The Institute of Design Strategy Conference 2007. The conference is an ambitious and stimulating event, now in its fourth year. See my (remote) report on the first event: 'Report: HITS is a welcome Collaboration of Design and Business' Hugh Dubberly, S. Joy Mountford, Ian McClelland, and Nico Macdonald (ed) Usability News, 8 November 2004 [fully linked draft of article]
See the speaker biographies on the conference site. These notes are not to be cited as direct quotes. In the meantime, see the ID Strategy Conference 2007 blog being edited by John Maeda and Becky Bermont. See photos from the conference in the entry on Upcoming.org.
Christopher Meyer, CEO, Monitor Network
Will talk about four things:
- Compared to last year: Business really likes design now; speed of change demands it: industrial to information economy: from science, technology, business, organisational change. Evolution of what has been asked of design: what works > what competes > human-centred innovation.
- Design thinking: What is design thinking: systems thinking. "I am not sure the design community is the leader in that particularly". Fitness-Search space landscape: businesses have a hard time seeing there is a higher peak
- Simulations are great story tellers. Generates more reliability in minds of people who are after that.
- Implication on where to play and how to flourish: Thrive rather than win. From mystery > heuristics > algorithms > code. Heuristics aren't marketable, algorithms are
Good news: business people are coming your way, and this won't change soon. After information curves is coming nanotech and molecular science. "Design is going to be in a period of ascendancy" but don't be complacent. Your thinking... will help you adapt.
Josephine Green, Senior Director of Trends and Strategy, Philips Design
- Designers are disruptive. Peter Drucker on Western societies being disruptive every 50 years
- What drives the future? We have colonised the empty space of the future with technology. (See Carlotta Perez book.) Problem of selling more stuff at a time when we should be re-thinking stuffGDP implies "the future is an empty space: we chuck more and more stuf at it"
- New metrics: Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. On happiness: we aren't happier than ever. Do we want to make people at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) wealthier?
- What is quality of life? Cut off point of QoL is surprisingly low
- Eckhart Tolle '<a href="http://www.soulfulliving.com/stillness_speaks.htm">Stillnes Speaks</a>' on the transformation of human consciousness
- "The Millennium Kids doing a million things in the digital world"
- See the 'Cultural Creatives' Paul Ray: on how 50m people changing the world by carrying the values of the future
- From mass consumption to mass creativity
- Intelligence is moving out of boxes into walls, clothes, etc.
- Beyond defining by what I consume to 'How can I best take advantage of...'.
- Solutions: Deep customisation; Enabling Tools
- Designers are great at re-framing questions
- From standalone to connected systems. Need to re-invent the "structures from the old industrial paradigms". From market to social innovation.
- Healthcare: crisis in EU and US. Biggest industries of C21 will be social industries: health, education, well-being
- An ecology of growth: "We cannot live in the way we have been living: we know that"
- Wolfgang Sachs 'Globalisation and Sustainability' The Wuppertal Institute, Germany: 'sufficiency' is about not giving more but taking less. "We need 11 planets if we go on like this". Otherwise "we will be finished" [Later] "otherwise we are in one hell of a mess"/
- From Manuacturing to Experience-driven, to Transformation: people/network driven. From installation period (first 20-30 years) to deployement period of eco-growth.
- [Diagram: Researching the future / Engaging with the Future / Co-creating the future / Envisaging the future]
- Towards being a socially lead company. See Karma Capitalism in Hamburg. To social innovation. Social entrepreneurs may be the new actors in the future.
Connie Duckworth, President and Chairman, Arzu, Inc.
- [Shows video about situation in Afghanistan and the role of <a href="http://www.arzurugs.org/">Arzu Rugs</a> in creating work for Afghan women]
- Approached the Institute of Design: told us to emphasise the quality of the design and inputs, focus on environmental and employment impact [check]
- One weaver said "I weave so my daughter won't have to"
- Design thinking is absolutely critical to solving these problems
William Kramer, Deputy Director of Dvpt. through Enterprise and Senior Fellow, World Resources Institute
- We live rather precariously with the weight of 4 Bn poor people bearing down on us
- Lack of quantitative data about customers in the developing world
- Most people work in the informal economy. Informality is a terrible trap as you stand outside the law, are unable to leverage assets. You cannot grow in the informal economy.
- Don't you want in fact to make poor people richer
- It is important to work out how to operationalise innovation in a new kind of market
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired Magazine; author, The Long Tail
- Carver Mead at CalTech: 'waste is good'. Taught people to waste transistors
- Unit cost of storage is falling. So why does our new Voice over IP system tell me my mailbox is full?
- For the first time in history, complexity is free.
- In an abundance model we no longer need to predict demand but just meausre it
- Apple allowed you to put your whole music collection, addressing the challenge that "I can't predict my own demand, so give me all of it!"
- A hyperlink is a vote
- We [at Wired] could run the stories online, where we have infinite shelf space, but we still have to get over the dollar-a-word problem
- C20 managment built around scarcity. Need to push innovation out to the margins as cost of experimentation and failure is so low
Denis Weil, Vice President, Innovation and Concept Development, McDonald's Corp 'Design thinking and practice at McDonald's: An update' [para]
- Service design goes to system design: organisationally, the offer is actually a system
- Value of design thinking in visualising, particulary for an experience such as a restaurant and the related activities
- At a McDonald's restaurant, the back of the building is a manufacturing business, front is a service business
- We co-produce our experience with our customers, hence participatory design
- Working on the next generation operating platform (like 'Intel inside')
- When customers hear beeping they assume it is a microwave, as that is what they have in their homes
- We are moving away from transactional (Post Office) experience
- We continuously have to do system design and have developed a strong operations research practice
- Best thing that happened to design was when we Integrated with the operations development group
- They were able to 'prototype the backend' and I said 'What if we could prototype the front end?'
David Lawrence, Senior Manager, Bicycle Product Development and Marketing, Shimano America
- We were really designing bikes or ourselves. How to desgin a bike for someone else, eg: your Mom?
- How to drive change when we are successul, cf SK Telecom.
- Took Trek to IDEO so they would believe what we were telling them. They validated what we told them.
Summing up: Larry Keeley, President, Doblin Inc.
- Our industry captains (Jim Hackett and Bumshik Hong) are prepared to show uncertainty
- On Hasso Plattner: See BizTube idea: combinations of objects ('composites') that are smart little goals.
- On Dale Fahnstrom: Note how few people in the world can still conceive and make stuff.
- The Institute of Design had its cult around 'design planning'. Now we see business leaders who don't know what to do. We will be meaningful to people "who are in that kind of pain".
- Rotman is first business school to re-invent itself: beyond being good analysts to synthesis.
Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto 'Designing in Hostile Territory'
- The fundamental tension: Reliability vs Validity: Why does this matter to the world of design? Business people live in a world of reliability
- Five things for designers: Take design unfriendliness as a design challenge 2: Empathise with the design-unfriendly elements 3: Speak the language of reliability: you think they are disagreeing with you, but in fact they don't understand a word you have said 4: Use analogies and stories: best way of mapping reliability to validity by connecting to past data 5: Bite of as small a piece as possible to generate proof
- Strategy is about shortening your odds
- Things arrive as a mystery. Then becomes a heuristic, eg: perspective, then becomes an algorithm and get coded
Connie Yowell, Director for Digital Media, Learning & Education, MacArthur Foundation
- "Design is an incredibly important dispostion of young people to have" in a world that will be increasing designed.
Matthew Holloway, Vice President, Design Services Team, SAP
- We were asked by HR to re-design their process tool. But it wasn't the tool but the policies that needed to be re-designed.
- Need for self-confidence in design
- Designers are often second class citizens
- We encourage people to 'Listen to make/Make to think': the artifact is key. Better to have a conversation about a 'thing' as you move the conversation from me vs your idea to me and you talking about 'this thing'.
- Our biggest impact is in helping other teams make impact. We want to enable other success. "We come across as not having an agenda... As being really nice guys."
- Designers also play a role as a connectors
Hasso Plattner, Co-founder, SAP
- I only use systems when I can do so without reading the manual
- In product development, we modeled every business function/process/screen, using pictures and text. We modeled interaction points with humans and other systems.
- Need horizontal communication. Problem of getting people to talk. We need people to explain new ideas in the form of models so it is captured and people can contribute.
- We will never be able to anticipate everything, so tools must be adaptable
- Learning design philosophy is absolutely necessary.
- Presented to a local company and they said 'For the first time we believe SAP understands what we need'. We had presented a working prototype.
Bumshik Hong, Vice President, Innovation & New Business Development, SK Telecom 'Growth Through Human-Centred Innovation'
- Our innovation model is evolving towards human centred innovation
- Stopped asking how we are going to expand our market share. Asked instead, how are we going to create the market?
- We have had a discussion of convergence of industries. We want to talk about convergence of needs.
- Korean telcos still seen as very creative, and lots of graduates want to work for them
Jim Hackett, CEO and President, Steelcase Inc 'Strategic/Critical Thinking'
- The notion of design thinking was the most important thing I could learn about
- Sarbannes-Oxley has taught us to be ready: 9/11 forced people to shorten their horizons. But in crises we need to do design-type thinking.
Introduction: Patrick Whitney, conference chair Director and Steelcase/Robert C. Pew Professor, IIT Institute of Design
- Apple and Steve jobs are a great example of not so much user-centred design but CEO-centred design