The Giant of Design: Bill Moggridge

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The exuberant Bill Moggridge

Bill Moggridge was a giant of a man in personality, accomplishment and stature. He is one of the first professionals to use ‘design thinking’ beyond the usual places and spaces. He was a founder of IDEO, arguably the organization most responsible for seeing design thinking move beyond the industrial laboratory and into public consciousness. He co-developed the first laptop. His influence on our everyday conceptualization of design and its possibility was everywhere. It was with a heavy heart that we learned of Bill Moggridge’s passing this weekend.

In the years before his untimely passing from cancer he sought to bring the passion and love he had for design to the world as the Director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City. Through the museum, Bill sought to enhance the profile of design beyond its traditional borders and instill his passion for design into those young and old. He wanted to raise the profile of design and its power to shape our lives.

My DTF colleague Andrea Yip and I had the priviliedge of spending a lovely afternoon with Bill in March of this year as part of the research for the Design Thinking Foundations project. Bill was as warm and welcoming in person as his reputation had suggested as we sat down to meet in his office overlooking Central Park. Over cookies and cappuccinos we discussed the importance of design, the concept of design thinking, and how his role as a designer has evolved to bring both ideas together over his illustrious career.

During our interview Bill spoke of his work developing the first laptop, the importance of prototyping and how time and timing both play into the design process:

Well to expand a little bit on the story of my career development I mentioned that originally I was expecting to practise as a designer of everyday objects and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work on the first laptop which came from GRiD computers and the interesting thing for me was you know having moved to California to put our second office and being in Silicon Valley that was an opportunity that fell into my lap and it was very exciting to have that opportunity to create this precedent, you know the first production laptop.

The thing that happened to me though was that I put a year and a half personally of very hard work into perfecting the physical design, working with a colleague engineer that I hired and together we made everything work for the case work. But we didn’t understand the technology inside, we didn’t understand the chips and the software and so we didn’t attribute to what happened on the screen and when I actually brought that laptop home, the first working prototype that I had and started trying to use it myself you know for the first five minutes I was really proud of my work because I was thinking oh great the hinge opens and you know I can put it up and it looks good etc. Well five minutes later I forgot all about it because I was so interested in what was happening with the interactive software and I found myself kind of being sucked down into the screen, into this digital virtual world and the next eight hours I was there and I only came back to thinking about my own design for the five minutes at the end of the day.

A giant of design

During our time together we spoke about the way design, thinking and design thinking has evolved, particularly in the context of efforts to educate people in what it means to be a ‘design thinker’.  Bill was skeptical that design thinking could be something your could learn through reason alone and spoke to the imperative to practice design, not just preach its virtues, if one is to learn it:

I mean if you look at the way design and the arts have always been taught they’re always learning by doing process. I mean that’s what the whole concept of a studio is and every art department has a studio so you teach people by putting them through the process. You don’t say “do this and this in sequence, well listen to me describe a methodology”. You say “you do this, go and paint” or “make a drawing of that, write me a poem, make me a design”. I mean it’s all the studio idea, that harnesses all these intuitive and subjective skills that we have.

It was through his experiences in designing technologies and their applications that he began to see the power of design to shape things beyond tools and gadgets and impact the wider world. We also need to be mindful of how different disciplines contribute to the design and development of products and services beyond the traditional ones typically seen as part of “design”:

You know designing services, designing systems, designing holistic experiences all of those things emerged from that combination of physical then plus digital then plus connectivity. And I think that then means that the nature of design has had to change with it. That in order to do good interaction design we had to learn about cognitive psychology and all those things that are about the way your mind works. And then in order to learn how to do the connected stuff we had to learn more about sociology and anthropology, how people relate to each other in terms of human connections.

And so the context of design has really expanded because of those big changes in technology. And so you know instead of now feeling that the only thing I could do was a piece of plastic I now feel that design and Design Thinking can be applied to really difficult problems, how to design government, how to design a service, how to design for social impact in the third world or whatever it may be. So all those things are enabled by this context of expansion of the design operations, the place where we’re designing really.

 

The design educator

As we spoke about the future of design thinking and design in general, Bill was optimistic. He believed that the students of today are better positioned for taking on the collaborative challenges that design requires and that the push to get education out of traditional silos is helping. For established professionals, it might take a while to get there.

So they (students) are absolutely interested in collaboration and they instantaneously collaborate and that’s amazing I mean young people are so good at that. They can just walk in, meet somebody the first time and a couple of weeks later they’re really working together in a way that they couldn’t imagine doing it before. If you try and do the same thing with people in mid career which is a lot what people like (University of Toronto’s Dean of Management at Rotman School of Business) Roger Martin are trying to do then of course the barriers are much greater because they’ve been siloed throughout their education, they’ve been siloed throughout their experience so far and then you say sit in this conference room and collaborate across disciplines, that’s a very hard thing to do when you’re in your mid career. So I’m doing it from the student level and making it advance from that forward and I have great hope that it’ll change the way that people use design to be much more broad, applied across disciplines, applied across problems, you know helping people to solve problems that are really challenging. I mean in future … although I think it’ll take a generation really to happen.

It’s hard to imagine that our discussions with Bill, which first started back when we met him at the DMI conference in New York last October, will not continue. He was a generous person and someone that we all owe a debt of gratitude for his contributions to design and  the way we engage the world through tools and our minds.

Thanks for everything, Bill.  The cookies, the coffee, and the conversation will forever sit warmly in our memory.

You will be missed.

Cookies, coffee and conversation

Bill talked with another of Design Foundation’s friends and fellow participant, Debbie Millman, on her Design Matters show in 2010 and can be heard here.

Details about Bill and his life’s work is available from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

A video tribute to Bill is on YouTube and well worth a watch.

 

The Shape of Design

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The Shape of Design

This is the first in a series of reviews of books that discuss design, design thinking, innovation and applied creativity. We begin this series by looking at The Shape of Design, by Frank Chimero (2012).

Frank Chimero’s book The Shape of Design, provides its readers with insight into the minds of one of the more creative, flexible and prolific designers operating in public discourse on design. The book is unique in that its genesis was funded through Kickstarter, the crowd funding site on the Web. There was clearly enough passionate readers out there to see this self-published book come to light and reading through the text I suspect that those early investors are not disappointed with the results.

Chimero describes the book like this: “The Shape of Design is a book about design as a method to plan and create change. It documents the hidden steps, methods, and thoughts of the creative process to produce a field guide for the emerging skillset: improvising, creating frameworks, storytelling, and delighting audiences. It’s a handbook that explores the qualities that make for great design so we may dream big, apply the lessons to our processes, then go get our hands dirty to shape this world.”

This book was a wonderful read, but this description sells something different than what is written. The Shape of Design is much less a handbook and more of a meditation on the creative process that designers undertake. This is part reflective practice and part memoir, but fully instructive to those interested in learning more about what design is, but also what it can be and how to think about it.

Good Design

Chimero begins the book with a question and answer: “What is the marker of good design? It moves…Design gains value as it moves from hand to hand; context to context; need to need. If all of this movement harmonizes, the work gains a life of its own, and turns into a shared experience that enhances life and inches the world closer to its full potential.” (p.XIII).

It is the designers task to organize and arrange movement in a manner that points it in a direction that aspires to a desirable future. Design is about envisioning this future and building upon the past work of others to shape the direction forward while the present is moving.

From this introduction Chimero takes us through discussion of the shape of this movement like an opera, staged in three parts: 1) The Song, 2) The In-Between Spaces, and 3) The Opening.

The first chapter focuses the reader on the development of point-of-view with Chimero advocating that designers must be intentional about their perspectives and that this comes from an ongoing dialogue between the designer and their work. This dialogue results less from a question of How design is done, but Why it is done. The question of Why “unlocks a new form of beauty by making choices observable so they can be discussed and considered” (p.25).

Asking Why questions brings the intention of design into full view for others to scrutinize and observe. From this I derive that we are makers at heart and sharing those creations is part of what makes us human, thus design is a vehicle to connecting us to that humanity and asking Why is one of the vehicles towards bringing us closer to it.

Working With Limits

In Chapter 3, Chimero builds on this theme and looks at the role of improvisation and creation. One of the case studies he highlights is the legendary recording of Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, which was completed in two takes with only loose notes guiding the role of each musician. The result was one of the most unique and celebrated jazz albums of all time.

In contrary to many writers, Chimero speaks to the benefits of limitations and how they serve the design process and help the designer to create better products. Limitations “narrow a big process into smaller, more understandable places to explore” (p. 45), something that is useful when tackling novel or wicked problems. Limitations not only shape the design, but also provide the impetus for creativity to begin flowing by suggesting the first few steps towards what a final product could look like.

Connection with Systems Thinking

In Chapter 4, Chimero speaks to three common traits of design: the message, the tone of the message, and the form. A successful design is seen has having “all three elements working in co-dependence to achieve a whole greater than the sum of its parts” (p. 49), thus making systems thinking manifest. This understanding of the systems that designers find themselves is critical. Skilled designers draw from their experience a knowledge of the domains that define the systems they work in. Although ‘systems thinking’ is not named specifically, the language that Chimero uses including the previous quote point to an understanding of the concept in practice, even if not in name. He emplores designers to learn about the full system in which they operate.

To illustrate how this thinking fits with craft, the example of the Catalonian restaurant elBulli and its former executive chef Ferran Adria is presented. It is here that the question of Why in design in brought forth again, unconsciously evoking the design method of the 5-Why’s as a means of tapping into the root of motivation for design. In the case of elBulli, that Why was to create sensory delights that the world had never seen before.

Designful Intent

In the second section of the book, Chimero focuses his gaze upon the designer’s intent and the potential outcomes from that. To that end, design is seen as a bridge between things, made visible by illuminating the white space around it. This space however, is dynamic and changes constantly provoking a need for designers to be comfortable with change and exchange. For example, design bridges between art and commerce, connecting creative expression to functional objects that add social value. Design is therefore defined by the quality of the connections it facilitates.

These connections can have widespread impact on the society around it and Chimero is quick to point out that design creates the cultures that define the very expectations that we have of design in the first place. Following his earlier argument that could read as designers ought to be systems thinkers, the notion that these systems are often complex and that what is designed must acknolwedge this complexity is also paid.

On page 77 Chimero writes: “the best design acts as a form of loosely composed, responsive movement, and seeks to have all of the adjacent elements sway together“. One can read into this that designing for emergence and creating those adjacent possibles that complexity scientists claim is the seat of much innovation is what Chimero is subtlely suggesting. Design is not a passive artifact, rather it is a tool to understanding, but also revealing them and shaping them.

From there, the book shifts towards more specific, classical design critique and explanation looking at such things as wording, interaction design object placement, and examples of good and bad design from the world of digital technologies. From this section the most important lesson is that any layout, iconongraphy, or typeface must consider empathy as its truest anchor in order to generate designs that delight.

Design and the Art of Giving

The book concludes by paying homage to the role of giving, creating, receiving and the interplay between the three. It is a commentary on how great design gives to its audience and takes from it as well. Milton Glaser’s iconic I [heart] NY logo became something owned by New Yorkers and promptly forgot the designer. To this end, that ‘forgetting’ of the designer is in part what made it great. With all due respect to Milton Glaser, he is not want for attention or recognition. It is telling that perhaps his most widely recognized logo is something seen as invisibly attributed to him but branded solidly on to its client, New York City.

It is the legacy of design and how it creates the worlds we inhabit that is its gift to those worlds and something Frank Chimero seeks to give to us through this book. He ends this gracious, well-written, and insightful volume as it began with the title: “The world shapes us, and we get to shape the world” (p. 122).

It is in contemplating this shape and striving to craft it in ways that serve our society that design shapes us as much as we shape it.

A Backstage Interview with Michael Bierut

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Michael Bierut is a partner at Pentagram and a leading voice in the world of design.

Michael studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, worked at Vignelli Associates for ten years and, as I learned from watching him host Command X: Season 3 at the AIGA Pivot Conference, has a charming stage presence and warm sense of humor.

He’s also an absolute delight to sit down and speak with.

We met with Michael at Pivot and, working under some tight time constraints, scrambled to find a quiet place to interview him in between his hosting duties. Luckily, we found a cozy dressing room backstage at the conference venue, set up our video equipment, and sat down and asked him to share with us his thoughts on design thinking.

Michael’s take on design thinking was thoughtfully laid out. He responded by highlighting two trends he was seeing in design.

ONE:

there’s something that is of interest to designers that really compels them, that I’m not sure is actually what’s being rolled up as design thinking.  And I think in a way it might be excluded by a lot of descriptions of designing processes

 

And, TWO:

And then there’s also I think…the danger with a phrase like design thinking, as it gets greater traction in the world, is that it kind of just becomes this empty sort of signifier of progressive and interesting thought, just like a lot of words like innovation or Six Sigma or all this bullsh*t

 

Michael described the role of designers in making artifacts, and the personal joy of the designer in indulging in her/his own craft…Or, as he puts it: making something new from nothing. This individualized craft and creation process, it seems, is what is underappreciated and perhaps even neglected in today’s notions of design thinking. Rather, design thinking tends to privilege a group-based approach to design (or co-design) in order to pursue some pretty ambitious goals like ‘changing the world’. Michael approaches the concept of design thinking with some caution as, according to him, it has the effect of reducing the design experience into a process that can be collaborative, managed, generalized, scaled, and made to dampen the ‘dangers’ and uncertainties of design.

In his own words, he explains these concepts further, beginning with the former trend:

 

Michael also spoke about his personal interest and motivation in design, and what he feels he contributes to projects in his role as the “designer”. To him, meeting different people and being put into new, diverse, and unfamiliar situations is incredibly stimulating. As he points out, designers are brought into situations to create beauty, surprise and imagination:

 

As we wrapped up our backstage interview, Michael made one final comment about how a deep and genuine passion for design is what ultimately leads to meaningful solutions. That is, with good intentions and care comes good design:

 

With that, our time with Michael came to a close. And before he stepped out, he left us with some kind and encouraging words:

The questions are really great, they’re really –When I first heard the subject [of the project] I thought oh, I don’t have much to say about that.  But I think you guys got something useful.

Thank you!

Posters, Spaceships + the Greater Good: A Conversation with Eddie Opara

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399 days.

That’s how long Eddie Opara has been working at Pentagram since joining the New York office as partner #17 in October 2010…At least that’s how long he had been working there when we met with him back on November 3, 2011 at RGD Ontario‘s Design Thinkers conference in Toronto.

Eddie is a traditionally-trained graphic designer who began his career in print pursuing his love for poster making. He is also a self-taught software developer with a socially minded approach to design. Eddie speaks to the need for design to be open, shared, public and contributing to the greater good. And to him, design serves as a bridge between the creative and artistic, and the political, cultural and social contexts in which we live. He told us about his design ‘philosophy’ and the reason why he believes that “you’re never finished as a designer“:

Eddie explained his client work as a process of gaining a deeper understanding of his client’s needs.  To do so, he described himself as playing the role of a psychologist: Actively listening to a client and weaving together an intimate understanding of their issues by learning how the client relates to their work…Their family…To everything. In this sense, design becomes a dialogue around the making of things so that the client can better pursue their goals and ideals. It is this very cerebral process that Eddie describes as being extracted from design and connected to other disciplines as “design thinking”:

After asking Eddie what was unique about “design thinking” as compared to other ways of thinking, he told us a story from his childhood about him and his brother competing with each other to see who could draw the ‘greatest spaceship ever’ – a true design challenge in itself. Eddie would show his drawing to his brother. His brother would take a look and draw a spaceship in response. But in his response, Eddie’s brother thoroughly explained what his spaceship could do, all the features it had, and why it was so amazing. “He totally won”, according to Eddie.

Through this story, Eddie highlighted the powerful connection between mental and verbal thought in making a structure, explaining it, and enabling other people to understand it. This back and forth process of visualization, discussion, reflection and storytelling was what he described as being a unique aspect of design. It is this ability to dialogue and make that fuels Eddie’s passion for design.

As we wrapped up the interview, we also spoke with Eddie about his identity as a designer.  As Western design is a male-dominated discipline with few high profile designers of colour, we took the opportunity to ask Eddie about Stealth, his installation from the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2007 exploring the notion of identity and invisibility in race in order to understand how he expressed his own identity through his design work:

According to Eddie, design is an opportunity to bring one’s own culture to the mix as “culture adjusts the way we think and the way we feel about ourselves and how we deal with our families and our work and everything” and not doing so may do a serious diservice to the field. Finding projects that enable him to indulge in his overly creative and personal side while balancing commercial issues and objectives bring together the best of both worlds.

We look forward to seeing how Eddie’s sense of identity and style of design thinking continue to unfold through his future projects.

The Academic Interaction Designer: Jon Kolko

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Jon Kolko’s career in design started with a secret desire to create CD covers. Jon went to school for industrial design where he learned about computer interaction, psychology, and computer science and developed a deep interest in interaction design. His career has since evolved working in a software enterprise, several start ups in Austin, TX, teaching and developing design curriculum at Savannah College of Art and Design, and working alongside Fortune 20 companies at Frog Design (Austin). It was these latter two roles that amplified Jon’s interests in academia, design education and the business of design.

Cameron and I first met Jon in April 2011 in Austin, Texas at the Design for Impact Bootcamp. As two curious Canadians with a deep interest in designing for social good and social impact, we signed up for the day-long deep dive. The Bootcamp was just a taste of the programming offered to students at the Austin Centre for Design (AC4D), an educational institution Jon founded in 2010 that brings together design education and business. AC4D uses interaction design and social entrepreneurship as a way to apply business practices to problems with a social or humanitarian bent to them. Throughout the bootcamp, we put this approach to design into action by interviewing people on the streets of Austin, understanding local design problems within the community, creating opportunities for addressing these problems, and finding ways to develop and produce solutions through sustainable business practices. Jon is currently the director of AC4D.

In October 2011, we caught up with Jon once again, this time to interview him for the Project. As an academic and active designer, he shared with us a unique perspective of his learnings from the field. We began by asking Jon to share with us his take on the term, “design thinking”:

Through Jon’s stool analogy, we understand design thinking as being held together by three major principles or ‘legs’: empathy (understanding what its is like to be another person), public prototyping (making things in front of and with other people), and abductive reasoning (moving forward with an incomplete world view but enough to make an informed guess to take action). It is these principles that are taught to AC4D students who are both designers and non-designers alike. As Jon explains, design thinking can perhaps be taught, but may only be relevant to one’s own craft:

Designing with social awareness and responsibility was an important area of discussion with Jon, particularly given the social aims of AC4D. He spoke to this and the lack of dialogue around designing with consequence rather than designing for artefacts:

Jon’s very honest and compelling perspectives on design thinking leave much to consider as one explores not only what design thinking is, but what impact it can have beyond the product that is designed.

For more information about Jon Kolko, please visit:
www.ac4d.com | www.jonkolko.com

Oh the places DTF will go!

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2011 has been a wonderful year for Design Thinking Foundations.

Fall was only the first phase of the project, and we have been overwhelmed by the warm responses we’ve received from designers and design thinkers we’ve met along the way!

Thank you to all of the amazing people that have kindly lent their time and voices to the project. As you’ll soon see through the blog, we’ve had the opportunity to speak with some prominent leaders in design and capture some of their insights on the topic through audio, video, and graphics. We are excited to share this with you.

We are also up to our knees with rich content to make sense of and synthesize, and we will be continuing our efforts in 2012 as we visit the USA once again (namely the Bay area) to conduct some more interviews. It will be exciting to see what themes emerge from the data, but already, we’re noticing some interesting connections.

We look forward to what the New Year will bring for the project, and in the meantime, are quite humbled from the great experiences we’ve had so far.

Warm wishes this holiday season + here’s to a designful and healthy 2012.

Cheers,
Andrea & Cameron

10 Interviews and counting…

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This is simply a quick update to say that after our whirlwind of conferences over the past two months, we have been quite pleased to meet some new faces and interview some pretty incredible designers and design thinkers in the field.

It’s been great to see people respond to the project and be willing to lend their time to us.

On a bit of an aside, I think Cameron and I have mastered our ability to carry around, set-up, actually use, and take-down equipment (including cameras, video stands, and yes, portable stools) in awkward and unusual spaces in conference centers, offices, hotel lobbies, and even in the powder room backstage at a conference center! We’ve become our own mobile interview unit and are happy that interviewees have been so willing to come along for the ride.

The interviews have generated a lot of great insights and perspectives. I won’t go ahead quite yet and share as we plan to profile each of our interviewees here on the blog so you can hear a snapshot of their thinking and practice as we move forward.

It’s been fun so far and we look forward to settling back into town and sitting down with some of our very own design thinkers from Canada! Stay tuned.

Design Conferences this Fall: Pivot, Design at Scale + Design Thinkers

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We are gearing up for some design conferences this Fall that will be taking us around the USA + Canada in October and November. The lineup of speakers and attendees are looking quite impressive and we are excited to be attending largely as both learners and listeners.

AIGA PIVOT
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Dates: October 13-16
This three-day conference has an intriguing title, Pivot, that describes design at an inflection point and potential game-changer for managing complexity and advancing change in the world. This is an interesting theme as it speaks to the ways in which design (thinking) has been used as a force for promoting social change and innovation outside of the conventional bounds of design.

DMI Design At Scale
Location: New York, NY
Dates: October 25-26
Design at Scale offers up the challenge of asking designers and managers how design thinking and doing can scale within organizations. I think this is a really good question, particularly as design thinking has been moving across disciplines and being used as a force for driving innovation and collaboration on the scale of communities and systems.

Design Thinkers
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Dates: November 2-3
Design Thinkers is a conference hosted by RGD Ontario that is taking place in our very own backyard. Design Thinkers is RGD’s annual conference and has previously brought in the likes of thinkers like Tim Brown. We are interested in hearing the designers at this conference present, and hopefully getting more of a “homegrown” perspective on design.

We are interested in meeting folks from all walks of design and would love to meet up if you’re at any of these upcoming events. It’s going to be a busy but also what I suspect to be quite a fruitful Fall!

Welcome to DesignFoundations.ca

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Hello and welcome to DesignFoundations.ca, the official site of the Design Thinking Foundations project.

We are thrilled to have our website up and running (at least a 1.0 version of it) as we begin the project. We are also excited for the designful adventures and conversations that lie ahead as we begin to map out the Fall. We’ve got our eye on some design conferences coming up and look forward to meeting lots of new people.

This project has a particularly special meaning to both Cameron and myself as it draws together a lot of the passions, interests, and work that we have been doing over the years by bringing it to light through the lens of design and design thinking. Our hope is to listen and learn from thought leaders within the field to gain their insights as to what it means to “design think” or “think about design”, and give greater weight and understanding to a discourse that has been highly popularized within the areas of design and business.

We will keep you up to date as we go and invite you to join us on this journey!