At the graduate level, you want really want to get that broader issue of the business implications and how does it relate to the brand image, to the target customer, to their decisions, and to the long-term goals of the company as far as strategy goes. So that takes a different set of thoughts and skills. And to really optimize that, this understanding of what people need, how they communicate that or don’t communicate that in some cases, and how you draw that out of them and come to these sorts of new conclusions, that really is where the focus of the graduate program is.
The difference between style and design, in relating to transportation, is style was very much this conventional idea of just dressing the surfaces. You know, don’t worry about the bones of the situation whether it was the bones of the business case or the physical bones of the car. You know, we’ll just style the pieces on it and make it all work, add a little trim and things like that. We’ve moved on from that a long time ago. There are people who still see the efforts of transportation work and think of it as styling, but you have to feel sorry for them because it’s much more a three-dimensional, four-dimensional issue and design is the right approach to take. But even in design, these ideas of the business case, the brand meaning, you really need to understand what the customer’s talking about and what they need and what they’re not talking about in some cases. To get very in-depth, not necessarily intuitive, requires a lot of intuitive behavior to peel the onion away in the right layers to get right down to the problem. That’s where design is going, that’s where successful design is now, and there are people executing it and we have to continue that development.
You know the other thing is, on a global basis, you look at transportation solutions on the outside and they are much more diverse and much more developed in other parts of the world because they have other transportation problems. In the United States it has been a more segregated type of transportation situation. I mean it was probably more diverse right after the war. And now you have these other solutions coming from other parts of the world, you’ve got financial models that start to move those towards this marketplace, and you have the growth of cities in a much more dense situation than you’ve ever had before. So you combine those elements together and you have a great time for opportunity.
The Paul & Helen Farago Chair of Transportation | Larry Erickson
I took high school classes at CCS. The possibility of putting together graduate studies at CCS is studying next to designers of other disciplines. You know, like if you go to Yale you only have architects to talk to, and if you go to Cal Arts you only have other graphic designers to talk to. But when you’re at a school just like CCS, the possibility of kind of cross-disciplinary work in design is a very alluring thing. It’s a place that exemplifies both the glories of the American past and the utter emergency that we’re finding ourselves in. You can pretend it doesn’t exist in other places but you can’t fake it there. The idea of design having a critical role in shaping what kind of solutions or future there might be, I think, is all the more salient in a place like that.
Today I am working on a project with a big landscape arcitecture firm in Philadelphia named Olin & Partners and we are producing a book on their work – which is all around the country – and trying to decide how to represent the phenomenon of wandering through gardens and parks in the flat space of a page.
MFA Advisor | Lorraine Wild
IDEO has moved from helping companies to design things that they’ve really already made business decisions about, towards a company that helps businesses decide what to do next – so we’ve really become about innovation through design.
What we’re looking for is people who are good at thinking as well as doing. You know, when one does one’s undergraduate degree a lot of the learning one needs is the doing part, in that you have to acquire the skills and the techniques. But you don’t necessarily have much opportunity to develop your thinking powers until you get into a graduate program. The other thing that needs doing is connecting to universities outside design schools and that’s something that academia’s been very slow to grasp; not much of it’s been happening so far and I think it’s well overdue. We need design discipline and business discipline under technology, with teams made up of all those different people from different points of view and background. Design has this ENORMOUS opportunity. You know, I feel the thinking is the part which is a crucial opportunity for design to make a big difference and have a big influence on organizations. The problems get messier and more complicated, and nastier, and more difficult than the conventional thinking process, which is very much to do with the conscious mind and explicit analysis. In short, people just can’t use specific analysis for these nasty, messy, complicated things. Design thinking in itself is a process that can be applied to just about any problem. It’s helpful to have the subjective, qualitative and experimentally prototypical approach that design has in its core skills to be applied to critical problems or organizational problems, as well as objects and software and so on.
Co-Founder IDEO & CCS MFA Advisor | Bill Moggridge
