Interview with Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

by Brandon Schauer

January 3, 2007

When thinking about using design to bring about change within your organization, it’s hard to not to consider the works of innovation and design consultancy IDEO. Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, will be kicking off day two of Adaptive Path’s MX Conference — a conference on managing experience through creative leadership. At the MX Conference Tim will be sharing his insights into the changing role of the designer, and the new skills and methods that are emerging.

Below, is a transcription of my podcast conversation with Tim, where we talk about this new role of the designer, selling and prototyping experiences, and the role of user generated content in the creative process.

Brandon Schauer: Why is experience, as an element of competitive strategy, so tough to sell within organizations?

Tim Brown: Because it’s complex; it cuts across a lot domains and silos that organizations have been used to keeping separate from each other — marketing, product development, service. [It’s also complex] because the business models of innovative experience design are not well developed.

Organizations have a hard time figuring out how to monetize a lot of the work. A lot of it has to be done on a leap of faith. And there aren’t too many people that are really expert about talking about it in a way that’s compelling.

BS: Experiences are inherently cross channel, yet organizations typically aren’t cross channel. So how does a individual with an organization try to bring about some conscious approach to thinking across these channels?

TB: I think it’s one of the great opportunities that design has within organizations. Design is normally cross channel. In most organizations design has an opportunity to touch many things, so I think designers and design managers have an opportunity to create a great deal of influence around the design of experiences — by connecting opportunities through experience, by connecting design through design language, and just by looking at the various opportunities there are to connect the various channels. So I think design can play a really valuable role.

The other place where a valuable role can be played is in, I think, marketing. More and more we’re finding that marketing execs are realizing that the offer, how you communicate the offer, and how you deliver the offer are all versions of the same thing. [Marketing execs] are looking to stitch that together in various ways. We’re certainly finding in our business that it’s the marketing execs that are often most interested in talking about this stuff.

BS: IDEO’s recognized as a strong prototyping culture. But we mostly see that or think about that in terms of product design and product prototypes. How is prototyping at IDEO conducted towards experiences?

TB: As we extend out into these different forms of design — whether it be software, whether it be service, whether it continues to be hardware (smarter hardware obviously) — we’re having to explore new types of prototyping. We’re having to explore narrative prototyping, the prototyping through storytelling using various techniques — whether it be film or whether it be online techniques. We’re having to create virtual prototypes as well as hardware prototypes where we’re using all kinds of narrative techniques for exploring ideas really early on. In fact, a lot of those prototyping approaches were inherent in interaction design when it was first developed. And a lot of those techniques came straight out of the movie industry.

BS: We talked about the interface of marketing and design within an organization. So what does the toolboxes say a good design manager within an organization look like?

TB: Well, I think a good design manager needs to have a team working with them who are more interdisciplinary than they used to be. [A team who] are not siloed, deep crafts people, but instead are able to think broadly and able to tackle an experienced problem from every direction — not only from the design direction, not only from the direction of the consumer experience… but also from the direction of technology and how to exploit technology to deliver different kinds of experiences; even from the direction of business.

[The team should be able to tackle] how what we do affect business models and how can we design business models into what we do. I think designers are having to become much more literate around the relationship between business and what they do. I think a good design manager really does need to be quite adept at that, and not wait for somebody else to figure out whether their ideas and initiatives make sense from a business perspective.

BS: This week Time Magazine named “You” the person of the year, which of course caused me to roll my eyes a little bit. But the Time story highlights the importance of user generated content. How can organizations plan for and design emergent systems with this user generated content as a part of the value they offer?

TB: From my opinion we’re in the incredibly early stages of what ultimately I think will be an ecosystem for design. The walls will have broken down between what goes on inside design departments within corporations and what goes on with the customers and consumers of that organization. This will just continue to develop.

I think right now we have relatively few great tools. I mean market research is still crude. The online tools we can use to collaborate are only just emerging. But I think forward in every field, maybe five or ten years, our design departments will be of an infinite scale. I’m expecting the first thing to happen is we’ll start to build some useful tools for that. We’ll start to build some tools for collaborative content generation, which can actually then lead to something that’s more than just transient and trivial. I think part of the problem at the moment is that for every really great video that happens on Youtube, there’s thousands of thousands of them which are basically trivial. We’ll need to develop tools and approaches that up the productivity rate in terms of interesting and quality content.

I’m sure it’s gonna happen. I think as designers we have to start to engage in it. We have to kind of give up on the idea that we can control every aspect of the things that we design. That modernist idea of design… that we’re the architects of the future and we have the vision that we can control completely… I think has slipped away. We have to approach design from a new stance.

BS: So one of the things we’ve been excited about watching is your work with the Acumen Fund. Can you tell us a little bit about your role in it and how it’s different than other nonprofits?

TB: Well… in a funny kind of way that relates to the pervious question about open source. Because in a way that’s what we do. We’re kind of doing open source design. The Acumen Fund is a social entrepreneurialship fund working in Africa and India and Pakistan. And what we’re not doing is designing solutions in the classic way and dropping them into the field as the result of aid, which is what used to happen.

Instead what we’re doing is we’re helping guide some of the entrepreneurs themselves, some of these people that are working on new healthcare solutions, new technology solutions, new housing solutions in these countries. We’re helping them to use design thinking and use approaches to innovation to improve their own business. So at some level, it’s kind of a open source approach to innovation.

Occasionally we can help with the ideas themselves: the offerings. But mostly we’re helping them become better business people really by including approaches to design and innovation in the way that they think. And we’re doing the same thing with Acumen themselves — helping them use some of our approaches to innovation in the way that they run their fund.

BS: That sounds really compelling. We look forward to hearing more from you at the MX Conference on February 12 and 13 in San Francisco.

TB: I look forward to seeing everybody there.

For more thinking from Tim, also see his Fast Company article, “Strategy By Design” and join us at the MX Conference February 12-13 in San Francisco. Tim will be joined by Caterina Fake from Flickr, notable author Scott Berkun, Jennie Winhall of the UK Design Council, Doug Beaudet and Sara Ulius-Sabel from Whirlpool, and more.

Brandon Schauer is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. He has nearly a decade of experience developing new products, services, and user experiences on the Web, handhelds, and beyond.