IDEO Fanboy

I admit, it seems every day I become more of an IDEO fanboy.

I just finished reading Tom Kelley's The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm, and it just makes me want to drop everything and move out to California and offer to sweep the floors if that's how I could get in.

The book is copyrighted from 2001, so many of the products and companies Kelley talks about are dated, but the book really has some timeless elements. Tim Brown's Change by Design (2009) was my first book by an IDEO team member. I'd probably recommend that book over Kelley's, but both are excellent.

Kelley's book reads a bit like a compilation of articles from Fastcompany Design, which is to say, it's an easy read with a bunch of tidbits, but the tidbits hang together more by their physical collocation than a strong narrative structure. Nevertheless, the tidbits are very, very cool.

Kelley opens with IDEO's basic five-step method (p.6):

1) Understand
2) Observe
3) Visualize
4) Evaluate and refine
5) Implement

Simple prescription, not easy to implement. One of the things I really like about IDEO's approach is the observe step. They have a strongly ethnographic approach: they really try to engage with the producers and users, asking questions and trying to see things that everyone has taken for granted, usually because of myopia.

The other step that I think is particularly unique to IDEO's approach is the drive to immediately start prototyping - to even use prototyping as part of the "understand" step. They even prototype for services by building mock-up environments where the services are rendered. The thing I am learning from my reading on creativity is the importance of doing, rather than planning. The act of doing tends create insights that simply trying to visualize or mentally model simply does not - at least not for most people.

He says:

Just as writer's block happens when writer's stop writing, so, too, does innovation grind to a halt when prototypes stop being built. When the muse fails you, don't mope at your desk. Make something. (p. 114)

Kelley has some other nice quotes about prototyping:

Prototyping doesn't just solve straightforward problems. Call it serendipity or even luck, but once you start drawing or making things, you open up new possibilities of discovery. (p.108)

Doodling, drawing, modeling. Sketch ideas and make things, and you're likely to encourage accidental discoveries. At the most fundamental level, what we're talking about is play, about exploring borders. (p. 109)

We believe in that great old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words. Only at IDEO, we've found that a good prototype is worth a thousand pictures. (p. 112) 

One of the important parts of prototyping is to help make sure you haven't gone of the rails from the client's perspective:

We pitch presentations in stages, show the rough sketch, the cheap foam model, and use them to right the course before it's too late. (113)

All this talk about inspiration from prototyping reminds me of how Austin Kleon really pushes this idea in his book Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative - it's important to do things. He quotes John Cleese - “We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops.” The idea of prototyping, of developing by doing, seems quite central to successful innovators.

The book is definitely worth a read, even if some of the specific products are now history (he talks a lot about now defunct Palm devices, for example). The process guidance is timeless.