See why you need to:

• Take play seriously in your work
• Avoid hiring assholes
• Prototype digital apps with physical materials

Seriously, take it from IDEO - you need to play more.

Learn how from two of IDEO’s toy designers.

Overview

From time to time we do some guest-blogging over at the 99% around creativity, careers, and pushing boundaries. I often find that at the end of writing an article there are scraps that for whatever reason don’t quite fit into the flow of the piece. It’s a shame because there can be some good stuff still wiggling around on the editing floor, so we thought we’d go ahead and publish those here on our blog.  

We hope you enjoy.

Background

So, to kick things off this last post on 99% was on how play and innovation is implemented at the renowned international design firm, IDEO, with two of its toy designers Brendan Boyle and Joe Wilcox. I met Joe a few years back at Hatchfest here in Bozeman and Brendan the following year - see this year’s Hatch schedule.

Note: For those that don’t know, IDEO is a modern day Neverland and considered by many to be the global leader for design. I toured the headquarters in Palo Alto last summer and saw firsthand that you can attend a meeting in a VW bus with a drum kit on the roof.

Interview Outtakes

Brendan Boyle and Joe Wilcox from IDEO's Toy Lab - Palo Alto, California

Let’s chat a bit about IDEO’s culture and growth: 

Brendan Boyle: Well, IDEO is still a pretty small company at 500 folks and we’ve grown pretty organically over the past 32 years. So, that’s certainly not explosive growth. 

We’re a company that’s all about learning. So when an idea comes up we say, ‘let’s try that as an experiment and see what can learn’ and move on from that. We tend to be an emerging company where things boil up from the bottom versus top down.

To build a culture like this we really look to hire those ‘T-shaped’ people and avoid the jerks. Bob Sutton (Stanford professor) has a great book called The No-Asshole Rule, which explores how hiring the one jerk can kill the culture. 

So, we try to build a culture with antibodies to those types of people.

So how does IDEO’s culture influence meetings?

Brendan: Well, we have some rules around brainstorming on the wall in the conference rooms and that helps clients and new employees get our culture. 

Note: here are IDEO’s 7 Rules of Brainstorming: 

1. Defer judgement
2. Encourage wild ideas
3. Build on the ideas of others
4. Stay focused on the topic
5. One conversation at a time
6. Be visual
7. Go for quantity

Where do you find inspiration?

Joe Wilcox: We have these ‘Thinking Meetings’ once a week where we sit together and watch some inspiring videos and jot down ideas on Post-It notes and present them. It’s a very low-stakes way of brainstorming.

Something else that’s helpful is to go do something that is outside your normal realm of activities. We all get locked into our daily cycle of deadlines and goals but going hang-gliding or doing off-sites encourage us to relate to team members in a different way. We go to toy stores, we go to movies and just get out and work in ways that aren’t straight from a computer screen.

Brendan: Joe and I went to Burning Man last year. If you want inspiration, go to Burning Man! (laughs)

How do you see mobile apps and toy design coexisting?

Brendan: The explosion of mobile is certainly a new element around play and platform development. 

We saw an insight where a mom would hand a 2 year old their smartphone while they were melting down in the grocery store or on a plane. 

So we thought that was pretty interesting.

The insight here being that the mom was using her smartphone just like any other tool in her purse. Not to stereotype dads but there is no way they were handing over their phones to a two year old.

We thought that was pretty cool so we developed this app called Balloonimals where you blow up a balloon on screen, shake it a couple times, and it turns into a dinosaur or different animals. That has turned into a whole bunch of work for us with Sesame Street and an app called Elmo’s Monster Maker.

The platform of the touchscreen on a mobile device is just an amazing interaction for a youngster and adults too. I see a combination of physical and digital where maybe your device snaps into a toy to enhance it.

Joe: I also think it’s one of those ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’. I heard this story recently about how a kid had got a brand-new play station and he played with it for a few days. But they got a new fridge and he played in that box with his friends for hours and hours and it was a time machine and a space ship and on and on. 

So for me, it’s all about how can technology enhance those inherent human needs rather than just being this cool new thing. What’s interesting is how it (technology) always points back to the primal.

Prototyping is at the core of IDEO’s design philosophy. How do you do it if you’re designing digital experiences?

Brendan: So, a good story is when we were working on the iPhone app and trying to figure out how Elmo should dance. So what our team did was plot a giant iPhone on foam core, cut it out, and had our guys dance behind it while we videotaped it up front. This was a prototype we could do in an hour or less.

We also did a lot of kids in here and get some insights you would have never guessed. A lot of hands-on skits or paper drawings of what the app could be - our goal is how fast can you get to something to learn and make it better. 

So, we like to say, ‘We’re building to learn versus building to test’.

A blown-up prototype of an iPhone for prototyping

As a parting story...We’ve started working on photographing and simulating what it’s like for a customer to interact with some of the brands we work for during our research phase. It has led to some interesting insights and ideas for designing the site and we have IDEO to thank for such an approach.

Brendan: I could back that up and call that role-playing because you’re playing the role of the new customer. The role playing creates empathy and understanding of the user which is what we did as kids. That’s why we played firemen. We tried to understand what that role was all about.