John encouraged us
to focus on three
opportunistic areas:
personal and flexible
tools, collaboration
space, and easy
access to a variety of
resources. He immersed
us in the process,
giving us permission
to think through the
work, and stimulate
were hired by Xerox to refashion
its copier, they began by stealthily videotaping executives and
their administrative assistants
trying to use their own copiers
and failing repeatedly. Then they
showed them the footage. This
evidence got their team the permission to redesign the entire
product system, which led to
the green handles and litany of
affordances that we still depend
on today in order to operate
these machines.
In like manner, after sizing
up me and my design skills
moments after we met, John
saw a young designer who
needed a dramatic shift in
perspective, and he extended
that cautionary invitation.
Accepting his offer was the
start of my process of learning
a new vocational language.
collaboration...
November + December 2010
interactions
on the ways of human-centered
design. John positioned himself
as the day-to-day consultant
who would lead this initiative
on-site. He actively sought young
designers interested in working
with him; I wasn’t one of them.
Instead, I sought him out. After
I introduced myself and showed
him the software interface I had
designed, he warned me that I
would have to learn a new way
to design starting immediately
and that it wouldn’t be easy.
John and Shelley’s first step
in creating a design language
included challenging all the
existing assumptions and conditions around the thing that
was to be designed in order to
express it anew. They called this
“characterization.” When they
Reregistration
It began with a trip to Chicago
in the fall of 1994. John worked
with our leadership at TI to
arrange for the design department to tour a firm that was
practicing human-centered
design and design planning
and visit the academic institution that was formally teaching
its theory and methods—the
Institute of Design at the
Illinois Institute of Technology.
The second step in creating a
design language is to reframe
the situation at hand, so that’s
what he did.
We began with a visit to the
Doblin Group. They were located
in a Chicago landmark, the
Jeweler’s Building on 35 East
Wacker Drive. The architect
Helmut Jahn occupied the top
floor. Jay Doblin started the firm
in 1972 after leaving Unimark,
an international graphic and
product design firm, and Larry
Keeley, Doblin’s understudy,
eventually worked his way into
a leadership position there.
John Rheinfrank was a senior
strategist at Doblin. The place
was white, black, gray, and yel-
low from thousands of post-it
notes. In what was to be typi-
cal form, John filled an entire
whiteboard with a diagrammatic
narrative of why we were there
(I don’t recall him ever using
PowerPoint or the TI standard
“foils”—transparent sheets of
plastic placed on an overhead
projector to cast the contents of
a presentation). We toured the
office, met the staff, and saw the
beginnings of the program that
many of us would touch and be
inspired by over the next few
years. The day spilled out into
the streets of Chicago, where a
friend of the firm gave us a boat
tour of the city’s architectural
gems. Then, at dusk, the small
ship made its way north to
Evanston, where we docked and
rode a bus to the Rheinfrank’s
splendid Victorian home.
