Ever wonder what
constitutes successful modern design?
IDEO, a large, international firm, designed the Apple mouse way back
when and the Palm hand-held organizer.
Recently, a wider lid for Samuel Adams beers. It designs services as well.
“There are three
main elements to IDEO’s ‘design thinking.’
The first is ‘lots of different eyes.’
It employs people from wildly different backgrounds—surgeons and anthropologists
as well as engineers and designers—and lumps them into multidisciplinary teams.
The second is to look at problems from
the consumer’s point of view: for example, conducting detailed interviews with
patients about their daily pill-taking routines and how they feel about
them. IDEO likes to focus on the
outliers rather than the typical customers—people who have demanding medical
regimes or who constantly forget to take their tablets—on the assumption that
this produces more useful results.
“The third element
is making everything tangible. The company
produces mock-ups of its products and processes to see how people react to them
‘in the wild.’”
We need firms such
as IDEO to help us re-think everything every so often.
from Schumpeter, “Back
to the drawing-board,” The Economist,
July 6, 2013.
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