Tuesday, November 20
Phil Agre book review:
Tom Kelley, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO,
America's Leading Design Firm, Doubleday, 2001. IDEO, as you surely
know by now, is the leading industrial design firm. This book is a
how-to derived from its celebrated techniques of innovation. It is
not perfect -- to benefit from it, you have to cut through its Tom
Peters turbo-charged gee-whiz writing style. And on first reading,
much of its advice will seem like common sense. But persevere. Ask
yourself: if this stuff is such common sense, why aren't you doing it?
There are just some things that we all need to be told: put together
an interdisciplinary team of fun people who respect one another, go
looking at what people actually do, brainstorm a hundred ideas, shoot
the bad ones, build dozens of prototypes, and keep everyone in the
loop until it's a real manufactured product. The stories are great,
and to really appreciate them you should keep handy a copy of IDEO's
coffee-table book: Jeremy Myerson, IDEO: Masters of Innovation, King,
2001. In a sense you only learn this material through stories: you
need conceptual frameworks, but the conceptual frameworks themselves
are rather simply and become alive only in the process of applying
them to real cases. On the other hand, because it claims to package
IDEO's skills for other companies to use, the book underplays
the skills of IDEO's own employees, particularly the ones that they
brought with them from innovative academic design schools such as
the Royal College of Art. But okay, if the stories get you motivated
to try the methods for yourself, then they've done their job.
