Human-Centered Innovation
Understanding the IIT Institute of Design

Patrick Whitney
Director, Institute of Design
Illinois Institute of Technology

GK. VanPatter
Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute
Partner & Co-Founder, UnderstandingLab

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1
GK VanPatter:Welcome, Patrick. As Director of the Institute of Design at IIT, you have a unique vantage point from which to view the massive changes and challenges facing graduate design education today. While some aspects of the IIT program, including the Bauhaus history, will already be well known to our astute readers, what is likely not so well known is how you personally view the state of graduate design education today. With that in mind we hope that you will share your perspective with us as we throw some difficult questions in your direction.

To begin, help us understand what your Institute's mission is today, Patrick. If the IIT Institute of Design is meant to be a solution to a particular set of problems, help us understand what those problems are perceived to be. What is the vision there?

Patrick Whitney: At the highest level, our mission is to develop and teach methods of human-centered innovation.

The reason our programs attract great graduate students and research money from companies is there has been a shift in where companies are looking for innovation.

Companies and other organizations have traditionally focused on advancing their knowledge of technology and business models in order to be competitive. They are now phenomenal at combining technology and business ideas to create innovations. However, senior executives tell me their frustration is that while they know how to make anything, they are increasingly unsure about what to make. The reason is that consumers have so many choices of products, services and information, driven by companies’ abilities and global trade, that the patterns of daily living are dramatically more complex than they were twenty or thirty years ago. The patterns of how we live, learn, keep healthy, work, and play are more varied than before, making it more difficult for companies to create meaningful offerings for users who are less and less predictable.

We are still recovering from a dramatic economic downturn that was in part caused by companies and venture funds believing that the fount of innovation was new technology.
Now they know that for an innovation to be accepted, it needs to fit the patterns in people’s lives.

So what are we doing about this? We know that companies are less trusting of large-scale demographic studies and focus groups to give them user insights that are meaningful to the teams charged with creating innovations. At ID the faculty are developing practical methods for understanding activities of users that are relevant to product and service categories. These are linked to other methods focusing on creating concepts, linking user value to economic value, demonstrating new concepts, and other issues that organizations need.

Companies support the research of faculty and PhD students to develop these methods. These methods, and those adopted and adapted from other places, are taught in the
Masters program.

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GK VanPatter: As I am sure you are well aware, the graduate design school phenomenon is in an era of transition as several move from “polytechnic” settings to inclusion within universities. In tandem there are always those who question the degree to which our graduate design schools should serve industry or serve to question the status quo, including industry.

Some believe graduate design education should be aiming for much higher, nobler goals than the service of industry. Are more consumer products for the world really necessary some might ask? How does your institute grapple with and address this issue?

Patrick Whitney: First, let’s deal with the relationship to industry.

In other professions like business, law, engineering and the sciences, faculty members in graduate schools spend a significant amount of time doing research projects. The results of this work are theories, methods and tools that help develop their profession. A major role of graduate programs is to help the field by developing new knowledge and transferring it to industry. Unfortunately in the design field, most graduate programs limit their activity to a continuation of teaching the same things that were taught in undergraduate programs or doing exploratory projects that do not get transferred to industry. In some schools faculty members and students take on projects to simulate professional activity. In general, we think this is a mistake. It does not develop new knowledge in the profession and often just undercuts professional design firms.

A healthy field needs graduate programs that advance the body of knowledge and transfer it to professionals. This is useful to industry while not being “vocational.” At the Institute of Design we accomplish this by having companies fund and work with us on the development of new design processes. As these methods emerge,
we conduct workshops and give them advance copies of papers that transfer our work into their internal processes.

Your second question about the avalanche of new products in the world is more difficult. One of the main ways companies compete today is through continuously improving their offerings and reducing their development time. As this system works now, it is not sustainable for environmental reasons and we are seeing a cultural backlash that could eventually lead to consumers rejecting new products. Some of our work addresses this by investigating how the upgrading of products can be achieved through software and services. We also do a great deal of work in the area of healthcare and dealing with problems in urban slums in India and other countries.

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GK VanPatter: In our practice we often work in the knowledge creation enabling space so I am curious to know how you think about your Institute’s role in knowledge creation. Is your Institute focused on knowledge creation around WHAT (content knowledge) or HOW (process knowledge) or both?

Patrick Whitney: The knowledge we focus on is not so much about a particular industry, sector or type of problem, but knowledge of the processes of creating innovations. These processes form a kind of tool-kit from which people can choose tools for a particular problem. There are four general categories. 1. Understanding Context - focusing on identifying user activities, core technologies, and business forces; 2. Identifying Patterns - re-framing the problem and creating criteria for success; 3. Creating Innovations - proposing systems of products, messages, environments and services that create experiential value for the user and economic value for the client; and 4. Communicating the Ideas - producing prototypes and scenarios that help organizations understand the value of the new ideas.

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GK VanPatter: The Doblin model appears to mix content and process. Is your IIT Institute of Design teaching something different from what they do at Doblin?

Patrick Whitney: Almost all high-level consulting firms combine specialized processes with specialized knowledge of particular sectors. To help a client develop strategy they need to know about their content. High-level graduate schools build knowledge about their field. We focus on building design knowledge that will help businesses and other organizations be more innovative. In this sense we are more process oriented. However, we tend to focus on particular applications including health care, learning, consumer products, and a variety of applications in the area of sustainable innovations. Most of the current sustainability projects are focused on improvements in urban slums in India. However, over time, the application areas change and the focus on building useful methods and tools remains.

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GK VanPatter: I recall that you once said: “Designers have an especially powerful combination of skills, but they become useful only if we have the methods to understand complex problems.” What is the relationship between design and problem solving from your perspective?

Patrick Whitney: “Solving” problems now seems a little simplistic. Companies and other organizations don’t so much seem to have “problems” that need to be solved, but situations or predicaments that they have to deal with. It seems naïve to try to come up with a single solution and now makes more sense to develop “options” from which an organization can choose. Problem solving is an idea that fits a world that is more deterministic and fixed, while creating options fits situations that are more probabilistic.

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GK VanPatter: That’s interesting. With your patience I would like to try to unpack the art and science of this a little more for our readers, but first help me understand what this process is intended to be. In the minds of the IIT leaders, is this a process specifically created for innovative product/service development or something else? Do you see it as a specialized process or something that has more general kinds of applications?

Patrick Whitney: It is not a single process or fixed methodology. It is a set of methods, frameworks and tools that we find useful for creating innovative products, messages, environments, services and overall experiences (the offerings that designers create). It may be useful to applications other than these offerings, but that is beyond our focus at the Institute of Design.

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GK VanPatter: OK. I am starting to get a sense of how you think about the world, Patrick. Perhaps the best way to try unpacking some of this now is to first acknowledge that there are a couple of ways to approach this kind of conversation. One approach might be to focus on differencing, while an alternate would be to seek commonalities. In the competitive marketplace one can see a lot of differencing, naturally occurring as various disciplines, practices, organizations, schools etc. compete with each other.

In organizational settings we are more likely to see groups seeking common ground as a strategic goal. We are more likely to see efforts being made to reach beyond positioning and into the fabric of what is actually occurring, in order to better understand each other. If we can imagine ourselves in that kind of setting for a few minutes it is more likely that we can surface connections that our insightful readers will find meaningful. I believe this objective aligns with your earlier remarks regarding IIT seeking to make contributions to knowledge sharing in the community.

Among the many things that I find interesting in your comments are your references to process. Although you referred to the processes of creating innovations at IIT as a set of non-fixed methods, tools, frameworks, categories, not intended to be a single process, not intended to be problem solving, if we look closely at the 4 part logic that you described earlier, it appears to map very closely to the logic of what we call strategic problem solving today. Whether we consider that logic, a toolkit, categories, non-sequential steps, or whatever, it is difficult not to see numerous connections there.

This would not be so surprising to us. In our research around foundational language we have yet to find any specialty design process, in practice or academia, that does not map back
to this underlying architecture in one way or another despite all kinds of creative descriptions and names being used in the marketplace today. So far we have identified more than twenty variations created for specialty purposes. That research is ongoing.

A key difference is often found in where design begins, but the underlying logic remains, regardless. As you know, much of traditional design is still taught around the notion that framed challenge statements are given as assignments to students who are then encouraged not to question how the challenge has been framed. I noted that the IIT logic model assumes that the challenges or opportunities will need to be reframed after fact finding, after the context is better understood. I am also assuming that it is understood that users of the model move around, back and forth, within the model and not always in a linear way. Again, both of these points map directly to the strategic problem solving logic of today.

I might point out that in the consulting work that we do around understanding innovation, we find ourselves being asked to map one discipline’s mental models into others in order for various groups to better understand each other. How do knowledge management mental models and processes or those from organizational learning, corporate strategy, organizational innovation etc. relate to each other? We have to be open, adaptive and prepared to do that constantly as many groups, not just designers are involved in innovation initiatives today.

For the purposes of this conversation I will refer to the IIT model/toolbox as INNOVATION ARCHITECTURE 1.0 and the strategic problem solving model/toolbox as ARCHITECTURE X. Below is an outline of the two models. I have used your language in the description of ARCHITECTURE 1.0. Correct me if I have missed something there.

INNOVATION ARCHITECTURE 1.0 (The IIT model/toolbox)

Intended Specialty Purpose:

• Creating Innovative Products, Communications, Environments and Services

1. Understanding Context:
focusing on identifying user activities, core technologies, and business forces.

2. Identifying Patterns:
re-framing the problem and creating criteria for success

3. Creating Innovations:
proposing systems of products, messages, environments and services that create experiential value for the user and economic value for the client

4. Communicating the Ideas:
producing prototypes and scenarios that help organizations understand the value of the new ideas.

INNOVATION ARCHITECTURE X (Strategic Problem Solving model/toolbox)

Intended Purpose:

• Driving change and cross-disciplinary innovation
• Adapting to changing market conditions
• Finding new growth opportunities
• Overcoming organizational inertia
• Reconstructing the way people think/solve problems, individually
and in teams
• Untangling complex, multi-layered, ill-structured challenges
• Creating innovative solutions (strategies, businesses, products,
services, experiences, etc)

1. Finding/Formulating Challenges/Opportunities:
problem/opportunity finding, gathering/understanding facts (context, users, technology, business, organization, strategy, etc) reframing challenge/opportunity definitions, mapping challenge patterns

2. Formulating Solutions:
generating innovative solution ideas, mapping & modeling those ideas , connecting dots across diverse ideas, creating criteria for evaluation, evaluating and selecting best options

3. Implementing Solutions:
action planning, communicating/selling solution ideas, action/producing solutions

I would be curious to know what your take is from the IIT perspective, on the apparent similarities here. If the IIT model is not problem solving what do you consider it to be? Is it that the terminology of “problem solving” has become unfashionable at IIT or is something else going on there? Do students in the IIT program learn about the relationships between problem solving and the IIT model?

Patrick Whitney: Your comparison is interesting and for the most part there is a strong match. I think there are a few reasons that the term “problem solving” is not used as much now as before.

First, I believe it became a dominant term in design in the 1960’s because of the design methods work of Bruce Archer and J Christopher Jones. Both of them tended to work on problems that were easy to define but hard to solve. They tended to be problems that did not explicitly deal with competitive situations. For example, new hospital beds, or a new workstation, or a new kitchen, or a new signage system were framed as problems of performance or function and the goal was to create more efficient and more effective systems for users. This work related to some aspects of engineering design and systems thinking that were emerging in the 60’s. At the end of the day, a successful project was measured by people being able to perform better.

This approach is still useful, but we are supplementing it with factors to do with competition and with the softer issues of user experience like social, cultural, and emotional human factors.

One of the ways we deal with competition is look at the issues of market size and direction and how an innovation might support a particular corporate strategy of profit, or growth in market share, or strengthening the brand. In the past, design schools essentially never dealt with these issues, which is a mistake because they are the issues which frame a company’s decisions about the direction of their innovations.

The softer issues of user experience are increasingly important to an organization’s success. In the 60’s, there was a strong focus on physical and cognitive human factors. These are still very important, but as consumers have more choices, companies have to be concerned with the total user experience, which certainly includes social, cultural and emotional experiences.

A second reason the term problem solving seems less useful is that it implies there is a fixed solution. I think today’s organizations all think they are in a mode of continuous innovation.

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GK VanPatter: I believe we have a not unusual understanding challenge here. Like the word “design” the term “problem solving” can mean many things. Masters inside the realm of design understand the word “design” in the most up to date, advanced way while understanding of the word outside is often out of sync and lagging far behind.

The same could be said of the term “problem solving.” To suggest to masters of that realm that problem solving “is an idea that fits a world that is more deterministic and fixed” that it deals with “fixed solutions” not “options” is roughly the equivalent to some one outside of design using forty year old notions of what “design” once was to define design today. In both instances we would have a huge chasm of misunderstanding to overcome, as each of these realms is being continuously reinvented and repurposed.

Bridging the chasm between these two realms is likely beyond what we can accomplish in this one conversation but perhaps we might be able to begin opening a channel in that direction if you are interested. There are many ways we could go about this but lets try building off the notion of “continuous innovation” in organizations since you brought it up.

Many of the large organizations that we work with in our practice, have “continuous innovation” as a goal. That is essentially why they have engaged us. Today, the question for organizations is less about the idea or the goal of “continuous innovation” and more about how to actually get there. Most fully understand that having consultants come in once in a while to help them develop innovative new products and services will not get them there as an organization (sorry folks).

To use a bakery analogy, we call the above baking/delivering a loaf of bread. There are lots of people in the business of helping organizations bake loaves of bread; products, services, etc. The point is that those organizations trying to get to “continuous innovation” seek more than occasional loaves via consultants. They seek to learn how to bake for themselves. They seek to become continuous innovation bakeries.

They are in pursuit of not just product or service innovation, but continuous business innovation and innovation across many dimensions of their organizations. Innovation as a way of life is their goal. With this in mind they seek adaptable innovation tools capable of spanning every aspect of their organization and the diverse, continuous challenges that can be found there.

In order to fully grasp what this means, one has to understand that there are numerous paradigm shifts underway in the workplace driving this organizational need that are rarely seen reflected in graduate design education. Among those drivers are rising complexity and compressed time frames. These two drivers alone continue to have enormous impact resulting in movement from the individual to the team, from linear processing to parallel processing among other things. While we do not have the time or space to discuss all of that here, suffice it to say that all of the large organizations that we work with have already moved to parallel processing and cross-disciplinary teams.

Many contain a very diverse employee base, including engineers, scientists, business people and sometimes designers, among hundreds of other disciplines. It is that diverse, innovative brainpower that organizational leaders seek to maximize.

Gone are the days when designers alone were considered the “creatives.” Gone are the days when designers had a reserved place at the innovation table. Such assumptions no longer sync with the realities of the marketplace. The innovation game and the rules have significantly changed. Today organizational leaders seek tools to ensure that everyone -all disciplines- are included in the circle of innovation. How to get to cross-disciplinary continuous innovation becomes the question.

In order for our practice to be able to intervene and help organizations grapple with such challenges and opportunities, we have to draw upon knowledge, tools and systems that were not and cannot be found in the traditional design business, or in graduate design education today. To say this another way: the needs and opportunities around continuous innovation in cross-disciplinary organizational settings arrived far in advance of the tool and knowledge readiness in the design community. Years ago we made our choice to reach out beyond design; today our continuous innovation toolset, our version of INNOVATION ARCHITECTURE X , is, for very practical reasons a hybrid.

To make a longer story shorter, today we view both design and strategic problem solving as collaboration/innovation process languages: the former remains very specialized in purpose, with a limited toolset (sort of like the Mac), while the latter can be applied to multiple purposes and has multiple tool attachments that are now applicable across many domains.
I believe this is clearly indicated in the comparison between ARCHITECTURE 1.0 and ARCHITECTURE X outlined earlier.

In the real world realm of organizations seeking to achieve continuous innovation across multiple disciplines, cross-disciplinary strategic problem finding/solving has already become the bridge language. Call it what you will: redomaining, repurposing, reinventing, etc. Whatever its original purpose once was, the point is that this language is well on its way to becoming a common ground, a foundational open architecture platform spanning multiple worlds (including design and business) as the notion of multiple intelligences, working towards common goals, takes hold. Whether those in the traditional design community like it or not, problem solving is the common language of business. Look underneath virtually every industry, every level, every job, from the CEO to the folks in the mailroom and you will find a need for it there.

I might also point out that the process logic outlined earlier in the description of ARCHITECTURE X is only one component. Among the other tools are interconnected behavior and team dynamics models that traditional design has never been able to muster. Simply stated: one cannot do meaningful interventions around continuous innovation in organizations today without such tools, as old default behaviors and lack of cross-disciplinary skills play huge roles in the disruption of ideation, the killing of innovation seeds and the setting of tone in organizational cultures. Getting to continuous innovation among adults involves significant value, thinking and behavior reconstruction as much as anything else.

To help organizational leaders understand what it means to undertake such a journey, we use several simple explanation architectures including this one: 1. MindShift, 2. SkillShift 3.CultureShift. While employees might achieve MindShift by reading a book on innovation, hearing a guest speaker or attending a conference, SkillShift rarely occurs that way. We help leaders understand that one cannot get to 3 directly from 1. To get to CultureShift requires significant mastery of SkillShift first. This is often a big aha! for organizational leaders looking for tangible ways to move forward towards the continuous innovation target.

To cut to the chase, one can see that doing SkillShift, skill-building around ARCHITECTURE 1.0 would get organizations to only a small subset of continuous innovation as 1.0 is recognized to be a specialty toolkit created only for the development of products, communications, environments and services. For that reason alone it is unlikely that ARCHITECTURE 1.0 like models will become candidates for common innovation language.

Continuous innovation in organizations today most often involves a wider set of goals and constituencies. Essentially we are talking about mastery of HOW skills that can be applied to many types of WHAT.

ARCHITECTURE X is a more likely candidate for common innovation language and innovation navigation as it can be applied to many types of challenges, by all kinds of disciplines. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how widespread mastery of that common language, that toolbox, allows organizations to span every company, department, discipline, project, level and role in the entire global enterprise. That toolbox can be super charged and humanized with the augmentation of design-related tools but that’s a story for another day.

I point this out, not to focus on our innovation acceleration work specifically but to note that this is what designers are already doing and being called upon to do in the marketplace. This is the scale and complexity of the challenges now facing us. We believe this terrain to be part of what next design leaders must be prepared to deal with today and will certainly be called upon to master as the cross-disciplinary future unfolds.

We seldom find this new marketplace context being discussed in graduate design education circles so we have the “opportunity” to surface such issues here! The point is, it is difficult to see how future design leaders will be capable of doing the kind of cross-disciplinary dot-connecting work described above if we continue to teach design as something without any connections to other processes.

I sometimes wonder if our market driven urge for differencing has gotten to the point where we have blurred many of the natural connections between ourselves and what others are doing. We have a lot of young people in the design community who seem to have no idea what these connections are or might be. This is not surprising since some of those teaching seem to have no idea. Many have been trained to think about design as exclusionary, as a remote, exclusive process, as a one-purpose hammer rather than a Swiss army knife.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I would also be interested to know if your program at IIT teaches cross-disciplinary innovation behavior dynamics? We most often see cross-disciplinary teamwork being “taught” in design schools simply by handing out team assignments and asking students to teach themselves. I am assuming there must be more than that going on at IIT?

Patrick Whitney: You have identified a lot of the main opportunities and challenges facing design.

The good news is that design is breaking into specialties. Now designers can decide to practice on specific projects (eg: the user experience of a single product or communications service) or on more general challenges (eg: organizational strategy, creation of new development methods), students can make meaningful choices about which school will prepare them for which type of specialization, and clients can choose from design firms that have different capabilities. Most of the choices are viable, but they are very different.

One of the main growth areas is the area you describe of having ever-compressed development times and requiring cross-disciplinary teams. This area tends to have more complex problems that need systems oriented innovations. Of course the teams working in this area draw from many disciplines other than design, but there are tremendous new needs for design.

In particular, designers can help the team move from an abstract description of a problem that frequently prolongs confusion and ambiguity to a more concrete description of a client’s situation including possible directions they can take. For example, methods and tools for observing user behavior can give a much more concrete understanding of what people really need than the more abstract understanding that comes from surveys and focus groups. Another example is the very fast and cheap use of conceptual prototypes, very early in the process, which helps team members from different disciplines gain a common understanding of what their options might be.

Using methods like this, with the client’s involvement, helps them know who to “bake the loaves” for, to use your metaphor. It also dramatically helps to speed up the development process and ensure it will be successful.

You’re right when you say design education seems not to be up to speed with this new world. Most schools are still trying to educate general designers; there is now too much knowledge in the field for anyone to be strong at all aspects of our field. All of the good schools know what they are good at and know what part of design is better done at other schools.

The average entering age of our students is 28; half of them have been professional designers while the other half come from engineering, the social sciences, architectures, business and other fields. Half are from other countries. They come here because they want to specialize in a methods-oriented education that will help them be leaders in the planning and developing of communications, products and services. They are also attracted because the community consists of 120 full-time graduate students, rather than being a smaller group that is adjunct to a large undergraduate program.

Their maturity and diversity of experience leads to amazing results. Of course, many are employed in jobs directly related to design in the leading design firms and corporate design departments. However, as a testament to the relevance of their work to the broad needs of industry, many are employed in other areas of a company such as new product development, marketing, strategy, and research. In fact, half of them have job titles that do not include the word “design”. These would include senior director of strategy, product manager, vice president of marketing, and chief of user research.

In a sense, your question about how to help design catch up is being answered by the high-level designers and firms that are helping companies increase the speed of innovation while facing a more uncertain environment. Out of this work will emerge iconic projects that will help other companies see what design can do for them.

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GK VanPatter: Your comments regarding co-creation with clients and the need for designers to prepare themselves to work the fuzzy front end of projects is very much in line with our thinking on where next design leaders can add significant value. There is so much interesting material here that I can see we will have to invite you back for another conversation Patrick.

As we begin landing this plane for today I want to return for a few minutes to the question of cross-disciplinary dynamics as that issue was likely buried in the flurry of comments that I made in my last question. I want to make sure we cover this ground as I believe it is not only of interest to readers but is central to how we think about the future of design from the NextD perspective. So let me return to that question and put you on the spot here. Can you tell us a little about how cross-disciplinary teamwork dynamics are taught at IIT? For example: do students learn what their problem solving preferences/profiles are and how those preferences relate to ARCHITECTURE 1.0 and the idea of continuous innovation?

Patrick Whitney: The most formal way we deal with teamwork is our largest workshop, which is called Systems and Systemic Design. In this class, the faculty member structures the teams and has the students rotate leadership, write evaluations of each other which he edits and reports back, and elect representatives to pick up the prizes or speak at the conferences which are a frequent outcome of the projects in this class. Of course, there are additional processes we could use and we are interested in improving our work in this area.

Companies who recruit here often mention that graduates’ ability to work in teams is one of the skills they value very highly.


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