NussbaumOnDesign - BusinessWeek

DOE Selects 20 Universities For Solar Decathlon--Parsons is Picked

Bruce Nussbaum — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:04:58 -0500

The Department of Energy just selected 20 Universities to compete in building a solar-powered house and Parsons School of Design made the cut for the 2011 competition.

Parsons is teaming up with the Stevens Institute of Technology to provide solar-powered Habitat for Humanity housing for residents of the low-income Deanwood neighborhood of Ward 7 in Washington, D.C.

The design consists of two modules that unite to form a functioning solar duplex. Each module is sustainable on its own, but they achieve peak efficiency when joined together. Module One will be assembled in Deanwood, and Module Two will be displayed on the National Mall for Solar Decathlon 2011. After the competition, the two modules will be connected to form a duplex that can house two families.

According to Parsons, "the duplex's primary power is generated using hybrid photovoltaic thermal cells, which produce electric energy and collect thermal energy to boost overall efficiency."

The dean of Parsons, Joel Towers, tells me that the Solar Decathlon projects involves dozens of classes in architecture, urban planning, design and technology.

Innovation Shifts to Asia and Europe, Away From The US

Bruce Nussbaum — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:15:08 -0500

When I began the Most Innovative Companies annual survey with BCG's James Andrew, nearly all the top 50 companies were American. This year, more than half of the most innovative companies in the world came from Asia and Europe. Despite all hoopla and blah-blah about innovation among CEOs in the US, the actual building of the rituals and processes that produce innovation is increasingly taking place outside America. With the S&P 500 stuck at 1999 levels, the profit proof is in the pudding. There has been an innovation mirage in the US over the past decade, perhaps two.

The new story lies in the BRICs--China, India and Brazil. Last year Greater China (including Taiwan) was 46 out of 50 in the survey. This year it is tied with Japan. Lenovo, BYD, Haier, China Mobile and HTC are on the list.

B-Schools And D-Schools Should Listen To The Cultural Context of the SEC Lawsuit Against Goldman--

Bruce Nussbaum — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:58:55 -0500

The deep meaning of the SEC's lawsuit against Goldman Sachs for fraud is that it marks the end of the "financialization" of the US economy and the return to the "socialization" of finance. This is a very good thing and educators at both business and design strategy schools need to note the huge change.

For the past three decades, the Chicago school of economics has propagated the theory of efficient, rational markets that divorced financial and economic activity from their social and political context. Wall Street recruits out of Ivy League schools went through year-long training rituals that taught them the belief that markets were always efficient, rational and correct; markets were the most important guide to society; and that they, as individuals, were the Best and the Brightest who deserved all the rewards that markets could bring.

What the Chicago school and Wall Street forgot was the very real social and political context of markets. Average people accept markets only when they believe them to be fair, transparent and open so anyone, not just the Best and the Brightest. Benefits from markets should accrue to anyone who participates. For Wall Street, the social context is even more specific--people believe banks and financial markets exist to promote economic growth and national wealth for everyone, not just insiders, not just a few.

The Great Recession, the Tea Party political movement, surging inequality and the revelation to middle class Americans that they have suffered through not one but two Lost Decades of income, have killed financialization as a working economic paradigm.

The SEC is accusing Goldman Sachs of breaking both rules of social context:

1- rigging the market by selling a synthetic financial instrument designed secretly to fail and fall in price by a big hedge fund manager so he could profit by shorting the market;

2- creating a financial instrument that had no actual connection to the real economy and no economic value except to profit one secret Goldman investor at the expense of other Goldman investors.

If you listen intently to the conversations now going on in business, in economics and in government, you hear the word "social" a lot. Not the ideological "socialism" that Tea Party and Republican ideologues throw around but "social" as in "society." The term "social business" is becoming popular because it includes both the social media platform and the social context of economic activity, including markets. The terms "behavioral economics" and "social economics" are rising in frequency because they replace the theory of market rationality and efficiency with the reality of human social interaction.

George Soros calls this social context for markets and economy "reflexivity" and he's just started an Institute for New Economic Thinking in London to research it.

Jeff Jarvis And Parsons' Students Agree on iPad--It's For Consuming Media, Not Creating It.

Bruce Nussbaum — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:19:01 -0500

When Apple first announced the iPad, I asked students at Parsons what they thought of it and they immediately said it was for consumption, not creation of content. No camera, no USB, no flash--not much to remix and make. They weren't going to buy it. Maybe their parents would to watch TV and read newspapers.

I just read Jeff Jarvis this morning on the iPad and he totally agrees and goes further, saying that it is perfect for the mainstream media giants and Apple who are into controlling content and selling it. In fact, Jarvis says it's a throwback to another era before the net was democratized and we all got the tools to make our own content. "The iPad is retograde," he says on his blog. "It turns us all back into an audience again."

Now I don't mind being an audience from time to time. I read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on Kindle. I watch Damages on cable. I see Avatar in 3D in the movies. But I don't need another expensive screen to do that. I also love to create online with blogging, tweeting, connecting, mixing, collaborating. Until Apple upgrades and opens up the iPad, I won't be able to do the generative thing on that screen.

So.....

New Jobs In The Economic Recovery? Try Communications

Bruce Nussbaum — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:20:41 -0500

Mike Mandel is the best economist I know and he's predicting that the fastest growing job segment in the recovery that is starting will be in communications.

Mike's Second Law of Booms and Busts says that jobs that tend to recover in the bust also tend to lead the boom. So, looking at the stats that are being published now on new job growth, what does Mike see? The latest batch of stats from Washington show a surge of jobs in the broad categories of "internet publishing and search," "computer systems design," and "wireless."

Mike is interpreting these numbers to mean that a broadly-defined media boom will lead the US economy for the years ahead. By "media," he includes health-care related apps (Future Well), mobile payments via cell phones, and all Facebook-Google-Apple platform stuff.

I would also include education, which is undergoing a massive de-massing and switch to social media platforms. When you add the University of Phoenix and IDEO together (they've partnered), you get massive change. And I would add government as well. Yep, a big chunk of business now being picked up by the innovation consultancies such as IDEO is federal government business. This will boom as states and cities join the revolution.

Very cool analysis by Mike--who is forming his own media company called Visible Economy--to play his hunch. Hear that VCs?

The Apple iPad--20 Years Ago It Asked Smart Design to Conceptualize It

Bruce Nussbaum — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:40:51 -0500

Apple's iPad has tremendous buzz and will hit the stores this weekend--with Boomer's loving it, techies hating it and mainstreaming media hoping it means salvation. But the iPad has been in development for 20 years, starting with Apple asking Smart Design in NYC to come up with concepts for what a tablet might look like. IDEO and other design consultancies were also asked for concepts of a tablet.

Remember, if you can, back to 1989--the Mac was big and came in only one color--putty. Interestingly, one of the two concepts Smart did for Apple had a built-in camera. The iPad, of course, does not have a camera.

IQ. EQ. We Need CQ--Creativity Intelligence. How Much Do You Have? How Much Does Your Organization Have?

Bruce Nussbaum — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:17:45 -0500

There is an extraordinary moment in "Horse Soldiers," a book about the US Special Forces team that went into Afghanistan right after 9/11, when the men realize they need to ride horses into battle to defeat the Taliban. Dropped into a culture they knew little about, in a land of unknown and threatening terrain, with tools that were insufficient for the mission, and dependent on a group of distrustful people, the SF team did what it was trained to do--design a valid new pathway to their goal.

The 12-man, multi-disciplinary team went through the ritual of innovation--they observed and empathized with the local culture, collaborated among themselves and with their partners, brainstormed to generate new options, iterated a few and chose the best one. In the end, that best option was to get on a horse. The team mounted up to show respect to the culture, establish their social position as warriors, and effectively transport their high tech GPS and laser sights across the mountains and desert to call in air support and achieve their goal of victory in battle.

The Special Forces have a very high CQ--Creativity Quotient. Another way of putting it is that they have a high DI--Design Intelligence. Teams know how to go into unknown, changing, dangerous cultural spaces, do fast ethnography, brainstorm, collaborate, iterate options, choose the most valid solution for the situation and execute. They would never call it Design Thinking, but that is what it is. They learn it in training, through education. It is no accident that this paradigm of "as if..." organization and behavior is spreading not only through militaries around the world, but through the smartest global corporations as well.

So it is time for individuals and organizations to ask themselves--what is our CQ? Just as IQ and EQ has proven to be measures of specific capabilities, the capacity for creativity is increasingly the core to building value in these uncertain and treacherous times. And just as IQ and EQ scores can be raised significantly for anyone by teaching and training, so too can CQ be bolstered for individuals and organizations. When Rotman's DesignWorks holds a workshop, it raises the CQ of the participants. Ditto for IDEO, ZIBA, Continuum or Jump.

At a recent symposium on the Future of Design at Stanford University, a group of design/innovation practioners and educators (including myself) came up with the concept of Design Intelligence/ Creativity Quotient. We hope it takes Design Thinking and the conversation around innovation to the next level. The concept really came home to me when Bill Burnett, the Executive Director of the Stanford University Design Program, said he wanted to add an additional screening measure to the SATs and GREs that students submit for admission to the school. “We measure math, verbal and writing capabilities, why not creativity?” Why not indeed.

MOMA Acquires "@" For Its Permanent Collection

Bruce Nussbaum — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:12:33 -0500

Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at New York's MOMA, tells me that MOMA has acquired the "@" symbol for its collection. This is breakthrough stuff. We increasingly live in a digital world, of nonstuff. Yet, it is real to us. Bringing @ into MOMA is a statement that you no longer have to have a physical object to highlight it's importance. You can tag it.

Scent As A Form Of Design.

Bruce Nussbaum — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:32:05 -0500

What happens when you ask famous architects, product designers and chefs to design scents? A symposium called Headspace. MOMA and Parsons School for Design have joined to put on a conference this Friday, March 26, after getting top "designers" to do just that. The IFF (the big fragrance and flavors makers), Coty and Seed Magazine (one of my new favorites) are collaborating in the venture.

The symposium is being held at The New School from 10-5:30PM, Tishman Auditorium 66 West 12th Street, off 6th Avenue">

Scent is a new frontier of design and this all-day symposium will show you why. We all know the power of scent, but somehow it is rarely acknowledged in the marketplace (except for perfume) or in design theory. In fact, Americans are told every day to lead scent-free lives. What a waste. Scent is powerful and primitive--it hits us in our limbic systems before we have time to think about it.

Five different design groups were commissioned to devise a scent. Just a warning here--a scent is not a perfume. They will all gather this Friday. A documentary film by Jane Nisselson will be released on March 26 as well.

Health Care Reform Passes--Now Let's Start Health Care Innovation

Bruce Nussbaum — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:51:49 -0500

To the surprise of many, Congress passed legislation this weekend that extended US healthcare to nearly everyone in the country. Bravo. The US joins the 19th century. The next trick is to try actual innovation in health care that lowers costs and increases the healthcare experience for Americans. There is almost nothing in the bill passed that does that.

The US already spends far more on healthcare innovation than any other country. But government healthcare R&D has gone into life sciences that haven't paid off (genome) or advanced medical procedures that are extremely expensive and help extremely few people. In terms of longevity, the US lags Europe and Asia.

US healthcare needs platform innovation that uses social media to connect people to the medical system in new, cheaper, more personal and more productive ways. Hello Health is one way to go. It's founder, Dr. Jay Parkinson, has just launched The Future Well, a design consultancy that promises to extend the new social media model for wellbeing across the country.

US healthcare also needs the kind of demassing and decentralization that design and innovation consultants can provide. Memorial Sloan- Kettering (MSK) did workshops with students at the Parsons School for Design to come up with small, inexpensive, neighborhood chemo centers and it just completed the first in Brooklyn.

The Mayo Clinic is innovating broadly in health care.

Clayton Christensen has a great book on The Innovator's Prescription that calls for disruptive innovation in healthcare based on new business models. This is a very important book.

Now that the US has extended healthcare to all its citizens, the next step is to cut costs and improve outcomes and experiences by harnessing the best thinking of designers and innovators. Most of the concepts and tools are already at hand.

The Future of Design Stanford Conference

Bruce Nussbaum — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:58:44 -0500

I'm going to give a 5 minute talk on the future of design on Friday to spark conversation within a terrific group of design thinkers from around the world. Banny Banerjee, director of the Stanford Design Program is putting it on. I first met Banny at a conference in India put on by the National Institutes of Design.

Here are my thoughts on where Design/Thinking is going and should be going--and what is needed to get there. They are designed to provoke. Let me know what you think.

Point of View: Designing A Post-Liberal Arts Paradigm—Innovation Arts

The creation of a new belief system—Innovation Arts—to replace the prevailing Liberal Arts paradigm should be the next stage in the evolution of Design/Thinking. A world of constant, cascading change and the failure of existing social organizations requires a shift from the prevailing Liberal Arts paradigm that trains individuals how to make sense of an existing world based on past knowledge and reifying society to a new paradigm that trains people how to build new social systems based on deep knowledge of current cultural rituals and behaviors while embedding action in social, economic and political context. An Innovation Arts paradigm would also form the foundation of a post-Neo-Liberal economic theory that reconnects elites to real business context rather than the quantified financialization of business functions, focuses on value in network relationships and group social behavior and educates people to make rather than consume.

Three Future Directions for the Advancement of Design

1—Develop a mature culture of criticism. If it is to evolve into a mature intellectual system of thought, Design has to create a critical, self-reflexive literature. Design’s public discourse remains aspirational, narrow and secretive. Despite an emphasis on the importance of failure in prototyping and learning, little actual discussion of failure exists. Despite a focus on practice, very little is revealed of what really occurs in consultancy or corporate design practice. The RCA and SVA have just started MFAs in Design Criticism. We need more challenging conversations on both Practice and Theory. And we desperately need a powerful HBR of Design Thinking, anchored in an academic institution. Suggestions? Business or Design School?

2- Build Human Centered Design Tool Kits for Political Policy Makers. Design has focused recently on creating how-to design kits for NGOs to operate at the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid level in Asia and Africa. Building how-to kits for policy-makers at the Top-of-the-Pyramid level in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia is equally important and challenging. The First World is the new Third World and needs Design Thinking to redesign itself. Design’s venue is expanding from product to experience to systems to policy. Policy is the new edge in Design and it speaks to domestic as well as foreign human needs.

3- The “as if….” perspective of ritual, serious play and the making of the new embodied in the Innovation Arts paradigm is already dominant in much of Generation Y culture. Gen Y has much to teach and much to do. In an effort to understand and activate the Gen Y demographic, Parsons is launching a Gen Y Research Institute. It will focus on deep understandings of Gen Y culture as represented by the global student body at Parsons and provide a public stage and financing for the products and services created by these students. A global collaborative of Gen Y research efforts would be hugely productive.

President Obama Is Promoting Innovation, Exports and Industry

Bruce Nussbaum — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:59:43 -0500

My good friend and old buddy Rich Miller has an insightful piece in BBW that talks about the NEW MIX--Exports and Business Investment--of economic categories that could well replace the OLD MIX of consumption and housing in the US. This is hugely important because if the US can redesign its economy to focus on making, not just consuming, and exports, not just imports, it can grow faster than current estimates and cut both the budget deficit and unemployment rate a lot faster than most people in Washington now believe.

Obama has already said he wants to double US exports in five years--a very ambitious goal and one no other President has ever prescribed. To achieve that goal, the President will have to push three policies very hard: 1--Turn the US back into a making culture, not just a consuming culture. Innovation is key here and the billions in stimulus funds to promote green tech is a good first step. Bolstering tax incentives for innovation is critical as well.

2--An innovation society needs great universities and public schools that teach creativity, not rote memorization. This requires big money for top universities and a new curriculum for schools.

3-- A global currency realignment, with China's yuan rising against the dollar, is necessary to price US exports competitively. The Great Recession was driven, in part, by huge imbalances in trade between the US and China. To balance that out, China needs to move toward a more consumer-driven economy as the US shifts to exports. A higher yuan gives Chinese consumers more buying power for imports and lifts their standard of living.

Transforming the US into a "making" society that exports requires a consistent set of policies from Washington. It means rethinking the decline of manufacturing and making green tech products in the US.

Cultivating Innovation And Creativity, Not Managing It

Bruce Nussbaum — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:46:46 -0500

There is a big movement in B-Schools and Design Schools to generate a new liberal arts paradigm that goes beyond learning how to think critically about an individual's role in society to learning how to build critically based on people's connection to cultural context. Call it Pragmatic Liberal Arts or Practical Liberal Arts. I call it Innovation Arts or Design Arts because it focusses on the "as if..." prototyping and creating that goes on in serious play (and which our schools succeed in stamping out by grade 2). I'll be discussing the idea of a new Innovation Arts paradigm at The Future of Design confab in Stanford next week.

One of the smartest guys I know thinking about creating new social behaviors by changing old rituals is Diego Rodriquez over at the great blog Metacool. He just had an insightful conversation with Michael Mauer, Porsche's head of design about cultivating, not managing, people. Mauer sees himself as a curator of designers and their ideas. He grows creativity. And anyone who has seen the new Porsche 918 Spyder can thank him for this approach to leadership.

Diego has developed his own set of Innovation Principles. Here they are:

1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world
2: See and hear with the mind of a child
3: Always ask: "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"
4: Prototype as if you are right. Listen as if you are wrong.
5: Anything can be prototyped. You can prototype with anything.
6: Live life at the intersection
7: Develop a taste for the many flavors of innovation
8: Most new ideas aren't
9: Killing good ideas is a good idea
10: Baby steps often lead to big leaps
11: Everyone needs time to innovate
12: Instead of managing, try cultivating
13: Do everything right, and you'll still fail
14: Failure sucks, but instructs
15: Celebrate errors of commission. Stamp out errors of omission.
16: Grok the gestalt of teams
17. It's not the years, it's the mileage

What do you think?

President Obama Appoints Edward Tufte--Big Victory for Data Visualization And Transparent Government

Bruce Nussbaum — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:57:09 -0500

I just picked this up from my Twitter stream. It's quite an amazing event. Edward Tufte helping the American public see where their $787 billion in economic stimulus tax money is going to help revive the US economy. Turning to Tufte is a brilliant move by Obama and a big win for innovation.

Here is what Tufte says:

"I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds:

"The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with two goals:
To provide transparency in relation to the use of Recovery-related funds.
To prevent and detect fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
Earl E. Devaney was appointed by President Obama to serve as chairman of the Recovery Board. Twelve Inspectors General from various federal agencies serve with Chairman Devaney. The Board issues quarterly and annual reports to the President and Congress and, if necessary, "flash reports" on matters that require immediate attention. In addition, the Board maintains the Recovery.gov website so the American people can see how Recovery money is being distributed by federal agencies and how the funds are being used by the recipients.

Mission statement: To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information."

I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary."

We need more designers and design thinkers like Tufte in government.

The Ritual of Innovation--What The FT's Gillian Tett Knows

Bruce Nussbaum — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:45:13 -0500

I am going out to Stanford in a couple of weeks to talk about the future of Design Thinking/Innovation and I'm prepping by seeing a Ph.d in social anthropology who also happens to be the best financial journalist around at the moment--Gillian Tett. Tett writes a column for the FT and was just appointed head of the US Financial Times. Her book, Fool's Gold, is a must-read.

I learned three things from Tett's columns and book: 1- many, if not most of the important innovations over the past decade took place in the financial services space: 2- the innovations were made possible by technology--faster computers and newer algorithms, but the actual creation of the innovations took place within a new and very specific culture of finance composed of ritual, rites of passage and beliefs. Think Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift here: from accepting more or less public market regulation to rejecting all regulation and believing that any financial market regulation is bad.

We know that it all ended in financial and economic disaster, with the worst recession since the last depression. The world got THIS close to a complete meltdown because the social context of technological invention messed up. The symposium at Columbia University with Tett will discuss the belief system, patterns of behavior and rules that came together to enable the financial crash. She will use the tools of social anthropology to explain what went wrong with financial innovation and why we need to change the culture of finance, not just the tools of finance, to prevent another catastrophe.

I have been in a nice conversation with Don Norman about what comes first in innovation--technology or culture--and Gillian Tett provides the answer. New technology creates new rituals of behavior, new belief systems and new rites of passage. Technology happens not only within the social context but it creates NEW cultures, new social contexts.

This is why Gen Y culture is so different from Boomer culture. It's not