Today sees the launch of OpenIDEO – a genuinely innovative web platform and I’m very proud to have been a part of its development. OpenIDEO activates the global community of creative people to solve some of the world’s tough challenges. Each challenge is an opportunity to go on a journey through the design process, focusing on inspiration, ideas, collaboration and critique. The output of this is a collection of tangible ideas created by everyone, for the world.

The OpenIDEO challenge journey

We started out with lofty goals about the power of open sourcing the design process. This last year has seen the evolution of these goals into designs and pixels, a web platform that encapsulates our beliefs and hopefully will engage the community in something powerful.

We wanted to tackle the world’s tough challenges.

We wanted to ask questions that were big, impactful and for social good. Questions like ‘How might we increase the availability of affordable learning tools & services for students in the developing world?’ The answers to these questions are open. It could be a website, a brand, a service, a new business, a gadget, the possibilities are endless.

With the questions so broad, the journey had to start off broad too. We begin the challenge by asking the community  to upload inspirations. These inspirations open up the space for potential solutions and focus them by revealing the bigger themes around the challenge.

For example, our Jamie Oliver challenge around making kids more aware of fresh food could result in themes around turning healthy eating into a game, or redesigning packaging to recognise fresh ingredients. This challenge has already generated fantastic inspirations from around the world, and common themes are starting to emerge. Instead of going straight to the ideas, these inspirations fuel our creative juices to get to even better things. Inspirations are an easy way for a diverse community to all join in. Which leads me to the next belief…

We wanted to engage creative people with diverse skill sets and abilities.

It takes people from many different backgrounds to answer tough questions. At IDEO, we work with designers with many life experiences and expertise, from child psychologists to ex-Circus performers. These diverse points of view all feed into the creative process to create new solutions. It was important to extend this idea of multidisciplinary thinking into OpenIDEO.

In order to create and maintain a diverse community we had to ensure that everyone could participate in the design process and they had equal ownership over the results. Each phase in the OpenIDEO challenge journey allows people with different skill sets to participate.

The inspiration phase empowers those inspirationally minded, those people who are always making connections or citing a great website they just saw. In the concepting phase, we ask people to submit ideas. These could be sketches, stories, brands, websites or gadgets. The top ideas are then taken through to an evaluation phase, where we ask people to give constructive critique. And of course, everyone should applaud the submissions and vote for the best ideas.

We wanted to reward people no matter how they chose to participate. So we created the Design Quotient, a points system that would reward you depending on how you participated in the site and over time would reveal your DNA as a designer.

We wanted to encourage collaboration and building on the ideas of others.

In the true spirit of open source, we believe that ideas are a collective effort of the community. Ideas get stronger as more people build them up. We wanted to encourage collaborative behaviour by allowing contributors to easily ‘build’ on ideas. When you upload your ideas you can link it to existing ideas through the ‘Build on this’ feature. These builds allow the community to see a network of ideas all connected to each other and how they finally contributed to the winning ideas.

Based on these strong beliefs we crafted a set of unique features for the OpenIDEO platform and we will continue to iterate on them over time. We have lots of things in store for the platform and I can’t wait for the community to sink their teeth in and engage with all the tools we’ve built!

Come join us and take the journey. Participate and reveal your strengths as a creative person, whether as an Inspirer, Concepter, Evaluator or Collaborator!

Some design thoughts behind OpenIDEO

Something interesting happened at a recent gathering of like-minded technophiles: I put my rather banged-up and decrepit silver-backed iPhone on the table (screen facing up to hide my shame among the flock of shiny new black iPhones) and someone pointed from across the table, exclaiming, “Is that a first generation iPhone? That is so cool!”

Okay. This doesn’t happen to me very often and within a week it had happened to me enough times for me to feel so emboldened as to start pointing it out to people.

Suddenly I was transformed, what had been old had become cool again. And those dings and dents had become battle-worn scars to show off with pride.

Dented iPhone

This led me to thinking that my iPhone is probably the longest I’ve ever kept a mobile phone (3 years) and more importantly, it’s functions are as relevant to me today as they were the day that I bought them. Because of the ability to expand the iPhone’s feature-set through loading it up with more apps, I’ve had no desire to replace it with a newer, better featured device.

The main complaint I have now is the increasing sluggishness with each new firmware update. Apple’s products all have an inevitable use-by-date as the software outgrows the abilities of the CPU. So it was interesting last week when I read that the Android 2.2 firmware update for the Nexus One will be 450% faster. Is it possible for new software to make your old CPUs perform better? Or possible to create CPUs we haven’t fully exploited the performance potential of at release?

Okay, so nevermind how google have managed this feat, the great potential here is that the lifespan of the mobile gadget, like the lifespan of the species, can be extended by much much longer, reducing the impact on planet sustainability. We will no longer need new stuff for their features, or new stuff for performance, or maybe even new stuff for fashion, because our old stuff would do all that stuff.

So the challenge for product design here is to keep up with the advances in software. How do we create gadgets that don’t need replacing? Is there a value in creating gadgets whose physicality improves with age? Can we swap out the bits that still need improving while keeping the things that don’t?

Taking inspiration from Ricoh’s new camera platform is to make the technology divisible, creating modular components of the stuff you want to keep (screen and processor) and the stuff you want to swap out (lens and ccd), or vice versa.

Ricoh gxr

Extending the lifespan of the gadget

We’ve begun a series of mini design exhibits curated by the multidisciplinary designers at IDEO London. The first 3 in the series represents interaction, communications and industrial design disciplines. I hope in the coming months we’ll be able to showcase the broad range of thinking and approaches toward design that make our teams unique.

Here are the first 3 exhibits…

Jessie Cutts
Communications Designer

The test of time
Some things just don’t need to be redesigned, have technology or extra features added. Everyday objects that help us in our everyday lives, just as they are. These are objects that work as well today as when they were first designed and made.

How might we create products that stand the test of time?
How might we design products that are stripped down to the very basics?

Pontus Wahlgren
Industrial Designer

It’s as big as…
We often use objects as references when we want to describe the size or volume of things. Certain objects have since become archetypes of size and volume. We speak about credit-card sized objects when we describe something very thin and small. Or pocket-sized when we want to describe something which is of a certain size – this has in turn reflected back on the object now called pocket book. The 15th century Venetian printer Aldus Manitus, embraced a new technology (printing press) and measured the saddle bags of merchants then created books which would fit into them. This simple observation allowed knowledge to spread throughout Europe.

How might we introduce new reference objects reflecting today’s world?
How might we design something new which already seems familiar?

Haiyan Zhang
Interaction Designer

Things we lost in the fire
As we move toward increasingly digital tools and artifacts, let’s not forget the affordances and beauty of the analogue experience. As our photos and memories have become intangible digital bits, we are slowly losing the traditions associated with our analogue memories. The family photo albums gather dust while photos and videos are spread across digital cameras, computers, mobile phones, in emails. We find our memories everywhere and nowhere, and the tradition of enjoying these memories together has become one of peering into a computer screen.

How might we give digital memories a tangible presence in our lives?
How might we support the occasion of digital memory sharing?
How might we introduce the character and dreaminess of film to digital photography?

IDEO London’s mini design exhibit

NPR has a great podcast on what credit card companies are doing to try and predict whether you’ll be a bad credit risk. Credit card companies are basically taking your purchase history and data mining it (in a similar way to Netflix), to profile you. One study cited is Canadian Tire (a Canadian retailer, kind of like Home Depot), who took all the purchase information from their credit cards and ran an analysis on it to find correlations between purchase and credit risk.

The results show two extremes. People who purchased the product premium wild bird seed are most likely to pay their bills on-time. While people who buy chrome-skulled accessories for their car are the worst credit risk, defaulting on their bills 4 times in a year on average.

Whereas before the recession, this information may have been used to market more credit cards to you, nowadays credit card companies are scrambling to get their money back from all those chrome-skull afficionados.

Since the 1980s, credit cards have been making the bulk of their money from bad money management having realized that “the biggest profits didn’t come from people who always paid off their bills but rather from less-responsible clients who never paid their entire balance, and thus could be milked through silently skyrocketing interest rates, late fees and other penalties.”

It turns out, after the recession hit, people couldn’t even afford to pay those interim late fees anymore.

This leaves credit card companies fire-fighting to recover all that debt, and one approach that’s working is to establish an emotional connection with customers. Call center staff are becoming agony aunts to debtors, offering words of comfort and advice, trying to solve problems rather than just demand their money back.

“Today the goal is for customers to get a warm-and-fuzzy feeling from their credit-card company,” said Carl Pascarella, a former chief executive of Visa USA. “If we have a deep relationship with you over a range of products and experiences, if we trust each other, you’ll listen when we give you advice.”

Hopefully beyond the recession, card companies will adopt this design approach as a way to prevent untenable debt, rather than just dealing with its consequences.

For example, how might my credit card company offer tools to help me manage debt, or become a partner in my finances rather than a pain point?

Read Charles Duhigg’s New York Times article for more details

Credit card companies get emotional