innovation playground Idris Mootee

Design Leadership Is More Than Simplicity. It Is About Design Discipline.

El·e·gant, an adjective and define or characterized by or exhibiting refined, tasteful beauty of manner, form, or style. Marc Jacob? Chanel? Jil Sander? Hermes? All are unquestionably elegant by design in the fashion world. How about smartphones or interfaces? Can they be elegant? Or what about customer experiences? Can you describe a banking or customer service experience as elegant? Most people don’t.

Is elegant a word reserved solely for tangible product? The design world likes to use words such as “elegant”, “simple” and “user friendly”, many designers understand how to subtract in creating simple and elegant design solutions. Human factors usually subtract more than add. Good designers often take away complexity in objects or interfaces. Design is more than just making things simple. They appears simple but not necessarily simple. Design is the most complicated process but least understood.

Design should be strategic. Being strategic also means being human. 9 out of 10 designers barely understand what that means. Most are trained as design craftsman. There are very few design visionary and I only know a handful of them. They are also very few design managers. And that’s the reason why designers never made it to the boardroom and they complain they don’t have a voice. Because they are not strategic. Design becomes a competitive advantage for corporations when it is used strategically. At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism supporting by the underlying economics to make it feasible to produce and sell.

I have been hiring and mentoring designers (including some of the very best talents) for decades and can tell you which typology they belong in 5 minutes. It is very easy to find designers, it is not too difficult to find good designers, it is very hard to find design visionary. Because they are not trained in design schools. They need to be cultivated.

But there are so much business can learn from design. If the best design can be elegant, then can a business strategy be “elegant”? Or can a particular management style be described as “elegant”? Anything elegant is often simple; not everything simple is elegant. Things that are simple are often user friendly, not everything simple is user friendly. Sometimes complexity is needed. Simplicity has different meanings. Good businesses need to be simple and easy to understand, and that’s the investment criteria for Warren Buffet. Businesses are getting too complex these days and same for design. Long gone are the days where a few talented young folks sketching out ideas in a room. That's a mindset that stops designers from growing up to a highly complicated world.

Design process is never simple, it is often very messy as everyone has an opinion. Don't try to make it simple. But the result shouldn't be complicated. Design needs strong leadership and no different from other disciplines. Design never works in a highly politically environment and as a result you get design by committee – which is a recipe for disaster. Design management is to take the politics out and allow the essence remains. And the process is true to the mission - design to delight and make profits - not one but both.

Design needs strong leadership. Design never works if it is not managed. Best designers perform well in a professionally managed environment. Not the most desirable for many, but it is necessary. Apple design team is professionally managed and same for Mercedes and Burberry or BMW. There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence. Strong design leaders are never popular, because they need to cut out the non-sense that designers to hide behind. To force people to unlearn old theories of design.

Designers wants to remain small, fully independent and less disciplined and that’s why most design firms cannot scale beyond certain size and fail after a few years. They want to ignore the commercial complexities and stay pure. I appreciate that too but companies cannot afford it. Unless it is your own business and you don't care about making profits.

Design for elegance is better for design for simplicity. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Elegance is “far side” simplicity that is emotionally engaging, profoundly intelligent, and artfully crafted to be two things at once: simple and powerful. In today's super connected world, the proliferation of digital devices and experiences require designers to create new ways of harmonizing software and hardware with elegant connectivity – connecting humans in an elegant way. Industrial designers, human interface designers and mechanical engineers need to explore new theories for them to make physical products real and meaningful and elegant. Why elegance? It is not an elusive target? Industrial designers should stop thinking about functional ease and simplicity, that is an over simplify way of thinking design. Some times people love things that are not so easy. Think about your personal relationships, you don’t go for the easiest one, you go for where your hearts is. Design is the same. How do you put love in an industrial produced object? That’s our job.

Media Disruption Is Not Slowing Down. Mobile Is Now The Center Of A New Ecosystem.

The media business is not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet. When people asked me about my magazine and the economics of that, they were saying why am I in publishing business. Well that is not my core business, just a hobby. It has been almost three years since the first publication of MISC and readership is growing nicely. We're now in 28 countries and we have have the digital version. I am getting a lot of positive feedback from readers from all over the world. Perhaps I should make the next issue the thickest one. This is the first cover that was shot in Milan. And the next cover will be shot in Shanghai.

The media business is certainly not easy with the never-ending technological disruptions we are experiencing and new behaviors keep evolving, we are nowhere near the end of it. The word social media makes no sense anymore as it is already main stream doesn’t matter how you look at it. Many traditional media types continue to cling to an old way of doing things, based largely on making minor adaptation to existing approaches and some are relentlessly experimenting with finding new revenue stream, largely still through advertising or sponsorship.

There aren’t many new opportunities for business model innovation if you take a strategic view, people are still thinking about advertising or sponsorship. Yahoo and Google are the same. The hybrid model of readers’ empowerment and buttoned-down professional journalism is already fullyoptimized. Media executives are spending a lot of time thinking about the future of their industry and what it will look like in 2020. 

Five years ago everyone is thinking about the online model and suddenly the tablets came and changed everything. And what’s next? Multiple screens device, new interactivity through voice, gestures and more external data sources, and glasses and watches etc. No one knows how content discovery and consumption model will evolve given the abundance of choice consumers have today. Neutrality is probably not the best interest for the media industry.

Media business is still suffering from an identity crisis, at least for another decade. The business model will not change, we will still end up paying for content through transactional, subscription or advertising models although there will be more flexibility on how we purchase them. With every person with a smart phone also has a video camera that can turn them into amateur journalists, news will become real-time and shows us different views of any event. And contextual bits will be consistently updated and events unfold. The Twitters of the world are the instant updates and these short bursts will create more noises than news value and readers need someone to break them down into manageable pieces.

Audience now lives in a multi-screens world. They can choose between raw news and organized news. The three key drivers of mobile disruption are hyper-local (geolocation), integration with home appliances and digital payments. The three together can put mobile at the center of an entirely new ecosystem. It is not merely another form factor. It is the biggest leap forward since writing first arrived about 7,000 years ago, which only impacted a tiny percentage of our population. Word of mouth was the only “information system” for most of humanity and now that will be turbo-charged by mobile as it unlocks an incredibly deep desire and capacity among us (humans) to share personally relevant information and feelings such as “I am waking up happy to a sunny morning” etc. These personal information is competing for attention with other news. And for me, I'd rather be reading what my friends are saying than the news. CNN is depressing.

3 Paths Towards A Creative Life. It's Not The "Aha" Moments Or Being Perfect.

You want to be more creative? Sometimes it is not about trying harder to act creative. I see a lot of people trying too hard. Sometimes it’s not just about giving one the space to be creative.  Sometimes it is just being strategic. And sometimes it means apply a healthy dosage of common sense. 

Strategic creativity is more valuable than creativity.  Not everyone needs to be “creative” the same way as other think you should be “creative”. It is not about ideas. It is an attitude. Everyone can live a creative life and be creative how he/she sees live. It seems that when creative people (artist) with certain carft try to solve a problem or achieve a certain end result, particularly when the goal is related to their craft or specialized skills, they have an advantage. But when the problem is too big for them, it takes strategic creativity on a more sophisticated level.

Creativity is in such demand today and it is not the years of schooling or what art schools you attend. The word “Creatives” is used in advertising world to describe those who work on creating advertising campaign or providing craft for production. People in these roles like to believe that they are more creative than others. It is not the case at all.

Creativity is not a job title, crafts, capability or skills. Creativity is state of mind, which you can use in everything you see and do. People should live a creative life rather being creative. By living a creative life and having that state of mind, one naturally becomes creative. Creative is independent of discipline, culture and tools.

So how do you live a creative life? Here are three specific ways that can help you to live a creative life.

1. Be Bipolar. A little madness yield great artists, designers, inventors and scientists. The evidence is growing for a significant link between bipolar disorder and creative temperament and achievements. Seeing the extremes of both sides of anything help you to understand the spectrum of choices and options.  Go to places you don’t normally go and use that space. It is not available for everyone.
2. Be Foolish. Be lazy. Everywhere people are telling you rules and the right ways to do things.  Be acting silly and even lazy can sometimes help you to see easy paths to complex problems. Agatha Christie wrote, “I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”
3. Be Strategic. Most people see this as the opposite of creative. This is total rubbish. Being strategic can also be creative. And being strategic you need to be very creative. The best strategists are often most creative people who can apply creativity in the context of a specific problem. They don’t’ dress in a funny way or even trying to act like artists. They may wear suits and even a tie, but they could also be the super creative types.

Creativity is not just about “aha” moments or interesting ways to look at things. Creativity is about putting empathy to work. Creativity is not about perfection. Weisberg and Csikszentmihalyi both talked the importance of motivation in creative performance. A notion of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of creative flow is that reaching peak performance is “autotelic”, meaning it is enjoyable for its own sake. So the ‘creative person’ is simply someone who enjoys creativity and therefore does it all the time, even with no reasons and gains nothing from it. Someone just want to be creative all the time. That's different from peope who are strategic in applying creativity. Nothing good of bad. Just two very diffferent creative types.

Creativity is not about opening new doors because something said creativity people have no doors and doors are for those without imagination.

At CES Everything Is Touch, Touch, Touch. Will Touchscreens Make Typing Obsolete Soon?

At CES this year everything is touchscreen, TV, laptops, tablets and kitchen appliances. Is the future of interfaces is moving to touchscreen? Is this the end of keyboards? We are seeing a completing transition in the design of user experiences to software based and touchscreens. The notebook computer is the final piece of the migration. Most people would find no reasons to touch a screen on a laptop or notebook, but we are also increasing used to the habit of touching screen even most of the time even we’re not aware of. Thanks to the iPhone and iPad.

Our view will change even when we don’t think touchscreens on laptops are useful; just see someone use a keyboard with an iPad or Galaxy. For many, it just feels more natural to touch the screen. I sometimes find myself touching the screen forgetting that it is not a touchscreen device.

Blackberry will join it even they will still keep the keyboard as an option for people like me. Automobile entertainment will move there too. Your next laptop will likely be touchscreen and you might not have any choice, whether you like it or not. I wonder when will Apple launch a touch screen macbook? I think it is only a matter of time before all laptops become touch-enabled. LG was showing a prototype of interactive retail display so you can try differetn outfits without going into the changing room.

With touchscreens, we will never worry about spilling coffee onto your keyboard but will have to deal with the problems of greasy fingers. I think touch will become the key user experiences but there is still a lot of room for innovation. Touch-enabled devices will accelerate adoption in the enterprise market and next will be education market. The next generation of workers will forget what a physical keyboard looks like.

Hong Tan, a professor at Purdue University who works for Microsoft came up with an interesting way to add the feel of buttons and other physical controls to a touch screen by using vibrating piezoelectric actuators installed on the side of a normal screen generate friction at the point of contact with a finger. The nice thing about the innovation is it can make an ordinary sheet of glass feel as if it has physical buttons or even a physical slider with different levels of resistance. That is a bug jump forward from just touchscreens. The haptic feedback could help users find the right control on compact or enable the use of a touch screen without needing to look at it.

RIM is working really hard to win this. They called it a “writing without typing”, a technology only apply to the keyboardless Blackberry London devices. This is a riksy bet as Blackberry loyalist (like me) likes typing on physical keyboards rather than tapping on a screen. I am eager to get my hands on the new Blackberry London... a few weeks I will know if that works for me.

I Am Not A Gadget! Or Am I Becoming One? How Close Are We From A Full Blown Computional Culture?

Sometimes I feel like I am a gadget. We all performing various specialist and general tasks everyday and somehow you feel each of these tasks are not related. And the worst part of our job is to perform something that is so tedius and doesn’t really require any creativity, analytic and imagination. And you wonder why this work cannot be done by a gadget. Or if I am doing the job, does it mean I am a gadget?

There are over 600,000+ personal pocket gadgets out there for whatever purposes and over 700,000 apps for iPhone 7000,000; Android and 99,500 Blackberrys to turn your smartphone into a gadget. There's an app for almost anything and someday my resume will look like my iPhone and people will look at how many apps I have to decide whether I qualify for that job.

Human is supposed to be good at problem solving. Or at least we think we are, I am not getting into that debate. There are differences between the different types of problem solving from pure creativity to system level thinking or analytical processing.  Creativity requires periodic, temporary “encapsulation” as opposed to constant calculation or recalculation. You need time for working privately as well as times for group ideation. Encapsulation is what allows for the possibility of self-testing that enables a quest for excellence.

The big question is will the proliferation of gadgets push us towards a more creative culture where our time is better spend on the creative side while our gadgets take care of the rest or in another scenario where these micro-computing machines (gadgets) will take over and we will be pushed towards a computational culture?

All these micro devices, bit data-warehouses and pervasive communication facilities are now omnipresent in our daily activities. The way we live, work, play, communicate and interact with each other is in permanent flux due to the influence of these cool gadgets. Historically speaking, technologies are developed as a result of the need for faster means of calculation to achieve the unachievable before the world emerging into a full-blown computational culture. Emerging in its modern form in the seventeenth century after the introduction of typography, that culture, it is here argued, remains dominant today.

Can future gadgets evolve to a point that they understand our feelings and not just commands and preferences? As part of our extended mind and heart and algorithm that can add feeling to an otherwise mathematical, non-physical, and consequently non-aesthetic, thought? This is the theme of the next issue of MISC for March. Look out for the big Gadget Issue.

Innovation Is A Discipline Like Marketing And Finance. It Needs To Be Designed, Managed And Optimized.

I am writing about a few articles on creativity for the next issue of M/I/S/C The Creativity Issue. The editorial deadline is this week so I am now selecting the pieces that goes into this issue and art directing the design. I am still not sure what to do with the cover yet, I have a few days to think about it. May be 2 or 3. Busy week with cocktail paties and b-school alum events. Here are pictures of IC end of summer party, but arn't we just a week away from end of fall?

Creativity is an easy subject to write about but also a difficult one. Creativity is too heavily linked to novelty rather than purposeful creativity that powers up innovation and create positive and sometimes disruptive change. I am looking forward to finish writing this and move on to my day job – which is helping clients with design thinking tools, frameworks, processes and organizational design to make innovation a discipline.

The key difference between creativity and innovation is that while any idea can be an expression of creativity, it must create both customer value and economic value, and preferably social value, for it to be considered innovation. Innovation is a discipline. It is not a group of people pumping out ideas (which is the easy part); innovation is essentially the application of high creativity, applied across different disciplines from product design to marketing and channel strategy.

How can innovation be turned into a discipline? It is the discipline of getting deep customer insight;the discipline of sense making from different data sources; the discipline of managing ideas along the innovation life cycle; the discipline of capturing the imagination of customers and employees; and the discipline of managing internal resistance and stakeholder expectations.

The discipline needs to crossover with strategy, marketing, insight and product development in order to create breakthrough ideas, to fuel growth, to completely transform the ways that companies are managing themselves on the front end and the back end of their processes.

There is an interesting event Optimizing Innovation 2011 (3rd Annual Cross-Industry Event) to be held in New York City, Oct 19th and 20th. A very interesting speaker list includes Fabienne Jacquet (Director, External Innovation Global Technology at Colgate Palmolive), Pascal Mignolet (International Marketing/Intelligence Director Coffee & Tea at Sara Lee),Jorge Carbo (Senior Innovation/Project Director at Nike), Dondeena Bradley (VP, Global Design & Development at Pepsico) and Hannes Erler (VP Innovation at Swarovksi). It is a great opportunity to get to learn the secrets of success from the most experienced innovators so to put these ideas into practices. See you there.

Do You Know The Difference Between Design Engineering And Engineering Design?

Went to the Made in Brunel opening last week, Made in Brunel showcases creations from within Brunel University’s School of Engineering and Design. The show was held at the Bargehouse, four storey building on the South Bank featuring an array of technological, sustainable, humanistic and virtual innovation concepts and prototypes.

Many wonder where the name Brunel comes from, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 -1859) who was a leading British civil engineer, famed for his bridges and dockyards, and the construction of the first major British railway, the Great Western Railway; and a series of famous steamships, including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship. The school has a very good brand management program which is rare as a degree program.

There are a lot of work showcased in the Made In Brunel show and as always the quality of ideas varies. A few ones caught my attention including some concept explorations for Foursquare – the location social network by Chris Strickland, a graduate of product design engineering school. A number of mini appliance prototypes that allow people to play with information physically with their hands. By physically with the pods, people are able to combine different forms of content.

Foursquare Gaze has two components including the six Pods provide the interaction with up to the minute information and the Home which keeps the Pods charged and provides a safe place to store them. When each pod is taken away from Home, wireless connections ensure that they are kept up to date with the latest information. In this way the experience can be taken anywhere in the home.

Another interesting one is a concept to use physical items to manage utility costs at home (perfect for the modern couple) by Nick Sardar, a product design graduate. It is a physical interface (see photo below) where each cylinder is assigned to a financial aspect of your life. It is like open books household budget management.

There has always been confusions among people between industrial/engineering design and design engineering. And the same confusion applies to art school and design school which the lines are often blurred. Standford D-school was originally a engineering school, Brunel is an engineering school, Rhode Island is an art school, Arts Center is a deisgn school, RCA is an art school but certain grad programs are more like design engineering school. The lines are fast blurring. Many students are confused.

Here are what the definitions from Wikipedia but probably can use some modifications: Industrial Design (ID) is an applied art whereby the aesthetics and usability of products may be improved. Design aspects specified by the industrial designer may include the overall shape of the object, the location of details with respect to one another, colors, texture, sounds, and aspects concerning the use of the product ergonomics. Design Engineering (DE) is a discipline that creates and transforms ideas and concepts into a product definition that satisfies customer requirements.

The definitions of these two categories of design have a fundamental difference between them: ID is an applied art, whereas DE is a discipline. This means that industrial designers have more room to dream, immerse, create, interpret or expand an idea than design engineers to design everything that they or their customers want. And for design engineers, the job is explore material, heat, modularity and other engineering constrains and at the end is to make it work. Many are still confused as to which one does what. Even prototyping means very different thing for each of the two. Although in some cases the line is not clear.

Art Is Like Viagra For Science. Art And Science Complement Each Other In All Forms Of Sense-Making. The Magic Formula For Innovation.

“If you’ve never been lost you’ll never end up getting anywhere new”. That was a great opening line when Dan Widen tried to sum up his observations on day one of the event. It was the first time I met him in person and I must say I really like him. Not only of his achievement but his personal style of reflections. Also met with his colleague John Jay, also a great guy and honestly I was a little surprised to see them at the event, a nice surprise. I was expecting to meet with only scientists, artists and policy makers.

The STEM to STEAM workshop was hosted by RISD and funded by the National Science Foundation, the idea is to bring together thought leaders to come together to develop strategies for enhancing STEM education through the integration of Art and Design thinking. "STEM to STEAM pedagogy integrates a broad range of learning methods and learning ecologies from the empirical studies in the science lab, constructive critique in the design studio and creative discoveries in informal learning settings," according to Dr. Pamela L. Jennings, Program Director, Computer and Information Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation. "Creativity and rigor are rewarded and STEM learning in formal and informal settings is transformed from 'we have to learn' to 'we want to learn'."

On my flight home, I was thinking, what is the difference between an artist and a scientist? Or the artistic process and scientific progress? This was the closing discussion we’re having on the second day of STEAM. It is never easy to have scientists and artists (I don’t know which group I belong to, I am a management scientist and an artist) sitting together to talk about the integration of art and science. There is no question that there were differences in opinions in terms of what’s the definition of an artist?

The commonalities seems to be that both requires extreme curiosity, certain expertise, experimentation and ability to deal with unknowns, and using various methods of inquiries etc. And the key differences the science progress requires validation and repeatability (other wise it is not a science experiment). On the other hand art can often be done as a one off. Art is more process oriented and science has more consideration for the outcome or goal-oriented (there are also a lot of science research that I don’t know what they’re trying to achieve). The process (may be process is not the right word) of art requires artists to deploy observational skill which allows them to see beyond the surface, recognize what the eye sees and interpreting them as they see it, and constantly experimenting with organizing colors, textures, patterns, shapes, space and form.

Artist is best in asking question and sometimes these questions seem to be irrelevant they are trying to make a point. And when art is applied in science, it is becoming part of the scientific process, it is a powerful subjective aid in enriching the objective world of scientific evidence. But when science is applied in art, suddenly it has become the “rapid prototyping of truth.” Instead of algebra equations and statistical charts or applying Multivariate Statistical Process Control when several related variables are of interest are collectively known, we can make a powerful piece of visual that brings all the data together added with a subjective richness to help viewers to see things otherwise they may not see. Art is like Viagra for science (or even for scientists) to help them to keep up with the crazy world out there.

Another interesting idea is for several decades, investigations into consciousness has always been a muddy area in the scientific community. Artists and designers have always believed that art can impact our phenomenological experience of the world - via our central nervous system - through artistic stimuli, which thrill, question and captivate, for centuries. The sensations from art, whether it comes from an art installation, a painting or a digital simulation can help us to experience the immediacy of the things happing (whether it is 50 years ago or now around us) and provide a truly phenomenological experience of our world. And thereby open a T1 connection into our consciousness.

I know a scientist/artist that uses her knowledge gained in biology to explore relationships between cellular form and function and she was showing people amazing visuals of how the double helix structure is telling us what makes us who we are – an example of science meets arts. When art infuses into science opens up possibilities for artists that have the scientific knowhow to use scientific knowledge to create works of art.

I must say I very much enjoyed the event and I had the opportunity to meet with lots of scientists and artists and a lot of great discussions about the value of crossing over. Art and science provide a complementary way of making sense of the every increasing complex challenge around us, it allows data to have emotion and help us to see (and sense) the past and future. A healthy dose of subjective enlightment can give scientific knowledge a richness and depth beyond that which our senses can perceive. They complement each other in sense-making which is really the comprehension of meanings, and projection of our future. And science cannot do it alone without art.

Powerful And Affordable Real Time Data Mining, Visualization And Interactions Are Powering Up A New Culture Act - And Enabling "Infovation".

Just landed in Rhode Island and spendin the next 2 days in Providence, long working sessions ahead, expect to some productive knowledge exchange. The topic will be around where arts meets science, design meets technology.

We talk about how information changes our life and how it affect the way we make decisions both as individual and as a team or society, I think we are still unaware of the true power of change information visualization can have and the impact when applied in an interactive and social mobile settings.

Imagine a scenario everytime a politician suggests an idea and you can see realtime information in simple graphics visual data to confirm his/her coment or when a company makes a statment you can see how other respond with an instant trust index? That's a very likely future, an idea which I am working on. Can't say more.

And I don’t mean just data visualization such as bar chart and 3D chart etc, primarily it is the study and application of the visual representation of quantitative data, meaning "information which has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information."

Infodesign of infographics is actually different (it is like when I was trying to explain the differencne between customer experience and user experience/usabiity 10 years ago) from data visulaization. Information graphics (or so called infographics) instead of visualizing data, it is the strategic use of data by incorporating interactions, icons, charts, diagrams, graphs, tables and maps to present information that could bring new knowledge and sense making. Not only it helps to explain oterhwise difficult to understand data, but also illuminate and explain system complexities or system relationships in an easy to digest manner.

This is not new, in our human history our ancestors created cave murals and giant paintings to show us what was happening including what their understand of the the world, an event or even the universe. The power of infodesign lies in its effectiveness in simplifying complex data into understandable visual representations that can be universally interpreted.

The power of real time interactions with live data brings the potential to a whole new level. The human minds are real time computing machines that works to constantly changing and creating value and meaning of objects; the interactions between human brain and semiotics is conducted every time we see a visual representation of a scenario and makes possible of expanding our human cognition to absorb large amounts of data at just one single glance or click.

Here comes the most interesting part, infodesign is powering up an “infoculture” where massive real-time socailly digitally distributed (useful and useless) information is enabling a new form of cultural act. It is where science meets arts, and will continue to power up new possibilities as we learn how to use them. I will be the first one here to call it “Infovation.” Remember you hear it here first. Will write more about it next few days.

One more thing, how many schools out there actually teaches information design? Not many. We are still training people yesterday's skills for yesterday's job. No wonder it is hard for designers to find work. I think design schools should be paying for the continuous education of their graduates, becasue they never trained them enough or properly in the first place.