Dean Kamen created an amazing technology in the Segway, but wasn’t able to make it relevant to people’s lives. Chris points out that the Segway was developed in such total secrecy, that it was never subjected to user testing — consumer preferences were never a consideration during the development process. Dean Kamen was the supreme innovator, but his innovation had little relevance to people’s everyday lives.

But this wasn’t Kamen’s fault.

Businesses are organized for operation, not innovation. Our businesses are optimized to do work that we already do — not to discover new products or new ideas. Most businesses are centered around the following process:

EEEMP

This acronym stands for: email, email, email, meetings, powerpoint. Chris tells us that we need to rethink our work modes, and suggests that we work like producers, not as product developers, not as product designers. The goal is to work like Pixar, not like Mackenzie. In Pixar, producers and directors have complimentary objectives. The director’s goal is to maintain the aesthetic quality of the work that is being produced. The director is responsible for the vision and story of the work created. The producer makes the trains run on time. The producer watches the bottom line, and makes sure that deadlines are met.

In Pixar’s environment, story development is the center and goal of the creative process. Story development follows a simple 3-step, iterative process: prototyping, storyboarding, evaluation (and then iteration, iteration, iteration, iter…). For Pixar, key aspects of the story development process are:

• Collaboration – or the use of different talents when and where appropriate.
• While all collaborators intensely believe in great ideas, they balance that belief with hard critique.
• No one in the process gets overly attached to one idea – everyone is attached to a shared goal.
• While the collaboration and efforts remain unstructured, the work all occurs within a highly structured, goal-directed framework.
• Visualize & Prototype every idea
• Use the pitch as a presentation and development tool.
• Decisions based on feel, not other factors

For Pixar, character development is based on:Empathy – the whole world is built on relating to peopleContextualization – all characters relate to their environmentEssence – eliminate a lot of stuff to showcase certain elements

The Collaborative cycle

1. Decide on a task to do
2. Do it prolifically, without judgement
3. Step back, ask, “What do we have?”, cluster.
4. Present to outsiders. Critique.
5. Prioritize & relate to overall goal.

Chris feels that it is within these processes that the innovation occurs, not when the product is released to the market. That the understanding gained from examining character and story development processes can be applied to design and product development processes. For Chris, story development is a key part of design innovation that produces products that are relevant to people’s lives.

Download Chris’ presentation

Interview with Paul Mercer
Interview with Takeshi Natsuno

First, Bill described the development of telephone service. Telephone companies viewed the key challenge of providing phone service as a personnel and training problem. Employees needed to be trained as phone operators to connect calls and provide a good human experience for the user. But today’s cell phone is an extremely complex object, incorporating multiple levels of design problems. The cell phone needs to have an appealing design, yet it is a sophisticated software and hardware engineering problem, and needs to be a platform for a complex set of user interactions.

Yet, the telephone, at it’s inception was a device that was primarily a people-to-people communication. Trained operators would connect your call, and the interaction of using the telephone was centered around a human experience. More recently the experience of the telephone interaction has shifted from a human-to-human to a human-to-machine, and a machine-to-machine interaction. Bill discussed how various cellphone providers have attempted to overcome this — most notably with the i-mode system, developed in Japan.

In an increasingly complex world of design approaches, where implementing design solutions requires varied sets of knowledge, collaboration becomes the rule rather than the unique situation. In fact, designers have a longer history of collaboration with experts in specific knowledge fields than one would first think. Designers of chairs have long collaborated with human factors engineers — people who understand the set of movements and range of measurements of the human body. Bill proposes that this collaboration is only slightly different than a design collaboration with a cognitive psychologist, ethnographic researcher, or environmental scientist, when a specific knowledge set is needed to inform the design process.

Yet, technology products often require the expert knowledge of several approaches. One of the very interesting aspects that informs this collaboration is the ways technology is adopted in our culture:

Bill described three aspects of technology adoption behaviour:

As a Hobby – by the Enthusiast – Exploit me!
As a tool for Work – by the Professional – Help me work!
As a part of Life – Consumer phase – Enjoy me!

Yet, many products begin in the consumer phase, which is perhaps the most complex set of behaviors associated with objects. One of these consumer objects that is most cited as a great example of a well-designed product is the iPod. Common belief is that the iPod was a result of a singular vision of the product. Yet Bill, citing Paul Mercer noted that the iPod was actually the result of a years-long iterative design process. Bill cited the iterative nature of Apple’s design process as one of the company’s major strengths. That Apple achieved greatness not just through great design and great leadership, but through a great systemic strategy that requires that people work in new kinds of relationships. For Bill and for Apple these kinds of great teams exhibit Design thinking, and Design thinking is:

Design research HOW TO KNOW?
Interdisciplinary Design thinking WHAT TO DO?
Specialist design skills HOW TO DO IT?
General design awareness HOW TO CHOOSE?

download Bill’s powerpoint 8.8 MB

At Image, Space, Object, small teams of participants and studio mentors work together to create multi-dimensional environments, human interactions and brand strategies.

People-centered narratives serve as a starting place for the design of graphic, interaction, product and environmental experiences. Research, modeling, team ideation and experiential prototyping are employed throughout the three days to produce tangible final presentations that can be brought back to work and used with your design teams.

Designing innovation requires a combination of understanding, inspiration, collaboration and communication, so plan to be part of an active hands-on workshop experience that inspires great ideas and gives you effective new design tools and strategic brand methods that can be added to your existing design process.

Learn how to create the next level of tomorrow’s brand experience in which images, spaces and objects resonate with people in an immersive physical and informational environment, as you convert theory into actual practice.