 Good evening. Hi, I'm Caroline Payson. I'm the director of education here at the museum, and I'm really pleased that you could join us tonight I'm delighted to welcome Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDO is Participant in our brand-new design talk series game changers Which will be an ongoing program of conversations featuring the most innovative and influential practitioners, thinkers and industry leaders in the design world today Stay tuned for the exciting game changer series And please go to our website. We'll be advertising those as soon as they're up We're incredibly excited to be launching the series and letting you we'll be letting you know who else will be coming soon It's appropriate that Tim is here to launch the series since the spark for it was ignited in conversations We had with beginning back in 2013 when thinking about how to honor the spirit of Bill Mawgridge We were thrilled when IDO jumped in to support the series and Bill's memory Bill was the co-founder of IDO director of this museum from 2010 to 2012 and with his pioneering work on the user experience one of the design world's legendary game changers Although Bill was only with us at Cooper Hewitt for a very short time before his untimely death He'd led the conceptual reimagining of the museum experience Focusing on moving the visitor from passive observer to active participant And you'll see the results of his work throughout the museum from our new interactive pen and the digital tables in the immersion room The process lab and of course in beautiful users the exhibition we dedicated to Bill Which focus on and his impact on user-centered design? Tim Brown is an industrial designer by training and frequently speaks about the value of design thinking and innovation to business people and Designers around the world his book change by design on how design thinking transforms organizations was published in 2009 He's received numerous design awards in his exhibited work nationally and internationally Tim takes special interest in the convergence of technology in the arts as well as the ways in which design can be used to promote the Well-being of people living in emerging economies Tonight Tim is in conversation with Ellen Lupton Cooper Hewitt senior curator of contemporary design and a game changer in her own right Ellen who is also the director of graphic the graphic design MFA program at Micah the Maryland Maryland Institute College of Art Was the curator of beautiful users one of our 10 open? I hope you all had a chance to see it her next Cooper Hewitt exhibition how posters work opens to the public on May 8th Please join me in welcoming Tim Brown and Ellen Lupton This one's working Mine works to Tim So it's so great to be here and thank you for the beautiful introduction Caroline and it's a moment for us to remember Bill and I would love to hear you talk about how Bill changed the shape of design as It was practiced, you know it changed how you practice design and that's why we're here. Yeah. Yeah, so let's start with That's the guy we're talking about So yeah, I mean I think they've been to Transformation in the way designs practiced or at least the way Industry I think is and the world is looking at design and These these two transformations are not even serial. They're sort of both going on at the same time But the one of them I think Bill was hugely instrumental and and he's absolutely saw the other one, too When I when I first trained as a designer and certainly when he trained as a designer quite a long time for me It was all about the object or the artifact I mean it however you were trained whatever you were trained in whether it be graphic designer Product designer architect it was about the post of the book the the product the building and The focus of practice design practice was on was on those objects To the to the point that we all got siloed in these disciplines, right and product designers didn't really work with graphic designers And certainly didn't we all worked on our little bits of the world and even if we worked on the same projects We didn't necessarily work together But it was kind of how it had evolved in I guess second half of the 20th century you're much more of an expert It's not I am but but it seemed like it happened over that period of time But what Bill saw and you know and and I Think principally when he started working on Computers in Silicon Valley in the late 70s Was that as a designer? He he he should he should be dissapointed When he just focused on the object so the classic story is he worked on the grid compass the first ever laptop Indeed had a was one of the patent holders for folding a screen down over the keyboard to make a laptop Which was you know one land that think God that was simple and well boy did that change our lives, right? You know and the sort of story that associated with that was the reason he got to that idea was because he With blocks of wood In brief in his briefcase until he figure out the form that a computer had to have in order for it that he could carry it around Right and in order to have to fit it had to have a folding screen So he got there by thinking about users not because he thought it would be cool to fold the screen down over over a keyboard But he built this thing Designed it it got made and he got it back and he turned it on for the first time and it was a wholly dissatisfying experience Not because because the hardware wasn't wonderful. It was but the software was terrible And I know he couldn't it was the old command line interface of DOS, you know before even Before even the creation of the desktop interface and it was a horrible experience and he had this kind of Realization there's a designer. He hadn't done his job. He didn't know how to do it He didn't know how to design software, but felt that he felt that that was an important part of what design should be doing So he learned right he coined the term interaction design He started bringing Psychologists and graphic designers and computer scientists into this little firm that he had it was before we created idios back in the days of id2 and Started what I think became this big transformation from artifact or object to user experience and Caroline just talked about his kind of passion for user experience Then what's next if that was one phase? What's the next phase? You know, I think I think we're I mean the funny thing is you know He so he I think coined the term interaction design back in about 1985 or 1986 You could arguably say that we're in the zenith of user experience design is the focus for design today, right? That the explosion of design that's happened in Silicon Valley Some a big part of it in New York London and other cities around the world is the application of design to the digital user experience Right, so the vast majority of designers thousands of designers in Silicon Valley today are essentially digital user experience designers. I spoke at the Ixda, which is the national kind of body of experienced designers at their conference together. They have 60,000 members Which can sit and they didn't even exist 10 years ago is pretty impressive So and so it's the it's the focus of industry today. It's the focus of Business is the is the idea of the of the user experience But I think there's an there's this other this other thing that's emerging and we've been pondering over an idea for a while and I've been interested in the idea for a while a lot of my colleagues have Which is this transformation from user experience to the role of design in the behavior of systems And the reason why I think that's a transformation that's interesting and I think that ultimately it will grow to be even bigger than User experience designers today is because that's where all our most interesting problems are It's what it's so many of the systems that we've relied on we rely on today are actually sort of rather squeaky data It's of the 19th and 20th centuries, you know our education system 19th century, you know our road system 19th century our cities mmm some would argue, you know 2,000 years ago never mind I mean many of these things are not working very well and a lot of them are not working very well not because the artifacts of those Systems are not working well in some cases. That's true It's because the behaviors of those systems isn't working very well And I think we can build from what we've learned from user experience design and find a useful role for design in those systems So why don't you show us a system that you're working on all right funny should ask that because we even have a slide So so I I think you know we've As we've been exploring this and we've been doing it for a little for a little while I mean even back When we were exploring this idea of user experience design one of the first Non-digital user experiences that we did that was of any scale was something that's still running up and down the east coast today Which is the a cell a train system right this at which And You know that was the application in some ways ironically of what we learned from interaction design back towards a physical system Which is thinking about the whole customer journey from the moment they Engage with think about the idea of taking a train journey to the moment They get off at the far end and head off to their destination and what are all of the touch points in between? But and so that in itself is a relatively simple in fact user experience But but what we realized when we started working on it There were all these other things that were associated with it like what it took in terms of dealing with regulation to even do anything on Amtrak was a you know was was was one of the kind of tricky things that we had to we had to learn about or You know that the a lot of the limitations of a seller to do with who owns which bits of track and what you can do on them compared to Europe For instance where they built fresh track and for the for the TGV systems and they got a much faster rail system because of it So they were infrastructure problems systems problems anyhow, so we've been exploring these things for a while and I think we're beginning to understand that Just like with user experience design There are some enabling disciplines that make it To think about the role of design in these broader systems So if interaction design was and and and and user research I think into the two were sort of enabling disciplines for user experience design Then we're finding that there are some new things we have to learn how to do for the design of some of these systems So this first one that I was going to talk about a little bit was the design of a new school system for a small organization Called Innova, which is a Peruvian private school system found funded by a Wonderful business entrepreneur by the name of Carlos Rodriguez pastor who runs a what in some ways is a is a rather conventional They don't exist in this country much anymore You know G's busy taking itself apart and we don't have very many conglomerates than ones We do have tend to be industrial, but in South America in India In Africa you still fire in Asia you still find conglomerates that are serving consumers and and Intercorp, which is the name of this conglomerate does that and it's Its purpose or Carlos's purpose is to double the size in the middle class in Peru It's kind of an interesting way of thinking about framing your country. Maybe you could do that here too Well, we could certainly do with reversing the erosion of the middle class here Which is one of the big biggest issues we've got socially I think but one of the pieces of that for him is that you He owns a couple of universities and but he also bought a fledgling K through 12 private school system It had five schools wasn't working very well And and we'd known him for a little while and he came and said we'd I'd like you to help us Think what this school system needs to be in order to be affordable scalable and look really good to be So where do you start with the problem like that? You start with the logo or well? Turns out not I'm not sure we ever got to a logo actually. Maybe there was one. I can't remember now The I was talking about these ideas of enabling disciplines and one of the enabling disciplines of the of the design of systems is what at least at IDO we call business design Which is we've we've found over the last few years that we can bring people with business experience and business creativity Into IDO and not have them play the role of management consultants or business experts But actually be designers, but with the skills of business people and What they're able to do I think is see the whole all of the moving parts of the system over something like a school system Both financially How does a business designer express their Contribution is it well turns out some of them are some of them are amazing with Excel spreadsheets, but And so you got to learn to love Excel spreadsheets if you if you're gonna appreciate business sign. I truly some of them are actually master For somebody who barely knows how to fill in a cell it's it's quite remarkable. I find it but um, no they're they're able to look at the sort of Kind of dynamics of well if you have you know a staff That looks like this and cost this much and can do these things and you have these students and you have school This much and we can build in this first of what does that whole system look like over time over time? And that's something that you know as product designers or even interaction designs We don't know we don't really know how to do yet You have to do that as part of thinking about a new school system If it's going to be funded effectively and it's going to grow to be hundreds of schools Which is what the ambition is so that's a really important new discipline for thinking about systems I think and and we've been slowly growing the number of people at IDO like that But you know we we approached it from what's the approach to curriculum? What's the approach to the physical campus? The classrooms themselves the technology in those classrooms the information systems that allow teachers to share So there is a lot of physical stuff that goes into it. There is there's a place There's a place and there's a logo. Look. Oh, there is there you go. Yeah I suspect that may have already existed before we got there, but I'm not sure Yeah, I mean so, you know, we had a team that included architects and included communications design Experts and it was a really rich really rich team and we got to design three different Kind of blueprints for campuses for different sized schools and different types of cities around that around the around the country And one of the things it's turning out that these so it's so Into corporals and what they've realized works really well is to build a school in a shopping mall next to each other the school acts as an in in Peru the school acts as a For people to come to the shopping mall for retailers to come to shopping. Well, not the other way around which is interesting So in so here the school is like a is like a cornerstone. It's like having Macy's in your shopping mall in America But there it's to have a school Complex, which I think is kind of cool. Actually, it's beautiful So we got to work on the on the physical campuses. We got to design a new kind of flexible classroom That they do there's a significant It's simply a knot lots of high caliber teachers around and so much as we'd like to have 20 kids per teacher or even fewer perhaps to get in the way that the best private schools can do here and 25 kids per teacher maybe in the way the best public school systems do Can't even get close to that in Peru indeed at some points there are 60 kids per classroom It's because there's not enough teachers because there are enough teachers and and so The interesting thing is that forced us to think about well How can we use new teaching methods like blended learning for instance or the flip model where you you have technology that provides much of the informational content through Videos Carn Academy was one of the partners that we took down to work on this school system I'm sure many of you have come across kind of coming It forced us to think creatively about that and about how you use the classroom space So these classrooms are can go from holding 60 kids to 15 by Using partition walls and so flexible layout and that just allows some some of the day The kids will be in small groups much much the day. They might be in quite large groups And some of the time that some sometimes they're even they're even working together without teachers Outside and outside that's one of the nice things about Peru. It's a bit like the climate we have in California Probably wouldn't work here in New York quite so well at least only in the summer but it's been a really interesting example for us of of Trying to design as many of the elements of the system as I was IDO involved in an entrepreneurial way Or I mean were we investors and I know we were it was it was a normal consulting way And you know, I think there's a really interesting conversation at the moment about where design plays And in terms of kind of being entrepreneur entrepreneurial versus being just a set of skills which you need in order to solve a problem And I think there are certainly places where designers as entrepreneurs make a lot of sense but there are other places where Design is just a skill people to come and help solve a problem also make also make sense Just you like like you need other skilled people to run a business like this and And I think this is one of those That us as investors would have been a particularly valuable to the story But we certainly been along for the for the ride. We you know, we're still working with them today We're we're two three years since we launched the first schools are now about 20 They're building them at a pretty fast rate one of the We doubled the attainment scores of the kids that are going through the school so far and in maths and reading Which is which is great Peru happens to be at the bottom of the Pisa rankings right now. So there's lots of room for improvement Each new school is sold out before it gets built because of the popularity now of the of the Schools parents are hearing about it and signing up and subscribing before the new schools get finished So they're having to do almost no marketing even when they leave Luma Lima and go out to some of the further out cities So it's looking promising so far Great and I'd IDO is creating its own Educational systems as well. I mean, I think a lot of the reason people are here tonight is because we've all learned so much from IDO creating a methodology of designing Right, it's a whole and you've been very generous as a company in terms of seeding that out into the world You know, I think I might give a lot of credit actually to Bill and and David Kelly who The founders of idea that teaching has been part of was part of the way the company was founded in the first place I mean David was already teaching at Stanford when he created his company bill at all bill met David by teaching at Stanford So it was it was right in the kind of an attic makeup We have I actually have no idea how many of the folks at IDO teaching at any given moment But it's many many people At schools around the world. We've always we have it helped master our craft by teaching And and not just teaching in the classroom, but through open idea Yeah, I mean it's gone on I mean it's gone on to other things But but but you know and we've now started to explore what that means when you try and do it online and sort of more collaborative ways but But I don't think that wasn't a I mean, you know, it could have been a We've been kind of going along as a design consultant scene and thought oh now's the time to go online and teach what we do but I think we've been trying to teach what we do right from the beginning and You know, I think to be honest, we were very fortunate that at the moment when The business world here in the in the United States started to get Interested in design again because it had obviously been interested in design Decades ago, but sort of lost interest in in the last 10 or 15 It's really this term design thinking which you help to create Which is different from the focus on product, right? It's about this method. That's more Right broadly available. Can you talk a little bit about the limits of that and how you're well? We're reaching those limits. Yeah, I mean we didn't I mean we didn't coin the term design thinking although we Read perhaps Sean a light McDonald's didn't bent hamburgers, right? That's also true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah But I mean I think I think of Herb Simon instigator of the idea of design thinking but but You know, I think I'd always been interested we'd always been interested in in the idea that design could be applied to things that designers didn't generally give attention to or Weren't given the opportunity to give an attention to and also that design was something that everybody could use if they were given the skills if they acquired the skills and so Design thinking was the best way we had of describing that idea and You know, I a lot of the thesis behind my book was We need to sort of break out of sort of the priesthood of Professional design and kind of get it out into the world Not that professional design isn't still very valuable and we can maybe come back to that a little bit later But but but that it it it can't be all I mean, it's a bit like you know, you Know a professional writer saying nobody else should be writing even though because you know, I mean I I've been trained in it, but other people shouldn't do it It's clearly that doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, I think Just a slight sideline I've been having conversations with a few universities over the last couple of years who are seriously looking at design thinking now as a liberal art Alongside the things that they have traditionally taught And these are not, you know new age universities. This place like Wesleyan and Princeton, right? So I think that's an interesting way of looking at that design that it it can be something that we can all use and we Can all activate in some way So anyway, that's that's that's that's something that we've been interested in and Exploring and it sort of led us to some places that I think we would wouldn't otherwise have gone Yeah, we'll show us your next project. I think this is a beautiful demonstration of how you're broadening Design thinking and yeah opening up the doors of it. Yeah, I think I think amplifies an interesting Example of something that we could only have got to because we sort of went on a journey towards it We could know I couldn't certainly couldn't have envisaged it. So so amplify is a Program we have running for the next five years. Well, we're about a year into it Funded by the Department for International Development, which is the UK's version of USAID It spends billions of dollars on or pounds I suppose on on Aid and development around the world mostly in countries that used to belong to the British Empire, right? So all those places where you have you ever seen those Victorian maps where like half the world's pink Those countries turns out to be a lot of countries for some reason they never include the United States in that I never could quite understand that but maybe maybe maybe maybe figured out, you know If it doesn't really need to help the United States some made I may argue with that. I don't know But but anyhow, you know, it's places like, you know, India and many African nations and you know and Places like that. Anyhow This is a program in which we're running 10 challenges focused on poverty But running on an open Innovation platform that we have that we called open idea that we built a few years ago That has about 70,000 people engaged with it around the world looking to tackle various social impact problems And we've run climate change things on there. We've run Education challenges been a very wide range of things, but we're specifically running these 10 amplifiers That's a separate part of your business. It's a separate little part of IDO. I mean, it's a small group of people they run sort of four or five challenges a year and Working with sponsors and teams from different organizations. It's not for profit Well, this is the complicated thing about idea. It's essentially not for profit. Yes, even though it's actually part of the for-profit part of idea We've basically run it at cost, but we also have a non-profit 501 3c called idea.org Which was an extension of the work that we started to do a few years ago in social impact particularly around global poverty It was something that I Got the number of us got interested in a few years ago And I had some experiences that made me believe that something we ought to be working on But we just couldn't scale it inside inside idea And so we created a not for profit so that we could scale it mostly so that would give us access to Foundation funding and other forms of bigger projects that we couldn't afford to support ourselves So idea.org has been very successful. It's now 50 person team just opening here in New York We've had it. It's been based on the West Coast We're just starting a team in our office here in New York So it'll be a bicoastal thing and amplify uses the same platform Exactly So very meandering way of telling the story here But so amplify is made up of a comp of a collaboration between open idea idea.org and diffid and then a number of other Organizations for instance, we're running a program right now a challenge right now on Expanding educational opportunities for refugees and refugee camps and that's also been co-funded by UNHCR so in some cases we're bringing other other organizations in the first challenge we did was on Finding safe places for women and girls in in in cities and You know that through Different ideas one of them you we were just looking at on the web But it was right this kit for creating a home daycare center Amazing it called a business in a box, right exactly turns out that we found that kits are a really good solution for Yeah for For these kinds of problems because you never really know the exact app It's very hard to predict the exact application in any given circumstance So if you want to do something scalable, it's actually often better to equip the equip the Entrepreneurs with the means to go build the thing that they want to build rather than Design it all for them and then try and kind of roll it out And I wasn't thinking about it that this kit for women to Home daycare business Includes educational stuff about laws and making a safe environment for children and how to make them the money thing work But also included these branded elements like aprons and uniforms that Are this visual signifier right of business and about being part of businesses and being a professional I think that's so interesting that In all these things which seem like maybe it's just a system or an idea There's still this element of the artifact the artifacts of design still matter We're just connecting them with other things as other bits of design as well And in fact I mean interestingly enough we found that the brand is incredibly important in in in these kinds of Solutions that are around around poverty we did another project pre-amplify but also that included open idea actually around creating a kind of a sustainable sanitation solution for it was in Ghana and It was a new product a new kind of composting toilet But it was also a service that so that Micro-entrepreneurs could set up a little service that collect basic collected the waste and then sold it for fertilizer and It only took off when we created we branded this thing clean team and created the brand for it and and I have that logo It's so it's it's it's actually the reason Simple is that trust is a big issue in many of these places, right? It's like that businesses don't big businesses don't exist Authorities often aren't very trustworthy And so brands are a way of building trust and so in many ways brands are arguably Good brand good branding is more important in these situations than it is on the high street here in the United States or in Europe and so there is enormous opportunity for Good graphic design good communication sign good branding good storytelling In these systems that are designed to help the poor as just as there is in when we're developing, you know stuff for the So anyhow, so I'm amplifies going on quite quite strongly. We're quite excited about we hope that One of the interesting things about it We don't only have it's funded so run these challenges to then fund Ideo org design teams that help the winners develop their ideas and then we have an implementation fund as well So Ideas coming from the communities or they come okay, and so then the communities you match up with so Yeah, so well, I mean the communities might mean that they're a little NGO somewhere that's built a first version of something or it might mean They're designers Sometimes they might be one of things that happens on the platform It's really interesting as we see kind of virtual design teams emerging as they start to share ideas So you might have a designer on the program at Stanford You know finding an NGO somewhere in Africa that they can work on a designer that wants to get involved in this area I Could find potential clients just go engage just go engage in the challenges and then start looking out for people that Maybe who you where you share ideas with that you can you can work with and we get a lot of that Happening so anyway, so we support those teams and then unusually You know For a situation like this we actually have money to then go give to the best ideas for them to go do some Go do the implementation. So yeah, it's an exciting program and again We've also found that education is an important part of it. There's another kit. So another kit This is this is one that's generally available to everybody and it's actually a read It's a rebranded version of what something we used to call the human centered Yeah, the human centered design toolkit. Sorry, it was always a bad name, which is why we renamed it and it's essentially a kit of methods and frameworks for design thinking for social innovators and now that's Either it's online and it's a free downloadable thing or You can pay for a very nice book if you want and On online there are all of the tools are there but also a whole series of videos and case studies and Another material that helps people understand how to apply design In in the it's kind of circumstances of social innovation and you attend the the audience of this to be Muggles as you were or is it for Professional designers, I mean everybody really I mean we see I mean lots and lots of downloads of this to come from students It's a it's a it's a relatively nice free resource for anybody that's studying design We're seeing a lot of small NGOs using it We don't have designers But you like envision a world where we don't need designers anymore because everybody can download your kit. No What I envisage I'm into designing for my employment too No, what I what I envisage is a world where we have many many orders of magnitude more Selfs understand design no They need to bring deeper expertise into their organization either on a permanent basis or a temporary basis to solve the problems that are most difficult to solve because you know I think You know one of the things I mean it should have been obvious I suppose but when I got on my kind of big hobby horse about you know getting design thinking kind of out of the hat or design out of the hands of the you know kind of professional elite elite into Everybody it's like that's all very well But just because you've taken one class in design thinking or read a book doesn't make you actually good at design and You know, it makes you hungry Turns out it makes some people good. I mean there are people who would have a natural inclination For design thinking that once they understand how to use the tools really There are a few out there and we have discovered some of them and some of them have come to idea too But obviously that's not true for most people So design thinking like any other set of skills is something you master over time And so we've got more we're now I'm very interested in the idea of mastery Not only how do we introduce the concept of design thinking to the world But what are the mechanisms in which we can help people master it? I mean institutions like this one I mean this one's a this one is an institution It's about the mastery of design thinking right whether it's through exposing people to what really good design has been about Historically whether it's giving kids a chance to experience design really on early on in their life So they actually might start doing it earlier and learn over time do start doing projects when they're Pre-school or a kindergarten or whatever it might be but anyway, we need to think about the mastery of design and that's One of the things that we're focused on right now And we just launched just a couple of weeks ago actually our first effort in this which is something called IDOU which is An online university for design It's very small right now. It has one course. It'll have more. We're gonna launch about one course a quarter So by a course you mean One so the first well, no the first course is a whole it's a set of classes. So so the first course is on it's called Insight for innovation or seeing with new eyes and it's all about design research And it's I think there are seven or six or seven classes in the course It'll and what are these classes? So each class is made up of a series of little video snippets and then slightly longer videos And then exercises that you go and do some of them while you're online most of them while you're not and then reflections on that So tell me about one we were talking earlier So you get a picture of yeah I mean in one of the courses and what the course about observa in the in the class about observation for instance There's one little exercise we do you get four pictures of somebody's living and from that We sort of ask you to to think about what you see How she kind of lives a life and how she organizes a life and why Right, and so we asked you to just go away and think about that and make some notes and so the two people that the Running this course and who speak on it are Jane Fulton Surrey who who founded design research at audio She and I joined the company at the same time and then co-leader Stafford who now runs use research design research idea So they're pretty good both of them So anyway, so they take they take you through this and then they tell you what they saw right which is you know Quite a bit deeper and in more insightful than what most of us including me would see right. Oh really? I that's interesting and then eventually you actually get to meet the person herself and she tells the story of her Anyway, that's just one little exercise and so an idea is producing all these I mean, it's been an interesting Understanding how to produce content and manage content. We've partnered up with a little stuff. It's not Free and it is not okay, so that's sort of a switch right? No, yeah, exactly and and it's something we thought long and hard about but we do have some free courses We partner up with the acumen fund which acumen which some of you may know here is a fantastic New York based social investment fund and So we do as part of design kit actually now. We do a course on human-centered design for social innovators and That has had something like 50,000 people go through it now. So it's it's fairly high scale But it's pretty simple and it's sort of very much an introduction Whereas this one is ended Intended more ultimately at mastery. So this is sort of an introductory class in design research But we're planning to do classes that are more like masters classes later on I'm working on one right now and do any of them get into the visual side of design. No, probably not. Well, actually The next one the next course will be on on ideation and prototyping. So yes, that is somewhat in the visual I've the third one will be on storytelling I'm doing I'm building one which will come out early next year I hope if I can do a decent job of it on creative leadership So there are various pieces of the puzzle around around around design I don't know that we'll do things on pure be on purely on visual or maybe This realm of design thinking is more about the defining a problem and basic idea generation Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of I mean They're already quite good courses on skillshare and things like that around around a lot of the kind of core visual skills for design I don't know. We may get to that. I'm not me. I'm not predicting I mean, this is not this is this is class course number one Who knows where we'll go this might be the last one. Although we do is great. You have your own university Well, we do have a we have 800 students going through the through this first version That's as big as a lot of art schools And and we are charging for it charging quite a lot of money for it and the Wanted to be sustainable. I mean even the free courses we give we have to raise funds to to do them So either way they cost money and this one we've decided if it's if they're good enough And students get enough value for them or maybe companies that want their employees to go through them Enough value from then they'll pay for them. And if not, we'll know we're not on we're not on track So anyhow, that's that's that's that's idea you and so feel free to go check it out if you're interested So so one of the things that you've been talking about is the skills of design many of which are very abstract or about Getting ideas or defining problems. They're analytical, but one of them that you keep storytelling which is very Creative it's it's narrative So can you talk about how someone builds that skill and how you use it in your company? It seems like it's essential Yeah, no, it is absolutely, but I do think all most of the skills we use in design thinking are actually creative I mean, I think I mean I would take I would I mean, you know I think with the way the way that we do And the way that I think designers in general do research for instance. It's actually a creative exercise It's not analytical in the way that market me You're actually looking to make a connection between you and a human being Understand that human being or that group of human beings in a way that you didn't understand them before So as to have ideas about what you might design. That's a creative process in my opinion Building something and learning through the making of something. That's a creative process And so I think most of what we do and what designers in general do is creative in getting kind of every step storytelling is is Something that I think we've Being a creative process. I think it's it's funny in a way the more Systemic the application of design gets the more important are great stories stories because it's important to make it human It's very easy when we start talking about systems and this is something that I think policymakers and regulators and Governments and people like that get in get find themselves tripping over a lot is that when they start talking about a system Even though it's a human system They start stripping away the human from it, right? That's why politicians always have you know the little girl whose life was changed by Right because that makes it understand it is but it doesn't actually help you understand the system very well necessarily But so I think we have got to get better and better about telling Stories of systems in ways that are actually emotional Intuitive they connect to why we're doing this stuff It's not necessarily all that easy to do but I think it's I think the example of the living room is good And I think you have something well I mean the next the last project we were going to share and then we should have opened up maybe for questions Sorry, but is is I think the other so if we talked about a Single a system as a single business which was in of a we talked about a platform to allow people to kind of collaborate and And make change happen over multiple systems, maybe This last one talk about is is what I think of what the place where many of the challenges for design are going to be as We look forward in the 21st century and that's the design of infrastructure so much of our infrastructure is outdated and There are so many opportunities and often places that designs played an important role in the past like the way our cities are created Right. It just it needs to be done again. They're all constantly done and we've been interested recently in Autonomous vehicle technology might ultimately play and Tried to look a little bit beyond the obvious which is you know, what's an autonomous Private vehicle going to be we looked at that but we looked at some other things too And tried to do what I think designers have often been really good about good at doing in the past But we maybe got I've got out of the habit a little bit and that's sort of looking out into the future kind of and Grabbing it and bringing it to the present by that story telling exactly So there's a very little video here. That's that's that's more illustrative than it is a story And then we've got a few a few slides which we can we can talk about the project itself So Website which you can go to which if you Google idea automobility it will take you there which allows Much much deeper, but we were interested in these I mean we had 20 different scenarios of the way this technology may play out over time and we illustrated three of them. I Mean partly because we wanted to do a small number because we really we actually in this case We did want to dig into the craft of how you Visualize something. Yeah, I mean this is such a level really using all the tools of visual design To create something that doesn't exist Which is another I mean clearly that's the power that we have to do that increases all the time because of the these kinds of tools but you know, but as You know as I said, so this first scenario was was very much sort of Exploring what we already know in a way that autonomous Autonomous vehicle technology is going to be able to do and indeed some of it can already do You know, there are Audi vehicles driving around Europe convoy together and And there are Google cars driving across America. So we know we know these things can already work But there are some things that be Jimmy and people perhaps might not have thought about a little bit that we're beginning to explore But that was the that was sort of the obvious one We were interested in what the behavior of these vehicles was going to be like when they were when they were in convoy and things like that And how you knew it? I mean if you're sat in a vehicle that's in a convoy or you're pulling up next to one ad, you know That's happening that that'll be something we have to figure out But then when we started to explore things like, you know package delivery Turns out, you know, there's lots and lots of money can be saved in just fuel costs alone by making more efficient use of these I mean these big trucks that they have today are terrible But you know, how's that going to change our behavior? I mean are we gonna have to come down onto the street to pick up our parcels now because so far the autonomous vehicle technology can't actually Take it up and deliver it to our front for a front door. Maybe one day. Maybe one day it will And then I was particularly interested by the by the the third scenario because it started to indicate What what it might be like when we start to think of that of this technology not as a technology to do with vehicles But as a technology to do with the what I think of as the fluid city when we could start to move space around Not just people. So the idea of this wasn't that you sat in your office and it drove around the city Which would be vaguely ludicrous But instead We might we might have spaces that could be wherever they were needed when they were needed So they might be stored in unused warehouses or on parking lots that weren't weren't being used But when you know, you wanted to have a meeting or a workshop Fort Mason where there was no office space the office could literally meet you there And or maybe it met you at the You know when you were meeting three people it picked the place that was the shortest commute for all of you Right, and you go and you go and meet in that place. I mean, it's you know, this is very speculative But but it's it's interesting to think of Can we make cities more efficient when we make them fluid when we make space fluid as well as people when we make Space mobile as well as people mobile is today. We're not we mean that's Beyond our kind of you know, by on the my side or not the just everybody's at home working Well, exactly. We assume that we assume that our cities are fixed infrastructure spaces are fixed But maybe they don't have to be maybe spaces can be can all it can also be mobile in some in some interesting You know interesting way. So I think this I think there's a lot For design to explore how infrastructure might might evolve in the future There's gonna be a amount of money spent on infrastructure over the night of the next Next few decades trillions and trillions of dollars some of it in the developing world Obviously because in many cases that infrastructure doesn't even exist today, but a lot of it in the developed world Spend, you know, probably more than a trillion dollars in infrastructure over the next 50 years or so And we can either do it based on all the assumptions of the 20th century or the 19th century Or we can start to explore what it might really be like what our cities might be like what our education systems might be like what our healthcare systems might be like and I At least for me anyway, they're the kinds of design challenges that are really We all hope that designers will have a role in that and not just our Policy makers right right exactly and to do that we might have to find new ways of getting funded Because it's not always some some of this is pre-business as it were, you know, some of it is Much of it are things that single businesses or single organizations probably can't take on for themselves So so are we are we gonna have to find ways of bringing different organizations together to work on these things? It's sort of in a bigger version. I just want you to make that. I think that's cool So we have time for some questions and if we go to the last slide we do encourage you guys to tweet and Instagram and share your ideas with the world But I know a lot of you are here to ask Tim questions. So we'd love to hear from you We have some people in the wings with microphones We really want you to use a microphone because that way our internet audience at home Your question is too So who has a question for Tim or a comment? Yes. Hi Yeah, I'm Less interested in Amazon using drones, although I think they probably will eventually but we did do some work last year Inside our nonprofit inside idea org looking at using drones to for last mile rural health delivery in Africa and India and places like that and we were actually we were interested in looking at What the implications for the technology might be a sort of project a little bit like this Autonomous vehicle one we just saw but intended to help both drone manufacturers and Non-profits working in the health sphere understand how that technology might be useful And so we created it again very similar way a number of scenarios looking at everything from health in disaster relief to Delivering vaccinations or other high value relatively low mass health health health products and You know really set create a sort of set of design principles But what's been interesting isn't that since then we've that we've started to team some NGOs and and drone manufacturers together so they can actually start working on things so Because the technology is moving pretty fast in terms of there are now some drone manufacturers that can actually lift You know reasonably heavy loads, you know 10 15 pounds and take them reasonably long distances 20 30 kilometers Which is enough to make a difference in in terms of rural health. So anyhow, we it is I it's a fascinating technology I'm just I think we're less likely to see lots of drones buzzing around New York as we might see them in the in the rural You know, you know Savannah in Asia Yeah Hi, this is sort of a two-part question One would be when you when you speak of infrastructure Well, what do you think these spending needs are for an online infrastructure as much as a physical infrastructure? such as meetings and I mean even doing meetings in an online way that's conducive to everybody and Then sort of the shops where they need to be New York has a lot of pop-up shops. How does that play into the same sort of I mean I think so It's not clear to me that the cost of infrastructure for physical Interaction is a whole lot different than the cost of infrastructure for digital interaction It's just it's borne by different people and a lot of the digital infrastructure is invisible But the energy cost for instance in supporting, you know cloud servers is very high today Arguably as high as supporting the real estate costs of buildings However, I would agree with you that our virtual space is more accessible in some cases than than physical space I mean it turns out at least in our excuse me in our experience That some blend of each makes most sense and and we're seeing a lot of online retailers for instance Moving offline because it's it's they're finding they can't build strong enough relationships with their customers purely online Warby and Parker with an example that's here, but there's almost no in fact. I I saw a Talk by one of the and the Stern School professors at DLD earlier this year where he basically said there would be no pure play Digital online retail left in five years Nobody including Amazon. He was arguing So that was a pretty big statement to make But it was an interesting point of view right anyway, so I think we're gonna see a continued blend Offline, I think the I think the pop-up thing super interesting Because it's an indication a bit like a lot of the shared economy stuff is of us getting smarter and smarter about how we use resources more and more efficiently So if the space is available and you can make use good use of it for a month or six months Then then we ought to have the systems that enable enable that and there are a lot of digital systems that are Okay, you need a kit for that. Well, it turns out. I think it's interesting a lot I mean that I mean digital systems clearly can do a huge amount to enable the use of those kinds of resources whether it's black cars whether it's Whether it's people spare space in their apartments whether it's retail space But there's another piece which we're which is much slower to adapt which we also need which is we need a policy and regulatory System that also supports more efficient use of those resources today We and so we're now seeing of course a lot of interesting things happening as kind of regulators start to move into this space as they respond and you know with the best intentions of trying to create a balance between What's great use of the resource but also what protects the interests of everybody that might be trying to Then neighbors of his Airbnb or whatever, you know, whatever it might be so I think Another place for for designers to play in systems in interesting ways in the design of regulation regulations and policy Because it turns out I think that one of the problems with Is that they're designed from a kind of a policymaking perspective in which is they're designed once and assumed to be perfect right and they're passed as laws, so they're very difficult to change and And that doesn't work when you've got a very fast-moving environment and yet what design does is it iterates, right? If it's been if it's doing it well You know you build something see if it works change it and change it and change it and I think regulations need to be more like that And so I think there's something that Designers can definitely learn from regulators, but regulators can learn from designers. Yeah, that's good. There's another question over here. I think Hi A couple of questions one has to do with the business business design concept that you talked about Interested to understand a little further how it is different than you know vanilla consulting And whether it's the multidisciplinary aspect of it or just a complete mindset shift I think it's more a mindset shift than it is anything else And so we scour the the business schools of the world and the ex-consultants of the world and and Product management people and folks like that to find folks who who who are creative as well as experience of business and it turns out Are there any business school students in the room? Great, I can say what good that might be some online So I have to be careful. No, it turns out they're hard to find, right? Because you know business school education today is largely built on analytical thinking It's very hard for somebody who's essentially a creative person to go through business school I mean there are some that manage it and more and more are doing so and there are more and more design school Sorry business schools that are starting some kind of creative pieces to the curriculum. You think they're doing it. Well They're doing it You know, I think I think that there are some that are doing So, you know, I mean I think it so Stanford's got the advantage of having a d-school So that students from the business school can go and do d-school classes Thing there is they're doing classes with engineers with designers with medical students with they're getting this multidisciplinary experience as well as getting a design experience in an in an environment that's really well designed for it whereas Most other institutions haven't quite got that yet. Some of them are trying pretty hard But anyway, and there's clearly a very high level of interest in business schools around design thinking There are you know, many of them have statistic in one of your articles that there's a hundred and fifty NBA graduates every year and 15,000 design graduates or maybe it's 1500. I think it was 1500 1500 m so there's this phrase that was popular a few years ago Yeah, the magnitude of difference. Yeah, and this was actually that was a point that Roger Martin I do quite a bit work together and yeah, he made that point It's like we got a bit of a problem here, you know, if we we're gonna have to figure out how to take that 150,000 NBA graduates a year and and and turn them into designers. That's a lot of work to do but anyhow, so we scour pretty hard for for People with business experience who've also got creative confidence essentially many of them It turns out had done engineering degrees or design degrees or architecture degrees before they go into business school And that's why they've got it but But anyway, we look hard for those and then we bring them to IDO where this is the this is this I think of the We have one secret idea was methodologically We have other things. I think culturally they're important Methodologically is whatever background you come from whatever discipline you have when you get to IDO you're a designer, right? And so you you're expected to participate in the design process You're not you're not expected to do whatever it was, you know, so if you come and you were a scientist before we don't We're not asking you to run science experiments and idea We're asking you to be a designer if you're a business person We're not asking you to to to do what you used to do as a business person We're asking you to be a designer We're asking you to bring all that experience and those skills to the design process But we're asking you to be a designer and by the way, we expect you to go out and do design research We expect you to be in the workshop building prototypes We expect you to do all the things things and yes, it takes a while for people to kind of get a hang of that But ultimately what we get are people with this very rich set of experiences who also understand design then what are you looking for from Designers like I know I have a lot of students graduating in a couple weeks and they're all going to be sending their resumes You know What you don't only hire biologists, right? No, although we do hire a lot of those, too I'll come back to that From designers. I think well for one thing, you know, there are two kinds of designers in the world And and one of those kinds of designers are just not that interested in working in teams And then there are designers that really love working in teams and we we like the folks who like to work in teams We accidentally hire the others occasionally Generally don't thrive at IDEO because everybody gets to work in a team And you know for some designers that's frustrating and I understand why To try and tackle the kinds of things that we're talking about here I would challenge any individual designer to be able to have all the skills Certainly nobody at IDEO is smart enough to do that and I really don't think there are people out in the world It's fun enough to do that on their own So you've got to be able to you got to want to work in teams You've got to want to work with people who come from other backgrounds even if you're all using a design process I think we need from our designers them to be above average communicators And by communicator do you mean through visual means or just being able to have an adult conversation having adult conversations So I mean yes, I mean we expect designers to be great visual communicators Anyway, but but you have to be able to have you have to it's part of working in a team It's part. It's a part of working often with the most senior people in the most complex organizations if you can't kind of cut through everything and and and and create a good story and and and Clearly communicate what it is you're trying to do then you're unlikely to be impactful So we're looking for designers got a little bit more of that But you know other than that, I mean, I think we did we're looking for talented people And we're lucky enough that I think there's a talented person right here who would like to say something. Thank you I Come from a program at Parsons cost of cheating design and management and recently a question came up regarding this notion of Design thinking and what it is that we do Do we design for the present or are we designing for the future and I think These two tie into each other because if you can allocate those problems of every day essentially you're designing for a better future, right? but I'm interested in knowing a lot of the projects at IDO vary in different design companies and For example the infrastructure one that you just showed us. It's definitely for the future How does the research methodology vary from these projects that are designed for now? Where it's easy to come in contact where there are so many less variables than there is in the future, right and For designing such specific things for the future. So how does how does that? That's a really I think that's a great question because one of the things I've noticed both inside IDO and Out in the world in general is that as design has got more complex for instance as we went from that world of artifacts and objects To the world of user experiences that what I saw most designers doing is that they started to get closer and closer to the present And I've got a hypothesis as to why that is it's because we've got an ability to deal with only so much complexity And so when the user experience is a lot more complex than the object was it's a lot harder to also think about the future And so and so I think we know we see I mean, you know all of this wonderful so Sorry, but 20 years ago when I first started a little bit more than that when I started my career There was a time when you had people places like Xerox Park or Apple Producing these like scenarios of the future. There was one called the knowledge navigator, which was Instrumental ultimately in creating the iPad the iPhone and everything that we live with today, right that they produced in the late 1980s a video and a guy in the video don Norman was part of this kind of future it showed the convergence of communications and computing and Media and And it was a very important piece of work And I think it was possible to do that work at a time when we weren't trying to do a lot of other things I mean even though it was a it did look at the interaction and the user experience It was somehow a time when designers did more of that we sort of got out of the habit a little bit so Anyway, I'd like to get back into the habit of it because I think it's important work to do But there's also designers now looking at the negative implications of technology so the whole critical design area and design speculation that Looks at what could go wrong, you know, so I think your firm represents this very optimistic side of designing for the growing Capital everywhere and there's another community that is Looking at the potential Problems with all this. Yeah, and I love what people like Tony down at Fiona rabie do. I think it's incredibly Yeah, it's another story to tell as we ought to be Using design in as kind of complete way as we can and one of just in the way that art was acted It acted as a way of kind of critiquing The things that business and culture did so I think that design can play the same role and it helps I mean, I've The things I've learned or connections I've made from the work from for most students For instance in that department at the RCA, which I've been hugely valuable to me They did a project on aging a few years ago, which completely changed my whole worldview about how we might think about aging So I think that works really really important I'm not sure it's work in general that we could do inside idea very effectively I think it sort of has to happen on the outside. I can see your next enterprise is like mean idea I Mean we do do a little bit of that inside just to kind of but But I was gonna just come back to a little bit extension of that question is that I think as we go out into the future Then some of the sort of natural and easy things we do when we take a kind of a human-centered approach Which is go study users and see what they're doing today and see what we can learn has You got to use that in a very different way when you're when you're thinking about the future You and I think actually when we think about the future We actually have to rely a little bit more on the intuitions of the designers The design teams that are doing that work even if and hopefully they include researchers But but because you certainly not I mean as Steve job families famously said, you know You can't go and ask somebody about what they want in the future. It just doesn't work And I know that you can ask what they want in the present either personally I think you've actually got to go and watch behaviors and have insights from those behaviors And then do the hard work I guess people don't always know what they want. That's a bad way We're gonna take a couple more questions and So I have a very simple question then a more challenging question and the simple question is Employees IDO has and then the complicated question is how do you you know these ideas? For the future like automobility or something. How does that cream rice the top? Who chooses those ideas to work on and develop and how competitive is that and how do you get to that place? Because it takes a lot of energy to finally put a presentation together that you believe in for the future So how many you know, how is that finally done and how many of those do you have going? That's a more complicated question to answer than you you would know because like partly cuz I've done no idea How many we have going any of them, but we have seven so we have about 700 people at IDO And about half of them are on the West Coast and the rest are spread around the world in offices in Asia or Europe and the East Coast And then about another 50 inside idea org and then a few other little bits and pieces Those Work like that that all the mobility piece mostly kind of rise up out of passions and interests that In the company that like a casual Friday project or is that no it was a little bit more than that But it was a team based in Palo Alto couple of our quite senior senior folks But they were senior design directors. They weren't who have been interested in this work for a long time they wanted to find sorry pardon the pun a vehicle to Not only explore what this technology was like, but also really look at the craft of how you visualize the future One for that and they started work on it and got sponsorship time basically from From the team that the local team in Palo Alto and and they built it and And now we're all using it. So it was not a top-down kind of thing occasionally I will Find things that I'm personally passionate about like our move into social innovation and then ultimately idea.org or something that I Drove because I was pretty passionate and most people tolerate me doing some of that, but not a lot of it So it's pretty much mostly Kind of comes from the grassroots of idea Oh, and then it's triggered idea is you've always got to find somebody who you can make passionate about what your idea is And so everything goes through these iterations And so if you can get enough other people passionate about it You can work on it Then you will and then and then if you can get a few other people passionate about it So they actually want to go take it out into the world and maybe show it to clients and things Happen and then then ultimately it'll have some impact. We're we're if you know, if there's a if there's the The way I like to think of it is the sort of the Google world of how you do this stuff and the Apple world of how We do it and we kind of fall on the Google side of the equation a little bit I think which is more of a thousand flowers blooming than it or than it is one single vision for everything that's going to happen in the future I wish I was smart enough to do that. I wish somebody that idea was smart enough to do that But we're not so we rely on the fantastic talent We have across the company to think of interesting things to do and work on them Yeah, and how much they're willing to put their spare time hours into things and work over whatever in order to get things done Because we don't always make it easy Clients don't always make it easy when they've got deadlines and we have to actually kind of get paid for some of what we do So I've got this signal. We're going to take one more question and it looks like it's your question Thanks You briefly talked about Design thinking being introduced into university courses that aren't specific to design Which I think is great. I wanted to get your thoughts on bringing design thinking to young minds a little bit earlier. So like primary school What do you call it here We're very excited about that and one of the interesting things about the inner of our schools is we didn't And for this but the but the team that actually runs the schools It's a very bright team of education, you know education folks in in pru decided that they actually wanted to use design thinking one It's one of the kind of core set of values for their school. So I don't if you notice but in some of those pictures You'll see design everywhere right and they're actually set design projects to the to the kids in the school And they do these little clubs and all kinds of so they're doing it without any help from us we've one of the places where we We are one of us. We have an education practice at RDO based in San Francisco and Sandy Spiker who runs that and I know he's done some work here with the team here at the computer she helped support and create a Kindergarten level, I think it is a little older than that Competition that runs around the world that has millions of kids doing it now started in India So we but we've also been trying to figure out ways in which we can help teachers so We created something called design thinking for educators. It's a website another toolkit We do by the dozen if in doubt do a toolkit But but it's I think been quite effective It's it's it's really more aimed at helping teachers bring design thinking into their practice So that they can think of ways maybe to make the classroom a better environment or creative ways to to do Whatever they do, so it's not just intended for teaching design But like is reaching the teachers is a big challenge. Yeah, yeah And so so we're and we continue to explore ways in which we can bring design and design thinking to teachers Because we think they're very powerful agents, right? I mean if they're if they have creative confidence if they're think if they're thinking like designers It will be a natural thing for them to bring that bring that to kids But the Coupi Huot is really focused on design and education at the K-12 and I think I think maybe the institution That's any certainly anywhere in the United States. It's most focused on that from a design perspective So lots of good things happening here. Yeah come to our website And you'll see lesson plans and incredible programs that we do for our teachers all around the country and even the It's not as a big part of our mission is this K-12 and and beyond in design education Well, this has been amazing and I'm sure Others will come and ask a question privately up here But it's been so fun to spend the evening with all of you and with my hero