by Tim Brown
One of the techniques we have developed at IDEO to keep the consumer-designer involved in the creation, evaluation, and development of ideas is the “unfocus group,” where we bring an array of consumers and experts together in a workshop format to explore new concepts around a particular topic. Whereas traditional focus groups assemble a random group of “average” people who are observed, literally or figuratively, from behind a one-way mirror, the unfocus group identifies unique individuals and invites them to participate in an active, collaborative design exercise.
On one memorable occasion—we were looking at new concepts for women’s shoes—we invited in a color consultant, a spiritual guide who led barefoot initiates across hot coals, a young mother who was curiously passionate about her thigh-high leather boots, and a female limo driver whose full livery was accented by a pair of outrageously sexy stiletto heels. Needless to say, this group proved to be extremely articulate about the emotional connections among shoes, feet, and the human condition. By the time we released them back into the San Francisco demimonde they had inspired an exciting portfolio of ideas. Though drawers in the heels to hide secret items and raised patterns that targeted key acupressure points did not survive, the insights on which they were based prodded us to think about what people really desire from shoes.
One autumn day in 1940 the industrial designer Raymond Loewy was visited in his office by George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company and one of the more colorful personalities in American business history. Hill offered Loewy $50,000 if he could improve upon the Lucky Strike package—a wager Loewy readily accepted—and, as he was leaving, turned to Loewy and asked when it would be ready. “Oh, I don’t know, some nice spring morning I will feel like designing the Lucky package and you’ll have it in a matter of hours. I’ll call you then.”
Today we no longer feel that we must sit patiently and wait for some outrageous insight to strike us. Inspiration always involves an element of chance, but, as Louis Pasteur observed in a famous lecture of 1854, “Chance only favors the prepared mind.” Certain themes and variations—techniques of observation, principles of empathy, and efforts to move beyond the individual—can all be thought of as ways of preparing the mind of the design thinker to find insight: from the seemingly commonplace as well as the bizarre, from the rituals of everyday life but also the exceptional interruptions to those rituals, and from the average to the extreme. That insight cannot yet be codified, quantified, or even defined—not yet, at any rate—makes it the most difficult but also the most exciting part of the design process. There is no algorithm that can tell us where it will come from and when it will hit.
CHAPTER THREE
a mental matrix,
or “these people have no process!”
One way to help design thinking diffuse throughout an organization is for designers to make their clients part of the experience. We do this not just to give them the thrill of peering behind the wizard’s curtain but because we find that we invariably get much better results when the client is on board and actively participating. But be forewarned: it can be messy! Imagine an avid theatergoer who is invited backstage to witness the chaos that lies behind even the most flawless performance—last-minute costume repairs, two-by-fours lying about everywhere, Hamlet standing outside the stage door having a cigarette while Ophelia chatters into her cell phone…or, as one client was heard to lament in a frantic call back to her office, “These people have no process!”
A few weeks later she had become a convert, promoting design thinking within her own company—a stolid, respectable organization renowned for its structure, discipline, and process. But as with all epiphanies, that’s where the hard work begins. It is one thing to witness the power of design and even to participate in it, quite another to absorb it into one’s thinking and patiently build it into the structure of an organization. Those of us who have spent long years at design school still find it hard to shake off dearly held assumptions about how to get things done. People from more methodical backgrounds may fear that the risks are too high and the margin of error is perilously slim.
What’s the best way to orient first-time visitors to this new and unfamiliar terrain? Though there is no real substitute for actually doing it, I can impart a fair sense of the experience of design thinking—some navigational landmarks, perhaps, if not a complete road map.
In chapter 1, I introduced the idea that a design team should expect to move through three overlapping spaces over the course of a project: an inspiration space, in which insights are gathered from every possible source; an ideation space, in which those insights are translated into ideas; and an implementation space, in which the best ideas are developed into a concrete, fully conceived plan of action. Again, these are overlapping “spaces” rather than sequential stages of a lockstep methodology. Insights rarely arrive on schedule, and opportunities must be seized at whatever inconvenient time they present themselves.
Every design process cycles through foggy periods of seemingly unstructured experimentation and bursts of intense clarity, periods of grappling with the Big Idea and long stretches during which all attention focuses on the details. Each of these phases is different, and it’s important—if only for the morale of the team—to recognize that each feels different and calls for different strategies.
One of our more jaded designers even devised a project mood chart that pretty accurately predicts how the team will feel at different phases of the project:
When a fresh team ventures out into the field to collect information, it is full of optimism. The process of synthesis—the ordering of data and the search for patterns—can be frustrating as important decisions seem to ride on the most insubstantial of hunches. But then things begin to pick up. The ideation process becomes more tangible, and new concepts begin to take shape. The process peaks when the team begins to produce prototypes. Even if they don’t look so good, don’t work properly, or have too many features or too few, they are visible, tangible signs of progress. Eventually, once the right idea has been agreed upon, the project team settles down to a state of pragmatic optimism punctuated by moments of extreme panic. The scary bits never completely go away, but the experienced design thinker knows what to expect and is not undone by the occasional emotional slump. Design thinking is rarely a graceful leap from height to height; it tests our emotional constitution and challenges our collaborative skills, but it can reward perseverance with spectacular results.
convergent and divergent thinking
To experience design thinking is to engage in a dance among four mental states. Each has its own moods and manners, but when the music suddenly starts it can be difficult to recognize where we are in the process and which is the right foot to put forward. The best guide, in launching a new design project, is sometimes just to choose the right partner, clear the dance floor, and trust our intuition.
Woven into the very fabric of our culture is an emphasis on thinking based upon logic and deduction; the psychologist Richard Nisbett, who has studied approaches to problem solving in Western and Eastern cultures, has gone so far as to suggest that there is a “geography of thought.” Whether the problem lies in the domain of physics, economics, or history, Westerners are taught to take a series of inputs, analyze them, and then converge upon a single answer. At times we may find that the best—as opposed to the right—answer will have to do or that we may have to choose among equally compelling alternatives. Just think about the last time you and five friends had to agree on where to go out for dinner. Group thinking tends to converge toward a single outcome.
Convergent thinking is a practical way of deciding among existing alternatives. What convergent thinking is not so good at, however, is probing the future and creating new possibilities. Think of a funnel, where the flared opening represents a broad set of initial possibilities and the small spout represents the narrowly convergent solution. This is clearly the most efficient way to fill up a test tube or drive toward a s
et of fine-grained solutions.
If the convergent phase of problem solving is what drives us toward solutions, the objective of divergent thinking is to multiply options to create choices. These might be different insights into consumer behavior, alternative visions of new product offerings, or choices among alternative ways of creating interactive experiences. By testing competing ideas against one another, there is an increased likelihood that the outcome will be bolder, more creatively disruptive, and more compelling. Linus Pauling said it best: “To have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas”—and he won two Nobel Prizes.
But we also need to be realistic. More choices means more complexity, which can make life difficult—especially for those whose job it is to control budgets and monitor timelines. The natural tendency of most companies is to constrain problems and restrict choices in favor of the obvious and the incremental. Though this tendency may be more efficient in the short run, in the long run it tends to make an organization conservative, inflexible, and vulnerable to game-changing ideas from outside. Divergent thinking is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.
The point, then, is not that we must all become right-brain artists practicing divergent thinking and hoping for the best; there is a good reason why design education draws in equal measure upon art and engineering. The process of the design thinker, rather, looks like a rhythmic exchange between the divergent and convergent phases, with each subsequent iteration less broad and more detailed than the previous ones. In the divergent phase, new options emerge. In the convergent phase it is just the reverse: now it’s time to eliminate options and make choices. It can be painful to let a once-promising idea fall away, and this is where the diplomatic skills of project leaders are often tested. William Faulkner, when asked what he found to be the most difficult part of writing, answered, “Killing off your little darlings.”
analysis and synthesis
Designers love to complain about “feature creep,” the proliferation of unnecessary functions that add expense and complexity to otherwise straightforward products (RCA’s original TV remote control device in 1958 had exactly one button; mine has forty-four). Design thinkers, for their part, need to be wary of what might be called “category creep.” Nevertheless, I need to bring two additional terms into the discussion: analysis and synthesis, which are the natural complements to divergent and convergent thinking.
Without analytical forms of thinking we could not run large corporations or manage household budgets. Designers, too, whether they are looking at signage for a sports stadium or alternatives to carcinogenic PVCs, use analytical tools to break apart complex problems to understand them better. The creative process, however, relies on synthesis, the collective act of putting the pieces together to create whole ideas. Once the data have been gathered, it is necessary to sift through it all and identify meaningful patterns. Analysis and synthesis are equally important, and each plays an essential role in the process of creating options and making choices.
Designers carry out research in many ways: collecting ethnographic data in the field; conducting interviews; reviewing patents, manufacturing processes, vendors, and subcontractors. They can be found jotting notes, taking pictures, shooting videos, recording conversations, and sitting on airplanes. They are, hopefully, looking at the competition. Fact collecting and data gathering lead to an accumulation of information that can be staggering. But then what? At some point the team must settle down and in an intense period of synthesis—sometimes over the course of a few hours, sometimes over a week or more—begin to organize, interpret, and weave these many strands of data into a coherent story.
Synthesis, the act of extracting meaningful patterns from masses of raw information, is a fundamentally creative act; the data are just that—data—and the facts never speak for themselves. Sometimes the data are highly technical—if the task is a sophisticated piece of medical equipment, for instance; in other cases they may be purely behavioral, for example, if the problem is to encourage people to switch to energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs. In every case we may think of the designer as a master storyteller whose skill is measured by his or her ability to craft a compelling, consistent, and believable narrative. It’s no accident that writers and journalists now often work alongside mechanical engineers and cultural anthropologists in design teams.
Once the “raw material” has been synthesized into a coherent, inspiring narrative, a higher-level synthesis kicks in. It is far from unusual for a project brief to contain seemingly conflicting goals—low cost and high quality, to use an obvious example, or an accelerated time frame together with an interest in an unproven technology. There may be a tendency, under such circumstances, to simplify the process and reduce it to a set of specifications or a list of features. To do so is almost invariably to compromise the integrity of the product on the altar of convenience.
These are the seeds of design thinking—a continuous movement between divergent and convergent processes, on the one hand, and between the analytical and synthetic, on the other. But that is by no means the end of the story. As any gardener will attest, the hardiest seeds, cast into rocky or barren soil, will wither. The ground needs to be prepared. Attention must be shifted upward, from teams and individuals to companies. We might think of this as moving from the organization of design to the design of organizations.
an attitude of experimentation
The master choreographers of the dance between divergent and convergent thinking, on the one hand, and detailed analysis and synthetic judgment, on the other, were Charles and Ray Eames, the most creative design partnership that America has produced. From their legendary office at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, the Eameses and their associates conducted a series of design experiments that stretched across four decades and covered every imaginable medium: the molded plywood chairs that became synonymous with American modernism; their famous Case Study House No. 8 in Pacific Palisades; the museum exhibitions they built, and the educational films they produced. Not always visible in the finished projects, however, is the methodical experimentation that lay behind them. The lesson? A creative team must be given the time, the space, and the budget to make mistakes.
Individuals, teams, and organizations that have mastered the mental matrix of design thinking share a basic attitude of experimentation. They are open to new possibilities, alert to new directions, and always willing to propose new solutions. Back in the 1960s, during the formative years of Silicon Valley, Chuck House, then an ambitious young engineer at Hewlett-Packard, came within a hair’s breadth of losing his job. Following a hunch, he ignored an explicit corporate directive and set up an under-the-radar skunkworks to develop a large-screen CRT. The illicit project went on to become the first commercially successful computer graphics display, used for the space video transmission of Neil Armstrong’s foot-on-the-moon broadcast, Dr. Michael DeBakey’s first artificial heart transplant monitor, and countless other applications. Chuck ended up as corporate engineering director for HP, with an office next door to David Packard himself, who had personally issued the prohibition against further research, and a “Medal of Defiance” hanging on his wall. Things have changed. He now runs Media X at Stanford University, a collaboration of industry and academia that brings together interactive technology researchers with companies committed to technical advancement and innovation. Today companies like Google and 3M are renowned for encouraging scientists and engineers to spend up to 20 percent of their time on personal experiments.
A tolerance for risk taking has as much to do with the culture of an organization as with its business strategy. Some would argue that a climate of open-ended exploration encourages a profligate waste of resources: Chairman Mao Zedong’s policy during the Great Leap Forward, “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” ended in complete disaster. But in contrast to the hermetically sealed environment of revolutionary China, the globalized economy today really is experiencing a “great leap forward.” In an organization
that encourages experimentation, there will be projects destined to go nowhere and still others that the keepers of institutional memory prefer not to talk about (remember the Apple Newton?). But to view such initiatives as “wasteful,” “inefficient,” or “redundant” may be a symptom of a culture focused on efficiency over innovation and a company at risk of collapsing into a downward spiral of incrementalism.
It’s no accident that designers in recent years have been following the emerging science of biomimicry—the idea that nature, with its 4.5 billion-year learning curve, may have something to teach us about things such as nontoxic adhesives, minimal structures, efficient thermal insulation, or aerodynamic streamlining. The bewildering variety at work in a healthy ecosystem is nothing but an exercise in sustained experimentation—try something new, and see what sticks. It may well be that we need to begin mimicking nature not just at the molecular level but at the systemic level of companies and organizations. An excess of experimental zeal would be risky—companies do not enjoy the luxurious time frame of biological systems and their leaders would be remiss if they chose not to exercise what might be called—with apologies to Darwin—“intelligent design.” What is called for is a judicious blend of bottom-up experimentation and guidance from above.
The rules for this approach are as simple to state as they are challenging to apply:
