Most days, David Kelley rides his bike from the Palo Alto, California, offices of Ideo, the design and innovation firm he founded in 1990, to the Stanford campus, where he directs the university’s fledgling Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or d.school. The ride is about a mile, but to Kelley it’s getting shorter every day. Ideo and Stanford have long been “joined at the hip,” as Kelley says, but recently the intensity of their relationship has increased — not just because of the 18 Ideo designers currently teaching at the university, but because Kelley has led them in the shared service of a singular vision, which he calls “design thinking.”
Design thinking is a methodology, but it’s also a way of seeing the world: a cosmology, even a kind of gospel. Design thinking insists that “design” is as much a verb as a noun, a somehow as much as a something, a process as much as a product. As an idea, it’s landed Kelley on the cover of BusinessWeek, helped raise $35 million toward a new building for the d.school at the center of the Stanford campus, and guided Ideo in its award-winning designs of organ transport systems, hospital waiting rooms, the Palm V, and hundreds of other products, places, and experiences. In fact, Kelley’s twin perch—at the helm of arguably America’s most successful design firm and within the walls of one of the world’s most innovative universities—not only speaks to his influence in communicating the promise of design thinking, but is its source as well. Both in the academy and in practice Kelley is at the forefront of pushing design closer to the center of our lives—and using design to make our lives better. On a recent visit to Ideo headquarters, Dwell tried to keep up with Kelley’s kinetic mind
The whole reason that I think design is taking off on the wider scene—with our pictures on the covers of magazines, and the university willing to give me buildings and faculty, and so forth—is the belief that design-thinking methodology leads to new innovation. If you look at what the country’s flipped out about, especially if you talk to the businesspeople, it’s how the U.S. is going to maintain its economy. And the answer that we need to get more innovative, we need to be the one coming up with new and different ideas. For the first time in my life, it seems that they believe that our discipline is going to be the glue that [will] hold together all these different dispersed talents. I sound like I’m running for office! But diversity is what’s cool about the U.S. We’re not inherently anything, it’s just that we have many different viewpoints that we’re putting together, which allows us to come up with different ideas than if you have a more unified point of view.
Instead of feeling that you know it all, that you’re the expert in the subject, design thinking also means being humble and questioning it. Many of the people who are designing things today are “experts” which means they’re looking for ideas from that “expert” viewpoint. But design thinking is much more about going out into the world not having a point of view and just finding these latent needs that are obvious, but only when you look with no agenda. With design thinking we try to get in the right general area first rather than just accepting what the problem is. We’re more experimental and less calculating. It’s optimistic. We thrive on the creative challenges rather than the obstacles. And it’s more intuitive, or empathetic, or however you want to say it. All this ends up being really cathartic for people who do nothing but analytical thinking!
Oh, yeah! It’s really great. We’re using the same method [we use for our clients]: polling the students to find out what kind of projects they want to work on, mocking up things out of cardboard, funding different student groups to write magazines. We’re just getting a huge buzz going in all kinds of different directions. Then we’ll say, “This one’s taken hold—let’s grab it!” We call it “fast and light,” where we find a bunch of possible directions rather than going deep in any particular direction, until we see which is going to be fruitful. We’re not about analyzing things, we’re more about trying things.
They mainly want to do sustainability, health and wellness, K-12 education, and super-low-cost housing for the developing world. And that’s a big change from a few years ago, when they all wanted to be Bill Gates and rich. We’re applying design thinking to whatever the subject is. Our question to the students is, “What can design thinking do for [blank]?” So last year we said, “What can design thinking do for autistic kids? What can design thinking do for subsistence farmers in India? What can design thinking do for K-12 teachers?”
I went through it recently designing a home for my family. We were really saying, “Okay, let’s tell a story of a really wonderful dinner party and [ask] how’s the architecture going to allow this?” rather than designing a living room that nobody will go into. It’s all about life experiences. We need to look at our life experiences and enhance those, rather than enhancing our show of wealth. What do big white columns and fake Tudor mansions have to do with California? Smart people are figuring out that they have to redesign their lives to have better experiences, to enjoy themselves more.
Well, I’m a big gift giver. Except now I find what I’m doing is giving people experiences: taking everybody to a cooking school or to see Cirque du Soleil. And I find that people really like to get pictures of what they just did, and so I design them a little book. It’s probably what my mother did with sending a little Hallmark card as thanks, but what I do is take pictures the whole time, and make the book myself or use iPhoto. But I can’t tell you how much everybody loves having that kind of memento of the experience. We remember the experience, rather than remembering what we bought there.
