I am recalling an experience that I had while I was at Syracuse University. A good friend of mine (also graduate professor) asked me if I wanted to go to San Francisco to tape interviews of leading designers and thinkers in Silicon Valley. Of course I said yes. It was a no-brainer. I had the opportunity of a lifetime to meet Tim Brown of IDEO and JSB (John Seely Brown) of Xerox fame. The whole point of the trip was to get design insight on how Syracuse should build a new design center for students and visiting designers to brainstorm new and innovative creations. Here is the story.
I arrived at San Francisco airport during my summer in 2002. I was carrying video equipment and on Syracuse’s bill we went to our beautiful hotel just a stone’s throw away from the Stanford campus. I realized at that moment that I was going to meet Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and John Seely Brown. IDEO, if you don’t know already, is one of the world’s leading design firms. Think of your office as a giant playground with a fluid cubicle environment and a lifesize airplane wing just jutting out from the wall.
They are located in a business district in Palo Alto and have several buildings strewn along a trendy street lined with coffee shops and bookstores. I walked in and we got escorted by a “tour guide”. I think his name was Michael. He showed us to the conference where the busy Tim Brown would make time and sit down at an interview with us. The conference rooms had glass windows from the floor to the ceiling and each room had their schedule on a touch LCD pad so that you could see if the room was taken. If there was a conflict, you can page the secratary through the system and you can watch her real-time adjust the schedules on the LCD. Pretty sweet. We setup the camera and mic’d the table and in comes Tim Brown himself. Tim wore a shirt with really long sleeves and had these springy keychain things to keep his sleeves up. He explained that they were cool toys that were meant to keep his sleeves up. Strange. I was handed a book, “The Art of Innovation”, written by Tom Kelley (former IDEO CEO). The read was pretty good and explained IDEO’s design process. I suggest picking it up. We were then off to talk to JSB.
JSB’s conversation was quite interesting. We were sitting in his quaint Silicon Valley home in his garage at a desk with his BMW motorcycle on one side and 4 Herman Miller Aeron chairs. He discussed our plans for a new design center in Syracuse and said that right now online communities such as video gamers online, were the wave of the future. Since he was the Chief Architect over at Xerox we took his word for it. He said that the space that Syracuse had to create was to be dynamic and and fluid. A community had to be established, so that ideas and designs could be nurtured. His insight was incredible. The trip to his house was definitely an eye opener. Heck, to be offered coffee by a world renowned designer was humbling enough.
I just wanted to share this experience with you and want to get you thinking about design and how it changes our lives everyday. Engineers like me design things everday and everyone out there like you ae designers alike. So go out there and make a difference in what you do and excel at it.
