Design Thinking

I am spending the next day and a half in Munich before heading up to Davos for the annual WEF annual meeting. There is a great event that happens here every year called DLD (Digital Life Day) put on by Burda Media. You can think of it as a mini TED but with many more Europeans. The content is eclectic but I came away with a couple of interesting insights from today’s sessions.

John Nesbitt, author of the iconic Megatrends in the 1980’s, is just publishing his new book China’s Megatrends . He, along with his wife and venture capitalist Joe Schoendorf, were talking about what is really going on in China. One interesting comment from Nesbitt was “China is a country with no ideology”. Given the way China is represented in the western press this comes across as pretty radical but the point he makes is that China today is about the under 25’s and they are only interested in creating better lives and not in whether communism or capitalism are the right ways to do it. For those thinking about innovation in China the point is that our assumptions are not necessarily accurate.

In another session on health, moderated by Esther Dyson, we heard how health will be driven by user generated content and consumer applications. Products in the future will be a collection of therapies, monitoring, applications, communities and incentives. In other words they will be experience systems.

Finally, the CEO of Deutsche Post, the world’s largest logistics company as well as the German post office, talked about innovation in his industry. One thing that is interesting is that Deutsche Post is quite profitable unlike its counterparts in the US and UK. He was quite critical of the banking industry because he believes that business has to be based on meeting the needs of customers and taking responsibility for employees. He believes that much of the banking world has lost touch with both of these ideas and in many cases no longer serves customers with its activities. I agree with the essential nature of meeting needs but I might expand the idea of taking responsibility beyond employees to include the community in which business is practiced which for the largest companies includes much of the planet.

I came away from watching Avatar the other evening stunned by the ingenuity and beauty of the world that James Cameron and his team created. Like any design geek I loved the futuristic hardware and the user interfaces that were even more seductive than those in Minority Report. What really blew me away though was the biology of Pandora. The design of the eco-system was  both visually seductive and functionally believable, at least for the most part. I was particularly enamored with the little ‘helicopter lizards’. One only needs to watch an episode of Planet Earth to know that some of these weird creatures created by Cameron could be quite plausible and I couldn’t help wondering how much of a leap is it to go from representing the plants and creatures of Pandora in cinematic 3D to bringing them to life in real life 3D?

Avatar makes the idea of designers creating new life forms that much easier to believe. I am sure there is much that is technologically challenging about going from software models to flesh and blood but personally I found many of the biological ‘inventions’ of the movie just as desirable and interesting as futuristic inventions of the past like the Star Trek communicator or the light saber from Star Wars.

There is a move afoot to hold a constitutional convention in California. The purpose is to address some of the issues that are causing complete gridlock in the governance of the state. Given the successive budget crises and the seeming inability to think about long term and strategic issues, as well as the worrying erosion of infrastructure, this would seem to be a good idea. Certainly as a resident of the state, I wonder how far things will have to degrade before regions like Silicon Valley lose their allure and innovation moves to more attractive environments.

So this seems like an opportunity for some redesign. But my question is will any design thinking actually happen? Is it possible to include creative and divergent exploration in such an initiative? Having watched the zero-sum negotiations taking place in Copenhagen around climate change and the US Senate around health care reform I have my doubts. And yet without some new ideas I wonder whether there is any chance of achieving significant improvements. Could the run up to the constitutional convention include a series of design activities statewide that provide a selection of new ideas for the delegates to consider? I think it would be worth experimenting.

The organization behind the call for the convention is called Repair California and you can find out more here.

It did not go unnoticed that there was some irony in having several hundred people assemble in Dubai last week (see my previous post) to discuss how to make global institutions and systems more sustainable, especially given this week’s announcement of delayed debt repayments by Dubai World.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, there was plenty of robust conversation about how a shift in values within our economies was called for. I was moderating a great discussion on values with several of the Global Agenda Councils and one of the attendees suggested that a shift in focus was called for from “having more to being more”.

This seems a great call to action to me and one that resonates with my own views about design’s role changing from encouraging consumption to enabling participation. My question is whether this sentiment can be globally relevant or whether it applies only to those of us who already have lots?

I had the great pleasure of spending a few days last week with some eminent designers and design thinkers as part of a World Economic Forum event in Dubai. We were participating as one of over 70 WEF Global Agenda Councils consisting of experts from around the world studying how to improve global institutions. As the Global Agenda Council on Design we felt that one of our greatest contributions might be to help other councils embed design thinking in their deliberations. We created a set of design principles that we felt might be a useful guide and I am listing them here:

Design is an agent of change that enables us to understand complex changes and problems, and to turn them into something useful. Tackling today’s global challenges will require radical thinking, creative solutions and collaborative action. Here is a set of principles identified by the Global Agenda Council on Design that could help your Council to develop ideas and strategies to address the complex problems facing us all.

Transparent: Complex problems require simple, clear and honest solutions.

Inspiring: Successful solutions will move people by satisfying their needs
giving meaning to their lives, and raising their hopes and expectations.

Transformational: Exceptional problems demand exceptional solutions that
may be radical and even disruptive.

Participatory: Effective solutions will be collaborative, inclusive and
developed with the people who will use them.

Contextual: No solution should be developed or delivered in isolation but
should instead recognize the social, physical and information systems it is part of.

Sustainable: Every solution needs to be robust, responsible and designed
with regard to its long-term impact on the environment and society.

What is missing? What would you change?

We are interested in distributing these principles further if there is interest.

The members of the council on design who contributed to the principles are:

Paola Antonelli, Carl Bass, Craig Branigan, Tim Brown, Brian Collins, Hilary Cottam, Kigge Mai Hivid, Larry Keeley, Chris Luebkeman, John Maeda, Mokena Makeka, Toshiko Mori, Kohei Nishiyama, Bruce Nussbaum, Alice Rawsthorn, Sudhir Sharma, Jens Martin Skibstead, Milton Tan, Arnold Wasserman.

There is a discussion going on amongst some of my colleagues about the merits of minimalism versus simplicity.

My own view is that minimalism has come to represent a style and as such is limited in its usefulness. It represents a reaction to complexity whereas simplicity relies on an understanding of the complex. This is an important difference. One is about the surface, about the stuff. The other is about our experience and requires a deep appreciation of how things work so as to make them just simple enough.

Minimalism is often all too obvious while great simplicity can be practically invisible. John Maeda of course talks far more eloquently than I about simplicity in his book of the same name.

I often look back to design history to find the best examples of simplicity. Sometimes it is the result of great restraint on the part of designers but sometimes it is a result of the limitations of technology. One example of just such an historical example is one that I personally experience every time I drive my nearly fifty year old Porsche 356 in the dark. With any modern car I find night time driving a disembodied experience with a Times Square like display of instrument lighting acting as a barrier between me and the world through which I am driving. My ancient old Porsche has no such isolating display. Instead I can see two crescent shaped slivers of light emanating from the headlights on the front edges of the hood. These perfectly designed beacons help connect me to the world outside in an elegant and efficient way, as well as helping reassure me that both lights are functioning properly, and are a result of the careful positioning of the edge of the headlights. Simplicity at its best.

One of the most important ideas about design thinking is that it creates new ideas that provide new choices for business and society. As we move toward December and the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen I worry that we have far too few ideas to talk about. It is all too easy to argue over what we will have to give up in the search for significant reductions in carbon and yet there is very little discussion about what we might create as we try to resolve the most significant challenge humanity has yet faced.

At IDEO we have been thinking about this over the summer and today have launched a new site we call Living Climate Change that is intended to be a place for just such a discussion to take place. We have produced a few of our own scenarios to get the conversation started and we are trying to link to as many existing interesting ideas as we can. If you know of good design content that should be included then please let us know. In the meantime please check out the site and help us expand the conversation.

Apologies for the unabashed self promotion but for a first time author, today is a big day. Change By Design has finally hit the stores.

Again thanks to many of you who have contributed to the dialog over the last year as well as to those who have helped me with the book itself. I fully intend to keep this blog going and maybe even post a bit more often.

Writing and producing a book has been its own interesting exercise in design thinking. From planning the structure, to choosing the stories to working on the design has all been a fascinating process. To those of you who may yet embark on this journey I would say the following: the work involved in writing a book is nothing compared to the work involved in promoting it.

I spent last week at the Mayo Clinic symposium on health care innovation called Transform. It was excellent. A great group of speakers and an audience populated by some of the most important players in health care innovation.

You can check out the videos from many of the speakers at the Mayo Transform site. Unfortunately I can’t link you to the individual talks but I would recommend the following in particular:

Clayton Christensen on the Innovators Prescription. For those that have not read the book this talk makes a rigorous argument for how the business model of healthcare needs to be restated.

Amy Tenderich talks about the Diabetes Challenge. An attempt to get design thinkers engaged in improving the lives of diabetes sufferers.

Victor Montori, a Mayo physician, does a great job of showing how doctors get it wrong when they don’t consider the whole lifestyle of the patient when they prescribe remedies.

Denis Cortese, the current head of the Mayo, describes where the health care system is dysfunctional today and what Mayo plans to focus on to help resolve that.

Elizabeth Teisberg talks about health care policy and in particular the importance of focusing on value not cost reduction.

Frank Moss from the MIT Media Lab gives a great talk and demonstration (with one of his graduate students) on empowering each of us to be responsible for more of our own health care.

Patrick Garaghty, CEO of Minnesota Blue Cross Blue Shield, makes an impressive argument for how it is in the interests of payers to focus on wellness programs. Given the bad press that insurance companies have been getting in the recent debates it was good to see some real leadership coming from them.

As always, Larry Keeley makes an eloquent and urgent case for innovation based on showing how Leonardo got things wrong.

The three ‘i-spotter’ award speakers all gave great short talks on their projects – Jaspal Sandhu, Jeff Belkora and Alexandra Carmichael.

I headed up the last session which was specifically on design thinking. I was followed by three wonderful talks by Karl Ronn of P&G, Christi Dining Zuber from the Kaiser Innovation team and Maggie Breslin from SPARC, the Mayo design and innovation group.

Overall I was very impressed by the level of the dialog about innovation and design thinking, particularly amongst the physicians. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a profession that is focused on making people’s lives better is so enthusiastic about a human centered innovation process.

The image is courtesy of Marc Koska at Safepoint. I included the story of Marc’s innovation, the auto-disable syringe, in my talk.

Sara Beckman of the Haas Business School has written a great article in the New York Times about Six Sigma and design thinking called Welcoming the New, Improving the Old. She talks with Chuck Jones of Whirlpool who gives a lovely analogy of design thinkers as quantum physicists and everyone else (including the Six Sigma crowd) as Newtonian physicists. Multiple possibilities versus defined measurement.

Sara makes the argument that businesses need to learn to build bridges between these two approaches. I have to admit that for a long time I was highly skeptical of design thinking’s ability to operate in a Six Sigma environment and I was once quoted in the Economist as saying that it was toxic to innovation.

I don’t think that anymore. Having spent more time studying companies like Toyota I have realized that high quality (the goal of Six Sigma) is a great platform for new ideas (the goal of design thinking). Similarly, as Chuck Jones implies, Six Sigma can help new ideas get better faster. Having been involved in several first mover products at IDEO I can attest to the fact that very rarely is that first iteration the best possible product in terms of quality or functionality.

Perhaps we should think of design thinking and Six Sigma being part of a cycle, each feeding the other to create new and improved products, services and experiences. Of course the biggest challenge will be to build business cultures that are agile enough to incorporate both.