Palo Alto Art Center Presents June 22–September 10, 2006
IDEO PROTOTYPES THE FUTURE Barry Katz
Prototyping the Future Throughout the 20th century, designers quarreled amongst themselves about everything imaginable, but on one point they were agreed: “Form,” as the great American architect Louis Sullivan had decreed, “must ever follow function.” Thus the table radio of the 1930s or the toaster of the 1950s was essentially a skin wrapped more-or-less tightly around vacuum tubes and heating coils, and we dwelt comfortably among objects whose visible surfaces expressed their inner workings. Then came the microprocessor. The products of the new technology operate at speeds unrelated to lived experience and at scales imperceptible to the senses; as such, they defy the Modernist framework which championed the reduction of form to function and functionality to the human body. The loosening of the physical constraints of the past, in other words, confronted designers with a new set of challenges and opened up a vast new range of possibilities: What should a “modem” look like? Should a “mouse” have one button or three? Should the “on/off” switch be a big green button or a pull-down menu? Specialists grounded in the realities of the industrial age were barely equipped to raise, much less to answer the questions of the information age, and in this climate a new breed of designer began to migrate to Silicon Valley. From its humble beginnings above a dress shop in downtown Palo Alto, IDEO has become a global force in the design not just of a new generation of products, but in the design of design itself. It has been a pioneer in bringing form-givers and engineers to the same table, and over time has added the psychologist, the ethnographer, the linguist and the MBA. Together they have crafted a comprehensive approach to a truly “human-centered” design and developed a set of procedures that is as widely sought-after as their actual design work. One of them is the disciplined observation of the myriad “thoughtless acts” that people perform on a daily basis. The other is prototyping. To spend even a few minutes walking around IDEO’s studios is to be immersed in a culture of prototyping. In Palo Alto, an engineer will be prototyping a communications device out of foam core, paperclips and Post-it notes while next door a CAD-CAM machine is turning out precision parts. A group in London will be prototyping the experience of sleeping on an airplane or trying on a killer outfit at Prada; at the San Francisco office, in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, a team of architects and anthropologists will be creating a spatial prototype to understand what happens when a tired business traveler checks into a hotel or anxious parents into an emergency room. In Munich, designers may be conducting a concept exploration of possible uses of a new heat-resistant polymer and building a “narrative prototype” out of words to explain it. And on an idle Sunday afternoon, a multidisciplinary team of volunteers can be found flinging buckets of water off the roof of their High Street studio, prototyping ways in which subsistence farmers on the outskirts of Nairobi can pump enough water out of the ground to grow enough food to sell the excess at the local market. www.ideo.com
A prototype is a preliminary design, typically one of many iterations that will become progressively more refined as viable ideas are identified and others weeded out. The designers at IDEO often quote Linus Pauling’s dictum that “The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas,” and the only way to do this—without blowing the budget—is to start with the quick and dirty. The delicate Diego surgical tool from Gyrus ENT began life as a plastic clothespin, a 35-mm film canister and a marking pen held together with a bit of clear tape. The essential insight—that a pistol grip could balance the weight of the motor at the center of the device—was validated, and successive versions could test and confirm it. Prototyping jump-starts the design process, at minimal cost and minimal risk. Although the design process may move from sketches to form studies to crudely operational “breadboards” to a finished, working model, prototyping rarely takes the form of a clean, linear evolution. As early versions of the Palm V PDA quickly reveal, the process generates a vast number of errors, false starts, and wrong turns, and that’s the point. IDEO Fellow Bob Sutton likes to talk about “dumb ideas that work,” but it’s just as important to generate a lot of smart ideas that don’t work. Maybe one of them will work next year, when the software is better or the material cheaper. Maybe it will work next door, on a completely different project. And maybe—as the remarkable exploration of Social Mobiles suggests—prototyping can be a way to inspire new thinking and explore future possibilities. We live in an era of unprecedented dynamism and instability, and Silicon Valley, for better or for worse, has been the engine of much of it. In the face of what Canadian designer Bruce Mau has famously called “massive change,” the importance of being able to stay abreast of rapidly changing technology trends, cultural trends, and business trends has never been greater. This is what “design thinking” is all about, and prototyping—not just of objects but of experiences, behaviors, spaces, and services—is a way of bringing it to life. Barry Katz is professor of humanities and design at California Collage of the Arts, and chair of CCA’s graduate program in Visual Criticism. He is an author of three books, has served as executive editor of the Design Book Review and contributing editor to ID Magazine and Metropolis. He is a consulting professor in the Design Division at Stanford University, and fellow at IDEO.