“Design for the Future” :: Tom Kelley, IDEO

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Tom Kelley’s keynote presentation discussed the blurring of the line between design and innovation, and perhaps more importantly, the notion of pace in relation to these two elements.

He begins with a venn diagram that suggests principles that guide IDEO: Design Thinking —> :: People [ desireable ] :: Business [ viable ] :: Technical [feasible] ::

Kelley describes a project analyzing the supply chain for Kraft Foods, and notes that “we start here,” meaning that the Design Thinking venn diagram constitutes an operative framework for tackling professional problems :: begin with the humans in the supply chain :: approach problems from the human side, not solely trucks/infrastructure [ for me, this is similar to the language ~ communication efficacy ~ documentation ~ circulation problems discussed in Actor Network Theory, and in projects from researchers at places like WIDE ].

Kelley discusses The Red Queen effect, a notion from Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass: “if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” The pace of innovation has changed: “Sony didn’t stop innovating,” says Kelley; they just slowed the pace of their innovation, and were passed by Samsung.

The 10 Faces of Innovation

The Learning Roles

• The Anthropologist [ ethnography :: observation ]
• The Experimenter [ taking risks :: make :: do ]
• The Cross-Pollinator [ knowledge work :: distributed work :: homophily + dissonance ]

The Organizing Roles

• The Hurdler
• The Collaborator
• The Director

The Building Roles

• The Experience Architect
• The Set Designer
• The Caregiver
• The Story Teller

Kelley hones in on two of these components of innovation, the first of which is The Anthropologist :: “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes” ~ Proust. “On a per capita basis,” Kelley says, “we’re probably the biggest employer of anthropologists in America.” “Anthropology is too important to be left to anthropologists.”

Kelley is basically arguing that people don’t notice the quotidian aspects of experience design; this is where observational study, ethnography, and applied anthropology come to the fore [ I'm thinking here specifically of Dan Lockton's Design with Intent methods ].

Kelley moves to a discussion of The Experience Architect, one of the faces of innovation which is paired nicely with the work of The Anthropologist. The Experience Designer is concerned with addressing needs, while The Anthropologist is concerned with identifying those needs.

Story :: Narrative :: Discourse :: Rhetoric

From the perspective of my own disciplinary expertise, experience design is always already a conflation between the material and the lingustic ~ the stuff and the discourse about that stuff ~ Stuff + Stories.

Like Herigstad, experience design for Kelley is about the vanishing interface :: the interface mediates, but the effective interface elides that mediation.

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