June 25, 2003

Master of Design

Q&A: Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, describes the interplay between technology and design-a process that, at its best, yields products that change the way people live and work.

By Technology Review

IDEO is the design firm renowned for its work on such products as the original Apple mouse, the Palm V and Handspring Treo handheld computers, the Lilly insulin pen, and interactive dressing rooms for Prada New York. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, spoke with Technology Review Deputy Editor Herb Brody about the process and the philosophy that goes behind fitting technological advances to human needs and habits.

TR: How does technology influence design?

BROWN: The way I think of it, technology travels curves. You can think of the steep part of the curve as the technology push stage, when new technology is changing very fast. And what accelerates that curve are issues of usability and accessibility-that is, having to get people to understand what the technology can do and figure out a way to fit it into their lives. Later on, as the technology change curve starts to flatten out, then users need a different way of differentiating the technologies. A good example is the personal computer: technology does not differentiate PCs these days. The only place you get any differentiation is when somebody recognizes a new need that a PC can address. That's the role of what we call human factors-the fit of technology to individuals and groups of people.

TR: What's the most exciting area right now for designers to work on?
BROWN: From a technological standpoint, the places where things seem to be changing most rapidly are anything to do with mobile-whether it's WiFi or 3G or whatever. What's really hard is integrating those things together. So from a design perspective, one of the challenges is to try to figure out how to create applications and devices that can move seamlessly through these different technologies.

TR: What would you like to be able to do that you can't do now?
BROWN: I'd want my tablet or my PDA or maybe even my phone to use the best network available wherever it is. So if I'm in my office, I don't want to be using the cell network, I want to be using WiFi, because I can get ten times the bandwidth that way. But as soon as I walk out of my building, I don't want to have to say: OK, I'm flipping from one to another. For this to happen, service providers like Verizon would have to say: we're going to manage your experience, whatever network that you're on. And that's not something they do today.

TR: What are the big obstacles from a product design standpoint?
BROWN: If you want to make something that's mobile that will fit in your pocket, then it can only be so big, which means that it's got a screen that can only be so big, or a keyboard that can only get so big. Let's face it, your handheld probably has more computing power than desktops had five years ago. So the design challenges then end up having to do with the constraints on us as human beings.

TR: Do you think this is well understood by wireless product makers?
BROWN: There are too many examples still of people trying to force content and experiences that were really developed for one type of experience through a different kind of interface. It's not just about the scale of the screen or the size of it, but it's even the length of time that we're willing to interact with things. We did some research three or four years ago in Europe where we followed people around who were using mobile devices. One thing we found that was so very different between the mobile world and the fixed line world was that when people use a fixed line they tend to approach doing things in big chunks of time. For instance, if we know we want to do something on the Web, we know we're going to spend the next 10 or 20 minutes.

TR: And it's different with mobile devices?
BROWN: Yes, in the mobile world, what people tend to use the mobile devices for is to fit little chunks of things in between everything else they're doing. So you could walk out of a meeting room and they'll be checking their e-mail on their BlackBerry, or they'll be making a quick call when they're going from one place to another. That tells you a lot about the kinds of interactions that people want to have with mobile devices. They want to be quick. They want to be able to do something that's just sort of chunked up into small things. So the applications that you design for that, or the experiences that you design, has to be able to do the same thing.

TR: Do you think today's products neglect this difference?
BROWN: Yes. The idea that people are going to use their mobile devices to do things like watch movies is just wrong.  I think this is as the reason that the Japanese i-Mode has been so successful-its applications are very small. Not small in memory capacity but small in time-that is, where it takes you a few seconds or a minute to go through the whole experience. It leads you to wonder whether you need some of the technological capability that people are focusing so much on. Do you really need to be able to stream megabits of video, for instance?

TR: Are there historical parallels to this phenomenon?
BROWN: Sure-it's the whole horseless carriage scenario. Early cars looked like carriages, early TVs looked like radios. Every time somebody brings you something that's new, it looks like the old thing. It's only the second or third generation before it finally starts to look like the new thing.

TR: Design must involve study of human behavior.
BROWN: Yes, one of the interesting human factors questions about new technology is, how long does it take for social groups to adjust to new technologies? How long, in other words, does the etiquette of new technologies take to evolve?  We're seeing, both with e-mail and with mobile, two massively influential and powerful technologies that we've yet to develop the etiquette around-the social graces that eradicate most of the technology's objectionable faux pas.

TR: What's an example of that?
BROWN: Well, think about e-mail. There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you're getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we've got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle.  If you think about a blog for instance, that's a timeline. And it's a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because we're quite good at sequencing. We're quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that's how we treat e-mail now. But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you've got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time.  So I'm guessing that we'll start to see that sort of timeline become more and more important. Because I think it's the way that we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data.

TR: What's wrong with product design nowadays?