>> Kirsten Wiley: So, good afternoon and welcome. My name’s Kirsten Wiley, and
then here today to introduce and welcome Warren Burger who is visiting us as part of the
Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Warren is here today to discuss his book,
Cad Monkeys, Dinosaur Babies and T-Shaped People, Inside the World of Design
Thinking and how it can Spark Creativity and Innovation. Great designers have learned
to maximize moments of clarity and creativity, turning ideas into innovative new
products and social networking tools. Today the best design thinking is helping to find
fresh ideas on how to meet basic human needs in developing countries, and is helping to
reinvent social services in general. If you approach entrenched problems with radically
fresh insights and solid design principles, you too can create progress. Warren is an
award-winning journalist who's written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ and
Wired, and is the author of Advertising Today, Nextville and No Opportunity Wasted.
He is also the creator of One, an acclaimed national magazine on advertising and design.
Please join me in welcoming him to Microsoft. Thank you.
[applause]
>> Warren Berger: Hi, it's good to be here. So this is the cover of the book as you
probably guessed. And I'll say a few words about that title later on, a little explanation of
some of those terms. But as you can see from the deck it's mainly about design thinking.
And that's what I'm going to be talking about today. In working on this book I--I'm not a
designer myself; I'm a journalist, so I was kind of an outsider and taking a journey into
the design world, and particularly kind of inside the heads of designers and this guy in
particular, inside his head. Bruce Mau is a very eclectic designer. I mean he designs, he
started as a graphic designer, but he ended up doing all kinds of designing interiors. He
gets involved in the design of cities. He basically designs almost everything, and he is a
great person to study in terms of how he approaches problems and how he takes on
design challenges. So he was probably my main guy; there were lots of others, I'll
mention a few today, but he was a guy I kind of wanted to focus on what he does in terms
of his approach to design thinking. I put a little trademark on there because that term is
actually becoming almost like a--I don't know if people here have noticed, the but it's
gotten to be really like a popular term in business these days. It's being used a lot.
It's the--you know Stanford University, Harvard Business School have kind of gotten into
this. The firm Ideo is promoting design thinking and it's really kind of getting around.
But you know, my challenge was first figuring out what it means, you know, because it's
an interesting term. There's a lot of different sort of academic definitions of it, and so
when you're trying to figure out what design thinking is you end up with definitions like
this one which came from Ideo, which is pretty heavy going. Design thinking is a
nonlinear approach to problem-solving that integrates what is desirable from a human
point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable by seeing
patterns in the environment and taking a human centered approach to engage people and
address problems. Which, you know by the time you get to the end of that definition you
basically need a cold beer, so I was looking for something a little bit simpler, that may be
more relatable, and after a lot of thinking I eventually came up with this definition. And
you know that's kind of, like, that's kind of what it's all about. And especially in terms of
the way I approach design thinking. It's just trying to figure out how designers approach
problems, you know. Do they, do designers in general do that differently from the rest of
us, and do they have some approaches that are kind of unique to them?
So that was--that was my quest, to sort of understand if and how designers think
different, and do they have unique ways of solving problems. I think that this is kind of
useful for everybody whether you are a designer not. If you're not a designer than
understanding design thinking can help you start to think like a designer, and there's a lot
of good reasons to do that. If you are a designer and you're already thinking like a
designer, it can be good to be able to articulate what you do, you know because a lot of
designers do certain things but they don't think about how they do them. They don't think
about the steps they go through and the processes and procedures. So it's good to, even
for designers, to understand and analyze their own thinking and be able to talk about it.
So in the book, as I mentioned, I studied lots of different designers, Yves Behar, Brian
Collins, Deborah Adler, Stefan Sagmeister, crossing a range of disciplines. Some of you
may know Yves Behar was one of the lead designers on the One Laptop per Child
Program, but he designs tons of really cool stuff. Deborah Adler redesigned medicine
bottles for Target in a really interesting way. Brian Collins does a lot of, just a lot of
different kinds of both experiential design, he design spaces, but he also does graphic
design. He designed Al Gore's environmental movement and his kind of logos. Stefan
Sagmeister just does a lot of really quirky interesting design, everything from album
covers to interiors. And as I got into it I, kept adding more and more designers and
talking to, you know, by the time I was done I probably talked to close to 100 designers,
crossing all kinds of disciplines, you know, from web design to product design to
basically everything you can think of.
So in doing that, one of the things I was trying to do is figure out, well, what do these
people have in common? I really started by looking at stories of how they design. You
know, and that was my starting point. And in the book there are a lot of stories about
how these individual designers solved the problem, the particular problem that they
might've been dealing with. Like this guy, Van Phillips designed the Cheetah Prosthetic
Foot. So in his case, you know, I tracked him down and found out his story about which
was he was waterskiing years ago, and he got sideswiped by a boat and the propeller
ended up cutting his lower part of his leg off, and he was in the hospital. Leaving the
hospital they gave him a prosthetic foot, you know, and he was just really dissatisfied
with it. He just said, you know, this thing can't--he was an athlete; he wanted be able to
move and he had this clunky sort of prosthetic foot, so he just said I need something
better than this, and that was the start of his career as a designer, because he had to design
it himself. And he ended up designing this Cheetah Prostatic Foot which has really
revolutionized the industry.
I mentioned earlier Deborah Adler redesigned prescription medicine bottles. You know
this is another great story about someone designing a problem just like Van Phillips,
designing a solution to a problem that was in their own lives. Like in her case her
grandparents were getting sick because they were taking each other's prescription
medicine by accident, because the bottles, they couldn't tell them apart. You know,
prescription medicine bottles all look the same. They’re in those little brown bottles and
they have the labels that nobody can read. So Deborah then took it upon herself to figure
out well how would you design medicine bottles that are easy to distinguish? She used
these color-coded rings for each member of the family, so you could immediately
recognize that something is your medicine. She changed the label so that they were flat
and easy to read instead of going around the bottle. She did all these things that really
were designed to, they just made sense. You know, they were the way that medicine
bottles probably should have been designed a long time ago, but nobody had done it,
nobody had thought about doing that for 50 years.
So this is the One Laptop per Child Project which I talked to Yves Behar about the design
of that and how they, you know, the challenges that they had to deal with in terms of
designing a laptop, and of course this is the more recent, a more recent iteration of it as it
started to move into a tablet form but, they just basically had to deal with the issues, you
know, how you design a laptop for kids in poor villages around the world where they're
not going to have the power needs, and it they’re not going to have--it has to be really
cheap and it has to be durable so that if it gets dropped on the ground, you know, it's not
going to break. So the design of that was really interesting challenge. And I looked at
how they did that. They actually did a great job on the product itself. I think in--we've
all heard probably stories about the One Laptop per Child Program and you know it had
mixed results as it got out there in the world. I think that there were issues of, you know,
when you create something like that, you design something like that, that's only the first
step, because then you have to figure out how do I get it out into the world? How do you
deal with the politics involved of, you know, getting this laptop into poor countries and,
you know, and that was a whole other set of issues that they probably were less
successful at that. But I think they were very successful at the design itself of the
product, and it was a really good product.
This was an interesting one. I came across a guy who, he designed something called the
universal nutsheller. And a very rudimentary device using a cylinder made of concrete
and then, a use of, spin it around and there's another concrete block inside of it. You drop
peanuts into it and it shells peanuts, and the reason this was really important, was because
when he was traveling around in Africa, he would, he went into a couple of the small, one
in particular, small African village and--maybe you should close that door, yeah. He
went into a small African village and he observed that the village was like really
dependent on the peanut crop and the women in the village were spending their entire day
shelling these peanuts by hand. And he said there was such a intense job that they were
like their fingers were bleeding, and they still couldn't keep up with the workload. You
know, so this device even though it's really, it sort of looks really rudimentary actually
changed, it changed that village dramatically. And because he designed it in a simple
way that could be replicated, it's really, it's just made out of concrete and some basic parts
that other people can design this or create other versions of this very easily. So because it
could be replicated, people in the village could make additional ones and in other villages
people could also make one of these. So it was really a very successful thing.
So basically, as I was looking at these different stories of designers creating all these
interesting innovations, one of the things I was trying to do is figure out, all right, what
do these guys have in common? You know, what, do they have a common approach that
they go through? Are there things they all do? And to me that was what I was really
zeroed in on. And I came up with basically there's lots of things designers do when
they're solving a problem. And it's going to be dependent on whatever it is they're
working on or what their discipline is. So you can't necessarily generalize across the
board, but I found that there were four things that innovative designers tended to do a lot.
They're almost like four characteristics or four steps. One is that, it has to do with
questioning. Second has to do with caring. The third has to do with connect. And the
fourth is commit. I recently wrote about this for the Harvard Business Review and they
dubbed this, they ended up dumping this the four phases of design thinking. I don't know
it’s like these are like the official four phases of design thinking. I just think that these
are four things that I observed designers doing a lot as they solve really complex and
difficult problems. And I'll talk about what I mean by each of those four things as I go
into it. But first I want to just mention a few of the, sort of the lighter things I observed
about designers.
Because designers really are, they're like a separate breed of people. Even across
disciplines, there’s some interesting connections between designers like, you know, they
have their own language, which is, which is really an interesting, an interesting language,
you know. It's got a lot of really funky and quirky terms. In fact that title that I'm using
is pulled from my own glossary of designer terms. Terms that I would hear designers
using all the time, which I found really fascinating and I think people love this stuff.
They love this terminology, even if they're not designers, they love these terms. They are
really interesting. My favorite is chunking. And I also like wayfinding. I also like
forgiveness, which is a really cool design term, about building forgiveness into whatever
it is you're designing. So you can--so someone, for instance in the case of the laptop
computer for kids, they told me that they had to design about four feet’s worth of
forgiveness into it, because kids would tend to drop it four feet—they’re about 4 feet high
and they would tend to drop it on the ground. So they had to build in enough forgiveness,
that it could withstand that. It didn't have to withstand a lot more than that, you know it
didn't have to withstand ten feet drop, but it had to be able to handle that four foot drop.
So anyway I love those terms. Another thing I noticed about designers is that, as a
species, they're very communal. They tend to get together and huddle together a lot.
They probably have more--there are probably more design conferences than any other
type of conference. I mean, designers just love to come together as a group and share
ideas and talk, which I think is really great. They also are competitive though, and
sometimes they can turn against each other. And so you see that, in particular, on design
blogs where they will sometimes really go after each other, and get into some really hot
and heavy discussions and arguments about design and the ethics of design and that sort
of thing. So I found that they’re also very--this is probably not surprising, but designers
are very obsessive about details. It's part of the nature of being a designer; that you have
to be sort of obsessed with details. And it made it sometimes difficult to work with
designers, as I was interviewing them, and they would be sort of obsessed with the details
of what I was going to write about them, things like that. But they also care about
important things like, one observation I made in my book is that designers care about
everything from the condition of the world. They care about the big issues but they also
care about like the kerning of type, you know. So everything, so nothing is either too big
for them to care about or too small. And caring is actually one of the, one of the big four
characteristics that I put up on the board a minute ago. It's the second one, but I'll start
with the first one, which is questioning.
I think questioning is, questioning is the first one because it's sort of the starting point, I
found for a lot of great design innovations and projects. I found that they, it's interesting
how many of them start with a designer questioning the reality that currently exists, and
asking questions that other people don't ask, for some reason. You know it's almost as if
designers see--designers tend to see reality a little bit differently from the rest, the rest of
society or the rest of the world. The rest of the world sort of sees reality and thinks that's
sort of a fixed condition. And designers see that same reality and think everything in it
can be changed, and everything in it can be reinvented or turned upside down. So it's an
interesting philosophy and, you know, it comes back to their ability to ask stupid
questions, you know. Basically like the kind of questions that when they get asked a lot
of other people will say that's ridiculous, that doesn't make sense. Why would you even
consider that as a possibility? Because we know that can't be done and we’ve been
through this already, and so why are you even asking that question? Those are the kinds
of questions designers ask a lot.
And you know like Van Phillips basically, as I said, Van Phillips was questioning the
idea of why can't they, a prosthetic foot, be flexible? Related to that, similar to that, I
also talked to Dean Kamen was one of the people I studied in the book. And you know
Dean Kamen told me that, an interesting story about this creation, the iBot. It all started
with him seeing a guy in a wheelchair, who couldn't get his wheelchair over the curb.
And he was just like really bothered about that, and just basically said, you know, in this
day and age why can't we have a wheelchair that can climb up over a curb and climb
steps? And that became like an obsession of his to design something like that. So it's just
really interesting, the Oxo people, who do the, you know the potato peelers and stuff like
that, they sort of started with asking stupid questions like, you know, why doesn't
someone make a better potato peeler? And in there--their competitors would never have
thought of even asking that, because the attitude would be, who cares about a potato
peeler? It's like this little two dollar thing that you know little metal thing in your hand,
who cares. Oxo was willing to ask that question, you know, what if somebody made a
differently, what if somebody actually made a good potato peeler that people actually like
to hold? By doing that they created a huge market for themselves. So I think it's really
interesting how that questioning, that ability to ask that question that no one else is
asking, is often sort of the hallmark of innovative design. I found that designers, they tell
this joke about themselves. How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? The
answer being, does it have to be a light bulb? So they will always turn the thing around
and question the assumption. And that's sort of the, an interesting characteristic.
This is also common among children. So designers are kind of like children in a way.
You know, because kids are always questioning, right? Kids are always saying, well,
why do it this way, or why do it that way? And it's very much a designer attitude. I came
across this clip I'm just going to play it, it's a one minute clip by comedian, and he was
talking about how his daughter does that as well. His young daughter asks those
questions all the time.
[video begins]
>>: [inaudible] papa, why can't we go outside? Well, because it's raining. Why? Well,
water is coming out of the sky. Why? Because it was in a cloud. Why? Well, clouds
form when there's vapor. Why? I don't know. I don't know any more things. Those are
all the things I know. Why? Because I'm stupid, okay, I'm stupid. Why? Well because I
didn't pay attention in school. I went to school but I didn't listen in class. Why? Because
I was high all the time. I smoked too much pot. Why? Because my parents gave me no
guidance. They didn't give a shit. Why? Because they fucked in a car, and had me and
they resented me for taking away their youth. Why? Because they had bad morals.
They just had no compass. Why? Because they had shitty parents. It just keeps going
like that. Why? Because fuck it. We’re alone in the universe. Nobody gives a shit
about us. I'm going to stop here to be polite to you for a second. But this goes on for
hours and hours and hours, and it gets so weird and abstract, at the end, it's like why?
Well, because some things are and some things are not. Why? Well, because things that
are not, can't be. Why? Because then nothing wouldn't be. You can't have fucking
nothing isn't. Everything is. Why? Because if nothing wasn't there'd be fucking all
kinds of shit that we, like giant ants with top hats dancing around. There's no room for
all that shit. Why? Oh, fuck you; eat your french fries, you little shit, God damn it.
[applause] Thank you very much everybody. Good night.
[video ends]
>> Warren Berger: Apparently, at the design from IDO, they have this policy called the
five whys, and I think there are other companies that are using this too. They sort of
encourage people to always step back and ask why in a series of five times, not quite as
many as that, but, you know, a series of five whys. Well, why are we doing it this way?
Okay, well, why that? Well, why that? Well, why that? And it's kind of interesting. It
gets at the essence of, a lot of times it breaks down something to sort of its basic
fundamental roots. So, this is a challenging, constantly questioning because I think you
can only do that if you are a pretty optimistic person. Because you have to be willing to
believe that there is an answer out there. Otherwise you better not be raising all these
questions. And Bruce Mao has this quote that he likes to use, “a designer does not have
the luxury of cynicism.” Basically, designers are hired to solve problems, and so they
have to believe that there's always a solution, and always a better solution. Otherwise
they are in trouble. Nobody wants a cynical designer. And I was discussing this at one
point with the, a big design guy who runs the Rotman School in Toronto and he's
basically saying, well, why do designers, why are they so optimistic and why does it
seem like designers always believe that they can solve any problem, and they can find a
better solution than the one that exists already? Does that mean that they're insane or
what is that all about? And he basically said, he had a really nice answer for that. He
said that designers and innovators, in general, successful innovators, they believe they
can change reality because they've already done it, like in the past. And so it becomes
self reinforcing, and he referred to this as the upwards spiral of problem-solving. Where
the more you solve problems, the more you believe you can, and the better you get at it.
And it's kind of an interesting dynamic. And I think these really successful designers and
innovators, they have this level of confidence that really serves them well. And that
helps them ask all these questions; they're not afraid to.
The second thing, I want to move onto a second characteristic after questioning. So you
sort of--these people are really good at questioning what exists. I also discovered that in
the design world there's a real emphasis on empathy and observing. In the book, I refer
to this as caring. Designers actually care about what's going on in the world around them
in a way that is interesting and kind of important. It connects to their success in an
important way, because design is kind of rooted in problem solving, but in order to solve
problems you have to first care about the problems in the first place, and you have to care
about people who are having the problems and the nature of the problem. It kind of is
part of the history of design really because as I was studying, as I studied and look back
at the history of design over the years, it's interesting to see how design has been
intertwined through the years with all these movements that are very utopian, like
utopianism, or, you know, modernism, socialism. Designers have been sort of entangled
with all of that with the idea of sort of creating a better world and how can we make
things better? And how can we solve the problems of the world, how can we fix it?
So they have this whole history of caring about, about what's going on in the world
around them. But the other reason this is important is just, on a basic level, you know the
more you observe people, and really observe them well, I mean really paying attention to
people, the more you see what they lack in their lives, in their daily lives in their routines
and work habits. You see what they're missing, right? And then every time you see that
it's a potential opportunity, it's a potential design opportunity, because it means there's
something there that needs to be solved; there's a problem that needs to be solved. And
the extent to which designers go around and do this is interesting. I mean, there's one,
one design researcher for Nokia who said this line “I'm like an authorized stalker.” And
it's because he, their group, their group of design researchers will just follow people
around, you know kind of live in their kitchens and do all this stuff just to see how people
are using their cell phones or whatever it is. They’ll just kind of really observe the
behaviors of people in an interesting way.
And, yeah, I found this to be pretty, you know, interesting to me because I used to write a
lot about advertising, and in advertising they watch people, as well, and they study
people. You know, they use a lot of, sort of psychological studying of people in focus
groups and so forth. And--but I-- the difference to me, a profound difference between the
way advertising studies people and the way designed does, has to do with the intentions
of the people doing the studying. You know, I was always a little bit put off by the fact
that when I would observe advertising studying people, it's like they were trying to figure
out what our weak spots are, our psychological weak spots so that messages could be
targeted at those, at those kind of weak areas. And then when I studied designers, I found
a very different attitude. It's like they were studying people to figure out what was
missing in their lives. So that they could fill a hole in their lives, in terms of giving them
something that they might really need. So it's a much more positive sort of spin on
observing people and studying people. And I think it leads to interesting little design
innovations as well as big ones. But the little ones can be really interesting, like I was,
Oxo, that I've mentioned already, the house wares company, that's one of the companies I
study because they do such great design, and they told me that when they were designing
a measuring cup, they just like would watch people. They would watch people using a
measuring cup in their kitchen. And they would just learn these things that don't come
out of focus groups. Like if you ask someone in a focus group about measuring cups,
they would probably say, yeah, my measuring cup’s fine, you know, it measures the
liquid; that's all I want it to do.
But when they watched people, they saw that, you know, to use a measuring cup, because
the measurements are on the side, people always had to bend over sideways and see the,
and it's a real pain. And that's the kind of thing that only comes about through watching
people, and then that led them to realize, oh well, why don’t we the measurements visible
from above, so that someone doesn't have to bend over and look at the side of the cup to
see how much water is in it? So little things like that come out of the idea that you have
to sort of go out to the world and watch people and you have to care enough to do that
So that was sort of a second revelation to me. The questioning, the caring and then the
third thing that I thought was kind of interesting that I found designers had a tendency to
do, is what I talk about in the book is connecting.
And I'm not talking about connecting socially here; I'm talking about connecting that
goes on in your brain, mental connections. Designers are really good at making
interesting mental connections in their minds, and that connecting, that ability to connect
allows them to come up with really fresh ideas. And I just--the interesting thing is like
why are designers good at that? I think probably other people are good at it too.
Engineers can be good at it; lots of people can be good at it. Designers happen to be
really good at it, and I started to look at and question myself, what is it, why are designers
good at that? What is it that enables them to do that? That gets into some pretty heavy
brain science about how we make connections in our brain and in our subconscious, but
basically at the most basic level what designers and innovators in general do is that they
seem to open themselves up to a wide range of possibilities. And most people don't do
that. Actually most people when they're trying to solve a problem are really focused and
looking straight ahead and they're very logical. And they're also looking in kind of
related areas. So let's say if you're an accountant and you're trying to solve a problem
you're going to look at what other accountants are doing, and you're going to read the
accountant magazines, right? What the innovative designers I found is they look all over
the place. And they're taking ideas really out of left field, and then they're bringing them
back into their area to try to solve a problem.
So going back to Van Phillips who designed the--this is sometimes referred to as lateral
thinking, right, the ability to sort of, to think of ideas, to think sideways, you know think
of ideas that seem to be unrelated then connect them. Going back to Van Phillips, the
guy who designed the prosthetic foot, I thought as I was studying his process it was really
interesting because he was making all these unusual connections. Like he was studying
the way a cheetah, the legs of a cheetah move, the muscles, the way the tendons contract.
He became fascinated with that. At the same time he was studying the dynamics of a
diving board, the spring mechanisms and the spring dynamics of a diving board. And at
the same time he was studying metal in a circular shape, and this all came about because
his father, when he was growing up, had an ancient Chinese sword that was C shaped,
and he was kind of fascinated that you could have this really strong metal sword that was
in a C shape. Somehow be connected all these things and all these things ended up being
hugely important in his final design, which that's Van on the right running with the
cheetah prosthetic, and this is an Olympic athlete, Oscar Pistorius, who used two of these
and competed at an Olympic level.
But, again, it’s just really interesting, the ability to sort of pull together these, these
unrelated ideas and influences, and then figure out how to connect them and make them
work. And that seemed to be one of the hallmarks of the designers I studied, very good
synthesizers. They synthesize the bits and pieces together. This is really important, I
think, because anyone who's in the business of innovating or developing something new,
I think there's a tendency to think as human beings we think that to create something new
we have to invent something from scratch. Like something that's just, you know, such a
radical departure from anything that exists. And to me, at least, it's liberating to think
that a lot of the great creations are actually sort of taking what already exists and putting
it together in a fresh new way. This is the way one designer expressed this to me, there
are no completely original ideas anymore. It's a matter of connecting existing ideas in
new ways. And I agree with that. I think that there are probably completely original
ideas, but I think more often it's the second thing and it's, and that's, kind of, that's good.
You know, that means that's more possible. The second thing is more possible than the
first, in my mind.
There's another designer in the book who uses this term, smart recombinations, to
describe what we're talking about. And really it's about taking, connecting A+ B and
coming up with a brand-new C. And in the book I have lots of stories about people doing
that and including just everyday designers, people designing small quirky little things
where they put two things together. I came across this woman who had trouble waking
up in the morning. She would, she would basically do that classic thing where her alarm
clock would go off and she would switch it off and go back to sleep. And so she was
trying to solve this problem through design and she, she ended up with this thing called
the Clocky, where she, she designed an alarm clock that had wheels on the side of it, so
that when it would ring and when it would go off in the morning, it would roll off the
night table and roll way while she was trying to turn it off. And so she would have to get
up out of bed to chase after it and it ended up waking her up. This is now actually a very
successful product. and it's in the Museum of Modern Art Design Store.
But it's just really interesting to look at these kind of, the ability of design to do these sort
of smart recombinations and match ups. I think that's becoming, that's becoming more
important in today's world. I think that, you know, we kind of live in a mash up culture.
You know, on the Internet, mash ups are huge. And so that ability to figure out how to
connect things in interesting ways, it's even affecting my field, the book industry. You
know one of the best-selling books Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is a really
interesting smart combination of Jane Austen and zombies. Who would think that you
could put those two things together and get a bestseller? And now the guy has a sequel,
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.
But, you know, it's just an interesting way to approach problems. I did, in analyzing this
I talked to one designer, Stefan Sagmeister, a really good graphic designer. And he, he's
really big on this whole idea of smart recombinations and combining ideas. And I talked
to him about how you do that I mean. A lot of it does happen in your self-conscious, you
know, when you're taking a shower, you know, so the connection happens. But he said
that he does exercises to sort of encourage himself to make mental connections and
mental smart recombinations. Like he did one while I was with him in his office. He
basically said, okay, so let's say I have to design a lamp. And as an exercise, he said, I'm
going to take something in this room that I see, and he looked around the room and there
was a picture of a fish. And he said now I’m going to work on the possibility of creating
a lamp that has something to do with the fish. And he was, he went through all these
iterations and sketches and stuff. By the time he was done, he actually had something
pretty interesting.
He said this is a possibility. I might actually pursue this. But he had something where
the scales of the lamp, moved with the heat, and it was a very interesting idea. But it just
said, he said, he does this thing a lot because it's a good exercise for your brain to realize
that you can connect things. You can force your brain to make these kind of random
connections, and it can lead to really interesting ideas, or take you in a really interesting
direction. So that ability to do that is big for designers. I think it's one reason why
designers are also good at that, is that they happen to have very eclectic minds. A lot of
the designers I interviewed and talked to our people, they’re big readers they’re filmgoers
they’re big, they just absorb, they absorb tons of culture and tons of information. When I
interviewed the designer Paula Scher, at Pentagram, her partner is a great designer named
Michael Beirut. And the, oh, that’s Stefan Sagmeister’s work there. He designed Lou
Reed album cover; it's pretty cool.
But this is a line about Michael Beirut, the Pentagram designer; Paula Scher said his brain
is a compendium. He absorbs everything and then uses what he needs at the right
moment. And I think that kind of sums up that whole idea of how that connection stuff
happens. So that's the third thing that I sort of focused in on. Designers question, they
care, they connect, and then there's a forth thing that they do that kind of interesting, and
that is they commit. And what I mean by that is, you know, when most of us talk about
ideas where, it's basically that, it’s all talk, right? And a lot of times the ideas disappear
into the, into the atmosphere. Designers by habit and by training are conditioned to put
their ideas into a form, as quickly as possible. So it means that sometimes it may be as
basic as doing sketching. You know they, designers are like, like compulsive sketchers.
And if you have a conversation with a designer, which I was doing a lot, interviewing
them, they will sketch as you're talking to them. And to try to explain something to you,
they will sketch it. It's almost like it becomes a language to them. But it's more than just
a habit; it's something that is key to their success, because that ability to sketch ideas and
give form to ideas, what it means is you are immediately making an idea real, instead of
just being words. It becomes something people can see. It becomes something that can
be passed around.
It kind of gives life to ideas and designers don't just sketch, they build, they create these
funky little prototypes, they may do digital prototypes. They may do prototypes that are
made out of cardboard and scotch taped together. They’ll make a prototype like in any
form you can think of. And, and they do it quickly and they do it a lot. So they're not
holding back. And I think that kind of becomes a key thing that innovators in general are
people who want to innovate in general can learn from, if they're not doing it already they
should be doing it. They should be putting their ideas into some type of a form as
quickly as possible, and then getting those ideas out there circulating even if it's just to
the person in the next office, or your friend, or whatever. That is kind of, you know,
that's kind of how these things happen.
The designer, one of the designers I interviewed in the book, Brian Collins, had this
phrase that he liked to use, design is hope made visible. And he wasn't talking about Bob
Hope; that was my addition to that. But what he means by that line, design is hope made
visible, is that design basically, designers have the ability to show us the future. They
have the ability to show us things that don't exist yet in some kind of a sketch a
rudimentary form or prototype. And by doing that, they’re kind of making the future
visible. They're making a possibility that doesn't exist yet, visible to us. And it's a nice
idea; it's a nice thought. And I think it's something that, you know, probably we all
should live by that idea of making hope visible. If we want to create change, we have to
first make it visible to people, and we have to allow people to be able to touch it, and
think about it and tinker with it.
And one of the things that I find about this, when you do this, you have to have a bit of
courage, because again, it's sort of similar to the stupid questions thing. You have to be
kind of courageous to ask stupid questions, because someone’s going to tell you it's a
stupid question, and you have to be willing to take that, when they do it. And in the same
way, if you do a lot of sketching and prototyping of your ideas, you have to be willing to
take the heat of the fact that a lot of prototypes are flawed and they don't do their, or
sketches are rough and the idea’s not developed yet. So you're going to, chances are,
someone's going to tell you, this doesn't work, you know. This prototype doesn't work
because I'll tell you why, XYZ, it doesn't work. And that means that to me designers
have to be really comfortable with accepting failure on a constant basis. And, in fact, I
talk in the book about the art of failing forward.
So it's an attitude that I found is really, really strong among designers and that is basically
to not see failure as failure. Which is really important, the good designers I'm talking
about. The really innovative ones, they do not see failure as failure. They see it as part
of an iterative process where you, each failure sort of teaches you, you know, what works
and what doesn't work, and it kind of brings you one step closer to a workable solution.
Van Phillips, the guy who did the prosthetic foot, you know, he told me that when he was
designing that, he must've done like, I don't know, hundreds of prototypes. I mean he did
so many prototypes of that foot that we saw there, and he would actually go out and run
on the prototype himself, and it would break. You know, every time it would collapse
under him and he would fall on the ground and, you know, not a great situation. And I
said to him, you know, isn’t that discouraging when you, like, you’re designing a foot
and it falls apart and then you fall down? And his attitude is like, no, absolutely not. I
totally, that's part of my process. I expect things to break. And as soon as they break, I
figure out why they broke, and that's, you know--I thought it was interesting and I think
it's something, what I've been talking about in the book as I talk to, and as I talk to people
about the book, in the business world, I've been talking to people about this, that I think
in the business world today, all of us, not just designers, but all of us have to become
rapid prototypers. Like if you're in any, almost any business you can think of, it is seems
to be going through a lot of change now.
And it seems to be--the business world seems to me, more than ever before, as in kind of
an experimental, experimental mode. People are having to reinvent what they're doing.
They have to figure out, how does what I do work in today's climate and with today's
technology? So becomes this process of reinvention. And it means basically if you're
going to be reinventing and innovating then you have to be comfortable with the
prototyping and the failing. The two seem to go hand-in-hand. Somebody described it as
a test and learn environment; that's what we're living in, in the business world right now.
Everything is test and learn. I think technology people know this already. It's nothing
new for technology people, but it's really new for lots of other kinds of businesses. You
know, in packaged goods businesses or companies in general, I don't think there used to
working that way. I think they’re used to developing products and perfecting them
before they ever show them to the world, and then when I think they got the thing perfect
they pull back the curtain and show it to the world. But that way probably doesn't work
as well now, and I think in that we’re in a rapid prototyping model for just about
everyone.
So just to sum up the four things that I observed designers doing, they question by asking
stupid questions. They care enough to find out what people actually need. They connect
ideas that seem unrelated, smart recombinations. And they commit to bringing ideas to
life through visualization and prototyping. And part of that is they’re willing to fail
forward. What's interesting about this model I've been sharing with various companies,
GE, Procter & Gamble and a few others. It's a pretty simple way to talk about this idea of
design thinking that I introduced at the beginning of this, and which can be a really
complicated and jargony idea that people have trouble getting their handle around. But I
find that if you break it down into a few simple steps, all of a sudden there’s some clarity
there. Oh okay, that's what we mean by design thinking. It starts to make a little more
sense. So this is not the only model certainly for design thinking and if you went to IDO
or you went to Stanford University you would, they would have a different, tell you that
design thinking is something different from this. But I think that this is a, this captures
the essence of it in sort of a very, very fundamental and easy accessible way.
And I think it touches on what a lot of companies are doing right now, are having to do.
They're having to question, you know, the basics. What business are we really in today?
You know, what do we have to do to survive? How do we, do we have to reinvent
everything? Sort of that ability to question has never been more important. I think the
ability to care and figure out what people actually need. You know, I don't think
companies have the luxury anymore of foisting things on people that they don't actually
need and then assuming they can advertise the hell out of it, and get you to buy
something you probably don't really need. I think that's, less of a possibility than it used
to be.
The ability to connect ideas in fresh ways and the ability to prototype and experiment and
fail forward. One of the things, in the book, I looked at a particular project that I found
really interesting is the Nike, the Nike Plus system where they connected, they connected
the iPod to the Nike shoe so that runners could keep track of their running, their running
programs, and it's been, that's been really successful for Nike. It caused their market
share to just like, their global market share to really jump up. And I found it interesting
that, you know, if you broke down, you deconstructed the process that led to the Nike
Plus that they went through, they went through those design thinking steps. I mean they
really started by asking some really fundamental almost stupid questions like, what
business are we really in? You know, and maybe we're not just about sneakers. You
know, maybe we’re not just about selling footwear; maybe we're really about something
that has to do more with the lifestyle of the customer and sort of figuring out just what
that person really needs, in a much more holistic way than just a shoemaker would
usually think about it.
And then in order to get into that market they had to do, they had to care they had to do
tremendous ethnography and sort of empathetic research. And I talked to some of the
researchers on it and they were just, they were going out there in the field, and watching
how runners track to their information, and how runners used technology and became a
big part of it and then in the end I think they ended up with a smart recombination. You
know, they ended up with a iPod and a chip in a shoe and that ended up being something
that was putting together things that already existed in a new way. So I think lots of
businesses can sort of learn from this. I think what we're seeing now is business schools
like the Harvard Business Program are getting into design thinking. They’re, they’re
realizing that, you know, MBA students need to start to think this way little more. You
know, because MBA students have been very trained to be very analytical and very
straight-ahead in their approach and they need to sort of adopt some of these ways of
thinking.
So I'm also interested in how this relates to the education world. I started to think about
that a little bit. In other words, you know, design thinking, maybe it's not just important
for business students or professionals in the business world, but maybe it's important for
kids. And there's a number of people looking at this already and I actually came across
an interesting, an interesting experiment called the marshmallow experiment. And there's
a couple of designers involved in this, and they took a bunch of young kids and they gave
them spaghetti sticks and string and marshmallow, and the test was they had to build the
tallest structure they could without it falling apart in a certain amount of time. Now the
interesting thing is they also did the same test with Harvard MBA graduates, and guess
who did better? The kids, the kids were better. They were better at experimenting they
were better at putting things together; they were not afraid to fail, they were not afraid to
build something and let it fall down. So they were, they were actually better at this while
the Harvard MBA guys, you know, kept arguing about who was in charge of the project
and stuff like that. But also one of the people involved said that the MBA students also,
they just didn't experiment as much. They’re attitude was we'll figure it all out before we
do anything and then we'll build it. And so what they would do is they’d figure it all out,
they’d build it and it would fall apart. And then they were out of time.
So it's an interesting thing. It's something I'm probably going to be pursuing in my next
book, the value of this way of questioning and experimenting and this kind of stuff as we,
in our educational system. Because I think right now we teach kids not to question.
Basically our current education system is based on memorizing answers. It's not about
asking questions. And so I think it's, and we're not real big on teaching kids how to
prototype, and how to make models of things and try them out and see if they work and
then if they break. Instead we sort of teach kids that the thing, again it's like business,
you know, the thing have to be perfect before you show it to the world. Before you turn
in your paper to the teacher, everything better be just right.
So I think it's a different way of teaching kids to think, and I think it's going to be a big
issue. I think it's already being talked about. I think it's going to get bigger, especially
now that, you know, Obama has sort of said we have to innovate. You know we have to
become an innovation nation, right. So he's basically put out this call to everyone saying,
you know, innovate now. And we need to think about what it is that's going to prepare
people to do that, and what's going to teach kids to think like innovators, so that they can
do that. And so anyway I see it as like this idea of design thinking is crossing over from
the business world to education to social problems, because you solve social problems
using some of these methodologies too. So it leads me to the conclusion that since this
affects everyone and probably every person in the world should buy my book. But, and
on the title of that book I actually started out with a different title, but we ended up using
this one. And now everyone seems to be asking me about the title because it's got those
quirky terms in it. So we designed a little film from my website which I'll close with and
this kind of explains it.
[video begins with music]
>> Warren Berger: A lot of designers are T-shaped people; I think it's kind of interesting.
This is my website, glimmer site where if you are interested in some of the things I've
been talking about and design thinking, what people can learn from the ways designers
think, a lot of it is broken down on the site into a lot of shorter articles and shorter bits,
and kind of interesting. And it's basically my contact info if you ever want to get in
touch. And that's about it and I'd be happy to take any questions anyone has, or sign
books if you want. Yeah?
>>: [inaudible] whether there are any engineers [inaudible] into education; have you
done this same study on engineers, or are you planning to?
>> Warren Berger: I haven't, but I do think that there's a little bit of crossover with
designers and engineers. And, in fact, I think some of the people that I studied could be
considered engineers, like Dean Kamen is probably as much an engineer as he is a
designer. And so I think that, you know, the terms, there is a fair amount of crossover
there. I've heard Designers say that, you know, they think of what they do as, on a more
creative level than engineering. I mean they think, and I don't know how true that is, but
they think of engineering as being much more focused on problem solving in a very
practical way, and designers see themselves as problem solving but adding this sort of
aesthetic level or this artful level that maybe engineers are not as concerned with. That's
the distinction they tend to make. I don't know that that's true. I think that engineers can
be thinking along those lines too while they’re solving a problem they may also be
thinking about how to make it the coolest thing or the best thing possible.
So not sure where the line cleanly comes down between the two, but I would say that a
number of the people in the book, Phillips, the guy who designed the prosthetic foot, I
mean he's an engineer too. I mean he's probably both, a designer and an engineer. So I
see a lot of crossover there. And I also see crossover with inventors. You know like, at
what point do you call some of these people inventors as opposed to designers? A lot of
them are inventors and you could say anyone that creates something new is an inventor,
right? But I like to call them designers because, I just think the term design is more
accessible, and if you talk about engineering and inventing, a lot of people are sort of put
off by that, and feeling that it's not accessible to them that they have to be somebody in a
lab coat, you know, to do it. And I think design, everyone thinks they can be a designer.
So I wanted the book to talk, to be accessible to people and so that's, I think that's also
part of why I probably focus more on design. People just loved the idea of design; people
are just sort of drawn to design. So, yeah?
>>: Why did you change the title from Glimmer?
>> Warren Berger: That was the publisher’s idea. I think they were going for more of a
younger demographic now, and now that it's out in paperback, and I think they're going
for, the college market. And they wanted something that was just a little funkier maybe.
And so they wanted to feature some terms that were sort of quirky terms. And the idea
behind Glimmer though was, I actually liked Glimmer, as a title. And that came from, I
was looking up definitions of design, and on the Internet there was a definition, it was
actually anonymous and said design is the glimmer in God's eye. And I, I just thought
that was an interesting definition, but I also, it kind of got me focused on that word
glimmer. And then I think glimmer is an interesting word. Glimmer is about potential,
like when we talk about glimmer we talk about the glimmer of hope, glimmer of
potential, the glimmer of possibility. And all that seemed to be, lined up nicely with
design. Because design is also about what you can do, what you might be able to do, or
what the possibilities are. So I kind of took that term and I ran with it and then in the
book I used, I referred to the designers in the book as the Glimmerati, you know. I used
it a lot. I talked about glimmer moments, as being the moment when you maybe start to
see an idea in your brain; you see this glimmer of an idea. So I liked the term and I used
it a lot, but they just ended up feeling like, well this might be a little bit more catchy with
the college crowd. So, yeah?
>>: I was wondering if you could explain a little more of how you plan to evaluate the
value of this [inaudible].
>> Warren Berger: In the education world? I'm still sort of thinking about that. The first
thing I have to do in the next generation of this book, which I think I'm going to do, if I
do it, is I have to take each of those four steps, the question, care, connect and commit,
and I have to go deeper on each of them. Because right now it's one thing to say these are
four things to do. These are four good things everyone should do, but I think to really be
effective with this, I need to talk about how to you question, how do you get really good
at questioning? How you get really good at observation? What are the secrets to it?
Well, the people who do it really well, what are they doing? And then, you know, how
do you get good at prototyping? What can we learn from people who have prototyped all
their lives about how to make a prototype really well? So I want to go through each of
those four steps, that's part of it. And then part of it is also to talk about, you know, once
we understand how these four things are done, can kids learn it as well as adults? And I'll
probably talk to educators about that. I'll talk to people who are involved in the education
system and how you reinvent education. So yeah?
>>: So maybe [inaudible] educational world [inaudible] to deploy this.
>> Warren Berger: Yeah, possibly. I think that would be good. Although it's really hard,
you know, a lot of people have ideas about what we should do with education and it's
really hard to change education you know because the system is, you know, the system is
very entrenched, and it's nice to think we can and maybe we should. I think the research
is showing now that our kids are, in the US, are falling behind on creativity. And that's
the first time that's happened in a long time. And so I think maybe that is going to scare
people into thinking that we need to finally take this industrial revolution school system
that we have, which was really invented for a different time, you know, and think about
some changes to it. But it's going to be hard.
>> Kirsten Wiley: Let's just do one more and then people can go up and ask a question,
or they can come up and get their books signed.
>> Warren Berger: Okay. Someone have one more?
>>: Okay, I have one. I'm wondering in your research in talking to people if you
[inaudible] culture design thinking or innovation in a grassroots style because, you know,
[inaudible] design thinking books and then, you know, once an individual says yes, you
know, what can we do to sort of influence others around us to that same way of thinking
and that same [inaudible].
>> Warren Berger: Yeah, to me one of the key things is the language that's used. And
that's why I was, I talked a lot about the language that's used to describe it. And, you
know, the language I've come up with here is pretty simple and I'm not suggesting that
that's the only way to talk about design thinking, but I am saying that the way it's being
talked about is not very good, right now, by the academic world and by the design world.
It's really jargony and it's really clunky; it's like that definition I read at the beginning.
There's a lot of discussion of design thinking right now that if you're not really steeped in
it, you get turned off by it, as soon as you see the language and the way it's being talked
about you just kind of go. It kind of just puts a distance. So I think the first thing that, to
encourage design thinking and--there's a lot of people who are behind this now and think
it's a really important thing. And I think in order for them to push it forward into the
mainstream and get more people excited about it, the first thing they have to do is clarify
it and make it accessible to people. And once you kind of understand it, it is exciting and
it's interesting, and you can see all kinds of possibilities, but you have to get past that
barrier that people have of like saying this is not for me; this is for some design techie, or
this is for some college professor, or it doesn't relate to my world. So I think that's the
first thing is overcoming that and then you go from there. And I think once people get
excited about it, they will form their own communities and their own cultures around it
and, you know then it will start to spread in companies and elsewhere. It already is. I
mean a lot of companies are embracing it. But I think it it's a small, small universe of
companies that are even talking about this. And there's plenty of room for other
companies to get on board if it becomes accessible to them.
>>: Thank you
>> Warren Berger: Okay thank you.
[applause]