Deep Dive

One day the week before Thanksgiving the user studies group watched a video of Deep Dive, an ABC production of Nightline with Ted Koppel. Deep Dive investigates the design process as illustrated by the company IDEO. The company was founded by Dave Kelley, a Stanford Mechanical Engineering professor, and creates 90 new products a year. They are experts on the design process. See their web site at www.ideo.com.

What intrigued the group at USC was the IDEO culture, which emphasizes creativeness to the point of zany, with a few guiding principles such as one conversation at a time in group discussion, focus, no critiques. IDEO would call their approach “focused chaos.” Employees are free to generate ideas and solutions within the confines of customer needs. One important concept is to fail often to succeed sooner.

The model of giving free rein to the creation of ideas and solutions is one that the user studies group hoped to apply to their work at USC, releasing their creative potential from the confines of a more structured process. It’s similar to the way The Incredibles was created, by investing in an excellent team and relying on their talent to produce the final product.

I was struck by the similarity between IDEO ground rules and techniques (such as posting sticky-notes with any and every idea and using team judges to sift through the ideas) and the strategic planning process recently used at UC’s University Libraries.