IDEO on 60 Minutes

The architectural systems they did for wounded and recovering war veterans was memorable. They are so BIG now that probably don’t take or don’t rely on traditional ID. They want a hand in the strategy, the systems, the service, and then finally maybe a reference product design. By then, the client probably can take all that “thinking” and scope out smaller ID projects for the next tier of firms to work on… for much cheaper.

Agreed its show then tell!

I’ve been in two companies that used IDEO, one project never saw light of day and the other was a collosal flop in the market. I was only on the perifery, and can’t say either wasn’t a case of “garbage in - garbage out” but they were asked to create disruptors in the market - tough gig for anyone.They cost tons of money and lost any future contracts.

This talk of Tier 1 firms or pure design is off base. People and firms have experience and talent and that’s all. Nobody is great at Everything. A Freelancer or small no-name firm that kills in a small market or narrow product category may never win any awards or get on TV but in my mind defines excellence or “Tier 1” status.

+1

When I used the term Tier 1, I did so in terms of their “perceived” status, their typical types of projects and scope, and while not stating it directly their “minimum price to do anything for you”. It had nothing to do with me implying “These are the best designers in the US”

For one, many of those companies aren’t doing work with internal ID departments, they’re being hired by marketing teams or other large organizations. Reason being your exact point, when designers need someone to design, they know there are killer consultants out there who know the problem, know their internal process, and charge 1/20th the amount. Some of those large companies literally won’t sign an invoice for less than 6 digits.

Either way, if you throw out a bunch of names on a table, those are the type of consultancies that come up often, and they’ve done a very good job of sculpting their business in a different way then the typical “I design gadgets” product design house.

It goes back to my last sentence - it’s about the client being happy. If the client gives you a crap product brief to reinvent their company “Hey, I work for cooper tire, what brand expansion can we do?” and they come back and say “For $500k we’ll tell you that you should start making BBQ’s because it resonates with your middle American focus groups” and that guy is thrilled, then they’ve done a good job. Even if that means the resulting project nearly bankrupts the company. Just take a look at all these posts we’ve had about the graphic rebranding failures on Tropicana and other big brands. The corporation loses, the company walks away with a ton of money. It obviously doesn’t tarnish their reputation enough to put them out of business.

I’ve worked at a place that both collaborated with IDEO at certain points, and did “clean up” on their work for our clients later, to get into production. This was ten years ago. Our firm was a reputable resource for product development. Weak on ID, strategy non existent. We were not ‘Tier 1’. It’s a general term for typically old school firms that have expanded and usually define the furthest reach of the ID world into the business world, at that time. Continuum is another.

BOOM roasted. When I was at frog, I was chatting with Hartmut Esslinger and he said almost the same thing word for word.

I don’t agree with that at all. The clients might be happy in the immediate end of a project with a dose of warm and fuzzies, but if the end result doesn’t provide a demonstrable ROI, they won’t be satisfied for long.

My old boss at frog, Paul Bradley (who was at IDEO for nearly 20 years, he was a designer at Matrix before the merger of all the firms that became IDEO) said something to the effect of “Ideas can not be innovative. Innovation only happens with proven behavior change of the end user, and to do that, you have to make something”

this is true, and one of the biggest challenges large firms face is bringing the right talent to a project. A large firm likely may have at least one of every type and flavor of designer, but if they are tied up on another project when the perfect program comes in for them, someone else who may be less suited will work on it. Not necessarily less talented or skilled, but less suited, and the result won’t be what it could have been.

This gets to the age old question, can a great designer design anything?

My short answer: yes
My long answer: No. While a great designer theoretically could design anything, so much of finding a great solution is being passionate about the problem and the space you are working in. So while a great designer literally could design anything, there is going to be a huge swing in the quality of the output as it aligns to things like experience and skill, but more critically interest and passion.

Good to see such a crappy video sparking such an insightful discussion.

  1. It is not 60 minutes long.
  2. It is not about IDEO.
  3. It teaches nearly nothing about ID.

The world is still waiting for Steve Jobs maid comming out of the closet, telling how he was the most demanding and best employer at the same time, how he showed her the Zen in floor wiping and chatted her up in the middle of the night on how she got the ironimg of his non iron jeans so right.

Really can’t wait for it.

mo-i

With these big firms, I just assume they are doing incredible work that can’t show. There are only a couple of firms where I constantly see great work, but maybe that has more to do with their clients wanting to be recognized as supporting design rather than the level of their work.

While a great designer theoretically could design anything, so much of finding a great solution is being passionate about the problem and the space you are working in.

This explains why so many male designers design dildos. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Seriously though, I think passion is just the fuel to great design. I can design anything, but I know that my first ideas will be only surface deep and lack direction. It’s being driven enough to keep chipping away at the problem and keep trying to increase the understanding of the problem that makes a great design. Sometimes, this is limited by the client (no money or time). Sometimes, it’s limited by the designers ability to work efficiently (burn through the bad ideas fast enough to get to the good ones).

I’m not saying everything they do is terrible and a massive waste of corporate money, but look through most of their work:

The amount of work that actually trickles down to stuff that we would see is surprisingly small. If you look though their work the amount of consumer electronics type stuff is fairly minimal. I think I own one of the WD hard drives that they designed.

So you can’t say they haven’t done anything, it’s just stuff that they’ve done may be beyond what we see. They might design a killer medical terminal or orthopedic bone saw, but we aren’t surgeons.

For example IDEO thought up Jetblue’s “Even more leg room”, which as a 6’4 person I love. But is that a product? No…it was just a way of removing a row of seats and charging everybody else more to make a few people happy, and that’s fairly clever.

It’s just a lot easier for us to look at a company like Astro and say “Oh I love those headphones, or Oh you guys designed the Xbox!”

For me, that requires a paycheck. I certainly am not passionate about most anything I have professionally designed. I have only bought 1 product out of all of the ones I designed. And that was a pregnancy test. And in that case, a positive can be a positive or a negative. That certainly throws a wrinkle into its design.

For me, it’s all about being professional in the use of my time to accomplish the “great” design (please note the irony of me posting this during business hours). And I couldn’t agree more about the time needed. That was the issue I had with the one time I worked with ideo. They flew in, did some 50,000 foot fluff, and then flew out. They, atmo, did not do the due diligence to determine anything much beyond regurgitating what the client told them in the first place. I can’t really blame ideo, they were likely on a slim budget. Or their hourly was huge, god bless them.

While that is only an anecdotal experience, my point is it takes a tremendous amount of time to determine how to change behavior. There is no quick panacea. I am currently working on a 160-year-old problem that has not wielded a solution to change behavior to date. But we have taken that 160 years of knowledge, and used it as a guide for a potential solution. It may launch in 2014, it may not.

I disagree with Yo’s implication - that a great designer can create a great solution to any design problem.
Yes, “Design is Design” but thats a broad generalization with limits, and we’re talking ab0ut the limits of IDEO …

With the exception of pure styling excersizes, I still say Talent + Experience = great results. if no experience Talent alone won’t make up the difference. Said designer would exceed the time/resources constraints. and vice versa .
(I work with engineers that are fond of saying they can send our projects to the moon with enough time and money)

Perhaps it’s just because it’s design awards season again, I’d like to find ways to define a problems difficulty as a measure of how good the solution is. Therfore when a consultancy struggles/fails to reinvent an entire category or simply regurgitates corporate inputs, even if successful - the resulting evaluations should be very different.

Two pages of discussions and nobody thought this was interesting enough to ask more about?

From the couple projects I have insight too, one, I believe IDEO bit off more than they could chew, at the time they were offering turnkey solutions - not anymore.

We’ve all had projects that turned to crap by the time they got to production. Why, is another discussion.
Bashing IDEO isn’t the point. Consultancies rise and fall all the time, just like any business. That any ID consultancy gets on TV is good for us all.

And when I was at IDEO so did David Kelley. They all started their companies because they like designing stuff.

Too many people take a dump on IDEO because they don’t “make stuff anymore”. The reality is that they do. The finality of the things they make has changed, a lot. It is true, they don’t make dope consumer electronic devices nearly as much as they used to or probably as well as places like Lunar, Fuse, Astro and New Deal. But I guarantee that they have designed several products in the last 5 years that you have used, maybe even loved. That product just happens to be a service or environment. If you go to walgreens you’ve benefited from IDEO’s work. If you keep your money at one of a handful of banks around the world you’re service is markedly better because of IDEO.

I’m really tired of the industrial design field’s narrow view of what product design is. I myself care deeply about designing beautiful objects, but understand that there is grand spectrum in which my talents can be used and that some industrial designers choose to be passionate about solving problems and yes creating products that are not necessarily physical.

It’s really easy to say, “I want to do design doing” like designing thinking is just a bunch of hot air. It’s not one or the other, great designers are both. Do you have to work at IDEO to do design thinking? hell no. But I would wager to say that most of IDEO’s detractors in the field of industrial design are people who have never worked at IDEO and probably never will and their nay saying is at least partially based out of jealousy.

You could probably guess which product. I’ve heard the same thing from someone else who was involved in that project.

My guess was the defibrillator…but to answer the original query as to why nobody asked…because it doesn’t really matter. There are always two sides to every story.

Fair enough, and I agree, it can be more difficult to demonstrate experiential design, which IDEO (and frog and every other large consultancy has been doing a lot of with nearly the same list of a big medicine, global financial, and large retail clients) but as I remember, aren’t these some of the same reasons you left IDEO?