If you look at the problems we are facing in the world right now around hunger.
If you look at the problems we are facing around epidemics
and things like HIV and Aids.
If you look at the problems we are facing around financial systems
and that we have the wrong incentives in place for certain groups
to be making more money than others
and a very skewed distribution of wealth in the world right now.
These are big problems.
If you look at what's happening now there have been fundamental changes,
in the way people think about problems, the kinds of problems that occur.
And certainly the impact on design.
- it's the issue of how the design mind
with this potential of huge creativity to defeat habit.
How that mind gets used effectively in stopping really complex problems,
that can only be solved with human solutions.
So there are all these changes,
all these dynamics are occurring simultaneously.
It's a point at which design can be extremely powerful in solving problems.
Or if designers conceive themselves too simplistically,
they can be irrelevant.
So it's a very challenging moment for design
where the potential upside is huge.
The need for change is pretty huge too.
In an ambiguous problem you don't know what you don't know.
The situation is changing constantly
and you don't necessarily have one path
that can go through that you have to be responsive and adaptive
to whatever the situations are and how they're changing.
So if a complex problem is like playing chess,
an ambiguous problem playing is like
inviting your in-laws over for dinner for the first time.
Yeah you're having dinner
but there's a lot of other issues that are going on there.
And navigating your way through that is not a very easy thing to do.
Tools of design help us
with these kind of difficult problems
that have several difficult constraints.
Why? Because when we have an issue like that,
there's just no way around thinking of different possible alternatives
and that's something designers are very good at.
Design tends to think of things more in terms of products and services,
but they don't necessarily think in terms of what is that higher calling.
What's that higher purpose?
What's that real vision of how a company,
how an organization, how a government
can have a massive impact on the world
and then consecrate itself to that higher calling.
My first idea,
it's probably not going to be the best but I can't fall in love with that,
I need to explore different alternatives
until I find a direction
that could really solve a big and hairy problem
with many difficult constraints.
That's what design thinking is all about.
Ok
Alright so you've had some time to prototype.
The coaches are now going to come out of their cohorts
and do a run-through with you.
So act as though the coaches are your users.
Design thinking
So I have not heard of design thinking.
I haven't, no I haven't heard that expression before.
I mentioned it to my girlfriend and she definitely heard of it
but I honestly haven't.
Action.
So right now there are about 130 students who,
before yesterday morning,
had not had any exposure to design thinking.
The topic that they're working on is redesigning the savings experience.
And so they were exposed to all different kinds of user needs.
People who are married, people who are students,
people who are 70 and thinking about retirement.
What happened was after I got tenure
I found that I was out there in University
team-teaching with different professors.
So I taught with an art professor,
I taught with a computer science professor,
I taught with a business school professor.
And I found those classes to be fascinating right?
Because they would bring their students, and I would bring my students
and we'd form a class right?
And that kind of multi-disciplinarity
really provides an interesting opportunity
to solve problems
that don't fit neatly in any one discipline.
So we're looking at problems global poverty.
We're looking at financial services.
We save lives, we said we're working on the solar car,
we're going to save energy.
Or we're working in a project that's
really going to be great fun at a Halloween party,
it doesn't have to be significant.
We take them through this kind of step by step process
where they start to be mindful
•oh, that's how I did it. Oh, that's where I synthesize ideas.
•Oh that's where I built prototypes and showed them to other people.
It's really about acquiring a broad range of skills
that helps you look at the world with complexity,
preserve the tensions
that other people have said actually it's a trade off.
We have to do this or we have to do this.
So many people think that it's kind of like in your genes.
You're a creative person or you're not.
I don't buy that.
It's like playing the piano with practice.
Examples of stuff that we make in the process everywhere,
everything from quick prototypes to finished,
kind of almost finished products
and having a physical workshop is absolutely key
to what we are as designers.
Now my definition of design thinking is
applying the methodologies and approaches of design and designers
to a broader set of issues and problems in business and society.
In fact if you can go back
and look at design writers from many years ago
you'll find the term being used in various, in various contexts.
But I think in terms of currently where it came from for me anyway,
was really Stanford originally.
And I think David Kelly -
because they're in a teaching environment
they were thinking about how do we talk about what it is that we do
and how do we talk about this kind of methodology of design
and how it applies in the world.
This was given to me by my grandmother so it has meaning to me.
That's one way to add meaning to a product.
Remember this from my childhood when this thing to measure your feet
•Something that's scientific
or something that's from a different country.
Rivets from the original golden gate bridge.
Design is a sport where you have to actually participate, right?
It's really hard to get passion for something
if you're not involved with it.
It's like, you know, I've never going to Burning Man.
People always talk about Burning Man.
I can't get excited about Burning Man, I've never been there, right?
But I'm sure if I went once then I would get what it is.
And of course David and I work very closely together
and we were interested in a lot of the same things at IDEO,
not so much teaching with students
but in terms of teaching the world and teaching our clients
about perspective on how we solve problems.
Design thinking was a term that arose
in order to distinguish between what others think of as design
which is usually just the surface,
to the thinking behind,
thinking is something you do first
and then you make
and it's also a couple of processes
begin from where the user is and understand human needs
through a kind of ethnography and observation.
Then to brainstorm and diverge
and understand what all the possibilities might be.
And then to prototype
and to improve the prototype through iteration.
As I understand it these are the fundamental pieces of design thinking.
People have said if nature didn't create something
an Autodesk customer probably did.
Someone designed it.
We'll see in the next ten years
different means of realizing your designs.
So for example 3D printing, been in the works for 20 years
and it's now starting to hit the mainstream
where we can actually through additive techniques
create forms that we were never able to create before.
There's some working mechanisms
that would be hard to create in the real world.
Spring.
There's someone's foot.
The key things about the way designers work, think and are educated
is to think in an integrative fashion to bring things together
and thinking about systems and how the systems relate.
This is Material ConneXion
Fantastic. I bought it very scary picture.
You see how tow people are fighting,
but actually its' one person fighting with himself.
Inside, yes, exactly.
So I think we are in a material age.
We really are living a material age.
And in the old days you know
there's a chart of materials or elements from chemistry lessons
You learned where there were 104, 110, 120 materials.
I'm not saying we are inventing new classification system,
but we have at least 6,000 materials in our databank.
You know it's still questionable what is good design.
But also big subject if you want to discuss what design means.
This is originally called Lamiki pen.
It's slender and beautiful.
So the new pen of this is thick.
It's like a fat version.
Why did they change it? I really don't have the answer.
Because good designing is scarce of course.
Is the proportion,
it works well,
and they've made it worse.
It usually has to be better, right?
So much for that.
Design is the act of seeing something that we want to be better.
And then the activity of making it better.
It usually starts by someone seeing a problem.
But it's up to that first conversation to begin questioning,
does the problem as stated
represent the problem that we should observe.
It's just like in medicine.
I may go to a doctor and say I have a pain here
and the doctor may realize that the problem isn't here,
the problem's over here.
And it's the design conversation's responsibility
to diagnose if you will.
If I asked you to build me a bridge,
what would you do?
If you built the bridge you could build that cantilever bridge
or a suspension bridge or right, a whole different kinds of bridges.
But if you ask me why
and I say to get across this body of water, right,
then what solutions might you come up with.
A boat.
Swimming.
Give me a wet suit.
A tunnel. An airplane, right?
Oh, and the bridge.
So by asking why I've now completely reframed what it is, right?
If you ask me why again
and I say oh, I need to get a message to the other side, right?
Now what ideas do you have.
No you don't have to go across now right
so how can I get a message to the other side?
Sometimes when you ask why you're sort of a bit of a trouble maker.
You know? That question.
What is an acceptable question,
why is a much tougher question to answer.
This is where we started. This syringe is a real basic syringe.
This and many others like it.
We used to call it, well-engineered but not well designed.
If you pull the cap off watch my right hands,
especially if the cap is sticky, which it is sometimes,
The cap will come off an you'll see a bit of a recoil
and accidentally stick yourself when you're taking the cap off.
Which is counter intuitive but a popular way to stick yourself.
I mean you can push it like that too, right?
Yeah and actually what we find is that there are many many different styles.
Some people are doing it like this.
You know some people may do it like this with the thumb.
Some people will do two-handed.
This is a little detail.
So this is this metal spring, we call it a flower.
It's actually pretty ingenious. It's got all these very small details
and this actually gets press fit into here using this tool.
When this thing sliders over this like such it's on.
So the next time you pull this off
these little teeth here clamp onto the plastic
and it won't come off accidentally.
Design research is much much much different
than marketing research.
So for instance. We may look at perception
and we may do that qualitatively or quantitatively.
We're actually responses perceptions can be measured.
And we could also see that males think differently than females.
That older people think differently than younger people
or what is, people in one profession
different than another profession in the way they think.
Watch the white dot
and I'm going to show you three different displays -
tell me how much fuel I have in the car.
Okay watch again.
By designing this display
to be an area of color, a large area of color,
it's much much easier to read.
It doesn't require accurate focus
and you can even see it out of your peripheral vision.
Our description of design for everybody may be a little bit different.
We want to accommodate as many people as possible.
Again it's my 1960's radical student sensibility
of power to the people.
In a way it was about illuminating segregation in design.
If you want to have a good idea have lots of ideas.
You know so we have a brainstorm, we come up with 100 ideas in ten minutes.
If you try stuff
that doesn't mean spending a billion dollars
trying something and having that fail.
You have to think cleverly and say
how can I have the first try for 10,000 dollar investment.
And that way if it doesn't work so well,
that's not going to kill us.
And so changing from I have to wait and wait and wait and wait
until I get an absolutely perfect
and invest more and more and more time into getting it perfect
and then I'll show it to you.
We want them to think you know I'm going to go very early.
I'm going to say, I've just done some preliminary thinking,
what do you think? Just, you can trash it if you want,
just tell me what you think
and then do it over and over again.
And that I think ends up feeling very liberating to these students,
who many of them are highly analytically trained
and they're in,
they've come from a world where they've got to get a right answer.
I make stuff up.
Whoever done this it's a really nice
- I think probably more like a guy like alright, I make stuff up,
I'm making t-shirts you know?
Well old ones like this, right?
It has a round shape
because it's got a time indication that's tipping like this
and this is sort of doing the same thing.
Yeah and the one thing about cities is that
they're pretty strapped for human resources.
So just managing the situation,
having thousands of these in the street
and you have, I don't know,
hundred people just operating them.
I think we could figure out a way that
basically throws the coins under the bus so to speak.
We don't do coins, we do, everything is digital.
My designer friends that I've known for so long,
the designer couple, is they just never mind trying something.
They just don't mind being wrong.
Having a bad idea.
As long as that being wrongness, that bad idea helps them
get the next stage of a good idea
and the next stage and the next stage.
Say I want to like log in and reserve a table
like on open table or something.
Then would that be cool if I could reserve a parking spot
and when I show up I see it.
So I wonder how we would indicate that within some of these guys.
You may be able to put in a reservation
related to your dinner reservation.
So when you pull up you kind of get automatic rock star parking.
If I'm entering something on my smart phone
and then I'm going to take my two hours and put it on the device,
you know assertively sort of across it,
and give it back to me.
We find it kind of a historical street furniture
and we want to design it.
And some really interesting ones actually dealing with non-object.
It looks like a bump that like,
it showed up
and it's raised that one's reserved now I can't park there.
You know you go over by the federal building
and they have all these anti..
people charging the people.
They come out of the ground, the post,
what if it's ...
Oh that would be wonderful
if you exceeding it basically lifts your car.
No no no like just two inches above ground
so your wheels are -
And the idea is that it's kind of protected from the sun and the elements
and like the screen it doesn't have to compete with the sunlight
when it's coming down.
So the design output from design thinking,
the idea of making a, creative leaps
in order to come up with a solution.
The idea of representing those leaps
with prototypes or renderings
or some form of communicating device.
The idea of choosing between then
and then going forward and developing concepts
has allowed people to not just be problem solvers,
using that explicit thinking,
but also be problems solvers using tacit knowledge.
Using the learning by doing.
And finding that they come up with solutions
because they build things, they're making things,
they're coming up with solutions using intuition.
This is really nice, the inside.
If you're doing a screen here,
the notion of illumination in the inside is really nice.
It could also shade the screen from sunlight.
Yeah.
And it protects against rain.
And it's a wonderful bird's house.
When Skype came up, okay,
it was 2003.
They said oh you know Skype, free?
Calling? It can't work.
It's not serious.
You can't offer phone calls for free.
They're going to disappear.
So they didn't take Skype seriously.
Well you know what happened?
Skype today is the largest operator of international phone calls.
They own 13 percent of the market.
Now what happened?
Is that these senior executives,
they were thinking of the industry
through the lens of their business model.
Running large scale network which costs money,
you can't give that away for free.
What they didn't realize is that Skype has a different business model.
Skype has zero network.
It's a software company.
And their network is the internet.
So for them it doesn't cost them any money
to offer a call for free.
But these senior executives didn't take the time
to analyze the business model.
They would have understand
we're doomed.
My name is Jefferson McCrelly.
I am the general manager of Mission Bicycle Company.
We are a company that makes bicycles.
Made to order, custom for each customer.
One at a time.
This is our frame, it is about four pounds.
So it's very light -
so we start with matte black.
That's, it's one of the most popular colors.
We get to choose another color
which we know all of these colors look really fantastic.
These are our favorite colors basically
but if you have a special color in mind
we have more options.
We have our frames custom powder coated right here in San Francisco
and you have about 200 different choices.
One of my favorite things is to see the light bulb
go off over people's heads.
If I didn't have to just pick a boring ugly bike
pre-built off the shelf,
if I got to choose the color of the frame,
the color of the wheels.
If I got to choose the riding positing
and the handlebar style that I wanted,
what would my bike look like.
A third of our customers I think are designers.
So you can be a designer on the web
and you can learn that trade
and you can be a designer in architecture you can learn that trade,
but it's very rare that you get to walk in
and be a designer for bicycles or for your city.
You know how you experience the city or anything.
That's the empowerment piece of what we're doing.
We actually literally enable people who have a design eye
to design their dream bicycle
and then we go and build it.
The frame is set, it's ready
and any parts you want to switch out or upgrade later on,
this is done.
You don't have to worry about that anymore.
So you're just cleaning it out...
Yeah so from now on anything you want to install
will be ready to go.
I'm not usually a details person.
I just, my brain doesn't work with details.
So when they stated going through all the details with me
and I saw just how many different things on a bike you can customize.
I kind of started thinking that you should,
I should start paying attention to these things
because it will really affect my relationship with my bike.
I kind of knew what colors I wanted
and they walked me through everything online
and then showed me everything in real life.
Traditional model is we're going to build this thing
and we're going to try to sell it to you
and you can either take it or leave it.
And then I think that that's maybe fine
if you don't have direct access to consumers
but when you start to use technology like the web
or you have a store where you can keep a lot of different parts
and have really smart people put them together,
you suddenly are less about saying take it or leave it
and more about saying what do you want.
Last week I was, it was at my office seeing patients
and when they told me my bike was ready I was so excited
I left patients in my waiting room waiting to see me
and came down the street to get my bike
and then went back to work and I was really excited.
So now that I see that I was riding a bike a lot
and it was my main mode of transportation,
I wanted a bike that I actually enjoyed riding
rather than riding a bike because I felt like I should or had to.
One of the things that we want to do
is push the store experience as far as we can go
and use that as a way to inform what we need the web experience to be.
And we really do treat it like a laboratory.
The web experience to be an extension of the overall customer experience.
And whether we need to have stores or we can go everything online,
we're agnostic.
Whatever makes the most sense we'll do.
We're not going to get it right the first time.
What we do is really iterative.
And what we do is really,
it's really almost as much about learning as it is about producing.
Things that we think are doable and putting them out there
and learning and fixing mistakes
and iterating and moving onto the next thing.
And that's a design,
that's a fundamentally what I know of design,
the design process.
You have to iterate.
And that's what we do.
Here is me getting really intense
but let me tell you I'm laughing
because the wave for me is not that big but it's funny how it looks pretty,
I'm getting all cowabunga.
To me it's one of the most Zen sports.
You are in the water
and you have to look at the horizon and watch the waves
and you know it's very, it's very meditative
and because I'm such a multi-tasker,
it's the one thing that gets me to stop thinking about everything else.
Different companies say they believe in
and they respect design and they understand design.
But their level of education in understanding how design,
how much you have to invest in design
affects the type of person we bring to them.
A company that's beginning to invest in design
would need to look for someone who's more of an entrepreneur.
Someone who knows how to set the foundation of a design team
in addition to knowing how to design or manage.
So it's very different than a company
who has a team of fifty, 100 designers
and they're looking for a new design manager.
People used to debate - is the term industrial design correct.
And people used to debate that it is hard to define to the public,
to non-creatives.
But in reality
the term industrial design to me is very effective.
It means design within the business world.
Long time ago when I started my company,
I think six months into it, I got a hiccup -
instead of working I just realized
I needed to do something to inspire myself.
And I wanted to know that one day we could make change,
help the design business world understand the value of design
to the point that I took a copy of,
I love Fast Company.
I think Fast Company really tracks innovation, creativity,
in all aspects in every business world.
So I took a copy of masters of design for Fast Company.
In fact I think that's Ives Behar in the back
so I feel sorry for him but I put my face in front of his.
And I even changed the words -
companies say we want to be the Yeh ideology of our industry
and I say do you have the guts,
and it has my Angela Yeh, CEO of Yeh ideology.
How to succeed with style, what Angela Yeh is teaching Coke,
J&J, Coca-cola about designing matches.
So that's our dream,
is helping design integrate into the business world.
My name is Vince Voron.
I'm the head of design for Coca-Cola North America.
Prior to joining Coca Cola in 2006
I was with Apple full time for 16 years.
I've really on a number of occasions
avoided sort of dropping the Apple bomb if you will
as to you know inside speaking about design
and educating team members or young designers.
I may give relevant examples
but I never say this is how we did it at Apple.
When I first heard the term design thinking a few years ago
and after I read Tim Brown's book from IDEO,
at first I didn't really understand the term.
We never, you know, uttered that word.
I never heard it at Apple's design studio.
I lead the design effort for one of,
I think it was Flower Power was the internal name for it,
one of the iMacs where it had the rear-end of the iMac
had an integrated graphic design of flowers
inspired from the 60's.
And it wasn't a success.
It lasted in the marketplace for six months.
But you know what it really taught us about
in mold decoration
and form design and material exploration.
One of the stories I heard about how this particular design was sold in
is that they prototyped it.
And they seeded it throughout the company.
They would make a hundred of them
and they would put them in conference rooms.
So business brand leaders, market leaders,
they'd be like wow that's great, why couldn't we do something like that.
And what I'm most proud of is the design thinking led
is the way that we've developed the ADA user interface.
We tested it at the Sheppard's spinal cord rehabilitation center
in Atlanta.
It's an area where people have been unfortunate in a car accident etc.
or they've become handicapped because of an accident.
From children to older adults.
When they realize we actually went through this extra effort
to enable them to pour their own coke,
I truly got goose bumps.
And it beats every interaction I had with
you know Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ives,
my great colleges at Apple.
Coca-Cola in a lot of countries is really viewed as a local company.
And they have the love of their communities and their consumers
and I don't feel that Apple has achieved that.
I feel that they have achieved maybe a love for their products.
But I don't believe that if you go to South Africa or Japan
that individuals really love Apple as a company.
And that even in a way is design thinking,
as the way Coca-Cola's chose to integrate into societies
in over 200 countries.
Cups that I was given from Korea just yesterday.
They're called moon cups
and you can see there's a shelf on the inside
so if you put say milk or white liquid into this one -
so this looks like a full moon,
whoops.
But if we drink some
you can see it looks like a partial moon.
Well the business man,
by taking one solution and testing it once to succeed,
the designer,
by testing a number of things knows some will fail.
So he doesn't care.
Many many large companies in the world will go
and recruit straight out of Harvard business school every year.
The great companies in the world are not going
and recruiting out of the great design schools.
They often just don't know what to do with designers.
They don't know what to make of them. Designers often scare them.
They talk in the language of what is cool,
they talk in the language of what is creative,
but they don't necessarily talk in the language that business speaks.
I get comments back from our business leaders that are like,
I didn't realize those designers down on the 14th floor were so smart.
Business speaks a very finite number of languages.
They speak in terms of a profit and loss statement,
a balance sheet, and a statement of cash flows.
Organizations have been designed for most of the 20th center
to be efficiency based machines.
You don't want to experiment. You don't want to try out new things.
You want to execute on plan and on budget.
Executives start saying well what part of that can I learn,
right they get the creativity part of that.
and they say oh, this is about being more creative.
Or they say oh well this is about more of an element of play
and so they play with pipe cleaners and pixie sticks and clay.
We tried that in 1975 and it didn't work.
They were local militias in towns of Holland
and they were actually paying him, Rembrandt,
to paint them.
They actually arranged because they paid different fees.
So the guy who paid more got the front.
So who done the art?
This guy, Ted Nelson realized that
the coming age of computers was going to change everything.
And the interesting thing is what is an artist,
a truly great artist doing with the brief?
He's not writing the brief, it's what's happening after the brief.
And this half of it is education about computers
and this half of it is what the future might be like.
I think I need to go hire a plumbing thinker.
You don't say that you say I need to go hire a plumber.
Prototyping, testing,
failing all the time
but failing quickly and cheaply in order to succeed.
You have found that design firms will do something like say
we'll have an MBA run the spreadsheet on this at the end of it.
And that in itself is the wrong idea.
That doesn't' work as well
because you haven't really integrated it into the creation process.
Succeed or you're going to fail.
When you already invested 50 million, 100 million,
so it actually becomes what some scholars call
a wild ass gamble.
Why is it that big, huge corporations
get beaten by kids in garages.
Oooh, yeah.
Are they trying to replicate what's being done already?
No. they're inventing the future.
They've got nothing, absolutely nothing,
and you know ten years later
they are bigger than Time Warner.
It's, and how could this possibly happen when Time Warner has all the resources?
It's because Time Warner is trying to
keep on exploiting the same things they do now
rather than inventing
because they felt the pressure of keeping on earning high returns
on an existing business model
and they couldn't step out of that
and say wait a minute,
we've got to have 3 or 4 years of really crummy earnings
while we completely restructure ourselves to be online, digital, etc.
This is actually the whistle from an Alessi kettle
who was designed by Richard Sapper.
And he wanted the sound of the cattle
to be more interesting than normal kettle.
So he designed it so that there are two notes that
when the steam comes through it blows like this.
That's one.
That's the other.
But together
and he gave me this as a souvenir when he came to make Bill's design talk.
So this is how it starts.
It's this kind of big format.
It gets redesigned several times,
this is when we cut back the size of the magazine to its,
to the smaller size.
This was our fifth anniversary issue.
This was our fifth anniversary
and this is our 30th anniversary issue.
So it's quite a change in size.
So the hub is...
I am not quite comfortable with the term co-working space
but in a way it's a space where people come together.
But not just any type of group,
it's a social entrepreneur,
people who are working in social innovation.
So I work out of the Hub.
I collaborate with my team.
We have a very international scattered team.
So nobody is in the same place at the same time,
so we use technology to communicate
so we can understand what the team is doing
and where they're at.
The fundamental nature of work is changing.
You don't need all these offices, you just need a laptop, connectivity,
and a great place to hang out, a good chair to sit in.
I think it's a combination of a lot of different things.
Because if I just wanted to be around other people
I could work at a cafe or in the library.
But being here, I think it has a lot to do
with the energy of the other people who are here.
The network that the hub provides, I mean it really is a hub
for people who are interested in social innovation.
So social entrepreneurship is a fairly new term
and it gets kind of confusing, especially in the era of social media.
Is it social media, social entrepreneurship,
no, completely different things.
So first of all a social entrepreneur let's just say
is somebody that is an entrepreneur
that is doing something that's of benefit to society
or a benefit to the environment
or the world in general, you could say it that way.
So that's how we loosely define social entrepreneurship.
There is no them.
What happens in rural Thailand for example
affects people here in San Francisco just as much.
So I think that having the awareness of that we are all in this together,
we all have some skill that we can contribute,
that would be valuable in moving us forward
is something that more people are tapping into.
We just had our next generation design competition winners announced.
They create an algae farm on the facade of the building
which is,
and you know that algae lives on carbon dioxide.
So it lives on the dirt that we produce.
And it's a very important,
it's going to be a very interesting resource of energy.
The architect has to reach out to the biologist,
to the other scientist, to the physical scientist
who know how these systems work
and put this information into the brief about the building.
It's become an example for me
of what 21st century thinking, design thinking should be about.
Which is collaborative, which is technically informed,
which is historically connected,
which is culturally connected,
which is environmentally aware.
We thought about what's the right environment
for people working together.
We have the kitchen area which serves as like a cafe style setting.
Rather than just go with traditional like cubicles,
we wanted to work with something that's a new design.
Anybody that wants to walk between the two spaces
needs to walk through the art gallery.
And there's something there that's inspiring as well,
art inspires the entrepreneurs,
the entrepreneurs inspire the artists
and starting to connect that.
But we also have ongoing workshops that we do almost on a daily basis.
Things like you know hub office hours.
And the office hours are like half hour sessions
with like a lawyer or with an accountant
or with a designer to try to understand a little bit better
how we can actually help that business.
We believe that there are certain things
that the nonprofits really need to be there for.
One thing we're really trying to emphasize here
because it hasn't been done so much
is for profit social entrepreneurship.
And if you think about it,
if you get one of these entrepreneur groups
kicked off with a little bit of money to help them get to the next level,
they're off to the races and they have
they're scaling up their business and you won't need to fund them anymore.
They've got a little business now, it's running and up and going.
So now I can fund this one and fund this one
and fund this one and fund this one.
People get really excited and turned on by this idea of
somehow an intersection between their values
and ultimately what they care about in the world
and their lifestyle of wanting something that's convenient,
something where they're going to live well by doing good
is becoming more and more attractive idea to people.
These are the people,
this is the collaborative group that I mentioned
so they're all young people
and this is what,
and then this is what it looks like.
This was the old building that they remade
and this is what the new stuff looks like with the algae on the facade.
And this then is the detail.
So it's pretty cool stuff
when you think about what changes can be made
and how boring kind of mid-century modern office building
can be turned into something beautiful
and be part of the community's life.
The thing that excites me the most about this
and the thing that excites most people,
is we have the chance to really move the needle.
We have a chance to make a difference at a significant level
when we get all the pieces together.
That's what gets me up every day.
Some people are really good at sitting on things like this,
I'm not.
So like as you can see like this is it
probably used to be inflated
but apparently if you sit on this it actually like gives you a better core.
Jump associates is a strategy consultant firm
and we spend most of our time working with companies
to solve highly ambiguous problems around growth.
The rest of the company get comments or get ideas
they can spin it around and basically post up on the outside
and people are able to then comment on it.
And that typically means taking a non-traditional approach
to solve questions that they have
where they don't necessarily know what the right answers are.
They don't even know sometimes whether they're asking the right questions
in the beginning.
Affectionately called the Zen room
and one of the benefits of a room like this is that
you're not sitting in a normal office chair,
you're not sitting at a normal office table.
We're having deep discussions about
what's the vision of the greatness of their company.
What's the vision of what kind of impact it could have on the world.
Set up to be reminiscent of an old style diner booth, right?
And you're talking and it's late at night
and you're hatching plans about
how you're going to go about changing the world, right?
And you know even when you've got a great idea
you reach over for the napkin
and you're scribbling a great idea down on that napkin there.
And we know what that script looks like.
We will often say in the middle of the meeting
okay everybody switch chairs.
Find a different chair in the room and you have ten seconds to do that.
Why? Because you've been thinking the same thing
and you'll see things from that perspective.
Give yourself a different perspective.
You know we -
there have been project rooms where I walk in
and there's not a chair to be found
because everybody's on some sort of other seating contraption.
We want someone as they happen to be
walking between the cafe and their office
to walk by the library and say
oh you know what, I hadn't thought about that
it might be an interesting book for me to go and look at.
I've been trying to think about this issue of pricing,
this might be a book that I actually want to consider.
It shows the page called the design problem -
a process is a problem solving term -
so you know when you think about things like design thinking,
like it all sounds new
but this is stuff that was created back in 1972.
I think it's hard to take yourself too seriously
when you're sitting on a big purple ball, obviously.
And so much of coming up with great ideas
is really about giving yourself the freedom to think crazy.
To think wild, to not be constrained by what exists.
And what you want to do is you want every designer
to be able to move up and down that line.
Now here, the reason you want to end up up there,
is not because it's more important than the craftsman down here,
but because that's where business values, the contribution design can make more.
And so that's where you want to be
and down here with technology
offering an increasing number of tools to all citizens,
it becomes a generic product.
And up here it becomes unique product
which has much greater value.
And that's what happened to AIGA,
we represent the experience design spectrum.
For democracy to work well,
there has to be trust between the government and the citizen.
And trust is established by understanding and communication.
And almost all of the communication between a government and a citizen
is based on asking for information or giving information.
Which means that democracy depends on information design.
Now when the government came to us and asked us to redesign the ballot,
we said we wouldn't redesign the ballot.
But what we would do is redesign the election experience
because it's not the ballot that's critical.
It's the experience from the time a citizen discovers
that there will be an election to the point
at which they understand the issues
and go through the process of actually getting to a voting place,
marking a ballot,
and then leaving that space confident
that it was marked properly and it was counted.
And that's the whole election experience.
Now there's a case where instead of designing a ballot,
we redefined and designed an entire experience.
I'm Jennifer Polka,
I'm the founder and executive director of Code for America.
We're a nonprofit that works with governments
and brings the talent of the technology industry
into working with city governments.
A lot of people think it's not possible to change government.
I think that they can be forgiven for having that view
because they've gone to the DMV and been frustrated.
The forms look the same as they did ten years ago.
One of the things that people as citizens don't realize is that
bureaucracies have evolved because of our needs and our demands.
We've made them what they are.
Certainly we have made city officials,
elected officials, bureaucrats,
extremely afraid to do anything wrong
because we hold them so accountable to doing it right every time.
There's a real sense that
you have the public's safety in your hands
and that if you mess up
really terrible things will happen.
It's totally antithetical to the culture of start-ups in Silicon Valley
where the idea is try something, if it doesn't work, just,
it was probably a couple of months work anyway,
throw it out and start again.
A big part of city governments is just getting them comfortable
with the idea of experimentation.
About trying something.
A really concrete example there is
they're used to only putting out web apps or software or web sites
that are completely done,
that have been checked by the lawyers and
you know signed off by every city department.
So when we put out a really early beta product
and say play with it
and we'll improve the product based on user-feedback,
they get very nervous
because you're putting out something that isn't accurate
or isn't right or isn't been vetted properly.
And that's a place where we can help them understand the role of beta,
help them caveat it properly,
just help them sort of get comfortable with the process
that's very common here in Silicon Valley.
Code for America as a program is an experiment now
because we're trying to get the program right.
The program can't be about
delivering a piece of software at the end of the year.
The program has to be about a deep engagement
between the fellows and their approach
and city hall and their traditional approaches.
Get some experience with that.
It's not going to change
how city hall works full scale in one year,
it's not about that. It's about experimenting.
We consider our model open source
and encourage anyone who wants to try it
to simply learn from what we've done
and adapt it to their own circumstances.
Because I don't think a direct translation of what we're doing
will necessarily work in some countries.
I don't really have enough experience in those other countries
to tell them what would work.
They'll have to figure it out.
I would issue a warning,
actually maybe that's too strong.
I don't want them to come after me late at night, you know?
In a dark alley.
They're on the West Coast, so.
My interest for the last several years
has been about how to have a better dialogue about design.
And design thinking.
And so the idea of having a film which explores that
I think is fantastic idea.
I mean it allows you to look at it from multiple perspectives,
it allows us to have a debate
kind of in real time without it being in real time.
People are talking about design thinking
because it's a bit fashionable
and the result is we've had some backlash recently
that some people are saying oh I hate the word design thinking
because they've seen things that weren't successful.
Then you might say well it doesn't take a designer to do that,
and that's absolutely true.
Some of the aspects of design thinking
are simply suggesting that designers are not thinking.
First of all if you're only thinking
then you're not doing
and you have to do in order to know
and you have to know in order to think better.
Which requires a lot of intuition
and requires some level of serendipity.
I've known some designers that are,
they're beautiful form givers.
They're not going to be replaced by design thinkers.
But they're absolutely incapable of solving ambiguous problems.
When you look through here you can see an image in three dimensions.
This idea I originally got from Virginia Postrel,
who is a designer writer and design critic
Which I thought is wonderful where she talked about,
I'm a professional author.
I don't think I could run a restaurant.
But I don't complain that other people write.
Even though I ran a pretty successful design agency.
You know I believe everybody should be able to write,
but I'm a professional author
which means I think maybe I could write a bit better than other people can.
If you call it integrative thinking,
then there's no problem in designers being involved in it.
It's only a term, it's only the start of a conversation.
They inevitably come up with a product
or a small design service,
well is that the right solution
or is that just the solution that you could make
because you are a designer?
That doesn't necessarily change the fact
that nonprofits the world are completely underfunded.
It doesn't matter what the problem is,
I can go in and solve it because I'm a designer.
Why the heck aren't designers changing the world?
You can't.
You don't, you didn't study the problem.
You don't understand the problem.
until you go and actually spend time really diagnosing
and having really deep empathy for those complex systems that are there.
Then and only then can you really be able to offer credible solutions.
And I'm not absolutely not trying to say there's one way to think about design
or that design thinking is some sort of dominant idea in design thinking,
it's not.
But it's a way of having a conversation with the world
about how design can have more impact.
I mean it's a lot like karaoke, right?
You got to kind of like get out, take a chance,
you know it doesn't' matter if it's,
you know how good it is really.
That's not the point.
You're like trying to open up right?
So is there anything dangerous about karaoke?
Well, where do you want to start from?
I've been a cook for many years and
prior to coming here I was an actor in Los Angeles for ten years
and I did a lot of TV work and theater work and
I got a phone call from a company and asking to do a corporate event.
We did that event, realized that there was a potential market
for team-building and also for cooking parties.
So we started Hands -on gourmet out of a garage in the Castro.
We built some shelves.
We had racks on the side -
pots, pans, cutting boards, linens, chef jackets.
And if you look back through history
and throughout the beginning of time,
the one thing that's always brought people together is food.
One hundred percent.
Every person in the kitchen is working together
to make this beautiful plate of food come out at just the right time.
I mean we're an entertainment-based business.
And it's really important to get chefs who are really talented
but that can also deal with people.
The chefs are there to facilitate.
Have to have patience
and they have to have the ability to work with people
and also be a host really.
We work with accounting firms or bankers.
They come wearing suits.
And they might sit back for a little bit and go, I don't want to do that.
That's fine.
Then they're on their cell phone, they look over,
and everyone's like having fun.
And they're like
-so those people are the people who are having the most fun
because next thing you know they're throwing pizzas in the air,
you know they're having a good time.
I think what they like most is it's an icebreaker.
And it really helps kind of make people feel at ease
and because we're not a cooking class.
We're a cooking experience
and so people don't have to feel like they have to perform.
So they just have to come in and have a good time.
You know the thing about here is that
in the beginning of the events especially
you need to get people excited about the events.
I mean cause this is a theater
if you really want to look at it - this is a big stage.
The connection to my acting
is taking the entertainment side
and then folding it in with the cooking side.
So it brings these two together which seemed to work.
We have a whole range of clients really.
We had a group of consultants come,
the challenge they're faced with every day
is solving problems that don't have a clear solution.
So what they did is- no recipes
and there were three teams
and each team had a different set of ingredients.
Their challenge was to come up a dish using all of those ingredients.
Design is very important from a lot of different elements
because you want a lot of this energy and this creativity,
you want to create this space that makes you feel warm.
and the big thing that I learned from here is one word:
restraint.
We wanted to look at it from an element that people come in and feel comfortable.
You don't want a lot of stuff but you want enough stuff.
And so it was very difficult to hold back
and not put more things and more colors and all those things.
So if you look around you'll see that it's a very open space.
And when people come in here
and that's very important they're wearing clothes that have color.
and also on the table there's vegetables and fruits.
So every day actually we design a new space.
I guess just making people happy really.
That's the best part of it.
Dealing with and redefining health care, is that a political problem,
is that an economic problem? is that a business problem?
Is it a religious problem? is it a science problem?
The answer's yes, it's all of those.
If you want to be able to solve all those
you're not going to get anywhere by just putting a rabbi and a politician
and an economist in the room.
Although that's a beginning to a really good joke.
It did take us quite a long time to really get good at working together.
And we achieved that by putting people into the same room in small studios
so that there was a chance for the engineer
to sit next to the human scientist to sit next to the designer.
It's not enough to simply have a multi-disciplinary team.
You have to have multi-disciplinary people.
Society doesn't do a very good job of promoting hybrid thinking.
Society does a good job of trying to strain it out.
And what that often looks like is that
we tell people from a very early age,
you've got to focus.
You can't look at everything.
We tell people that you have to pick one major
when you get to college, right?
I have three different disciplines.
You know I started off in electrical engineering.
I then received my master's in business
and then I went back to get a master's in human factors design.
And I truly believe that
if you can't reinvent yourself
you can't reinvent a team.
That what I really respect about for instance the movie industry is that
they developed a very astute sense of respect for each one of the crafts.
And with design it's really blurry.
Oh no~
Yep, here we go.
And action.
My name is Jack Perez.
I've been directing for about 20 years.
My last film was Some Guy Who Kills People,
a comedy thriller,
executive produced by John Landiss.
I also directed a film called La Cucaracha,
and the Big Empty, made in 1997
and Monster Island for MTV
and Wild Things Two and the pilot for Xena Warrior Princess
and a whole bunch of stuff.
The irony is the one film that most people know me for
is the film that I'm least proud of
which is this Megashark vs. Giant Octopus.
Which is really the shittiest movie in my entire filmography.
and not necessarily, it's not my fault entirely
but it's funny that that became the one that people know me for.
The making of a film is a huge project.
It's something that starts on paper
and in this case it's script
and then continues through the paper process,
through storyboards, conceptual illustrations.
And then it becomes a matter of translating all of that into an actual,
physically shooting the movie and then cutting it
and then mixing it and on and on and on.
So in a lot of ways it's like building a bridge
or any huge project you know where you have a lot of people.
But you do need somebody and the director
really to have a very strong vision of what he wants
in order for that information to be funneled properly
through all of these people
so that it turns out to be like those storyboards
or those conceptual illustrations.
A camera can be wielded like a brush.
So in a way you can imagine a painter,
somebody else was using the brush,
I mean the painter was trying to tell the guy who is operating the brush
this is the kind of stroke I want -
sometimes you feel that way.
Design thinking.
I haven't, no I haven't heard that expression before.
Well I think that
prototyping is something that can happen in films,
sometimes there are tests, there are wardrobe tests
or tests with preliminary special effects tests.
The nature of collaboration
is people are going to bring something to it.
Ideally what they do is they take what you have
and enhance it.
And I think the foolish director
is the one who doesn't consider other people's opinions,
who's working with.
Because you're working with so many different people
you want to work with people who see the way you see
because if you work with a cinematographer
who's vision of the world or this particular story
is so drastically different,
or a production designer whose color choices or textural choices
are different from how you see and feel it,
it's going to be murder getting what you want on the screen.
You're going to be fighting and arguing and trying to get your voice heard.
Action. Get 'em!
I once had a guy come to me and literally say it ain't show art kid.
You know it's show business.
The problem is, is that
you know I mean it's not, it's not exclusive to filmmaking,
but the people that make film, physically make the film
are of a different mindset than the people that are
behind the scenes business wise.
They're completely different personalities.
It's a question of priority.
The value system is different.
so you can't expect an executive or business man to value art
the same way an artist does.
All you can hope is that they see some of the value
in what you see
and support that
or find a way to financially support that.
And it's also up to the creative filmmaker
to understand that you can't have everything you want,
that things cost money.
In the film world every day costs a certain amount of money,
equipment rentals, salaries.
and if you go over a certain number of hours
you're into overtime and a big expense
and in the beginning I didn't know that,
I just thought well it's the studio movies
just a bottomless pit of money.
You just do it until you get it right
and my very first time out this producer grabbed me and like
listen kid, if you don't get this done, you know,
before you know seven o'clock I'm firing your ass.
and at that moment I was like
well they didn't teach me that in fucking film school.
Film, a director is in control.
I mean a control freak is the natural personality for a director.
You want to control this little world you're making.
Sometimes you take too much control
or you realize or you forget that life cannot be completely controlled.
Life is much more complicated and chaotic.
Film is just an echo of that.
Cut, that was a good one.
Doctors have this funny situation
where we want them to quickly diagnose us.
You know on some level I don't' want my doctor to be creative.
You know it's like I want my doctor to be really good
with a surgery or what it is
and do exactly the same way it worked last time
and don't try new stuff on me.
The doctor says to you
I don't know, let me like go and do some studies
and come back in a while right?
That doesn't, it doesn't make you feel well.
The danger of the whole design thinking movement
is that people will try to push it so far
that it makes it a formula.
There is a great desire to push things to algorithms,
to like a strict formula
and the reason is with an algorithm you can be extremely efficient.
You can be completely rule-based.
You have a process where you can just analyze your way to answers.
And design thinking is never going to get there.
And when people reduce design to a formula
I think they will lose virtually all of the value of design.
When we're innovating what we want to do
is look for the outliers.
We want to understand the outliers
and say ah, here's something that doesn't' fit the pattern.
Why is that?
Does this give me a new insight or a new way to do things?
So innovators are actually searching for the outliers.
There's a disciplined optimization where things like 6 sigma,
we really trying to narrow down the problem.
There's also a disciplined innovation
that disciplines a different kind of disciplines.
It's a discipline of doing very controlled experiments,
saying okay I'm going to have a hypothesis
I'm gonna test the hypothesis, learn from that,
change my hypothesis and move on.
So my name is Tony.
I'm from Taiwan.
I'm a fourth year graduate student at Stanford University
in the department of Systems Biology.
My projects involve looking at how frog develop
and how human white blood cells move.
We raise frogs in our labs.
So we typically inject hormones in the frogs.
We want to induce them to lay eggs.
This is actually human hormones.
In Africa when they don't have you know the real like pregnancy tests,
what they do is actually
they have women pee on the frog.
And then the frog lay eggs the next day
it means the women is pregnant.
We only take their eggs. We don't do anything with the frog.
They can lay like thousands of eggs each time.
and sometimes we just need one.
In this department the second year we have to propose a proposal
which you describe the question you want to answer throughout your PhD.
What I heard is probably 90 percent of the time
when you graduate
and you go back and look at what you proposed in your second year,
it's usually not the same.
We propose a question
and then we have to always modify a question
or modify the experiments that we do.
So it's really an iterative process.
During my second year I proposed a model that I feel like,
I feel very excited about.
I made some predictions of my model
and I want to do experiment to test it.
At that time it's really hard for me to think about alternatives.
But then the more I test it
the more I convince myself that it is not right.
And it takes a lot for me to believe it's not right
because this whole lab and a lot of labs
has done a lot of things based on this assumption.
But then I finally decided that I want to prove that it's not right.
You can't just come in and destroy everything
and tell everybody that you are wrong.
and then go away.
Right? You need to come up with some new model
that is consistent with the past observations.
It's more like I definitely have more understanding now on this question.
If ten scientists are doing the same thing
and trying to answer one question,
the answer should be the same,
otherwise it's not called science.
Because if we want to study what causes this disease,
it should be one answer right?
For example a doctor cannot be creative.
Like your ultimate goal is the same, you want to cure the patients.
But what's different?
The creativity comes from the process.
So there will be people who follow traditional ways,
but then there will be people who are creative enough
to come up with new approaches
and get to the answer faster.
So I have not heard of design thinking before you told me about it.
In regards to what you do in your lab is it designing?
Yes. I design experiments.
So I would not say I design a question.
I identify a question.
But then after I identify a question
I design the experiments and the process to answer this question.
Probably every few months or maybe once every year,
you sit down and think about
am I really doing the thing that is important
or am I just doing something that are not relevant.
It's a very interesting story about
how design managed to not explain itself
through the last 100 years.
There was a point at which design was about form.
Mid-century, in the last century.
It was all about form.
Then it became about form and content.
So in other words
the designer became responsible for the message or for the function
as well as the form.
But now it's about how a designer can deal with the problem
considering the form plus the content plus the context
in which people have to address the solution overtime.
If we can start to show examples of our best selves, entrepreneurs
and others that are doing good things -
regular everyday people that are doing great things and having impact
somebody some where's gonna say
wow, that person, I could do that.
And I think that's the most important thing to look for,
is where's impact happening?
Is this idea helping us do better things in the world
than we were able to do before?
Is it allowing us to bring people together
to work on creative things
who would never have imagined being creative in the past.
Or never imagined working together.
Or if they did come together
they wouldn't have had a language or a methodology to use
to actually get to an interesting place or an interesting solution.
And if we're not having an impact
ask the question why not,
what can we do to improve?
There are the kinds of people who feel that this is dangerous.
I want to know the formula.
Tell me the Black Schole's option pricing formula or the,
tell me the whatever the four Ps and the five forces
and I just want to do the analysis and get the right answer
and others just feel that they're freed up.
They feel oh, you mean I don't have to get the right answer right away?
You mean I can,
you know I can dream about what might be?
You know it feels like they're saying you've taken my shackles off.
You know the world is a very diverse place
and I'm happy to have that diversity.