Synopsis
Unusual book
Extrait
1. Ask Stupid Questions
What is design? Who is Bruce Mau? And, by the way, does it have to be a lightbulb?
1.1 The Joke That Explains Progress
As Dean Kamen tells the story, it started when he went out to get ice cream. "So I'm at the mall," says Kamen, who is a prominent New Englander now but who grew up in the New York City area and still speaks with the accent and clipped sentences of a New Yorker. "I'm on my way in from the parking lot, it's raining. I see a guy, in a wheelchair. He's not an old guy, he's young, fit looking—probably a vet, maybe had his leg blown off by a land mine, for all I know. But here he is, in this brand-new modern shopping center. And he can't get over the curb. He has to get help from a couple of other people, to lift his wheelchair over the curb."
Kamen raises an index finger to indicate: That's part one of the story.
"Few minutes later, I'm going by RadioShack, to get some batteries or whatever. I see the guy in the store, and now he's having trouble reaching something on the shelf. Then, as fate would have it, when I finally get around to going to the food court for my ice cream—there he is again! He's waiting to be served, but it's a high ice cream counter and he can't make eye contact. He couldn't do a basic transaction, not with any dignity anyway."
Now comes the point in the story when Kamen's design brain kicks into gear. "I'm looking at all this thinking, What a pathetic lack of progress. I mean, seriously—with all the incredible things we're doing with tech nology, what are we doing to improve this two-hundred-year-old wheelchair? And what are we doing to restore this guy's dignity? Because that's what it's about—not just mobility, it's dignity. Can't we do better than this?"
And that was that. Because once Kamen raised that question—even if initially only within the confines of his own head—it begged an answer and set in motion a chain of developments. Kamen would spend the next several years trying to resolve dynamic stabilization issues in new ways, using solidstate gyroscopes, sensors, and microprocessors to simulate human balance in a package "small enough to sit under someone's butt," he says. "Because we knew once we could do that, we could stand a guy up on two points. And once we're balanced on two points, then we can deal with climbing the curb. And if we can climb the curb, then we can take it a little further and climb stairs."
Kamen eventually did manage to do all of that with his iBOT wheelchair: The seat raises its occupant to a standing position, as the wheels intrepidly roll up and over curbs or steps. The whole complex engineering and design project was triggered by a simple human observation and an emotional reaction to it.
"That's where our ideas always seem to come from," Kamen explains. "I think what happens is, we look at the same things, the same reality, as everyone else does. But we see it a little differently. Just because something is a reality today, we know that doesn't mean it has to be a reality tomorrow. So we're constantly looking at things and asking, Why? Or why not?"
At that shopping center in New Hampshire, on a dreary, rainy evening, Kamen looked at a man in a wheelchair and saw the glimmer of possibility. But he was only able to see that by stepping back, reconsidering what he saw—and by questioning the way things are and might be.
The questions Kamen raised at the time—Why shouldn't someone in a wheelchair be able to stand and make eye contact with others? Why can't he climb curbs, or even stairs?—fit the definition of what Bruce Mau calls "stupid questions": the kind that challenge assumptions in such a fundamental way they can make the questioner seem naïve. Had Kamen asked these questions at, say, a business meeting within a company that makes wheelchairs, they very well might have elicited discreet eye-rolling and restlessness, along with a feeling that the meeting's forward momentum had ground to a halt.
But in actuality, the opposite is true. The act of questioning basic assumptions can be the first step toward reinvention and meaningful change. And it is often design's starting point.
Designers are so known for questioning that there is a joke acknowledging this tendency:
How many designers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Answer: Does it have to be a lightbulb?
Joking aside, when designers ask whether "it has to be a lightbulb," what they are doing is reframing a familiar problem or challenge in an unconventional way. Framing is a favorite term among designers, used with various meanings, but it generally refers to the way a problem or challenge is defined and laid out by a designer who intends to try to solve it. And often, the way a problem is framed will determine the solution. The problem of needing to figure out how to change that lightbulb may be reframed as a need to bring more light into the room without constantly having to change the bulb. This, in turn, may lead to putting a window in the roof to let the sun shine in.
The inclination to ask stupid questions and to frame problems in new ways (the two practices tend to go hand in hand) is a big part of what makes a good designer good, but it can also be useful behavior for just about anyone. To be able to step back, look at what surrounds you with a fresh eye, and question what is usually taken for granted is how people can change their lives, how societies or governments can retackle old problems, and how companies can regain focus or completely reinvent themselves.
Mau says that, as the economy soured in late 2008, he found he was getting an increasing number of phone calls from businesses who were discovering that in this new, difficult environment, the old formulas and models that these companies had lived by for years were no longer working. Some of them undoubtedly were hoping Mau might be able to hand them a new formula, a bit of design magic. But what these companies really must do, Mau says, is the hard work of reconsidering, which often requires that they ask themselves some very stupid (but by no means easy) questions as they try to reframe their very purpose: Why do we make the things we're making? Does anybody still need this stuff? What if we were to radically change this thing we make? Or make something else instead? Maybe we need to stop making "things" altogether and start providing something more—a service, an experience?
The questions are so fundamental that a lot of companies haven't stopped to consider them in a long time, if ever. Likewise, social services providers are using old models that are not holding up well in these times, but to adapt to a new reality, basic questions must be asked: Never mind what we're used to providing; what do senior citizens really need these days? What makes a poor child want to learn? What do homeless people do all day? And on a personal level, asking stupid questions is every bit as relevant: Where should I really be living? How can I get more done? What makes me happy?
Designers know that asking fundamental questions is not easy to do, but on the other hand, you don't have to be an expert, either. In fact, generally speaking, experts are the ones least capable of asking stupid questions, because they know too much (or so they think). Designers, on the other hand, are often in the role of "anti-experts"—they tend to come at challenges from the perspective of the outsider. In business, designers are often brought in from outside to solve a problem, but even if the designer works in-house at a company, he/she is usually expected to take an "outside" point of view—one that is more in line with the end user or customer than with the company's executives.
Designers like Mau or Paula Scher from the design firm Pentagram are used to taking on assignments that range from working for a bank one week to a hospital the next. As they jump around, they're not expected to have deep expertise in each particular industry, and in fact their lack of inside knowledge can be a great asset. "When I'm totally unqualified for a job, that's when I do my best work," explains Paula Scher, a renowned graphic designer who has worked with public theaters, children's museums, and banks (she once sketched an umbrella logo on a napkin for Citibank and, in a matter of minutes, changed the identity of one of world's most powerful financial institutions—though, alas, Scher's umbrella couldn't keep Citi from getting soaked in the end). Scher says, "If you're trying to find a new way to think about something that makes it better, it can actually hurt you to have too much experience in that particular milieu—because you understand the expectations too well. And that can cause you to limit and edit your possibilities, based on what you already know 'doesn't work.' "
But if you're inexperienced in a given area—or, to use Scher's words, "if you're a complete neophyte, a moron"—you'll tend to ask questions that elicit more profound responses. "You'll ask what would seem to be the obvious, except nobody's seriously thought about it," she says. "From ignorance, you can come up with something that is so out of left field that it has been ignored or was never considered a possibility."
Questioning and framing require that one try to observe situations or scenarios in an open, unbiased manner. Mau sees this as akin to adopting a child's view of reality, in which everything is noticed as if for the first time and it's all subject to inquiry and investigation.
It makes sense, then, that the specific question that is often most useful in this approach is the one favored by inquisitive kids everywhere: Why?
It's such a good all-purpose query that many designers have adopted...
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