This might be the coolest video I’ve seen online. Sure kids these days might have mySpace, but we had funked up Stevie Wonder singing Superstition live on Sesame Street.

What does this have to do with design or innovation? Well watch the video and compare it to, say, the VMA. On the one hand we have an increidbly cool, intimate and authentic experience. On the other we have generic, prefabbed, homogenized posing. What is an authetic, from the heart, expereince worth to you?

(yes folks, those are real musicians playing real instruments, live. who knew?)

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Ok, i fully admit that this is a totally cheating post: I originally posted this over at The Healthcare IT Guya few weeks ago. However with CardinalHealth’s recent problems with the FDA over one of thier infusion pumps, I think it’s important to reiterate my post. Why? Because the FDA acted on CardinalHealth not because of some technical failing of the device, but because a failing of interaction design. It seems that the design of the physical input mechanism increases the potential for a particular kind of data input error. So this is a case where a trivial investment in interaction design and testing upstream could have helped avoid costly consequences downstream.

Why does healthcare product design lag?

The simple answer is because the design discipline usually isn’t invited to the table. In most cases only engineering and marketing contribute to a product’s design—whether that product is hardware, software, or services. The problem is that engineering concerns itself primarily with feasibility and marketing with viability. This excludes the role human experience plays in the success or failure of products, resulting in so many poorly designed healthcare applications and devices.

Contrary to popular misconceptions design is not about style or aesthetics. Design is about people, real people. Design is about understanding and solving real problems real people experience. It seeks to deliver solutions that are the most useful, usable and desirable. Integrating design with engineering and marketing yields a more balanced, holistic and effective model for creating great products.

However this is a relatively new model, and as many of us know, healthcare can be very slow to adopt new models.

Why do you need a new model when the old ones have been working so well?

Poor design is not a competitive disadvantage in an environment where it is the norm. It is however a huge disadvantage when both markets start rejecting poor design and new players start delivering good design. Where competitors quickly match functionality, and solid quality initiatives have improved reliability across the board, good human-centered design is the next battleground for competitive advantage.

For instance, both Philips and GE have deep competencies in design for consumer markets where human experience is often the prime differentiator. They are now beginning to leverage these competencies for their healthcare efforts to boldly drive preference for their products and brand among patients, clinicians and administrators.

The consequences of poor design include delivering products that may exceed quality expectations, but that miss what people truly need, that are hard to learn, that are hard to use, that propose less compelling market choices for both clinicians and administrators, that increase patient safety risks and that ultimately damage your company’s brand.

So what can you do to help deliver better design?

Simply make design part of how you do things. Focus on people rather than technology. Judge your design ideas on how useful, usable and desirable they are. Open up your culture to appropriate change by introducing your people to design thinking and methods through training. Use personas and scenarios to help keep you focused on people. Foster in-house design talent. Cultivate a trust relationship with a quality design firm who can not only deliver but also educate. And most importantly for many in healthcare, give design some teeth by making design targets part of your quality system. Think big, but start small.

Some companies staff clinicians to help design products. This is a fantastic idea. But it is no substitute for an explicit competency in design. Users are not designers and more often than not don’t understand their own needs. Just like patients, users are only partially aware of symptoms and not root causes. They cannot therefore provide a diagnosis or a treatment on their own. Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Back in grad school I was one of Richard Florida’s students as he was discovering the connections and correlations between various metrics of diversity and economic productivity. His conclusion was diversity and social tolerance has a consistent measurable and predictable positive economic effect. In other words, diversity pays.

He goes on to point out how it is exactly this openness to diversity that has driven the US to be the world’s largest economy.

Unfortunately American public policy has started to close and damn up the flow of creative talent into the country. This, Florida says, is potentially very dangerous because it threatens the very engine of US economic prosperity. Anyway, lots of good stuff here about how cultures cultivate talent and innovation.

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I do a lot of work with scenarios as tools to help drive innovative thinking. I don’t use them to forecast the future—forecasting is impossible. I do use them to explore many plausible futures, none of which actually come true, but some unforeseeable amalgam usually does.

I start with STEP factors (social, technological, economic, and political factors). The more tactical the scenario’s focus the less important political factors become.

Often a change in one of these factors ripples out into the others. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes this truggers a chain reaction, manifesting otherwise latent possibilities. Here’s a super crude example I cooked up in about 15 minutes. It about the shrinking size and cost of industrial manufacturing capability. But let’s start with some STEP factors.

Social
Having reliably satisfied many of Maslow’s needs many North Americans focus more on self-actualizing and self-expression. Evidence of this is our attitude towards work: we don’t want a job, we want fulfillment. This affects how we buy things and the kinds of things we buy. Mass produced homogeneity is increasingly anathema to North American consumers. We want to see ourselves in the artifacts we buy, not some generic corporation. And more importantly we want other to see us in these artifacts, with a product’s semiotic function becoming more important than its functional function.

Technological
Advances in manufacturing technologies are now to the point of delivering mass industrial manufacturing capability to a micro level (1, 2, 3). Such advances have also shrunk the associated costs as well, providing industrial production unit cost structures together with the customization of local craftsmanship. These technologies have already hit the marketplace in the UK with a furniture company call Unto The Last, that delivers made to order furniture at Ikea prices.

So, 3D scanners can be used to auto generate CAD files of things. These files can then be downloaded over the net into local rapid manufacturing machines. Start costs for these machines are about the same as a modest car. These machines then physically reproduce the original artifact for roughly the same unit cost as industrial mass production can. And if the stock item isn’t quite what you need? No problem, have the CAD file tweaked to make your own unique item for the same price.

Economic
Transportation is expensive. And as go oil costs, so goes transportation costs. For instance Canadian consumer have seen the cost of fruits and vegetables rise by 18% due to increased transportation costs.

Furthermore serf labour, the driving force keeping global consumer product prices low, is simply not sustainable. Global manufacturing costs will necessarily rise, not to North American levels, but enough to erode current price advantages. This will open the door for domestic and local alternatives.

Political
Outsourcing becomes a political touch-point. People in North America are increasingly afraid of its impact on their lives. Exporting jobs and crazy trade imbalances threaten our sustained prosperity (at least that’s what the people think, and the politicians are happy to exploit another fear to gain more influence).

Furthermore security along global transportation infrastructure is increasingly difficult to maintain threatening the reliable and cost-effective flow of both finished consumer goods and raw-materials. The common political response to this is increased security, which addresses the symptoms and not the root causes. This brings temporary relief until the threat responds by going to another level.

Of course all these are highly arguable. They are also highly plausible as well. Remember the point here isn’t to pick the future, but explore many plausible futures. Next time I’ll post some very crude micro and macro scenarios to flesh out these STEP factors.

I’ve been ploughing through a small hill of books recently, and its time to start posting the reviews. Unfortunately the quality ranges from not-so-great to absolutely horrible. This is unfortunate because i hate wasting my time, and because all of these authors have written other books I’ve found to be extremely good.

Hard Facts, Dangerous half-truths and total nonsense
by Robert Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer

Ironically this book far too frequently trades in exactly the kinds of half-truths and nonsense it rails against. Here’s an example:

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out why IDEO is so creative (p 85).

Rhetorically this is very clever. It makes the claim about IDEO being creative in the subordinate clause. This technique assumes the truth of its claim, and hopes to sneak it in under the radar, by subordinating it, so that readers are less likely to question its veracity. Is IDEO so creative? Well, I know they are extremely good at self-promotion. But are they really so creative? I haven’t seen any evidence. And for a book about evidence-based action, its ironic that the authors provide us absolutely no evidence beyond the rhetoric. In other words, its probably total nonsense. Thanks guys.

Later they claim that you shouldn’t worry too much about hiring good people, in part, because you really can’t tell the good from the bad anyway. As evidence, they offer up 3 quarter-backs whose careers started slow and improved. That’s a nice anecdote for football fans, but isn’t evidence of anything. They then go on to then say that studies have shown (beware, such phrases as “studies have shown”; they are the Welcome to Las Vegas neon-signs heralding total nonsense) that people’s performance varies day to day. This may or may not be true (they only provide scattered references to these studies), but again so what? So people’s performance varies? How does is this evidence that you needn’t worry about hiring good people?

Similarly Sutton and Pfeiffer warn us not to waste our time looking for natural talent, because natural talent doesn’t matter. Evidence: Tiger Woods practices relentlessly and that’s why he’s at the top of his game. No doubt his relentless practicing has helped put him on top. However, I’m willing to bet, if he stopped playing for a year, and I practiced every waking hour, he’d still be a way better golf player then I. He practices not to be in the top 10% or even top1% or even the top 10 pro golfer. He practices to be the #1 best golfer in the world.

What Sutton and Pfeiffer fail to admit is that looking for talented people, people who with work well in your culture and with your people, is not the same as trying to find the Tiger Woods of accounting. Not only is their evidence entirely anecdotal, but their whole argument about hiring good people is based on a series of subtle strawmen.

I stopped read by page 122; the book’s refreshing early chapter contrarianisms quickly became mired in half-truths and total nonsense and stayed there. So I’ll end with another example of IDEO and the tricky subordinate clause:

One of the main reason’s that IDEO’s system works so well is the attitude its people have toward knowledge (p 103).

Rhetorical trickery and an outright contradiction of earlier claims to boot! Either finding good people matters or it doesn’t guys—which way is it going to be? Unless of course people are blank slates to be written upon by the corporate culture that pays thier wages.

Well, I never lasted long enough to find out.

We recently returned from a road trip around Vancouver island and the BC interior. The first night we camped on a little island off the big island. This had been only the 4th time we’ve used our Sierra Designs tent, and the first time in over 3 years.

Sierra Designs makes great tents from ultralight materials, that compact into teeny-tiny little packages. They’re made for real back country campers who carry everything in and out with them. Size and weight are crucial.

So, after using this tent only a couple times several years ago, and without any instructions, it still took us with no great pain only about 5 minutes to completely assemble the thing. That’s great design.

Here’s a follow up on my post about the annoying puddle receptical every mug has that fills with water and spills on the floor when you remove it from the dishwasher.

I got some really good answers from some bright people about why cup have that indent.

Recent I came across this picture from the 2007 Ikea catalog (p.14) that shows a brilliant, non-technical solution to the problem that does not impact the indent’s functional purpose. One simple little cut in the bottom rim allows the water to drain out of the indent. Poof. Problem solved.

Then something ocurred to me. Perhaps knowing the reasons why something sucks can prevent you from exploring how to make it better. Indeed after Victor explained the history of the indent, I just accepted it and resigned myself to the fact that I’d forever splash water all over the floor every time I emptied the dishwasher. Instead I should have thought “how can I make this better”. Ikea did.