Hasta La Ideas

About halfway through Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, Tim Brown repeats Tom Peter’s much cited comment that “the MFA is the new MBA.” In doing so, however, he doesn’t fully endorse the sentiment. Instead Brown observes that the dynamic skills required in business share as much in common with the creativity required for a design practice as they do with the critical thinking required for the MBA. On the back of the book jacket the author observes, “this is not a book by designers for designers, this is a book for creative leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization.” In that way it straddles the gulf between the MFA and the MBA. Clearly learning to draw is a far sight from learning how to run a discounted cash flow analysis and the skill set doesn’t overlap. We need both MFAs and MBAs. But the crux of what Brown is getting at is what McKinsey & Company referred to as the “T-Shaped” person, where the vertical axis represents the depth of the skill set that forms their core competency. Valuable design thinkers, however, “cross the T,” holding not only deep familiarity with their core role, but also a disposition for collaboration across enterprises. A “design thinker” isn’t just an artist and isn’t just a number-cruncher. Instead they need to be knowledgeable enough about each to be conversant: to be a member not of a multidisciplinary team but of an interdisciplinary team.

If this all sounds a little like business-jargon-tinged self-help … well, it is. Business books tend to be written in a peculiar dialect somewhere between anecdote and allegory, and Change by Design is no exception. Perhaps owing to the Harvard Business School case method, it seems de rigeur in business books these days to present lessons as anecdotes about business interactions (e.g. Shimano’s core business of bicycle sprockets and derailleurs was flattening) followed an analysis of the market and the causes of said shift. At the “B-School” the initial case would be followed by rigorous debate and a written analysis of what the company should do to change its position. In Change by Design, the reader learns what solutions IDEO reached (e.g. returning to the comfort and familiarity of coasting bikes from childhood). Regardless of the success of that coasting initiative, however, the real lesson is in the allegory as Brown provides that proves the centerpiece of the book: “The reason for the iterative, nonlinear nature of the journey is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is an exploratory process; done right, it will inevitably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead.” Reading that, then, perhaps industrial designers should be thrilled; the processes that we learned for “needsfinding” and “directed research” truly are akin to the case method. Perhaps that’s what Peters was getting at after all.

But if Tim Brown was right, and this isn’t a book “by designers for designers,” what can we get out of it? The rigorous analytic thinking that MBAs learn in finance classes isn’t presented here. Instead we see the softer/touchier side of “inspiration, ideation, implementation” of which long-time prototypers and experimenters should already be aware. IDEO, however, has managed to out-business corporate America through design, so perhaps there’s something to be learned here. Ultimately, the difference between design and art is commerce and function, so most designers will eventually need to reach out or at least speak to corporate America. Through his years as CEO of IDEO, Brown knows as well as anyone how to communicate with suits … even if he has an MFA. Consequently, while we (designers) may not be the target audience for the book, there is certainly something to be learned here for us to “cross the T” and speak to MBAs.

(more…)

While not exactly summer beach reading, Hartmut Esslinger’s new book on Design Strategy, A Fine Line crams as many ideas, themes and disparate story arcs into its 180 pages as a Dan Brown novel. For the first few chapters Esslinger follows the tried and true business book methodology of using real world examples to illustrate lessons in leadership and strategy. For the last three chapters, he begins to apply the design lessons he learned in the corporate world to what he terms “industrial-colonial capitalism” — the problems of the modern age caused in part by the last century of design strategy. The beginning brims with ideas and scattershot observations about people and companies that occasionally distract from the underlying message, but by the end Esslinger has hit his stride, talking about big ideas applying principles with real insight.

Esslinger’s clearly not afraid to express his own opinion and in the early pages. When he recounts the garage days of his fledgling consultancy, frog, the book engages in a fair amount of “I told you so,” and name dropping as he heaps praise upon friends (e.g. “the brightest minds of our age, including Dieter Motte, Akio Morita and Norio Ohga of Sony …”) and scorn upon enemies (e.g. “including Paul Kunkel, who wrote a largely inaccurate and trashy book about Apple’s Design in those early years”). Depending upon your perspective, these early chapters could be refreshingly candid or unpleasantly gossipy. That said, Esslinger’s certainly entitled to a few “I told you so’s”. From his very earliest work, when he proposed that the clockmaker Kienzle use radio signals to synchronize with an atomic clock (in 1968!) his brand of design thinking was met with frequent skepticism and disdain. Today, however, companies all over the world chase the sort of strategic design thinking that frog pioneered, radio clocks are a standard (you’ve probably even got one in your pocket, depending upon whether you set your cell phone’s clock or it’s time zone) and Kienzle clocks are mostly museum pieces. Fortunately, much of frog’s design is still in production.

(more…)

Fine summer fiction in pretty packages.

See the New Yorker  above (“Future Generations”
by Dan Clowes) and the Walrus below (cover by Joost Swarte).

After reviewing Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives just a few weeks ago, it seemed premature to cover another one so soon, but any drawing teacher would concur: you can never do enough sketching. Sketchbook: Conceptual Drawings from the World’s Most Influential Designers by Timothy O’Donnell covers similar material in a slightly different manner. While Brereton’s book caught artists and ad execs at their most candid, O’Donnell documents primarily illustrators and designers doing real projects. Thus the art throughout is more precise, a little tighter and far less kooky. While this bodes well for the pencil chops of designers as a whole, it also means that looking at some of these sketchbooks is totally demoralizing.

Looking at the book as a whole, however, is beyond lovely. Laid out on a grid with four unrelated serif and sans fonts (no superfamilies here!) it coheres harmoniously … and that’s even with Johnny Hardstaff’s frenetic sketches on the page. Hardstaff, however, is the only artist that appears in both O’Donnell and Brereton’s books, probably because his skills with a felt tip are so damn tight. Lots of other talent abounds too. Ayse Birsel of Birsel+Seck says of her partner, “Bibi draws like a god,” and although I don’t know what god draws like, he (that would be Bibi) is as good as Mr. Hardstaff. Birsel+Seck are product designers to boot … plus Yahweh might find Johnny Hardstaff’s sketches a little risque. What Sketchbook: Conceptual Drawings from the World’s Most Influential Designers does far better than The Hidden Art of Designers is illustrate the creative process. Each serves a different master. While Brereton’s book was about love, O’Donnell’s book is about results. Fortunately for the reader, viewing these conceptual sketches doesn’t feel like work at all.

(more…)

Martin Bone is one of us. The opening pages of his collaboration with Kara Johnson, I Miss My Pencil, include fetishistic shots of everyday objects like kitchen knives and attache cases that the authors know and love. In the short blurbs of text that accompany the beautiful product shots, Johnson explains a part of the product lifecycle that designers too often ignore. Recounting the effect of a ding on her experience as a car owner, she explains, “My previously flawless car now registered a dent above the back rear wheel. But my love did not waver. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, it grew: I love my car even more now with this little dent,” that now serves to remind her of a weekend snowboarding. After the personal introduction, Pencil embraces the holy grail of industrial design: infusing shiny new products with the same love that grows naturally out of a shared history (or dent).

No strangers to industrial design, both authors work at IDEO, with Bone as design director and Kara Johnson leading the materials team. A series of 12 projects done for the sheer joy of creation, I Miss My Pencil reads like a student’s wet dream of industrial design 101. The book is broken into three sections: Aisthetika, which deals with sense and experience, Punk Manufacturing, which combines craft and mass production, and Love+Fetish, which might be enough to titillate any objectophiles out there. Using about as much white space as I’ve ever seen in a book Mr. Bone and Ms. Johnson populate their tabula rasa with plenty of full bleed artful photographs and IM formatted conversations about their products. In yet another designer detail, the voices in those exchanges are each given their own font, with Bone speaking in dot matrix and Johnson a businesslike serif. At once joyous and confusing, I Miss My Pencil left me incredulous in the same way an avant garde indy movie produced by a major studio would. Every once in a while a completely impractical beautiful thing slips past consumer focus groups. At numerous times while reading, I wondered what sort of person would want to read a book about the joy of following absurd premises like “what does a laptop taste like?” to their logical (!?!) conclusions. Perhaps the audience for that sort of thing is tiny, but I think it includes us.

(more…)