Design Thinking: Ready for Prime-Time

Rotman Management Magazine - Fall 2013

David Kelley has infused his thinking into the legendary

design firm he founded more than 20 years ago, creating

thousands of breakthrough inventions and a growing

appetite for Design Thinking.

by Charlie Rose

EDITORS NOTE: In January of 2013, Design Thinking reached a milestone when 60 Minutes featured “one of the most innovative thinkers of our time; a man who has had an enormous impact on our everyday lives.” Chances are, many viewers hadn’t heard of this visionary; but for our readers, his name was familiar. Following is an adapted excerpt from the segment, which indicates just how far Design Thinking has come in a few short years.

DAVID KELLEY IS THE of the Silicon Valley global design firm IDEO.

His company has created thousands of breakthrough

inventions, including the first computer mouse for Apple, the

stand-up toothpaste tube, and a better Pringle for Procter &

Gamble. IDEO may just be the most influential product design

company in the world.

Kelley is a pioneer in ‘Design Thinking’ — an innovative

approach that incorporates human behaviour into design. “The

big thing about Design Thinking,” he says, “is it allows people to

build on the ideas of others. Instead of having just one thread,

you think about it, and come up with an idea, then somebody else

says, ‘Oh, that makes me think we should try this, and then we

could do that.’ You get to a place that you just can’t get to with

one mind.”

If you follow him around IDEO, as I recently did, you can

see how Kelley has infused this thinking into the Palo Alto firm

he founded more than 20 years ago. Breakthrough ideas happen

here every day, and the key to unlocking creativity at IDEO may

be its unorthodox approach to problem-solving. Basically, they

throw a bunch of people with different backgrounds together in

a room. On a recent visit that included a business specialist, an

aerospace engineer, a software engineer and a journalist. On

another day, it might include doctors, opera singers and anthropologists.

Such diversity of thought demands a certain corporate

culture, of course.

“The hard part is the cultural aspect: creating an environment

where a diverse group of people can work together, and

having them get really good at building on each other’s ideas,”

says Kelley. At IDEO, they actively encourage wild ideas and visualize

solutions by making prototypes; but the main tenet underlying

it all is empathy for the consumer: figuring out what humans

really want and need, by watching them.

“If you want to improve on a piece of software, all you have

to do is closely watch someone while they’re using it, note when

they grimace, and correlate that to where they are in the software

program. Then, you fix it. Our goal is to build a high degree of

empathy in people, so they can understand others by closely observing

them.”

In other words, user experience can communicate what innovators

need to focus on. This is a concept that had its genesis

in 1978, when Kelley and some Stanford pals took to the notion

of mixing human behaviour and design and started the company

that would eventually become IDEO. One of their first clients

was the owner of a fast-growing personal computer manufacturer

by the name of Steve Jobs.

“Steve Jobs basically made IDEO,” says Kelley, “because he

was such a good client. We did our best work for him.” The two

became friends, and Jobs would often call Kelley at 3 a.m. “We

were both bachelors at the time; he’d call in the middle of the

night and be like, ‘Hey, it’s Steve.’ Of course, at that hour, I knew

it was him. There was never a preamble; he would just start right

in: ‘You know those screws that we’re using to hold the two things

together on the inside?’ I mean, he was deep into every single aspect

of things.”

Kelley’s company helped design dozens of products for Apple,

including Apple III, Lisa and the very first Apple mouse — a

descendant of which is still in use today. According to Kelley, Jobs

once said to him, “For 17 dollars, I want you to make a mouse that

we can use for all of our computers.” Kelley and his colleagues

had to figure out how to do that — how a user would move their

hand and how to make the thing move on the screen. “At first, we

thought, ‘We’ve got to make it really accurate, so that if you move

the mouse one inch, it’s moves exactly one inch on the screen.

But after we prototyped it, we realized that didn’t matter at all,

because your brain is ‘in the loop’; the real challenge was to make

it intuitive for a person to use.”

Even after they solved that monumental problem, Jobs still

wasn’t satisfied. “Steve didn’t like the way the ball [inside the

mouse] sounded on a table. So we had to rubber-coat it. Well, this

was a huge technical problem, because the rubber ball couldn’t

have any seams in it. We had to get it just right.”

I had to ask: “Suppose you had said to him, ‘We can’t do

that.’ What would he have said?” “Well,” said David, “the expletives

that I would have heard can’t be repeated here, but it would

have been something like, ‘I hired you guys because I thought

you were smart. You’re letting me down’.”

Since then, design thinking has led to thousands of breakthroughs,

from redesigning Zyliss kitchen tools so they’re easier

to use, to coming up with a heart defibrillator that talks to you

during an emergency. IDEO even came up with TiVo’s ‘thumbs

up, thumbs down’ button, which basically makes your TV smarter

because it learns what you like and what you don’t. This is why

Steelcase, a company that has been building furniture for 100

years, turned to IDEO to reinvent a classic product: the traditional

classroom chair.

“When we looked at that old wooden thing with the dog legs,

it was awful,” he says. “If you watch kids closely, right away you

notice that the main thing they need is a place to put their backpack;

so we created a place for that. The next thing you notice is

that they’re fidgety — they like to move around. That’s why we

added wheels, so they can move around a bit. Once again, it was

about empathy — really trying to understand what young students

value.”

Today, IDEO is working with clients all over the globe, using

that same intuitive human point of view to improve access to

safe drinking water in India and Africa, redesign school systems

in Peru and help The North Face expand its brand in China.

Kelley has always been good at coming up with ingenious solutions

to everyday problems. His first job was at Boeing, where

he was part of a team that designed the lights around airplane

passenger windows, as well as a milestone in aviation history: the

‘lavatory occupied’ sign.

He says the seeds of who he is today can be traced to his

childhood in Barberton, Ohio, “the passenger tire capital of the world,” where he learned the value of building things with

his hands. “In my family, if the washer broke, we didn’t go out

and order the part; we tore the washer apart and tried to make

a new part to fix it. That was part of the game — knowing that

you were capable of fixing things. One of the best stories my

mother tells is, the time I took the family piano apart; the problem

was, it wasn’t that interesting to put it back together, so this

big harp-shaped thing just sat in our living room for most of

my childhood.”

David was in his 20s, working unhappily as an engineer,

when he heard about Stanford University’s product design program.

What he learned there would transform his life. “When I

got to Stanford, it was heaven. It was the synthesis of art and engineering,

and it was wonderful.”

It was shortly after that that Steve Jobs came into the picture.

For over 30 years they worked together and were close friends.

The biggest misconception about Jobs, according to Kelley, is

that he was malicious — that he enjoyed being mean to people.

He wasn’t, says Kelley: “He was just trying to get things done

right, and you had to learn how to react to that. He did some truly

lovely things for me in my life.”

For one thing, Jobs introduced Kelley to his wife, KC Branscomb.

And Jobs was also there for him when the unthinkable

happened: in 2007, Kelley was diagnosed with throat cancer —

and given a 40 per cent chance of survival. Jobs, already suffering

from his own deadly cancer, gave him some advice. “Steve

came over and said to me, ‘Look, don’t even consider any of that

alternative stuff — go straight to Western medicine’. I think, in his

mind, he had made a mistake by trying to cure his own cancer in

other ways, and he was like, ‘Don’t mess around’.”

When the two had cancer at the same time, they became

very close. “One day I was at home, sitting around in my

skivvies, waiting for my next dose of something. It was the day

after the iPhone was released, and Steve called to say he had

one for me! My own iPhone, delivered by Steve Jobs! He decided

to hook it up for me, so he gets on the phone with AT&T, but it

doesn’t go well. Eventually he pulls the, ‘I’m Steve Jobs’ card —

and I’m sure the guy on the other end was like, ‘Yeah buddy, and

I’m Napoleon’. We never did get the iPhone hooked up that day.”

When he learned he was sick, “Steve focused more on his

kids than anything else,” says Kelley. “That focus on family was

something he taught me. I started to think a lot about my daughter,

and what her life would be like if I wasn’t around; and that

was really motivating.”

It was around this time that Kelley decided to commit himself

to something even bigger. He approached Stanford University

and a wealthy client named Hasso Plattner with the idea of

setting up a school dedicated to human-centered design. “Hasso

thought that was a great idea and said he’d help me. He ended up

funding the whole thing — giving Stanford $35 million. He actually

asked me, ‘How much do you need?’ Sometimes I wish I had

said $80 million.”

Kelley now runs the groundbreaking and wildly popular

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. Otherwise

known as the ‘d. school’, it is recognized as the first program of

its kind dedicated to teaching design thinking as a tool for innovation

— not just to designers — but to students from all different

disciplines. Twice as many Stanford grad students want to

take classes as are seats available. The lucky 500 students in the

program augment their master’s degree studies in Business,

Law, Medicine, Engineering and the Arts by solving problems

collaboratively and creatively, and immersing themselves in the

methodology Kelley has made famous.

But there are no degrees. That is something Steve Jobs talked

him out of. “He said to me, ‘I don’t want somebody with one

of your flaky degrees working for me; but if they have a Computer

Science degree or a Business degree, and then they learn this way

of thinking on top of that, I’d be really excited about that.”

Today, Kelley’s cancer is in remission. He spends more time

doing the things that he cares about most, including tinkering in

his workshop with his 15-year-old daughter, Clara. When I ask her

what goes on in there, she says, “Everything. Really: everything!”

David adds, “Our big project is right over there, which is to

make a 3D printer. We call it a ‘printerbot’, and it’s a little machine

that makes three-dimensional objects in much the same

way that a printer puts ink on a page.”

His love of making things is as much a part of his DNA as

his appreciation for the automobile, which he calls ‘the most important

object in our lives’. Almost every day, you can find him

driving his ‘54 Chevy pickup truck between Stanford and IDEO,

inspiring the design thinkers of tomorrow and quietly shaping

the future.

Before I leave, I tell him this: “If I could write the first line

of your epitaph it might be, ‘David Kelley helped people find the

confidence in their creativity…’

“That would be lovely,” he says.

‘And changed the world’, I would add.

When it comes to design, one size does not fit all. The design

framework that we have developed at IDEO over the years is not

a definitive step-by-step process for design. However, it can be

seen as a recipe to learn from. Just add your own fertilizer, water

and soil and see what you come up with.

Phase 1: Understanding. If you’re going to develop something

new in a certain area, you need to start by talking to the people

who know that area best. If you want to design a great new medical

device, for instance, you have to really immerse yourself in it: study

the state of the art, go out and talk to the experts, do research. In

my experience, you will be really surprised at how quickly you can

get up to speed, even in a highly technical area.

Phase 2: Observation. You can learn plenty by interviewing

people, but we believe that you learn different, even more important

things from observing them. That’s why we ‘get out there’ on a regular

basis, travelling around the world, wherever there are interesting

people with interesting needs. We’ve watched nurses and seen the

problems they experience with shift changes, and we’ve watched

people using vending machines. What we have found is, if we’re going

to have some kind of breakthrough, it often occurs at this stage.

If you see somebody having trouble using something, or if they

seem unhappy or scared, there is a need for innovation. By observing

people and building empathy for them, you will start to have

insights about them. While it won’t be obvious at first, you will begin

to notice what they really value. Because Design Thinking is a team

sport, it is best to have all sorts of different eyes doing the observing.

We might have a business person, a technology person, and a

psychologist or anthropologist, so they all notice different things.

Phase 3: Visualization. Okay, so now you’ve seen what the problems

are; you know what you need to fix, and you have some big

ideas from the observation phase. Now it’s time to visualize some

possible solutions. By this stage, you will have developed a point of

view: you might think, for example, that ‘the problem with checking

into a hospital is that it’s too redundant — that you should be able

to do some things in advance of getting there’. That’s your point of

view, and then you start building systems: you start making physical

things out of cardboard — prototypes, or videos that show what

the solution might be. If it’s a service, like checking into a hospital,

you would make a video of what you think would be a really cool,

efficient and better way. You are basically ‘painting the future’ in this

phase.

Phase 4: Iteration. Now it’s time to start showing the prototype

around. In the Visualization phase, you haven’t worried about

being wrong, or been too careful about the whole thing — you’ve

just cranked out a few possible prototypes or videos of the ‘better

future’. The prototypes we make are not precious: they’re really

quick and dirty — just a way to get our ideas out, so that we can

get help from other people. Now, in the last phase, you are engaging

the brain power of everybody else. The big deal about this

entire process is the iteration part: rather than having meeting after

meeting and planning incessantly, quickly come up with something,

you show it to some users, take their feedback and do it over

— again and again. That’s iteration, and it is extremely powerful.

It’s the reason why I often give my students the same problem over

and over again: because no matter what the problem is, you can

always get to an even better answer.

-David Kelley

Charlie Rose is the co-host of CBS This Morning and has hosted a latenight

talk show on PBS since 1991. He also contributes to 60 Minutes.

The preceeding is an adapted excerpt from a segment that aired January 6,

2013 on 60 Minutes. Published with permission from CBS.