IDSA & San Francisco pictures here - let 'em load, cause there are about 5 meg ...

I'm in SFO, waiting for my flight to Dallas, and reflecting on the IDSA conference. I was quite happy with the content of the program this year; while previous years have always provided plenty of free booze, this year's conference also had a phenomenal lineup of speakers and contributors. The highlight for me was the Saturday morning program, which included talks by Yves Behar, Sir Ken Robinson, Tim Brown, and Roger Martin.

Yves' work is appropriate and his attitude about Design and society is equally as well structured. I particularly liked his theme of "If it is not ethical, it cannot be beautiful" - that there is a level of completeness to form that is actually driven by the substance of the Design rather than by the facade. I was able to chat a bit with him at the Microsoft Zune party [talk about abundance - piles and piles of shrimp, uneaten, while a mostly nude Circus performer performed acrobatics with a thinly abstracted Zune logo], and he seems as down to earth as his talk would have you think.

Following Yves, Sir Ken Robinson presented what has to be one of the most well delivered, well proportioned, hilarious and thought provoking talk I've ever heard, at a conference or anywhere else. No slides, no notes, and standing in the very center of the stage, Robinson presented forty minutes of reflection on the state of our culture, avoiding the overly-hyped theme of sustainability and environment and focusing instead on the broken state of the people themselves. The talk discussed how we spend a great deal of time "educating" people to be logical and objective, but at the expense of their ability to be creative; this is the crisis, and has resulted in the other issues we now are aware of and fear [China, sustainability, poverty, etc]. To fix these, we must first fix ourselves and provide environments in which people can re-claim their creative energy.

Tim Brown's talk was largely an advertisement for IDEO, and while he tried several times to distance himself from "claiming ownership over Design Thinking", there was definitely a level of pretentiousness to his talk which I found irritating. It was nice to hear him speak, as I've read a bit about and from him over the past few years, but the content itself was disappointing.

Roger Martin's talk, however, had by far the most rich and intellectually refined content in the conference, and I felt that it helped me resolve a number of things I've been considering. I've run into Martin's name and work recently quite a bit, as I research and think about abductive problem solving in the process of Design Synthesis, and the clarity with which he presented was excellent. His talk focused on the knowledge funnel that exists as the environment for Design decisions: Mystery => Heuristic => Algorithm => Code. Designers focus on the Mystery, and find the most excitement in finding value that is contextually appropriate validity to their ideas. Business owners focus on the Code, and find the most excitement in moving towards reliability and repeatability. That creates a "fundamental predilection gap". Business owners demand logical proof, but Design can't prove the solutions to the mysteries: these are unprovable, and are only demonstrable and testable. "Prove it" insists on declarative reasoning, which wipes out new and innovative thinking. You can't; you can't prove these types of things. You can imagine the possibilities. The logic of what might be: Abductive Thinking.

While these four powerhouses were back to back, the rest of the conference had a number of gems as well: Richard Seymore, Janine Benyus on Biomimcry, Bruce Sterling, Darrel Rhea from Cheskin, the founder of my company Hartmut Esslinger, and Patrick Whitney from IIT... The insights alone were well worth the steep pricetag of this conference. Throw in the absolutely hilarious Core77 party, the packed frog party, the ridiculous Microsoft party, and the networking opportunities, and you get a wonderful use of a weekend in San Francisco.

More freeform notes from IDSA:

Why and how
Yves Behar

It's been a big year for fuseproject. I've been invited to speak for intimidating audiences. There's nothing quite as daunting as speaking to an audience of your peers. There's a lot of scrutinizing, and so this is humbling.

In thinking about what might be interesting to designers, I was thinking about recent directions the studio has taken, and this is a presentation of personal thoughts. I want to share something that's been on my mind lately - the notion of relationship. As designers, we have an opportunity to create new relationships between design and the world. In order to do so, we need to have a sense of optimism - we need to be enthusiastic, and not listen to the media. Pessimism sells a lot of newspapers and magazines.

What drives optimism?

I want to talk about what we do, how we do design, and the effect of the projects we have.

If it is not ethical, it cannot be beautiful.

How Design is about constructing entire businesses through design.

For me, the value of design is so great and so far beyond the fee model - who ever thought Designers should behave the same way that accountants do? The value is so far beyond this antiquated model, that we must drive towards something different. We should either work on civic projects, health care, etc - and give it away. This is about doing the right thing, and giving it to the world.

Design is about value, what we create, and values, what we believe in.

NYC Condom. Health department of new york is distributing 3 million condoms a month, as a part of aids prevention and pregnancy prevention. A bloomberg initiative, and said "how do we take out the negative stigma and look at this in a new way". So we can look at the graphics, and the dispenser. This is a project that needs to be desirable. Stores, homeless shelters, bars need to want to have this dispenser.

NYC Condom: Get Some.

Also working with the department of health: so much they want to do. Encourage biking, etc. NYC helmet. A low cost solution to a helmet that may be given away, or would become an object of desire. New Yorkers don't want to look like an average biker. Require a sense of variation, and weather protection. Can leave the helmet locked to the bike, and take the precious part to the house or the office. Low cost versions, some of which are given away as promotional items, and could have fashionable, beautiful, transforming versions of the hat portion. Taps into the sense of new york, the coolness of new york, individuality, and protection.

Would anyone have ever expected to see someone carrying a laptop on their head? The hundred dollar laptop project - a laptop that is educational. Started at MIT, and the goal is to provide a tool for education in the developing world. Been in tests in Nigeria, and around the world. Plan an idea seed, let it grow a mind. Mind the world share.

Nicholas Negroponte has obviously dedicated his life to technology and education, and wanted this project to be about design. Design in this case would be the glue - the thing that brings this project to life, and makes it love. Something that the heads of governments want - when this project has been shown in the middle of the desert, or in a kitchen in italy: it softens up the whole room. This is the funnest part of my day now.

This has been designed overall as a completely new approach to bringing knowledge to the world. We should look at this project in so many ways as a way to reinvent a business model and design yourself into an amazing place.

The laptop is robust, and has a wifi antenna built it. This allows the kids to connect to each other. This is not about individual work and mimicking what we do with laptops; it's about kids inventing new ways to collaborate. Some of the things that it does which are unique: ability to see people in the vicinity. These communities of OLPC users organize themselves around activities. I can make some music, for example: you can make some music, play it, and build a little music together. Another possibility is: I can resume the chat: I can chat off the web, no server needed. There's no airports, no server: it's just direct connect between laptops. When the kids go home, they open up the laptops and continue talking to each other after school.

A mesh network is a way to connect from point a to b, over a lot of laptops.

One of the funnest parts of this is how the kids can talk to each other. They can see each other and exchange ideas, and exchange visualizations between each other. This is a fairly incredible project, and is fully designed at every level: software, hardware, manufacturing, etc.

From six feet away, you can recognize it immediately. When you get to touch it, there is tactile discovery that occurs. There are different power solutions: human power, solar power. One of the things we learned through testing was that the kids couldn't recognize their laptop, so there are 20 different color variations of the two colors, so when the kids get their laptops, they immediately have their own color.

While we do pro bono work that we give away, what other kind of work do we do? Most of my students are idealistic and are ready to do game changing types of work. I'm starting to realize that pleasing a client may not be in the best interest of the client. The main incentive in consulting is "the faster, the better". This is not how you drive a design-directed enterprise.

If kids start seeing the bottle of reuse as a fun one, they may stop throwing things away completely.

We need to continually invest in our creativity. There needs to be an internal laboratory of ideas that are constantly developed. Pure investment, that brings us back to craft and making, and the discovery. These take us to new places, to discover new possibilities.

Leaf light: Herman Miller & fuse. Move to warm to cool, and change the intensity. Light shifting colors, and LEDs integrated.

I hope I've conveyed my beliefs and experiences. My job is to add value, and even give it away if possible, and it will eventually come back to us. We need to use problem solving to consider how we work with clients, and we need to experiment internally.

Beyond the Creatives
Sir Ken Robinson

How many of you are in California for the first time? Have you been to LA? I live there, and moved there six years ago, and recently went to Vegas. What is that? In January, it was my 25th wedding anniversary. My wife is a major Elvis fan, so we went to Vegas to get married again. We went to the Elvis Chapple. I highly recommend this. You get the chapel, the impersonator, three songs, a hula girl, optional, and smoke. We walked in, and for another hundred dollars we could have gotten a pink Cadillac.

The Venetian is better than Venice. It's more authentic, and it doesn't smell.

There's no reason for Vegas to be there. Most cities - every other city - is there for a reason. Vegas is there because of imagination. The principle of what imagination achieves for us.

I want to put three ideas to you. All of us are engulfed in a revolution with extraordinary implications for the profession. It's a real revolution, and it's changing everything. Technology plays a role. Digital natives and Digital immigrants. If you are over 25, you were born before the digital revolution happened. We are kind of OK with it. We are fumbling. We have iphones, but watch children under 25. When I'm online, my children leave the room.

They speak digital. They are living in another side of a cultural chasm. The digital revolution is just beginning. I was recently talking to someone at apple. The most powerful supercomputer on earth has the processing power of nothing; but in the relatively near future, we may get to a six month old human child.

Computers will be able to learn. They will be able to rewrite their own operating systems.

That may mean that you give the computer an instruction.. and it hesitates.

Huge shift towards cities, bringing us to a point of departure. There is a major crisis in the natural world, brought about by how we've been behaving for the last 300 years. Atlanta may run out of water in 90 days. That's a crisis.

But there's another crisis, that for the same reasons and forms, we have a crisis of human resources. We misuse the capacities of ourselves, and our children. The levels of dropout, and dissatisfaction, most people are not happy. Something is going wrong - there's a problem in the ecology of human resources. Part of our job is to reconnect them.

We need to think about the strategies we are taking in our businesses and educational institutions.

There are misconceptions about the relationship between intellect and creativity. We think these are different things. These things are intimately related. The most intelligent thing you can do is be creative. Children believe they are very creative. Then they become "educated", and they learn that there is one answer, and don't copy from anyone else, because that's cheating. Outside of school, that's called collaboration. Only special people are creative? Not true. People who call themselves creative have just discovered something that they are particularly good at.

Creativity is about special things? No - you can be creative at anything.

There's a huge amount you can do to develop creative capacity.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.

Most creative processes are about connections. Challenging the things we take for granted. Fundamental.

The problem of taking things for granted is knowing what it is.

Sense of time.

In Europe, a century is not a long time. In america, it is.

Senses. We think we have five; what about intuition? What about value? Some people have never thought to count their senses. What about the main one? What about balance? Physiologists will tell you that you have 17 or 18 sensory systems. We take for granted we have 5 and the spooky one. We think it's true because we spent our entire life hearing about it, so we think it's true. We cut ourselves off from the others. As soon as something becomes obvious, it means every opportunity to understand it has been abandoned.

Imagination is the most powerful process available to humankind. It sets us apart from every other animal.

Imagination is the birthplace of every human creation. To be creative, you have to be doing something. The people who feel the most energized by creativity love the medium. Most people who think they aren't creative haven't discovered their medium. We have a culture that demands objective, analytical frames of thought, yet we think in multiple ways that our senses afford us. We don't build our institutions that way. If we are to move forward into this new future, we need to think better about our resources. We have a perception of our world that is flawed.

Organizations are not mechanisms. They are organisms. You cannot make people creative; the good news is, if you are a farmer, you don't make plants grow. The plant takes care of itself. You provide the great conditions for growth. One of the hottest, dryest places on earth is death valley. Nothing grows there. In the winter of 2004/2005, it rained. Normally it rains 2 inches a year. It rained 8 inches for the first time in a hundred years. In the spring, Death Valley was covered by flowers. And then the rain stopped, and it all went back to the ground. Death valley was not dead. It was dormant, and just needed conditions for growth.

Most organizations just require the proper conditions for growth.

If all the insects on earth were to disappear, within 50 years, all other forms of life would perish. But if all human beings were to disappear, within 50 years, all other forms of life would flourish.

Tim Brown
From Design to Design thinking

There's been a lot of discussion about the relationship between design and design thinking over the last few years. Because of what we do and say, we've been a part of that discussion. Also, part of the d.school relationship at Stanford. What I want to do today is talk about the story of using this term and what it means to us. This isn't about this being dogmatic, it's about a story of why its useful to us. To start, I love design products. It's what I was trained to do.

But our work sometimes is accused of not being the best thing for the world around us. Sometimes we can be damaging. We can talk about how industrial designers are responsible for a lot of trash. All of those monitors that were made ten years ago are probably in a trash bin.

That kind of story was brought about on a story of a toothbrush for Oral B. One of the first toothbrushes that were designed to help kids brush their teeth. Lots of human centered design and understanding, and having kids use these things, and very successful. After launching the product, one of the designers was in Costa Rica on vacation, and saw one of the toothbrushes washed up on the beech. You can see the pitting on the rubber, which means it's been in the water for a very long time. One of millions, and one of the thousands of projects, and very depressing.

How can you remain optimistic in spite of this? Design looks to the future, and imagines possibilities. Unless we can be optimistic, we have a hard time being impactful. Maybe our definition of positive impact have become a bit narrow. Maybe our view of impact is rooted in an outdated industrial system.

The intent to have a more positive impact is causing us to rethink how we practice design.

After seven years of design education, graduated from the RCA. Aesthetic experience of products to make and create delight and understanding with the use of new technology.

Then, introduced to this idea of interdisciplinary design. Interaction Design, human factors, and human centered activities. Then, began developing products.

Became CEO of IDEO, and then the bottom fell out.

Time to redirect our thoughts to being more influential in how companies and organizations deal with their companies and brands, and making the link between design and innovation.

IDEO was 300 people large. Changing direction would be a difficult prospect. Needed a new movement, something a little like the bauhaus, but perhaps not as grand.

Realized how difficult it was to describe to anyone what it was that we actually did. I find that every time I talk about Design, I put the word Thinking after it to describe what we do. This shift, which has a focus on the output to process, has really changed the way we do things at IDEO.

Design thinking has enabled us to reflect on and create positive change.

Charles and Ray Eames have shown us how a willingness to cross disciplines has led to iconic design solutions. But now the stakes are higher. Brands need to face up to their global footprints.

We need to figure out a way that design can be more strategic, and participate in a way that has a more positive impact.

The World Clock counts in real time, the births and deaths, oil, cars, etc.
Focus on new problems.

Focusing on new problems, with new approaches, allows us to learn more and therefore evolve.

The design of public services
Sustainable products and services
Convergence in Healthcare
Goods and Services for the poor

The design of public service is a long way behind in the United States.

Most of the innovation that is going on here has been supported by NGOs instead of the government. Been working with the red cross to increase the amount of blood donors. Been an interesting experience, because it creates a set of design challenges. It's service based, and the workers are volunteers. The donors have deeply emotional reasons for giving blood, and the experience is intimidating.

Limited in ability to create a better experience by sitting in the studio. Evolution was through a series of live prototypes.

Better with More, to Better with Less.

Convergence in Healthcare. You can map this out through individual .> social behaviour, and thinking about management and prevention.

crowdspirit

Design Thinking: The Next Competitive Advantage
Roger Martin

I want to make an argument that Design Thinking is a competitive advantage for companies, but most companies think in a fashion that is inconsistent with Design Thinking and therefore don't take advantage of it.

How does understanding take place? Everything that comes across our "screen" is a mystery. Gravity was a mystery; we ask ourselves "why", why do apples fall and birds don't, and we thought about it long enough that we get a first level of understanding. We develop a heuristic, or a general way of thinking about things. We start to have a general sense, or heuristic, or way of thinking about it. Then we can get to an algorithm. We understand it well enough that we can make a prediction about it - a rule about it. In the late twentieth century, we got to a fourth stage of understanding of some things: code. We can program that rule into binary code and have software that can follow it. The mystery moves through the stages, and eventually, we can develop a way for planes to fall from the sky in an organized fashion. There's a funnel of knowledge, and at each stage, good and bad things happen. As we get a greater level of understanding, we leave things out. In the end, we leave everything out except the essence of the thing, in order to allow for execution. The advantage of this is that it is more efficient. We move things through this funnel in many disciplines. The negative is that any nuance of judgment eventually falls by the wayside. As this happens, good and bad.

Sometimes the code is "wrong", though. kerning: introducing judgment back into the equation. There's a plus in code, in that it is efficient exponentially, but the minus is simplification past the point of contextual grace. Companies, corporations that take knowledge and move it through this knowledge funnel free up time and resources to do the very most important thing for a company to prosper in the long term (stare up at the mysteries). As you move through this knowledge model, you can then spend more time looking for the next mystery. You can fall in love with the algorithm, and perhaps not ask the surrounding questions, because we don't ask about the next mystery that we are attempting to solve.

The dominant form of thinking in corporations is analytical thinking. The purpose is refinement in the existing knowledge base. The approach is substantiation based on past outcomes. You look at all the times you've done it before, and you hone it a little more. To think analytically, you use a limited number of objective variables in order to quantify things. You don't want judgment, or bias, because the goal is reliability: the production of consistent, replicable outcomes. Most corporations, most of the time, think only of analytical thinking. Staying at the same stage in the knowledge funnel. As they stay in the same stage, they spend all of their time not looking for the next mystery.

Design Thinking. The purpose is the advancement to the next knowledge stage. Designers act like designers, when they stare into the mysteries, and try to think about it. A way of thinking about things: an advance, as it is helpful to humanity as a way of thinking about the mystery. You can take a heuristic and drive to an algorithm, and think about how to package it in a continuous way. Can create a program like visicalc, and detract the amount of time required, and that's design thinking: moving the thought through the knowledge funnel. The approach is substantiation based on future events. You can't prove any movement along the knowledge funnel in advance. you can imagine it, but you can't prove it. You need a broader range of diverse variables: you have to have judgment, and you have to acknowledge the reality of bias.

The goal is validity: the production of an outcome that meets an objective.

The fundamental problem between design and business, is that there is a gap between business and design, of a range from reliability [honing within the same knowledge stage] and the desire to come up with a better answer that is valid and that moves knowledge forward. Designers generally live in the world of validity, and business people live in the world of reliability.

A fundamental predilection gap.

Prototypical clashes: in analytical thinking mode, all tasks are ongoing tasks. You are running the same algorithm. Design thinking is project based, because the project is advancing knowledge. When it's done, it's done. You organize yourself around that. There's a difference in the mode of reasoning: declarative vs. generative. Declarative is being able to assess if something is or is not true: deductive and inductive logic. Taught as the only useful ways to think in life. Deductive and Inductive doesn't get you to a new idea. There's a third kind of logic: adductive, which is the logic of what might be. The inference for the best idea of what might be true. You need generative reasoning to move to the next stage.

In most corporations, that's illegal.

Two words, used together, kill this type of thinking.

"Prove it."

Prove it insists on declarative reasoning, which wipes out new and innovative thinking. You can't. You can't prove it; you can imagine the possibilities.

The source of status in business is big budgets and large staffs, and solving wicked problems is what gets you status.

The dominant attitude within analytical thinking is that constraints are the enemy. In design thinking, constraints add to the challenge and excitement.

When designers think they are in hostile territory, there's a reason: the way you think is foreign and dangerous-feeling. They are foreign and dangerous-thinking t you.

Five productive steps.
- Take design unfriendliness as a design challenge. Don't punt on this, as this is one of the design challenges that should be solved.
- empathize with the design-unfriendly elements. Why are they doing what they are doing? The culture and context of business creates a schizophrenic nature: they want reliability, but they also want innovation. Not replicable. Who knows what will happen as a result of this innovation? They are terrified.
- speak the language of reliability. Speaking the language of validity uses words like "imagine", "what might happen", "oh wow". That terrifies people who use reliability. Being sure. A high level of confidence. Learn the language.
- use analogies and stories. you are trying to get them to do something that's never been done before, a
- bite off as little a piece as possible to generate proof. Future proof: when I do this, consumers will love it and it's going to be great.

The bad news about the immediate future is that it's the future, and liability-oriented people are scared of it. But the good thing about the future is that it soon becomes the past. Bite off as little as possible to generate proof; this is what will happen in the next few months - and it happens - you generate a more cohesive source of truth.

Leveraging Design in Business. Five productive steps to increase innovation.
- Take inattention to reliability as a management challenge. They would argue that designers are not responsive to reliability. How can you manage and deal and live with this?
- Empathize with the reliability-unfriendly elements. You've asked them to be creative, but given them reliability oriented rules. understand what they are up against.
- Speak the language of validity.
- Share data and reasoning, no conclusions. When talking to designers, business people say "I've thought about this and here's the answer". Instead, "I've thought about this." Allow the designer to draw the conclusion, because you want a conclusion that you haven't seen.
- Bite off as big a piece as possible to give innovation a chance.

We can start to now understand why folks engaged in the knowledge funnel game will end up in a clash. There is a way, that will never be easy, to say "my business is moving things along the knowledge funnel". Moving them along the knowledge funnel faster than anyone else allows you to save time and resources of people working at a stage, and I can redeploy my organization to stare back at the mysteries, and I can move them quicker across the knowledge funnel.

This is the greatest competitive advantage a company can have. This frees them up to be one step ahead of all competitors. This is also the hardest competitive advantage. The company has to give up on the idea of proving something before it happens, and taking some leaps. Proctor and Gamble is dedicated to doing this, and speeding things through the knowledge funnel faster, and it will be interesting to watch.

* some kind of connection between this, wicked problems, business week, interaction design *

Innovation 2.0 - New Mindsets, new imperatives

Different takes on the connections to design. Design consulting background, but been with a manufacturer. Consumer electronics, recruiting, from that perspective, we have a good cross section on the topic. Steve Russak, VP global innovation and design, kaz. A manufacturer of home comfort and health care products, like honneywell amd braun. Spent over 15 years working at Smart Design in nyc, pretty much out of school. Cut teeth on consulting and design business. Started as freelancer, partner, VP of operations. Kaz was one of the lcients in the early nineties, and did the first project with the Vics brand, applying it to a digital thermometer. Then a humidifier, and then building a business as a licensee for p&g. Fast forward to today; they tripled in size after acquiring honeywell division. Built a department called innovation and design within Kaz, and that's a hot topic about what the hell that means.

Doreen Lorenzo, President and COO, frogdesign. Been with frog for ten years, first as a GM in the digital media group, and then as COO. President last year; transitioning frog from a transitional frog boutique to a strategic consulting firm. Working with the fortune 500. Ten studios in four countries.

Keith Kozak, senior manager of user experience, dell. Team conducts global investigations to map consumer psycopgraphics.

Rita Sue Siegel. Premier design search firm focused on identifying innovative and creative talent. Degrees from Pratt.

Innovation is an evolving topic. I'm going to allow each person to give their thoughts on this topic. Doreen had submitted the topic in terms of imperatives for the new economy. It was interesting, and what occurred to me is that there are many perspectives on this, so good for a panel discussion. My take at Kaz has been an ever changing topic, a wholy grail. No one function owns it, and most brutally put, once a designer feels that they own innovation in their company, they have just missed the boat and are going to end up chasing the train instead o getting to the front of it. Specifically, within goals and objectives, they have to deliver innovation. It's ubiquitous. The premise for the session is to discuss what the implications are to design, and our careers, and what we are trying to do for our companies.

When you go to work on Monday, are you going to be innovating? Do you know how to approach it? Have you seen others getting involved in it? It's all over the place.

I'm going to jump to Rita Sue.

Today was an eye opener, as was yesterday's presentation about biomimicry. I also learned something in thinking about the future of design education: we were discussing what we are trying to prepare students for. Turkey doesn't have an industrial case; we are educating students to build an economy for us. Innovation is going to mean something different depending on the organization, the continent. It's a much broader topic. In the beginning, people would call Design Innovation because no one would listen to them. It's very healthy that other people are leading the charge in all aspects of the company, and some will end up leading design as well as innovation. It doesn't matter what they studied in school; whoever does it best is going to be the leader.

Er Ozlem - question from audience - Turkey has an industrial base, but it isn't as vast as America. How do you deal with companies - advanced companies - who have never used design before? There are different types of behaviors, and there needs to be different types of approaches to deal with these different types of companies. But we have an industrial base, fortunately.

Keith. At Dell: What are we talking about? I'm not really sure what this means. innovation is really advancing something, a product or service, to make it better. If you create something that is better than what you have today, people will want it. Really, the public is going to tell you - the consumers will tell you - if you are actually being innovative. With all the products, technology evolving so fast, it's coming rapidly. People don't have time to adopt technology and read manuals. People get things in their hands, and it's not better, they aren't going to use it because they have so many choices. The companies that get this right are the ones that are successful. Really concentrating on the end user needs. From a design perspective, it's good time to be in the field. You have to have the right people to go out and do that. Multidisciplinary teams; my team - global user experience - cognitive psychologists, industrial engineers. Look at the behavior of consumers; keep our eye on the ball and do that (?).

Doreen. I'm always chomping at the bit, so I'll keep it short. It's said that we have to put a number to innovation. We've been innovating since we were eating berries. That's our spirit. There are certain degrees to which people feel comfortable; certain companies innovate. But there's a fear factor that goes along with innovation. 5xx projects at frog; all of the companies asked for innovation. There were 5xx "great" projects, but were they innovative? Designers can walk into boardrooms. They no longer shun those dressed in black; designers have learned to speak a business language. We've changed the way we need to look in a business context, and the way we need to look at it that way. We've been innovating for four billion years.

Why did people come to this session? What do they want, and what can they expect to get out of it?

Design director at human scale. One of the challenges I have is that the expectation is harder on my team than on the rest of the .. ? What I ask my boss all the time, is how can we set up an environment to be innovative. Innovation doesn't just occur.

Doreen: I think innovation has to come top down. You have to feel comfortable that you can make mistakes and no one will call you out for it. Doing things differently - things don't work all the time. That's OK. The smart thing is you throw it out and keep moving. You can do it in little silo'ed parts of the organization to get things going, but it has to come top down. We all need to do better - we all need to take things to the next level.

When we first started Kaz, we did 80/20. 80% would be "upstream". I took part in a career day panel discussion, and started talking about what we do. Tucker was there, and lots of ex-smart people were there. The consistent theme was to sell ideas: designers need to be able to walk into a boardroom and have a seat at the table. You also need to earn it; but at some companies it's already installed, but for the most part, you have to earn it. What are corporations asking for? Are they asking for Chief Design Officers? How much of that work needs to be done, and what's the value of that? What's at the crux of this is courage, conviction and confidence. I've had to overstep my boundaries and take some risks. I told my boss he sucked the other day.

You have to establish that you will be thinking differently. How do you create an environment for this? In each project that comes to the table, and you set those lines separately, at least you've taken it to the idealistic end of what it could be. I see this happens all the time at coca cola; the project team says "this is what we want to have happen". For me, organizations should be set better to afford this. You have to do a couple things: you have to have support at a high level and have the day to day work done. You have to assemble the right people with the right goals, and you have to have a demonstrable success.

Once you start winning, they want more of that. This is what we experienced at Dell. Michael Dell wants to support and champion this environment. Just go ahead and do it.

How do you prioritize? Here are the programs we can handle; resource needs indicate which projects we can take on. You need to be able to say "were not doing that project". How much we focus on innovation in our own world indicates what we do with innovation. We are in housewares, a high volume, low margin, low investment business. We count pennies on every feature, and there's a very recent injection of everything being "researched" before we are willing to take on a project.

When you are in the company and talking about getting the products to the consumers, we need to think about purchasing innovation, marketing innovations. The things they are charged with doing every day. The things we are endeavoring to do every day; a light went off when I heard this topic.

Innovation is defined differently here than what I know about in my background. Will customers complain that things don't work? Big companies define this differently. Motivation that brings in the VPs of Design are the ways business talks; are competitors nipping at their heals/ Are they losing key engineers? Something major to get them out of their comfort zone. Design is ready to move in when that climate is there. You can help move to the next phase of the learning.

Doreen: When I listen to this, I wonder what Innovation is and what it means. Everything you do and touch implies a sense of improvement. When you look at truly innovating within a business context, you have to understand business and the market drivers. Design and business used to be very different; we just find right now that the fastest growing part of our design business is our business analyst role. Understanding how to translate these things into actionable items. That's a very different thing than the ah-ha pretty product that is done.

We begin to see other opportunities in an engagement, and we deliver things to them. And it's outside of their comfort zone and their

Innovating within the box.

Any good designer sees problems as opportunities. We turn them around. today, given the economic stressors, you need to look for smaller wins - the low hanging fruit or quick wins may be better. You may have to pull back and think differently; that's innovation 2.0. How do we better what we do today? Throw that to the design group and see what they do with that. Bringing the product direct to consumers is a challenge - a marketing challenge.

Design Bake Off. We pit two companies next to each other to come up with the "best design initiative". Companies coming to ask for innovation within their scope.

Less time, less resources, these things raise the bar for innovation. It's not the same. New imperatives for the new economy and what this means to us. We need to innovate: meaningful innovation. Not just being different for the sake of being different. It needs to be different for a reason.

Method in the Madness
Patrick Whitney

Why are methods relevant? Why are people like IDEo hiring graduate students who specialize in methods? Why is the school receiving attention from executives who don't normally pay attention to design? It relates to what Roger was talking about this morning. The companies needing to pay more attention to the wicked problems at the front end, and are returning to Design to do that. it's our responsibility to help them understand these wicked problems.

Design takes a long time to do, and it's hard to speed it up. Bill refers to Design as Creative Soup, where things come in and magic happens and design comes out.

Methods can speed up the work in complicated problems, leaving us more time to spend on the fuzzy front end.

There is method in the madness. Polonius talking about Hamlet, who was feigning madness to get through a problem. Executives think our process is mad. They like it, but they don't understand how it happens. Client Intent: customer loyalty, profit, share, brand, better user experience. A number of elements to do with intent. Then, there's a design process dealing with the problem; magic happens, and then we make things happen. Analysis to Synthesis.

There's an innovation gap, though, which is perplexing.

Organizational knowledge on the Y axis. Time on the X axis. We know how to make anything, but what should we make?

They've become so good at technology and business models and they create such a variety of things, and there are so many choices for consumers to make; the companies don't know who they are designing for. In the past, there was less of a gap between technology and their understanding of users. Now they are turning to Designers to get a better understanding.

IIT: Companies are coming for a more assured way of doing innovation. Executives and managers, senior designers, brand managers, product managers, social scientists all come to the school to learn methods.

The examples that will be shown seem like ordinary design. The methods that are being taught come from the traditional design process. It's stuff we've all learned in traditional design education; it's been more articulated and more defined and more compartmentalized as a body of knowledge so it can be taught faster and so others can work in the teams.

Rather than it being a simple process that's fuzzy, we've identified about fifty methods that we teach.

In addition to needing more formalized methods, Chuck Owen had the insight of driving towards abstraction. Methods can be mapped between real and abstract, and analysis and synthesis.

Research in the context of users, leads to reframing the problem. People are interested in the "wrong map" - they are operating based on the wrong map. Reframing takes place. Then to synthesis, where we create numerous options. Leaders in companies are not following the jack welch model - picking a model and optimizing and driving to it as fast as possible; they instead postpone a decision and holdoff.

Product centered research, culture-centered research, activity centered research. Highly structured ways of looking at user activities; field notebooks: a long list of insights are generated. Use disposable cameras.

People, Objects, Environments, Messages and Services: POEMS.
Cluster the insights, map them on a grid, identify the clusters.

whitney@id.iit.edu <= methods poster

Mark Dziersk and Richard Seymore

10 Things the business world should demand from design from now on
1. Clarity about Equity. If Design is going to lead, if marketing is going to report to design, we need to be prepared for this. What cuts through a Sea of Sameness?
2. Your Designers are your Storytellers.
3. Ergonomics of Understanding.
4. Good Design is Good Business.
Creativity + Risk = Reward
5. Early and Often.
6. Orchestra Leader

The Naked Interface: Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions
Luke Williams

The language of computing is difficult, when you are coming into it fresh like that. Mom took a computer course, and said the Language in computing is absurd. The promise is strong, where computers disappear. All information will be available to us 24/7, and it will be wonderful. The interactions people have with computers and technology. Nearly everything we work on has some sort of reference to minority report. When computing becomes ubiquitous, we risk introducing new levels of frustration into our lives. We can't turn off ubiquitous computing, and so we stand a very good chance of introducing needless complexity into them.

Our track record to date are in a cell phone mode - they demand our conscious attention. How do we introduce more information through our peripheral senses? It might be unbearable.

This is particularly unbearable because our track record to date hasn't been that good. We are the communities responsible for the ubiquitous blinking 12:00. There are a host of interfaces out there which are frustrating to use.

We are suggesting that we remake the entire essence of our lives on a paradigm that we aren't really happy with yet.

We face a very short window of time, and it's closing fast. The magnitude of the challenge is huge: the conceptual models of how this stuff should come together are broken. We need to develop a new level of sensitivity; we need to agree on conventions.

Where do you start with this?

Think about how the mind works. Research in Human Computer Interaction indicates how the mind works. A computer to some people are a beautiful smooth service to place post-it notes. The information revolution will never reach its full potential as long as it ignores how the mind works. (Steven Pinker). His specialty is evolutionary biology and cognitive science, and he's talking about how the mind evolved to conceptualize entities as physical objects, that can be stored in boxes.

Katamari Damacy. A small ball, that picks up things as it goes. Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces and places. Even when you are playing a game like Katamari Damacy, it has the tetris effect: it invades real life. We analyze objects and spaces in order to remember how the mind has evolved. Thousands of years of evolution: it evolved to deal with physical places. No matter how much technology we have, we have that same hard-wired connection in the brain. A collision: the physical property system is hitting the digital property system. The dynamic nature of the digital information; every object has been looked at like an interface objects.

The wii controller is an example.
Another example is how we use analogy to communicate affordances in the digital world. We've had millions of years to get the physical right, and we have all of these different analogies in the physical world to deal and pick from. In the digital world, there's no archetypes to draw from. We've been using the paired analogy. We need to dig deeper and wonder about the structure of the physical things that makes them useful to use. It's not about taking physical properties and representing them in the digital world.

The rich affordances of these objects that are dealt with all the time: the problem is that these are limited. A marble is fixed. It doesn't allow the dynamic properties of digital systems to express themselves. The challenge for us as designers is to take the best from both worlds and collide them together. How do we use that?

Industrial Designers need to play a key role in this. We are the ones that understand these rich affordances of physical objects.

The physical property system.

Reference frames
Geon Grammar
Direct Sensation

How the brain works out how we understand an object.

Intuitive physics
Subconscious signaling
Constraints

The brain understands an object by analyzing the shapes in it. We impose this on everything around us. Top to bottom. Front to back.

Geon Grammar: the arrangement of the shapes. Geons are primitives.
Direct Sensation: texture, material, surface. sense of light and color. When you introduce gloss, and transparency, and depth, you fool the visual systems. When the system is fooled, you introduce touch, and that allows you to recapture an understanding of the object.

Touch; the sensitive parts of the fingertips, are treated the same way as the sensitive parts of the retina. Provoking synesthesia.

Infants very quickly separate the animate from the inert. They bring objects closer, or further, by pushing or pulling. They bring humans closer to them by making noise. Children are intuitive physicists. Continuity: children will be upset if an object passes through a gap that is too small for it. No contact at a distance. Things can't move by themselves.

More freeform notes from IDSA:

Design After the Information Revolution
Paul Saffo

We are living in the moment of profound change and uncertainty. Gold is at 762 dollars an ounce. Google is at 640 dollars a share. Both are headed at 850 dollars, and the question is, which is going to get there first. Mortgage crisis, the disaster of Iraq, a moment of unprecedented uncertainty, where connecting is the most important thing we can do to get out of these problems.

I'm a forecaster, and as a forecaster, there are moments when not to make a forecast. An excellent forecast is, in moments of uncertainty, to avoid ensuring that things are too certain than they are.

Uncertainty is our friend. Change allows for opportunities.

Uncertainty is high because we are in the middle of a vast shift. This is a shift away from information, towards media. Information only makes sense when there isn't very much of it. When it is ubiquitous, it becomes media. The media revolution is here, but this time, it is different. It's a shift from mass to personal. The mass media revolution is over. You don't know this, in your heart.

There are two words in our vocabulary. blog, and web. Personal and media are old, but we may not understand how the meaning of those things have changed. We are in a completely new world, described by words we understood all along.

The world we are in today closely resembles the 1950s, and the advent of the last media revolution, mass media. A period of wild experimentation. Entrepreneurship with crazy ideas doing crazy things. Interesting failures, and unexpected successes. A pattern to the underlying technologies. Television arrived in the 1930s, and twenty years passed before it turned into a medium (broadcast). Time sharing technology occurs in the 1970s, and expressed in media as e-mail. Client-server advances in technology in the 1980s, expressed as the world-wide web. A technology arrives, time passes, and you have the expression. Then, it advances when it moves to the next platform. Peer to peer architecture, perhaps embedded in Napster. The web is here, but the revolution hasn't started.

We are in the early days of plastic, where people were trying to make plastic look like wood. The web is here, but it isn't interesting yet. The excitement is still ahead. We don't really know what peer to peer architecture is going to deliver yet. The surprises are yet to come. As the long expected media arrives late and in unexpected ways. Think about hypertext arriving as a concept with the general public; we are going to have a future of hypertext. Hyperdocuments on CDRom was predicted as the future. Compared to an online system where you can connect with it; Utopian view, thought of as 50 years out. Imagine walking in the door in 1987 and saying "CDRoms will never be more than a niche market for teenage boys playing violent video games".

Global ubiquitous hypertext document system took off like a rocket, and triggered the biggest change in consumer purchasing habits in 50 years. The hottest thing being sold online was books - the thing everyone thought was obsolete.

Another technology with specific implications is the idea of "sensor" technology: rfid, video cameras, etc. Media technology. A substitute for barcode initially, but beginning to put eyes and ears on our physical environment and letting things observe themselves.

Sensors become a tool in the media revolution. Nike/ipod as an example.

Media used to be bits and bytes and things floating in the air; now, media are physical objects. They are not communication devices - they are media devices, and they have built in video cameras, and we've developed a ring tone industry. This is 15% of the global music business. Everything will become media.

In 10 years, if not sooner, well below 1% of all web page viewing will be done by human beings, and the same amount of creation. Machines will talk to machines, having conversations on our behalf.

A little deeper into mass vs. personal media. In the 1950s, when mass media took off, we were looking at television. The location was the living room. The web, on the other hand, is everywhere. Personal media is becoming like oxygen. We want communications with us, and it's coming everywhere. Instead of watching and consuming, now we participate and create. Ordinary people are going to create things that no one wants to see, but they will be very, very valuable. The world of mass media is the world of the few and the large - the foxes, the time warners. This new world is the world of the many and the small.

You will get big by enabling the many and the small. We used to be about products and services, and now we are talking about subscriptions (and more). It's not the service revolution: it's something new.

The shift from product to subscription is the shift from a world where you buy and own to where you pay for the use. The future is already arrived; it just isn't evenly distributed yet. I buy my cellphone, but that's not a product - I only buy it because the phone companies are too stupid to give it to me. Without the service, it's a paperweight.

Change is coming, in the nature of the economy itself. The best way to understand the future is to look back at the past and observe the cycles, not the details. 100 years ago, we had an emergent industrial economy. This was the world of Ford, etc. Back then, the challenge in the economy was to make enough stuff that was cheap to satisfy the desires of the emergent middle class. The economy was about overcoming scarcity and increasing productivity. The central actor was the worker: the symbol of the economy was the timeclock. The management literature was about productivity increase.

50 years working on it actually made it work: at the end of world war 2, and the companies started making things for ordinary citizens and consumers, they discovered that they were so good at making stuff, that they were capable of making vastly more stuff than consumers wanted to buy. That was the end of the industrial economy. Power shifted to a new kind of economy where the worker was not the central actor, and workers started to wane. The new economy was the consumer economy, and the central actor was the purchaser.

The key enabling technology was the credit card. Charge it! The consumer economy appeared at the same time as mass media, because this enabled the consumer economy. The new economy was on marketing and selling.

The shift is to a new third economy; a creator economy. This is an economy where the central actor is not the purchase who makes, nor is it the person who consumes. It's someone who does both things at the very same moment. Creation and consumption is the same action.

Facebook and wikipedia are examples of this, but they are baby steps towards a creator economy.

There is one company that has nailed this creator economy thing. That's google. Google is free! You don't pay for online searches. How can the CEOs of Google be worth 17 billion dollars, each? Google isn't free. You pay for google every time you use it. Google is the quintessential media technology. You can't watch it; you have to participate. You have to put things in, in order to get things out.

The companies that harness the smallest quanta of creativity are going to be the ones that are the biggest. This is just the beginning.

Here's a piece of forecasting advice: look for things that don't fit. Things that don't fit are whisperings of the future. The best advice on how to deal with the uncertain future: "if you fear change, leave it in here".

If you really want to invent and innovate and connect in the new world of personal media, don't fear change: leave it in here when you go home.

Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times
Anthony Dunne and Fione Raby

Most of the time, Designers are trying to ease their entry into everyday life by making things easier to use and more functional. Once they are in life, they have an unpredictable impact on our life. The impact is more and more profound, and begins to indicate what it is like to be human. Design can begin to debate these impacts before they happen: it can be seductive in a commercial context in order to facilitate a discussion. From applications to implications. We aren't thinking about how products fit into market places, but instead thinking about the societal aspects and needs of these products and people.

We are both optimists, but we have to entertain some possible negative outcomes, visualize them, manifest them, and discuss and argue about how to avoid these situations and consider what will go wrong or right. Instead of forecasting, we are interested in asking a lot of questions and then trying to make the answers more tangible.

How will designers deal with the ability to "grow" things out of cells? Restaurants where you can eat yourself - you can have cells removed. You could eat politicians, perhaps out of malice instead of love. Designers try to mess things up, because we don't think about pure ideas, and instead think about how these things get woven together with economic systems.

Designers, working in a hypothetical space, can shift the conversation from abstract to concrete and debate about the results. We don't want to trivialize things.

Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow; exploring how designers can connect with things. For example, a new grown meat won't need livestock, and we can think about how key animals can be scanned from head to toe. Their internal organs can be used to develop a new language for abstract meat. It would have an interesting texture and form, and would be a throwback to real meat.
Nanofutures: Sensual Interfaces.
Bees.

Evidence Dolls. A project that looked at biotech and genetics. Research into new technologies and businesses evolving in the space. Many of the discussions were abstract and philosophical, and far away from real experience. Ideals of the future; we participate as well behaved citizens. We wanted to move this away into tangible territory, a place where we have underlying desires, which may be conflicting. Craig Benther, a genetic scientist, was going to allow you to send in a bit of DNA and some money. He will send you a CD of all of the potential illnesses that you might die of. Implications of this knowledge; in everyday life, the potential for understanding potential health future of your partner, your offspring,etc - would that affect how you date in the future?

Designed a product to make things tangible, and to indicate how complex these things really are. Marketed for the sex and the city generation. A plastic object, indicates a partner.

Design can be used to embed things into everyday behavior, in order to understand the hopes and fears and relationships between objects and people.

Robot language seems to be narrow, and determined by function. Robots start to imitate humans, and animals fall into this trap as well. The closer they get to people, the creepier they get. With all of this technology and computing, another choice is that they get mixed in and everything becomes one. Instead, we wanted to understand the material and formal ..

A Conscious Emulation
Janine Benyus

Core of Awareness
Naoto Fukasawa

Talking about the core of awareness.
People often cannot answer such a question as "what kind of design they wish to have", but they know what they want when they see good design.
People are aware of what they want, but are not conscious of it.
We are able to live by finding meanings in environment even if design does not exist.
Affordance is a word invented by James Gibson, an american psychologist. Random values each environment allows us.
Environments provoke our behaviors.
When people are best connected with things and environments, this is the core of awareness of the situation.
Connecting: people and environments are best connected when people naturally behave in given environments.
Empathy as a form; beauty is latent in the fragments of our life.
Our behaviors for sitting exist even without having any chairs.

It is more like a feeling of "already existing" rather than creating something new
We always get the essence of the form from five senses; if a sense is tricked, it changes the form

People do not think of objects while they are engaged with them; we commit errors when we think of use.

In tension; inherent power. Hari.

Strength is envisaged through movements.
A good designer is capable of objective sketching

Bruce Sterling
Shaping Things

Are we going to laminate bits and atoms? It's going to happen in real life - a qualified yes - it will happen, but it will not be as people have imagined it, as ubiquitous computing, the mixture of the real and the digital. It feels like magic, but it's not magic. It's an easy way to get into the idea, but really mixing it up feels disconcerting and peculiar. It's not magic, it's technology. There will be no ai involved; we don't have any, and we won't get any. We aren't any closer than in the 1960s. It's not about context awareness, or machines having elaborate conversations with one another; they are just machines. What we are aiming for is an internet of things. That's where Industrial Design has the ability to forge relationships being things.

I am a design visionary, because I am an author and not a designer; a long romance with design desires fidelity with materials to get the proper affect. There are six things happening on the ground, that lead to an eventual internet of things: digital plans, that can be shared on a network. tags, electronic barcodes, and computer fabrication, manufacturing real objects from a digital plan in a single step. Search engines, and tracking capacities, and the ability to recycle things by knowing what they are and knowing their history.
'
A comprehensive system that unites things into a single, super capacity. It's a spime - an object track able in space and time. Google the word Spime and you are catapulted into an education course, and you can see what people are doing with spimes. Ubiquitousness, leaving behind a pool of meta-data that designers can splash around in. A key awareness of people and objects, which can be folded back into the original plan. Not a science fictional idea - it's not far out like time machines or faster than light space travel. It's a different kind of everyday life, a new production system is rarely talked about in a wonderment kind of way any way that I would talk about getting here by jet propelled aircraft.

I'm not all jet propelled, and neither are the electric lights a miracle, and the fact that I'm talking with amplification is neither here nor there either. It's part of the regular everyday fabric of the world, and it will be cheaper, and better, and faster. It will come into being simply because it increases our wealth, and our power, and our command. What's it really good for is that it is good for sustainability. You can measure objects, total life cycle analysis. There are very few methods of mass production that can get us to sustainability; a spime is a method of ubiquitous computing on the path to sustainability. I tried to go in the exact opposite of that.

Rather far fetched scenario, being packaged in an over zealously banal way. Google centric because search engines are leading the pack between the six things I'm looking at. I keep track of industrial developments that keep track of spime material. I have very little skin in the game, as a visionary. I'm not a design evangelist for spimes.

Given that this exists in the public domain, as a fun conceptual schema, what do I do with my time? I'm a science fiction writer, and I've written a few short stories on this scheme. Kiosk, a story that discusses an advanced fabricator, and The Interoperation and Technology Review, an example of a science fiction story that should be in a technology review.

Very strange things are happening in Torrino. It's an industrial town - Detroit of Italy - that was based on fossil fuels and automobiles. The city is trying to change themselves, trying to create a business model that can succeed. They have so little to lose from the transition and so much to gain; they've gotten the power brokers in the city on the same page. Torrino is tearing apart assembly buildings, and building creative class retail under these gigantic structures. They have the same problems everyone has: they aren't green, and are trying to take a page out of the richard florida handbook. They are trying to route around the inherent blockades in their own society. They are aware of their status as first design capital, and they are trying to set an example of things to follow.

There was a kind of sobering example given last week when Al Gore won the award; he was matter of fact about the validation of his ideas. The real effort starts, and that's the situation we are in. That effort is well under way in Torino. I'm there bearing witness to that.

Making Meaning: Designing Meaningful Customer Experiences
Darrel Rhea

Louis Cheskin, interested in understanding the science of art. Started the color research institute of America, and then went on to understand that area; wrote 16 books on color. Henry Ford would send him a Lincoln Continental every year with a big bow on it; involved in the Marlboro Man campaign.

Had the courage of his convictions. Would stroll into Proctor and Gamble, wearing riding boots and britches, and a vest with a purple shirt and yellow tie, and a cape, and waltz into the boardroom, beating his cane and telling them about what to do.

The shifting context for Business, Design and you.

Been going to China every five years. What I was impressed with was the shift going on there, not in terms of Design standpoint, but the size of the economy. Power brokers of the world are beginning to say they need to physically move into the emerging markets. After listening to the world's economists for four days, I was impressed with what happened and what will happen. The economy in North America has been leading the world, and has been the center of the economic universe; that is now moving to China. In moving to China, you begin to see this; there are more teenagers in China than people in North America. There are twice as many 40-60 year olds than people in the United States. There are more mobile phone subscribers with China Mobile than there are people in North America.

The theme of talking to the various CEOs in the country is that 30-40% growth is the norm. What's going on the economy - driving consumption - is China.

Major cultural shifts are going on, too. A few hundred million teenagers in the mix, who don't look like their parents or value the same things; China's New Culture of Cool. New text that shows some of the changes going on in that particular niche. This illustrates the dynamic market, and what's going on there is huge - it's not just people ripping off handbag designs. It's new and creative too. Very aggressive market; the western economy will no longer be in control: be ready to react.

Giant collusive marketing groups won't be calling the shots anymore; we need to have more situational awareness. It's not just our vision or creativity that matters - we need to be looking more aggressively at what's going on in the rest of the world, especially in emerging markets. What's happening? Why is it happening? What will happen next? What can I do about it?

John Boyd - the US's most successful fighter pilot. "The fighter pilot who changed the art of war". The tiger woods of flying. Wrote the manual of air to air combat for the airforce. Went back to school, got a degree in engineering, and taught himself engineering. Wrote standards and practices for aircraft design; one of the most influential in military aircraft. Understood what pilots needed to do, and wrote about it. Finally wrote about applying this on a meta level to military strategy. What I find inspiring about that has nothing to do with the military; it's about raising awareness and the level of mastery and application of our discipline.

Situational awareness was the foundation of his work.

So how do you institutionalize this for your practice?

The shifting context for design; design is a process for creating value. When talking to senior business leaders, I don't use the word design at all. The word leads to a glazed over look, or they think you are an interior decorator. I talk about design as the process for creating value, as this is what companies are interested in and what is relevant to us. As IDSA moves more prominent, we are providing value for human beings. Value as a concept is always defined by the customer. It doesn't exist in the product itself: value is an assessment that is made by an individual. That means that design has to be about paying attention, carefully, to consumers and customers and understanding what really serves them and what adds value for them.

Design is about empathy and compassion for users.

Design 20 years ago was very different. The conversation was about courage, vision, articulation, social responsibility, and leading the world. A shift from leading to serving: Design is the skill of identifying and creating value. This is a new competence for designers. This is why we hear about empathy, and observational research; human-centered design, customer led innovation.

We've moved beyond designing symbols and artifacts to "designing experiences".

Historically, where did that come from? We started by creating demand; creating the right product, the right promise and the right experience. Madison Avenue - selling product. The Marlboro Man was about selling product. How do we create demand? We started using research to define the right product, and then marketing started to play a larger role in structuring innovation.

Mostly concerned with managing experiences - the 360 degree approach, so we have a consistent message or approach at every touchpoint. Let's try to create meaningful experiences, instead of just experiences. Nathan Shedroff, who wrote a book about Experience Design, and Steve Dillar from Cheskin, were talking about "what makes a great experience?"

There are different levels of experience that someone can have. You can have an economic experience; you pay to do something, and that sets expectations. If that's all it is, you've defined a commodity product. A functional experience lives above that. It does what you want it to do. An emotional experience: a product that is simply fun to use. A status experience. A meaningful experience. Reinforces your values as a human being. It's what makes life worth living - it's what makes life worth living.

There are levels of value - economic -> functional -> status -> meaning. If our job is to create value, why aren't we striving to create as much value as we possibly can? We should challenge ourselves to produce more stuff that matters, instead of "more stuff". What does that look like, in terms of an experience?

"I believe in what Patagonia is into, as a company". A way of being, a way of life - values that we should adhere to as human beings. Not about the quality of the product. Talking about a way of being. That's worth investing myself in; it's not about the social status experience of the brand or product. A meaningful experience.

But what is meaning? We all require an explanation of the world. We've all evolved to make decisions in the world. We have a system embedded in our system that can help us and tell us how to act. We've evolved in that way. We have a construction of reality that we carry in our mind - meaning is our mind's construction of reality. It's a framework that we understand the world through - it creates understanding about what we should value, desire, and lust after. That's the framework that determines meaning: if we could be focused on understanding an individual's framework of meaning, we can start to create and develop products, services and systems that match that. Businesses are starting to wake up to that.

Anthropologists and neuroscientists agree: meaning is the sense we make of reality.

What is that sense that people have? What is the sense that people have, and how can we design against that? It's the story of life, and how we design against it. People go to war for stories; people give their lives for their stories and their sense of meaning. What's worth living and dying is a rich territory for us to be dealing with: not in an exploitive way, but in a way that explains who they are.

New book called
Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver meaningful customer experiences.

Oneness, brotherhood, beauty, truth, wonder, accomplishment, security, freedom, justice, love, duty, wisdom.

Consider the Harley community: you become a Harley owner, and you get to express freedom and living with no constraints. You are buying meaning. It's a place for you to start thinking about things.

Meaning is a framework for what matters most to customers and consumers and users. Why not design things that matter most? Why not reach really high for people that really creates value - things that people love?

Meaning helps with the complexity of change over time; it transcends culture, ethnicity, geography and time. Meaning can be the basis for proprietary IP and loyalty.

The evolution of methods: creating supply, analytics, and secondary research: how does this relate to research? Seen the evolution of methodologies applied; creating supply had secondary research about distribution channels, quantitative data. As we started looking at the idea of attitudes, quantitative research becomes even more important. As we get into the worlds of emotion and branding, we need qualitative research. Ethnographic research leads to valuation. We had ethnography years ago, but they weren't needed nor were they useful. Observational research may not even show up in a human factors sort of world, where the material was almost entirely quantitative.

Approach to Design depends on your mindset. Practice, management, and leadership. Practice is about craft, and the satisfaction that comes from understanding the connection between form and function and color. Designers have gone from designing to managing design across an organization around the world, and that's a new level of competence for many of us. At some point, that will be a part of your career. There is also a level of Leadership: Dialectic of "What's possible". Experimentation and play, in order to be a catalyst for change in organizations. We are being put into that position, and expected to lead the conversation in ways that traditional business people can't or won't necessarily do.

Most people in the management paradigm are focused on analytics. As we get further into design, and understanding meaning, there is an aspect that designers bring to the table, that is about conversational leadership about what's possible. What's missing out there. The McKinseys of the world are smart, and great at pointing at opportunities and what's missing. But ask them to design a solution and they are really, really challenged, and they will continue to be. What makes them so good at what they do - the analytics framework - makes them bad at problem solving. As you move into a leadership position, you need to leverage the ability for conversational leadership and getting others to lead and express and listen as well. This is an area that designers should move into.

more and more, we are playing and experimenting: these are words that you don't hear a lot about in business, but you hear a lot about in design consultancies. It's about leveraging what you are already good at in order to go after organizational change.

Leadership is the highest potential contribution we can make as designers.

How do you get there? Do your homework; travel; read; develop a point of view; share the point of view; blog; speak and lecture.

Be a powerful presence.

Hartmut Esslinger
Form Follows Emotion

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken. Albert Camus. You can not be too stubborn. You have to live in the world as it is. All creative processes are based upon knowledge, information, and myths, and therefore, we have to live with the conflict between biological, intellectual and spiritual realities.

We make decisions within seconds, and then later try to explain why it is good or bad. The rationalization is bullshit. We need to understand and keep in mind the differences.

Creativity is like beauty: you don't know what it is, but when it is there you see it immediately.

The emotional rejection - $5/5, 9/1.

Reason - pure reason has the ability to form concepts that are the conditions of experience.

Sullivan has a bigger picture of form follows function.

At IDSA; freeform notes ahead:

Design as Myth Buster
Hans Rosling

Why did he go into Design?
Started a program in Global Health. Did a test, and asked students what they knew about the world. Gave them pairs of countries, and asked about child mortality.

Turkey has twice the rate of child mortality to Sri Lanka, etc.

The error margin is about 10-15%.

The Swedish students had 1.8 right answers, +/- .4. "Ignorance is the best friend of the professor". This is good, I could just go on teaching.

The results of the study are one thing, but when writing the report, discovered that Swedish students know statistically significantly less than Chimpanzees. Worse than random.

They aren't ignorant. They have preconceived ideas. These are much more difficult to face in teaching than ignorance. It's a lot easier to talk about stem cells, because you can start from scratch; no one knows anything about that.

Swedish Professors were on par with the Chimpanzees.

We can use Design to take away myths. Asia has improved, but we don't know the magnitude of the improvement.

So when discussing with students, they are very concerned about We and Them. We must help Them.

We is the Western World. Them is the Third World. Two types of countries becomes the taxonomy. What is the criteria for a western country? Long life in small family. Third world is short life in large family.

This becomes the starting point of visualizing, in order to show how the world is. Designed a program where we could show countries of the world as bubbles. The size of the bubble is the population, and the color is the continent.

So we can show the fertility rate on the X-axis, and we can see the length of life on the Y-axis.

So how can we tell what has changed? We let it move. And we find out that almost all of the countries in the world have about 3 children per family, and they are living longer than ever.

We can push this material over time, and we learn that the length of life and the size of families in Vietnam corresponds to the data in the United States in the 1970s. You knock the door, kids come out, and you count them. We have certainty about the data.

Vietnam today is like the US at the end of the war.

So where are students getting their knowledge? Tintin has produced a world view that is very difficult to take away. We perpetuate this colonial view for a longer period of time.

What about money? Students point to money as the problem. There is a gap between the rich and the poor, they say. So we look at dollars per day in purchasing power. "There is no gap. It's bullshit." People live in a continuous cycle of money. There is no grand canyon.

There are one to two billion people living in absolute poverty, and there are one billion who are relatively well off, and the remainder are in the middle. It's a continuum, not a dichotomy.

People are catching up. The economies are growing faster, and they are catching up, and eventually, they will begin to overly western europe. United States is the Brazil of the rich countries.

So over time, we can map Child Survival from 1960 to the present day. And we begin to see China getting healthier, but not richer. Then, it got richer but not necessarily healthier. Where China is today is exactly where Japan was in 1960.

There is a great opportunity to showing how the world has changed by using Design in a more forceful way, to show a fact-based world view. We have the world, and through the world, we create statistics. Add the media, and it gets a bit more confusing. Now add the internet and design, and we can ignore and skip the government and the media.

Competing designs and solutions that make the data available to the public, can level the playing field. Through technology and design, we can provide access to this data in a persuasive and interesting way. Technology can increase the bandwidth; design increases the bandwidth of the optic nerve.

www.gapminder.org

Richard Seymour
Space Tourism

When I was a boy, I read Dan Dare. Pilot of the Future: Mars, in 1997. The future moves and changes; in the 1950s, strange things were going on. What we knew about rockets were limited; a little bit of guidance and radar knowledge, but that's it. The imagination of people was miles and miles ahead of science. Things have changed places two or three times each century.

We are now facing a world where so much can be done, and we can do so much, that we are actually having struggles about what we SHOULD do. We are trying to work out what to do with stuff.

Space Tourism is exciting. Why would you want to do something like that? By propelling new technologies, it expands our understanding of the future. Optimism in the 50s; but now we think the world is getting worse. It feels like it's getting nastier, and we are designers, and we can't be pessimists. Maybe the full story of the future of space tourism is something in between, where we fix things in between.

It isn't technology that necessarily leads anything. It's Optimistic Futurism: it's people who think it will get better, and try to make it better.

Sleek and Green
Martin Eberhard and Barney Hatt

Martin is the founder of Tesla Motors.

I set out in 2003, thinking about this problem: our dependence on foreign oil would never get better, and the American refusal to sign up for Kyoto was irritating too. To do something about Oil meant doing something about cars. Analyzed the various technologies out there, and looked at the net resource consumption per mile, the carbon dioxide emissions per mile, and the net reduction of petroleum usage. Net net, electric cars are the best choice. What happened to all the electric cars? Zero emissions mandate led to Toyota RAV4 EV, Chevy S10 EV, Honda EV Plus, etc. All of these cars were taken out of commission. "There simply weren't enough customers at any given time to make a viable business proposition for GM to pursue long-term". Dave Barthmuss, GM spokesperson.

Imaging, the porschius. Create a car for people who love cars and also care about oil consumption.

Performance vs. Efficiency. The high performance cars aren't very efficient, and vice versa. There's only one way to get off the curve - with an electric car.

Created an Electric Powertrain system. The battery is the heart of the electric car. Lead-acid batteries have stagnated. Lithium Ion batteries changes the equation. Putting 7000 batteries in a car is difficult. Using many small cells have advantages, though - highly reliable (redundancy), safe, etc. Needed to develop a proprietary motor. Tesla's Copper AC Induction Motor. Worked with Lotus.

Barney Hatt, Lotus Design - styling developed.

design research v Design Research
Stephen Wilcox

Both design research and Design Research produce insights. Both produce new ideas. Do they require social scientists? No - "design research" does not, while Design Research does. The proper phase costs about tour times as much as a conceptual design, and provides hard data. The notion of validity doesn't apply to design research in practice.

Evolving Empathy
Deeper and wider for design impact
Jane Fulton Suri
Aaron Sklar

Ways we are using empathy in the design process:

1, deeper. How do we involve non-designers in the role of design process?

People are not passive consumers of design; they are active designers of their own world. How can we engage with that? People make modifications to their world continually, often functional, sometimes emotional. A real explosion of craft-oriented tools; the support and conversation of making things, in Make magazine, and other online sources, allows people to become more creative in their own world. Democratization of design - a conversation between producers and consumers that hasn't taken place until before the era of mass production. It's the world of craft, where the relationship was literal.

Design for people, to Design with people, to Design by people.

Through empathy, we can come up with a radically different type of system.

for, with, by - evolution over Jane's career; what's the role of the human factors individual in each case? Inspired by people; learning from people; empowering people.
inferred needs => translated needs => self recognized needs

2. wider. emphasis on the user, and on empathy for people at the moment of use.
more of an awareness, that a focus on the moment of use (human-centered design) isn't enough, as it may have a number of unintended consequences.
Expanding from human centered design to humanity centered design.
Lifecycle analysis, a way to look at a product lifecycle from a person point of view. The social cycle, instead of the life cycle. Talk to the list of people involved in the project, considering the installation, the creation, the disposal, etc.

Design & Change: A Paradox?
Sabine Junginger

Design and Organizational change.
The Paradox: organizations turn to Designers, almost exclusively to change something. Organizations use Design to avoid change.

Three kinds of change: Drift, Accommodation, Transformation. Drift occurs when you aren't consciously attending to it: your hair grows. The chaos of the world takes over. Accommodation: when things break, fix them quickly and move on. Short term approach. Transformation is described as radical surgery. Disrupts core beliefs, assumptions, values, etc.

Organizational change has the same success rate as products in the market - 55-85% failure rate. Lots of investment, lots of failure.

Simplistically, we can assign Buchanan's four orders to look at how brand and advertising has pushed towards a change organization.

Organizational theories and design practice actually limit the ability for change. Fundamental assumptions, lead to values, to beliefs, to norms, and to artifacts. So if the product is the end, Design Accommodates. Accommodation is a quick fix, or bandaid. But if we shift so the product is the beginning, then it becomes a vehicle for change, and in the development of the product, we learn more about all of the externalities of the organization (the consumers, etc)

So we can compare Drift, Accommodation, and Transformation.
Drift becomes designer centric; accommodation becomes product centric; transformation becomes people centric.

Design is the Pattern that Connects
Steve Skov Holt
Mara Holt Skov

History repeats itself. Repetition is the essence of patterns that connect.
Respect pattern, and honor pattern. A great influence in the decision to honor pattern, through the study of metaphor in linguistics, was a quote from Gregory Batesen; a command from above to search for the pattern to connect. Some kind of hidden order to things, that, if we only put in the time, we might perceive it.

Art+Design
Theory+Practice
Life+Work

Design is a way of talking about life. The sum of the words was greater than they ever could be; We truly live our life through design, and therefore become a different species, perceptually speaking, than other human beings.

We are in the relationship business.

Human Connections.

How do you connect the venus of vilendorf (?) - a piece of carved stone - how do we find meeting in something that ancient? As an art history, we start deep and layer on top. Rubens is showing a breast in a way that is seductive, but still connected to history and to a historical figure. Now, the fertility figure is a mother giving life to a child. Connection to a product, the philou packaging by Yves Behar. Soft, inviting. Part of the reason that there is a profound attraction to curvy objects is the attraction to the breast. Consider the relationship to ergonomics; a poetic side of this relationship might later introduce a proclivity to curved form.

Natural Connections.

The attraction of beach rocks is difficult to ignore. They become fetish-like. We can connect those to products; a geological ergonomics.

Discussion and extended thought series of "good design"; good, vs appropriate: one of the qualities that came through and is represented in the spiral and in the staircase is a quality of elegance, doing more with less, and doing the most with the least. Ross Lovegrove's staircase in his office. Replacing mass with information. This could be the dream of some of the luminaries of the twentieth century, and is one of Buckminster Fuller's idea as well.

The poetic of biomimicry, of the photosynthesis of a leaf. Biology as master and metaphor.

Products open themselves to us; the surface allows the greater transparency. The microprocessor is a jewel, waiting to be released from its plastic prison. That possibility still exists. We haven't seen that type of computing or electronics device yet. The notion that products are perforated, or wholly, or opened-up, seems to be a wealth of possibilities. A trend to open.

Scientific Connections

We need to find where our new beauties lie. As a cultural research team, we need to understand new definitions of beauty and the location of these.

Expressions of mathematics throughout product and space creation.

Disconnections.

Already produced goods are being treated as raw materials. It's only a late, luxurious, post capitalistic society that can consider using already produced goods as a raw material.

This is my fence. I built it. Now I can pretend that crackhead Carl isn't really there.

And because it's such a beautiful night, I took a picture of my house, too.

And my cat.

And my sporty-spice wife.

I'm building a fence, so I can psychologically separate myself from the crackhead next door who likes to get in fights with his girlfriend at 4 in the morning. I was going to contract it out, but the *seven thousand dollars* I was quoted made me throw up in my mouth a little, so I'm building the sucker myself.

I've got my holes auged, and 2/3 of my posts are in.

Carrying 80 pound bags of cement around makes me feel manly.

I also exercised my brain this weekend, getting the majority of the contents for our first Interactions issue proofread, and working on the website. A static sneak-peak is up here, but the final product is going to be a bit of delicious wordpress-powered goodness.