Questions for Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO
You have said that, at its best, design creates relationships between people and technologies. Please explain.
When I use the term ‘technologies’, I mean anything that is constructed by human beings — whether it’s an iPod, an automobile, a rapid transit system, or an organization’s methods of communication. Herbert Simon said that whenever we shape the world to meet our needs, we are designing. For better or worse, we also shape nature to meet our needs. In each case, by better understanding the needs of those you are trying to serve — and expressing those needs in the form of insights that you develop and prototype — you can end up with new and powerful choices.
The issue is, we don’t always get to the shaping part as early as I would like. Sometimes, we let a technology take its own path for too long, before we realize that we can shape it to meet our needs — instead of being affected by it in a passive way.
One of the key tenets of IDEO’s approach is studying ‘emergent behaviour’. How do you define that term?
In our practice, we are particularly interested in the behaviour of ‘extreme users’. If you take the bulk of behaviour around whatever you are focusing
