I'd be posting these videos even if Paul Bennett and I weren't colleagues at IDEO, so rich and fascinating is this conversation between Paul and Egill Helgason, the host of the Icelandic show Silfur Eglis. Design thinking is a central theme of their time together, and they touch on many important topics of the day, including transparency, community, and how we might move ourselves out of this mess. It's definitely worth a listen.
And don't worry — it's all in English! Enjoy.
The David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series in Design starts up again next week. The speaker roster is truly amazing, and they should be an awesome experience.
If you're anywhere near Stanford on these dates, I highly recommend stopping by. Do check the series website for any room or date changes.
In this age of economic swirl and uncertainty, quality is more important than ever. As people decide where and how to spend their precious dollars, I think they're going to vote in favor of things of high quality, and hence greater meaning. It's a good time to be a design thinker who intuits quality, and the great news is that lessons in the do's and don'ts of quality surround us each and every day. It's relatively easy to enroll in a continuing education course in the art of bringing good stuff to life — all you have to do is to be mindful in your daily journey. They constantly surround us, these simple pleasures.
When I feel something is of high quality, I literally feel it — my world calms down, and I experience an emotional response which is not unlike the feeling you get upon settling in to a champagne jacuzzi.. ah, this is nice, this is good. I can look at a high-quality object for unreasonable amounts of time, entranced by the quality of the details that make up the whole, as well as with the whole itself. Paying attention to quality is of prime importance to those of us dedicated to bringing cool stuff to life; knowing what goodness feels like is a key enabler of having a strong point of view, and it also keeps us from settling on the mediocre or the convenient. It's good to look and to know.
And what do I mean by quality? I'm not talking about process control and six-sigma methodologies, as much as respect them when used at the right time and place. Nor am I conflating quality with high prices; the realm of yuppie-driven quality is a place where price and opinion leaders combine to dictate what's hot and what's not to a club of self-selected consumers, and the value proposition there is nothing if not hollow. The quality I speak of has to do with materials, fit, proportions, workmanship, and care of assembly and upkeep. It is unavoidably a function of what something is in the world. In short, it has much more to do with the visceral (it looks and smells right) and behavioral (it works right) elements of design than it does the reflective (the meaning is right).
Taken in mindfully, life offers us a continual flow of lessons in quality. No matter if you are experiencing the built environment or nature, taking the time to really look around will deliver a constant stream of opportunities to think about quality. Because this isn't about money, I don't think you have to be in a high-zoot environment to see interesting stuff. Sometimes a lack of quality can be as instructive as its presence.
Just the other weekend I made a quick trip to my local grocery store, and happened across two wonderful chances to feel, hear, and see quality at work.
The first was this charming 1959 Porsche 356:
It was in beautiful shape, likely restored, but not over-the-top
perfect. I spent a few minutes sitting across the street so that I could
admire its proportions in profile. Why am I the only person admiring this thing? Come on, people! An open driver's-side window
allowed me to admire the deep red leather interior, as well as the
creamy steering wheel, a color combination which works wonderfully. I
waited long enough for the owner to come out (by which time I was
distracted by the bike below) so that I could hear the motor start up.
It cranked up immediately, with zero smoke or stumbling, and its
exhaust note was a smooth mix of metallic crispness and baritone song.
It's educational to experience a machine in good tune. Quality.
Parked right across the street was this bike:
What sublime aesthetics. I love the way the metal fenders exactly match the arc of the wheels, the artful way the side marker lamps are positioned, and the highly considered color scheme. Everything is just so. I find bikes fascinating because they are endlessly customizable. Cars, and to a lesser extent, motorcycles, must meet regulatory concerns to be considered roadworthy, but with a bike, you can go to town and make it just as you see it in your mind's eye. Without any badges in evidence, I couldn't ascertain the make of this bike, but looking at the compontents and accessories, I'd wager that the owner is a frequent shopper at Rivendell and Jitensha, both local purveyors of (extreme) quality bicycle paraphernalia.
The simple pleasures of quality: feel it, imbibe it, know it.
Here's a fabulous talk from last week's TED conference.
Listen as Elizabeth Gilbert provides us with a Director's Commentary about her own creative process, and then shows us why we might be better off if we thought differently about where creative leaps come from.
This should be a really interesting movie! Comes out later this year.
And be sure to catch Helvetica tomorrow night on PBS.
… creating choice out of constraints
… linking needs with desires
… moving the baseline with intent
More? What do you think?
Sure, you can call me anal-retentive (which I'm not — I think "perfectionist" is a more accurate term, but without the connotation of stasis that comes with it), but I love what I see in the photo above. I took it at a hotel I visited recently.
What do you see?
I see the mark of someone who cared. I see someone who was paying attention. I see a belief in quality and the pursuit of perfection. I see a work culture where people are able to exercise their need to do good work.
All this in eight screwheads aligned on the same plane, plus four switches located correctly within their assigned cutout (if you've ever put one of these panels together, you know how hard this is to do). Quality experiences and offerings are fractal in nature, and rely on the largest and smallest elements to all be in sync. Being a guest at this hotel — from the bed to the room to the food to the views — was a marvelous experience, and looking at this panel none of that news should come as a surprise.
Again, everything matters.
Exactly: a point of view is the set of conscious constraints a design thinker adopts in order to make a specific statement. In the case of Anathem’s Millenium Clock, it is about a design which can be complex and nuanced because of a ready supply of labor to run and maintain its myriad mechanisms. Another point of view could have been to design a very simple clock with few moving parts, the extreme version of this point of view being a sundial.
I submit to you that, as a rule, things that are remarkable are born from a strong point of view. Those that are not remarkable are often the result of a muddled point of view, or no point of view at all. Having a point of view requires making choices among many possible alternatives. Having a point of view means having a vision of what good looks like as a means to make those choices. You can feel it when something was created with that vision in mind. And when that vision was not in play, you can feel the lack of it.
The New York times ran a great article yesterday called "Design is more than packaging". Of course, if you’re part of the metacool community, you already know that. But it is great to see this meme getting out there and sticking. I’m very happy to see that the article was published in the Business section. Cool!
Among others, the article mentions IDEO, my employer, and the Stanford d.school, my other employer.
A couple of quotes.
Tim Brown:
Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about
divergence. Most business
processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives.
Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then
differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new
alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can
do.
George Kembel:
It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves
everything. That’s putting it too high on a pedestal. Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more
powerful.
Well put, gentlemen!
Check out Gary Hustwitt’s cool new blog Objectified. The blog is about his upcoming movie by the same name. Here is what it is all about, in Gary’s words:
One reason that I’m delving into the world of objects in this film
is that I, admittedly, am obsessed by them. Why do I salivate over a
shiny new piece of technology, or obsess over a 50-year-old plywood
chair? What does all the stuff I accumulate say about me, and do I
really need any of it in the first place?Those of you who followed the making of my first film, Helvetica,
know that the reason I make these films is not that I have a
comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter. I wasn’t an expert on
graphic design, and I’m certainly not an expert on industrial design.
But they’re both fields that fascinate me, and that I want to learn
more about. I’m interested in industrial designers because their work
influences so many aspects of our world yet most of the time it’s taken
for granted. And I think that, especially today, it’s crucial for us to
re-examine how we make and use consumer products at every level.And if you could get all of these designers and design experts
together at a dinner party, what would they talk about? This film will
hopefully represent that conversation. I’ve been lucky to be able to
include an amazing group of participants in the film so far, and I
sincerely thank them all for their time and knowledge.The term objectified has two meanings. One is ‘to be
treated with the status of a mere object.’ But the other is ‘something
abstract expressed in a concrete form,’ as in the way a sculpture
objectifies an artist’s thoughts. It’s the act of transforming creative
thought into a tangible object, which is what designers in this film do
every day. But maybe there’s a third meaning to this title, regarding
the ways these objects are affecting us and our environment. Have we
all become objectified?
About Dieter Rams: nothing. What’s cool is what is on his reel-to-reel. Man, that thing is awesome. If Apple sold one, I’d buy it in a second.