 And welcome to another episode of the 42 Courses podcast. This week, hosting GTs are going to be taken by my best friend and co-founder, Jake Courage. And he's chatting to the incredible designer called Terry Behan. Terry works for Parsons. Enjoy the podcast. Terry, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast today. And I just wanted for the benefit of our listeners or indeed watchers, if you could just introduce yourself. Sure. I'm Terry Behan. I do design, I teach design, I invest in design, so pretty much a bit of a design nerd, Jake. You are a design nerd. I can confirm that. As a design nerd, the first important question, I think, is how did you first become interested in design? That's a tough question, but I suppose a pretty straightforward answer. So when I was growing up, I was interested in two things. I was interested in how things worked and how you would experience things. So always used to be obsessed about how I was experiencing an airplane journey or a hotel or a product or an old computer or a trip to the shops. And I was quite a sense of little sausage as a young person. So this was probably not good for my health growing up in the parts of Dublin that I grew up in. So growing up in Dublin, I was kind of into two things. I was into design, which was fantastic. But being sensitive and all those kind of things required me to get into boxing. So the only things I've done since I've been 12 have been design and boxing. Luckily, I'm now retired from the boxing world. I'm a little bit too old for that. But I have kept up the design side of things. My obsession has always been with this idea of experience architecture. How do you engineer an experience? How do you engineer a product or a service to work in a certain way just to deliver some better value? But I think more in the last decade or so, you know, how do you use design to really kind of solve for some of the big social challenges of our time? Yeah, no, definitely. I picked up two things there. You're talking about sensitivity. And I guess also curiosity. It sounds like from a young age, you were sort of naturally curious about what was going on in the world around you. And I guess that's probably a theme that comes up a lot in design is sort of curiosity, questioning things, being sensitive to your environment. And I guess also the people that you design for, would that be fair to say? No, absolutely. You know, that and that and I suppose a desire to want to make things better and to want to improve the conditions within which we exist. And if one thinks about it like we've got a limited time on this planet, rather, we spend that time in an enjoying process or enjoying an experience rather than being taxed by one. And that applies to everybody. I mean, whether you're kind of resolving a design challenge for impoverished communities or you're resolving a kind of like couture design challenge, ultimately, what you're trying to do is you're trying to ensure that the experience your customer or user has with the product or service that you're building is an engaging one. It's a pleasant one and preferably a memorable one. Absolutely. Yeah, it's got to be memorable, right? I mean, you want people to go back and hopefully experience that product or service again. And I think I sort of started to hear in your response there, the sort of beginnings of a definition of what we might call design or human-centered design. And I think you've got a lovely definition that you've told me about before, but I was wondering just for everyone's benefit, if you could, if you could just give your kind of definition. I know there's lots of definitions of design, but personally, what does it mean for you? Sure. I mean, this is a challenge as you've indicated, like every design school on the planet has a different definition of design. So it's quite an eclectic mix. So myself and a couple of my colleagues a couple of years ago kind of set out to figure out, well, let's just create a meaningful definition for ourselves that we can work with that gives sort of perspective and scope to the work that we do. So it goes something like this. So design is an act. It's an act of creation. It's an act of improvement. It's about improving or building product services or experience that are there to move the world forward and to redress the imbalances of the past. So there's a lot going on there. I mean, the first thing we have to say is you have to produce a thing that has utility, that has function, that has benefit to others. So that's the act part. And that can be a product service or experience. But importantly, it's got to seek to move the world forward. And it's got to seek to redress the imbalances of the past. I mean, we exist on the planet of heading trending towards eight to 10 billion people where there is a significant amount of inequality. And therefore, the role of a designer is not just to build a thing because we can. It is to apply some value, some judgments, some sensibility to why we're doing that in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, we're not short of big problems to solve. And I guess that is one of the sort of huge appeals of designers. It's kind of like a useful tool for solving problems. And I guess in your minds, thinking about designers and how they go about solving problems. What is it you think that makes the best designers really excel? What is it about them other than sensitivity or curiosity? What is it they're really good at in your opinion? I mean, you get so many different types of designers that do that in different ways. But I think the commonality is there's a sense of belief in their ability to design. And that's quite an important thing. I mean, a lot of people may be even listening to the podcast and have to deal with this issue of imposter syndrome. It's a big challenge for the design community because designers don't often or the perception is at least designers don't often have a seat at the table and therefore their views are not necessarily heard. So there's an element of belief and conviction in oneself. So that is absolutely critical to being a successful designer. And this idea of having a simple, durable, easy to follow design process that you can marry different skills together, different methodologies together. But whatever works for you and to be able to follow that through and to really manage some of those ongoing challenges, to really seek out insights. So good designers really understand there's insights out there. And if we call it the refreshing truth, how do we tap into the refreshing truth? What is that refreshing truth? That's critical. That's like I think one of the key skills that great designers bring to bear. And then the other component of it, which is human nature. So it's human nature to sort of fall in love with their own ideas. So designers have to manage bias particularly well. And that's an important difference between a designer and an artist. So a designer has to produce a thing that has objective value where an artist will produce a thing that has sort of subjective value. And the third component of it is always have to build a prototype. So we think we have a good idea. We may do some research that sort of validates that, but we absolutely have to build the thing, put the thing into the hands of real people. And they must tell us it works in the way that benefits them and not the other way around. So those are some of the sort of the key tenants of great designers of which there are many across the world. Yeah, no, totally agree. And I think you mentioned sort of or touched on two things there around one, I guess, failure, which I think was really interesting. And then, I guess, related to that, you know, prototyping. And I suppose a lot of people maybe don't understand or realise just how many amount of iteration there is or evolution there is in design before we see the final product. I mean, there's that famous story about James Dyson and, you know, building something crazy like 10,000 prototypes for his first vacuum bagless vacuum cleaner. And probably maybe not 10,000 prototypes, but there's probably lots and lots and lots of prototypes for every product or service that we we use today. And I suppose that's something that maybe people aren't aware of is a good design has to be very comfortable with failure, but also that good design involves iteration. It's a very iterative process. What you see is the final thing is the product of a very long, often a very long journey. And yeah, would that be a fair assumption? Absolutely. It's about marrying the art and the science. So the art is very much, you know, the creative side. So we come up with these crazy ideas. Sometimes we think they are going to solve big problems. But then there's the science and a scientist or any scientific process is going to go through multiple iterations of experimentation before they can produce, you know, a product that's going to have value. And that's where sort of as a designer, you've got to marry those two things together really, really well. You've got to be creative. You've got to really think, you know, beyond the norm. You've got to seek out these interesting insights. You've got to allow the creative side of your brain to go crazy. But at a particular point in that journey, the thing that you are passionate about has to work. So that's where the science kicks in. And the science is about rigorously testing and prototyping your idea, your solution, your product, your service, until you hit that sort of, we call it the Goldilocks effect, that sweet spot where it really works well. And that can only be determined, that can't be determined by user, the designer. That's going to be determined by the person you're designing for. And there's great instances of great ideas that looked phenomenal on paper. And in fact, usually win great awards, but they don't serve the end customer because they work in prototypes and test it in the right way. So you've got to marry those two things together and balance them in the delivery. And also, most design projects are funded. Very few designers have the luxury of funding their own design projects. And then they can take as long as they want. They can go on whatever path or journey they see fit. The majority of design projects are funded by a startup, by an entrepreneur, or by an established organization. And again, that's where the sort of the science part comes in. You've got to be able to do all of that amazing stuff. But you've got to do it in the context of time, cost, scope, and bring that sort of like real-world business acumen to bear as well. Yeah, I know. And it's an expensive process, right? Like design, R&D, whatever you call it, it involves lots of money because you have to make or be allowed to make lots of mistakes. And I guess that's why some of the inventions that we use today, like GPS, for example, comes from a kind of military or government funding. A lot of the funding and military hardware that then filters down to day-to-day consumer goods, I assume was made much easier by governments essentially having almost limitless funds to indulge designers and scientists and everybody else to keep trying, to keep reiterating, to keep improving because they won't get it right the first time. Absolutely. Imagine a GPS that sends you to a location five kilometers away from where you wanted to go, and that's a fundamental product that doesn't work. I mean, the synthesis is also true. It's incredibly expensive to not test and not prototype because you're typically going through all that sort of capital outlay, capital expenditure, that time and energy to put something in market, but then the thing doesn't work properly because you didn't take the time to go through the prototyping and testing and get the right feedback. So it swings both ways. I mean, there's sort of an equilibrium in the middle where you can't test indefinitely, but there's a special sell on Riker Island for designers who don't prototype, who just go, okay, I've got a great idea and I go straight to production and that's often not the designer doing that. That's the cultural corporate conditions that they exist in. So I hear stories from my students and from my fellow designers in different markets where you get this scenario quite a lot where they're under such pressure to get to market quickly. Let's be first to market. And it's not about being first to market. It's actually about being first to scale. It's not about who gets there first. There's lots of instances of companies who got there first. Netscape is a good example, but you don't see them around anymore. You see Google. There's lots of examples of organizations that like Blockbusters who got there first but did not scale in the same way that Netflix scaled. So the obsession has to be about really getting to market with something that is going to solve the original problem that you identified but in a practical and meaningful way. Yeah, and I guess that's one key mistake is you say that designers sometimes make is not doing enough researching of the real thing, i.e. the prototyping, testing it with the market. And on that sort of same topic, are there any other sort of common mistakes designers make in your opinion other than failing to research, trading to test properly? Yeah, I mean, it's something, it takes a lot of time to learn how to do this properly. I mean, there's lots of programs out there. You can go and do a course on human centered design or design thinking over a couple of days, but it's not gonna make you a great designer. That's the practical application of learning that those tools and those skills over decades in some cases. So what we observe is many of the challenges is sort of there's a definite challenger and hubris. So this idea of the belief in the idea, as opposed to the belief in the utility of the outcome. And to a certain extent, most designers are well enough trained to know that that's sort of something they have to manage, but they're often in environments where there's a lot of pressure to skip the basic steps and go straight to market. So I think one of the biggest mistakes I think designers make is not enforcing the design process as rigorously as they could in a business environment, because you have product owners and engineers and sponsors wanting solutions quickly. And typically, you know, often see this, the designer sort of just capitulates and goes, okay, I'll help you get it to market fast. Knowing in the heart of hearts, that was a bad idea because we really haven't solved for someone which we call product market fit. So we often talk in design about problem solution fit and product market fit. So problem solution fit is I see a problem, you know, in the market or an opportunity and I come up with a solution. I come up with a broad-based solution to that. Now the mistake is that typically we call that a value proposition, the buzzword CVP. And then what happens is that value proposition gets taken straight to market. Now customers don't buy value proposition, they buy products. There's a huge difference between a good idea and a good product. And that product market fit phase is often fast tractor skipped. Now if you can analyze the DNA of hugely successful organizations across the world, they really obsess about product market fit, be it Amazon, be it Apple, be it even Netflix, they really obsess about how the service the product is experienced by the customer, they get deep into the data on that. And that's what you're there to solve for as a designer. Ideas are diamond doesn't, you know, they come out to wash on a daily basis. But truly great products that really have awesome utility solve for product market fit in often quite unique ways. Yeah, no, I mean, I can completely agree with that. And I think stepping back a little bit to an earlier comment, which I thought was really interesting that you made about designers having a seat at the table. Do you think it's any coincidence that, you know, some of the most successful companies in the world like Apple, for example, an obvious example, obviously put design at the heart of what they do. I mean, both Steve Jobs and obviously Johnny Ive until he stopped working, I think a few years ago as the chief design officer for Apple, but you'd say that both those two were very focused on the importance of design and you can see how it affected Apple as an organization. And would you say therefore that, you know, companies would benefit hugely from investing more in design and practicing design and maybe even every company should have a chief design officer? Yeah, well, I mean, that's a sort of a rhetorical question to a designer, but even like an example, like Airbnb, you know, founded by a team of designers and they were not the first company of their kind in the market, there were dozens, but they just really understood how to make that experience phenomenal. So the short answer is yes. I mean, I think it's a lot got to do, there's a genesis to this. So there's a history to why it is the way it is. And part of that history is how we are educated. So if you look at the sort of education models that the majority of executives grew up in, it's, you know, that classical sort of, you know, the three O's, reading, writing and arithmetic. And that's based on an educational system that was designed in the late 1800s that was really around sort of pushing society from the agrarian era into the industrial era. We wanted people to be able to read, be able to write and give instructions and do basic mathematics and arithmetic calculations. But we didn't want them to be too creative. You know, you don't want someone to be creative when they're putting kind of buttons on a bottle or hubcaps on a Model T forward. That was intentional within the educational system back in the day. And by the way, that was hugely successful for the time because it took millions of people out of poverty into the middle class. And it sort of set up the foundation for the industrial society that we're in today. However, those skills are not fit for purpose in the future. So what you find is you find a lot of big organizations, very neuro-typically heavy at the executive level at the board level, people with very analytical brains, very good at mathematics, engineering the legal profession and so on and so forth. And there's a gap. There's a sort of a neurological diversity problem within executive teams across the world is that you don't have enough of that creative spark, that sort of design thinking mentality within those senior teams. So there's a sort of a significant shift at the moment towards something called the Four Seves, a sort of creativity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, being the kind of new foundational skillset of the future. And the world's in a bit of a transition phase at the moment. It's kind of transitioning from that sort of old school, reading, writing a arithmetic model into the Four Seves model. So that presents a problem today because we're in transition. So you see a lot of senior teams sort of understand, I kind of think I need that design thing at a more senior level in my business, but I don't really see enough designers who can talk to me in a language that I understand. So one of the responsibilities of the design community is to produce designers who can operate at the chief design officer level and have meaningful conversations with executives in finance and engineering and product in distribution about their processes and really understand the language that they speak such that they can help solve their problems in the way they're comfortable with. So it does place quite a large onus on the designer because he or she not only has to focus on solving for their craft, meaning to be good designers, they need to also manage the design process. The third thing they need to do is learn how to speak business and learn how to speak commerce. So they can become comfortable and fluent in that language and that's gonna help them sort of do awesome things into the future. Yeah, and that's quite a challenge, isn't it? There's a lot of skills that the designer has to have and you mentioned creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, those are all obviously skills that a designer must possess. But that point that also keeps coming up when you talk is the sort of stakeholder management bit. You've got lots of parties to satisfy within an organization and you need to speak the right language to the right person. And I guess particularly on your point about creativity, that's something that I think found interesting when I worked in advertising that people thought that you could kind of schedule creativity, you could put a time to it. So it's like we want the idea by 9 a.m. tomorrow but of course everything we know about creativity it's not how it works. You can't schedule the moment that that idea appears. So yeah, I can see why there's so many tensions between the designer and say the heads of organizations which are maybe as you say, not be so averse with those new skill sets. So it's definitely a big education job to be done. Now completely and it's not an easy thing to do at the moment but I'm starting to see really serious chief design officers in global companies like Phillips and General Mills and Wells Fargo and that process is starting to sort of bubble to the surface. Diageo is an awesome chief design officer as well. So we started to see senior level designers starting to occupy those environments but that takes time and what you'll start to see is you'll start to see over maybe the next couple of years the sort of transformation of executive teams and boards as they start to recognize that that sort of neurodiversity is critical to their success and they'll see that in designers because they'll see the track record, they'll see the quality of the output, they'll see how they've solved problems and then they'll start to sort of invite them into those structures over time. So it is happening, it is something that's ongoing but it will take time to kind of settle but certainly I would say to any designers out there I think it's a great time to be in design. The world is in flux, it's in change. So many of the ways we consume products and services is changing and it's going to have to change into the future and you're going to see sort of significant growth in those senior level roles for designers across the world. Yeah, no, I completely agree and I think also there's perhaps a misunderstanding on behalf of those who aren't so I'll say with the world of design that it really can be used for almost any problem. I think there is a certain mindset that design is about making products but obviously now you can use the same process of thinking for, as you say, designing services but even organizations, there's no problem that design can't solve. So it's an incredibly useful and versatile skill. And I guess to sort of draw our conversation to a close there's two more questions I'd love to ask you. I think one is as a designer and as a curious person what would you say is your sort of favorite piece of design and it doesn't matter what it's from in category terms, but is there a standout piece of design that you really admire? Yeah, I mean, I can give you a shopping list but I'll roll with my favorite one is the YouTube one. I love that kind of that piece of design. I have one in my kitchen and I've even been known to travel with one on occasion because it's solved for a very obvious problem which was, you know, the market was saying actually we like this idea of having a shake or a smoothie in the morning but if you look at sort of the blenders the big blenders that we have in our kitchen they just didn't produce that particularly well. And the beautiful thinking and the business model thinking that went into that was look, you can take whatever's in your fridge just maybe as it's starting to tip out of date you can throw it into your new tree but let's take some ice cubes in there mix it around, we'll give you a delicious shake or my kids use them to make smoothie bowls. So it's got a lot of different sort of functions but it's beautifully designed, beautifully engineered and it's almost, I mean, if I can use it it's idiot proof, it's complete its utility is very easy to work with. So that's currently my working favorite. But it's a great choice and yeah, you're absolutely right because all of the kind of existing products on the market for that role did a pretty bad job because they were cumbersome and they were very difficult to clean so I guess people don't use them as a result and obviously they kind of crack that problem. So I think that's a great example probably of human-centered designers and they really understood what people wanted. And then last but not least everyone loves a good book, podcast, film, documentary whatever recommendation. And I suppose for any listeners or watchers sort of interested in learning more about this topic is there a book maybe that you recommend or podcast or whatever it is that can help people learn a bit more and get inspired. Sure, I mean there's a really good podcast series by Debbie Milman, she's a well-known broadcaster in New York, she interviews a lot of designers and she really asked some very probing questions about their career, their methodology, their method of thinking. I learn a lot from listening to her also a friend of mine, Steven Gates known as the crazy one does an extraordinary good podcast for the design community and for designers. Probably my favorite book is a bit of an oldie it's about a decade old at this stage but it's by Warren Burger, it's called Glimmer and it really is a beautiful manuscript on what design is, how it can solve for many of the big ticket issues of our time. In that book he interviews Bruce Mao, he interviews a wide variety of legends in the design community and he just codifies it from this broad ideal around design and how design can help solve problems and he makes that very, very practical and he takes us on a tour across the world so he bounces between different continents and uses different examples from different parts of the world, so if you're getting into design that's a beautiful book to inspire you on your journey to being a great designer. Fantastic, that's some great recommendations, thank you and yeah all that remains is me to say thank you so much Terry for your time, it's been a great discussion and yeah I hope people find it inspiring and it's the beginning of their journey to learning more about this amazing topic. Thank you. Absolutely pleasure, take care. Thanks for joining us for this week's edition of the 42 Courses podcast. We'll be back soon with more interviews from some of the world's greatest and most interesting minds. In the meantime you can find more nuggets of wisdom by following us on Instagram and Twitter at 42Courses or check out our website 42Courses.com to browse all our courses we offer. Have a marvellous week and chat again soon.