Ideo's David Kelley on "Design Thinking"

By: Linda TischlerWed Jan 14, 2009 at 1:46 PM

Courtesy IDEO

David Kelley, founder of the design firm Ideo and the Stanford d.school, was leading a charmed existence. Then he felt a lump.

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Preliminary tests looked worrisome, but Kelley, an optimist, figured that with good energy and good medicine, he could prevail. Then his oncologist sat him down and gave him the statistics: He had a 40% chance of being alive in four years. "That was the moment," Kelley says. "As an engineer, you say, 'Show me the data. This has got to be for older people.' So the doctor looks at the chart and the median age is 56. I'm 56. So it's right on me."

What ensued was sheer hell. Chemo, surgery, radiation. Mouth sores. A throat so raw he could barely swallow. Nausea so severe he couldn't concentrate enough to read or even watch TV. "I spent nine months in a room trying not to throw up," he says. The treatment wrecked his saliva glands and his taste buds. He lost 40 pounds.

Kelley, now 58, says his wife, Kc Branscomb, a former CEO of IntelliCorp whom he met through his buddy Jobs, was masterful at orchestrating his care, marshaling doctors, haranguing insurance providers, keeping on top of appointments, medications, and daily life. But, Kelley says, it was his brother, Tom, who got him through the rough patches psychologically. "Here's a guy I shared a room with for 18 years," he says, choking up. "Basically, he gave up his life to be there for me every day."

David asked Tom to negotiate his relationship with the world, alerting friends that his brother wasn't up to communicating with anybody. "More than 100 people came to me and said, 'I know David's not talking to others, but he'll talk to me. I'm a special friend,' " Tom says.

It was the thought of his 11-year-old daughter that kept Kelley fighting through the lowest moments. "At first, you think, 'I don't want to miss her growing up.' That's motivating, but not that motivating," he says. "It's when you manage to get out of yourself and start thinking of her that you get the resolve to continue. When you think, I don't want her not to have a father -- then you want to stay alive."

In the recovery phase, Kelley was assigned a psychiatrist. "When they tell you that you don't have that many more years to live, you ask yourself, What is it that I want to get done? What is it that's going to make me feel good?," he says, sitting in a neo-yurt at Ideo's Palo Alto headquarters. "Given a finite amount of time, how do I spend it?" Kelley and the shrink began parsing his days, calibrating which activities were the most satisfying. "The punch line is that one of the things that's really fun for me is Ideo," he says. Working at the firm he built fits into Kelley's lifelong mission: "I really do believe I was put on the planet to help people have creative confidence," he says. "I don't have 27 agendas. I'm not the sustainability guy, or the developing-world guy. My contribution is to teach as many people as I can to use both sides of their brain, so that for every problem, every decision in their lives, they consider creative as well as analytical solutions.

"The illness has given me more resolve to do that."

When Kelley got sick, his friends were desperate to find ways to help him, sending cards, movies, cartoons. John Maeda, formerly the associate research director of MIT's Media Lab and now president of the Rhode Island School of Design, built a Web site with a picture of Kelley at the White House, surrounded by other 2001 National Design Award winners -- all with Kelley heads -- under the banner, EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE DAVID KELLEY.

"David is the kind of person you aspire to become," says Maeda. "He's like a brainy Muppet. You want to hug him, stick by him, and support what he stands for. He doesn't wear a fur stole or sunglasses. He's like the guy you run into at the 7-11 getting a Slurpee. I like the idea that he's an anonymous superstar."

Watching Kelley, in his jeans, flannel shirt, and striped socks, shuttling between Ideo and Stanford in his greenish-yellow '54 Chevy pickup, you're more likely to think he's a Sacramento tomato farmer than one of the country's great design minds. (A self-confessed "car nut," Kelley also has a '67 Ferrari, a '57 Porsche, and a '32 Ford in his fleet.) Even as a boy growing up in Ohio, Kelley saw the world from a different angle. "David believes he was a geek," says Tom, the youngest of the four Kelley siblings and four years David's junior. "But it's not true. He had his own rock band, for chrissake! Even then he was a rock star." At the town line, there's now a sign that trumpets, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING BARBERTON, HOME OF DAVID KELLEY.

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Kelley took a job at Boeing, where he designed what he calls a "milestone in aviation history": the 747's LAVATORY OCCUPIED sign. He eventually moved to National Cash Register (now NCR) in Ohio, a similarly dispiriting experience. Fate intervened during the 1973 -- 1974 oil embargo, when Kelley met a guy in a car pool who told him about Stanford's product-design program. "Without the oil crisis, David may have spent the rest of his life as a very capable but moderately unhappy engineer," says Tom.

From Issue 132 | February 2009

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Recent Comments | 29 Total

January 29, 2009 at 11:52am by Ray Wilson

Great story on many levels. If you like'd it, check out Martin's book, "Opposable Minds". A good read on the theme of attending to the whole picture before jumping in to solve the single frame problem.

Ideo's David Kelley on "Design Thinking"

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Recent Comments | 29 Total

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