What are we sharing? Tim Brown

Tim Brown is guest blogging for the Forum. He is Chief Executive Officer, IDEO and a Member of the Global Agenda Council on Design. He will be attending the Annual Meeting in Davos.

I like the theme for this year’s Davos Annual Meeting – Shared Norms for the New Reality. I like the way it is characterized as the challenge of navigating complexity while experiencing an apparent reduction of shared values and principles. I like all of this because in describing it as one of the foremost concerns of many leaders today, the Forum is describing a classic design problem.

 

As a designer I ply my craft in the turbulent waters between the complex things we create and the human beings they are intended to serve.  Often I define design as getting the interface right between technology and people. If you accept Kevin Kelly’s definition of technology in his recent and excellent book, What Technology Wants, then technology means all manmade things including business and political systems. Therefore design can be about getting the interface right between businesses and people, politics and people or gadgets and people. We are surrounded by instances where these interfaces do not work. Places where they confuse, confound, annoy, frustrate or miss serving altogether the users (us) for which they were intended. Whether it is navigating our on-line bank account, programming our digital alarm clock or managing cancer treatment, the experiences we have of our systems too often degrade rather than enhance the human condition.

When I get asked to help out with one of these interfaces I am often asked to look at the system and figure out how to make it better for the customer. My response is to say no because this is the wrong approach. Instead, I suggest that a more fruitful approach is to look at the people and figure out what the system is that they really need. This may seem like a trivial and semantic difference but it is not. When we look at what the world needs through the lens of the systems as they already are the most we can achieve is incremental difference. If we look at our systems through the lens of what the world needs then the possibilities for innovation are endless.

As always, I am traveling to Davos in anticipation of great discussions and new discoveries about the  systems we create. I expect to hear about new business ideas, important themes in the global economy, the ups and downs of the political landscape and the latest in science and technology. What I most hope though is that we share plenty of discussion about the needs, hopes and values of the people these systems are intended to serve. Do we really understand values and principles by which people navigate our complex world? That, for me, is the key to getting the design of the interface right.