Creating experiences, not just products

IDEO, Jeff Mulhausen, Italy 

“HCD surprised us because even people who didn’t know a lot about the topic were able to create so many solutions.”

“The reason this process is called “human-centered” is because it starts with the people we are designing for, examining their needs, dreams and behaviors.”

The nucleus of these quotations is the word “people”. People are the source, the medium and the recipient of IDEO projects, and people are even the real creators: 

“The right team has to be assembled by mixing different disciplinary and educational backgrounds, so that you will have a better chance of coming up with unexpected solutions and different points of view.”

As a matter of fact IDEO wants to teach us that one of the cornerstone of the whole system refers to the teamwork and its capability to develop a new approach for each project. The various project teams are assembled like Lego bricks, based on skills and needs.

Creating experiences, not just products could be the right way to summarize both HCD philosophy and Jeff Mulhausen speech. Let’s try to analyze the HCD plan with the key elements provided by Jeff Mulhausen:

- Does it design the system? Yes, through interviews and focus groups it considers all stakeholders and their environment.

- Does it design the majority? Yes, the process has been specially adapted for organizations that work with communities of need in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

- Does it design the empower? Yes, it originates tangible solutions to enhance living conditions in that places.

- Is it a universal design? Yes, its outputs are suitable to everyone.

- Does it design for simplicity? Yes, the result meets the needs of the organizations.

Then we can say that HCD is successful and moreover it represents where we are going to in the future through the Design Impact.

Focusing on IDEO and its working philosophy, I’d like to make a comparison with the Italian situation, given that I come from there.

This way of organizing the work, pointing out the importance of the team, is an American version of the traditional Italian production district, what we call “artificial industrial cluster”. In a country like Italy the typical industrial cluster result is generally only one specific kind of physical production (shoes in Marche, chairs in Udine, cars in Turin, furniture in Brianza, etc). The IDEO model is actually much stronger because is not directly related to physical production and it can range on a 360 degrees angle.

Another important element of IDEO process is making the whole creative process visible. It shows that there is no magic, no intuition, just hard work.

This is a formula that can be shared, communicated, thought and sold to all companies interested.

If I had to find an analogy between the traditional Italian system to produce goods and to make innovation and the IDEO one, I would say that they are two different approaches. In the American case the end result is the last step of an intentional group process, while in the Italian case we have outputs of planned manufacturing phases, linked through centuries of local experience.

The typical example of an Italian company able to emerge internationally is Benetton. In the Benetton production system the “factory” is actually a shipping hub where you collect the production made by thousands and thousand small family-based sweatshops. Benetton was smart to understand how the local system worked, and they developed a production mode perfectly fitting the local habits and social attitudes.

Isn’t it the same thing done by IDEO? IDEO invented a new reality made out of new social and productive systems and tools.

Compared to a world that seems more and more standardized, without other real options than the “big business” ones, here we are facing a different way to be active in the design world on a mass scale. HCD was able to overlap in a sensible and sensitive way the typical constraints of an organization with a set of values related to the welfare and well-being of the population and workers.

In my opinion IDEO has the peculiar characteristic to be very transparent and then easy to be copied, but yet no one is able to copy it. Paradoxically IDEO communicates in details what/how/why they do (as we read in our document), but no one is able to replicate the same model.

What is the hidden magic, if any?