Interactions - March/April 2010

panies who invested in design, clearly showed that design-led businesses outperformed their design-lacking counterparts and the FTSE index by a full 200 percent [ 15].

I do believe basic competency in design lies at the root of what it means to innovate; it’s a very important and strategic activity individuals and organizations attempt every day. And I do believe that individuals, teams, and whole organizations can develop a level of design competency and apply it to the making of anything, whether that “thing” is a product, program, process, place, policy, or perfume. The practice of design is broadly applicable and once mastered can help anyone and any organization “make things better.” Like basic mathematics, it is not rocket science, but well within the full range of everyone’s cognitive and kinesthetic capabilities and will help the rocket scientist, product manager, entrepreneur, filmmaker, and industrial designer alike harness the power and complexity inherent in 21st-century life and work.

But even if you agree with this premise, the reality of design literacy is easier said than done. The seeds have been planted, but for the everyday practice of design to become as pervasive and central to our way of being and making as arithmetic, we need to make an overall shift in the way we think about design, innovation, education, and work itself. For starters, two very popular stereotypes need to be stamped out. The first is design as merely the act of arranging how something looks. The second is innovation as good ideas

that suddenly turn on in our mind, like a lightbulb. This is no small task when one consid-ers the extent to which these notions are embedded in the way we work, and the culture at large. [ 16] But they are necessary to challenge and change if we want the majority of leaders in business, government, and education (not the small minority we have now) supporting initiatives like corporate-wide HCD institutes, training whole divisions of engineers how to make low-fidelity prototypes and test them, and incorporating design thinking throughout K- 12 curriculums. In addition the praxis of design needs to be more formally understood and clearly expressed. Design is rife with exploratory, integrative, and abductive reasoning methods, but they are no mystery. The habits of a virtuoso can be observed, codified, and taught to everyone and will do much to balance our education system’s primary emphasis on mastery (see Figure 2). In the end, I do think pervasive competency in the collaborative and iterative skills of “looking” and “making” to understand and advance our world, or as Simon put it, “turn existing situations into preferred ones” may prove to be another watershed moment in our history (see Figure 3). Once added to our current pervasive human competency of reading, writing, arithmetic and our capacity to be objective, analytical, and deductive, it may even prove to be profound.

You may wonder, and you
have the right to, what’s all this
fuss over design thinking and
making everyone a designer?
Industry and life have been
getting along just fine without
it. This is true and difficult to
argue. Industry and society, par-
ticularly in the West, have been
getting along just fine. But let
me leave you with this. I would
argue that most of those living
in 1202 thought they were get-
ting along just fine with Roman
numerals. No one, not even
Fibonacci, foresaw how this new
way of solving problems would
emerge into a pervasive lit-
eracy and become the source of
such massive and fundamental
changes. Truly, it was an evolu-
tion of the mind.

[ 14] For P&G see:
Lafley’s The Game
Changer. For GD
see: http://www.
luma-institute.com/
workshops/testimoni-
als. For Emerson see:
http://www2.emerson-
process.com/en-US/
news/pr/Pages/909-
HumanCenteredDesign.
aspx/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Pacione is the direc-
tor of LUMA Institute where
he leads a highly skilled,
multidisciplinary team of
practitioners and educa-
tors, who are passionate about helping
organizations foster pervasive competency
in design. Pacione is also an adjunct
instructor in the School of Design at
Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU). He is a
frequent speaker, teacher, and writer on the
topic of design and education both in the
U,S, and Europe. In 1999 he co-founded
BodyMedia, Inc., one of the early pioneers
in wearable health monitoring, and was
responsible for interaction design and cus-
tomer marketing for the company until
2008. From 1995 to 1999, he was an assis-
tant professor in the School of Design at
CMU where he held the McCandless Chair
and taught courses in HCI, interface
design, information design, and drawing.
During and prior to his tenure at CMU,
Pacione worked as an interaction designer
for the Engineering Design Research
Center at CMU and Fitch Richardson
Smith’s Exploratory Design Lab, where he
collaborated on new product development
projects for such clients as Intel, Motorola,
Xerox, and Kodak. He has an undergradu-
ate degree in design from CMU and a mas-
ter’s degree in painting from Cranbrook
Academy of Art. He holds several IDEA
Gold Medal Awards sponsored by
Business Week and the IDSA, and has been
awarded numerous U.S. and EU patents for
his work.

[ 15] Design Council (UK). Design Index “The Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance,” 2004; http://www.designcoun-cil.org.uk/About-Design/ Research/Design-Index/ [ 16] Consider the definition of a U.S. design patent as that which “covers the ornamental design for an object having practical utility,” or the use of the word “designer” as a prefix to market fashionable apparel like “designer sunglasses” and “designer jeans,” or the persistent image of glowing light bulbs hovering above one’s head to represent innovation.