Hasta La Ideas

Image courtesy of the UN Population Fund.
Article by Beth Comstock, Senior Vice President & CMO, GE.

According to the United Nations, today we celebrate the birth of the world’s seven billionth person. This is both awe-inspiring and terrifying. Awe-inspiring when we consider the new ways that technology will connect those seven billion people and the tremendous opportunity it creates. Terrifying in that it raises some serious challenges for society. How do we feed, clothe, treat, educate, and supply power to seven billion persons, all while not destroying this beautiful planet?

There has never been a better platform upon which to showcase the power of design thinking than this moment. The complexities of our expanding world require innovations that go beyond simply adding more to meet the growing demand, but that identify the true roots of the demand, consider the context surrounding the need and apply creativity and empathy to defining the solution. In short, design thinking is the answer to managing the growing global community.

The good news is that brilliant designers around the world are already hard at work creating these solutions. Consider—how would you house seven billion people, when two billion are surviving on less than one dollar a day? You’d need houses that were both safe and functional, and that cost only a few hundred dollars. Sound impossible? Patti Stouter, founder of Simple Earth Structures, proved us wrong. She recently won Vijay Govindarajan’s and Christian Sarkar’s $300 House Challenge with a home that would cost $293 to build.

Or, think about the challenges we face delivering water and sanitation, when already one billion people lack access to clean water. IDEO is doing some incredible work with the people of Ghana to create better access to sanitation services via portable, low-cost, functional toilets that will reduce spread of disease while preserving the dignity of the Ghanaian people.

And I’m not the only one lauding the power of design. Across industries we are witnessing an increased focus on solution-centered designs. Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum exhibit at the United Nations in New York City, is filled with real-life examples of how designers are addressing major world challenges. I encourage everyone to check out the broad range of powerful designs on display, such as the Millennium School Bamboo Project that addresses the large number of Typhoons in the Philippines and bePRO motor-taxi helmet for motorcycle taxis in Uganda.

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We are now face to face with wicked problems. Childhood obesity, climate change, aging population, literacy—the scope, implications and rate of change of today’s critical problems make them unlike anything we have faced before. Solutions to these wicked problems have the potential to change the way we live in the world.

To even begin to address such issues, we need people and organizations with the ability to innovate. Expertise in health care, education, and energy are not enough. Neither are superb analytical and creative thinking skills. Motivation, informed by beliefs in ability, is the critical ingredient we often ignore. Without believing in our ability to develop and implement innovative solutions that can address the world’s challenges, we will not even act.

The ability to act is tied to a belief that it is possible to do so. Without a firm belief in our potential to develop and implement innovative solutions that can address these wicked challenges, what we call innovation self-efficacy, good or even great ideas are of no use at all.

What is innovation self-efficacy? And how do we develop these beliefs?

Innovation is the intentional implementation of novel and useful processes, products, or procedures designed to benefit society. Despite anticipated benefits, innovation work can be unpredictable, controversial, and in competition with current courses of action. Innovators must develop, modify, and implement ideas while navigating ambiguous problem contexts, overcoming setbacks, and persisting through uncertainty. Innovation self-efficacy is our belief in our ability to take part in these types of actions. Innovation self-efficacy and innovative action are mutually reinforcing. Positive feedback from innovative action builds confidence, which leads to more innovation behavior.

Innovation Self-efficacy ↔ Innovation Action

Building on Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura’s framework, innovation self-efficacy develops in three primary ways: Social persuasion (being told you can do it), Vicarious learning (watching others do it), and Mastery experience (doing it).

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By Ultra7 (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

There’s this scene in How to Make It in America where Lake Bell’s character (Interior Designer) meets her college roommate, who is on her way to Africa for PeaceCorps. As a designer, someone in the commercial arts, it’s hard for me to feel like I am effecting social change by making expensive chandeliers. I’m tired of feeling like the best thing I can do for the world is to make this ________(noun) more ___________(adjective) so more people will be more apt to use it. How can I justify my work to a world of friends who are hell bent on making the world a better place?

Perhaps the best things we as designers can do for good is to put people to work. Designers make things. But don’t focus just on the object that comes in the box. Designers make jobs. We design cars and car factories make communities. People buy our things and we find people to make them. Graphic designers make books. People print books. Interior designers make, um, interiors. People build those. It is this creaTION process, not the creaTIVE process, which gives us so much power.

Take a look at the work of Thrive.

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By Cristina 1981, [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Over the last few years, design is increasingly seen as a tool for creating change. Through the work of many, including thought leaders such as Roger Martin and Tim Brown, design has become a key process and way of thinking that transcends disciplines and offers a roadmap for navigating and creating solutions. To both the like and dislike of many, business leaders, designers and non-designers continue to discuss design-thinking as the new pathway to innovation. Although design-thinking doesn’t replace good design, as Core77 columnist Helen Walters recently articulated, we do see a broader and broader scope of how the term “design” is being described. The expanding notion of design is captured by Core77’s upcoming design awards, which includes both traditional categories—web, interaction, graphic, interiors, transportation, services design—and emerging ones, such as research and strategy, social impact and design education. These conversations, books, articles, etc. collectively beg the question: “What is design?”

This is actually one of my favorite questions. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find the expanding definition of design terribly exciting. I used to say, “I don’t call myself a designer unless you change the definition of design.” When I was in school, Industrial Design was, for the most part, still confined to cereal boxes and toasters, but I knew that design, as a process and way of problem-solving, was applicable to far more than this. Don’t get me wrong, toasters and cereal boxes are well needed and well-designed ones add delight and productivity for millions, but I couldn’t help but to feel in my gut that design could be, would be and was, something more. So it is with great relief that those I admire started saying, “Yes, design is more. It’s design with a big ‘D.'”

However, those around me still don’t necessarily “get it.” When I tell someone I’m a designer, they either ask me to design them a website, or once I explain industrial design, they only half-jokingly ask me to design them an alarm clock. As a design educator, I see the design of a product or service as a means to learning the design process. If I’m going to be really honest with myself, I’m more interested in how a student learns to think than how good their renderings or prototypes end up. To impart this knowledge, I have to actually describe what design is in a way that encompasses the broader spectrum of how it is being discussed in the design world. One explanatory framework I have been using that seems to resonate with people is what I call the “Dimensions of Design.” It goes a little something like this:

2D: lives in the x-y axis including graphic design and images
3D: lives in the x-y-z axis with products
4D: when you add the human element you get systems, services, and experiences
5D: and when you apply this over time, you get the 5th dimension of strategy

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TDK Life On Record

Getting TDK as a client was like winning the lottery.

I’d like to say that design teams at Ziba form an instant emotional connection with every client we have, but that’s rarely true. The process of connecting is usually complicated. We’re always analyzing brands, trying to get what they’re about and find the core values that will influence our designs. It’s a lot of work.

But with TDK we knew right away, on a gut level. The designers on the project team grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s, so the name brought a flood of memories, of unwrapping a fresh cassette in front of the stereo, crafting a mixtape for some road trip, some friend, some girl. Or listening to Get the Led Out on 97.9 at 10 pm, waiting to hit record on that one song and complete the Led Zeppelin collection. We knew it was about music and sharing, and a tangible, tactile listening experience. We also knew that modern listening isn’t tactile at all and that TDK has the most badass logo ever.

TDK hasn’t enjoyed that kind of day-to-day cultural presence in the digital era. They made the world’s best cassette tapes, but cassette tapes got replaced by CDs, CDs by DVDs and today even DVDs are fading away. To a bunch of former mixtape junkies it felt like the biggest well of untapped potential ever. Cassettes were storage media, but they were also containers that held your passion for music. If TDK wanted to move their brand forward, they needed something that brought that passion to the modern listener.

The Cost of Digital
Modern music is digital, and most of us are fine with that. It lets you grab a song from the other side of the planet in 30 seconds, and fit 10,000 of them in your pocket. Nobody really regrets that ability, but it does have its costs.

Midway through the project we spent a few weeks visiting urban male listeners in Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, San Francisco and Manchester — music-obsessed cities. The guys we talked to weren’t necessarily musicians, but they had huge collections and loved listening to music and talking about it, more than just about anything. We called them Music Prophets.

Despite owning thousands of hours of music, Music Prophets are the first to admit they rarely sit down and really listen to it. This sense of detachment and semi-nostalgia showed up in interview after interview — no one actually wished they lived in the ’80s, but they missed the purity of experience you got out of analog. Even guys in their early 20s, too young to have recorded an actual mixtape, would talk about how unsatisfactory digital listening was.

We saw related evidence everywhere: kids on the street riding fixies, collecting vinyl, printing their own T-shirts — doing things the hard way, because it connects them with the experience and with other people. Music used to be harder to get and harder to play, but because of that we celebrated it. We listened out loud.

Analog was great because it was social, and because you could touch it. You couldn’t bundle a bunch of functions into a single screen back then, so everything was switches and knobs. You got this direct connection with the act of playing your music, whether it was carefully laying the needle on the spinning platter, or turning the weighted volume knob, or hearing the “thunk” when the tape drive engaged.

Boombox interface image: CC Flickr user Joseph Robertson

But it was also a pain. Anyone remember the confusing Tape Selector switch on your boombox? Metal II? Dolby EX? 35 different equalizer settings? As playback got more advanced there was more to control, and most analog interfaces were a complete mess. This is where the hierarchy and contextual control of digital really helps. Nearly anyone can figure out an iPod and most of the technology that connects to it.

TDK could be the first brand to bridge the gap between the good parts of analog and digital. Something warm and tactile but also precise and flexible. Over the course of our research we’d covered a whiteboard with images of analog and digital interfaces. Eventually we cleared a little space in the middle, wrote down the term “Digi-Log” and went from there.

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