Adaptive Path Blog

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Peter Coughlan, the head of IDEO’s Transformation by Design Practice and MX San Francisco speaker about the ways in which organizations can fundamentally rethink their approach to things from a design-oriented perspective. Some highlights:

On making change tangible:

 One of my favorite examples comes from a hospital that wanted to help reduce their patients’ worry levels while they were waiting for (chemo) treatment. A very simple idea they had was to just go up to patients and ask them if they had any worries, any questions that they could address. It turned out that doing that — going up to patients and asking them questions — was very awkward and difficult to do. So they created an artifact to help them get over that awkwardness — a set of question cards that they shared with patients to help break the ice and provide something to talk about. It turned out to be a wonderful way to prompt new behavior on the part of patients and providers.

On the designer-client relationship:

I would say that the most important shift in the design profession will be for designers to get comfortable with the notion that it’s more important for a client to have a great idea than for the designer to have the idea. If the client organization has played a role in coming up with the idea, it’s way more likely to see the light of day.

Read the complete interview here.

You can still register for MX San Francisco, April 20-22 here. Enter the code FOHF for a 15% discount.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Friends of Adaptive Path, MX SF, Management, People you should know about. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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