“Design is a team sport” – an hour with IDEO’s Tim Brown

Tim Brown is an unusually thoughtful interviewee. More than once in our conversation, he pauses and says, “Let me think what I think about that.”

A product designer by training, he joined Bill Moggridge’s ID TWO in 1987. That was one of four firms which joined to form IDEO in 1991, and Brown rose through the ranks of the new firm, eventually becoming its CEO. In 2019, he stepped away from his day-to-day role to become executive chair.

Through his book, Change by Design, and his popular TED talks, Brown established himself as one of the pioneers of design thinking

During a rare visit to London from his base on the West Coast, we sat down with him to talk AI, design leadership, and how to keep your creative spark alight.

Broadly speaking, are you nervous or excited about AI?

More than either of those two things, I’m very curious.

That’s perhaps an instinctive behaviour for me, because I realised a while ago that I really have only ever been interested in one thing throughout my whole career.

I’ve been asking one question over and over again – what’s next for design?

Is there any technology shift you’ve seen in your career that is analogous to what we’re going through with AI?

It’s hard to say. We’re right at the beginning of a journey, or a transformation, or a revolution maybe.

It’s not the first time digital tools have threatened to disrupt what we do as designers. When I came out of the RCA, we were just getting the first 3D modelling.

And that, to many people, felt like a remarkable opportunity, but it did require designers to start doing things differently. And that also felt like a threat.

And then of course there was the early 1980s, when desktop publishing happened, and people thought it was the end of graphic design. But it didn’t last very long, because we soon got pretty tired of documents with 25 different fonts on them and horrible graphics.

And in fact, it turned into a renaissance of graphics. Suddenly we had these designers using digital fonts in ways that nobody expected.

So you’re hopeful?

I’m perfectly prepared to be wrong about this, because there is something about this technology, in terms of its speed of adoption, and its ability to do unexpected things, that is potentially more threatening than anything we’ve seen before.

But there are some innate human qualities which I think might turn out to be quite important.

Think about taste. As human beings we get bored with seeing the same thing over and over again. And it’s already apparent, when you look at a lot of this AI generated material, it all looks the same.

It’s all got that super polished quality to it, and I think people get bored with that.

Graphic design is so often about getting people’s attention, and you don’t get people’s attention by showing them the same thing that they’ve seen a thousand times before.

So I have a feeling that the desire we have, and the need we have, for design to keep nudging us forward, and giving us something new to experience, will not be something that AI is awfully good at doing.

And designers are ingenious people. I think designers will find ways of using the tools that we haven’t thought about yet, and that will itself generate new outcomes.

It’ll be like the typographers that then had to develop digital typefaces, and we suddenly got this rich set of typefaces we didn’t have before, that you couldn’t do in metal.

Where are you seeing AI impact businesses?

I was talking to the chief product officer of a big outsourcing tech company the other day, and they said they now use AI for all of their first round recruiting.

Humans had to ok the choices that AI was making, but the AI reviewed the applications, and did the first round of interviews, and then humans got involved. That’s the sort of place where I feel the early impact is going to show up.

And so how will AI change what clients want from designers?

For me, design is about the connection between two things – the idea, and the expression, or implementation, of that idea. An idea on its own is no use. An implementation on its own is no use.

Most of the benefit of AI, at least in the early days, is going to be on the expression and implementation side, which, presumably, is going to increase the value of good ideas. And I think that’s probably where most creative people are going to end up putting more of their effort.

It should give us more time. I’ve always been a little bit critical of design, that we spend so much time using the tools. So much time in Photoshop or Illustrator or AutoCAD.

We spend a lot of time refining the idea, and maybe not as much time as we might actually having the idea in the first place, or developing the quality of the idea.

So if, as I believe, these tools create more time, more space, more capacity even to explore the quality of the idea, that would be an interesting outcome.

My guess would be that the large amounts of money that clients spend today on implementing ideas will go down. Maybe not totally to zero, but it will go down.

And if everybody’s got the ability to execute really well, then the only way to distinguish one company from another will be how good the ideas are.

If you’re going to compete, then you have to be more distinctive. Which could mean your brand, or your products and services, or maybe even the culture of your organisation.

The essence, the ideas themselves, are going to matter more.

Do you see a difference between business culture in the UK and the US?

It certainly used to feel that way. That was to do with the increased entrepreneurialism in the States compared to here, the access to venture funding.

But that’s improved a lot over the last couple of decades. There are a lot of VCs working here in London now.

It took a long time for Britain to get over the idea that business was a legitimate thing for people to get excited about. I remember coming out of secondary school, I had no idea business was a thing. It was ridiculous.

But there are things to learn both ways.

I’ve always loved that there’s generally an attitude in America which is a little bit more optimistic, a little bit more open-minded, a little bit more willing to try something without overthinking it.

That was harder here for a long time. There was a bit more scepticism, or cynicism, a tendency to think about all the downsides before you actually invest in something, which does make it harder to get new ideas off the ground.

But what I like about the UK, and Europe, is a willingness to take a slightly more nuanced view of things that in America end up being very polarising.

Do you think design leadership has changed a lot since you started IDEO?

I find it a little hard to know whether my view on that is due to the fact that I’m getting older, or whether it genuinely is different.

As a young designer, I remember feeling like some of those who were a few decades older than me might not be thinking about some of the things they ought to be thinking about.

So I suspect that that’s a universal truth.

But if I think about the change in assumptions that we’ve gone through during my career – about what design is about, or what it’s for, or who should be doing it –  they are pretty fundamental.

I like to think IDEO helped some of those changes happen.

One of the things I loved when I joined was the culture where they didn’t believe that the most senior people had the best ideas.

They specifically hired lots of young people who they knew had better ideas than they did, and then gave us free rein.

Organisations often say, “Good ideas can come from anywhere,” but they sometimes struggle to live up to that. How do you build that culture?

You give the real authority to people who are a lot younger, or come from different backgrounds, to actually run the project.

So it’s about power?

Yeah. When I was running IDEO, I may have known the content of 25% of the projects that were going on. And maybe I was involved in 5% of them.

So 95% of them, somebody else was making the decisions. Even in the 5% I was involved in, I usually didn’t get to make decisions.

The people closest to the projects were the ones who made the decisions. Along with the client, of course. But certainly not somebody who only came and looked at the work once a week.

That doesn’t mean that more experienced people can’t give feedback and advice. But how can you possibly know enough to make a decision if you’re not deeply involved in a project?

“You don’t run out of ideas if you don’t run out of questions.”

I do think the problems that we’re often trying to solve today are so much more complicated.

You have to consider issues of sustainability, which we weren’t thinking about back then. There may well be complexities to deal with over who’s doing the designing on behalf of whom. Are you including the right kinds of voices?

I trained as a product designer. And product design, at least in the 1980s, was something where a small number of designers, it might be one, or it might be a small group, were designing a product.

We designed it once, and it would end up in the hands of millions of people. I might try and learn as much as I could about as many of those users as possible, but I couldn’t possibly have them all involved in the design process.

Now we’re working on problems which can be highly contextualised, where it’s much more expected to find a way for those communities to participate in the design process.

That makes a lot of sense, but it’s very hard to do. You have to integrate a lot of points of view. You have to deal with a lot of information. That’s hard.

And you have to avoid the “camel is a horse designed by committee” problem.

Exactly. It requires a lot of skill to take the voice of a lot of people and turn that into something that’s actually meaningful. It’s much harder.

So given that complexity, how does that change design leadership?

I believe that design is a team sport, not an individual sport. There are so few problems that we’re tackling today where you could expect an individual to possibly understand enough of it to be able to be the sole author.

So just like a team sport is different to an individual sport, designing with a team is different to designing as an individual.

It’s all about the team, and the amount of work that goes into getting that team to work at its best.

I think we will get there. I’d say that in the coming decades, when we look at the icons of design, they will be teams, not individuals.

To circle right back to the start, you talked about curiosity. How do you keep that spark going?

I stepped out of running IDEO a few years ago, and I have no management responsibility any more. I do what I have always done, which is to wonder about things and ask questions.

I’ve been involved in co-founding a couple of companies. I love thinking about the implications of new technology, whether it’s AI or other things.

And I have a group of people that every week, we get together for a couple of hours on Zoom. We’re just exploring new ways of thinking.

We call it our oasis. We have no purpose. We have no deadlines. We prototype things and we try things out. Basically, it’s play.

The world can seem like a pretty difficult place sometimes. Some of the problems that we face seem overwhelming.

But as designers, we hold the power in our hands to do something about it. We have these skills, these mindsets, that most people don’t have, that allow us to explore things.

And we can turn that thinking into something real that can make a positive difference, in some very simple, little way, or in a big way, because you’re reframing the world. It doesn’t matter where you are on that spectrum.

You don’t run out of ideas if you don’t run out of questions.