriCorps*VISTA, I took the risk of leaving the comfy non-profit world (and climate) of San Diego, CA and relocated back east to become a journalist in New York. The confidence I gained from working hard to become a professional writer for BusinessWeek -- really learning one aspect of the craft of writing -- was something that paved my way to an even more purely creative pursuit: sculpting (sometimes known as stone carving), something I do for its own sake.

The connection? Both are "subtractive" for me in a very particular sense. Here's what I mean (and let me know if you have a similar process): my method of writing has long been to throw it all into one document – all the data, the quotes, the rambling attempts at annotated biographies – and then proceed to whittle it down. To carve it, you might way. Stone carving, it follows naturally, is also a subtractive art form. You use a chisel or rasp to help discover the form already hidden within the stone.

What I've found is that reducing a mass of matter or words can often "add" more nuance and character than actually adding to it, that you can actually complete a creative endeavor by removing or destroying. And further, the beauty of seeing a work emerge from an otherwise untended, unharnessed, unsmoothed, unpolished mass of rawness can be supremely satisfying.

Here are some photos of my second work of stone carving (I'm definitely a novice so don't judge me too harshly):

The early stage:

And now:

I'm sure this is the same in business, especially in web (and probably often in process and product design), where a stripped-down version can actually function much better than its more decked-out counterpart. A good example that comes to mind is 1) The Google homepage,

when compared with Yahoo:

Can you think of others?

Also, I'd love to read your thoughts on creativity. What media do you use to express yourself? And how do you integrate it into your work life? It's an endlessly fascinating subject and one I'd love to discuss through comments and further posts.

Journalists as Designers

2010-01-15T10:17:00.000-08:00

On this whole topic of design thinking, there seems an obvious affinity between journalists and design. Which begs the question -- do journalists make good designers?

My friends from BusinessWeek -- and those folks at the Harvard Business Review and Fast Company -- would have us believe that they do, or at least that a business magazine editor can be considered an authority on the topic.

Like many of today's business journalists, BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum and Helen Walters are enamored with design thinking, and in my first post, I linked to one of Helen's recent articles, "Inside the Design Thinking Process"in which she discusses an experience on a multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary team on a design thinking project.

Given the narrative of her story, it does seem that Helen brings something to the table -- at the very least a dissenting viewpoint that drives the conversation and process forward.

So, aside from that argumentative ability, what makes journalists a friend to the field of design, and to design thinking as a practice? This won't be an exhaustive list, but for one, journalists are good at winnowing a topic down to its rawest storyline and delivering it to the reader in the way they can best digest. Journalists are also good at seeking out the new, or at least mashing up old topics to make something more or less new. And perhaps above all, journalists are used to conducting interviews and are often talented at connecting with people in a way that solicits novel insights.

Of course, this last item is a double-edged sword. From my experience, being skilled at the art of the interview can get journalists into trouble sometimes. All too often we've preemptively decided on the arc of the story we're trying to tell, and THEN seek out sources that validate us. Furthermore, for us, the interview can often trump the importance of observation, as it relates to individual behavior. We're good at observing and remarking on trends in the world. But observing people doing what people do? Perhaps less so...

Peter Merholz, "a founding partner and president of Adaptive Path, and"... "internationally recognized thought leader on user experience," in this recent blog post on HarvardBusiness.org, seems to agree that journalists are well-suited to design thinking. In fact, he reveals that two of his firms' cofounders are journalists.

Merholz adds: "And much of our company's success has been in utilizing journalistic approaches to gathering information, winnowing it down, finding the core narrative, and telling it concisely. So business can definitely benefit from such 'journalism thinking'".

Of course, this is all a thinly-veiled meditation on my own peculiar predicament. Why, as a writer and a businessperson, do I feel drawn to design and creativity? Probably because my training, predispositions, and general positive attitudes toward novelty and art deem it so. I just feel more useful and valuable in the world when I'm helping give birth to something new, whether that be a piece of journalism, or a PowerPoint deck, or an alabaster sculpture.

It makes me wonder what other fields make good designers? We have a lot of evidence that anthropologists, engineers with open minds, and architects are valued in the field. Merholz further confides to the reader that, aside from journlists, his firm also employs "librarians, and historians, and fine artists."

If you're counting at home, we've already compiled a list of at least seven occupational backgrounds that often make for good designers, or at least good additions to a design thinking team. In last year's "Creative Design for Affordability" class at Cornell, we also encouraged students of sociology, public affairs, education, law, and others to join -- anyone willing to give it a shot.

Who else would you add to the list? I'm sure there are huge numbers of strategy people, product managers, and others both inside and outside the business school world whose unique sets of skills and abilities would also make them an asset to any design team.

Next up, I'll further examine some elements of my own creativity and encourage you to do the same.

Who is this guy and why is he qualified to write about design?

2010-01-13T15:22:00.000-08:00

I am Jeff Gangemi, and I am a writer.

I admit that it took a long time to convince myself that I had the right to call myself that in the first place. Ironically, now that I’m two and a half years removed from my career as staff writer for BusinessWeek, I can’t make myself stop saying it, even after adding three completely unrelated letters after my name -- MBA.

But now that I write personal essays, blogs, television scripts (for my day job), and a host of other things, I consider myself more of a writer than ever.

I'm also a design thinker.

As I've already alluded to, I graduated from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University this past May. My biggest achievement while there was co-founding a class on design called “Creative Design for Affordability” with a classmate named Charles Lo.

Here's a picture of us during the workshop we did with design firm Design Continuum (he's on the right and I'm across in the blue and red shirt:

You can read an interview with us about the class here: http://www.nextbillion.net/blog/creative-design-for-affordability-at-cornell.

The class is continuing in its second year, and I can say it’s the first thing I’ve ever truly had a hand in designing from the beginning. I would say "from beginning to end," but I'm happy to report that the class will continue (in an upgraded version) this Spring for a second year and a full semester.

Much more on the class -- and its continuing evolution -- in future posts...

Design Thinking Comes of Age?

2010-01-11T18:30:00.000-08:00

When I wrote this article called “Creativity Comes to B-School” in 2006, I didn’t realize it would be the seminal article for so much of my future work – both in business school and beyond. I’d originally pitched the piece to my editors because the techniques and thinking displayed by the schools and professors were so appealing to me personally. Who would have thought that, since then, the idea of design thinking would be splashed across business publications of all sorts?

Today, this article called "Multicultural Critical Theory. At Business School?" was published in the New York Times. In a sense, it feels like the ideas I discovered for myself (and hopefully one or two readers) have officially entered the mainstream of business education. One could easily argue that they did so long ago, but permit me the dramatic entrance, if you will.

Whenever something officially enters the mainstream, a couple of things happen (in my experience, that is): they occasionally get vastly misinterpreted, and they often get hopelessly watered-down. Since I -- like many people -- feel some connection to this field for reasons I'll discuss in future posts, I'll attempt to add to the conversation by casting an at-once critical and adoring eye on this field of design thinking, particularly as it relates to business school education.

In this blogging forum, I plan to examine the design field (firms like IDEO, Ziba Design, Frog Design, and Design Continuum) to determine if the business press is right when it asserts that companies like these "might just help to change the world, community by community."

I’ll take a look at whether the hype around these companies is backed up by commercial successes – or not. I also plan to detail in some small way my own experiences of trying to infuse design thinking into my own life and work.

Since I’m something of a novice in the field, I plan to use this forum for discovery. Along the way, I’m sure I’ll put forth the occasional opinion that would benefit from further pondering, but as they say, that’s what blogs are for (do they say that?). And I hope you’ll chime in with misguided or thoughtful ponderances of your own.

Between now and my second post (when I'll reveal more about me and why I think I'm qualified to write on this topic), here's a video that gets to the heart of where I'm going through this blog: