innovation playground Idris Mootee

Can Startbucks Be Saved? Howard, Let Me Treat You Breakfast At The Al's Cafe.

 

Howard Schultz needs a little help. Starbucks did not lose its magic overnight and we all see it coming. I see people lining up in those stores in the morning (without the aroma of coffee) just like people lining up to get cash from ATM machines. I am not sure what the average wait time is today particularly in rush hours, it is not the Starbucks I used to know.  Last time I was near a Starbucks was in an upscale neighborhood in Southern California, the experience was awful. The refrigerator was noisy, there was a smell of detergent and the lighting was terrible. Big contrast compare to my experiences at Peets.

We owe it to Starbucks to give it a second chance. You have a great brand and a great culture. Use your strong cash flow smartly in reinvention of the Starbucks experience. Don’t just look into your core but also look outside your core. Don’t be blind sighted by the organization’s inertia. It takes an outsider to see this. Where’s the theatre of coffee making? It used to be a live theater where barristers celebrate the art of coffee making, but over the years it has been reduced to more like DVD rental. You need to put the art of theatre back into the stores and may be get the customer to participate. Mr. Schultz, here’s an inspiration for you.



My friend told me about this Al’s Café for a long time and I finally got a chance to see this last week while I was in Minnesota.  This place is one of a kind, nestled between an Espresso Royale Cafe and a bookstore. This place was built between two buildings and is one of the narrowest restaurants in the world (a width of ten feet or 3 m serving full-service breakfast with counter-only) and I was told that they never have to pay land tax. They were hit with a big tax bill and the governor jumped in to save them.

It is crammed into a former alleyway between two relatively larger buildings and is located in the city's Dinkytown neighborhood. The restaurant's 14 stools have seated generations of students, along with notable figures including writer James Lileks and former governor Wendell Anderson. The recipes and short-order cooking style that Al Bergstrom developed in 1950 remain the same today.

I love the experience as it is one of a kind. The small place has its walls covered with old photos, reviews, drawings, etc., and the air smells of decades of pancakes and eggs whipped up on the grill.  The two guys working in the front of the restaurant, switching off at the grill and taking orders, carry on a constant witty banter and chat with the diners. They were friendly (not the superficial kind) to the core and that makes it special.


You cannot get more exclusive that this….only 14 stools in the whole restaurant.  Everyone stand and wait in the back. And when there’s a spot opens up, the man or woman behind the counter will tell people to move so to provide double seating. Here’s some review I’ve come across from a site (ok this guy didn't appreciate it):

"Our friends invited us to Al's Breakfast because of the great reviews. None of us had ever been there before - and we won't be back. The wait was terrible and our party of four was separated - leaving me standing in line. Since I was on call for work, I got a phone call (on vibrate) - another taboo in this place. I was first singled out, then ridiculed behind my back - and when my wife explained the situation she was told ‘I don't care.’”

This place is a theater and the show has been running for 30 years. Aroma of breakfast is everywhere (thanks to the lack of ventilation). The place has an attitude, they don’t care how important you are, loyalty customers get preferred treatment and that doesn't get you in the line first, just some attitudinal different in treatment. The experience is 120% human. No one that works there has been trained in what we refer as customer service but all they do is treat everyone human. Howard, suggest you spend a day there with your executive team and you will be inspired. Let me know if my friend can reserve 2 stools for you.

Talking about coffee, a small design firm here was jsut hired by an unusual client with an unconventional request: The Ethiopian government commissioned Brandhouse to come up with a brand that will make consumers feel like they are drinking a "luxury" when they have Ethiopian coffee. This month, the Ethiopian government is releasing the logos for three varieties of Ethiopian coffee beans that it hopes will eventually appear from the burlap sacks that are used to transport coffee beans to coffee cups in cafes. It is the first time the country has introduced a brand for its major export.

The Future of PC 2010 - When Is The Mouse Going Away?

People often ask about the new new thing…I wonder what will happen to the PC we use today in 2 years? When is the mouse going away (it is 40 years old)?  What does the next generation of keyboard looks like (current QWERSTY is more than 100 years old) ?

Will touch screen go mainstream? What about browser (there has been little innovation since the first browser)? What about “eye-tapping” technology which is laser-based and allows the eye to function simultaneously as if it were a display and a camera?

The current PC experience sucks as we know it although many of us are so used to it that we stopped complaining. Think about it, hard drives die without warning often at the worst time. Can we use a dozen of flash card instead?

Current PCs were designed for man (forget all those pink and red) and I can imagine how different they will be if they were designed for women. The first PC designed for female will probably become the most popular PC used by both male and female. Believe me.

Since landfills are filling up with abandoned toxic electronics, the next-gen PCs should be made out of recyclable material with a built-in small solar power screen.

Your future PC will not run on Vista as it will be discontinued in 09 and MSFT will declare that it is a complete failure. You will most likely be using Windows 2010.

Your future PC should have no cables.  All files synchronization will be done through wireless.

And if you PC catch a virus, the Center of Computer Disease Control (CCDC) will be alerted and a man in uniform will show up on your door in 10 minutes and snatch your PC and put it under quarantine for 10 days. They will be returned to you for a fee if proved cleaned.

Or in the future, PCs will be free. All you need to do is to sign up with a social networks and opt-in for some ads then you will get a free FaceBook PC?

Or by 2010 PC will cease to exist and computing will be embedded in all appliances and all you need is a terminal. Back to future, the network is your computer. The social network is your gateway to your connections.

Three Lenses To Look At The Emerging Discipline of Service Design

There were lots of talks around Software as a Service and it is actually becoming part of a major transformation of the software industry and yet many still don’t fully understand what it takes capture these opportunities. Service activities (both digital and non-digital) are essential for value creation not only in software-based businesses but also other industry from Telco to Financial Services and Business Services. With IP Telephony going mainstream and further convergence of data and voice, this is happening fast. Every bite of data has the the potential of becoming part of the delivery of a service.

Service Design is still an emerging discipline that lacks common methodology, tools and definitions. In the face of Web 2.0 empowered customers and a push for transparency; companies are facing a crisis in customer interaction and relationship management.  Service Design is part of part of front-office revolution as described by Rayport who authored the book “Best Face Forward”, Service Design is the core driver of any customer experiences.

The NY Times has an interview with a social psychologist Daniel Gilbert who talks about the difference between experiences and products (At Harvard, he is known as Professor Happiness)  According to Gilber, "Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t." I think this it is such as un-American or un-Canadian notion but it may be changing.

Service design is an emerging field that includes different design disciplines (graphic, product, information, interaction, brand, customer service, interiorl) working together to create the tangible and intangible artifacts of service…sort of Hotel School meets Design School. I don’t think Service Design belongs to traditional service design as in retail and hospitality industries, it goes beyond that.  It is fair to say that “Service Design” is multi-disciplinary in nature. I don’t think it is like the service design as in retail or hospitality industries. I think it is more multi-disciplinary in nature. It is important to look at the boundaries of “Service Design” from the following lens:

The first lens is information design and visualization. Web 2.0 brings many interesting challenges to information design. Think about it, today many Web 2.0 services are based on participation and that usually comprises of content created by these conversations and these conversations create content. These content are part of service design and the community is in fact the service platform  not the technology.

The second lens is product design. Many of today’s products are either informational product or it is a product that serves as a node to a system. Industrial design uses a lot of artifacts and these artifacts start to develop context and consequences. How does these artifacts establish relationships among people within a virtual community? How do we use these artifacts to build on these conversations to create a service?

The third lens is business management. I am not sure where I am going on this one. Is good service design simply means good common sense and good business design? I first came across “service management” was during my Operations Management Courses taught by Kim Warren at London Business School which focused a lot on operational design. I also remember sitting in Jeffrey Rayport’s “Service Management” classes at Harvard Business School which he put a lot of focus in customer service design as part of marketing strategy. Both were drastically different from the “Service Design” we are talking here. Both put an emphasis on service redesign and closing the gap between the demand chain and the supply chain, examining the difference between a factory and a custom job shop. Should “Service Design” simply need to be part of business? Should business strategy itself becoming just another kind of multi-disciplinary design activity.

What Schools Of Design Are You From? What Is A Designer: Objects, Functions, Meanings?

I have not written about post on design for a few while. I do enjoy writing about design rather than business and strategy. May be I've written everything about that in my previous life.  I was drinking from this beautiful limited Evian bottles (limited edition designed by Christian Lacroix, click on the picture above to see the details) that I purchased from Whole Foods two weeks ago and it sparks a few thoughts on design. I also talked to some creative folks from OCAD at the Innovation Exchange and I think there’s a lot of exciting thing going on there. I plan to follow up with a visit in the next few weeks. Now back to design.

I recall reading a book on Design by Bryan Lawson a while ago, he is both an architect and a psychologist. Many of his ideas can apply to interaction design as well as other design discipline.  He acknowledges that design is “an everyday activity that we all do.” However, “professional designers also design for other people rather than just themselves,” and “are better educated and trained.” This juxtaposition serves me as I have a similar view on this.

Lawson believes that the models of design are too logical and not actually useful for practitioners. Lawson says, “Designing is far too complex to be describable by a simple diagram.” This idea is in part my motivation for my paper, having encountered quite a few models that illustrate the design process only to feel like they weren’t quite right, and certainly, never actually using them when it comes to the actual process. “We probably work best when we think least about our technique.”

I’ve seen hundreds of design processes that are anti-design in nature. They force a linear process-driven approach to design as if it is a production line (Six Sigma for Design? No thanks)  Process schools like a form-driven problem-solving approach. This school trace their linage back to the advanced program of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel (Switzerland).  This Swiss-style process schools thrived mainly as response to the slickness of the portfolio schools.  The portfolio school has a different approach and is more mercenary in my view and end-product driven. The problem-solving approach is more conceptual and the product rather than the process is king.  The two schools don’t get along well naturally. 

Doesn’t matter which school you are from, if you think that every problem in this world has a pure visual solution that exists outside the cultural context, you have a serious problem.  That’s often the biggest limitation of designers.  Designers’ job is to translate everything within a special user and cultural context.  Design is not process-driven and any methods of science are in fact unhelpful to the designers. There are intimate relationships between observing, reflections and inquiring and this is how design happens. “Good designers tend to be at ease with the lack of resolution of their ideas for most of the design process,” says Lawson. And for those who are not at ease, the design process is painful and the unproductive.

Massimo Vignelli (Martin Scorcese of Graphic Design, see his work below) earlier declared that "Helvetica in the morning, Bodoni at night" in response to a panelist asking what his favorite typeface is, but the most brilliant response was Vignelli's "In the States" when asked what was the worst use of Helvetica he had ever seen.
Here are good nuggets from Massimo Vignelli when he spoke at an AIGA event, the comments in bracket are mine:

“Without a grid I’m lost” (I use a grid not only for design but also for strategy mapping. I often swap tools from different disciplines and it works for me all the time)

“A chair is more important for your head than it is for your ass.” Discussing his love for a Rietvelt chair. (This one is interesting. Everybody should be designed for the head first)

“Design and fashion are big enemies” (Oh yes, good design should be anti-fashion, if it ends up being fashionable it should only be by accident)

“The culture of refinement is much bigger than the culture of change.” (Think about incremental innovation vs radical innovation)

“There is no room for irresponsible design.” (Design has a long history of addressing issues relating to social responsibility such as  ecodesign, inclusive design, design for disability, and eco-efficient innovation, design against crime and design for lower income etc.)

“The opposite of modern is contemporary. Contemporary is trendy” (The opposite of trendy would be -- fascination with old things --be called? Gentrophili. And that could be trendy too)

“We never figured out how to make politicians modern. They’re still old farts. Except Gore, we miss him.” (Gore is an exception. We need more politician like him)

I love the last one.  It is time to make politician modern. It is time to make government modern. It is time to make every Non-Profit Organization modern. It is time to make a B-School modern.
If you ask me what is a designer?  Here is my answer:

Design is about “translation”. Designers are “translators”. They translate needs, culture and meanings into products and services.  The design process is a “translation” process. Yoshiaki Koizumi (director of Nintendo's biggest Wii game yet, Super Mario Galaxy) sees his job requires him to "translate" the maestro's often-inscrutable insights into real-world gameplay.

Design is more than simply a form-giving activity—it is a strategic issue related to changing from existing to preferred states. Design is concerned with imagining how things can be different (for the better), and transforming strategic aspirations and desired futures into reality in a social responsible manner.

Experience Design and Authenticity - Is There A Connection?

Is design being assumed to be an offshoot of visual arts of visual art is an offshoot of design? Or is interactive design an offshoot of theatre arts? There are many common grounds. No questions designers often draw inspirations from visual arts whether it is art book or galleries. There are also examples of artist look to commercial design and technology for inspirations. Let me think of one example.

I think good designers do not need to hang out in art galleries and museums. Just look around you and let everyday objects and experiences to inspire you. I know many see popular objects as tacky or lack of style. But sometimes this attitude blinds them from many interesting and inspiring solutions. I am not saying that style exist in all everyday objects of experiences, they can be a great source of ideas that can rival high style counterparts. IDEO's human factor leader Jane Fulton Suri published a book called "Thoughtless Acts" which captures many amazing and provocative ways people react or adapt  to things and the world around them. Cure little book with lots of pictures. The goal of the book is to inspire examples of intuitive design. This is an excellent example of how everyday things and actions can be a gold mine for new ideas. May be I should put together a book with my hundreds of photos on everyday service experiences. That's a good idea.

How do we celebrate everyday objects?  Often we don't buy these objects for their "design," but it's because of their design that they find their way to us.  They don't look pretty at first and somehow we get used to it. They may not be art objects but they represent elegant solutions to our real-world problems. You can buy them from Wal-Mart and marry form and function and make economic sense. There are plenty of examples.

How about everyday experiences? Often these little experiences (digital or real world) are not engineered to be great, but somehow they find a way to us and we feel comfortable with it. They don't appear to be great at first and somehow we get used to it. They may not be places for special occasions but they represent a third place we spend our time. People are friendly not because they are trained to act that way but they are simply who they are. It is called authenticity.  We can tolerate those long waits or any human errors because we know they are like us - being humans.  The questions why we do we tolerate these service hiccups in those places and get mad when it happens as a result of a service breakdown in a large company whether it is hotel, airline or retail chain? I think it has to be with authenticity.

A tales of two experiences: Mecca and Alinea. Both are my favorite experiences (photos above). 

Mecca, a small Indian restaurant in the Greek district of Toronto, it is one of my best places for curry. People there are enjoying Mohammad Miah's food the traditional way, delicately digging fingertips into the aromatic biryani. The scene is a lot like Miah's native Bangladesh. Nothing is staged and the lousy but friendly service is part of the character. Food is great. On the other side is Alinea in Chicago, unarguably the most designed or engineered restaurant in the world. It is where restaurant meets modern performance art. Everything they do was to convey the emotion, the expression, the essence of the restaurant. It is a hyper-experimental cooking style that pushes the limit of cooking and restaurant operations management. The two restaurants are drastically different in sophistication, scale, operations, investments and target market, but one thing is common. They are both unique and authentic experiences. One cost $8 per person and the other $250.

What are the world's msot authentic experiences? Here's a good piece from NY Times. Great lessons from India (one of my favorite places on earth). In India, visiting temples that pulsate with devotion will evoke a sense of the sacred, with religion is such an integral part of daily life, spiritual experiences occur when you least expect them. Here are some examples:

See Things As They Really Are (Vipassana Centers throughout India): Maintaining a strict code of silence with no sensory stimulation for 10 days may sound like a self-induced hell, but after attending a 10-day Vipassana meditation course, most people claim transformation and find the mental training invaluable. 

Hop on a Motorbike and Head for the Drumbeat (Goa): Once capital of the global beach party, Goa may be past its prime, but when rumors start that an event is in the making at a to-be-announced venue, keep your ear to the ground. Why? Because only in some deserted clearing near a golden Goan beach can you trance out with the nationals of the world, and find solace in the serenity of a rural villager's smile as she hands over cups of soothing chai for the duration of the party.

Worship the Sunrise as It Touches the Southernmost Tip (Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu): You can't help but be moved by a sense of the miraculous when a simple daily occurrence is venerated by thousands of pilgrims who plunge themselves into the turbulent swell, believing that the tri-oceanic waters at India's southernmost tip are holy, while others delight in the glorious spectacle as if it's a major Bollywood (the nickname for India's booming film industry) premiere.

Lose All Sense of Reality in the City of Light (Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh): Drifting at dawn on a boat on the Ganges along Varanasi's bathing ghats (steps leading down to the river), against a backdrop of 18th- and 19th-century temples and palaces, you will witness surreal sights -- hundreds of pilgrims waist-deep in the Ganges cleansing their souls in its holy waters, while others pound laundry, meditate by staring into the sun, or limber up to wrestle. All the while, bodies burn on the sacred banks, thereby achieving moksha -- liberation from the eternal cycle of rebirth. P

Purchase a Pushkar Passport (Pushkar, Rajasthan): As you wander around the ghats of Pushkar, the beautifully serene temple town on the edge of the Thar Desert, you will almost certainly be approached by a Brahmin priest to offer puja (prayers) at the sacred lake. In exchange for a "donation," he will tie a red thread around your wrist -- the "passport" you can brandish at the next priest who approaches. This is the commercial side of India's spirituality, and one you need to be aware of.

Make a Wish at the Tomb of a Sufi Saint (Ajmer, Rajasthan): The great Sufi saint Khwaja Moin-ud-Din Chisti was known as "the protector of the poor," and his tomb is said to possess the power to grant the wishes of all those who visit. His Dargah Sharif is the most sacred Islamic shrine in India, second in importance only to Mecca but frequented by Hindus and Muslims alike. The atmosphere of pure devotion is both ancient and surreal; some pray fervently, and others tie threads onto the latticework while supplicating the saint to fulfill their wish, while throughout these activities, the qawwali singers seated in front of the tomb repeat the same beautiful, haunting melodies that have been sung for centuries.

Let me now if this inspires you to think about service design. Pls share your stories with us.

Where Are The Product Development Folks? How Could They Missed This One - Greenprint?

When I first read about new software that eliminates wasted pages I said Finally! I hate wasting paper so much that instead I often end up wasting my time cutting from web pages and pasting them on a word so I can then print the pages that I want. It is not a rational decision as my time worth a lot more than a few pages of paper and some ink. But like all human beings, I kept doing this as I hate to waste 5 pages of ink and paper and all I need is one paragraph.  I don't want to print the crab.  Remember when you print out a google map and it takes  4-5 pages to get the one diagram you want?

One thing I don't quite get it is I am sure there are many people like me, but with all these larger corporations that makes tens of millions on printers, how come they all missed this important feature despite all talk around customer-center innovation.  It should be a standard feature on any computer or printer. All office should make it a policy to have this installed across the enterprises. This Greenprint software lets you see the whole document, easily click on what you want to keep and what you want to disappear, and then prints it. Not only does this save forests; it also saves money on paper, disposal and ink cartridges. If you don't need paper at all, it has a PDF generator so that you can send it straight to your computer without paying for Adobe. Isn't that great? I will pay for this software anytime. I don't care how much that costs.

It still makes me wonder, with all those money spent on market research and customer interviews, not one big players can come up with ideas like this. We do get a lot of useless features that confuse us and the chance of people using those are less than 5%. What are these product development guys doing? This is an excellent example of ethnography can easily covered these unmet needs. If I send our ethnographers to spend a day with uses, I am 100% sure we can come up with another 5 of these ideas easily. And that's exactly what we are helping companies with.

Service Design and Experience Design: Starbucks Vs Le Pain Quotidien

Talking about "service design" or "experience design..forget Disney or Club Med, the Belgian chain Le Pain Quotidien (Our Daily Bread) is one best example of great experience design. Currently there are stores in California, DC and NYC. Toronto is opening one soon. My friend Scott is obsessed with it. I love the communal table and everything is organic there (I teased the people by asking them all the time if the tea is organic). The chain now has more than 80 stores in 12 countries and it is still growing. "17 years ago, Alain Coumont was putting a large communal table in his shop and the people sat down around it.” This is how Harry De Landtsheer recounts the original idea of the founder of Le Pain Quotidien. The baker’s plus restaurant is still there in the Rue Dansaert in Brussels. The basic idea of eating good food together has not changed either. So the combined shops and restaurants have plain furniture made of pine; the metal or glass lamps are simple and the shelving for bread and bakery goods are old style. With classical music in the background, this makes a Starbucks experience like the food court of a second tier shopping mall.

Now we're on the topic of "service and experience design". What is service design? Particularly those that is delivered through a digital interface or through a peer-to-peer network. It requires a very different approach from traditional operations management and the economics is very different. Service is becoming a key part of any customer experiences. Many still find the concept a little abstract. Little attention is paid to service innovation or seeing services as structure.

Film director Howard Hawks once said that to make a great movie all you need are three great scenes and no bad scenes. Ok three great scenes, now look at your company's customer experience and see if you can identify three great ones.  It’s a pretty simple formula for success. I first came across this quote from Jeff Howard who is a designer and writes a lot on service design. We need more designers who think service or even experience.  My friend Mark Ury will like this analogy. 

Let’s try to look at service design through the same lens?  Imagine each service encounter is composed of touchpoints. (I hate to use the word touchpints as it is so overused by old school CRM folks) This is one of the most misleading terms in business and I think the concept itself is flawed. I usually look at those under 1/ data point 2/ dialogue point 3/ feedback point. Anyway, let’s use that for now. The question is whether it is enough to create three great touchpoints and no bad touchpoints? Or how many great touhpoints make up for one bad touchpoint?

Let's think of a few parallels. One is music. You bought a CD and the first two songs set the impression of the album. Another parallel from the world of book writing, the first twenty pages were the most important as it was written to attract the readers and they usually consists of the most interesting concept. If you come to a bad chapter, you would then consider whether to read on, despite the opening is so great. In fact, most books fall short of excitement when it comes to the ending. Other parallel includes retailing, open that Tiffany's blue box, untie the ribbons and then the little blue bag before you see what's in there.

The traditional distinctions between products and services are beginning to blur. Traditionally, a product was physical and discrete, somewhat tangible, something obviously demarcated in space and time. The designer's brief rarely encompassed more than the form of an object, and there's a well defined usage.  But with Web 2.0  and  ubiquitous networking and the open standards it gives rise to, all is changing  fast: no longer can the designer of any product assume that it will stand on its own, autonomous and serenely uninvolved with the others. A product has become a node connecting to other both from a data and social perspectives.

London Business School released a paper on Innovation in “Experiential Services “with some great examples that bridge service design and experience design. The research references about 100 case studies from companies like Royal Caribbean, Virgin Atlantic, American Girl Stores, (picture above) the Apple Retail Stores, Build-A-Bear Workshops, Joie de Vivre Hotels as well as European examples from YO! Sushi, first direct, the Eden project, the Guinness Storehouse (picture below) in Dublin and Die Glaserne Manufaktur (the Transparent Factory) of Volkswagen in Dresden. There are some interesting insights.

Here's how they explore the metaphor of “the service journey”:
A customer experience is built over an extended period of time, starting before the actual sales experience or transaction to include pre and post purchase experiences; The journey consists of numerous touchpoints between the customer and the organization or the brand; these touchpoints need to be carefully designed and managed; Each touchpoint has a potential for innovation.

The question remain:
You can design a service but you cannot design an experience. Service designers can only stage or create favorable conditions for great customer experiences to happen.  If the customer contributes to the “experience”, how do we co-create these experiences with them?  Stop using the word “service designer”, call them “experience architect” or “experiences co-creator”.

Have a great weekend.

D-Schools Are Innovating Faster Than B-Schools

Stanford D-School is innovating and now offers a few exciting class options. I must say I am very  impressed with them. Interesting enough, all four courses are so relevant to our current innovation projects. I just wonder why B-School are not doing the same. I guess B-School are often behind the curve in this fast moving world. I really like the course "Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability", I think B-Schools should design new courses similar to this such as "Business Design for Triple Bottom Line" or "Business Model Design for Sustainability" or "Driving Innovation in Large Organizations". I'd love to teach all these. Oh you know what, how about "Visualizing Your Future Business Strategy"? Unfortunately B-Schools are still using old case studies that were written for the industrial age and disruptive technologies were uncommon or unheard of. If they don't do something, B-Schools themselves can slowly becoming irrelevant.

Here are my favorite courses:

Design for Agile Aging - Maintaining mobility is critical to successful aging. Impaired mobility limits daily activities and independence. For individuals who are already mobility-impaired, or are at risk of becoming so, small improvements in mobility can dramatically improve quality of life. This two-quarter interdisciplinary course sequence is designed to explore innovative ways to integrate computer and device technologies with behavioral and social interventions to maintain and enhance mobility in seniors. 
Transformative Design
- Designed products have always had tremendous impact on individual, social and cultural behavior. This project-based course investigates how interactive technologies can be designed to expressly encourage behavioral transformation. Class sessions will be structured around interdisciplinary discussion of topics such as self-efficacy, social support, and mechanism of cultural change in domain such as weight-loss, energy conservation or safe driving; accompanying lab sessions will familiarize students with basic hardware and software tools for interaction prototyping.

Entrepreneurial Design For Extreme Affordability - Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability is a two-quarter project course in which graduate students design comprehensive solutions to challenges faced by the world’s poor. Students learn design thinking and its specific application to problems in the developing world.  Students work in multidisciplinary teams at the intersection of business, technology, and human values.  All projects are done in close partnership with a variety of international organizations.  These organizations host student fieldwork, facilitate the design development, and implement ideas after the class ends.

Teams will develop empathy with all stakeholders so that they can develop a solution that fits into the culture, aspirations, and constraints of their target users.  Teams will iterate on their designs and business models through a rapid sequence of prototyping and testing.  Students also will interact with entrepreneurs who have launched ventures in the developing world, including several alumni from the class.  The final deliverable is a product or service framed in a comprehensive implementation plan including the business model, the technical innovations, the cultural rationale, and the appropriate next steps. 

Innovation in Complex Organizations 
- The purpose of this course is to offer students a chance to pause, discuss, and integrate design thinking and innovation in business in a small seminar, case-study format.  This centerpiece of this small seminar will be three or four “live” case studies where, executives from large, complex organizations come to class and describe their efforts to move creative new ideas from inception to implementation. They will describe how their organizations screen and move along promising ideas and how their organizational practices facilitate and impede that journey.  Student teams will analyze each case and provide recommendations to the executives, who along with the teaching team, will judge the work.  The final project will be a general analysis and set of recommendations about this vexing organizational problem.

Business Practice Innovation -
Treating Business Practices as Prototypes. In this small, team-based, multidisciplinary class, students will work in dyads or larger teams.  They will apply the design process to specific practices (like talent management, organizational design, and communication with external stakeholders) in organizations that may include a software firm, a professional services firm, and an airline, and treating the targeted practices as prototypes. 

How MBAs and MFAs Operate With Incomplete Information?

There is a common false expectation that anyone graduate with an MBA will be capable of making difficult business decisions. The same apply that may those who graduate with a MFA is automatically a big thinker and is capable of creating the next iPhone or Twitter. 

I have been hearing rumblings from clients about the quality of MBA graduates these days due to big quality gaps between of b-schools. Most MBA graduates are undoubtedly smart but often unprepared and unequipped to handle the most crucial of managerial responsibilities: quickly solving problems with less than perfect information. In my b-schools days, people often complained about the lack of information when reading a case study and believing that having complete information will help them make the right decisions. Let’s face it, there’s no perfect information in the world and everyday we are making decisions based on limited information.  More often today we are dealing with too much information and a sea of useless or meaningless data. We need to make sense of all this ourselves.  Business is about managing uncertainty; strategy is about winning in an uncertain world.

What about MFAs? Well my observation is designers are sometimes over reliance on getting perfect information about users. They develop dozen of persona and hopefully it will give them more rigor. It won’t. Design teams sometime spend a disproportional amount of time on developing personas and not spending enough time on dreaming and crafting the solutions. Design is about managing uncertainty too, the beauty of personas is that they can help designers to create and communicate information about users to the larger development teams.

The approach is to gather information about users’ needs, behaviors, and preferences, and uses those data to construct vivid descriptions about explicitly fictional individuals. The three advantages compared to traditional user research are: 1/ the ability easily to engage teams to think about users; 2/ the possibility for designers to extrapolate from the personas to make design decisions; and 3/ freedom from problems that arise when a full spectrum of user data is presented, such as paralysis or inappropriate generalization which happens all the time.  Of course the big question is whether the chosen personas are accurate and reflective of user needs.

But the whole “personas” approach suffers some practical limitations. Two significant issues involve how personas are reconciled with other information, and actually who is responsible for interpreting them. It is not not uncommon that fictional personas would frequently conflict with other sources of data usually quantitative research. Design teams receive information about users from many sources: self-observation, spouses, friends, technology media, and so forth. They form impressions about customers and those naturally show variance from the precise data presented by personas. Even with good personas, there’s still plenty of unknown.

Whether MBAs and MFAs, their commonality is that their jobs require them to make important business or design decisions with incomplete information. There's only so much tools can help.

Is Design A Team Sports? Or Should We Treat Designers Like Rock Stars?

I received a lot of emails regarding my post yesterday on “Super Normal Design”, I thought we should explore this topic a little more. There’s a good interview on the latest Business Week of Richard Sapper (the 75 year old designer that is till playing with new ideas). His famous designs including the ThinkPad and the Tizio Lamp for Artemide. Both were once my favorite items. I have 8 Thinkpads and one old broken Tizio in the basement. His signature is usually consists of advanced technology, simplicity of form, and surprise.  According to Sapper "The most important thing for me is to give everything I do a form that expresses something, it's not neutral. It has a point of view and a personality."

Over a career spanning 50 years, he has designed more than 200 products—everything from the rearview mirror on the 1956 Mercedes 300SL Roadster to the 1998 Zoombike foldable bicycle for Elettromontaggi. According to Sapper, "I think that I have proved through my work that you do not need big teams to create innovation. As a matter of fact, big teams often act as brakes to innovation," he says. "However, you need big teams to translate innovative ideas into mass-produced products."

Here’s an interesting question: Is great design a one person journey or a team sports? What are they teaching at D-Schools? Is there enough balance between “design thinking” and “design doing”? For design to be truly useful as a profession and as a discipline, designers can’t just use “design thinking” to come up with strategies and concepts. It is much easier to come up with big ideas than overcoming different kinds of hurdles to bring a design to life. I found many D-school graduates are lacking on product development skills. In order for MFAs to play a key role in powering up the future of business, they do need to learn the logical decision making skills of product development.

Are we going to end up with a generation of so called “innovators” who are basically MFAs that can talk business or MBAs who can draw? What about those anthropologist and social scientist? Shouldn’t they be part of the team? Or designers or market researcher just continue to pretend that they can do the job of a trained anthropologist which requires years of training to do what they do? What about those product engineers that lacks design sensitivity? Bringing new ideas to life is a team sports. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a star in your team. Relying on a star to be win a name is a risky business. I think I’ve answered that question.

With all respect Mr. Sapper, I have to disagree with your statement "big teams often act as brakes to innovation”. Your thoughts please.

Does "Super Normal Design" Goes Against The Mainstreaming Of Design?

What is “Super Normal Design”?  This is the first time I’ve heard about the term. As an economist I am more familiar with “Super Normal Profits”.  When design guru Naoto Fukasawa admitted to feeling "a bit shocked and a little depressed" on discovering that the aluminum stools he had designed were plonked on the floor for people to sit on at a Milan Furniture Fair, rather than displayed on plinths like other new products. He was worried that no one would notice them. Later that day Fukasawa, received a call from the British designer Jasper Morrison, who raved about the stools and congratulated him on having designed something so subtle, yet distinctive. They coined the term to describe the stools - "super normal."

A few months later they decided to put together a collection of products, which were similarly enjoyable to use and to look at without resorting to stylistic gimmicks. Not so much of anti-style but more of ordinary looking. The pieces they chose -ranging from inexpensive items like a paper clip and Bic biro and workspace designed by the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra.  They see this as a celebration of “normality” in design.

"Too many designers try to make their work seem special by making it as noticeable as possible that the historic purpose of conceiving things that are easier to make and better to live with has been side- tracked," he says. "The objects that really make a difference to our lives are often the least noticeable ones, that don't try to grab our attention. They're the things that add something to the atmosphere of our homes and that we'd miss the most if they disappeared. That's why they're 'super normal.'"  Reported IHT.

I started to think how many objects together are made without much design thought or any attempt to achieve anything other than a good ordinary tool, happen to be successful? It raises the question of what constitutes a good design. How many great designs are lacking noticeability?  Does it goes the current trend of using design to create “branded differentiation?’ The current business climate of hyper competition forces company to use design to create maximum noticeability by means of color, shape and function.  Design can make everyday things special. Isn’t that part of the job of “design”? Isn’t a designer’s worse nightmare when his client tells them his designs are “ordinary”?

Questions for us:

- Can “normal” just come to mean “unstimulating” or more about “low key” design?

- Can “normal” be also “unique”? Are they mutually exclusive?

- What’s the equivalent of “normal” design in interactive design? Is it about an elegant and efficient approach to design?

- Is this a lifecycle issue where one needs to be very special before it earns its right to design for “normal”?

Slow Design + Local = Innovation Opportunities

It has not been easy to keep up with the habit of blogging and I try to do at least 5 posts a week. Mine were exceptionally long so I was told. Particular the last 12 weeks with my weekly travel, I hardly have time for my personal life. I am definitely the opposite of the "slow" movement, but I do need to slow down a bit as my friend Mark has suggested. Talking about "slow", the two concepts of SLOW + LOCAL are now converging in what NY Times called "Slow Design".  It talks about designers of everything from T-shirts to housewares, who are sourcing manufacturing from local artisans. Although I am a "fast" personality but I'm loving this. I think the bigger opportunities are SLOW + LOCAL + WEB 2.O. I can easily think of half a dozen of ideas that can bring in tens of millions. Slow Design can bring Fast Growth.

Here's an excerpt from NY TImes: The Slow Food idea is now in its third decades, an established global movement with an official manifesto and about 85,000 members in over 100 countries, Slow Design is still in its infancy. But it does have an increasing number of proselytizers, like John Brown, an architect in Calgary, Alberta, whose year-old Web site, theslowhome.com, urges consumers to say no to “fast-food architecture,” and Geir Berthelsen, a Norwegian motivational speaker whose Web site slowplanet.com, which is to go online in mid-March, has as its goal to be a hub for all things slow, from slow travel to slow shopping to slow design, he said. Ms. Chanin, meanwhile, has a book, “Alabama Stitch Book: Projects and Stories Celebrating Hand-Sewing, Quilting, and Embroidery for Contemporary Sustainable Design” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) due out in March. It gives instructions on how to make her stenciled, poetry-embellished sheets and teaches her Slow credo, which is to use discarded materials to make something new — and to take as long as necessary doing it.

Back to writing blog, a few friends of mine just started and I think they will bring interesting perspective to things. One of them is Mark Ury's blog Restlessmind (I've added a permanent link here). Actually I am pretty new to blogging (8 months) but I love the idea to sharing my thoughts with a few thousands of visitors everyday on topics from strategy to innovation and design. I am getting some great e-mails now and then from readers and I am very grateful for that. Pls keep coming. 

I really want to thank those Very Special Visitors including Andre, Bart, Rory, Morgan, John, Bilal, Peter, Jonathan and many others who always bring new insights and thought provoking ideas to these topics. Someday I think we should publish a book together. I must have missed some names. There are a few emails that I'd like to share with you. Here's twi I received yesterday: one from Natasja, London and one from Scott, Palo Alto. Thank you both.

Hi Idris,

I've been reading your blog on my RSS feeds for a long time now (in fact, I've saved 75 of your posts that I want to re-read because I liked them so much!), and have been meaning to write to say thanks, but kept on putting it off. No more, so: thanks for a great blog!

Your most recent post on design and strategy really struck a chord with me, since I'm a fairly newly minted MBA from LBS (MBA Class of 2007), working in a branding and design firm and I'm also a current part-time student doing an MA in Design Studies at Central St Martin's in London.

I'm very excited by and interested in the intersection of business and design, and your post really hit the nail on the head for me, especially when you wrote "“Design” thinking brings those needs to the decision making core of the organization and activities should be developed around these “Design” ideas. That’s strategy." Bingo. That's what I'm trying to tell people on both the b-school side and the d-school side, but I'm finding that both sides most of the time have a hard time getting it. Or maybe I need to find a better way of explaining it. My b-school friends think that I don't have a 'real' job because all I do is fiddle with colours and my d-school friends think that all businesspeople are evil and that commercial is a dirty word.

So, I think what I'm trying to say is thanks. It's great to see that there are companies out there that do great work where b-school and d-school collide!

Yours,
warmest regards from London,

Natasja

Hi Idris,

what's up man...was checking out the blog, pretty interesting, good dialogue...
With respect to 'Designs seat @ the strategy table' I'm going to sum up the sentiment from within the design trenches... The irony, after having been subjected to 3.5 days of intense strategy disection, It's actually a remarkably simple correlary.

Ready.  Here we go =
Before I divulge this truth, a quick context needs to be mutually agreed upon --- "The end-game strategy for companies is to make $$$".  Nothing more.  That premise can be veiled under the articulation of 'Creating value,' 'Sustaining & driving growth,' 'Increasing market share,'...the vernaculuar is of little consequence --- we exist, you the strategist, me the designer, to advance the corporate ambition of making $$$.  Okay, agreed.  Now, whether your business is service, consumer product, or durable goods, that goal requires the goodwill of the consuming public.  in this game, as you indicate in your blog, the consumer is becoming increasingly sensitive to 'design.'  'Good design' is nothing more than 'brand management'...now, not brand management in the sense of a P&G juggling a million sub-brands, but 'brand management' as 'brand control'...brand ownership.  That's it.  Brand ownership allows you, the company, to control you destiny----deliver a good product, good value, reasonable price, right sales channels, appropriate segment...so on, sor forth.  These are support activities.  You get those support activities correct, marginally better than your competitors, you win.
Now, what I know to be true, and what I think I'm reading on your blog (we are in agreement my friend) is that 'brand ownership' is not just some incremental piece of the overall picture...IT IS THE overall picture---the rest are details, some big, some small, relatively speaking.   Authentic 'brand ownership' requires design...graphic design, product design, interface design, environmental & retail design, design of advertising, design of PR, design etc....Anything (& everything) that forms public perception of your product/ service requires these design inputs...The proportion & scale of each of these inputs is highly dependant on what is you do (what business you're in), but in essence, you need MANY of these design inputs "SIMULTANEOUSLY"....Not just a good interface, not just a good marketing PR campaign, not just gorgeous ID surfacing, not just a beautiful interior space...it's the intersection of multiple design inputs.  ID is one element in this sea of plug-ins. Often times, as in the case of an Apple, or much of my HP work, and truthfully most consumer products companies today, ID is an extremely LARGE component of all of those design inputs.   Okay, enough talk, what does this mean.

In consumer products (different for the service business) the Industrial Designer is the only true 'design' representative @ the process table. Add to that the pedigree a good designer has from years of heightened cross-media design appreciation & finely tuned design sensitivity, it appears that the Industrial Designer is the perfect respresentive to help guide this destiny of 'brand control.'

The trick is in finding the right designer...that with the right quiver of business acumen & technical skills, for he will be the single greatest asset that makes the difference.
Thanks for allowing me to opine.

Cheers

Scot Herbst
Palo Alto

If you want to share your ideas and perspectives, pls send them this way. Have a great Easter weekend.

Shoud "Design" Have A Seat At The Corporate Strategy Table?

I decided to read Mark Dziersk’s paper after meeting him. It is called Visual Thinking: A Leadership Strategy published by Design Management Review. It was a light read and I did that in 5 minutes on the flight back from Chicago. He has articulated a couple of very interesting points on business and design.  The core of his paper is around the idea that “design” and “strategy” should come closer together. He urges designers to communicate with those responsible for strategy by using their talent for visualization and storytelling—“languages” that can powerfully convey content in such areas as consumer experience, innovation options and approaches to decision-making. It is good read for designers….not only industrial.

He wrote, “The truth is, very few designers understand strategy, much less leverage is in their work. But the design world is trying, and making inroads……this is a new territory for design—demonstrating business and brand leadership by creating and visualizing companies strategies.” Funny enough, this is exactly what my company is doing. Yes, there are not many firms (if any) out there that bring “Design Thinking” to “Business Strategy”.  On this topic, I have a few thoughts....

Great designs can only go so far, not that I am not an advocate of great designs. I am an advocate of great designs. The challenge is most industrial design firms can only engage with clients at a middle senior level and their scope of work are often confined to a product or product family mission. Any innovation would only have impact on a product level. If “Design” wants to fully leverage its influence, it needs to happen at the corporate strategy level. That’s where you can have the most impact and influence. But what can a bunch of creative designers do in corporate strategy planning session when they hardly understand how organizations operate and how (and why) decisions are made?  (May be that's fine because 60% of senior executives have no idea of what strategy is anyway) That’s when things fall short.

People often ask me “Idris, you are a hard core business strategist with a 20 years real strategy experience and your extensive b-school training, why do you need designers to help you on strategy? What can they bring to the table? What languages do you speak B or D?’ These are all valid questions.

First of all, I truly believe “Design” is our future. It can help shape and change the destinies of many large organizations. Think beyond products and packaging, think bigger. “Design” is  “Strategy”, but “Designers” are not “Strategists’. Design should be the core of all organizations as they switch from product-centric to customer-centric, I know this word is so over-used.  I don’t mean CEOs now need to become designers. “Design” is a culture, something that helps bring back the sensitivity and empathy that were long lost in many large organizations. Thanks to B-school training and all those quantitative research, companies think that there have formulas for success. These formulas or numbers can magically bring profits. Wrong. Profits exist because customer buys your products and they buy your products because you fulfill their needs (both articulated and unarticulated needs). “Design” thinking brings those needs to the decision making core of the organization and activities should be developed around these “Design” ideas. That’s strategy.

Designers or design firm alone cannot achieve this goal. They need to work together with strategy consultants (I mean real ones, many claim to be strategist because they have an MBA, a grad degree does NOT make one a strategist) that understand business economics, marketing adoption and most important has a balanced mindset between market-driven and market-driving. My wish is to be able to acquire a good design firm over the next 8-12 months that can work with us and our clients at the most senior level. In the meantime, we continue our B-School meets D-school hiring strategy. We're building something very special.

I wrote on this blog 2 weeks about “How to visualize your business strategy?” May be I should write more on that one.  Landing in 10 minutes..... need to turn off my MacBook.

Should We Take "Industrial" Off "Industrial Design"

I was watching Mark Dziersk's presentation about industrial design and his view of the world through the lens of an industrial designer. Mark is a well respected industrial designer (he was president of the Industrial Designers Society of America from 1999-2000). Mark is currently VP of Design at Herbst LaZar Bell in Chicago. He is a great storyteller and mentioned many times the about the needs for multi-disciplinary team., well that is not that simple. I like one of his quotes:  "There's no half insanely great products." How true? But there are many half successful companies...too many.

One question came across my mind. Should industrial designers be called industry designers? In particularly we’re talking about this network-driven post-industrial age. The role of industrial designer has definitely gone beyond usability and all above, their jobs is about uncovering new needs and  adding emotive elements. He raised the question if there is a difference between industrial design and brand. I see where he’s going.

The relation of conceptual design and social interaction is an important issue that influences the future of industrial design management. Web 2.0 have made astonishing progress the last two years while advanced manufacturing technology emerges in an endless stream. The results are extensive amount of accessible data that can promote endless new ideas for innovation. The environmental effect and social moral concept of design, the manufacturing place and method of product, the materials, function and usage of product, as well as abandonment and recovery of product have become the new connotative meanings of conceptual design. This goes beyond traditional product design.

The design of product into the design of service, from the design of material object into the design of virtual product and the design of service into social interactions… a complete new mode of industrial design is emerging. The whole world is moving into the era of accelerated digitalization and extended collaboration.

I was reading the NY TImes article on Japanese industrial design guru Naoto Fukasawa,it is an interesting story on his design journey. He is being called a later day Charles Eames amd is highly respected in his field.According to Brown, "He is able to interpret the relationship between people and objects in a way that is at some level obvious, yet nuanced and sophisticated. His approach to to design isn't intellectual, it's human." This is an interesting one, I find that architects can design great things while striving for an unrealistic level of perfection, yet industrial designers are looking for all the human elements or solving little problems of our lives. Two very different schools...just my personal experience working with some of the best people in their fields.

The world of industrial design shows great culture consisting of humanistic spirit,  appealing aesthetics, philosophy, science, human interactions, space and technology. The industrial design culture is a product of this period stigmatized distinctly with times. It is easy to see that the method and means of industrial needs to evolve. I propose we stop calling it Industrial Design.

Human Factors Are Often The Missing Factors

Scott and I were hanging out with some friends at a bar in Chicago. Hey it is St. Patrick's day. Didn't wear my Green Hornet outfit...left it at home.

The last two years, we are all catching the ethnography and human factors fever. I guess it is due to the proliferation of electronic devices and increased sensitivity to design. Product development people and their engineers can not longer to push out ugly products when their competitors are talking a holistic design approach. Many companies are incorporating human factors into their product development processes. There are obvious reasons to do so.

Only a few years ago, human factors was a discipline virtually ignored in the medical device and consumer electronics world. They exist mostly in the military, automobile and aerospace industries. Device design was a field normally dominated by engineers, and their main concern was whether the device functioned properly or not. How easy it was to use, how well it fit into a caregiver’s workflow, and whether the design contained the potential to prompt use errors were factors considered secondarily, if at all.  Can't imagine how many die because of this error in hospitals.  Error proofing is a big deal today. Everything is too complicated and nothing is easy to use, so designing for error should be a big part of any design process from websites to smart phones or insulin pump.

Human factors has its origins in the Industrial Revolution and emerged as a full-fledged discipline during World War II. It was recognized that aircraft cockpit design needed to consider the human interface for controls and displays. Design Engineers were focused on the technology while Industrial Psychologists worked to optimize the interface. In some cases, Human Factors design can affect bottom-line profitability or can be a life and death matter, e.g., you don't want to push the wrong button or mistake meters for kilometers in a spacecraft. Companies came to realize that a products success is dependent upon good Human Factors design.

Many consumer device companies are incorporating principles of human factors and ergonomics into their designs. Some are hiring human factors experts for their staffs, while others are using consultants. More devices go through some form of usability testing before hitting the market. There are a number of reasons why the human factors discipline is finally catching on in the medical device industry.

Unfortunately, there are an equal number of reasons why it still hasn’t caught on in parts of the sector. The increasing competitiveness in certain sectors of the device industry is contributing to added use of human factors in design. As a few companies adopt the philosophy, others are following suit.

Human factors is still outside the dictionary of marketing. Not see what it takes to get marketers to see the importance of that.