For a Seller of Innovation, a Bag of Technotricks
IT is a company that makes its living out of inspiration, creating and selling brilliant ideas. But how can something as ephemeral as inspiration be systematically created and nurtured in an organized, deadline-driven business environment?
One of the answers at Ideo Product Design, a company based in Palo Alto, Calif., is the Tech Box, a library that catalogues some 200 weird physical materials and odd objects, ranging from rubber balls to pieces of space shuttle tile, for inspiration-seeking engineers to play with.
Ideo, a design consulting firm, has engineered everything from the gummy-toothpaste-resistant cap for Crest's Neat Squeeze toothpaste tube to the entire body of the handheld Audible Mobile Player, a new device that downloads recorded books from the Internet. Since it was founded as David Kelley Design in 1978, Ideo has completed approximately 3,000 projects, including collaborating with Apple Computer to create the first commercial mouse and some of the first laptops and assisting in the design of a virtual-reality headset for Sega. One of Ideo's recent projects involved the user interface for an easy-to-use portable defibrillator from Heartstream Inc.
With the Tech Box, the company has catalogued and electronically documented materials, objects and gadgets. There are six boxes all told in the company's six major offices -- in San Francisco; Palo Alto; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Chicago; Boston, and London -- and one that the company has sold to an office furnishings client, Steelcase Inc. in Grand Rapids.
Each box has five drawers holding 200-odd objects, which are tagged and numbered. There are related Web sites on a company intranet; access to the intranet is gained through an iMac that sits on top of a file cabinet. Only Ideo employees (and Steelcase employees, for their box) have full access to the boxes and intranet information; Ideo staff members can walk other clients through the box for brainstorming sessions.
Engineers rummage through the compartments and play with the items, which include tiny batteries, miniature switches and the kind of heat-sensitive thermochromatic material that makes mood rings intuitive, in quests for inspiration. They might be seeking the right ''click'' for an electronic book's buttons or a microprocessor cooling mechanism.
''It's the Montessori approach,'' said Dennis Boyle, a senior engineer at Ideo who has taught product design classes at nearby Stanford University for 15 years. ''The whole idea is to go through and just experience these things.''
As Mr. Boyle explored the drawers' compartments, he picked up various things. ''Here's an electroluminescent display -- you find it in portable computers and pagers and watches and night lights,'' he said. ''See how light and flexible it is?''
He handled a piece of Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof vests, then a sheet of shiny gold-colored Mylar, the insulation material used in space satellites. A clear gelatinous material in a small plastic container grabbed Mr. Boyle's attention next. He said it was called Aerogel and explained: ''It's really only four times as dense as air. It crumbles quickly, and it's somewhat of a hazard, so we don't let people fool around with it. But in space it's turned out to be an extremely efficient insulator. It's so light, it feels like you're holding a piece of smoke.''
Christine Kurjan, an Ideo design engineer who acts as the Tech Box's curator, added: ''If you had a piece the size of your body, it would only weigh a pound but it would support a car. I've read about it being, in 20 years, usable for windows.''
Mr. Boyle said the Tech Box (and its precursor, a cardboard box of stuff owned by Mr. Boyle) has been a way of collecting information over the years ''so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you come up with a new idea.''
Matt Herron, formerly of Apple and currently vice president for product development at Softbook Press, has worked with Mr. Boyle for several years on various projects. In a recent project, the Tech Box helped Softbook, an electronic book company based in Menlo Park, Calif., find the right click for its electronic book buttons.
''For years,'' Mr. Boyle said, ''there had been a tech collection in boxes that we'd more or less just dump out on the table for brainstorming or student talks. It was less formal.''
Mr. Herron, who also worked for an Ideo competitor called Frogdesign, based in Silicon Valley, said of this kind of object catalogue, ''Dennis is the only one I know who's applied it to high technology.''
Demonstrating the actual workings of the Tech Box, Ms. Kurjan pointed to the intranet page displayed on the dimly glowing iMac while Mr. Boyle pulled open the drawers. ''Each one of these items has a page in here,'' Ms. Kurjan said. ''What it is, what it's made of, how it works.'' The pages also list manufacturers and who, if anyone, in the company has used the material in a project.
Mr. Kelley pointed to a ''phase-change chemical hand-warmer,'' a packet that is put in ski boots or mittens to release heat. ''We've not applied this one yet,'' Mr. Kelley said, ''but my favorite concept for this one is the 'plate in the restaurant.' '' Mr. Kelley would like to embed the phase-change chemical warmer inside the plate to keep it hot. Because boiling cools the phase-changing chemical warmer, the dishwasher should return the hot plate to normal, theorized Mr. Kelley, who pointed out that he was not an engineer.
The transformation of the Tech Box from a handful of favorite gadgets on each engineer's desk to a catalogued and curated collection has had people vying to come up with things that would be worthy of it. Drawing on the work of a Stanford professor of organizational behavior, Bob Sutton, who is writing a book based on an 18-month study of Ideo, Mr. Kelley said getting something included in the box might even be seen as raising someone's status.
Mr. Kelley said he had recently risen in status when a discovery of his had been deemed worthy of the Tech Box. ''It's a Pack-A-Ccino -- a cappuccino with its own heat source, so when you're on the ski slopes you can still have a hot cappuccino,'' he said. ''I suspect it's really, really bad-tasting, but the technology is there, it works.''
Mr. Boyle countered that at a staff meeting where the coffee had been sampled, the consensus had been that it ''wasn't as bad as we expected.'' Mr. Boyle paused and added, ''Maybe we could use that for a piece of sports equipment, or medical equipment, and have it be very portable.''
''It's a mental tool box,'' he added, glancing at the Tech Box, ''a whole bunch of neat, possibly useful ideas.''
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