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Spotted by Niti Bhan
Archive for September, 2005
INDEX:2005 has presented the five winners of the 100.000 € design
awards in the categories BODY, HOME, COMMUNITY, PLAY and WORK.
Read more….
Join the conversation or tell us here at CPH127 what you think about the Jury’s different motivations.
As part of the recent AO2005 Innovation Summit, Morgan McLintic, a vice president and senior partner at Lewis Global Public Relations, interviewed David Kelley, the founder and chairman of product design firm IDEO and a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University. This is a four part post from that session.
From part one:
What are your thoughts about the state of innovation today?
Kelley: I’m happy to say that innovation is still playing as a
concept throughout the world. You know, it surprises me sometimes when
we sell innovation strategy services in different places: I’m always
thinking that innovation will have a pendulum effect, that it will run
its course and then come back. But the truth is, everybody is
interested in innovation. We had the slowdown in the economy, and now
if you look at where companies think they’re going, you’ll see that
they’re dusting off their old stuff and that they really want
innovation. If I were in some kind of fad business, I would be a little
concerned, but it seems like year after year people want to hear about
how they can become more innovative. I think the thing that has
changed a bit is that when companies come to me, they don’t necessarily
want or need a new product or service; they want to actually change the
whole innovation culture. They want to get so that they routinely
innovate in their culture. That, I believe, is a change—and a welcome
one.
McLintic: You’ve spoken in the past about fostering a culture of
innovation that becomes deeply embedded in organizations. If I were a
CEO, how would I go about doing that?
Kelley: I think the trick is trying to understand the barriers
to innovation in your organization. Some organizations are fear based;
others are focused on one aspect of the innovation equation rather than
the whole thing. The thing that’s interesting about building a culture of innovation
(and that I try to teach my students as well as the people who work
with me at IDEO) is that you need to have empathy for every aspect of
innovation. You have to be empathetic about technology, which we’ve
been very good at focusing on. And then you need to think about
business viability. As a techie graduating with an electrical
engineering degree, I was really irritated when I got out into the
world and found that businesspeople were driving the bus. I thought,
‘Well, jeez, it’s all about electrical engineering; if you don’t know
about semiconductors, you aren’t going to be important within an
organization.’ But it turns out that business viability is something
you must understand. The same thing goes for human values.
Our bias—my bias and the thing I’m most excited about—is that there
exists a new way into innovation, which people are just beginning to
pay attention to. We know how you go in from a technological point of
view; we kind of know how you go in from a business point of view.And we’re now finding innovation by going in through a human-centered point of view.
Once you ask, What do people need?, you can pursue technical
feasibility and business viability from that point of view. This
human-centered view of innovation is just now starting to be funded and
valued in the innovation space.
McLintic: Is there a difference, then, between analytical thinking (the sort of logical left-brain way of thinking) and design thinking.
Kelley: Yes. What’s happened is that universities have been very
good at developing analytical thinking—making outlines, approaching
problems analytically—and I don’t want anybody to stop doing that. Now,
however, Stanford and other universities are beginning to focus on design thinking.
The reason for that is that if you take great analytical thinkers and
teach them ways to be better at design thinking, you get what we call
T-shaped people—people who have depth and an integrative approach to
thinking. This will lead to different kinds of innovations. We’ll be
looking in different places and finding different things.
In academia, we have these tall towers of knowledge, and mining those
towers of knowledge is really important. Let’s get more Nobel prizes;
let’s go as deep as we can. But I think that by putting different
people together and having them think in this integrative way, we’ll
achieve new kinds of innovation.
Read the whole series here.
During INDEX:, during other events and occasions where we have the
possibility to get closer to people who have an important voice and views in the
discussion of the intersection between Innovation, Design and
Leadership what would we then like to ask? Questions?
The interview guide look - until now - like this:
- What is your definition of design?
- How do you see design interacting with business and innovation?
- Do you use design as a problemsolver in your business? If yes, how?
- What is your approach towards participatory design? Do you think this applies to other areas of business?
- Where do you see design in 10-15 years?
- To which extent do users have influence on your products/services?
- If you had to choose one part of the design process to take with you on a desert island, what would it be?
The week before last we had the opportunity to make interviews with Professor Ron Sanchez and Chris Conley. Chris is the first “celebrity” on stage. As you may well know Chris Conley is one of our CPH127-pilots.
In a few days we will move our binoculars forwards Mr. Sanchez.
And please take a look at our new section - Views 
A lot will happen there during next week.
What do you think - how can we improve the Views-section? Any ideas?
Interesting article from headshift that kind of makes you think
about the scope and scale of experience design. What he seems to be
saying is that traditional experience design methods don’t account for
massively co-created systems, like health care systems or schools. It
is a mind boggling thing to think about, but some models come to mind
that are not so much design methods as much as co-creation efforts,
like eBay, amazon, and wikipedia, all too massive to design through
research, but instead well designed frameworks that co-creators can
work within.
"Martin Bontoft, user researcher and design strategist at IDEO who is also involved in the Design Council’s health services co-creation projects, explained the concept of ‘co-creation’.
He started by pointing out that user experience design (UXD) is fine
but that we have to ask ourselves what comes next. UXD is not going to
deal with the large scale system changes that’ll come in health and
schools. Large scale systems that include the people who are actively
engaged in the production of these services. Typical UXD methods such
as sympathetic design and careful observation are good but they still
produce ‘postal designs’. These are fine when there is a one-to-one
relationship with a product but it becomes very difficult when there
are a large number of people that actively produce a service."
I am intrigued by the concept of qualia. That such a contentious philosophic concept has found application the field of UX is somewhat “curious” to me.
Although a number of densely verbose definitions and papers exist [see the links below], the concept is expressed in very commercial and therefore accessible terms on the Sony website. Please keep in mind I am not posting this as a promotion of Sony products, but as an example of how “user experience” can be extended and elaborated on to integrate seamlessly with branding strategy. The effect in this case is serene and sophisticated.
Here’s some links to pages on the Sony site that promote Qualia based products. It is clear that user experience [and justification for high end products with hi end prices] is central to the strategy.
What are qualia? Apparently it is a debatable topic. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines some of the key issues and definitions…
Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. In this standard, broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia. Disagreement typically centers on which mental states have qualia, whether qualia are intrinsic qualities of their bearers, and how qualia relate to the physical world both inside and outside the head.
Here’s some more
Qualia - The ‘what it’s like’ character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc
Plural for quale. "Quale" is a technical term introduced by C.I. Lewis (1929). A quale is an introspectible and seemingly monadic property of a sense-datum. For example, the qualia of a visual sense-datum of a rose would include the experienced red-ness, and the qualia of an olfactory sense-datum of a rose would include the sweet-ness of the scent.
Chris Eliasmith & P. Mandik
In terms of user experience there may be very viable but challenging opportunities for designers of products and services.
I love Adam Greenfield’s somewhat bemused take on the whole issue of how Sony has utilised the concept of qualia in their UX approach and branding of certain product lines.
He writes:
I have no doubt whatsoever that the products themselves are exquisite.
Further, it seems like Sony’s gotten the details of the packaging and
the merchandising and the in-store experience right, as far as that
goes. But I liked it better when I naively thought the appearance of
"qualia" as a concern meant that corporate folks were beginning to care
about their customers’ subjectivities."Over and above technical requirements," the Times relates, "Qualia
products were designed to elicit an emotional response." Well, all
right then. I approve. More products should aim to! I often enough sigh
sadly, upon encountering a mass of rental-fleet cars at an airport
parking lot, to think that none of them were destined to be anybody’s
dream ride. It’s a noble enough ambition, as these things go.But why then wrap yourself in the mantle of neuroscience, or toss
around obscure terms from the study of the phenomenology of
consciousness? Why go on and on about Concorde and the Grand Canyon and
Chateau Latour, when all you’re really trying to say is, "We want you
to feel special enough about this product that you’ll overlook the
surreal profit margin on it"?Sony’s number 3 Shizuo Takashino, head of Qualia ops worldwide, cuts to
the chase: "We have to do this because, well, $39 Chinese-made DVD
players are already being sold in Wal-Mart."
Me, well I still like the idea that we can strive to create significantly superior experiences for users. I’d like to be less cynical than Greenfield and at least for a moment immerse myself in the apparent purity of the qualia concept and just experience it!
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Another Jeff de Cagna weblog
STEEP
(Societal, Technological, Economic, Ecological and Political) was a new acronym I learnt at the Futuring 101 workshop on Friday, Sept 16th, the day before the Accelerating Change 2005 conference. A full day workshop, there were three lecturers, Dr Peter Bishop, Tom Conger of Social Technologies and George Gilder.
I was most impressed by Tom Conger’s presentation. He is a practicing futurist and founder of Social Technologies, a futures consulting firm based out of Washington DC. As he described his approach and methodology for future consulting, I could see why he had a client base like Nokia, Kraft and McDonalds. What I could not understand, however, is why aren’t those focusing on long term scenario building and forecasting for a 10 year span, as important, if not more than those consulting on short term, immediate return/profit innovation alone. While coming up with ideas for your next big paradigm shifting product is certainly valuable, the futurists take a longer term, holistic view and facilitate innovation in a more profound way.
Certainly, Conger shared with us the limitations of being a consultant and a change agent, the need for long term commitments to projects, and the sometimes off track requirements of Wall Street that business must meet. But more and more I could see how the work the futurists are doing can map on to the work the product planners, design planners and strategists do. Social Technologies is already hiring an ethnographer, in an effort to better understand the impact of the now on the future. I believe that both designers and design managers, new product managers and strategists, need to start taking a larger contextual worldview into consideration before recommending tactics for the short term.
NB: I found this blog post by Jon Udell which is an excellent and comprehensive overview of the conference.