“Design has become too important to be left to designers,” Tim Brown told a packed auditorium at Parsons last Wednesday. Brown, the president and CEO of IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy based in Palo Alto, advocates applying a problem-solving methodology founded on observation, storytelling, visual thinking, iterative prototyping, and experimentation – what he calls design thinking – to problems, such as voter turnout or educational reform for instance, that might not normally have you raising a finger and exclaiming, “Aha, what we need here is a designer!”

The reason, according to Brown, is that traditionally, large organizations and institutions have prized analytical thinking. Analytical thinking is great for narrowing down options but it’s not so great for coming up with those options, which is probably why you don’t see a lot of innovation coming out of accounting departments. Where analysis narrows and reduces ideas, design thinking broadens and multiplies them. Designers give ideas form.

Brown envisions a future in which a kind of perpetual design that springs from the end-user replaces the one-off project. Services in particular tend to innovate incrementally, so design needs to be constant and led by design thinkers embedded within organizations. The Mayo Clinic established its Center for Innovation for that very purpose. And the key to the success of such initiatives, according to Brown, is participation.

“I’ve struggled my whole career with the notion that Modernism got it wrong,” said Brown. Most designers learn to design from first principles rather than to connect their ideas to existing systems of use. Business writers and innovation thinkers have been harping on participatory design for the last decade. Involve the people affected by the changes you’re trying to promote in the design of those changes, and they’ll be much likelier to succeed. Not rocket science, but also not necessarily part of every design curriculum. Imagine if all architects invited students and teachers to participate in the design of their school.

It’s relatively easy to envision the perpetual and participatory design of intangibles, but is such an idea really applicable to the physical worlds of industrial design, architecture, or urban planning?

At least in principle, why not? Obviously there are certain material constraints – you can’t start moving around roads or expect a plastic cup to become a metal bottle overnight, but why not build in affordances that allow users to shape products, buildings, and cities through their use after they are “finished?” It’s not too hard to imagine an intelligent city grid that reroutes traffic, flexible and reconfigurable interiors and even exteriors, or modular hospital machinery.

Even as Brown encourages the widespread adoption of design thinking, he stresses the need to educate designers to think “upstream.” Every object is part of a larger system and it is up to designers to understand how that object will influence that system and vice versa. But he’s optimistic, recognizing – in the burgeoning DIY movement and a return to tinkering – a much larger shift away from industry and towards ideas, one he likens in importance to the Industrial Revolution.

In Brown’s view, if this new revolution succeeds, society will need to update its measure of value. Economists will tally the value of networks and knowledge created in the exchange of ideas rather the money generated in the exchange of goods.

In the meantime, Brown’s ideas in book form will set you back $27.99.


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Alex Kauffmann is a former innovation consultant and a current tinkerer. He makes art that beeps.