metacool Thought of the Day

Posted on 30 November 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

"When you're making something of high quality, you have to polish it a certain number of times. This is actually a number of trial and errors. When you think about how much you can polish something in a four-year development period, you're talking about how many times you can do trial and error and then speed becomes the defining factor. When you all share that speed as a team, you can polish a car like never before. It's that simple, really."
– Kazutoshi Mizuno, Chief Vehicle Engineer, Nissan GT-R

I love this insight of Mizuno's, because it speaks to one of the fundamental aspects of design thinking as it relates to the process of innovation: iterate, iterate, iterate. I often relate "business by design" to "business as usual" by using a sporting analogy: business as usual is about efficiency and accuracy, about swimming as fast a race as one can. And there's a time and a place for that. Business by design, in contrast, would be a swim race where you where rewarded based on the number of laps you could get in within a certain amount of time. You want to do lap after lap, because with each stroke through the water, you gain the opportunity to learn something new, to try a different approach. The sum of all those small learnings and insights — together with the occasional big leap — is what ends up being called innovative behavior.

But I like Mizuno's notion of polishing more than I do that of laps. Lather, rinse, repeat. Keep trying for perfection even though you know it will never come in a full sense, but with each try some new learning emerges.

So how quickly can you polish and iterate?

quote source: Gran Turismo TV, "The GT-R Legend Inside Story"

Thankful for enough

Posted on 26 November 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

If you have a minute, read this awesome blog post by my friend Bob Sutton

I hope you have a good Thanksgiving.

Quality in a switch

Posted on 24 November 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

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.

CIA 2009: Kill Gas

Posted on 12 November 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

Just the other week I met with the teaching team for the 2009 edition of Creating Infectious Action (CIA) at the Stanford d.school, and we spent a few hours coming up with a new point of view for the class. In previous years we've focused students on building something up, from finding ways to spread the idea of saving money to recruiting more users of Firefox. This year, however, we want to try something different: we're going to have students try to take something down. Really take it down, down to downtown.

The mission of CIA 2009 will be to kill gas. As in the gasoline you put in your car. How can we spread the idea that gas is not the only answer? We'll find out in the Spring of 2009.

Nothing is set in stone, however. We're just prototyping the idea, which means that I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on this theme. Can you imagine projects we can do? Or organizations to work with? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.

This should be a really interesting class, and I'm looking forward to learning a ton from the rest of the teaching team: Perry Klebahn, Joe Mellin, and Bob Sutton.

Designing sticky messages

Posted on 10 November 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

As I've learned over the past few years of teaching the Creating Infectious Action course at the Stanford d.school, it is possible to consciously design something to be viral. If you have a remarkable offering and a system to spread the word, all you need to be viral is a sticky, memorable message. Easier said than done, but at least there's a list of reliable design guidelines. That's progress.

Last week Tom Perriello won the battle for the congressional seat of the 5th District in Virginia. An underdog in the race, Perriello won the election in no small part because of effective messages, such as this remarkable commercial:

This is nothing if not a memorable, sticky message, artfully designed. It is so because Perriello hews closely to the "SUCCESs" algorhthym laid out by Chip and Dan Heath in their wonderful book Made to Stick. Deconstructing this ad shows us these component parts:

Simplicity: this commercial is of NASCAR country, designed for NASCAR country. As such, no explanation of the sponsorship stickers on this race car is necessary. This is about taking money from people with a lot of money.
Unexpectedness: when was the last time you saw a race car in a political ad? When was the last time you saw a candidate ripping stickers off said race car? Not quite riveting, but certainly memorable.
Concreteness: each of those stickers contains the logo of a real company. Instead of referring to a vague notion of "big oil" as many other politicians do, Perriello is able to be concrete without wasting his own breath mentioning names, which might be distracting from his bigger message, which is "Vote for Perriello". He manages to be concrete without being boring. Using the device of removable stickers also allows him to employ a quite visceral gesture which, when added together, implies a message of change agency: I'm going to remove all of these players from power to defend you, the little guy. Look how I can tear them off and create a blank slate for the rest of us to build from.
Credibility: Perriello wisely leads off with a statement about his opponent's campaign finances in order to establish his own fiscal and moral credibility.
Emotions: NASCAR, NASCAR, NASCAR. More American than motherhood and apple pie, there's nothing with more emotional appeal for his audience than a NASCAR racer. Notice too the patriotic color scheme. The car is red and white, while Perriello sports a blue shirt and a red tie. When all the stickers are stripped away, you get a clean burst of American color. It's not in your face, but it is there.
Stories: this ad is just a series of stories. I count three: 1) his opponent taking money for his campaign from big oil and power lobbies, 2) we're paying too much at the gas pump, 3) he is taking no money from corporate sponsors so that he can fight for the common man.

While I don't know if the Perriello campaign used the SUCCESs guidelines in designing this commercial, as a finished piece it is a great benchmark of what a truly sticky message should be.

I don’t care…

Posted on 4 November 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

… what your politics are. In my book, any week where Lewis Hamilton can become World Driving Champion and Barack Obama can be elected President of the United States of America is a very good week.

A very good week for humanity, indeed.

Optimism, perseverence, and courage will take us far.

Thoughts of Ferguson

Posted on 30 October 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

I participated in The Business Summit at Harvard Business School earlier this month. If you were to plan the most interesting time possible to gather 2,000 business leaders from across the globe, you couldn't have found a better time than October, 2008.

A highlight of the conference was hearing Professor Niall Ferguson lecture on the origins of the current macro economic climate. His lecture was instructive and riveting. You can see the video here.

He also penned a great article for Time magazine earlier this month: The End of Prosperity?

Innovating, not innovation

Posted on 29 October 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

At IDEO (the firm I work at), we recently held a "chain reaction" event across all of our offices: Shanghai, Munich, London, New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Palo Alto. Self-nominated teams in each office crafted their own chain reaction experience, each of which was triggered by another chain reaction experience sitting in another office. It all took place on one Friday morning…

Why? Because… just because. Because it is fun. Because it is there. Because cultures that play on a routine basis are more likely to be innovative routinely. Because the question "how can we be more innovative?" is better couched as "how can we be more comfortable acting in innovative ways?". It's about encouraging a behavior, not a thing. A verb, not a noun.

Since innovative behavior is about both the practitioner and the environment they live in, why not do something that buffs both?

You can see more about this grand world exercise at IDEO Labs

PS: the "trick" in the NYC/SF transition was done using a body double

What is design thinking?

Posted on 24 October 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

Here's a great interview with Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman.

He provides a very crisp definition of what design thinking is about. Design thinking is about creating better things, while traditional analytic thinking is about choosing between things. We need both, but surely the world would be in a better place if there was a bit more design thinking in play out there. Which is why we now have places like Rotman and the d.school and the entire design thinking movement.

By the way, if you don't read Rotman magazine, you should. And if you haven't read Martin's book The Opposable Mind, go out an grab a copy today!

On Anathem and points of view

Posted on 21 October 2008 by Diego Rodriguez

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.