by Tim Brown
Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. It should be no surprise, then, that the human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically human-centered approach to problem solving, design thinking.
designing in the fourth dimension
We have already seen hints of storytelling at work: in ethnographic fieldwork; in the synthesis phase, in which we begin to make sense of large accumulations of data; and in the design of experiences. In each case, we are talking about adding not just a new widget but a whole new dimension to the designer’s tool kit: the “fourth dimension,” designing with time. When we create multiple touchpoints along a customer journey, we are structuring a sequence of events that build upon one another, in sequential order, across time. Storyboards, improvisation, and scenarios are among the many narrative techniques that help us visualize an idea as it unfolds over time.
Designing with time is a little different from designing in space. The design thinker has to be comfortable moving along both of these axes. I learned this back in the mid-1980s, when designers working in the computer industry were still concerned mostly with hardware (remember all those beige boxes?). Software was still the domain of geeks in computer labs, not designers, much less students in classrooms, workers in offices, or consumers at home. The Apple Macintosh, which was oriented toward a mass market, changed everything. The smiley Mac icon told a completely different story from the blinking green cursor of MS-DOS.
The talented designers at the core of the Macintosh software team—Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare—were by no means the only ones thinking about how to create a seamless computing experience at that time. In 1981 Bill Moggridge, having been lured from Britain to the Bay Area by the challenges of the emerging digital technology, began work on the design of a curious little “laptop” computer for a Silicon Valley start-up called GRiD Systems. The team received a patent for the idea of folding a thin, flat screen down over the keyboard. The GRiD Compass established the standard layout for the laptop computer and went on to win countless awards. Once the computer was turned on, however, the terrible DOS-based operating system overwhelmed the experience. To perform the simplest operation, it was necessary to type an arcane sequence of commands that bore no relation to lived experience—in the sharpest contrast to the ingenious device, which folded in half like a notebook and disappeared into a briefcase.
Inspired by the Mac and the GRiD, Moggridge decided there had to be a role for professional designers in software development—the insides, as it were, and not just the outsides of computers. This led him to propose a new discipline: interaction design. In 1988, when I joined Bill’s team at ID Two in San Francisco, I worked with a small team of interaction designers on projects for computer-aided design, network management, and later video games and various online entertainment systems. For an industrial designer accustomed to designing discrete physical objects, designing for a series of dynamic interactions over time was transformative. I realized I had to have a deeper understanding of the people for whom I was designing. I had to think as much about their actions as the objects they were using—“We are designing verbs,” Moggridge kept reminding us, “not nouns.”
To design an interaction is to allow a story to unfold over time. This realization has led interaction designers to experiment with the use of narrative techniques such as storyboards and scenarios borrowed from other fields of design. When working on the predecessor of the modern GPS system for Trimble Navigation, for instance, the designers told a story about how a sailor might navigate from one port to the next. Each scene described some important step that would have to be designed into the system. In the early days interaction designers tended to be too prescriptive. Today, they are learning to let go and to allow the user a greater say in determining how things unfold. Almost everything now has an interactive component. The distinction between software and the products in which it is embedded has blurred, and time-based narrative techniques have entered into every field of design.
taking time to design
One of the many problems bedeviling the health care system today is “adherence.” Once a doctor has diagnosed a condition, patients often fail to take the prescribed medicine for the duration of the therapy. The pharmaceutical industry is concerned about this for its own reasons: drug companies lose billions of dollars each year because patients give up on their medications. But adherence is a serious medical issue as well. In the phrase of the incurably blunt former Surgeon General C. Edward Koop, “Pills don’t work if people don’t take them!” In the case of chronic conditions such as heart disease or high blood pressure, patients risk letting the condition get worse. In other situations—antibiotic treatments of bacterial infections, for instance—they may put others at risk by releasing attenuated drug-resistant microorganisms back into the larger population.
IDEO has worked with several pharmaceutical companies on specific drug adherence regimes. The brief: drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars, often using aggressive marketing techniques, to promote their drugs, only to lose much of the therapeutic, and business, advantage when the patient stops taking them. They are taking a traditional approach to selling a product rather than creating an experience that engages the patient over time. Rather than badgering doctors with unwanted sales visits and the public with obnoxious television commercials, pharmaceutical companies should use design thinking to explore a new approach to the business of pills.
There are three self-reinforcing phases of medical treatment. First, the patient must understand his or her condition, then accept the need for treatment, and finally take action. This time-based “adherence loop” suggests a framework with many different points at which it is possible to provide patients with needed positive reinforcement. We can design better information to educate people about their disease; there could be better methods for dispensing and administering medications; along the “adherence journey” the patient might find support groups, Web sites, and call centers staffed by nurses. The specific set of tools will vary according to the particular disease or treatment, but two underlying principles are the same: first, as with every other type of time-based design project, each patient’s journey through the process will be unique; second, it will be far more effective to engage individuals as active participants in their own stories. Designing with time means thinking of people as living, growing, thinking organisms who can help write their own stories.
the politics of new ideas
An experience that unfolds over time, engages participants, and allows them to tell their own stories will have resolved two of the biggest obstacles in the path of every new idea: gaining acceptance in one’s own organization and getting it out into the world. An idea may be a product, service, or strategy.
More good ideas die because they fail to navigate the treacherous waters of the organization where they originate than because the market rejects them. Any complex organization must balance numerous competing interests, and new ideas, as Harvard’s Clayton Christensen argues, are disruptive. If it is truly innovative, it challenges the status quo. Such innovations often threaten to cannibalize previous successes and recast yesterday’s innovators as today’s conservatives. They take resources away from other important programs. They make life harder for managers by presenting them with new choices, each with unknown risks—including the risk of making no choice at all. Considering all of these potential obstacles, it is a wonder that new ideas make it through large organizations at all.
At the heart of any good story is a central narrative about the way an idea satisfies a need in some powerful way: coordinating a dinner date with friends on opposite sides of town; making a discreet insulin injection during a business meeting; converting from a gasoline-powered to an electric-powered car. As it unfolds, the story will give every character represented in it a sense of purpose and will unfold in a way that involves every participant in the action. It wil
l be convincing but not overwhelm us with unnecessary detail. It will include plenty of detail to ground it to some plausible reality. It will leave the audience with no doubt that the organization “narrating” it has what it takes to make it real. All this takes skill and imagination, as a group of executives from Snap-on discovered.
From the neighborhood gas station to the vast maintenance terminals of the major commercial airlines, the bright-red-and-silver Snap-on toolbox is an icon of machine shops everywhere. The Wisconsin-based company felt less certain about how to tell a compelling story about the computerized products that were the key to its future survival. Every garage mechanic feels an emotional connection with his hand tools, but it’s not so easy to personalize the experience of an electronic diagnostic device that interrogates a car’s onboard computer to identify problems and parts in need of repair. Where Snap-on saw a problem, a design team at IDEO saw an opportunity to tell a new story.
Once the brief was settled, the team took over an abandoned automobile-repair shop a couple of blocks away in Palo Alto. During a frenetic week of activity, they transformed the place into a space-time narrative their client would not soon forget. On the day of the final presentation, the Snap-on visitors headed up the street to the garage, in front of which was parked a fleet of Ferraris, Porsches, and BMWs, all in the signature Snap-on colors of silver and red.
After a wine-and-cheese greeting, the executives were given a briefing in the main garage bay, then ushered into a room with a museumlike display of inspirational artifacts, and finally to a screening of videos of real mechanics talking about the Snap-on brand. The story reached its climax when the Snap-on executives were led from the makeshift theater into a darkened room. As the lights faded up, they found themselves surrounded by sleek prototypes of a new generation of diagnostic devices transformed from generic computers to high-tech siblings of Snap-on’s iconic wrenches and toolboxes. Posters advertising products based on the new brand strategy lined the walls. As the CEO and president played with the models, the marketing VP sponsoring the project stood by with tears streaming down her cheeks. Though it’s not always necessary to make your audience cry, a good story well told should deliver a powerful emotional punch.
when the point of the story is the story
Design thinking can help bring new products to the world, but there are occasions when it is the story itself that is the final product—when the point is to introduce what the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins famously called a “meme,” a self-propagating idea that changes behavior, perceptions, or attitudes. In today’s noisy business environment, where top-down authority has become suspect and centralized administration is no longer sufficient, a transformative idea needs to diffuse on its own. If your employees or customers don’t understand where you are going, they will not be able to help you get there. This is doubly true in the case of technology companies and other businesses whose product may not be easily recognized or understood.
Chip designers live in the back room of the computing industry. Nothing would work without them, but no matter how vital their contribution, it is hard to build a brand around a microscopic chip that sits on a board that sits inside a device that sits inside a box. This is the genius of the little “intel inside” sticker affixed to so many of the world’s PCs. In the highly competitive computer industry, where Moore’s Law humbles the mighty and technological advantages are short-lived, Intel has built a powerful global brand that is meaningful to consumers even though they cannot see it or hold it in their hands.
More recently, pursuing what the Stanford professor of organizational behavior Chip Heath calls “ideas that stick,” Intel has moved from adhesive labels to an approach that uses storytelling to explore the future of computing. Having conquered the desktop, Intel is now promoting a shift to mobile computing. Oftentimes these projects are showcased at influential industry events such as the Intel Developer Forum, but it can be hard to demo a product that hasn’t been created yet. It’s easier just to sit back and enjoy a movie.
Most of us are already lugging around “laptop” computers in our briefcases and backpacks, but Intel wanted to show what life might be like in a world of ultramobile computing—the next generation of smart phones and other devices we might carry with us all the time. Using sophisticated computer graphics, a design team working with Intel created “Future Vision,” a series of film scenarios intended to show how we might in the near future integrate mobile computing into our daily rhythms: a Mandarin-speaking businessman finds his way to the offices of his American partner while preparing for a tough negotiating session; a jogger receives a Wi-Fi notification that his afternoon meeting has been moved forward to 8:30 a.m.; shoppers compare prices; and friends coordinate their urban movements in real time. The design team even arranged for “Future Vision” to be uploaded onto YouTube, where it has been seen by well over half a million people.
Intel did not have to go to Hollywood to make “Future Vision.” A design team, working with a talented film crew, completed the entire project in a few weeks and at a fraction of the cost of a conventional ad. Effective storytelling, even with high production value, does not have to break the bank.
propagating the faith
Should an idea manage to survive the perilous journey through an organization and out into the market, storytelling can play another vital if obvious role: communicating its value to its intended audience in such a way that some of them, at least, want to go out and buy it.
We are all familiar with the power of great advertising to tell stories, and create myths, about new products. I remember as a kid in the United Kingdom in the 1970s watching the great TV “adverts” for Hamlet cigars, Silk Cut cigarettes, and Cadbury’s Smash. They were clever, funny, and engaging. Advertising, in those days, greased the wheels of the consumer economy, and it resonated with a more optimistic, less skeptical public. By then, however, there were already indications that things were changing: I loved the ads, but I never took up smoking and the taste of the powdered potato mix that went into Cadbury’s Smash still makes me slightly nauseous.
Many observers have commented on the decline in the effectiveness of traditional advertising. One simple reason is that fewer people are reading, looking at, or listening to traditional forms of broadcast media. But there are other reasons why thirty-second spots no longer serve as an effective vehicle for new ideas, including what the Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz has identified as “the paradox of choice.” Most people don’t want more options; they just want what they want. When overwhelmed by choice, we tend to fall into behavioral patterns used by those whom Schwartz calls “optimizers”—people paralyzed by the fear that if they only waited a little while longer or searched a little harder, they could find what they think they want at the best possible price. That was not a problem in the days when “automobile” meant a black Model T or “the phone company” meant AT&T. The other camp is populated by “satisficers,” who have given up on making consumer decisions and will put up with whatever works. Neither presents marketing departments with a happy situation, and marketers have been driven to increasingly desperate measures to deal with the fact, with dubious results. I suspect that I am not the only one who can recall an ad but have no idea which financial service, pain reliever, or limited-time offer it advertised.
From the perspective of the design thinker, a new idea will have to tell a meaningful story in a compelling way if it is to make itself heard. There is still a role for advertising, but less as a medium for blasting messages at people than as a way of helping turn its audience into storytellers themselves. Anyone who has a positive experience with an idea should be able to communicate its essential elements in a way that encourages other people to try it out for themselves. Bank of America launched its successful Keep the Change offering with plenty of advertising, but the campaign served mostly to build on a habit many customers already practiced and make them propagandists for it.
Example
s abound of effective storytelling, of design thinking engaging an audience and playing itself out in the medium of time. When the MINI Cooper brand launched in the USA, BMW made excellent use of storytelling to market a brand. Instead of relying on the normal mind-numbing TV ads full of cars speeding through the mountains or depositing their elegantly dressed cargo in front of fancy restaurants, the creative agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky exploited the car’s small, cute, and irreverent character. Their “Let’s motor!” campaign evoked the story of David and Goliath, with the diminutive MINI bravely arrayed against its gigantic American competitors. MINI billboard ads appeared everywhere, and their clever visual puns inspired spontaneous storytelling about the place of the MINI—and of the billboards advertising it!—in the urban environment. Magazine pullouts included fold-up MINIs. In one particularly nasty tweak to the U.S. auto industry, professional drivers tooled around Manhattan in SUVs with MINIs strapped to the roof! After signing the papers—including one headed “The Sucky Financial Bit”—new buyers were given a personal Web site where they could follow the progress of their MINI being made. All of these clever marketing tools not only were well executed, they also got people talking, and that became part of the story.
the challenge of a good challenge
There is almost no trick in the design thinker’s tool kit more enjoyable to observe or more productive of results than a “design challenge.” This exercise takes the form of a structured competition in which rival teams attack a single problem. A single team usually comes out on top, but the collective energy and intelligence they mobilize ensures that everybody wins. IDEO was recently asked by one of the Bay Area’s leading art schools to help imagine the future of the institution, so we spent most of the modest budget hiring the school’s own design students to figure it out in rival teams; the results exceeded everyone’s expectations.