Hasta La Ideas

Photos by Bekka Palmer

By Chris Beatty

On Friday, May 16, Joel Towers, Dean of Parsons the New School for Design, and Tina Roth Eisenberg, the ‘Swiss Miss‘ behind Creative Mornings, welcomed David Kelley to speak at the New School’s newly opened Tishman Auditorium. Despite the early wakeup call, over 600 guests showed up for the largest Creative Morning ever.

Hailing (somewhat unsurprisingly) from California, Kelley is a founder of IDEO and the creator of the d.school at Stanford University. He began his talk by comfortably declaring that he was not going to present using any slides and that he enforces a no-slide rule for student presentations at the d.school.

Kelley is a natural storyteller came to industrial design with a background in electrical engineering. At first Kelley was mesmerized by the magical, “as if out of nowhere” process of design; however, in reality, he spent many of his early days toiling over beige computer enclosures for Silicon Valley tech firms. It was then that he realized that design was pigeonholed as an object-centric process that routinely neglected the needs of its users.

Through his design practice, Kelley began to address this by carefully mapping the experience of a person using the product. By stepping back and thinking holistically about the product, the problem could be reframed, contextualized, and ultimately simplified. At the core, it was this thinking that allowed IDEO to nurture a human-centered design process that put the user, not the product at the center of the design process.

Kelley with Tina Roth Eisenberg

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