Last weekend I was re-reading Sketching User Experiences by the Bill Buxton, who I admire for various reasons, two being he doesn’t mince words and he loves the outdoors.  He seems widely loved too;  I once met his Bloomberg Businessweek editor Helen Walters, and she gushed about him. So, I decided to see what content YouTube had up by him. I found a presentation he gave entitled “Design Thinking in the Wild” at Institute of Design Strategy Conference, May 2008. (The ‘wild’ being in corporations and in practice.)

Bill Buxton on sketching experiences, Institute of Design Strategy Conference, May 2008 from IIT Institute of Design on Vimeo.

His driving thesis was organizational design is the central task of companies that want to innovate and create great products.

He led in by saying most organization’s culture screws designers.  In order to be affective, designers needs the right environment (and status).

Buxton drilled this thesis home from various angles. He used as a reference model construction+architecture to highlight how work ought to be divided up. The skinny: only 17% is construction, leaving tons of space for design. Design is about experimenting and thinking/prototyping out ideas. Time is needed for that.

He also said this:  “A design managers product is the organization.” That’s beautiful. He said Steve Jobs gets it; he is a great design manager. An acquaintance, who works at Apple as an interface designer, concurs, “Apple gets it. Most organizations don’t. You have to put interaction designers in charge of stuff.”

Buxton dismissed the “designer genius” thesis, but also made it clear that every person is not a designer. He refuted Don Norman’s idea that everyone is a designer because they paint their house by quipping that this would mean everyone is a mathematician because they count change when leaving the grocery store.

You don’t need geniuses. You need high placement in the organizational structure. He highlighted something that I first heard mentioned in the documentary Objectified. Steve Jobs didn’t bring in new people when he was brought back to Apple. He worked with the same crew, which included Jonathan Ives, who had been at Apple since 1993. The implication is that Ives therefore had worked in an environment that didn’t help him. Then came Jobs, who empowered his team, because, as a good design manager, he got design.  And the rest is history.

Buxton said IDEO is successful not so much because of the people but that when they get hired in, they get hired from the top, so they are situationally powerful from the start. He says the placement in an organization is the key prerequisite. Designers can’t work at the bottom of an organization.

Buxton joked that Microsoft had designers reporting to the programmers. This poke at his employeer made the audience laugh. Buxton said he had to speak honestly for people to take him seriously but of course the situation is better at Microsoft, and, of course, he doesn’t report to a programmer.

I’ve seen how placement in hierarchy works either for or against consultants we’ve work with. These consultants have ranged from the  fantastic to the abysmal. The hapless ones can be “successful” despite themselves because of higher placement. And the fantastic ones, even though savvy with navigating politics, can’t do there job fully because they aren’t placed high enough. Consultants generally are bounded by the hiring boss. Instead of being a collective resource, they enter into a circumscribed space.

The larger point though is not about designers being placed higher and have more power up but about how the organization is designed, which he says is more important to get right than designing products. Organizations that are designed well will product great products.

One reason why is that good ideas come from diversity – a heterogeneous group. (This important point was first drilled home to me by Cass Sunstein in his book Designing Democracies.) Creativity doesn’t happen in on person’s neo-cortex. “That is so 5-minutes ago,” Buxton said. Good managers understand that ideas don’t happen in a brain.  They happen by our social and cultural intelligences mixing and through the tools we use and the physical spaces we share. “It’s the diversity of people with many different experiences  producing a lot of ideas of which you cut away at until you find The One. Design, after all, is “the most destructive profession. You start out with a million and end up with one.” You need the ability to throw out ideas – your own ideas.

And to do that as a designer, you need an organization that supports idea generation and idea destruction.