Tim Brown
I’m going to talk about design and design thinking today. There’s a lot of discussion about what design thinking is, where it comes from, what its relevance is to designers and to business. I guess we’ve been part of that discussion for a while, partly because of what we’ve done and what we’ve said, and also our association with Stanford and the d.school which has been one of the places where I think the notion of design thinking has emerged from.
Today I just want to tell a simple story about how we got to design thinking, and the role it plays at IDEO. I’m not trying to make an argument for design thinking as the dominant idea in design today, I just really want to hopefully show you how it’s important to us.
So, to start, I really do love and was trained to develop and design products. That’s what I spend four years here in Newcastle learning how to do, and then some more time at the Royal College of Art learning how to do. But I think it’s reasonably safe to say that our work is sometimes rightly accused of doing damage, or at least as being of fleeting benefit, and one of the things I’ve had to come to terms with as an industrial designer is that I’m personally responsible for lots of this stuff. In fact I’m pretty sure that every one of those monitors that briefly flashed up on the screen that I designed 10 years ago is now in one of these. There may be one of two left, but I’m pretty sure most of them are in one of these now.
That was really brought home for us at IDEO a few years ago. We worked on a project which was for Oral B, this is a toothbrush – it was the first of the co-moulded toothbrushes, the squishy handled toothbrushes designed to make toothbrushing better for kids. It was a great project and we really did a great job of understanding how kids behave and what was innovated around materials and manufacturing to be able to design these toothbrushes that really are better for kids.
A little while after we’d launched the product, one of our designers was down in Costa Rica on vacation walking along a virgin beach, miles from anywhere, and he found this. It’s the same toothbrush! – and it’s the same toothbrush after it’s been tossed away and floated around in the ocean for a while. It looks pretty much as pristine as when it was first thrown away. It’s actually been in the water for quite a long time, you can tell by the pitting in the rubber that the seawater’s had quite a long time to do its work, but it looks pretty much the same as when it was being used, and this is just one out of the millions of those toothbrushes that were part of this product line, out of thousands of projects that we’ve done at IDEO.
When I think about this, I kind of get a little bit depressed. It makes me feel less great about what I do as a designer. And yet, fundamentally for me anyway, design needs to be optimistic, it’s what design’s all about. It looks to the future and imagines better possibilities for the man-made world, I think that’s how design and particularly industrial design emerged, and it relies on having a positive impact to drive that optimism. Unless you are incredibly cynical about what you do, you’ve got to believe that you have positive impact if you are going to be optimistic about what you do.
So I think the problem is that our definitions of positive impact have become too narrow as designers. Focused perhaps too often on pleasing our own ego, which was certainly a problem for me when I started as a designer; or only achieving positive impact through the business bottom line but within a context of a kind of outmoded 20th century industrial system.
So I want to talk a little bit about why and how I think the change in context for design and the way we work as designers can actually help us have more positive impact and then perhaps ultimately allow us to be a little bit more optimistic about what we do.
So to start off with I want to give you a very quick scan of my 20 year story as a designer and my experience of going from design to design thinking at IDEO. So I graduated after seven years of design education here in the UK, as I said four of it here in Newcastle, the rest of it down in London at the Royal College of Art, with what I felt was a pretty refined and developed idea of what design was for me. And it was all about what I called the “aesthetic experience” of products. This is one thing that I designed, I think in fact John – who is over there somewhere – he took this thing that I designed very soon after I left the RCA to a series of exhibitions in Japan. It was all about the use of form and behaviour to create delight and understanding in the use of new technology. That’s what I was interested in and I still am interested in that, but that’s all that design was for me when I started working as a designer.
Then I met these two people, some of you might know them – one of them Bill Moggeridge, one of the founders of IDEO, the other Jane Fulton Suri, who was the first human factors person to come to IDEO and brought the idea of psychology and human factors and ethnography to IDEO 20 years ago. They introduced me to the idea of design as an inter-disciplinary activity and a collaborative activity and one where it completely disabused me of the notion of designer as the all-encompassing author, as the single person responsible for the outcome. I discovered interaction design, well I should actually say Bill discovered interaction design and I learned how to do it; and human factors – I began to understand the power of design, to tackle more complex issues, and a kind of essential characteristic of design as a human-centred activity.
So that led to a decade of working in Silicon Valley in Europe helping develop hundreds of products, learning how to bring this growing set of disciplines together to create products that were more usable and desirable. And now I’m going to show exactly the same slide that Frans showed – this happened, this is the NASDAQ, that peak is just after the beginning of 2001, that’s when I took over as CEO of IDEO.
It wasn’t great timing, it was like being at the top of a roller coaster and watching it go down. And for anybody working in the Valley and perhaps here too, I don’t know, business definitely took a hit. It wasn’t the best time to be a design consultant. And it seemed like design was vulnerable, at least design consulting was vulnerable, and it was time to take pause for thought and maybe redirect our role as designers from being tools of the development process, where we were really at the mercy of the kind of booms and busts of business and industry, to being more influential in how organisations conceived of their offerings and their brands, moving up stream in other words, making the link between design and innovation.
But innovation without context wasn’t enough, at least it wasn’t enough to change our behaviour as a company. We were 300 people then, by design terms a pretty big company, a lot bigger than that now, and changing direction in any fundamental way was actually quite a difficult prospect. So what we decided within IDEO was that we needed to create some kind of new movement, modelled after some of our heroes of the past: the Bauhaus or Green movement. We were a little bit ambitious perhaps, but anyway that’s what we were thinking. This guy, another very important person in my career, David Kelly, who was the other founder of IDEO, we were sitting around in his office at Stanford talking about movements and change and how to create change and behaviour in large groups of people and we were also talking about how difficult it was and is to talk about design and describe design to anybody outside of design, anybody outside of IDEO, what it was we did.
He said that “I find that every time I talk about design, I find myself putting the word “thinking” after it to explain what we do”. So that was as simple as that. That’s where we started to use the term “design thinking”. And the shift from design, where the emphasis is only on the output, to design thinking, where the emphasis is also on the act or the process, that’s been the catalyst for change for us at IDEO. Now, neither of us make any claim to having invented the term design thinking. In fact, if you go back into the literature, you’ll find people using it long before we started using it, but that’s how we got to it. I also don’t make any claims to its universal relevance, but it has helped us evolve as designers.
So I want to talk about for the rest of this little session is: how has design thinking led us to try to achieve some more positive impact? It’s not the first time that design has attempted to break out of the confines of accepted practice, it has happened time and time again. My personal design heroes, Charles and Ray Eames, showed how experimentation and playfulness, as well as a willingness to cross disciplines, led to groundbreaking and iconic solutions, they really were great design thinkers.
But now the stakes are higher. Urbanisation, global warming, crashing healthcare systems – four billion people living on less than a dollar a day – these are all changing the stakes of what we do as designers today. We can continue to be defined by the design briefs that naturally come to us, the next product, the next advertising campaign, the next range of clothing; or we can figure out how design can be more strategic, and play a part in tackling some of these issues in a way that actually maybe does create sustainable improvements in people’s lives and create businesses that have a net positive impact.
I don’t know if any of you have come across this world clock, it’s at a site called poodlewaddle.com, it’s a terrible name but it’s a great site. It’s a real time clock, I recorded this off the web a few days ago, but it’s counting real time, year to date, world population births, deaths, population growth, all based off UN figures and things, deaths from various diseases, non-communicable and infectious, and how many barrels of oil we’re pumping, how many cars we’ve manufactured, how many bicycles we’ve produced and computers. You just look at this for two or three minutes and it just gives you a sense of the scale of what we are doing on this planet. Some say that it’s all too late and that the human race, if not planet, is going to inevitably crash. This addition to optimism that I have means that I can’t just think of it that way. And anyway I think the doomsayers have got it wrong, more often than not, but this is a great reminder.
So what does design thinking let us do? I think design thinking for a start let’s us focus on new problems. To work on new kinds of design problems where our unique approach can create different kinds of results, where the human need is apparent, and that cause us to challenge existing assumptions about business models, growth, resource use and value and where ultimately hopefully we can achieve new impact.
Also when we focused on new problems, we also learn faster, which I think is essential. The process of learning at the edge is how we evolve, and it’s how we evolve to greater fitness within an environment of more complexity, and I don’t think any of us would argue that we’re in an environment of ever more complexity. And also it’s how we deal with less certainly, and I also think nobody would argue that we aren’t in a situation where we’re dealing with less and less certainty or more and more uncertainty.
So I just want to touch on a few of the areas that we’ve been trying to learn at the edge, that we’ve been trying to evolve, and just share some examples of some of the work we’ve been doing in these places. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but some of the areas that we’ve been exploring with design thinking over the last couple of years. One of them is around how to get organisations to a point where they can go beyond what we would call “incremental innovation” to things that are more disruptive or more revolutionary. It’s a huge challenge; most companies find it very difficult because they’re built for efficiency, rather than exploration, they’re built to do the same things over and over again. Most businesses do require lots of innovation to grow, Frans was just talking about this. Incremental innovation leads to proliferation of offerings and rapid commoditisation, never mind issues around sustainability.
And so the challenge for companies is, how do they get to have some kind of portfolio of innovation, work on the things that are incremental but also work on things that are more revolutionary or evolutionary?
So we had a good opportunity recently to work with an industry on the challenge of trying to create a new category and it was in the cycling industry, working initially with Shimano, some of you may know Shimano if you’ve got any kind of high-end mountain bike or road bike – they make bike components. They were worried about the fact that they had sold as many high end racing bikes and mountain bikes as they thought they were really going to sell, the market had been flat for a while, and that in America particularly 90% of Americans don’t ride bikes. They rode them as kids, but they don’t ride them as adults. So what could they do about this?
Together we created a new category, called “coasting”. It’s a different kind of bike, and biking experience, different products and components, a different retail experience, worked with local governments to create safe cycling campaigns in 21 cities where this category of bike cycling was introduced. It’s been great, it’s been very successful so far, and there are three of the major bike OEMs in the world, the biggest in the world – Treck, a rallying giant, have already launched bikes in this range and there will be 10 more next year.
Now what we learnt from this is that it was all about building a coalition. It wasn’t about us designing a bunch of stuff then launching it out onto the market. In fact, one of the biggest learnings we got was that by the time these things get out, and these are on the right it’s the bike that Treck launched – we didn’t even get to design the bikes. As designers we had to let go of that bit of the process, because the right thing was for each of these OEMs to design and build bikes that were right for their brand. So in fact we ran workshops for them, we showed them what the platform was and what the idea was but they ended up designing them. So as designers we’ve had to learn that in order to innovate in this way, and build some of these more disruptive innovations, we sometimes have to let go of the bit that we find most precious and that’s actually quite a difficult thing to do.
Another one – the design of public services. In the US we’re a long way behind you guys in the UK. There’s a lot more innovation and design going on in public services here than there is in the US and most of the interested innovation that is going on in the US is being funded by NGOs rather than by government. There’s a lot we do learn from the Design Council, I’d point everybody to the Design Council website in America when they’re talking about this stuff.
So we’ve been working with the Red Cross the last couple of years trying to figure out how we can get higher levels of blood donation in America. It’s an issue everywhere, it’s obvious why that would be a good thing, it’s been a really interesting design challenge – partly because it’s a complex service, it’s not a product; the service providers are volunteers, they’re not professionals; donors have many deeply emotional reasons for giving blood – people just don’t turn up and give blood because they think that’s an OK thing to do, they do it for many different reasons. And the experience is for most people intimidating. What we learnt through this was that there was only so much we could do in the studio, there was only so much design thinking we could do without actually really working live with donors and service providers. In fact, most of this experience that we’ve now got rolled out was developed in a series of live pilots in different parts of the US where we built prototypes, we worked with live with donors and service providers, and iterated them as we went along. It was a huge learning.
I think we all like working on things we believe are more sustainable, whether they be products or services. I personally subscribe to the Bill McDonagh view of sustainability which is, I don’t want to become a hair shirt proponent of sustainability and I think what design’s contribution is that we should go from creating better human experiences which is what our job is, by using ever-more resources in an unsustainable way, to creating those better experiences with fewer resources, which hopefully are ultimately sustainable.
It sounds really simple of course, but is, as we all know, incredibly complicated to do. One little example is that we are working on a project for this guy, and a number of his pals – there’s a very large demand, certainly again in the States, and I think it’s probably outside the States too, for safe anti-bacterial cleaning products. Parents want to make the world as safe as they can for these little kids. Most of the current cleaners and hand sanitisers that are on the market have some pretty nasty chemicals in them. They’re not very good for us and they’re even worse for the waste stream when they get out into it. We came across a rather cool technology, it’s called thyme, it’s a plant – when you do some clever things to it, you can make a cleaner hand sanitiser or soap or whatever you want that kills pretty much every bug including things like MRSA. It does it in a way that mitigates against resistance, which is even cooler, because biology has figured out how to do this in a pretty clever way, and best of all this stuff grows as a weed in most of the arid parts of the Mediterranean, so you can then turn this into a value crop for poor farmers.
So this seemed great, and we did what we would normally do – we took this technology and we went along to some of our clients to say, “this is great! – you should launch some products around this and we’ll help you launch them” and none of them went for it, on reflection for obvious reasons. To go for it, they would have to disrupt all of the brands they already had out there that were using these nasty chemicals. So we said, OK, we believe in this idea, so we’ll go and do it. So we set up a company, it’s now a separate company to IDEO, that manufactures this stuff, you can buy it in Wholefoods, you’ll be able to buy it in some of the big mass distributors in America before the end of the year. We learnt a heck of a lot more from going through that process of having to develop this product for ourselves, and launch it and build a business around it, than we would ever have done creating it for another company. These are the products which are already out.
Another area that I think’s really fascinating, and an opportunity to learn, is what I call convergence in healthcare. Healthcare has always been an area that designers have worked in, and I think we’ve been able to see a positive impact, but the world of health is changing. You can map it out this way I think, it works relatively well, that healthcare goes from the management of sickness to the prevention of sickness; it goes from dealing with individuals to dealing with society and social behaviour. The vast majority of western medicine is down in this bottom left hand corner. This is where we spend nearly all of our money today. But economics, new technology, new social behaviour, is causing this to happen. All of these different components of healthcare are beginning to converge and crash together, and creating all sorts of new interesting opportunities for innovation and for creating new experiences.
An example of this that I wanted to show is not something that we worked on but I think is simply the best example of an integrated healthcare solution I’ve seen anywhere in the world in the last few years, and that’s an eyecare system in India, it’s called the Aravind Eyecare System, some of you may have come across it. They do 250, 000 cataract operations a year, they have a million patients. They do 60 per cent of those operations for free, and yet they’re still completely self-funded. They’ve done that by innovating in every single step in the process of delivering eyecare, from the way they do the eye clinics out in rural villages, where they have telemedicine facilities that allow doctors back at the hospital to do the diagnosis without having to come out to the clinics, to the way they’ve set up incredibly efficient operating theatres, where they operate far faster than most other systems, to the point where they manufacture their own lenses and sutures – by doing that, they’ve brought the cost of lenses down from $200 a pair when bought from Bausch & Lomb to $4 a pair when manufactured in the basement of the hospital.
As a result, not only have they become the biggest eyecare hospital system in the world, they’re also one of the biggest teaching hospitals outside North America, they have a consulting operation that’s now working with healthcare systems all over the world developing highly efficient healthcare systems, not just in eyecare, but in other areas too. Just another fact that’s interesting – 21 of the 26 senior leaders of the business all come from the same family. That’s the family that founded it, and every one of those still practises as a surgeon as well as running the business. It’s a very committed organisation and well worth a visit if you’re ever heading to Madarai in India.
Aravind is a good example of a service for the poor, and it’s a great example of how you can do that and serve quite a broad spectrum, they serve wealthy people too. It really is I believe an excellent opportunity for learning with design thinking.
So we did another project recently with Hewlett Packard looking at microfinance, which is the kind of fundamental enabler of the most innovation in emerging markets today. We were interested in whether it was possible to digitally enable microfinance, because it’s actually kind of a tough system. Right now, people are going round on bicycles with wodges of cash in their back pocket, distributing money in these villages, and we thought, well maybe there’s an opportunity to do something with digital systems here to make that more efficient. Two areas that we learnt there that were very valuable for us – one was just going and doing user-centred design and actually spending time in villages in Uganda meant we had to develop a whole series of new observational techniques to do that successfully, because we were learning about people whose lives we had absolutely no understanding of, who spoke languages that it was hard to even find interpreters to speak, and so we developed a whole series of new techniques to help us along.
We also, when it came to the products themselves, and this is a prototype of one of the things that we did, because of the cost demands in these marketplaces, we end up to things like toy technology for a lot of the technology for these things because it needed to be both cheap and robust, and the interface, which you can see on the front of this here, is actually a paper interface, it’s got a button matrix underneath it. The reason for that is that if somebody needed to, they could localise the interface by completely handwriting a new interface and just slapping it on the top of the product. There’s a level of simplicity that came from working in this kind of environment.
So what’s the difference between working on these kinds of problems and working on maybe the more traditional projects that we continue to work on in the rest of our business? I think they’re more complex, they require us to deal with more complexity. Even at its root, when we talk about design thinking, we’re actually talking about a more complex landscape. Design thinking is based on taking a human-centred approach to problem-solving. It starts with what’s desirable and then moves to what’s possible from a technology perspective and what’s viable from a business perspective. That in itself represents complexity. It means that as design thinkers we need to be cognisant of a whole set of issues that we didn’t have to be so cognisant of before, because when I was educated to be a designer, I expected the client or my boss to come with the business stuff and the technology stuff already done! I expected them to turn up with the brief that said, “Here’s the technology we’re going to use, and here’s the business that we’re actually going to apply it to – you’ve got to design it”. We don’t get to do that anymore. Now we have to work with all of these things, they’re all fluid at the same time. That’s more complex.
But even in these different domains, more complexity is emerging. In the domain of people, we have whole new ecosystems of users and participants in the innovation process. In technology we’re moving from a 20th century hierarchical top down view of industrial technology to a 21st century view of networks in which things like emergence are the key properties. Microfinance is a great example of an emergent technology. In business, we’re forced to question existing business models based on the traditional value chains and things like consumerisation, and instead explore new ways of creating value, just like Shimano and Aravin have done.
The people that we’re working for and designing with are changing, not just the users but everybody in the system. This is the way I used to think of the world, as a kind of siloed model where we had businesses produced and people consumed and governments regulated and NGOs advocated and that was the world, it was a very simple world. I think that maybe some of us think that’s still the world we’re in. I think we’re in a much more inter-dependent world where now people are both creating and consuming. NGOs are funding businesses and businesses are funding NGOs and governments are investing in NGOs. It’s incredibly more complex than it used to be.
But one result of that is that all kinds of new participants and new kinds of entrepreneurs have emerged from that complexity, which is very exciting, and social entrepreneurs is a particular group I think that’s emerged in the last few years who are really interested in tackling design challenges in whole new ways. One that we work with is one called the Acumen Fund in New York, it’s a fabulous organisation, it’s essentially a VC fund that supports social entrepreneurs in India, Pakistan and Africa who are delivering goods and services for the poor. So they invest, just like a venture capital firm would do, in start ups. So we’re working right now on a project around safe water storage and transportation in India and Africa with them.
I talked a little earlier about how working on new problems causes us to learn and evolve. I think one place where we need to evolve as design thinkers is around our process. We can’t necessarily rely only on the process that we developed before.
I want to talk about just three examples today. The first is what’s happening to human centred design or user-centred design. Human factors in design used to be about having empathy for the individual and their relationship with a product, that’s where it started. With the development of things like the internet, it became much more important to understand groups, social behaviour. To some extent, human centred design process has always had an element of collaboration and with individuals or small groups of users. That’s what going out into the field is all about, you’re essentially collaborating, but the technology and particularly the emergence of Web 2.0 social communities is obviously opening up a whole new set of possibilities for collaborative design. Just a very simple example, we did a little experiment recently – we were running a workshop with a series of company executives in New York and we had a group of end users in constant communication with the workshop participants the whole of the way through the workshop through instant messaging. They were never not talking to the users, all the way through, just to see if it would change the behaviour of the participants and it was really interesting to see what happened.
Crowd Spirits a new start up that’s emerged recently that’s what they call “crowd sourcing” or collaborating with a social community to design, invest in and create new consumer electronics.
Swedequity Enterprises is another interesting organisation, again based in New York, that’s bringing corporations, designers and under-privileged inner-city high school kids together to do design projects. They’re bringing what I would call these communities a purpose, in that they’re creating new design ideas that are much more valuable to the companies because they’re inherently more connected to the audience and that the solutions approach to serve and at the same time they’re educating kids in the design process, it’s another form of collaboration.
I personally believe that letting go as designers and being involved in a collaborative process is maybe the biggest challenge for us from a conceptual point of view going forward. I think as designers if we don’t do it, we’ll just become irrelevant, because it will happen to us anyway. I think it’s the big challenge.
Another one is around the development of prototyping. Frans talked about how important prototyping was. I fundamentally believe that rapid prototyping, lots of prototyping, is hugely important in innovation and design. It used to be that simple problems could have simple prototypes. I was taught to put the prototype out on the table and let it speak for itself. That doesn’t work any more. More complex solutions need to be explored in more sophisticated ways. As designers, we no longer let the prototype speak for itself, we speak through stories and narrative, and I think our narrative skills are having to evolve very quickly as designers. This is just a silent version of a video, an explanation of ultra mobile computing that we did with Intel a few years ago, where actually I was pleased that we anticipated the iPhone interface with some degree of facility.
And that’s where I think this issue of storytelling and narrative is also deeply connected to the idea of craft. It’s very easy when we focus on design thinking to say, the craft of design is becoming less relevant. I don’t think the craft of design is becoming any less relevant at all. It’s just it has different roles to play. One place it has an incredibly important role is I think in the craft that’s associated with storytelling – our ability to be compelling, because our ability to be strategic is I think very limited if we can’t also tell compelling stories and if we can’t implement our strategies in a compelling way.
But we also need new skills to tackle these new kinds of problems. Design thinkers need to be broad, inter-disciplinary, which means we need new academic institutions willing to educate in new ways. I mentioned them earlier, the d.school, Stanford, is one that we’ve been most associated with.
The teams do these inter-disciplinary projects where folks from business school and design school or engineering school and are product designers, medical school and the school of education come together to work on projects and these kinds of projects are often the first experience that business school students or engineers have had of the design process. They’re clearly not intended to create designers in the traditional sense of the word; they’re intended to create design thinkers that can work alongside designers on these more complex problems.
I think that the question that comes up, design school versus design thinking school, we clearly need both, but I don’t know that we want them to be siloed from each other, I think we maybe need people who are actually experienced both in their educational journey, but we absolutely need both, and I think it would be a huge mistake if every design school moved away from focusing on design craft and only focusing on design thinking. We’d lose a lot and we’d throw a lot of babies out with the bathwater if we did that.
So design thinking has acted as a catalyst for us, it’s enabled us to tackle new kinds of problems from which we’ve learnt, and that these problems are more complex than they were before, we’ve had to develop our process to deal with it. The big question at the end is, are we indeed having more positive impact? Can we be more legitimately optimistic about design? And the answer is, I don’t know, not yet. I wish I really did know, but I don’t. We haven’t been at it all that long, and as the problems get more complex, I think it takes longer for the outcomes to emerge. There are places where I think we can begin to observe and perhaps even begin to measure. One example is when it comes to trying to instrument the work that we do, we have this sort of dashboard portfolio management tool that we use for some of our clients where we are doing multiple innovation projects where we just simply try and see the impact of individual projects, where they fall on the spectrum of incremental to revolutionary innovation – each of these little dots actually, we’ve stripped out a lot of the data here, but the dots represent the level of net present value of those individual projects looking forward, and then we also see the inter-dependencies between projects because one thing that we found out very much is that, in an organisation that does a lot of projects, it’s not that one project works and another one doesn’t, but one project can lead to some other project that ultimately creates more value in the marketplace. So looking at those inter-dependencies is important.
So this really becomes a portfolio management tool for business leaders and that’s one of the things that I spend a lot of my time doing is to illustrate to business leaders that they have to think of innovation as a portfolio, just like if you were running a big fund, an investment fund, you manage your portfolio. So innovation needs to be thought of in the same way. It’s not just a series of projects.
I think another thing that we can measure relatively easily is our attention to certain things. It’s not a measure of impact but at least it’s a measure of potential for impact, so as the saying goes, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket, so you can’t have impact if you’re not working on some of these areas. I did a little audit recently looking at just those categories of projects that I showed a little earlier – how much of our time at IDEO are we spending on these things? And it turns out that this is the number, about 15% of our time right now over the last two years on those projects. Now that doesn’t seem like a very big number – a couple of things I did to qualify it. Firstly, we’re big enough now that the idea of that represents quarter of a million design hours, so that’s actually quite a lot, and about 60 projects in those categories over the last couple of years. I think it’s just the beginning, I think of it is our kind of R&D portfolio, these are the projects where we’re learning the fastest. Considering that they’re relatively difficult projects to identify and very difficult projects to fund in many cases, and the work itself is quite challenging, I think it’s not a bad start, something we expect to grow over the years.
Another form of impact are the new ideas themselves, what Richard Dawkins would call “memes”, things like processes and frameworks that can be used by others to tackle more complex problems – that I think is impact.
But in the end, probably the most useful measure of impact is not really a measure at all, but it’s the kind of inspirational stories that can come from successful outcomes and successful projects. So I’d like to absolutely like to finish off by talking about one other series of projects really with Kaiser, a very large healthcare institution in America, introducing notions of design thinking for doctors, nurses and administrators to help them innovate within the patient care experience. This project was done by a series of nurses who were interested in seeing if they couldn’t redesign the way they change shift. They prototyped new ideas, built the tools, shared those tools, developed a new process. The result of that (Kaiser measures everything, which is great) is that the average time it takes for a nurse when they walk onto a ward to when they see their first patient has gone down from 43 minutes to 12 minutes. So when you think that’s about half an hour for every nurse on every shift in every ward in every hospital in their 40 hospital system, that’s a lot of extra hours of patient time that’s come out of these nurses redesigning their process. I think that’s an interesting impact. It’s not only affected the patients, it’s affected the nurses as well, and so these anecdotes talk about how the nurses are feeling better, about what they do, because of this redesign.
So for us the relationship between design and design thinking is a complicated one. We rely on one to catalyse the other, design thinking has allowed us to expand the canvas on which we work, but without forgetting that it’s the craft of design that’s essential to the eventual outcome. As I said before, I’m not claiming any big breakthroughs here, it’s simply a mechanism that’s allowed us to work in some new areas that we care about, and have some, I hope, beneficial impact and become a little bit more optimistic about our role as designers.
So thank you!
Jeremy Myerson
Thanks very much Tim, a really robust and global defence and exposition of design thinking. Before we break for coffee, I know you’re probably buzzing with ideas, there is caffeine coming just to make you even more wired, one killer question – the gentleman there, the mike is coming to you, tell us who you are and where you’re from?
Audience
My name is Simon Rucker from Seymour Powell.
You mentioned the fact that you saw IDEO and other companies moving upstream and you described it as, I suppose “helping clients define the problems that before perhaps they would have briefed you with. You mentioned that the reason you thought was complexity but my question for you is that complexity is a relative thing, every generation thinks that their generation is more complex than the one before, and so it goes on and our ability to deal with complexity is increasing. So is there something other than complexity that accounts for the fact that clients increasingly don’t have briefs to come to designers with? – that they increasingly expect designers to help them define problems in the first place?
Tim Brown
Interesting way of thinking. I suspect because we’ve actually got a lot better at helping them create better briefs. I don’t know about you but a lot of clients that haven’t gone through certainly not the sort of innovation process, even if they were used to going through relatively incremental kind of design processes before, don’t know or didn’t know how to develop good briefs and I think we’ve all got quite good at it, just like we’re quite good at the rest of our processes, it’s become part of our process. So I think companies get value out of us participating in that dialogue. I think for us it’s also one of the questions that often get from clients is that: ‘You work in all these different areas, you’re seeing lots of things that are going on, can you help us figure out what we should be working on?’ That’s a legitimate question. We get others who walk in the door saying: ‘We pretty much know what we’d like to work on but we still don’t know quite how to frame what we might do together.’ I think it’s because it’s become an inherent part of our process and as I said right at the beginning, I believe that where it’s useful for us as designers to at least participate if not actually have a little bit more control of that bit of the process. I don’t really want to go through the 2001 Nasdaq thing again. I see this as a bit of an insurance policy.
Jeremy Myerson
Well Tim, thank you very much for your keynote presentation.