Out of the Box

Gilmore emphasizes the Emotional Dimension card. Cars have "life trajectories," he says. Like furniture and certain pieces of clothing, they carry memories of a particular stage of a person's life. So he'd have seniors craft a personal history of the cars they've owned and what those vehicles have meant to them. Buying your first car is a rite of passage. But, Gilmore wonders, what does it feel like to buy what could be your last car?

"It takes a certain amount of organizational confidence to do this," says Ideo's Tom Kelley. "You can only do it if you believe you're going to be doing even more sophisticated things."

Second deal: A national television network seeks to reinvent its struggling nightly newscast and to update a format that has been largely untouched for a generation. What are some ways to uncover new approaches to the nightly news?

Lizardo starts things off by shouting, "A Day in the Life!" A card from the Look suit, it asks the potential users to document everything they do in a given day. The goal is to discover how people actually spend their time -- and how that affects when, where, and whether they watch the news.

Fulton Suri, eyeing the four cards fanned out in her left hand as if she were playing poker, sees and raises Lizardo. She suggests pairing her approach with another card: Behavioral Sampling. Ideo would give subjects pagers and then contact them randomly throughout the day to ask what news and information is available to them at that moment and what they've encountered in the past five minutes. Surveys and focus groups don't yield this sort of texture nor do they set the problem in context. And in this room, as elsewhere at the firm, context is king.

So is serious engineering. Two of the six people in this room are mechanical engineers, each with four patents to her name. One is Lizardo. The other is Papadopoulos, who offers the Foreign Correspondents card. She would enlist Ideo staff in different countries to watch the nightly news where they are and contribute their observations. Along those lines, Sklar wants to broaden the inquiry by using Extreme User Interviews, a card from the Ask suit. He'd try to understand the center by interviewing those who occupy the edges: "someone who doesn't have a TV, someone who gets all their news from the National Enquirer, someone who watches TV constantly."

Minds click. Ideas fly. How about Affinity Diagrams? How about Word-Concept Association? Says Fulton Suri: "Just the fact that I've got them in my hands is making my brain think about all sorts of different approaches."

A breakthrough, it seems, is in the cards.

Daniel H. Pink (dp@danpink.com), author of Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself (Warner Books, 2002), is completing a book on the rise of right-brain thinking in modern life. Learn more about Ideo's Method Cards on the Web (www.ideo.com/methodcards).