The philosophy behind design thinking can be best summed up by Steve Jobs’s quote, “design is not the way it looks, design is the way it works." And it’s popularity rose hand-in-hand with the rise of Apple. But it’s founding is much more than Steve Jobs and much more than just a methodology to make sleek designs for new technology. Our host, Ron Volpe, sat down with Barry Katz, professor, IDEO fellow, author, and pre-eminent design thinking scholar to discuss the rich history of design thinking and how it influences the way companies use design to solve problems and design products with their users in mind.
We started out by discussing Barry’s illustrious career and what design thinking really means.
So why Silicon Valley? Why did design thinking evolve in Silicon Valley, and how did it start?
In 1979 there were only nine design firms in the Bay Area. And today we have the largest concentration of designers in the world. All the major consultancies are based here. And world-famous corporate design groups, most famously Apple.
What I discovered is that there was some design activity before Apple in the 70s. And I researched further and found some more activity in the 60s. And I kept digging until I got back to August 4, 1951, which is the date in which Hewlett Packard hired the first professionally trained designer to work in what is now Silicon Valley.
So Apple really came at exactly the midpoint and was a fulcrum that pivoted everything.
How did Apple’s view of design as much more than just sleek products influence others in Silicon Valley?
Steve Jobs said "design is not the way it looks, design is the way it works." He wanted to move us away from thinking that you can take technology and put it in an attractive box and call it design. Instead he moved us toward a more comprehensive idea that design is not something separate from the actual product.
Design thinking has almost nothing to do with the appearance of products and everything to do with a strategy for creating innovative experiences. It's not the aesthetic skin, or the radius, or the fonts or the color. It's the entire experience of using a product, and it's delivering that experience. So in Apple, and subsequent generations of designers in Silicon Valley, they really began to work around that idea, and we saw a real shift in thinking.
I learned from IDEO that design thinking can help develop business processes, not just products. Was IDEO first at thinking of design as more than just products?
IDEO was a real pioneer in exploring the margins, exploring the perimeter around what we can call design. So at one point IDEO introduced the concept of Human Centered Design, and began to guarantee that everything that went out the door would not just look good and work well. But it would have gone through a rigorous Human Factors Analysis by very highly trained Human Factors professionals. And this really opens the door to a much wider range of ideas that feed into the design process.
Do you work with a lot of companies to do organizational design work as opposed to service, or product, or experience design work?
That is an increasingly important part of the practice at IDEO. It can, in some respects, be traced to a recurrent experience that many of our clients had, which is that we'd present them with something and then something internal to the culture would kill an otherwise good idea. Or cause it to go through so many reductions that by the end of it, it was not an exciting product any longer. So you've probably heard many of the standard cliches about how organizations can develop antibodies to kill off exciting new ideas. And why? Because of threats to people's positions, because of uncertainties as to where this will lead, a fear of risk, which I think is a very dangerous thing for individuals as well as organizations.
So we began to look not just at the product that we were being asked to work on, or the solution we were asked to find, but also at finding a hospitable home within the client organization for that product.
How do organizations design for success?
I certainly don't have the answer to that beyond saying that it's imperative that you do so and that you create an effective means or modality for doing exactly that.
We’re working on another project for the Los Angeles County voting district, the largest and one of probably the most diverse voting districts in the United States. They're using a voting machine that was developed in the 1960s. So they initially asked us to redesign the voting machine. And we preferred again to take it to the next largest context. So really, we’re looking at how to design for democracy.
And the process included thinking not just of the person who goes to a neighborhood polling station on election day to vote, but also the guys who drive the trucks that deliver the machine to those 4,200 polling stations, the retired school teachers who assemble the machines, the volunteers working in the polling stations, and the attendant to the blind person who is voting.
So gathering and solving for the greatest diversity of stakeholders is no guarantee of success, but leaving them out is a guarantee of failure.
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Barry Katz
Design is not something separate. It's not the aesthetic skin, or the radius or the fonts or the color. It's the entire experience of using a product. Let us say we have the technology, or it is close to maturing, then how do we translate that technology into a compelling human experience? And that's where design comes in.
Ron Volpe
I'm here with Barry Katz. Barry and I have known each other for a number of years through work we did together at IDEO, and when I was at Kraft, so Barry, welcome to supply change.
Barry Katz
Good morning, Ron. It's always nice to see you.
Ron Volpe
And Barry is the he's a prefect at the California College of the Arts. Yes. He is an IDEO fellow.
Barry Katz
Yes.
Ron Volpe
He and he is also the author of a number of books, the most recent of which was "make it new," which is about design thinking in silicon, the history of design thinking in Silicon Valley,
Barry Katz
more or less correct.
Ron Volpe
All right. All right. So welcome. So why don't you fill in the blanks for work that I left out about your illustrious career?
Barry Katz
Okay, so I'll tell you about the illustrious career. And then we can go on to the less than illustrious parts that you left out. Also been a professor in the engineering school at Stanford. For decades, we have a group there called the design group, which is positioned sort of at the, on the edge of the mechanical engineering department. Okay. Yes, you are correct. I have three professional affiliations at Stanford where I am dealing mainly with engineering students, and trying to persuade them to take art and culture more seriously. And then up to my art school, California College of the Arts, where I am trying to persuade art students to take science and engineering more seriously. And in between, I have worked for many years as an external Fellow at IDEO, which is widely regarded as the founding consultancy of Silicon Valley. And I've made the argument in the book that you mentioned "the History of Silicon Valley Design," and a number of other publications. Not that Silicon Valley would not have happened without the design industry, but it definitely would not have happened in the way that it did. And I more or less define design as the process of moving technology into the market.
Ron Volpe
So when I read your book, there are a number of things that, that that were new news to me or surprise me. So one thing that didn't but I think that, you know, I'd call out and just ask you a question about it is, a lot of times we think of design thinking in Silicon Valley as being about Apple and Steve Jobs, and it started it ended there. But what I learned in the book was it goes way back, and there's a whole bunch. It's happened since. So I wonder if you just talk a little bit about how that evolved in Silicon Valley? Maybe why Silicon Valley?
Barry Katz
Sure. Will you say you learned a lot from reading it, I learned even more writing it. So when I started the book, I was provoked by the fact that there are probably more design professionals within 50 miles. So where you and I are sitting right now than anywhere else in the world. And that would be remarkable in itself. But if you contrast that to, say the early years of Apple, we were really not on the map.
One of my friends gave me a page out of the Palo Alto telephone book from 1979. So younger listeners, I should probably explain that a telephone book is this thing are you looked at...nevermind. The Yellow Pages listed every design consultancy in Northern California, there were nine of them. And they were squeezed in between detective agencies and diaper services. And today we have the largest concentration of designers in the world. All the major consultancies are based here. And world famous corporate design groups, most famously Apple. So I became interested in how that happened, and happened so abruptly. I think if you asked almost anybody around 1979-80 what are the major design centers of the world, the answers would have been pretty clear Milan for furniture, Paris for fashion, London for product design, New York for graphics, Los Angeles for whatever they do down there, Tokyo for electronics, and if you had said, and the San Francisco Bay Area, silence. We were not on the map. And now we are at the center.
So I wanted to find out how that happened. And it seemed pretty obvious to me at the time that Apple and Steve Jobs's passion for good design was the real driver. But what I discovered is that when I started to scratch, I found that there was actually some activity before that in the 70s. And I scratched a little bit further, and found some things in the 60s. And I kept scratching until I got back to I think it was August 4 1951, which is the date in which Hewlett Packard hired the first professionally trained designer to work in what is now Silicon Valley.
So end of the point there being Apple was not the beginning of the rise of design in this region, it came at exactly the midpoint and was kind of like a fulcrum that pivoted everything. So this does not take anything away from the accomplishment of Steve Jobs, quite to the contrary, but he was building upon a foundation that had already been laid.
Ron Volpe
One of the things I also learned in your book was, you know, when I when I think people think of Apple, when I think of Apple, I think of sleek design and iPhones and, and the reality is when I read the book, he was really about everything to do with the products and marketing, the presentation, the retail. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that, and, and how that has influenced others in Silicon Valley?
Unknown Speaker
Well, he said to me once and I flattered myself that he had never said this to anybody else. But then I saw it quoted everywhere. He said, in response to a question I put to him along those lines, what explains, you know, the beauty and the precision of Apple's products. And his answer was "design is not the way it looks, design is the way it works." And he wanted to move us away from thinking that you can take technology and put it in an attractive box and call it design and toward a more comprehensive idea that design is not something separate. It's not the aesthetic skin, or the radius or the fonts or the color. It's the entire experience of using a product, and it's delivering that experience. So in Jobs in Apple and subsequent generations of designers in the region really began to work around that idea, we began to see a real shift in thinking. And the latest version of that is what everybody is now calling "design thinking," which has almost nothing to do with the appearance of products and everything to do with a strategy for creating innovative experiences.
Ron Volpe
It when I first engaged with IDEO back in 2005-2004, the I think that the team was
Barry Katz
You were just a kid!
Ron Volpe
I was just — we were both just kids! I think the team was called transformation by design. And I think what surprised me at that time, and it surprised a lot of leads at Kraft at the time, was that the notion of using design thinking to develop processes, and in our case supply chain processes was something that had been thought through and was relevant. So was that a big leap as you started to engage with companies when you were at IDEO? Or, you know, was that a first for you? Or that going back further than just, you know, my short recollection?
I would, I'm always wary of talking about anything as a first, because you can always find some guy's cousin did it the week before. So with that qualification, I think IDEO was a real pioneer in exploring the margins, exploring the perimeter around what we can call design. So at one point IDEO introduced the concept of Human Centered Design, and began to guarantee that everything that went out the door would not just look good and work well. But it would have gone through a rigorous Human Factors analysis by very highly trained Human Factors professionals. And this really opens the door to a much wider range of ideas that feed into the design process. Because the human experience, I mean, where does that start? And where does that end? It's much, much more complicated than I would say simply solving a mechanical problem in an elegant way, or a visual problem in an attractive way. That's when you begin to get into behavioral issues into organizational issues, into cultural issues and the dual sense of the surrounding culture that we all live in, but also the culture of the company that you worked with at the time. And what are the things that get in the way of making a well functioning, attractive product, also a successful product? And those are often cultural organizational problems and not mechanical or electronic problems. And that's where the transformation practice came in.
We didn't when we were working with idea, but do a lot of companies come to IDEO, or do you work with a lot of companies that are really there to do organizational design work as opposed to service or product, or experience (maybe experiences is the wrong term) design work? And yeah is that a thing? And it How often does that happen?
Barry Katz
Yeah, that that is an increasingly important part of the practice at IDEO, and many of our competitors with whom we are good friends. It can in some respects, be traced to a recurrent experience that many of our clients had, which is that we'd present them with something and then something internal to the culture would kill an otherwise good idea. Or cause it to go through so many reductions that by the end of it, it was not an exciting product any longer. So I mean, you've probably heard many of the kind of standard cliches about how organizations can develop antibodies to kill off exciting new ideas. And why? Because of threats to people's positions, because of uncertainties as to where this will lead, a fear of risk, which I think is a very dangerous thing for individuals as well as organizations.
So we began to look not just at the product that we were being asked to do, or the solution we were asked to find, but also at finding a hospitable home within the client organization for that product. So there are groups at IDEO today that are working on poverty as a design problem, working on pediatric obesity, as a design problem, urban violence as a design problem. Death has a design problem.
Ron Volpe
Interesting. Is the way design thinking has evolved, does that continue to evolve? Are you redesigning design thinking I guess is what I'm saying on the fly.
Barry Katz
Interesting that you should ask Tim Brown, the outgoing CEO of IDEO, and I worked on a book together called "Change by Design." We did that 10 years ago. And the publishers came back to us some months ago, and asked us if we would be interested in a 10th anniversary edition, it was a rather successful book. So we sat down and asked ourselves, "has anything happened in the last 10 years that could justify a new edition," And, no not really just, you know, the smartphone, autonomous vehicles, CRISPR, gene editing, cloud computing ,and the maturing of artificial intelligence, the consumerization of robotics—where does it end, it's probably been the most disruptive decade in human history.
So we tackled that in a new edition. And in a final chapter, we address the need to redesign design, which is I think, exactly your question, in order to grapple with the uncertainties with a technological insurgencies, with the political instabilities, with the increasing global interconnectedness of our world. And one of the one of the key themes there is we we face the challenge of continuously rethinking what design can and cannot do, as that that perimeter gets wider and wider. I like to quote, a famous line from the great finish architect, Eliel Saarinen, and many people know his sons work, Eero, the St. Louis arch and the TWA terminal in Washington Dulles Airport. But this is the Father. And he said, "always design a thing by considering it in its next largest context." So if you're working on a chair, think about the room that the chair is going to be in. If you're thinking about the room, think about the house. If your problem is a house, think about the street, if it's a street, think about the city plan. And I'm inspired by that because now we're thinking about the global ecology as the context within which even the smallest thing we design operates, and the the impacts are reciprocal.
Ron Volpe
One of the things when we work together that always struck me is, in the way we started at the time it was Kraft and Safeway, one of the things that struck me was, we were two companies that had a bit of an adversarial relationship. And I think we use the design process and IDEO's way of doing design thinking, to recreate the way we work together. But it also had an unexpected impact of having us work together better as a team going forward. So this notion of solving a common problem together, ended up having a result that we weren't expecting, and frankly, was one of the reasons we continued to do it on and on was we kind of took it to problematic relationships and use it as a way for us to come together over a challenge. So I don't know if you've seen that same dynamic play out elsewhere or not.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I have. And it has been a topic that has intrigued and concerned me very much. I recently completed a project with a group in the Stanford Medical School, what we did was to create some kind of a--So I’m a very theoretical guy--and this was a big switch for me, we created a very hands on step by step Practical Guide to using design thinking to effect changes in medical environments, high stakes, operations, hospitals, clinics, emergency rooms, medical schools, and one of the key pieces of it has to do with how you build a team. This goes to your question about Safeway and Kraft, I think, and getting disparate members of an organization or in your case, two organizations to get on the same page and move forward in sync.
Unknown Speaker
So if we wait for the leadership of let's say, a hospital to say, here's a problem, go solve it. This is very top down. If we have leadership support for a kind of grassroots initiative, which identifies key stakeholders, so in one of the cases of a project for an improvement project, the stakeholders included a surgeon, a nurse, a patient advocate, an ambulance driver, a pharmacist and a janitor. Take any one of these people out of the equation, and you've got a partial solution, which could break down and you see of the janitor anybody can clean up? No, I mean, this is absolutely critical to maintaining a hygienic environment in a hospital every bit as much as the ambulance driver who's got to be in sync and coordinated. So we are advocating building an improvement team, call it a design thinking team, if you're wedded to that term, I'm not, but to build an improvement team that will represent the key stakeholders for the particular problem you're trying to solve. And I guarantee that the janitor and the pharmacist will have a different point of view, and different information and different insights than the patient advocate and the surgeon.
Ron Volpe
Well, it's really interesting, because what I was thinking, as you were saying, saying that if I'm thinking about supply chains, where if you look at the steps from the time to grow something, to the time the processes it, to the time you store it, to the time you sell it, to time somebody eats it: at all levels of that there's very little connection with the guy that's packing the box to the guy that's eating the product or the woman is eating the product. So we've we've thought a lot about how do you bring those those pieces together in a way? And kind of design it for success, if you will? It's tricky.
Barry Katz
certainly don't have the answer to that, beyond saying that it's imperative that you do so. And that you create an effective means or modality for doing exactly that we did another project, it's actually still underway at IDEO. And it was for the Los Angeles County voting district. So Los Angeles is the largest and one of probably the most diverse voting districts in the United States. And they're using a voting machine that had been developed in the 1960s. And as everybody knows that the American electoral processes in a state have to be charitable extreme uncertainty nowadays. So they initially asked us to redesign the voting machine. And we preferred again, like Sarah, and ticket and the next largest context. Now, we won't do that, but we will redesign democracy for you, How's that? (laughter)
Unknown Speaker
And the process included thinking not just of the person who goes to a neighborhood polling station on election day to vote, but also the guys who drive the trucks that deliver the machine to those 4200 polling stations, or whatever it is, and the retired school teachers who assemble the machines, the volunteers working in the polling stations, and the attendant to the blind person. So the greatest diversity of affected parties, call them stakeholders, is it's no guarantee of success, but leaving them out is a guarantee of failure.
Ron Volpe
In terms of industry today, and there any companies I won't ask you to call out who's doing a particularly poorly, but are there any companies like wow they really are knocking it out of the park beyond that Apple?
Barry Katz
Apple is going to be renegotiating its future. So since you mentioned that, you know, I guess I would have to say that when Steve Jobs walked onto the stage at the big Apple event and said, we're going to make a phone, the shockwave went through the industry, whatever the industry is the electronics industry, the phone industry, "well wait a minute, we thought you guys were a computer company." And then some years later, Apple is exploring building a car and another shockwave I mean, that project has not gone forward, apparently.
We have not heard such a thrilling announcement from Apple in sometimes so you know, the earbuds are pretty cool and and so on. But we haven't heard anything that says "we are going to reinvent a category" in the way that that we have before.
Elsewhere. There is stuff coming out of labs that's really exciting. I have been an advisor to an emerging design program at the Technion in Haifa, in Israel. And there's a group there that is working on an electric aircraft and electric jets. So think about the difference in the noise level between an electric leaf blower and a gas powered leaf blower, an electric car and a gas powered car: the efficiency, the environmental impact. And air travel, as we know is one of the most egregious sources of noise pollution, space pollution, and fuel consumption, carbon emissions and all of the rest. So the thought that we might have an electric air transport. And then the the question for designers is okay, let us say we have the technology, or it is close to maturing, then how do we translate that technology into a compelling human experience? And that's where design comes in.
Ron Volpe
So last question. Barry, Katz: so what's next for you? The book coming out? What challenges do you see that you'd like to tackle next?
Unknown Speaker
Okay, well, I can answer that. So I have done seven books I am at work on number eight is called "The Architecture of Information." It's a study of six emerging corporate campuses, physical buildings in Silicon Valley. So it's been really striking to me that Silicon Valley has been a global center for innovation in almost every field except one: and that is architecture, which has been a disaster. It's a wasteland. fly into San Jose International Airport, as you look down from the plane, it looks like a gigantic computer chip. And so Apple, Facebook, Samsung, Microsoft — I'm leaving something out — and Nvidia, excuse me, have all either recently completed, have under construction, or have planned, extraordinary new buildings designed around the information technology industries. So I am looking at that.
Ron Volpe
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. As always, it was an amazing discussion. I really appreciate you being here
Barry Katz
Always, always. Always a pleasure, Ron,
Ron Volpe
thanks Barry
Barry Katz
Good luck to you.
Ron Volpe
Thank you.