Impressions by James More

D school Stanford
- Seek to establish ability to radically collaborate and find ways to remove roadblocks to innovation
- Seeks to inspire multidisciblinarity to foster radical collaboration between students faculty and industry.
Student groupings – size important (around 3 or 4 students) – reference to Steiner’s creative groupings of 3/4
- Industry comes for innovation solutions, but become part of the team and learn how to become innovators. The problems that the students tackle ar thus real world
- In the multi-disciplinarity context, design thinking and the design process becomes the common language and the glue that holds the complexity together
- Space is important: provides habitat which governs how people behave and how the disciplines will come together
- The issues are around the technical and feasibility, business and viability and human values and desirability/usability
- Staff are T shaped people – a deep knowledge of their subject and practice, with a hook to engage with others to seek solutions
- All the interesting work is done at a Masters level – and the sharp money relates to live projects where industry seeks solutions.
- Programme runs for 1 year – students state that they are self selecting. While they come from different disciplines, they haven’t quite fitted in to the way that these disciplines are practiced: issues here are about the ubiquitous opportunity the vehicle of learning provides.
- Spectacular failures are good learning vehicles.
- Art in design does not have a corner on aesthetics: all students should develop their own aesthetic. Where art in design forces decision making without constant data and relies on intuition.
- Innovation often relies on using other peoples ideas, but moving them forward (healthy stealing)

IDEO
- The methods and processes designers use to solve problems allows designers to resolve issues that they are not traditionally asked to be involved in.
- Projects are run by teams of 3 or 4 people of different discipline backgrounds – again T shaped.
- Sense of space is again important, with a café experience important for chance encounters and the kitchen space is an important tool for developing collaborative ideas
- There is a blend of the business voice and the design process
- The consequence of their work is that they have to find ways of making sure that they share the knowledge of their processes and can digest it to keep the company moving along. They thus hire film makers and writers to help develop the narrative so that information is not held in dead storage, but is fluid. This is important, as the more the company moves into strategy solutions, the less tangible the outputs are.
- Where design can spectacularly fail is when the brief is too easy, to be resolving the wrong questions. Designers need to make sure that the design question is the right one.
- Another point of failure is again a consequence of growth from a successful product – that the client has not got the capacity to grow at the rate of change that the product has the potential to deliver.
- Innovation in large companies is difficult sometimes to manage in an ongoing way. A new phase is beginning, where good ideas are created in small/medium size companies and when the capacities are required are sold on to larger companies. This process hasn’t actually changed from the past, but the dynamic change is that of ownership – this present phase is design led, not financially led or business led.

Jonathon Ive
- Fanatical perfectionist. Hugely charismatic.
- Very deep engagement with his own discipline and practice and has a personal ability to hook in with expertise in order to facilitate the design processes requirement to be eclectic.
- Very clear objective about the perfect product. Uncompromising.
- Developed niche brand culture for functional objects of desire that drive new lifestyle activities (gin talking).

Jump
- Believes that design improves peoples lives and has further developed/enhanced the Stanford innovation model in their practice.
- The company is project led – interesting management structure in that there is management responsibility for the projects externally and internally.
- Space – absolutely key to working process, with different accommodation and environments for different design activities. Fixed, Flexible and Fluid. Space allows for collaboration, project building, individual reflection and consideration and the ability to approach thinking in alternative ways. Staff spend most of their time in the office somewhere.
Again teams have 3 to 5 people
- They felt that ‘3 legged’ staff rather than T shaped staff were key – staff were multidisciplinary in themselves, working in their teams.
- Development with companies – focus on the USP can deliver new strategies
- As there is an increased demand for innovation, the bar is raised in staff competency. The company is thus concerned to ensure staff development plugging into the real world and understanding the real world through reading and media
- Innovation is defined as invention with a socio-economic impact. Consequence? Can innovation happen without impact – how do you prepare for the impact, what do you do about the aftershocks.