The Layman's Almanac

Barry Katz

As a professor at California College of the Arts and Stanford, Barry Katz is an IDEO Fellow, as well as author of many significant books on design: with Tim Brown – Change by Design and with Branko Lukic – NONOBJECT. His articles are frequently published in I.D. Magazine, Dwell, and Metropolis.

At California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

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(Barry draws a small circle in a sketchbook representing 1980, then a larger circle across the page representing 2010. These two represent seating at tables of involved people at Phase Zero of a project.)

BK: Who is sitting around the table in 1980? My answer to that would be, based on my experience, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and an industrial designer. I'm talking about Silicon Valley, which is what I know and I'm not going to try and talk about things I don't know. Maybe you have a guy from software in there. Then we're going to fast forward 30 years and I will ask who is sitting around the table now? The first thing that I notice, at least in the consultancy world, is it's not 3 designers. It's one industrial designer as a member of a cross-disciplinary team.

The key insight here is what that table looks like in 2010: it's way bigger. That is because it must accommodate a lot more people. I've seen projects in which there was a human factors human researcher with a background in psychology, a cognitive scientist who was interested in brain functions, a mechanical engineer who had a background in new product development in medical instruments, a guy with a PhD. in behavioral economics, and even a writer. Occasionally, in the past, if you were really flashy, you would hire a writer to craft a story about it, which you sent out to Metropolis, and I.D. Magazine. Now, I'm seeing writers being assigned to design teams at the beginning and asked to use their narrative strategies to help drive a project forward.

The trend that I see is that industrial designers today are learning to work with a broader interdisciplinary mix of professionals. Another way that I often think of it is we used to think routinely about industrial design as a link in a chain; Engineering passed it onto industrial design, they did their thing, put it in a box, then passed it onto marketing. What I'm now seeing is that design, rather than a link in a chain, is more like the hub of a wheel. So you're integrating lots of processes. That's why you're hearing about design management and things like that. The designer has become the integrator of a process.

Next, I see a movement from "Thinking about Design" to "Design Thinking." It's widely misunderstood, widely caricatured, and it's turning into some sort of silliness, which makes me sort of unhappy. But the basic idea behind it is that designers spent about a hundred years acquiring a toolkit--a technical tool kit, an ethnographic toolkit, a strategic toolkit. This represents an impressive body of skills. The Design Thinking phenomenon, or whatever you want to call it, emerged from the idea, first, that those skills can be learned by people who are not designers, and second, that with this skill set designers themselves can expand their horizons very dramatically.

So you don't have to only think about doing injection molded plastic parts. Design teams that I've worked on have worked on providing clean water in east Africa, not by inventing a nifty machine, but by creating a program that promotes entrepreneurial activity among local people. So where's the industrial design? If you're looking for an actual object, there isn't one. But there is a program that creates incentives for local people to start businesses providing clean water. That's the flip side to design thinking. It's applying that skill set to a much, much wider range of solving problems.

My friend Tim Brown at IDEO likes to say, what happened was designer's thinking just got smaller, smaller and smaller. Some of them are very good—we have some gorgeous cars, kitchen gadgets, medical instruments, etc.—but it's time now for us to start thinking big again, and applying those tools to problems that really need to be solved. Industrial designers were just working in too small a compass to be much concerned with the much larger system, and that doesn't work anymore because everything is so integrated. What is this anyway? [Barry holds up his cellphone] Is this a piece of industrial design? a piece of interaction design? What's the relation between the iphone and the itunes store? Things got too interconnected and too confused: It plugs into my car: does that make my phone a transportation design problem, or does it make it my car an entertainment design problem? Or something else entirely? We cannot remain bound to those old models.

LA: Where do you think today's generation of designers lie?

I've had a really good time in academic life, mostly because I enjoy your age group. I enjoyed living it, and I enjoy it as a spectator now, but there was one period that was kind of demoralizing, and that was roughly 1995 to January 2000. In 1995, venture capital investment in Silicon Valley was roughly 1.5 billion dollars. In 1996, it just about doubled. In 1997 it doubled again, about 6.7 billion. In 1998, it doubled again, so we're at about 13 billion. At about 1999, it doubled again. By Fall 2000 it was around 40 billion dollars. During that period you could not find a parking space because of the limos; you could not get a restaurant reservation; you could not find a hotel room. Until September or October 2000, when it crashed, the only thing students wanted to talk about money. It's not that it was a corrupt generation, it's just that that's what was framing the discussion. For me that was very demoralizing, and intellectually not interesting. What I am hearing now is sustainability, bottom of the pyramid, primary school education, working with non-profits, design thinking in the sense of expanding the range of design work (socially responsible work for those who need it). Ironically, the conversation today is much richer, even though it's not about money.

LA: What are your thoughts between East coast versus West coast design?

Everybody here (West coast) complains that New Yorkers have this Saul Steinberg view of the world that everything stops at the Hudson. IDSA was started in 1965 with 10 regional chapters. One of them was San Francisco, which covered the area from San Luis Obispo to the Canadian border. A decade later there were 9 members in the San Francisco chapter. In New York, I'm going to guess it was about 800. The west coast was not on the map. Today, there are more working design professionals within 50 miles of where we are sitting (CCA Campus) than anywhere else in the world.

It started to shift in 1978 when the San Francisco chapter made a bid to host the IDSA national conference. The national officers were uneasy about this because, of the two chapter organizers, one guy was completely unknown, and the other was a recent college dropout. Well, they let them do it, and although nobody had any particular expectations, it was a blockbuster. It changed the direction of the national organization from an 'old boys club' showing slides about their tractors to a new organization that was much more about technology and much more inclusive. There were females on the speakers' list; sustainability was a main theme; speakers discussed the disparity between technical capability and the quality of life. The keynote speaker was Ralf Nader, who was booed because he accused the industrial design profession of complicity in creating products that kill and maim people. The Asilomar conference marked the beginning of the emergence of the west coast as a significant voice in the national discourse.

LA: What are your thoughts on Apple?

Out here it's not that polarizing, except that it is a bit of a cult. I have hosted, for a number of years an annual awards ceremony for the Bay Area winners of the Industrial Design Excellence Awards. Apple always wins a lot of golds, but never comes. In that sense, there is a certain feeling of arrogance. Beyond that I think that if you ask around you'll find that most people feel that Steve Jobs has done more to drive the quality of industrial design globally than any other single person, and Apple more than any other single company.

For years and years and years, Apple was a niche company. Those of us on the west coast, especially who are Mac users, had this idea that the world was equally divided between Mac users and pc users [laughing]. That is the view from somebody living in the Bay Area and working in a design, because all the while Apple was occupying 3 to 6 or 7 percent of the market. I believe that at a certain point they said "screw it, we're never going to get in there, so we're going to do what we want". Jony Ive now says very clearly that "we're designing for ourselves." If you've got 3 percent of the market, you don't have to worry about reaching everyone, and since you've given up trying, you can afford to say "we're going to establish a set of values and standards and benchmarks that we believe in, and we're going to stick to them". It's a thick headed, arrogant, Apple-centric view of the world, but it worked. Apple is now the second most highly capitalized company in the world.

LA: How has Asia has changed or influenced how design is now?

James Fallows, wrote a really interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly a number of years ago. He created a value curve which looks like a "U", and asked himself where does the value lie. [Barry draws a "U" as a projection on a chart] Where does the value lie in a chain that starts with an idea and ends with service. Up here is Jony Ive and the ID studio at Apple [top of the left side of the "U"], thinking up what's next, and getting paid a huge amount of money for that. And then comes the detailed ID work [moving down the "U" again], then the engineering stuff, they you finally get down to the gritty level of manufacturing [bottom of the "U"]. The margins here are a few pennies per item and they way people here are making money is that they're making a whole lot of them. Moving up from there, you get to the service level [marking on the right up side of the "U"]. You get to itunes, and the itunes store, and then to the whole brand infrastructure where are getting a whole lot of money. Again, this is where the United States was 100 years ago, and Britain 200 years ago. Everyone down here wants to move up that value curve and the Chinese are doing it. And everyone who is up there [at the top right of the "U"] is trying to figure out how to move up higher on that value curve.

So what you guys should be concerned about is that ID is here [about halfway on the vertical], and it's heading that way [down], while everybody is trying to head in the other direction. In other words ID is becoming commoditized. It is a basic set of functions that more and more people can do if the tools are there. Cynics have said that Design Thinking is just a scam to persuade clients that you're moving up a curve where the Asian guys cannot compete, and there is some truth to that. But I think the lesson is that in the business world they say you either move forward or sink.

LA: What are your thoughts on the "T" shaped designer, or "I with a serif" shaped designer?

The issue with the "T" shaped person, which I believe was developed by McKenzie years ago and which Tim and I wrote about in the book (Change By Design) is that if you can do it, great : hire people with significant technical depth who really do bring something to the table but also a disposition to connect with people who do things very differently and who do very different things. But I know a ton of people who are terrifically skilled industrial designers and who think this "T" shaped thing is total bullshit and that what the consultancies are doing is hiring all lateral minded people who don't bring the skills. This judgment strikes me as a bit harsh, but the fact is, genuinely T-shaped people are not so common.