Category Archives: Design

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.