Hasta La Ideas

Bruce Nussbaum is a luminary in the business and design fields, as well as a professor at Parsons the New School for Design and an occasional contributor here at Core77. A year-and-a-half ago, Bruce famously declared that design thinking was dead. We had the chance to sit down with Bruce and see how his thoughts on design have evolved since then.

Core77: How has your thinking about design thinking changed in the last year-and-a-half? Now you’re hearing business professors talk about design thinking as the new thing and a year and half ago you said it was dead!

Bruce Nussbaum: Well, that’s what happens when you’re there at the beginning of a concept and you live through it, you see it mature, and you believe that it is now a wonderful foundation for something else. Then you come to a place like Harvard where they’re sort of discovering design and embracing design thinking. My reaction to that is that it’s wonderful because for this situation, for this time, for them it’s great that they’re understanding the power of design and what design can do, not just in terms of objects, but in terms of relationships, experiences and education. For here, it’s great. For those of us who’ve been inside, we’re trying to push the envelope and move forward and Harvard will embrace that too as time goes on.

Does this mean that design thinking is enduring? Or that there’s kind of a lag time between these concepts emerging and their adoption down the road?

Yes, well, government is just beginning to adopt design, much less design thinking. But there are institutional lags, cultural lags, there are all kinds of forces at work. There’s the force of fad. I remember when design was hot and then not and then innovation was hot and it’s kind of peaking now. You can see more and more creativity is moving up that S curve. And creativity is getting hotter and hotter. My book is coming out on “creative intelligence,” which will have its moment. To me, they all become scaffolding for other ideas. You’re moving down and evolving one’s thinking about all of this, whether you call it design, innovation, or creativity. We’re all in that same space and trying to do a better job of understanding the phenomenon and the process and most importantly the practice.

When I moved from Business Week to the New School at Parsons, that really changed things for me in terms of my frame and I wanted to be more inclusive. Design is very powerful, it’s very particular, and it involves a small number of people. Everyone feels that they’re creative and everyone probably can be creative. I just found over the years that when you talk about design, people lean back a little bit and will be a little wary and they’ll hear you out. But talk about creativity and they’ll start telling you about their kids and they’ll talk about how when they were in school they did that. Or they’ll talk about their job and you’ll tell them, oh, that was very creative. They’ll say, Really? And the fact is what they were doing is really creative. So it just brings everybody into the conversation, that’s why I went there.

They’re still talking about design, design thinking, focusing on user needs or the experience. That’s just the tiniest, tiniest bit of what we know in anthropology and sociology about what I consider the most important thing, which is engagement. That’s what it’s about. How we engage with products, how we engage with services, how we engage in a social way and it’s the design of that engagement which is so powerful. And that’s what Apple used to do so well. It was that engagement that we had, the meaning we found in that engagement, which they seem to be losing.

Bruce Nussbaum’s new book will be released in early March

Why do you say that Apple is losing that engagement? What was that shift?

Well, the map thing was a disaster. The latest iteration of iTunes is pretty problematic. Perhaps the most important thing is the promise of things to come. In the book, I talk about aura. I want to bring back aura. And the reason I want to bring back the concept of aura is that it is quintessentially about engagement. Aura is this thing that beckons you, that pulls you in, that you have an engagement with, and that very often is an emotional engagement. I would argue that there is such a thing as simulated aura, that you can in fact create aura, that you can create an engagement with people. I have a friend who just bought an Apple Mini. She loves it! And she looks at the Mini the way prisoners will eat their food, she circles it. If I were to get between her and her Mini, she’d kill me! That’s aura, that’s passion, that’s emotion. That’s the power of engagement.

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