-: I've always believed that many of the people
that we call great engineers are actually great designers.
Actually many of the people we often call
great businessmen are great designers too
because they can somehow conceive of a need
and go away and build it and make it real in the world.
So that's the kind of highest level and broadest sense
what I think design is
and there are various flavors of design, obviously.
I happen to come from the flavor of design
that's called industrial design.
That's where I was kind of educated
to be a product designer.
But at IDEO, while that was where we started,
back a few decades ago when we got going,
in fact, today it's an interesting day to talk about it
after the sad news about Steve Jobs.
But one of the first projects we did
was working with him on the Apple 3 and the Lisa
and then the Mac.
Actually on the mouse itself.
So we started working in the world of hardware.
But pretty quickly we started to realize
that this sort of notion of applying a set of,
so standing on the side of the human being,
representing the human being,
or sets of human beings and looking at the world
and saying how can we make things that create value
and how can we build things that create value
was something that applies
to many things beyond hardware.
So today, a few decades later, we're working only
maybe about 30% of our time is working on products.
Much of the rest of our time is spent working on services.
Everything from financial services to healthcare
to government, all kinds of things.
We're working on digital experiences.
We do a lot a work in the world of software.
So we work on strategy for companies as well.
So it's a, it can be applied,
the concept of design I think can be applied very broadly
and sometimes when I talk about what design thinking is
I think it's essentially taking the tools
that designers have developed over centuries
and applying them to any challenge.
The challenges of business, the challenges of society,
the challenges of government.
I think that it's all legitimate as far as I'm concerned.
-: And one of the questions was the students was
what do you think about the Media Lab?
Design in the Media Lab?
Should the Media Lab have a design course?
It's interesting because Nicholas and I
were talking about mission statement, you know,
and mission statements typically was discussing the field.
But Nicholas made a really important point
which is well, the Media Lab is more about the process,
not about what we do.
We've got a wet lab.
We've got a fab lab.
We've got all these different things
but what's unique about what we do is not neccessarily
the material that we're using at the time
but the way we do it and the way we think about things.
One of the questions since
to a designer it sounds like the whole world
is a design problem which is great
and to you, government bureaucracy is a material
that you can think of in design thinking.
As you went through the lab today
and when we talked a little bit about the Media Lab,
what do you think about the Media Lab
from the context of design?
Because we obviously don't have clients,
well some people try to do this,
but clients aren't supposed to come in
and give us constraints and ask us to design a better mouse.
But we do stuff that looks like design.
I mean, what...
-: I really do think, I mean I look through the world
obviously through a lens that's called design
when I look at the world.
So I see design in everything.
But I really think of the Media Lab as a design institution.
It's other things as well.
In fact, maybe what I think is most special
about the Media Lab is that it acts absolutely
at the interface between design and technology
and other things in technology, too, perhaps,
but design and technology.
So you have people here who sort of
you're right on that frontier.
You've got people kind of standing on either side of it
and you've got people kinda stepping backwards
and forwards from one side to the other.
You kinda go around and look at projects
and they look to me,
some of them look like designers working with technology
and some of them look like technology's trying to,
gonna express through design.
I don't think it really matters
and I think that interface is really important.
So no, it's not a classical design institution.
It's not attached to an art school
or attached to an architecture school.
I suppose it's not that far away.
It's not a classical design institution
but it's funny, I've been here all week
and in our office it's just up the street, Central Square,
and I sort of stand there.
I was giving a talk on Tuesday night
at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard
and I sort of, feels to me like the two ends of Mass Ave.
Kind of, you're bracketing the world of design
at some level, you know?
On that end, it's not a very
sort of intellectual, slightly abstracted,
very thoughtful notion of design that comes
through architecture and here at the lab
it feels like it's getting your hands dirty,
building stuff, expressing design through technology,
expressing the world through technology
and for me, that's a really nice encompassing
of the whole world of design.
So I love being in Central Square
and being in the middle of those two
and being able to kind of run backwards and forwards
and benefit from both of them.
It's fantastic.
-: One of the things that I noticed
talking to you about the history about you
and where you've gone
you did go from the design of a mouse
to now design of systems.
Next week we're having a conference
and the theme is networks.
I don't know if Caesar is here but he talks a lot
about as the amount of information in society increases,
the ability of an individual and now a firm
to contain that information is limited.
So like one company, like one of our partner companies
are member company sponsored
they can and longer in one company
hold all the information that's required.
Doubling the number of people at IBM
doesn't double the capacity of the complexity
they can understand.
So then you end up in networks of companies
and then you have to understand systems, right?
I think you started to take your design
from the product stuff more and more into systems
and as you start to think about systems,
one of the things that I'm trying to push at the Media Lab
is for us to go from products to ecosystems,
from a container to a platform
and one of the things that I wrote about on the blog
is that we're changing the name from sponsors to members
and that a lot of the member benefit
of joining this club that we call the Media Lab
is this interaction between the members
and sort of creating a platform for them
to think better, to work better, and things like that.
I mean, do you have any thoughts on that?
I guess we can announce it too.
We've been talking about, so IDEO is gonna become
a member of the Media Lab
which is, we still have the paperwork to sign,
but I'm really happy and it's interesting.
I sent an email to one of the student mailing lists
and said well, if we're gonna become members,
members means that we invite members.
We don't let people in just because they have money.
So we're creating a wish list of all the companies
that we would want to be members.
This is, you know, this is a dream thing
is to be able to go up to somebody
well, you've been invited to become a member
of the Media Lab and we should only have members
that we would want for,
I mean it's kinda like I don't love you for your money.
Right?
For the members
(audience laughing)
-: I'm so glad to hear that, Joey. I really am.
(man laughing)
I always thought we had more between us than just that.
(audience laughing)
-: But you know, the nodes of this network
have to be really important and then I think
so anyways, I guess I sort of gave you a pitch
of where I think that we wanna go with Media Lab.
Do you think, is there any improvement to that idea?
-: I'd like to comment on the idea.
I think that everything you say about complexity
must shift from objects to systems is absolutely true
and it's challenging us in so many different ways.
I mean it certainly, clearly with,
this complexity has both been driven and enabled
by these amazing networks that we have,
these information flows and data flows that we have today
which allows, if you like, smaller entities
to tap into much greater complexity
than was ever possible before.
But I think some of our kind of core concepts
get challenged when we find ourselves in this world.
It was interesting because the talk that I was giving
at Harvard the other night was a proposal
that one of the fundamental constructs
for design is wrong.
Alright?
At least in terms of how I was educated in design
and how I think as a designer
because I was educated as a designer
from what I would describe as a sort of Newtonian
point of view which is that as a designer
I could imagine everything and I could control everything.
That I could imagine the complete entity of that
which I was trying to design.
With a product, certainly with a simple product,
yes you can do that until you start worrying
about the supply chain
and the environment that it's part of
and even then, even a simple thing like this gets hard.
But if you ignore all that
then I can pretty much imagine everything.
I can properly design the bottle
and I may even have some ideas about engineering
and manufacturing it and I understand the graphic design
et cetera, et cetera.
As we get to these more and more complex systems,
we start to think about platforms
that idea that I can imagine everything
is no longer appropriate.
So I was arguing that a better analogy
was not a Newtonian view of design
but a Darwinian view of design,
that as designers we have to allow ourselves
to lose control,
to imagine things that will constantly evolve and adapt
and we'll never be finished.
That's what platforms are all about, right?
So I mean I'm kind of excited
'cause what you're talking about
is kind of going on a journey
that I think design needs to go on
and I suspect,
and even just kind of walking around the lab
and seeing some with a project,
they're already examples of that kind of design going on.
Design that's about kind of evolving and growing ideas
rather than kind of conceiving and planning complete ideas.
-: And it's interesting because we,
our degree is media arts and science.
Art doesn't expect that it understands all,
I mean it's very complex.
It embraces complexity and loves it, right?
I think that science, real science is also that way
because science knows that Newton's laws
are not laws that are local ordinances
that change when you change the speed and the parameters
and I think that some engineers,
a lot of economists, and most businessmen
mistake local ordinances for laws.
So we built all these institutions assuming
that a lot of the theories that we have
that are suitable when things aren't so fast
or when things aren't so complex at work
and we're trying to apply these things as laws
but they don't open those black boxes
to reinvent the laws and I think what's interesting as
we get into this world of complexity
is a lot of these Newtonian laws that we thought were laws
are very clearly local ordinances that don't work anymore.
So what I think is also critical
and it's interesting to see you go in the design
and reinvent design to encompass that
but when you think about it from an artist's perspective
or a scientists' perspective, a scientist should know
that whatever they're using right now will be wrong
and that's why they're called theories, right?
So to me, that ability to question authority
is also really, and the academic institution
because the people who produce stuff
don't have the leeway to sit around and question
and open every black box, right?
-: Well I think, I mean it's interesting
because at both ends of the spectrum
kind of pure science and pure art
the ultimate output is intangible, right?
I mean art is expression.
Science is knowledge or truth.
But in the middle, design, technology, and business
it's not abstract at all.
It's tangible.
I mean it's stuff.
It's stuff that's supposed to have an impact on the world.
It's the stuff that's supposed to change the world
in a tangible, almost physical way.
I don't like using the word physical
'cause we're often talking about virtual things.
That's when one's trying to achieve that,
it's difficult to just say okay, it's too complicated.
(laughs)
I've still gotta somehow reduce it down
to something that's meaningful for a business
or for people.
-: Right.
One of the questions was about the freedom
we have at the Media Lab.
To tie this into constraints, right?
Because you get your constraints from your clients
and the design problems are based around the constraints
and the brief.
How do you think it works or should work
at the Media Lab?
I mean 'cause in a way we're telling everybody
you can do anything.
But that's doesn't really work with design.
-: No, I mean I would argue
you need some kinds of constraints.
But I think you have plenty of constraints
here at the Media Lab.
They're described differently.
For us, I mean the sort of standard challenge
that we would have would be a client will come to us
with a question which is too narrow
and so we're working hard to kind of, you know,
leaver out the constraints a little bit
to make a question that is big enough
to the degree that we think we can have an impact
and that we can solve something interesting.
You perhaps, the lab are coming at it
from the other direction.
You've gotta have much broader constraints
and the job of a particular lab might be to say okay,
we're interested in tangibility.
We're interested in materials or whatever
and then sort of that set sort of sum set of constraints
and then individual projects might have,
so you're working at it from a slightly different direction.
But you still end up with constraints.
I mean maybe this already happens.
Certainly in our world constraints evolve
and change over time also.
They're not a fixed thing.
So the constraints you have
at the beginning of an exploration,
at the beginning of a project, may be quite broad.
As you move forward, one might narrow them.
As you start to recognize interesting parts to follow
those constraints may get narrower and narrower.
They may widen out again and then narrow again.
So I think one has to be sort of fluid
about them a little bit.
I would have thought you had more ability
to do that here.
-: Yeah, that is interesting.
That's true.
I think each of the faculty,
that's a really actually an interesting way to describe
what the faculty's role with the students is really
even some of them may even be arbitrary
but you set the constraints that allow them
to be interesting and creative.
I know that there's a lot of people here
who are interested so I'd like to start
getting more people involved.
I don't know.
I'm looking at Nicholas in case he has any disagreement
(laughs) or any comment that he wants to make.
Anybody have any comments?
-: Hi, it's nice to be here.
I think a response about the constraints
is really intriguing.
Maybe now your business, constraints may come
with consumers or costs or a market trend.
But maybe when we do research
constraints is something we can really create and define.
For example, I don't copy somebody we're doing
or mainstream stuff is not what I want to do.
But also, we want to make a quantum leap.
But as a means, I want to use this like a dead pan,
for example, so I think freedom defines the constraint
or space or design space or beyond
seems something very great advantage of being academia.
That's something I thought.
-: We also have the great advantage of time to iterate.
That's the thing that I miss most
in our world that we can often find
a really interesting area.
We get through a project and then we're hunting around
for somebody else to to work on that same thing
and it can be quite challenging.
There are times when I would dearly love
to have that opportunity to kind of iterate
around some particular area of study a lot more.
-: You were speaking about clients who came to you
with questions that were sort of too narrow
for you to make an impact
and how your first step was to first widen their questions
to the point where something you could do
would be interesting and make an impact.
Could you give you an example of one of the questions
you were presented with and how you sort of turned that
around to make it something you could work with?
-: I always hate it when people ask those kind (mumbles)
(audience laughing)
then I have to remember something we actually did
and my memory is truly appalling.
Boy, oh boy. I try to think of a good example.
One where I can actually talk about it.
Well, you know, it's not,
I mean rather than giving a ultra-specific,
a class of problem that we often get
would be somebody makes a particular product.
They've done very well with it
and they come and ask us to design the next one
assuming that the next product is the right thing to do.
So very often we'll spend quite a bit of time
in conversation with them about whether that assumption
is the correct assumption
because it may be that the right thing to do
is not to build the next product but to build
the right service around the product, for instance.
If that turns out to be the question
then you've changed the constraints quite considerably
because now we're saying okay, it's not either the right
economic thing to do
or the market doesn't neccessarily want to make
another bottle of water.
But it would really love to have a different way
of distributing water.
So let's work on that rather than designing
another bottle of water.
So that thing that comes back to some degree
to the point that Joey was making
that we need to have the capacity to think around the system
and then look for the right interesting problems
within that system.
I think it gets too complicated too fast.
I think one can design the whole system.
I don't think, at least as a designer
I don't feel smart enough to do that.
But at least I can choose different places in the system
to have the impact.
I might have
an interesting example where we didn't do it
and we should have done
is a few years ago we worked with a great NGO
called ApproTEC, now called KickStart.
They do water pumps for farmers in Africa.
They came and asked us to help them design a new pump
and we did it but interestingly enough
became very apparent afterwards
that actually the problem we should have,
there were actually two different problems
we should have tackled that were actually
more important to them.
One was how can we find a better way of making pumps
so that we can make more of them less expensively?
The other question was how can we find a way
of better distributing these pumps
so that we can get them into the hands of farmers?
So it was a less valuable problem to solve
the design of the pump
then it would have been a more valuable problem
to have solved the design of either the marketing
and distribution system
or the manufacturing system
that created or put those pumps out into the world.
Part of the problem, I think,
with design today is that it's sliced up
into all of these different categories.
So you wouldn't, you think okay if you would have known
it was a manufacturing problem,
you might have gone to a manufacturing company
or if you would have known it was a distribution problem
you might have gone to a marketing company.
But they came to us.
It would have been interesting if we'd have been able
to know that or understand that
and pick the right problem more fluidly
then we were able to.
So I feel it's one of the reasons why
at IDEO we've worked quite hard over the last few years
in sort of broadening out the kind of people we have
in the organization. I mean 30 years ago we were made up
principally of mechanical engineers,
electrical engineers, industrial designers
and human factors folks, psychologists.
Now we have manufacturing folks.
We have marketing people.
We have business people.
We have practicing physicians
because we work so much in the medical space.
We have chefs and food scientists
'cause we do so much in the food (mumbles).
We have a much, much more diverse group of people
all using design methods
and design methodology to operate
but coming from a much broader set of backgrounds
so that we can be more fluid about how we think
about problem-solving.
-: So that sounds a lot like the Media Lab.
(laughs)
it started out as the architecture machine group
and now we have physicians
and we're talking about a culinary lab.
-: Oh great.
-: Just a little bit about the social dynamics.
The process of design usually goes
through this iterative phase where you broaden out
and then you talk to a lot of people
and you brainstorm and then you try and identity
which ideas are good and which ideas aren't.
I'm assuming that with all these people from different
backgrounds within your organization
there have to be some sort of guidelines
about the social dynamics and how you end up
deciding which ideas are good and which ideas aren't.
I'm sort of interested in how that process
has evolved with IDEO.
-: We operate, I mean one can describe design
as sort of a balancing of a set of tensions
between sort of three kind of components to it
is that the component of desirability.
That which the world might need.
There's the component of feasibility
which is what can we make
and there's the component of viability
which is what makes sense to make.
What creates some kind of sustained
and sustainable business or system
whatever it may be?
We, although I believe any successful design,
any successful innovation has to (microphone cuts out)
has to get that balance right,
we tend to look at the world pretty firmly
from the desirability kind of frame.
In other words, the social contract of IDEO
is if you haven't figured out
how to get it right for people,
then you probably haven't got it figured out.
It doesn't mean that we don't step
kind of around that map and occasionally look at things
truly from a technological point of view
or purely maybe from a business point of view.
But if you're in theme talking about an idea
or a set of ideas and you're not describing why
or you haven't shown why this is the right thing for people,
we're probably not gonna give up yet.
We're gonna keep going till we figure that out.
So I mean (microphone cuts out)
covers what you're talking about.
-: The internet is successful
because no one knows the whole of it
and you kind of have this almost spiritual belief
that if you do the right thing in your space
somehow the whole thing is gonna work
and it's this kind of working anarchy
is what the internet is
and it won against central planning.
So it's a system but it's not like we designed the system
in the sense, in one use of the word design.
So often when I hear people at like, I won't say where.
But some of these large institutions saying
oh we just need to design it properly
it reminds me of things like intelligent design.
It's like somebody went in and took every pixel
and put it in the right place.
When really good open systems network design
is about just making sure your DNA's fine
and then allowing the system to kind of self correct itself
into a better design.
That will produce something of a higher robustness
than something that any one human could ever understand
which sounds a little bit different
than designing a system.
Do you know what I mean?
It's a nuanced thing and I don't wanna go
too much into the weeds.
But I'm wondering are we talking about the same thing?
Do you as IDEO go into a problem sometime
where you have an open system
and you're talking about one actor in that open system,
one intervention, and you don't actually know
what the outcome is gonna be?
You have certain constraints but you actually don't know
how it's gonna behave.
Can you as IDEO design those sorts of things?
And have you?
-: So an example of something we're working on right now
which I think would fall into that category
so based on the Healthcare Reform Act of a couple years ago
we're supposed to develop these healthcare exchanges
that we're all gonna use to buy healthcare.
They'll be rolled out by individual states.
They will interface with healthcare providers.
So the piece of work we're doing right now
is designing the kind of
the base model of that healthcare exchange
which will then be offered to all the states
and they'll roll it out however they wanna roll it out.
So we have no control ultimately in how they do that.
What we can do is to design the best user experience,
in this case, that we can,
that we believe if all the right pieces and parts happen
then people will be able to choose good healthcare
and they'll be know what's going on,
they'll get good information,
all that kind of stuff.
But we sort of have to trust that the rest
of those pieces and parts are gonna fall into place
'cause we can't possibly design them.
We can't go to every hospital in the country
and say you're gonna do this.
So I don't know if that's the same, but--
-: Right. -: That's an example of where
we just sort of have to have faith.
-: Since we have you here,
maybe you could give us some advice.
When we started the Media Lab,
it's birthplace was a degree program in visual studies
that I happened to chair.
It included film and photography and graphic design
and computer animation and human computer interface.
Those were the constituent parts.
So it was dominated by some flavor of design
when we started.
So Media Arts and Sciences was parsed
Media parenthesis Arts and Sciences.
Over time, for a variety of reasons, including attrition,
including expanding, it got parsed differently,
became Media Arts and Sciences
and you have the biotech stuff and the life sciences
and so on and because of various reasons,
people not getting tenure,
becoming Presidents of other universities or
(audience laughing)
sadly, in a couple of cases, dying,
we've gotten very sort of not balanced.
We've very few people in the design and the arts.
We're gonna correct that with two hires
and the reason I'm interested in your advice
is because your practice is a practice
where you have within your practice become
more ethnographic and broader
but would your advice to us be
to do something like that or swing in the opposite direction
and get a few hard core industrial designers and artists
who will use the environment to get that breadth
verses themselves trying to do it.
-: Yes.
You've got the breadth here already.
This is an immensely broad organization.
I think
my advice would be if they aren't here already
and I think, would be to have some strong designers here.
They don't, I think one could be experimental
in the design backgrounds that those designers come from.
I mean there may be some industrial design
but it could as easily be film or some other field
that was interesting to you.
But it feels to me that there's a designness
to this place, right?
I mean it's always had that.
There's a you come here and you see evidence
of design going on even if the design,
classically-trained designers aren't responsible for it,
but you've had lots of classically-trained designers
come here and do their graduate degrees,
done them very successfully and we've hired a bunch of them
(laughs) and they've been very successful at IDEO
and they've come into our organization
because they understand languages and materials
and media that we didn't understand.
So yeah.
But I--
-: I'll come.
(audience laughing)
-: I've got another job, but...
-: Let's talk afterwards.
-: I think this is just a wonderful place
for a designer to come hang out.
Come and be.
-: Well, tell, tell your young designer friends
that we're looking very hard.
-: I will.
-: So Ian asks on Twitter if Darwinian design
means letting go of control and trusting process
could you talk about good
and bad starting conditions for that?
-: That's already a level of thoughtfulness
that I've not got to yet.
(audience laughing)
Wow.
Interesting.
I think well, again, I'm really hopefully
there are no biologists in the room.
But one of the concepts that's interesting to me
around this notion of kind of
is evolutionary fitness or fitness in ecosystems
and one of the things I think you could observe
is that fitness is based on often very simple rules
and it's those interactions of simple things
that end up giving you kind of complex fitness,
complex ecosystems that operate and survive and sustain.
So I think designers can often be quite good
at identifying very simple things that make
a difference but matter.
Think about it as sort of an icon that's really easy
to understand so that people know what to do with it.
That's a very simple thing.
It can have tremendously broad implications
in a complex system.
So I would say a starting condition for letting go
is doing really clear and simple things
and then sort of seeing what happens
or escalating them in some way.
-: One of my systems biologist friends and I always talk
and it's really interesting because I'm an internet guy
and he's always making fun of the internet
because he says that the number of processes
that you can remove from the human body
before it fails is some huge order of magnitude higher
than the number of things you can take off of the internet
before it fails and he looks at robustness of systems.
It's interesting in systems biology and internet
it all the components.
This is David Weinberger's term I love
which is the internet is small pieces loosely joined
and each of the pieces are quite simple
and beautifully designed and together they create
this system that becomes very robust.
I like the way you framed it because it really is
'cause a lot of evolution is about robustness
and the human body has developed a robustness
that we haven't even achieved,
gotten close to yet in our design network
which is the internet and what I liked about,
'cause I hadn't thought about it
from the perspective of physical things as well
but it's really, if we get back to this idea
of the system design,
how does this thing interact in the system?
But I'm sorry, I'm not a systems biologist
but just to go off on it for a second,
what's really interesting
is he does this really fascinating
analysis of Chinese medicine
and what he does is he starts to use computation
to show the interaction of all the different ingredients
and each single ingredient doesn't have a huge
noticeable effect which a lot of Western medicine does.
It's like one big effect and lots of side effects
whereas when you think about it as a system,
each thing is very simple, does a very small amount of stuff
but as a system it has a tremendous impact.
What's interesting is the way that Chinese medicine
has been designed is through evolution, right?
Trial and error.
I guess the question is how intent,
so how much can you design it?
Because evolution works in a certain way
and this is pushing the question back at you again.
-: Yeah.
-: But can you be intentional about it?
-: I think on some level to not be intentional about design
is crazy, right?
I mean why would you not be, when we're human beings?
We got brains.
Therefore we can be intentional
and we should be intentional.
I'm interested, although I don't know a whole lot about,
but I'm interested in the role of things
like genetic algorithms in design, for instance,
where you can combine intentionality
and sort of evolutionary characteristics.
I know you're doing work around that here
and there are others doing work around that
in architecture and other design fields
where the ability to get to especially fit solutions
through kind of evolutionary processes
I think that can and should play a role in design.
I also think you can kind of back up from the system
and say it's less about what one designer does
but it may be what multiple designers do over time,
you know, and you can think about something like
maybe the chair, for instance, is a great example.
We've, there have probably been hundreds of thousands
if not millions of different designs of chairs
over the last several thousand years.
You could also argue that they've not neccessarily
got a whole lot fitter over that time
but that's another issue.
But it's interesting to think about chair nurse
as a design idea
that's come from thousands and thousands of designers.
-: So now imagining the thousands and thousands
of designers and thinking a little bit about the Media Lab
and the future of the Media Lab
one question that I have for you
is when you think about
instead of each design project,
you think about IDEO as a design project
or we think of Media Lab as a design project,
how do you create,
because one of the things we've been talking about
about this new building and how do we increase serendipity?
The glass is great but you can't walk through it.
One of the great things about IDEO
that I got from you and seeing your Palo Alto office
they have the chairs are bolted down
so you can kinda like group up with your friends.
All of the mail comes in the cafe.
And tell me if I get any of this wrong
and that's the only place where you serve food and coffee.
Is that right?
So everybody has to go to the cafe
and you have to sit down next to somebody
that you're probably not working with
and it forces a certain kind of serendipity to happen
and there's a lot of design in the design system
and this ecosystem of designers
that you're creating at IDEO.
I think we're also trying to figure this out
but having seen the Media Lab,
having walked through a new building,
and I know this just was an hour
but do you have any thoughts
on how we could increase the productivity?
Then there's also another piece of it
which is the DNA, right?
-: I was gonna say I think the sort of things
that you're talking about, they're what we do in our cafe.
What you do with your glass walls,
they're sort of,
they're interesting but somewhat peripheral.
What's most important is to understand what,
I mean we would call it culture.
You might call it DNA.
But what's that kind of central stuff of the place
that is instrumental in its impact in the world
where it's instrumental in what it's become.
I would argue that, well for instance, for ours,
one of the things that is tremendously important
is that we try and clear away as many barriers
as we can in our organization between the designers
and the problem they're trying to solve.
Right?
So that means we don't have,
you know, if you went to an advertising agency
you'd find they have lots of kind of account managers
and things who kind of configure the world
between, we don't have any of that kind of stuff.
Means we put, you know, long haired, pink haired folks
in front of clients and that scares clients sometimes
but that means the designers understand the problem.
The designers understand the client.
They're much more likely to solve the right problem
and solve it well.
Same reason we enforce designers to go out into the world
and spend time with real people, real users,
because that way they get close to the problem.
It's not mediated in some way.
So that's something that's central to us.
So, you know, it's like okay, whenever we're doing anything,
are we making that better or making it worse?
And if we're making it worse, let's stop doing it.
I would suggest that one of the things that's central
to the Media Lab's DNA
and you talked about it before
is mucking with stuff, right?
It's getting your hands dirty.
It's building things.
It's making things.
It's learning by doing, right?
So don't do anything that makes that harder to do
and do things that make that easier to do
and maybe do things that makes the doing of that
easier to share. I mean it's one of the things I do love
about the design of new spaces
is I love the fact that you kinda wander around the hallway
as you're looking down and across into the labs
and you're seeing stuff. I imagine, I mean I don't know,
I imagine if you're here on a kind of day to day
week to week basis, you'll see a new piece of stuff appear.
Oh, I'm gonna go and find out about that
'cause I hadn't realized it was going on.
A new connection's made.
That's tremendously valuable.
So I mean I'm sure there are other pieces of the DNA
that are important but that's one that occurs to me.
-: Actually on that note, we had another question.
-: This one may be even more difficult.
From your tour today in walking around
and seeing all of the neat stuff,
which of the groups that you toured
was your favorite and why?
(audience laughing)
-: Okay so that's designed to get you
into real trouble, right?
Well the good news is I only saw three groups, right?
So I mean that is not,
I mean I don't know
how many have you got here at the moment? 20, 30?
25.
-: Five groups.
-: So I did see, I mean it's been a little while
since I've been here but I did see a new group today.
Is it mediated materials?
Is that what it's called?
-: Yeah, there is.
-: Which I was fascinated.
For me, as an industrial designer, I mean, hey.
You're doing fancy things with concrete.
That's cool.
Right?
So I was excited to see that kind of design material
science technology exploration going on
'cause I hadn't realized that you were doing that
here at the lab and that's something that I know
a lot of our industrial designers
would be super interested in.
But, you know, I love what.
I mean we went to Hiroshi's lab.
I love what he's doing.
We went to the lifelong kindergarten which was fabulous.
Those platforms, I mean that's just some wonderful.
Everything was cool.
I could be here another three days and go.
Unfortunately, I can't come next week
when I know all the labs are open.
But there's a bunch of my colleagues coming.
-: Anybody else have?
-: I have a question about your personal experience.
What was your experience like scaling up
from an individual industrial designer
to an employee of IDEO, managing a regional office?
What are the issues of scale that...
-: I mean in my own,
the best way I can describe it is I still feel
like a leaf that's got choked in a stream.
You're just kinda bouncing around between
and you end up going somewhere
that you neccessarily didn't know you were going.
I mean for me,
the most important moments in my kind of scaling up
if you wanna call it that
were the moment I left design school
thinking that I knew everything about design.
I went to an institution that's a wonderful institution
called The Royal College of Art
and where I was entirely focused on making beautiful things
and I left there and met a guy
who Nicholas knows quite well.
Bill Moggridge.
He kind of became my mentor and I discovered
I knew nothing about design when I started working with him
(audience laughing)
and he introduced me to things like interaction design.
I never heard of interaction design.
It never existed.
We didn't have it in England in those days.
We barely had computers, actually.
So I discovered design was so much
a vaster thing than I thought.
So that was a pretty important moment for me
and a very exciting moment for me.
Moving to Silicon Valley was a very important moment.
Kinda happened at the same time
and that expanded my notion of what design could be
as I saw these sort of,
particularly the start ups
kind of seemingly designing themselves
in sort of interesting ways again.
Something in England where every institution
seemed to be at least 200 years old.
It was a very kind of different sort of change in pace.
Taking over a company was a moment of growth for me
because I thought I had to be somebody different
in order to run a company.
I thought as a designer, suddenly I had to become a manager.
I had to understand business.
I really struggle with that.
Then after a little while,
and it did take me a little while,
I realized nope.
The right way for me to lead a business
is to treat it as a design problem
and as soon as I realized,
because that's what I'm comfortable with.
Not because that's the right way to run a business
but it's because that's what I'm comfortable with
and what I'm good at
and what I know how to do.
So as soon as I saw that I could run a business
as a design problem, I was perfectly happy
and I understood the help that I needed too.
I mean I realized that I didn't have to go figure out
how to use Excel or which of those funky green,
which was it?
The funky green icon at the bottom on the screen?
Was that Excel or was it the purple one?
I couldn't quite remember.
Anyway I didn't have to worry about that
'cause I could have other people help me with that
and I could focus on the things I was good at.
So anyway that was an important moment.
The kind of physical growth of IDEO,
that's happened all on it's own (laughs).
None of us have tried to control that.
It just happened sort of naturally.
-: So we've spoken a lot,
give me a second,
spoken a lot about how the design and creation process
is organic and stochastic
but when the rubber meets the road,
when you have a client and we have a customer
that you have to deliver,
how do you sort of manage the conflict
between the free-flowing process
and a maybe hard deadline
or solid product that has to be shipped?
-: The deadline actually isn't really the problem
because without deadlines we'd never design anything.
(man laughing)
I mean you know.
You're all the same, right?
You design forever unless you had a deadline.
I mean it's one of the most important constraints
in the design process is a deadline.
So that's not a problem.
In fact, one of the things I'm kind of excited about
where we're doing some interesting experimentation today
is what can we do with extreme deadlines?
Instead of assuming we need three weeks or three months
to design something,
what happens if we give ourselves three hours?
Then we do that often over and over again
and there's this sort of length of time
between conception and execution in design
technology's allowing us to shorten that all the time.
Software, you know we can design things
and build them almost instantaneously.
We can do that around services.
We're starting to be able to do that with our hardware.
You guys have experimented with much of that
kind of technology.
It's what's so exciting about it.
So deadlines aren't really the problem.
The biggest problem I find in sort of rationalizing
what I do and the sort of free flow
and kinda chaotic process of design
with the world of business and clients
is that they have a tendency to want to be able
to answer the question before they've asked it
and that's a problem, right?
It's really hard to be creative if you think
you need to know the answer before you're willing
to take the risk of asking the question.
I've never found a good way other than,
I mean, you explain that to somebody.
Yeah duh, that's pretty kind of obvious.
But I've never found a good way of convincing clients
that that's the case
other than having them experience it.
So to be honest with you, the best way ultimately
of kind of rationalizing the kind of relationship
between what we do and the world of business
is to have them experience it
and then see the results.
So we've tried to make the way we work
pretty experiential for our clients.
We actually don't make it super hands off.
We don't kinda disappear behind the curtain,
do what we do and then bring it back.
Partly because we're often asking permission from them
to do pretty expensive and pretty risky things.
So our approach is try to bring them into the process,
have them live it, and understand through experiencing it.
Just kind of in the same way that
people do when they come here and are students here.
So that, which again, is problematic
because you've got to get to a point
in a relationship with an organization
that they're willing to go along on the ride with you.
But it's by far the most effective way
of getting folks comfortable with the chaos of design.
-: Tim, thank you.
Thank you very much for coming and for this presentation.
I wanted to ask you about
you've been talking about design
and how we conceptualize design different areas.
What about designing to the inside, to IDEO,
within IDEO, for IDEO
and what are the main challenges that you're facing ahead?
-: There's a long list.
We could spend quite a bit of time on that.
One of the challenges that I'm interested in at the moment
is how do we make sure that our configuration
doesn't get in the way of the work we wanna do
and the impact we wanna have?
So we've been sort of starting to experiment recently
with some different configurations
that allow us to do different kinds of experiments.
So two that we're running at the moment,
both of which actually you're involved in
or I hope you are anyway.
I hope you will be.
One of them is that we this month launched
something called IDEO.org which is a non for profit
version of IDEO so that we can scale up
the social innovation work that we're doing.
The only reason for doing that is
it's essentially identical to IDEO.
It's got smart designers working on projects.
But by putting it in a not for profit context
we could get better projects funded by people
who fund those kinds of projects
and we can do some additionally interesting things.
We've got a fellowship program running
so we're bringing folks in from around the world
to come and work with our teams,
learn how to do what we do
and send them back out into their organizations.
So that's kinda cool.
Joey's on the board of advisors for IDEO.org
so you're kind of part of that
and we hope that we can find something interesting things
to kind of collaborate around.
The second experiment we're doing which is sort of related
but a different experiment
is we launched about a year ago something called Open IDEO.
We're interested in the question or whether
we could reach out into the world and find a community
of people that wanted to work on some of the problems
that we're working on.
So it's an open innovation platform,
open design platform.
We sort of ask the question what happens
if IDEO was 50 thousand designers instead of 500?
When we didn't have to hire the other 49,500?
So it's an experiment in that a little bit.
It's also an experiment through kind of broad collaboration
can you get to different and more interesting maybe answers?
So it's a platform where we set
again, social innovation challenges
in association with NGOs and some corporations
that sponsor them.
We've got about 18 thousand folks around the world
working with us on challenges now.
Hopefully some of you will get interested
in that and participate.
We run about a dozen challenges so far.
We're learning some really interesting things
about which bits of the design process work
in a kind of collaborative sense
and which bits you still need small teams for.
We had a hypothesis going in.
It was pretty much right but we're learning
some things about it and we've learned some things
about how you intrinsically motivate people to collaborate
and how you extrinsically motivate.
One of the decisions we made right at the beginning
is unlike almost all of the other open innovation platforms
is we weren't gonna offer prizes.
So there's not prize-based.
People don't get paid for solutions
party because we wanted to see if it was possible
to have people participate in different parts
of the design process and for sort of ad hoc teams to form
and we thought that if we were offering prizes
it can be very difficult to do.
Anyway, we found that we absolutely can get ad hoc teams
to form and we're tracking that.
If you go to the site, we've got this little network
mapping tool which is very cool.
You kinda click on an idea and you see all the other ideas
that have either built off it or built to it
and now, anyway, lot of really interesting cool stuff
happening from that.
So yeah, there are a couple of design of IDEO experiments
that we're doing at the moment.
-: My question is very much related to Open IDEO.
I guess I'm wondering what your thoughts are
about involving users in the design process.
I mean on the one hand, I was just reading
that Steve Jobs didn't believe at all
in sort of involving users in the whole design process.
On the other hand, there's all these movements of people
designing and making things themselves.
So do you believe that you can de-marketize
the whole design process?
Can you crowd source design problems?
Or does it require the one brilliant visionary
or maybe small brilliant visionary team
to really make some amazing design happen?
-: So I'm interested in the totality of impact
that design can have
and for that reason, I think that the answer is yes and yes.
Right?
So we have a construct when we're thinking about users
which is just 'cause we call for, with, and by.
So we're interested in designing for users,
which is to kind of put a release mark designer
in a room somewhere and let them develop the perfect thing.
We're interested in designing with users
and we're interested in design by users.
All of those can have impact.
All of those can lead to interesting results.
I wouldn't want to say one is the best for everything
'cause it's not.
We're seeing some remarkable work going on by,
you know, we've been working with teams of nurses
in healthcare organizations giving them design tools
so that they can improve patient experience.
Now there's just not enough designers in the world
to kind of send them in to every hospital
and recognize every problem and have that happen
in the conventional design process.
But if we can give the tools to nurses and doctors
and technicians, we can get good design to happen.
So why would you not want that to be the case?
That's amazing value.
So I believe in the full spectrum
and I think we need to have different mechanisms
and different tools for each
but we should be exploring all of them.
-: One thing we think about here is the relation
between design and learning
partly because we think a lot of the best learning
happens when you're involved in design process
and partly because we think the learning experience
is a design process itself,
that we don't just acquire understanding.
We design understanding.
So I'll be interested in your thoughts about these links,
either how it could help people learn
to be better designers
or how we can use design
to help people become better learners.
-: I mean I agree with everything (laughs)
that you've just said.
I don't know how much more to add to it really.
I mean you're far more deeply expert in it than I am.
But you know, we've clearly come to understand
that the right way to learn how to be a designer
is to practice it, is to do it, is to try it,
is to go through the experience of it.
That's what this institution is about.
It's what most design-based institutions are about.
I think that we've unfortunately
in the kind of primary education system
lost more and more of that learning by doing quality
and I think as designers and innovators
we should be trying to figure out how to find ways
to push more of that back into the education process
so that more kids can experience it.
I mean one of my greatest frustrations
is that I think
is that in general, by the time people get
to this level of education,
the pool of people who have any kind of creative
confidence is so small in comparison to the totality
and that's not because the capacity is not innately there
but it's because the education system
knocks it out of people.
I'm kind of excited by both things that you're doing here
and things that we're beginning to see elsewhere
where technology and the kind of playfulness of technology
is being introduced into the, you know, back into education
with things that there's lot of interesting startups
and activity going on.
We've got these great platforms now
like iPads and other things that allow us to do
kinda cool stuff.
So I think maybe we're in for a bit of a Renaissance
over the next little while
where we get a bit more creative about it.
I was at the NewSchools Venture Fund Conference
which is kind of a, I know what it is.
It's a sort of a TED for school folks
or something I think.
Just countless startups being discussed
that were kinda trying to do sort of interesting things.
I guess, I mean we're doing a little bit
of work in education. I'd like to do a lot more.
I'm excited about things like the d.school at Stanford
which I think is a new kind of an experiment
in giving folks who have not had much experience
of design, design thinking a chance
to kind of experience it deeply enough
at least to know what it looks like when they leave.
I mean it's not creating designers.
The d.school, we hire quite a few grads from the d.school
but most of them were designers before they got
to the d.school and so we need to be careful
not to set expectations wrongly.
You can't take a business school student
and turn him into a designer in one program unfortunately.
-: We're just at--
-: Archie's calling.
-: We're just at the end but I wanna finish
with one last thing.
There was a question here about IDEO support the d.school,
iSchool, Tokyo University and things like that.
Now that you've become a member
or becoming a member of the Media Lab
and to become a model member
I want you to prove to us,
help us prove to the world that obviously
we care about what you think
and that the perfect members are the ones who help us
redesign ourselves and so I'd really would love for you
to get more involved in helping us think about
how we would design and redesign the Media Lab.
But also I think there were a couple of questions
asking about, you know, I think there's a question
among some of the students about are we designers?
I've had a couple of students say can we go
to a design school and take design courses?
I'm like well, why don't,
first of all, we probably sort of have them.
Maybe we just need somebody who's an authoritative designer
to come in and say you are a design school, you know?
(audience laughing)
-: I think I said it before, you know?
You're one end of the Mass Avenue Design Institute
or whatever you want.
I honestly think this is a design school.
It's just a different design school
from most other design schools in the world
and it's a lot of other things as well.
-: Can we put that in our collateral?
I honestly think you are a design school
(audience laughing)
says Tim Brown.
(man laughing)
-: I mean I think this is alright.
It'd be great to have more designers hanging out here.
One of the things that we wanna do with you,
I mean as we're so close by
is have our designers come and hang out here
and if we can be helpful
and help a little bit on things that you're trying
to do out in the world.
We'll figure that out together.
You're a design school.
Take it from me.
You're a design school.
-: Yay. Alright, on that note, thanks a lot Tim
and I look forward to seeing you back here again soon.
-: Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)