Design Thinking

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A Simple Thought

"A beautiful side effect of making things is you start to look around and wonder, 'how did they do that?'; you learn to see, analyze, and appreciate different approaches, well-made things, and clever solutions."
- Lili Cheng

The Crisis of Success in Design/Innovation.

I gave speech at the most amazing design conference I've ever attended last week in San Francisco, the Connecting '07 World Design Congress. Some of the top designers in the world were there. Many of the top innovation thinkers were there. Maybe a thousand of top students in design and design thinking were there.

Organized by the brilliant Bill Moggridge, IDEO co-founder and pioneer in interaction design, it had nearly 2000 people attending (15 from P&G alone), 144 presentations and workshops and well-spring of optimism. The Industrial Society of America put it all together and it did a brilliant job.

It's not every day that you have Dieter Ram, the great designer of Braun products, Yves Behar, Roger Martin, Hans Rosling, Tim Brown, Patrick Whitney and Cat Chow in one conference.

I'll be blogging over the next couple of days on the major themes and trends that I saw there. For the day-to-day, check out the Core77 site.

The IDSA gave out its annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards on Saturday night. I gave an opening talk, which draws on the excellent work being done on design thinking by Chris Conley at Gravity Tank, Diego Rodriguez at IDEO, Dick Bolland and Fred Collopy at Case Western and others.

Here is the speech. You can substitute the word "innovate" for "design" or "design thinking." Or call it a banana, I don't care what the methodology and philosophy is called. Let me know your thoughts please.

The Crisis of Success
10/20/07 IDSA Speech

I'd like to speak tonight about a crisis—a crisis in design. Of course, design has had many crises. There was the crisis of acceptance. Business just wouldn’t give respect to design. There was the crisis of money. Designers were paid miserably for their work. Then there was the bubble crisis. Tech collapsed and work disappeared.

Today, we have a another crisis—the Crisis of Success. Everywhere in every sphere, people are asking the question, Can Design Help? Why is the answer to so many problems today design?

It’s simple really In a society of little change, the answer to most problems is efficiency. Doing the same things, only better, makes them better. Maximizing efficiency creates values.

But in a society undergoing huge change—like ours now—the answer to most problems is possibility, not efficiency. New solutions makes things better. Maximizing possibilities of what could be creates value. This is what design can do. Design sees around corners. And that is why this is design’s moment.

Just look around. What do you see? Our business models are melting. Our healthcare models are collapsing. Our education models are failing. And efficiency, such as testing kids again and again, is not the answer.

So what is the power of design to provide answers? Why are people embracing it?

1- Design is the curator of conversations. To solve problems, design begins with people and cultures in communities, from rural villages at the bottom of the pyramid to social networks at the top of the pyramid. It observes, integrates, imagines and proposes.

2- Because of this approach, design is authentic and real in business and civic societies awash in fake and hype.

3- Design can abstract, deconstruct and recombine. It can reposition small, narrow problems in new broader contexts.

4- Design can visualize many possible outcomes and solutions using limited knowledge and speed decision-making.

5- Design can both reduce risk and manage higher risk in the process of developing new products, services and experiences. And it can do this within many spheres: business, health, education, transportation and others.

Wow. So powerful is this methodology that society is reaching out to embrace it. We are seeing the field of design go from simple design to design thinking to just thinking as it is embraced and embedded in corporate and civic cultures.

And this is setting off a crisis of success. Plug into my blog, NussbaumOnDesign, or the blogs of Core77, BplusD, Design Observer, Design Thinking and others and you see a huge conversation—or battle—underway.

Should designers become managers? Is design innovation? Will managers take over design? Does beauty trump strategy? Are blondes better than smarty-pants design thinkers? Should industrial design become international design? Is design education failing? Are B-Schools taking over the field of design? What the heck is design thinking anyway? Is the media hyping design or reflecting its growing influence in business and society? Is design and innovation just a fad? Is a backlash underway?

Oh, the passion, the name-calling, the worry, the fights. And oh, the incredible vibrancy of this conversation. Design is alive with debate because it has grown so very much. The swirling intellectual eddies reflect its growing depth and sophistication as a method for maximizing options and promoting change.

Most important, the debate highlights the choice now facing design. Will the success of design generate a backlash and cause it to retreat or can it continue to move forward? Will society’s embrace of the field of design force a return to the insular, the familiar and the narrow or will design move to embrace society? Will design choose to be on the periphery or the center of the big challenges of our day?

If you are a young designer today, you are blessed by success. And you are truly challenged by it. You have the tools to make cool, hip objects that also pollute the planet. Or you can design cradle-to-cradle things that save the planet. You can design for your friends or you can journey to the communities of the aging, the sick and the poor. You can stay in San Francisco, Palo Alto, the Lower East Side or Brooklyn or you can go to Century Village in Florida or the HIV-ridden villages of Swaziland.

These are your choices in this moment of success for design. I implore you, I beg you to make a difference. Design has always been a calling. Now it has a chance of becoming a mission.

Thank you.

vía BusinessWeek Online - NussbaumOnDesign de bruce_nussbaum

Zero House by Scott Specht

Vaporware prefabs that never get past the rendering stage are as common as rotting FEMA specials these days, and don't get the exposure they used to when modern prefab was finding its legs a couple of years ago. Then there are some that are so compelling that we just have to show them, such as Scott Specht's 650 square foot Zero House. It generates its own electrical power from that dramatic canopy roof; collects its own water for a rooftop 2700 gallon cistern, and processes its own waste in a composting system at the lowest level. ...

vía TreeHugger

Formal / Informal

The re-designed First Direct site includes an un-bank like vocabulary in it's footer: "We're obsessive about the quality of our service, so we monitor or record calls to make sure everything's tickety boo." An extension of First Direct's branding of being an un-bank like bank.

A night's stopover in Frankfurt on the way to Accra - jetlag providing an opportunity to catch up (un-)banking admin.

vía Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect

Premio Vico Magistretti: A Contest for Living Simplicity in Design

The good people at designboom recently teamed up with Italy's DePadova to organize and present the "Premio Vico Magistretti" design contest (to commemorate Vico Magistretti, the Italian architect and designer). 5402 designers from 98 different counties submitted entries on theme of "Living Simplicity and Furniture Design," and, after the dust settled, some really interesting designs rose to the top. The winner, as selected by an international jury of architects, designers and engineers, was "Bo...

vía TreeHugger