IDEO is always the company that gets quoted as the best in its field. It is interesting to see another viewpoint about this company:-
Here the aforementioned blog post:
I’ve generally made my career out of going the opposite way to everybody else. This is good sense: I’ll always find new things that have been missed. Hence, I worry when everybody follows the lead of one person or organisation because the consensus is they are so special, so right and so perfect.
I get the feeling these days that IDEO, the design and innovation consulting firm, is too often pictured as walking on water. I knew people at the chunk of IDEO that used to be Moggridge Associates in London. They were mostly a product design business, but they’d been pioneering computer interface design, working for example on the icons for MacWrite. Soon they introduced psychologists into their work and majored on user centred design with lots of observational reports. It became clear that these ‘extras’ actually made more money than the product work and so the art of ‘fee building’ emerged – more and more services piled on to the core task. Some years back, I visited the head of IDEO in London after the merger with Moggridge Associates. He was a worried man: business was down in the recession and the Chinese manufacturers were starting to throw in product design as a freebie to clients. As a result, the office had abandoned product design and had branched out into services, including running a lot of training and brainstorming workshops for clients. And lo, profitability went up, up, up.
So it is an interesting question: is IDEO the greatest fee-building organisation in design, or are they really delivering in a way that we should all emulate? My greatest suspicion is that these guys are now telling businesses how to innovate and succeed in the market when the IDEO leadership haven’t grown up as entrepreneurs through the harsh world of start-ups, failure and eventual success. I have a lot of respect for IDEO, but they are not the role model - in fact, the role model doesn’t yet exist.
Is he saying that offering services is a shady con, invented by IDEO to make profits? While cold, hard product design is honest and honorable?
mh, don’t know what this is one is about really.
Sounds a bit bitter to me. Maybe there are other personal experiences than the ones mentioned that guided (mis-guided?) that blog post.
To me, it seems to be more a rant regarding the tendency for western consultancies to offer more and more intangible solutions rather than hands on designed objects.
Then of course to say that all leading personel at IDEO are all old golden children born with the silver design spoon in their mouths is just simply not true. Leaders and managers are recruited out of many walks of life and a wide variety of backgrounds.
I absolutely agree with the fee-building sentiment, but I think it goes for a lot of design firms, not just IDEO. After going through a curriculum in HCI, I can say that it’s actually encouraged to use fancy words for ordinary things so you can charge more money (I still remember that moment in lecture… “By saying you’re doing sense-making instead of making sense, you can charge an additional X dollars to your client…” might’ve been a joke, but who knows?). IDEO’s many methods are definitely an easy way for them (and other design firms) to rack up costs and charges to the clients.
Of course, I’m still a student and maybe it is actually OK to charge for “sense-making”…
Just wait till IDEO will come up with an idea of “Chartered Designer”. They are not talking about it, but I’m sure they are planning to launch this.
A chartered engineer can charge higher fees because he/she has passed a series of extremely difficult competency exams, so the client knows that there aren’t many people like that around. It makes the client appreciate their work a lot more. I can see how IDSA and IDEO will collaborate to launch a scheme where design practitioners will have to go through competency exams to become chartered, so the public will pay them much higher fees.
I think this goes for a large number of the giant ID firms, not just IDEO.
From work that I’ve seen, many of these big name firms deliver good work but at completely outrageous prices. They are able to pull it off for a few reasons - relationships and a typical lack of internal ID on the corporate side. Often times the divisions of these giant corporations who can afford the services of the mega firms have no internal ID teams to actually review or criticize the work done. Work is done instead for marketing or business teams who feel good when average design is combined with a paper from a psychologist telling them how much consumers liked the product. I have seen some work done by firms and thought “This looks like it took a Jr. Designer 1 month to do” but it turned out to be hundreds of thousands worth of work on a 6 month schedule. I’ve heard from several colleagues who have come from other large corporations that certain consultancies are actually banned from future work because they got caught charging an insane amount and then not delivering on it.
If anything I’m jealous that I’m not in a position to turn down all proposals that are less than a quarter million. I remember getting a quote back for some visualization work that was almost a half years salary for me. Wound up doing it myself in 3 days and thinking “man I’m in the wrong business”
At the end you have to remember that all of these companies are businesses, and if you can provide a service to a customer that makes them happy and is $1 less than the maximum they’re willing to pay, you’re doing a great job.
Just wait till IDEO will come up with an idea of “Chartered Designer”. They are not talking about it, but I’m sure they are planning to launch this.
A chartered engineer can charge higher fees because he/she has passed a series of extremely difficult competency exams, so the client knows that there aren’t many people like that around. It makes the client appreciate their work a lot more. I can see how IDSA and IDEO will collaborate to launch a scheme where design practitioners will have to go through competency exams to become chartered, so the public will pay them much higher fees.
First, awesome with a capital ‘A.’ The field could use some serious gatekeeping.
Second, making as much money as possible should be our goal. If new services are more profitable than traditional design services, then you owe it to yourself to ramp up and offer those services. No more starving artists.
A comment that comes out of this is: if a design company is simply making money rather than giving a cient a competitive advantage, by definition that must devalue what the design company does. And with a falling reputation will come falling fees (or a blacklist as mentioned). Hence, going for the ‘high-service’ end has it’s pitfalls when it’s not where a company has real expertise.
Define outrageous, please. Also, why is charging anything less than an engineer, or lawyer “outrageous”?
Yes, it is called competition and attrition. If you charge $175/hr and you do crap work that the client feels doesn’t bring value, they won’t ever pay you for it again.
The same can be said the other way around. If a client complains constantly about the cost of what you do but with no other reason but simply not wanting to pay what you charge, fire them. They’re not worth your time.
I’m a bit confuse by the direction this thread has been taken. What does IDEO, or what hasn’t IDEO done that makes them undeserving of charging a rate that people are willing to pay? They do good work.
Do they look after themselves? Yes.
Do they do a lot for the Design Community as a whole? Yes.
Are they as good (maybe better) at promoting themselves as they are at Design? Absolutely.
Do I wish it was my company and not theirs? Yup.
Should they be on a pedestal? Yes, we all have to have something to aim for.
Good for them.
I’m with the Pro IDEO group here. It seems weird to look down on a company because they are charging a lot for their services. Are you not a designer? Would you not like to have design in general viewed as more valuable that it is right now? That starts by having a “premium brand” of design that can charge a premium. Obviously they do good work with how big they are and how much design they are actually doing. That’s capitalism, if someone has a lot of sales (or clients in this case), they generally have a good product (or design process).
I think some people get down on IDEO because these days they are changing more from designing actual objects and becoming more of a business / service / experience design firm. Maybe this change scares some people as they feel very safe in their role as an object designer.
IDEO’s many methods are definitely an easy way for them (and other design firms) to rack up costs and charges to the clients.
Having approached design projects through both sketching/visual problem solving and more-methods based design-thinking processes, I’m all for methods-based design. Sketching is great for styling and certain kinds of mechanical problem solving, but when it comes to identifying core problems and finding the right way to approach their solutions, design-by-sketching falls way short. And that is why IDEO’s vast experience in methods-based design, while it may cost more, is also worth more.
IDEO charges peanuts compared with what the advertising and corporate identity agencies are charging… And their deliverables are often much more impactful and relevant to a company.
Besides that they are nice guys and share their knowledge with the design community.