ep. 38: Lessons from Design Innovation History for Building GenAI
9 min read
In exactly one month, I’ll be in Santa Monica, CA attending EPIC, the premier international conference on ethnography in business & organizations. I’ll be presenting my paper, Designing AI to Think With Us, Not For Us, as part of a session on Crafting Research Futures. I’ll also be part of a panel on Ethnography in AI Product Development, joined by leading UX practitioners Lee Cesafsky, Rebecca Knowe, Larry McGrath and Anoop Sinha.
Preparing for EPIC, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we design for emerging technologies like generative AI (genAI). Human-computer interaction research has described the importance of design practitioners increasing their technical literacy, and experimenting with in-development genAI solutions in tight collaboration with engineers (more on this at 47:20 of this Design Better Podcast, where I ask Design Leaders at Adobe about how, if at all, the design process changed for them when building generative-AI-based solutions).
While genAI is unprecedented in its exponential pace and growth of its development, the idea of a tight coupling between interdisciplinary functions has deep roots. This includes collaborations between designers, social scientists (e.g., design researchers, who often come from psychology, sociology and anthropology backgrounds), engineers (e.g., software engineers, machine learning engineers), and artists. This week’s episode explores what the history of design innovation can teach us about designing for genAI.
Defining Design Innovation
“Design Innovation'' (or sometimes, “design-driven innovation”) is a phrase that has been used in both academia and industry for over 30 years. Looking across the multitude of definitions of the phrase, a common theme emerges: design innovation is the application of design practices to create both incremental and radical innovations of products and services. Let’s unpack that.
Incremental innovation is an enhancement or upgrade to an existing product - for instance, a smartphone upgrade. In contrast, radical innovation is the creation of a product that is significantly different from what came before, such as smartphones entering the market. Design is the creative process that brings rise to these innovations, and generally involves planning and crafting a solution that addresses human needs and goals (more on a deeper history behind design’s definition here).
A particular approach often tethered to - or sometimes used synonymously with - design innovation is Design Thinking (DT). Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO and - as we’ll see, a key figure in establishing DT - defines it as, “A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” DT has become a widely-accepted approach in innovation and entrepreneurship circles, and serves as a good case study for the origins of design innovation.
If you’re interested in learning more, check out this 2021 paper, The origin and evolution of Stanford University’s design thinking for more history. This article helped inform much of the history you’re about to read. It’s also important to acknowledge broader discussions on the limitations of DT - read more here and here.
The Origins of Design Thinking
The Early Days: 1957-1964
This period marks the foundational years of what would become DT, rooted deeply in the work of John E. Arnold, psychologist and engineer at Stanford University. Arnold collaborated with other psychologists, such as Abraham Maslow (yes, the hierarchy of needs guy), as well as with faculty from other disciplines, for instance, product designers from the mechanical engineering department like Robert McKim.
By 1959, Arnold, McKim (Department of Mechanical Engineering) and Matthew Kahn (Department of Art and Art History) established the Joint Program in Product Design (JPD) between the departments of mechanical engineering, art and architecture at Stanford. Arnold and his collaborators outlined a design philosophy and practice that focused on creativity and invention, deeply rooted in humanistic psychology, which posits that humans, as individuals, are unique beings (this would later grow into the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s, centered around the concept that all people have a largely untapped extraordinary potential). They identified three “Thinking Modes” of “organized creativity”, comprised of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
“Human values and needs is of prime importance to the designer. Design is, after all, a response to human needs.” - Robert McKim, Stanford Mechanical Engineering Professor (1959)
Students at JPD were encouraged to adopt attitudes of questioning, observing, associating, and predicting. Techniques like brainstorming and attribute listing were formalized to help students and practitioners systematically explore and solve problems. The Student Machine Shop and Sculpture Studio played a critical role in turning ideas into tangible prototypes. This period also saw the importance of creating a psychological environment of safety and freedom, where individuals could freely express and test their ideas without fear of judgment or ridicule (still a key aspect of design critiques). In short, this period set the stage for a human-centered, iterative design practice that sprung out of close collaboration between psychologists, product designers, mechanical engineers and artists.
Growth and Entrepreneurship: 1965-1985
Following the passing of Arnold in 1963, McKim and Kahn continued to develop JPD. Numerous faculty joined in subsequent years, notably David Kelley in the late 1970s (would-be co-founder of influential design and consulting firm, IDEO). The Design Division expanded the Design Loft into a unique design space in the 1970s. The Center for Design Research was established by Larry Leifer in 1984.
During this period, “Thinking Modes” expanded, with the visual thinking modes of seeing, imagining, and drawing, including mock-up building. These approaches were grounded in Gestalt psychology, which emphasized that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. Brainstorming and role-playing became more sophisticated, supporting collaborative creativity and interdisciplinary teamwork. Courses and practices were refined to focus on understanding users’ needs and emotions, with an increasing emphasis on empathy and user-centric design (e.g., needfinding).
“Ingenious and well-detailed prototypes of marketable items” (source) emerged in the countless student products created each year. In the 1970s, these entrepreneurial activities resulted in the creation of new companies including Powell-Peralta (skateboards), Concept2 (rowing machines), and Hovey-Kelley Design (which would become IDEO). Alumnus Jerry Manock was the first designer at Apple, working first as a consultant and then as an employee. He and his colleagues produced a video on Apple's design values mirroring JPD’s design philosophy. In this video from the early 1980s, the first statement says: “The Apple industrial designer is a generalist who integrates the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and technology in order to understand the customer, perceive [their] needs and desires, and create new and innovative product solutions.”
![Screenshot of the Apple Video. The text reads, “The Apple industrial designer is a generalist who integrates the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and technology in order to understand the customer, perceive [their] needs and desires, and create new and innovative product solutions.”](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F33e1ba1f-2d4b-43cb-b507-603b09248911_1322x828.png "Screenshot of the Apple Video. The text reads, “The Apple industrial designer is a generalist who integrates the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and technology in order to understand the customer, perceive [their] needs and desires, and create new and innovative product solutions.”")
In addition to Manock, other JPD graduates like Bill Dresselhaus, Dean Hovey, David Kelley, and several others collaborated with Steve Jobs on many projects, including the Apple II, III, Lisa, Macintosh, and created Apple's first mass-producible computer mouse.
At the 1982 Stanford Entrepreneurship conference, McKim presented his need-finding approach to illustrate the value of understanding people's needs in entrepreneurial activities and the importance of the capability to translate the need into a tangible result to generate value for people. Around the same time, Leifer started collaborating with Xerox PARC, applying the collaborative design activities taught by JPD.
Design Thinking: 1986-2005
The connection between design and management further crystallized in the early 1990s. Courses started by business and design scholars started to emerge, such as Integrated Design, Manufacturing, and Marketing. This course brought together business and engineering design students through the activities and practices of market research, needfinding, building prototypes, and study of pricing and production decisions.
In 1989, Bill Moggridge and David Kelley taught Advanced Product Design two years before they co-founded IDEO with Mike Nuttall. They had now been at JPD for over a decade. IDEO expanded and refined these creative approaches through countless projects, winning numerous design awards year after year throughout the 1990s. Key innovation approaches used by IDEO included visual thinking modes, a brainstorming culture, an environment of psychological safety and freedom, and a machine shop - all with direct throughlines to JPD’s practices. Employees at IDEO expanded these creative and humanistic approaches into digital and experience design.
By 1999, Leifer introduced a course with the title: Designing the Human Experience -An Exploration into the Theory and Practice of Design Thinking. This introductory course emphasized that design education is for everyone, and DT is a liberal art of integrating science, arts, and humanities. The second DT course was Human Values and Innovation in Design, introduced by Kelley. Around the same time, IDEO started using the term DT. Stanford University's design philosophy was further institutionalized through the establishment of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, commonly known as the d.school, in 2005. The d.school, founded by Kelley, played a crucial role in transforming DT from an academic concept into a practical approach for innovation in various fields.
Publications by Kelley and Tim Brown, such as The Art of Innovation and Change by Design, shared DT principles with a wider audience, with potential applicability to services, experiences, and organizational strategy. DT advocated for multidisciplinary teams, empathy-driven research, a tolerance for failure and agile response to change as integral components of the innovation process.
Lessons Learned: Designing for GenAI
This history of DT serves as a case study for how Design Innovation came into being. Innovation emerged from a confluence of people from the arts (i.e., humanities), psychology (i.e., social sciences) and engineering (i.e., technology) working together, fundamentally grounded in human needs. This innovation laid the groundwork for these approaches to be codified and connected to business practice, making strong inroads in the innovation management community. While the future of design innovation and DT are subjects for a future posts, this glimpse of their history offers lessons for building genAI solutions:
Embrace Human Values: Ensure that your design process prioritizes human needs and values. This means deeply understanding your users, and building solutions that genuinely enhance their lives.
Balance Human Needs with Creativity and Practicality: While a grounding in human needs in essential, creative solutions that are functional, reliable, and differentiated from other solutions on the market are also key ingredients to a successful product or service.
Support Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Innovation thrives in environments where diverse perspectives intersect. While technical expertise is invaluable in the age of genAI, so are the roles of social scientists (e.g., psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists) and artists (more here). It is vital to include these disciplines early in the product design process to drive innovation.
Stay tuned for more episodes that delve into the past, present and future of Design Innovation, to help us build more human-centered emerging technology solutions.
Human-Computer Interaction News
How to assess a general-purpose AI model’s reliability before it’s deployed: MIT researchers developed a technique to assess the reliability of general-purpose AI models - aka foundation models - by comparing the consistency of representations from an ensemble of similar models on the same test data. This method, called neighborhood consistency, helps determine if models can be trusted for specific tasks without needing real-world data testing, which is particularly useful in privacy-sensitive areas like healthcare.
A new twist on artificial 'muscles' for safer, softer robots: Engineers at Northwestern have developed a new soft, flexible device that makes robots move by expanding and contracting - just like a human muscle. To demonstrate their new device, the researchers used it to create a cylindrical, worm-like soft robot and an artificial bicep. In experiments, the cylindrical soft robot navigated the tight, hairpin curves of a narrow pipe-like environment, and the bicep was able to consecutively lift a 500-gram weight 5,000 times without failing.
Meet Odyssey — AI video that’s ‘fit for Hollywood’: Odyssey, a startup that’s about one year old, announced it’s building “Hollywood-grade visual AI”. The tool promises to generate cinematic scenery, characters, and lighting and provide creators with full, fine-tuned control over every element in their scene.
Looking to bring custom-tailored design innovation practices to your team? Sendfull can help. Reach out at hello@sendfull.com
That’s a wrap 🌯 . More human-computer interaction news from Sendfull next week.