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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The program has been so successful -- reducing interruptions by 50% and increasing on-time delivery by 18% -- that Kaiser is now rolling it out to its 36 facilities and responding to inquiries from around the world about its effectiveness. "Kaiser Permanente has always been innovation driven," says Christi Zuber, director of Kaiser's innovation consultancy, "but Ideo gave us a teachable approach." It's hard to imagine McKinsey giving away its proprietary techniques, but Ideo's largesse is in sync with Kelley's mission -- and with his confidence in his own company's ability to reinvent itself. "I can give our methodology away," he says at a staff meeting on Ideo's future, "because I know we can come up with a better idea tomorrow."

Besides his mania for cars, one of Kelley's primary design passions is his house, designed by his late friend Ettore Sottsass, the founder of the design collective Memphis. It's a sprawling, eclectic masterpiece with multiple, asymmetrical wings: a green one shaped like a Monopoly house for his daughter; a two-story, barrel-vaulted office for his wife; a blocky guest house, where Kelley spent most of his time while he was sick.

In 1983, Kelley started a small business with Sottsass linking Italian design with Silicon Valley technology (their product -- a phone -- made it into MoMA but failed in the marketplace), and he understands the frequent criticism that American design is inferior to European. "The rest of the world defines design as an artistic discipline," he says. "They were taught culture. I wasn't taught who painted anything. So as Americans, we're at a disadvantage." But while Americans may be underrepresented at the Milan Furniture Fair, he says, the United States has something few other countries can match: diversity. The way Kelley sees it, our polyglot populace gives us an extraordinary advantage in generating truly creative ideas.

That idea was one of the animating forces behind the d.school -- a place that would help analytical Stanford types become creative thinkers. The school would welcome students from business, law, education, medicine, engineering -- the more diverse, the better.

In recent years, universities across the country have developed an obsession with cross-disciplinary collaboration. One of the foremost success stories, the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, is right on the Stanford campus. Still, it took eight years for Kelley to convince Stanford that his unconventional idea -- a school that grants no degrees, but functions as more of a specialized graduate program -- had merit. "When David was making the case for the d.school at Stanford," says Tom Kelley, "he went to [university president John] Hennessy and said, 'Look, we're good at "deep." We have Nobel Laureates drilling down into esoteric topics. But what if there are problems that aren't solved by deep, but broad? We should have a side bet in broad.' " In that climate, Kelley's notion finally began to find an audience. By 2005, he had persuaded Hasso Plattner, a founder of the software giant SAP, to pony up $35 million to the d.school. The new 42,500-square-foot home of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, smack in the middle of the Stanford campus, will open this fall.

"Programs like this are absolutely necessary if the U.S. wants to maintain its position in innovation," says Plattner from his company's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. "For many products, it's a mandatory strategy for survival. And David's so passionate, he can even motivate me."

Kelley is still a bit astonished at what he has been able to pull off at Stanford. "I've been here 30 years, and nobody paid any attention to me at all," he says. "At one point, they were trying to reduce the size of my office -- which was 78 square feet. Now I'm sitting in meetings with the president, with him asking if I want another building." Hennessy is now talking about making creative confidence a requirement at Stanford, just like a foreign language.

Whether or not design thinking revolutionizes the world and all its ramen experiences, Kelley's influence is sure to live on in the institutions he has built and the people he has touched. "David's legacy is that he spends his life doing things he believes in, with people he believes in, with the abiding faith that it will lead to good things," says Dan Bomze, CEO of CleanWell and a former Kelley student. "From David, I've learned that there has to be someone to create something out of nothing. He embodies that. But he makes people feel he couldn't have done it without them. Anybody who spends time with him comes away transformed."

"From David, I've learned that there has to be someone to create something of nothing," says a friend and former student. "David embodies that. Anybody who spends time with him comes away transformed."

As for Kelley, he's currently cancer-free, energetic, and full of plans. But every six months, he has to submit to a scan to make sure the disease has not metastasized. It's a terrifying reminder that, as for all of us, life is short.

"So I sit here today," he says, leaning forward in the shelter of the Ideo yurt, "knowing there's a chance it could come back. So I better make some hay. I better get my religion in place in as many people as I can. It's working really well."

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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