With IDEO Prototypes the Future, The Palo Alto Art Center explores IDEO’s iterative and future-facing approach to innovation through design, June 22–September 10, 2006.  IDEO Prototypes the Future is the first exhibition to present a comprehensive collection of IDEO’s concepts and prototypes, representing work from the past twenty years with more than 75 individual pieces. Spanning conceptual objects to time-based media, the exhibit builds awareness about IDEO’s hand in expanding the terrain of design beyond industrial objects to social and educational domains. IDEO Prototypes the Future is presented in conjunction with ISEA (International Symposia of Electronic Art) Symposium, which takes place August 6–12, 2006, in San Jose.

A public opening reception will be held at The Palo Art Center the evening of June 22, 2006, from 6–8:30 pm. Admission is free. Docent-led tours, “Art Dialogues,” will be offered every Saturday at 2pm at no charge during the exhibition. In addition, a series of associated programs will be held at the Palo Alto Art Center.

Podcast:
Design Thinking Out Loud: Exploring Innovation and Creativity with IDEO:
Panel members include IDEO CEO and President Tim Brown and Cofounder Bill Moggridge
Moderater: Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate in Every Phase of their Evolution

Lecture:
Design Thinking: The Historical Perspective:
Barry Katz, Design Historian / California College of the Arts and Stanford University
August 3, 2006 / 7–9pm, Palo Alto Art Center

Lecture:
Sustainability: A Lens for Design: Bob Adams / IDEO
August 31, 2006 / 7:30–9pm, Palo Alto Art Center

Tim Brown presents a depiction of the modern-day design thinker: collaborative, empathic, adept at storytelling, and able to implement ideas in the world.

Watch the video here.
Note: Requires Quicktime. Download Quicktime Here

Every year, the World Economic Forum gathers the world’s political, cultural, and industry leaders in Davos, Switzerland to address most crucial global issues. With The Creative Imperative as its theme, the 2006 conference opened with a call to “harness creativity to provide new answers to the world’s problems.”  The WEF invited Tim Brown and IDEO to participate in a number of sessions on innovation.

The Innovation and Design Strategy session, which Survivor at Davos,” asked eight panel members to describe their vision of the keys to creativity.

Last to be voted off the island was IDEO’s Tim Brown, who suggested that creativity is spurred by approaching problems with a beginner’s mindset, and by exploring ideas through the use of rapid prototyping. And the winner is: Google’s Marissa Mayer, who argued for “a healthy disrespect for the impossible” combined with the virtues of constraints.

The Financial Times’ John Gapper caught this comment from Tim, “Everyone should go out and try to solve a problem they have never thought about before.” Other notable sessions Tim attended that touched on the power of design thinking were Healthier Partnerships for HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria and another on Mobile Entertainment (which included the CEOs of Motorola, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Qualcomm, and Orange).

With assistance from IDEOers Kate Canales, Chris Flink, and Charles Warren, Tim led a workshop titled Building a Culture of Innovation, which was covered extensively by John Thornhill of the Financial Times (sub req’d):

Design can be used for many things, or so designers say. “Design is about more than making things look cool and pretty. You have companies that use design thinking as a way of creating their future,” according to Tim Brown, president of Ideo, a US-based design firm, who is running this workshop that stretches late into Friday evening… “Design thinking is an approach to innovation,” he says.

According to the design gospel, it is a way of looking at the world through other people’s eyes: it draws inspiration from empathy…

Just before the participants headed out to Davos’s bars, they were left with one sobering thought. There are 4,000 industrial design students in the US. There are 200,000 in China. “It would be interesting to think about how we could unlock that talent over the next few years,” Brown suggested optimistically. That’s design thinking for you.

Finally, Tim participated in the Closing Plenary session with the chairs of the event and other luminaries. Asked to sum up, he said, in part, “it’s going to take really strong leadership from the leaders of companies and the leaders of institutions—because institutions need to innovate, too—in order to directly support a growth in innovation.” An edited video of the plenary is available on the WEF site (in Windows Media and RealPlayer versions); Tim’s excerpt begins about six minutes in.

Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek attended and filed his report on Monday night, saying:

...two things, at least, are clear. First, top managers of global corporations are convinced that innovation and creativity are critical to the future success of their companies. Second, to make that happen, a massive hunt for creative talent around the world is under way.

Creative people want to be part of a great, creative team and culture. Community is very important to them. Shaping and managing that organization is critical. Creative people need compelling problems they can feel passionate about. These are problems that can change markets, solve social ills, and build new product categories.

This kind of talent also needs to do other things, often outside the corporation. They need validation within their own peer group and often within a global set of like-minded people. And they often like to be personally branded—identified with innovations. The grey corporate organization man/woman is gone.

From documentaries to design strategy: The Compostmodern conference explores the growing opportunities for sustainable business practices.

Kicking off 2006 was Compostmodern, a one-day interdisciplinary green design conference in San Francisco, sponsored by the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Industrial Designers Society of America.

Speaking at the event were leading-edge representatives from industries of design, retail, publishing, printing, and media, among others. Together, these figures represent a growing collective of change agents, who, as the Compostmodern website aptly described, are beginning to “embrace the responsibilities of dealing with larger marketplace issues and engage in a quest for business practices and resources that allow you to make a difference in your day-to-day business lives.”

October 16, 2005 - January 2, 2006

SAFE: Design Takes On Risk features a carefully selected array of more than 300 contemporary design objects and prototypes from all over the world designed for a variety of reasons: to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances; respond to emergency situations; ensure clarity of information; and provide a sense of comfort and security. The objects displayed in the exhibition address the spectrum of human fears and worries, from the most exceptional to the most mundane, from the dread of earthquakes and terrorist attacks to fear of darkness and loneliness.  The exhibition is organized by Paola Antonelli, Curator, and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.

IDEO is represented by four separate works in the exhibit:

LifePort Kidney Transporter
This high-tech medical device from Organ Recovery Systems greatly increases the stability and quantity of kidneys available for transplants. This Flash-driven website explores the project in greater depth.

Identity Cards
Sixteen IDEO designers explored issues of identity, trust, security, and community as expressed in the exchange of business cards. These conceptual cards explore previously unspoken issues raised in this everyday act of social communication. The original project comprised over twenty concepts, of which four—Hair Card, Blood Card, Tree Ring, and Seed Card—were selected for the MoMA exhibition.

Crave Aid
Originally created for the Design Bienale in France, the Crave Aid food patches were an ironic take on our addiction to unhealthy foods, inspired by nicotine patches that enable people to wean themselves of tobacco without enduring the withdrawal symptoms.

Ha-Ori Shelter
This ingenious and elegant temporary shelter was designed and constructed by IDEOer Joerg Student as a project for the Industrial Design Engineering program at the Royal College of Art in London. Stemming from Student’s exploration of a folding technique inspired by the leaves of a hornbeam tree, the Ha-Ori (Japanese for “folding leaf”) shelter is constructed from corrugated polypropylene that has been folded in a series of trapezoidal shapes to create a rigid structure. When open, the shelter has a diameter of 12.5 ft and a height of 8.5 ft. When folded, the Ha-Ori measures 8.8 ft x 1.5 ft for easy transport.

You can learn more about the SAFE exhibit through the MoMA website and from this article in Metropolis Magazine.

There’s more to the design world than the design of objects. On September 21, as part of the series “Why Good Design Matters” at the Apple Store in San Francisco, Fred Dust, Smart Space Practice lead at IDEO, described how his firm uses innovative design methodologies and applies them to housing, cities and even governments.

Dust presented a design process that IDEO deploys on projects that are “bigger than a breadbox.” These large-scale projects include fresh takes on failing neighborhoods, the reinvention of government services for Finland and the creation of immersive interactive spaces for the likes of the Gap, Prada, BBC and Virgin. Dust ascribed IDEO’s success in this wide range of activity to its development of what he calls “design as an investigative process.”

IDEO’s LifePort Kidney Transporter chosen as final nominee in Body category.

The INDEX: awards were held for the first time in 2005, initiated by the City of Copenhagen and the Danish government. Intended to create a global event that demonstrates the capacity for design to improve life, INDEX: has been described as the “world’s largest design awards.” The first occurrence saw entry of 538 designs from more than forty-three countries, nominated by influential individuals, and leading design centers, organizations, universities, and institutions from around the world.

Divided into four major categories, Body, Home, Work, Play, and Community, INDEX: Award 2005 celebrated the various approaches and outcomes that have come to make design so valuable on a global scale, including human centeredness, prototyping, multidisciplinary collaboration, and technological expertise. With these principles in mind, the jury—composed of design practitioners, writers, and thinkers from Europe, the US, and Asia—chose 118 top nominees after seven months of nominations and review.

Included in the final nominees was IDEO’s LifePort Kidney Transporter. Nominated in the category of Body, the design has been proven to successfully preserve 50% more donor kidneys while in transport, and to increase valuable travel time from eighteen to thirty-five hours.

In September 2005, the jury announced the five finalists at the INDEX: 2005 Award ceremony in Copenhagen. Following the ceremony, the 118 nominees were included in an exhibition in Copenhagen that attracted more than 150,000 visitors.

July 26, 2005 - March 5, 2006 at the V&A Museum in South Kensington, London

IDEO rethinks the future of hearing with fashionably designed “hearware.” Developed by RNID and Blueprint magazine with Wolff Olins, in association with the V&A.
The results of an innovative project to radically re-think the future of hearing, Hearwear displays designs and prototypes by some of the UK’s best designers, including Ross Lovegrove, Priestman Goode, Industrial Facility, and IDEO. The display will show how fashionably designed “hearwear” can be as desirable and accessible as ‘eyewear’, and will change the way people think about hearing.

IDEO’s contribution to the exhibition comes after a number of conversations with hearing impaired people and an insight-filled visit to a noisy pub. Table talk

IDEO’s Q concept finds a place in the San Jose Museum of Art’s first exhibition of industrial design, March 6, 2005 – July 10, 2005 in San Jose, CA

With the influx of consumer products defined by smooth-formed, “blobby” silhouettes peaking in the mid-1990s, Blobjects & Beyond: The New Fluidity in Design was a not-too-distant retrospective, filled with curvaceous product, furniture, graphic design, media, and architecture from the past two decades. Demonstrating significant advances in prototyping and manufacturing, Blobjects & Beyond tracked such “classic” superfluids as the Apple iMac, the Nike Triax watch, the Smart Car, and a handful of recognizable Alessi designs, among others. Also included in the exhibit was IDEO’s Q mobile workstation concept for Steelcase, a desktop prototype of a capsule-like space that illustrated the need for new levels of adjustability in the work environments of the future. This and other forward-looking designs brought an element that, according to the San Jose Museum of Art, “goes ‘beyond’ the upbeat, friendly blobject toward a design language reflective of the darker post-9/11 mood.”

Also in conjunction with Blobjects & Beyond was a conversation between Yves Behár and IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge on April 7, 2005, at the San Jose Museum of Art.

November 16, 2002 – March 23, 2003
Curated by Joseph Rosa

Exploring the ways in which the human form inspires and influences design, Body Design featured more than a dozen prototypes and commercially available designs from the fields of furniture, fashion, industrial design, and architecture. Divided into three categories—proximity, cladding, and enclosure—the works expressed how the human body determines the space around it, how design can be applied to the body, and how the body can be contained or changed by constructed space.

Two IDEO conceptual prototypes were included in the exhibition: the Kiss Communicator (1999) and the Penta Phone from the Technojewelry series (2002). Chosen to represent the idea of proximity, the Kiss Communicator is a two-part device that transmits a kiss-like signal to the remote receiver through a series of pulses and softly glowing LED lights.

The Penta Phone was included in the cladding category for its basis of wearability. Comprising two ring-like pieces to be worn on the thumb and pinky fingers, the at-hand design represents the adaptation of technology to our existing behaviors and lifestyles.