Newsweek recently published an article about David Kelley from IDEO and a virtual-tour slide show showing some of IDEO’s global offices.

IDEO's David Kelley helped design products like the first computer mouse and the first laptop. Next? Reinventing innovation.

There was a time when it looked as if David Kelley’s design career might have been summed up in two words: “Lavatory Occupied.”

Kelley, then a fresh grad from Carnegie Mellon, was working for aviation giant Boeing when he helped design the bathroom sign that went into 747s. “I spent six months on that,” recalls Kelley, now 59. “I had a narrow role. I wanted the ability to come up with solutions that were new to the world and to see them have an impact.”

Kelley, now chairman of IDEO, one of the country’s best-known design firms, has come a long way toward that goal, designing scores of wildly successful products. Even before cofounding IDEO, he helped create the first computer mouse for Apple. (The prototype was crafted using the roller ball from a deodorant dispenser and a butter dish.) IDEO later created the first laptop (for Grid Systems) and the first portable defibrillator. The company is responsible for such contemporary creations as the Palm V handheld organizer and the stand-up toothpaste tube. Current customers include Samsung, the Mayo Clinic, and HBO.

But Kelley has moved the company well beyond designing beautiful things you can hold in your hand; IDEO also designs experiences. For Marriott’s Courtyard Hotels, IDEO installed “Go Boards” in the lobbies, screens offering helpful information and guest recommendations. While working with the DePaul Hospital emergency room in St. Louis, IDEO's designers came up with a solution for a chronic hassle: baseball cards of the doctors and nurses. “People kept asking patients, ‘Did you see Dr. So-and-So?’ They had no idea who they had seen,” Kelley says. “But if the medical people had these to hand out, the patient could just show them their cards.”

As Kelley explains it, IDEO’s current mindset is less about product design than it is about, well, fostering new mindsets. Kelley says his company’s mission is to train its clients in “design thinking,” or the ability to think as designers do, deploying similar methods to conjure new lines of business or improve existing ones. “The world seems to be good at coming up with innovations out of a new technology or a new idea in marketing,” says Kelley. “But by trying to understand people, and looking for their nonobvious needs, we find good opportunities to innovate.”
 

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