Discussion
Ideo's David Kelley on "Design Thinking"
By Linda Tischler
|
February 1, 2009
David Kelley, founder of the design firm Ideo and the Stanford d.school, was
leading a charmed existence. Then he felt a lump.
Courtesy IDEO
Related Content
Infographic: The K -12 Educational Experience
Ideo's Newest Design Projects
17 Career Lessons from IDEO's David Kelley
Why a Bowling Shirt Made Me Love David Kelley
IDEO's David Kelley wins Edison Award for Innovation
The smell of ramen noodles wafts over the Stanford d.school classroom as David Kelley settles
into an oversize red leather armchair for a fireside chat with new students. It's 80 degrees and
sunny outside in Palo Alto, and as the flames flicker merrily on the big computer screen beh ind
him, Kelley, founder of both the d.school and the global design consultancy Ideo, introduces his
grad students to what "design thinking" -- the methodology he made famous and the motivating
idea behind the school -- is all about.
Today's task: Design a better ramen experience. Some students seem a little mystified, as they twirl noodles around their chop sticks. What does a
"ramen experience" have to do with design? Better packaging? Curlier noodles? Adding a cute
little forky thing to the cheap staple of dorm rooms everywhere?
Kelley, a lanky guy with a bald head, a Groucho Marx mustache, and a heartland -bred affability,
tackles the mystery head on: "I was sitting at a big dinner in Pacific Heights recently, and I told
my hostess I was a designer. 'Oh,' she said. 'So what do you think of my curtains?' " That, Kelley
says, is not where we're going.
"You're sitting here today because we moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking
of ourselves as design thinkers," he continues. "What we, as de sign thinkers, have, is this
creative confidence that, when given a difficult problem, we have a methodology that enables us
to come up with a solution that nobody has before."
"We moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking of ourselves as design thinkers .
We have a methodology that enables us to come up with a solution that nobody has before." --
David Kelley
It is a radical notion, in its way: the idea that creativity can be summoned at will, with a process
not unlike the scientific method. That contradicts what most people -- including the 50 students
sitting mesmerized before him -- have always thought. "That to be creative, an angel of the Lord
appears and tells you what to do," Kelley says, laughing.
Ideo -- which now counts more than 50 0 employees in eight offices on three continents -- has
drawn on Kelley's methodology to do everything from stimulate customer savings at Bank of
America to revamp nursing shifts at Kaiser Permanente. Over the past 30 years, the firm has
tackled the challe nge of delivering a needle -free vaccine for Intercell, building a better Pringle
for Procter & Gamble, revitalizing the bicycling experience for Shimano, and rethinking airport -
security checkpoints for the TSA. It has racked up more than 1,000 patents sinc e 1978 and won
346 design awards since 1991, more than any other firm. The design -thinking process underpins
the company's near $100 million in annual revenue, drawn from a client roster that has included
Anheuser -Busch, Gap, HBO, Kodak, Marriott, Pepsi, a nd PNC, among hundreds of others. Ideo
has, in short, become the go -to firm for both American and foreign companies looking to cure
their innovation anemia.
Until about a year ago, Kelley, the man at the epicenter of this expanding universe, was on a roll.
He had received a National Design Award, been inducted into the National Academy of
Engineering, held an endowed chair at the Stanford School of Engineering, and even won the Sir
Misha Black Medal for his "distinguished contribution to design education." Cara McCarty,
curatorial director of the Cooper -Hewitt National Design Museum, summed up his influence:
"Kelley has pushed our definition of design more than anybody in this country."
He also had a loving wife, a daughter to whom he was devoted, and a vast circle of friends that
included Apple's Steve Jobs and actor Robin Williams.
Then, one morning, he noticed a lump on his neck. Kelley was helping a fourth -grade class at his daughter's school use design thinking to create
better backpacks when his cell ph one rang and his doctor's number came up. He stepped out to
take the call. "You have cancer," the doctor said. "Just like that," Kelley recalls. He went back
into the class to finish the lesson but, he says, "I was a mess."
It was stage -four squamous cell carcinoma, which had gone misdiagnosed -- as "inflamed fish
gills" -- for a year and a half. During that time, it had migrated to his lymph nodes. "I could tell
by looking in people's eyes that this was a big deal," he says.
Preliminary tests looked worris ome, but Kelley, an optimist, figured that with good energy and
good medicine, he could prevail. Then his oncologist sat him down and gave him the statistics:
He had a 40% chance of being alive in four years. "That was the moment," Kelley says. "As an
engi neer, you say, 'Show me the data. This has got to be for older people.' So the doctor looks at
the chart and the median age is 56. I'm 56. So it's right on me."
What ensued was sheer hell. Chemo, surgery, radiation. Mouth sores. A throat so raw he could
ba rely swallow. Nausea so severe he couldn't concentrate enough to read or even watch TV. "I
spent nine months in a room trying not to throw up," he says. The treatment wrecked his saliva
glands and his taste buds. He lost 40 pounds.
Kelley, now 58, says his wife, Kc Branscomb, a former CEO of IntelliCorp whom he met
through his buddy Jobs, was masterful at orchestrating his care, marshaling doctors, haranguing
insurance providers, keeping on top of appointments, medications, and daily life. But, Kelley
says, it was his brother, Tom, who got him through the rough patches psychologically. "Here's a
guy I shared a room with for 18 years," he says, choking up. "Basically, he gave up his life to be
there for me every day."
David asked Tom t o negotiate his relationship with the world, alerting friends that his brother
wasn't up to communicating with anybody. "More than 100 people came to me and said, 'I know
David's not talking to others, but he'll talk to me. I'm a special friend,' " Tom say s.
It was the thought of his 11 -year -old daughter that kept Kelley fighting through the lowest
moments. "At first, you think, 'I don't want to miss her growing up.' That's motivating, but not
that motivating," he says. "It's when you manage to get out of y ourself and start thinking of her
that you get the resolve to continue. When you think, I don't want her not to have a father -- then
you want to stay alive."
In the recovery phase, Kelley was assigned a psychiatrist. "When they tell you that you don't
hav e that many more years to live, you ask yourself, What is it that I want to get done? What is it
that's going to make me feel good?," he says, sitting in a neo -yurt at Ideo's Palo Alto
headquarters. "Given a finite amount of time, how do I spend it?" Kelle y and the shrink began
parsing his days, calibrating which activities were the most satisfying. "The punch line is that
one of the things that's really fun for me is Ideo," he says. Working at the firm he built fits into
Kelley's lifelong mission: "I reall y do believe I was put on the planet to help people have creative
confidence," he says. "I don't have 27 agendas. I'm not the sustainability guy, or the developing -
world guy. My contribution is to teach as many people as I can to use both sides of their br ain, so that for every problem, every decision in their lives, they consider creative as well as analytical
solutions.
"The illness has given me more resolve to do that."
When Kelley got sick, his friends were desperate to find ways to help him, sending ca rds,
movies, cartoons. John Maeda, formerly the associate research director of MIT's Media Lab and
now president of the Rhode Island School of Design, built a Web site with a picture of Kelley at
the White House, surrounded by other 2001 National Design Aw ard winners -- all with Kelley
heads -- under the banner, EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE DAVID KELLEY .
"David is the kind of person you aspire to become," says Maeda. "He's like a brainy Muppet.
You want to hug him, stick by him, and support what he stands for. He doesn't wear a fur stole or
sunglasses. He's like the guy you run into at the 7 -11 getting a Slurpee. I like the idea that he's an
anonymous superstar."
Watching Kelley, in his jeans, flannel shirt, and striped socks, shuttling between Ideo and
Stanford in his greenish -yellow '54 Chevy pickup, you're more likely to think he's a Sacramento
tomato farmer than one of the country's great design minds. (A self -confessed "car nut," Kelley
also has a '67 Ferrari, a '57 Porsche, and a '32 Ford in his fleet.) Even a s a boy growing up in
Ohio, Kelley saw the world from a different angle. "David believes he was a geek," says Tom,
the youngest of the four Kelley siblings and four years David's junior. "But it's not true. He had
his own rock band, for chrissake! Even the n he was a rock star." At the town line, there's now a
sign that trumpets, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING BARBERTON, HOME OF DAVID KELLEY .
After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Kelley took a job at Boeing, where he designed what he
calls a "milestone in aviation hi story": the 747's LAVATORY OCCUPIED sign. He eventually
moved to National Cash Register (now NCR) in Ohio, a similarly dispiriting experience. Fate
intervened during the 1973 -- 1974 oil embargo, when Kelley met a guy in a car pool who told
him about Stanf ord's product -design program. "Without the oil crisis, David may have spent the
rest of his life as a very capable but moderately unhappy engineer," says Tom.
At Stanford, Kelley met his mentor, Bob McKim, a pioneer in using experiential psychology in
desi gn. "I had an intuition I couldn't survive corporate America," Kelley says. "I hated the
hierarchy and just wanted to work with my friends."
In 1978, Kelley and some of his Stanford pals banded together to launch a design and
engineering firm, and opened f or business over a dress shop in downtown Palo Alto. In 1981, the
firm created the mouse that controlled Apple's graphic interface. Its descendants are still in use
today.
Silicon Valley was a great place for a restless mind like Kelley's to soak up ideas on how
innovative companies work, from HP's iconic culture to Xerox PARC's breakthroughs in
marrying engineering and social science to Apple, where the idea that business is a mission
reached full flower. In 1991, Kelley's firm merged with two others -- those of Bill Moggridge, who had designed the
first laptop computer, and Mike Nuttall, whose skill was in the visual design of technology
products -- to form Ideo.
A cluster of buildings on a side street near Palo Alto's business district, Ideo's headquarter s look
like a cross between a cool Montessori school and a crash pad circa 1970. There are tubs of
markers and easel pads of paper everywhere; Post -it Notes litter the walls of conference rooms.
A gum -ball machine, xylophone, and Tickle Me Elmo lie nearby, critical elements in the latest
company prank, a global Rube Goldberg contraption, which began with a coin drop in Palo Alto
and bumped and rattled its way, with occasional electronic leaps, through the company's seven
other offices. A vintage Volkswagen bus has been converted into a meeting area, complete with
beach chairs on the roof.
The playfulness of the place is utterly intentional, an outgrowth of Kelley's conviction that
children are naturally creative -- at least until the educational system beats it out of them. To test
out his theory, Kelley has several educational programs going at local schools to try to teach
children to be as adept with their right brains as with their left, and he's fond of quoting British
educator Sir Ken Robinson on the to pic: "Creativity is as important in education as literacy."
As much as Kelley loves teaching, though, he knows that his ideas can attract more powerful
acolytes -- and be disseminated more widely -- through business: "If the goal is to change the
world, th e business part changes the world faster."
What's remarkable about Ideo is that it's constantly reprototyping its own business model much
as it would those of its clients. From its early work designing tech products for Silicon Valley, it
moved to designin g experiences, and it's now on to tackling the hurdles that prevent design
solutions from getting traction within an organization. But even as that expertise evolved, Kelley
struggled to explain it. Ideo was pushing its clients forward, using something it called design, but
what the firm was really doing was more transformational. "Just like a fish doesn't know he's
wet," he says, "we didn't realize that our real contribution was that the companies we worked for
didn't think like us. And when they did, it r eally had a lot of advantages for them."
In a meeting with Ideo's CEO, Tim Brown, in 2003, Kelley had an epiphany: They would stop
calling Ideo's approach "design" and start calling it "design thinking." "I'm not a words person,"
Kelley says, "but in my li fe, it's the most powerful moment that words or labeling ever made.
Because then it all made sense. Now I'm an expert at methodology rather than a guy who designs
a new chair or car."
"They went meta on the notion of design," says Roger Martin, dean of the University of
Toronto's Rotman School of Management, referring to the shift from object design to focusing
on organizational processes. "They concluded the same principles can be applied to the design
of, say, emergency -room procedures as a shopping cart. "
While the "deep dive" ethnography that Ideo uses as a foundation for its process has since
become table stakes for most top -tier design firms, Martin says Ideo was among the first to recognize that to redesign a customer experience, you also have to rede sign organizational
structures, culture, etc., or you won't produce the experiences you want.
Design thinking represents a serious challenge to the status quo at more traditional companies,
especially those where engineering or marketing may hold sway. Pat rick Whitney, dean of the
Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), who sends many of his graduates
off to Ideo, says he sees this resistance all the time. "A lot of my students have MBAs and
engineering degrees. They're taught to identify the opportunity set, deal with whatever numbers
you can find to give you certainty, then optimize."
But some problems need to be restated before a big, new idea can be hatched. It often helps to
take the problem and break it apart, before putting it back together in a whole new way -- the
synthesis or abstraction step. That's where the creative leap often occurs and what Ideo's process
is designed to unearth.
It took Kelley a while to appreciate the power of stepping back before forging ahead. In t he mid -
1980s, he says, he used to write proposals with the various phases of the process --
understanding, observation, brainstorming, prototyping -- priced separately. Clients invariably
would say, "Don't do that early fooling around. Start with phase thr ee." Kelley realized that the
early phases were where the big ideas came from -- and what separated his firm from a bunch of
management consultants. "That moment was really big for me," he says. "After that, I'd say, 'No
way, I won't take the job if you sc rap those phases. That's where the value is.' "
Now, all of Ideo's projects employ the process, whether to redesign water pumps for developing
countries, or to devise a music service for (RED). Marriott recently hired the firm to overhaul its
TownePlace Su ites, a chain of mid -range extended -stay hotels. The company had originally
hoped to set the chain apart with snazzier, more guest -friendly lobbies. But after hanging out in
the hotels, Ideo staffers discovered that guests were reluctant to be seen in the lobbies at all. "If
you're hanging there, it means you basically have nothing to do," says Bryan Walker, the Ideo
team's project leader. "They were really sad spaces." The happiest guests were those who'd
managed to bond with the larger community -- by joi ning a nearby tennis club, finding a church,
frequenting a restaurant. That led to a brainstorming session on how to make TownePlace feel
more like a temporary home. One result: a giant wall map of the local area that highlights guests'
favorite discoverie s, and not only introduces newcomers to the area but also spurs conversation
among them -- itself a community builder. Skeptical franchisees were trotted through a prototype
built in a San Francisco warehouse, and won over. A year after the rollout, guest satisfaction
with the new lobbies has increased 16.8%.
Procter & Gamble, too, has been seduced by Kelley's ideas. With CEO A.G. Lafley leading the
expedition, for example, the company's entire 40 -member Global Leadership Council has twice
come to Ideo head quarters for a total immersion in the firm's process. "Our senior management
was blown away," says Claudia Kotchka, former vice president for design innovation and
strategy. "They learned that design is more than aesthetics, and that there are different wa ys of
solving problems than the analytical methods that most disciplines teach." Still, despite the P&Gers' enthusiasm in Palo Alto, once they got back to Cincinnati, ideas
created in the design process kept getting stuck as they ran smack into the commerc ial side of the
business. This frustrated Kotchka, who called in Kelley, Rotman's Martin, and IIT's Whitney to
help her find a way to break the deadlock. Over the summer and fall of 2005, the three came up
with a prototype of an integrated approach that to ok a product team through the design process
all the way through the impact on strategy. What's more, they trained the P&G employees to
facilitate such programs on their own.
"Our dent in the universe doesn't mean we have to do all the digging," Kelley say s. "We
empower our clients. We teach them to fish."
Kotchka says there are now more than 100 internally trained facilitators within P&G. "It's
amazing how the process scales," Kotchka says. "We try to use it not just for products but for
how we work togeth er, how we organize, and how we develop processes."
The Ideo School for Anglers taught similar tricks to the giant West Coast health -care provider
Kaiser Permanente. After a hugely successful 2004 project that Ideo conceived to improve
information transfer during nurse -shift changes, the firm's philosophy inspired Kaiser's own
innovation center. Recently, that facility tackled the problem of medication error, and using
Ideo's techniques, deployed a team to shadow nurses, doctors, and pharmacists as they
pre scribed, filled, and administered medications to patients. In the U.S. alone, more than 1.5
million people are harmed by medication errors annually; Kaiser's information -- videos and
journals -- from the observation phase revealed that interruptions were the main driver behind
errors. The team took that insight and brainstormed solutions ranging from streamlining the
process for medicine delivery to protecting the process from other employees. They then
prototyped tools -- including aprons that said LEAVE ME ALONE! and red DO NOT CROSS!
lines in front of pill -dispensing machines -- that could solve the problem.
The program has been so successful -- reducing interruptions by 50% and increasing on -time
delivery by 18% -- that Kaiser is now rolling it out to its 36 facilities and responding to inquiries
from around the world about its effectiveness. "Kaiser Permanen te has always been innovation
driven," says Christi Zuber, director of Kaiser's innovation consultancy, "but Ideo gave us a
teachable approach." It's hard to imagine McKinsey giving away its proprietary techniques, but
Ideo's largesse is in sync with Kelle y's mission -- and with his confidence in his own company's
ability to reinvent itself. "I can give our methodology away," he says at a staff meeting on Ideo's
future, "because I know we can come up with a better idea tomorrow."
Besides his mania for cars, one of Kelley's primary design passions is his house, designed by his
late friend Ettore Sottsass, the founder of the design collective Memphis. It's a sprawling,
eclectic masterpiece with multiple, asymmetrical wings: a green one shaped like a Monopoly
house for his daughter; a two -story, barrel -vaulted office for his wife; a blocky guest house,
where Kelley spent most of his time while he was sick.
In 1983, Kelley started a small business with Sottsass linking Italian design with Silicon Valley
technolog y (their product -- a phone -- made it into MoMA but failed in the marketplace), and he
understands the frequent criticism that American design is inferior to European. "The rest of the world defines design as an artistic discipline," he says. "They were t aught culture. I wasn't taught
who painted anything. So as Americans, we're at a disadvantage." But while Americans may be
underrepresented at the Milan Furniture Fair, he says, the United States has something few other
countries can match: diversity. The way Kelley sees it, our polyglot populace gives us an
extraordinary advantage in generating truly creative ideas.
That idea was one of the animating forces behind the d.school -- a place that would help
analytical Stanford types become creative thinkers. T he school would welcome students from
business, law, education, medicine, engineering -- the more diverse, the better.
In recent years, universities across the country have developed an obsession with cross -
disciplinary collaboration. One of the foremost s uccess stories, the James H. Clark Center for
Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, is right on the Stanford campus. Still, it took eight years
for Kelley to convince Stanford that his unconventional idea -- a school that grants no degrees,
but functions as more of a specialized graduate program -- had merit. "When David was making
the case for the d.school at Stanford," says Tom Kelley, "he went to [university president John]
Hennessy and said, 'Look, we're good at "deep." We have Nobel Laureates drilling d own into
esoteric topics. But what if there are problems that aren't solved by deep, but broad? We should
have a side bet in broad.' " In that climate, Kelley's notion finally began to find an audience. By
2005, he had persuaded Hasso Plattner, a founder o f the software giant SAP, to pony up $35
million to the d.school. The new 42,500 -square -foot home of the Hasso Plattner Institute of
Design, smack in the middle of the Stanford campus, will open this fall.
"Programs like this are absolutely necessary if th e U.S. wants to maintain its position in
innovation," says Plattner from his company's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. "For many
products, it's a mandatory strategy for survival. And David's so passionate, he can even motivate
me."
Kelley is still a bit astonished at what he has been able to pull off at Stanford. "I've been here 30
years, and nobody paid any attention to me at all," he says. "At one point, they were trying to
reduce the size of my office -- which was 78 square feet. Now I'm sitting in me etings with the
president, with him asking if I want another building." Hennessy is now talking about making
creative confidence a requirement at Stanford, just like a foreign language.
Whether or not design thinking revolutionizes the world and all its ra men experiences, Kelley's
influence is sure to live on in the institutions he has built and the people he has touched. "David's
legacy is that he spends his life doing things he believes in, with people he believes in, with the
abiding faith that it will l ead to good things," says Dan Bomze, CEO of CleanWell and a former
Kelley student. "From David, I've learned that there has to be someone to create something out
of nothing. He embodies that. But he makes people feel he couldn't have done it without them.
Anybody who spends time with him comes away transformed."
"From David, I've learned that there has to be someone to create something of nothing," says a
friend and former student. "David embodies that. Anybody who spends time with him comes
away transforme d." As for Kelley, he's currently cancer -free, energetic, and full of plans. But every six months, he
has to submit to a scan to make sure the disease has not metastasized. It's a terrifying reminder
that, as for all of us, life is short.
"So I sit here to day," he says, leaning forward in the shelter of the Ideo yurt, "knowing there's a
chance it could come back. So I better make some hay. I better get my religion in place in as
many people as I can. It's working really well."
