Ideo's David Kelley on "Design Thinking"

The smell of ramen noodles wafts over the Stanford d.school classroom as David Kelley settles into an oversize red leather armchair for a fireside chat with new students. It's 80 degrees and sunny outside in Palo Alto, and as the flames flicker merrily on the big computer screen behind him, Kelley, founder of both the d.school and the global design consultancy Ideo, introduces his grad students to what "design thinking" -- the methodology he made famous and the motivating idea behind the school -- is all about.

Today's task: Design a better ramen experience.

Some students seem a little mystified, as they twirl noodles around their chop sticks. What does a "ramen experience" have to do with design? Better packaging? Curlier noodles? Adding a cute little forky thing to the cheap staple of dorm rooms everywhere?

Kelley, a lanky guy with a bald head, a Groucho Marx mustache, and a heartland-bred affability, tackles the mystery head on: "I was sitting at a big dinner in Pacific Heights recently, and I told my hostess I was a designer. 'Oh,' she said. 'So what do you think of my curtains?' " That, Kelley says, is not where we're going.

"You're sitting here today because we moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking of ourselves as design thinkers," he continues. "What we, as design thinkers, have, is this creative confidence that, when given a difficult problem, we have a methodology that enables us to come up with a solution that nobody has before."

"We moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking of ourselves as design thinkers. We have a methodology that enables us to come up with a solution that nobody has before." -- David Kelley

It is a radical notion, in its way: the idea that creativity can be summoned at will, with a process not unlike the scientific method. That contradicts what most people -- including the 50 students sitting mesmerized before him -- have always thought. "That to be creative, an angel of the Lord appears and tells you what to do," Kelley says, laughing.

Ideo -- which now counts more than 500 employees in eight offices on three continents -- has drawn on Kelley's methodology to do everything from stimulate customer savings at Bank of America to revamp nursing shifts at Kaiser Permanente. Over the past 30 years, the firm has tackled the challenge of delivering a needle-free vaccine for Intercell, building a better Pringle for Procter & Gamble, revitalizing the bicycling experience for Shimano, and rethinking airport-security checkpoints for the TSA. It has racked up more than 1,000 patents since 1978 and won 346 design awards since 1991, more than any other firm. The design-thinking process underpins the company's near $100 million in annual revenue, drawn from a client roster that has included Anheuser-Busch, Gap, HBO, Kodak, Marriott, Pepsi, and PNC, among hundreds of others. Ideo has, in short, become the go-to firm for both American and foreign companies looking to cure their innovation anemia.

Until about a year ago, Kelley, the man at the epicenter of this expanding universe, was on a roll. He had received a National Design Award, been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, held an endowed chair at the Stanford School of Engineering, and even won the Sir Misha Black Medal for his "distinguished contribution to design education." Cara McCarty, curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, summed up his influence: "Kelley has pushed our definition of design more than anybody in this country."

He also had a loving wife, a daughter to whom he was devoted, and a vast circle of friends that included Apple's Steve Jobs and actor Robin Williams.

Then, one morning, he noticed a lump on his neck.

Kelley was helping a fourth-grade class at his daughter's school use design thinking to create better backpacks when his cell phone rang and his doctor's number came up. He stepped out to take the call. "You have cancer," the doctor said. "Just like that," Kelley recalls. He went back into the class to finish the lesson but, he says, "I was a mess."

It was stage-four squamous cell carcinoma, which had gone misdiagnosed -- as "inflamed fish gills" -- for a year and a half. During that time, it had migrated to his lymph nodes. "I could tell by looking in people's eyes that this was a big deal," he says.