Stephanie Flanders
It’s turning into quite a feel good session this I feel. We can feel slightly more optimistic about design in Britain, but Bill...
Sir Terence Conran
I think we’re optimistic about design in Britain. We just want to pursue the government to see that Gordon Brown opens his sporran. Which he keeps fairly tightly zipped.
Stephanie Flanders
Bill do you want to chime in?
Bill Moggridge
Well I was certainly made to feel good by remembering the Festival of Britain because as an 8 year old, 7 year old boy, coming to that an experience. Well I was mesmerised by the wonderful needle with the point at the bottom but I remember, you know, the experience of going to that festival really made me want to be designer and it never really changed after that. And thank you also Sir Terence for making me feel so young.
Sir Terence Conran
Well you look it. You live in the sunshine dear boy.
Bill Moggridge
I’ve put together a few slides here because I’d like to propose a sort of process for innovation and creativity. I have to say that when Jeremy talked about the separation of the two this morning he said that innovation was more to do with development and creativity more to do with discovery. I really think of innovation as about what we do next, going through processes of iteration, so it’s about development as well but the question being trying to decide what to do rather than just developing or implementing something that’s already there and I think of creativity perhaps more as an attribute that you bring to that process.
But the common denominator that I see is more to do with the idea of connecting people and prototypes and we’ve heard a lot about people today and as Sir George Cox talked about it as the most important attribute, many speakers have done the same. David Kester just reminded us that we’re in the museum of mankind which is wonderful but I do think that the design brings the sort of human element and, where thinking first about what people want, why they want it, what might be good for them, how to make it enjoyable, how to meet latent and unfulfilled needs and that is a really powerful aspect of being a designer.
But the thing I think that really makes it successful is when you put that together with prototyping and when you are willing to try things out and try them quickly and often and I’d like to build on that idea as well.
So just to start a little bit with the people, perhaps designers forget sometimes that other people are not always the same as themselves. They may be older or younger or perhaps rebellious teenagers, they may be a different ethnic background or have some particular role. So it’s really important for us to remember the differences between different kinds of people and over the years at IDEO we’ve developed, or our human factors staff as we call them now, ergonomics and psychology and so on, they’ve developed 51 ways of trying to understand the latent needs that people may have that can lead or help with design and that I find is quite a rich set of things. I find myself dealing from the pack when a new project is proposed and you say “oh well maybe this idea is good for this project” and then you perhaps have 6 or 7 cards and you can bring them back and discuss them with the team or the client.
But it’s important to remember the difference between the study of people that we need when we haven’t decided what to do yet and the study of people that we need for a business case and on the right hand side of that diagram the 51 methods that we use reside. They are about discovering latent opportunities and needs before you’ve decided what you’re going to be designing and it’s quite different from the nature of study that you need once you have decided and you want to build your business case. So that is more like conventional market research and you do need to ask those questions in the development of the project once the initial innovation is complete and you’re trying to test whether an idea might go forward and be successful. Then you need market research to tell you how much people will pay, how many people would like it, etc.
So I think those two studies of people need to reside side by side and be thought of as complementary rather than being overlapping in any way. And then on the prototyping techniques the nature of prototyping has changed over time as our life has got a bit more complicated. You know, I think if you look at the way prototyping is thought of conventionally in design and engineering schools it is mostly the left hand image of building things in a physical workshop with machine tools and so on, making a model. But if you think of electronic behaviours you also need the kind of shop which build chips, builds rudimentary printed circuit boards to try out a behaviour which is a computerised behaviour. So you need prototyping for electronics as well and when you think about a more total experience like designing a service or designing what happens with the chips and the people, then you need something which is more to do with storytelling. Perhaps something like using video of how to tell a story or theatre for enactment or computer simulations. All of those become a necessary part of our prototyping vocabulary.
And the thing I don’t want to forget is that to do it quickly is perhaps the most important aspect of success in my view and there’s a big reason for this. The fact that the business person comes at design from a very different position from the designer. The design innovator tends to say “well I’ve got this brilliant idea and it’s going to change the world and it’s the first time you’ve ever seen it and just give me a few million pounds and a nice department and I’ll develop you a prototype, trust me until then”. And the business person’s response to that, of course, is “never seen it before, that means I don’t know what it’s going to be like, there’s a huge risk associated, how can I measure my likelihood of success, how is it going to be proven a likely risk that I could take to improve my bottom line”. So everything to do with the business background and way of thinking is sort of diametrically opposed to the design and innovators way of thinking and background and I believe that the secret to getting past that barrier is a lot to do with rapidness of your prototypes. If you can say to your business client or customer “look I’ll just try this smallish thing it won’t cost you very much, I can do it pretty quickly, we can see if people like it, we can make a small prototype very inexpensively, we can try it out, test it and if they like it perhaps we’ll move forward to the next stage”.
Then you find people getting confidence, building confidence in the relationship between design and business and I believe it’s the rapidness of that prototype cycle between trying something out and testing it with people, trying it out with people, which makes the relationship between design and business successful.
I’ve said a lot of this in the final chapter of my book which, please forgive the plug but, it’s just being launched in the UK today so I couldn’t resist it.
And I think the other thing that’s part of this new complicated world is the question of interdisciplinary teams. But if you have a simple thing being designed and there’s plenty of them still being designed in the world like ceramics or a chair or a light or something, then a single mind can easily get round that problem. But if you have a complicated solution to tackle a complicated context, for example, a cell phone where the physical object is very complex but there’s a user interface in it as well, there’s a service to be designed and there’s also maybe even websites that have to be accessible through that cell phone. Then the idea of doing that as an individual designer, it’s just hopeless, it’s too big for any single head.
So what we need to do is develop interdisciplinary teams that can really share the load and typically we see this kind of relationship between skills on a single team expanded from the ones that are mentioned there to include, say, business factors, brand factors and other more sophisticated forms of human factors and psychology and anthropology. So I think the successful team for the complex context is essentially interdisciplinary and we had a few mentions today of what’s going on at the D-School in Stanford, the Hasso Plattner Institute in Design at Stanford which David Kelly, my co-founder, has put together and I have been helping a little bit peripherally. The point about this Institute is that it is about design in an interdisciplinary context. So every project is from people from different departments within the University. Each project has both student teams and faculty teams drawn from four different departments at least. So you have a design student, a technology student or a computer scientist, a human sciences student and a business student all working together. So it’s not an Institute that becomes a separate department, rather it’s an Institute that allows for collaboration between departments and that’s the first time that that’s really happened, that we know of, in academia except in Helsinki which has been running a programme for about 10 years.
There have been quite a few like the RCA IDE which was mentioned this morning that are between two skills, between design and engineering but not with this three way or four way mix of disciplines.
Interestingly enough the students have no difficulty at all in collaborating, in fact they enjoy it because they find that they are the only one in their team who really wants to do the business plan or really wants to do the design visualisation. But the faculty find it really difficult. But maybe that’s a comment on the difficulty of institutional collaboration.
Stephanie Flanders
It’s a working demonstration of the overlap between the design and business, I think the book is called “Designing Interactions”, its available at all good bookshops.
Bill Moggridge
Thank you.
David Godber
With a discount at the signing ceremony.