Last Sunday, I had the good sense to attend a product design workshop conducted by IDEO. IDEO is a well-known design firm famous for designing the first computer mouse for Apple Computer. You may have seen their Nightline special on redesigning the shopping cart. I’ll explain their approach more in a minute, but the basic message is that they focus on “realizing people’s stories” by observing human behavior.

The workshop was fun and informative, but it would have been better if fewer undergrads attended. Not because I felt old (I did) but rather because a small portion of the undergrads dominated many of the sessions with stupid questions (yes, there is such a thing as a stupid question).

First we learned the IDEO process (described below). Then we used that process to design a better laptop bag for Dartmouth students. It took almost 4 hours! My extremely dysfunctional group designed a laptop bag called “The Monica.” See the pic for some of our other brainstorms, including

• the “antennae” backpack: flexible yet lightweight antenaee emerge from the bag to provide the user with extra hands, or to form a crate, or to serve as an umbrella (patent pending)
• the “alien backpack”: a backpack made out of an alien
• “Reebok Pump” backpack
• “the nanoparticle” backpack, and finally
• “there is no backpack” (by far the best one, for all of you Matrix fans out there),

In case you don’t have 6 hours on a Sunday afternoon to sit through a workshop, here’s a summary of the IDEO process. I find it to be a very useful framework for human-oriented design and will certainly incorporate it into my web start-up project.

1. All innovation begins with an observation.
   1. Innovation begins with empathy
   2. Short list of stuff to think about when observing others:
      1. extreme uses, aspects, NOT used
      2. areas people ask for improvement
      3. themes & personalization
      4. their uses, not yours
      5. context of use
      6. analogies and metaphors
2. Your job as an entrepreneur is to realize people’s stories.
   1. Concentrate on extreme users and non-users to get inspiration
   2. Start telling stories based on the observations
   3. Look for patterns
      1. themes/buckets
      2. problems, ideas, insights, themes
   4. Play with early frameworks
      1. Journeys
      2. Venn diagram
      3. 2 by 2 matrix
      4. Map
3. Based on the stories, create unique “How might we’s?”
   1. For example: “How might we use the joy of collecting to teach 9-12 year olds math?”
4. Brainstorm ideas that meet “How might we’s.”
   1. Brainstorming rules
      1. defer judgment
      2. encourage wild ideas
      3. stay focused on the topic
      4. one conversation at a time
      5. be visual
      6. go for quantity
      7. build on the ideas of others
5. Prototype immediately, not to spec
   1. Roughly (don’t overdo it)
      1. Quick and dirty
   2. Rapidly (simple)
   3. Right (clear about what you want to learn)
   4. Prototypes don’t have to be physical, but must be tangible
   5. The whole point is to get feedback to validate ideas

The biggest challenge in following this process is sticking to the process.