 Mr. Design is not just any designer. He was the real visionary and the real designer. He certainly had a huge influence. He embodies change by design. His way of being. He was tall. He had a British accent. This crazy guy from England. Bubbly sense of humor. Radiant warm welcoming smile. He had a big open face. He's very theatrical. His way of thinking. Bill is driven by what am I going to learn? What's new to learn about? He has a lot of ideas. He's very strong. He's very tenacious. It was never the Bill Margaret show. He's saying, this is what I really think. What do you think? He wanted everybody's opinions. He's so open and empathetic. He had such empathy. He was just like that. Let me tell you a bit about myself. My name's Bill Margaret and I'm an industrial designer. There was always something magic about his name. He just sees the whole world from his design perspective. And it just exudes him in every facet of his life. And I say, I know a lot of designers. More than anyone else, he has that in his genes. Bill has had more influence, I think, on other designers than almost any other designer that's working today. Bill has always been a pioneer. He brought professional human factors folks into a design company, one of the first people to do that. He really saw that we would get ideas from understanding people. When a designer starts to build empathy for the person that they're designing for, they start to see the nuance of what's meaningful to that person. And so he brought in, he brought in psychologists as part of our team. He brought in Jane Fulton Surrey. I'm interested in why people like things and what gives them rewards that are long term, what gives them pleasures, what gives them, what's exciting. It's about the effect that everything that you might design has on anybody, somebody. There are very few opportunities that a designer has in a career to do something which is truly precedent setting. You know, you don't predict that it's going to spread in the way it's spread, but it was clear that it was very important in the sense of being very innovative. My role at the beginning was to design the physical form of the product. But when I had an actual prototype and I took it home, I was amazed that really everything I'd done wasn't very interesting or important. And the thing that was really important was what was happening between me and the software behind the screen. Bill really invented the notion of interaction design. This software stuff was coming fast and he got really enamored with software and its power. He decided that it was important that designers, human centered designers, were going to be involved in that, be the ones who designed that interaction. He was a founder of IDEO, which between him and David and Mike was a breakthrough kind of organization in the world of design. Bill somehow knew that he could make his designs better if he kind of talked to other people, experts in other fields. That's what he was talking about, he was talking about interdisciplinary design, was he could bring those people in and use their ideas in combination with his building on them and that the more diverse the team was, the better the ideas were. The shared mind is more powerful than the individual minds or even the sum of the individual minds that really allows this kind of fluency with innovation. I've thought of my career I suppose in three basic phases. First was being a designer myself. The second phase was a manager of design teams or helping interdisciplinary teams of people work together. And then I thought of myself more as a storyteller. And then it occurred to me that it might be possible to do that at a national scale and develop an international design authority, perfect for storytelling. Hello, welcome to our design museum, the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Our ambition is to explain design. Here we were an institution that was closing for a couple years wanting to reinvent ourselves as a 21st century museum and to have someone like Bill Margridge who's led so many companies through rethinking what they could do or could become was such a gift. Something that Bill was extremely proficient at was listening. It was always, how can we collaborate better? How can we work best together and bring success to Cooper Hewitt? Design is everything and design is about people. And no matter what conversations we were having internally here at the museum, if we weren't talking about people enough, he would always say somehow bring in the people, remember the people. The sort of important feature that design brings is this bridge between the sciences and the arts. I don't think many people understand the power of design to put those two things together. He had never worked in any sort of museum atmosphere. The beauty of that is everything was new. As a result, we were looking at things and working in different ways. He improved communication here. We're seeing more efficiency. We're seeing more friendships. I think he cared more about the latter than the former, which is great. He brought us all to new ideas, new visions of what we really wanted to become. We'd like every kid in America to have an experience of design by the time they're 12 and have the opportunity to study it in high school if they want to. I think it would be great if every leader in America knew how to use design for more successful innovation and solutions. For the great designers, the most sort of influential designers, it's their life. It's not a job. They don't stop. Design is fascinating to him and it's his life and therefore he kind of lives it. It's interesting that as so many things change around us, the evolution of technologies and social relationships and so on, if there's a simple, easy principle that binds everything together, it's probably about starting with the people.