An Idea To Build A Dream On

A Killed Dream (almost)
Academic life is full of interesting irony. On my first week of college, there was one class I devastatedly looked forward to and another one, with just as much devastation, I avoided. The former was Industry and Organization, and the latter was Greek Philosophy (the rest of the classes were not horrible, but they didn’t exactly made me jump and down in glee). Contrary to the myth of Greek Philosophy being boring, it turned out that it was every dreamer’s class. Mr. Hassan made philosophy sounded like both history and fairy tales. I didn’t have to fantasize anything in General Philosophy. Even better, Mr. Hassan is the king of telling the greatest tales (the combination of –est and plural noun is intentional). Not once did I skip his sessions.

Different story went with Industry and Organization. According to the department manual, in its first year Industry and Organization would talk about ergonomics, the study of product design to perfectly fit human behavior. The word ergonomics was for me synonymous to ‘promising reward’. Ergonomics is the dream of everyone who’s interested in the culture of human artifacts in the future. I had a plan that Industry and Organization, combined with Human Anthropology, would make me believe that what science promise us, Star Trek for example, is just around the corner. The class turned out to be a major blow –a dull. Apparently I had to find another way for my faith without involving my Industry and Organization class.

A Re-lived Dream
Because my classes didn’t live up to my sci-fi fantasy, I had to conduct a number of extracurricular investigations. I began to read books on computers designs. After seven years I found out that I haven’t been reading the completely right books. As interesting as they were, something was missing in those reading: a human touch. I found it from another source (surprising ones, at that): business magazines. Apparently, these magazines do better in putting mad scientists’ divine dreams in laymen terms. Besides, who else have an agenda of making the future an industry (or any time for that matter).

In May 2004, a name came up to my attention: IDEO. IDEO is a design company head-based in Palo Alto, famous for the IDEA[1] trophies they confiscated. In this particular article, IDEO did an amazing thing. Kaiser Permanente, the largest health maintenance organization, hired them to fix their waiting and assessment rooms their clients have been complaining about –which means practically the whole building. IDEO took on the challenge and got right on with the prep researches. They didn’t give Kaiser the new building they asked for, but instead they presented them a hospital with a new experience.

It may be true when people say that the best solution is the simplest one, and IDEO’s solutions fit the simple category. Patients were no longer feel intimidated because IDEO simply hid all the nasty doctors’ toys out of their sights, and patients’ social supporter no longer felt helpless because IDEO simply advised Kaiser to provide these people with enough information so that these ‘social supporter’ would actually know how to support their loved ones in social terms. IDEO saved Kaiser God knows how much dollars. Apparently IDEO does have a habit of saving its clients a lot of dollars.

The amazing part of article was what IDEO did and have done –and they have a very long long long list stated in the article. But the most amazing part of the article was how they do it. I used to enjoy seeing Mission Impossible’s Jim White reading his potential mission crews (and then the theme song started). The idea of picking people with different expertise for an excellent result was inspirational. In many ways, IDEO did the same thing. IDEO employed 350 people with expertise in product designs, computer science, sociologist, anthropologist, and cognitive psychologist, to name some. I will not spoil the story of their methods with the details, but believe me this: IDEO is a bunch of mad scientists with sane human touches.

In spite of their fame as a design company, they do a lot of something else in their kitchen. Most of what they do in gathering knowledge involve similar stuffs psychology researchers do (and for the first time I actually feel proud of having majoring that). IDEO secret recipe is that they are attempting to design human experience, not a gadget. With their method, their great gadget design has always come as an automatic added bonus. Those methods make them several steps ahead from every other design company. Maybe they even get to taste what it is to be people from the future, by creating a future piece by piece themselves (and maybe the future would actually be what they created).

IDEO’s kitchen is wide open for public. They don’t keep their enlightening methods secret. Its website actually has some dedicated sections of how they do things. Maybe it’s because for them knowledge is something to share (even to competitors). Or maybe, they know that they will always be several steps ahead (and by any means will always keep it that way). They don’t just talk about being creative to make something, but also being creative to be more creative –metacreativity. It’s all there in the website and the articles I’ve read about them (it turned out that there a lot of them).

Last week, I read a review about a book –Ten Faces of Creativity: IDEO’s Strategy for Beating the Devil’s Advocate & Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization by Tom Kelley. Tom Kelley is one of IDEO’s top level management officers. It would be extremely interesting to walk through IDEO’s playground from a first-hand source, even if it’s only in written format. The reviewers said that it took him only five hours to finish the 300-pages book (during his LA-NY flight). A book that page-turning is my kind of book and I look forward to reading it cover to cover (so far, it is not yet available at any bookstore I browsed). At the end of the review was stated the reviewers name: Bruce Nussbaum. Bruce Nussbaum was the very person who wrote that article I read in May 2004.

God bless IDEO, Mr. Kelley, and Mr. Nussbaum for restoring my faith in the idea of the future.

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PS: A little later after the May 2oo4 article, I found out that my very Sony Ericsson T610 was the result of their craftsmanship and that it won IDEA award in the Information Technology category. I felt pseudo victorious about it, too.

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[1] IDEA is designers’ version of Oscars and Grammys.