People Centered Design

Chris doesn’t like it when people think that innovation is encapsulated in a single shiny object that we place on our shelves. For Chris, true innovation happens incrementally, every day, in our development processes.

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

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 3:50 pm and is filed under workshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.