Søren Starbird



It's the hot design company hired by Apple to create its first mouse, (and by Microsoft to create its second), by the Post Office to rework the postbox, by Muji to create its wall-mounted CD player and by Procter & Gamble to reinvent toothpaste tubes. It made the Nokia N-gage, the Palm V and the Head Airflow tennis racquet.

Now IDEO is being retained by Barack Obama's White House to help to reinvigorate the American civil service; by the government of Iceland to help the country to innovate its way out of financial crisis; and by the Kellogg Foundation to reinvent education.

It might seem bizarre that a company used to designing products is now solving country-sized problems, but it all comes down to the technique it pioneered and preached to its clients. It calls this philosophy "design thinking".

Design thinking defines the practical way in which IDEO approaches its problems, but as a phrase it also allows design to be talked about in a meaningful way by non-designers. After all, what is a designer? In the popular mind, it's the person who lends his or her name to a range of sunglasses or shoes - beret-sporting chaps who add several noughts to price tags. Or it's the engineer surrounded by technical drawings, making machines. Either way, for most people - and most companies - the idea of the designer does not involve solving problems that don't involve making a product. But proponents of design thinking say that they can extend this creative mindset to address all forms of problem-solving. Designing products, yes, but also designing new businesses, new strategies, even new additions to society. Tim Brown, IDEO's president, calls it "a way of describing a set of principles that can be applied by diverse people to a wide range of problems".

Practically speaking, the approach isn't complicated. In stages, it goes like this: firstly, immersion, whereby the designers research the problem by plunging themselves into it - talking to the people they're trying to help, working with them, interviewing experts. Secondly, synthesis - whereby they gather together their findings and look for patterns. Third, ideation - brainstorming solutions to the real problems identified by stage two. Then comes prototyping, making mock-ups of solutions to try out against the problem. After that comes the product. Only at the end, at the prototyping stage, are judgments made; until then, all ideas are given equal weight.

This methodology is radical in that it differs from traditional approaches to business strategy in two key ways. Whereas in many companies the concept for a new product may have already been based on, say, an idea from the marketing department with a designer later brought in to make it look pretty, design thinking places the designer at the heart of the innovation process. Secondly, the methodology gives a firm framework within which a wider team can work. It takes the cliché of the lone creative mind being struck with genius, and replaces it with a process that a whole team can follow. Creativity, therefore, isn't a thing that magically appears, but a process you work through.

And work through it they have. IDEO was founded in 1991, through the merger of four companies: David Kelley Design, ID Two, Matrix, and Moggridge Associates. That year, it won 15 awards, 12 of them IDEA awards (perhaps the most prestigious international design competition). By 2009 it had won more IDEA awards than any other company. Fast Company magazine named it tenth in its top 25 list of innovative companies; by some reports, IDEO has worked for the other 24. Fortune placed it 15th in its list of companies most popular with MBA students. BusinessWeek, too, named it one of the world's most innovative companies.

It's the open-minded approach to ideas and innovation that defines design thinking - a term made famous by founder David Kelley. The methodology has led to a distinctive feature of IDEO offices around the world: walls full of Post-It notes, intended to help teams share their suggestions. In group brain-storming sessions, every idea, every observation is written or preferably sketched on to one of the sticky sheets and then displayed. During four months of Wired's visits this summer to IDEO's London office - an open-plan loft-like space in Clerkenwell - the areas set aside for each of its current projects ebbed and flowed in the form of the sticky notes. Research was written, sorted and synthesised with them; brainstorming sessions, where every member of staff is invited to contribute their input to a project, produced walls full of the things; prototypes even more so.

But there's no better way to understand how creative people work than to be part of the process. So Wired commissioned the London office to tackle a problem as if we were commercial clients (detailed at the end of this article). The brief, we decided, would be unlike any conventional design project. It would be to resolve one of the UK's most pressing social problems: urban rage.

Bill Moggridge, the twinkly-eyed grey-bearded British co-founder of IDEO, a Royal Designer for Industry and the designer of the world's first laptop, explains how IDEO, design thinking and his own ideas came about. "I think in the early days, in an industrial- design consultancy, people probably came to us because they thought we could do cool-looking stuff," he says. "The difference was that I always insisted on trying to understand what people would think and what they would want. The simplest way of doing that was to make sure that we saw the real world. So, for example, one of the earliest projects John Stoddard, who still works with us in San Francisco, worked on was for a Danish marine radio. We sent him to Hull and got him to go on a fishing trip up to Iceland so he could see what it was really like.

If you don't get out there and see what it's like, then you couldn't really design it right. That was my basic thinking. I remember doing something for bone surgery, when we were first starting to do artificial joints. So I put on the wellies and green gown and went into the operating theatre and watched what the surgeons did as they were carving people's legs up. It was pretty nasty, but very informative."

Increasingly, as products become more sophisticated, consultancies such as IDEO are focusing less on individual devices and thinking more about designing systems. The iPod, for example, is a design classic because it is part of a system that includes iTunes, its music store, its packaging, even the real-world Apple store, and the way in which the music you buy is charged to the credit card attached to your account. It's a product, yes, and a system too, but also a service.

Another example is the work IDEO did for Bank of America. Asked to help attract new customers from a specific target market - middle-aged women with children - the firm, along with a team from the bank, conducted interviews with potential customers across the US. They observed that some of them rounded up their bill payments for speed and ease of mental arithmetic: if an electricity bill came in at $42.23, they found that many would pay, for example, $45, knowing the difference would go towards the next bill. It meant household accounts were simplified, and also that the customer's psychological relationship with the utility company was subtly changed. Other potential customers they met had difficulty saving. These insights led the IDEO team to develop not an advertising campaign nor a set of branding guidelines, but instead a whole new bank account: one in which any money spent on the accompanying debit card is rounded up to the nearest dollar, and the difference automatically placed into a separate savings account.

Since its launch in 2005, the Keep The Change account, based on observation and developed through design thinking, has brought Bank of America up to ten million new customers, and has resulted in $1.8 billion of savings.

Today's new technologies, of course, do not necessarily add any complexity to designing a system or a service over designing a single device. The lines have become blurred. As more devices are made to connect to the internet, to communicate between themselves as well as with their users, and to interact with the ever-more complicated new systems that make up modern life, their design becomes hugely more complex. Bill Moggridge offers the example of traditional telephone design.

"In the old days, you'd go into the hall and you'd pick up this thing and stick it to your ear and wind the handle, and then you'd speak to another human being. There was a bit of design for the infrastructure, which was an engineering  thing connecting you, and there was a very simple piece of exchange that the operator did, and there was a very simple piece of product design - the instrument - but nothing challenging about it. The really interesting challenges were human-to- human. The operator had to be trained to learn how to deal with rude people or to know the addresses of two Mrs Smiths. Human intelligence was simply relied on, and businesses would think of this as a training opportunity or problem, rather than as a design opportunity or problem.

"Contrast that with today," he continues. "You take the telephone, and now you've got human-to-machine first, then machine-to-machine, and finally machine-to-human, so there are design challenges all the way because of the process - because you can't rely on human intelligence to do the interpretation. The thing becomes a design opportunity and need.

"Then you add all this other stuff like SMS and email and internet access, and you have a whole other set of design challenges and opportunities. Which means there is this very sophisticated object which is pretty intimate - you put it up to your face like a wine glass - with all sorts of interactions going on with tiny screens, controls that are too small to be easy to use, and there's this range of things you can do with it, all of which you have to try to align. It becomes a very difficult, complicated system with lots of layers and a hierarchy of complexity, but every one of those layers has to do with design, as opposed to training."

Here, then, is a third new field of design: interaction design, which considers how humans interact with devices and systems - in a way more involved than simple ergonomics. Moggridge may be most famous for the GRiD Compass, widely seen as the first laptop. But his most lasting contribution may come from having pioneered this field of interaction design - again, the study of how we use technologies, not just how they look or how they're built.

The two go together, though, as Moggridge recalls:

"I had my first prototype [laptop] in 1981. I took it home and I started thinking, 'Now I have a chance to use this myself.' I sat down to work, trying to understand what was happening in this little electroluminescent screen. And within about five minutes I'd forgotten everything about the physical form of the product, I was so focused on that interaction with the software - I found that I was sort of sucked through the screen into this virtual world. Occasionally I'd remember, 'Oh yeah, I designed this physical thing,' but beyond that, the important aspect - the interface -was something that I didn't yet know how to do. And so I decided to learn how."

That decision - to leave behind industrial design - was a fateful one; it led Moggridge to become a trustee of the Design Museum, a visiting professor in interaction design at London's Royal College of Art, a lecturer in design at the London Business School, and a founder of the short-lived but hugely influential Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. Today at IDEO he helps 550 staff (roughly equally split between men and women) and ever-more unusual clientele to "create impact through design", as the firm's mission states.

Impact is key. Indeed, Moggridge sees the designer's job as embracing not just the person, but the entire planet."You can think of design as three concentric circles. You have the person in the centre, and then you have the environment they live in, and then you have the world as a whole. For the person, we can also think of health and welfare - so you're designing actual improvements in the way people exist in their relationship to the world in a holistic sense.

"The larger version of that is just a holistic look at the planet... and that becomes political. It's no good just thinking about CO2 emissions in one country, it really has to be a global thing in order to have an effect. So the design of political systems that enable greater sustainability and that really will have an active effect is a much better problem outcome than looking at nice materials to make packaging or something.

"I think that the smaller circles are still always there, but you've got this bigger one surrounding them as well."

Somewhere there's a new pack of Post-it notes ready to tackle it.


  1. So their big solution was to put some ads on billboards and bus stops? How exactly does this represent an alternative to business as usual?  

    Pete Mortensen
    Nov 5th 2009
  2. Oh, I see now that I missed the key detail that they had created an implausible service that no one would ever use.  

    Pete Mortensen
    Nov 6th 2009
  3. This system just hooks people into a prescribed value system where giving money to charity is universally approved - but which charity? How much good do they really do? And why should we delegate our time to them rather than safeguarding time spent on good deeds within our own immediate social or physical arena?

    The issue of queuing centres on the politics of physical space - and that is where the solution should be grounded. A good solution would be to provide scenarios where impatient people can queue tactically (just as in a supermarket) or pay a premium charge to checkout faster. Offer the timewasters a scenic route to the checkout and we'd be surprised – if they move like they’ve got nothing better to do then they’ll probably find meaning in such a frivolous activity.  

    Robert Cave
    Nov 10th 2009
  4. Simpler and better would be humanising the use of cars - giving people options other than the horn and a flash of the headlamps to interact with other road users to say 'Go ahead', 'Thanks' and 'Sorry' would go a long way to making Britain a little bit better.


    Alistair Reid
    Nov 14th 2009
  5. i am 12 and what is this?  

    Feb 12th 2010

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