I understand why people like repeatable processes and reliable frameworks. It’s reassuring when you know that something will work before you try it; to know its been done before. But with mastery and experience comes the confidence to improvise. I’m perfectly comfortable using techniques that I’ve never used before in situations for which they were not intended.
Consider the opposite: if we always do what we’ve always done, then we’ll always get what we always got; if we never try anything new how can be expected to arrive at something creative or innovative. I believe we have to be comfortable taking novel approaches if we are going to reach previously undiscovered destinations; innovation and creativity come from unusual journeys.
Outdated business efficiency technique + Mickey Mouse = kitchen appliances?
My portfolio is full of weird journeys. For example, by a weird chain of events I ended up (re)designing an academic library, then a pattern language for future academic libraries, a call centre, the new HQ for a bank and then offices for a tech firm. That all started as a result of designing kitchen appliances inspired by an old film about architecture and Mickey Mouse.
I was approached about a project for a client that makes kitchen and laundry appliances. They wanted to design future concepts for two lines: a top of the range set of appliances; and a set of appliances for people moving out for the first time. At Modern Human we had a tradition where every project got a codename, so these two became Projekt Queller and Projekt Linsen which translates as Project Samphire and Project Lentil. What could be posher than samphire and what could be more humble than the lentil?
While we were ramping up on Queller, I came across a film on architecture called City Spaces, Human Places by William H. Whyte. The film documents the Street Life Project, which is the source for his book: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. In the film Whyte talks about the data they gathered from time and motion studies in city plazas. Serendipitously, watching that film gave me the idea for the design research we needed to do to design future kitchen appliances.
What if we went into people’s houses and watched them cook a typical meal? What would we learn about how they used their existing appliances and their potential needs for future appliances?
That got me wondering: what would happen if we repeated that exercise in professional, Michelin starred kitchens? What differences would we observe? Innovations in car design are often passed down from elite motor sport so we anticipated that we might be able to observe things about the professional kitchen which might have application in the home. We set about finding out with time and motion studies in both home and professional kitchens. We gathered really interesting data about both types of kitchen.
I remember having to work quite hard to convince the client that their path to innovative new connected home appliances was through a little used, historical management science technique like time and motion studies. Fortunately, they not only believed me, they engaged in my madness by getting me invited into some top Michelin-starred kitchens!
It was while drowning in the data from the time and motion studies in home and professional kitchens that I arrived at a personal insight. I realised that in an automated kitchen I wanted to feel like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia when he first starts commanding the buckets and the mops. Everything is under control and he stands in the middle like the conductor of an orchestra. That reminded me of some of the head chefs I had seen in professional kitchens. That’s how I wanted to feel in my own kitchen if it were automated: like the conductor of a meal; like a head chef in a professional brigade.
So I had a huge dataset from the time and motion studies, inspired by City Spaces, Human Places and this image of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia which drove the invention of those connected kitchen appliances.
From kitchen appliances to call centres via a library
Not long after completing these two projects, the University Librarian at Cambridge asked me if I could conceive of a project to examine what libraries at Cambridge might look like in the future. That became the Futurelib project, which is reasonably well documented online and led to a subproject called Protolib about prototyping new library spaces.
For that project (Protolib), I again wanted to taken a path untravelled. I wanted to apply techniques that would typically get applied to digital spaces to physical spaces: I wanted to track people’s behaviour in physical space just like you would on a webpage. I wanted to use this tracking to understand how people were inhabiting the space, I wanted to use eye-tracking to understand how they navigated the space, then apply what we learned to rounds of rapid prototyping and reconfiguration of the space. This required us to reuse the skills we’d learned from the kitchen appliances projects. Combining all of those slightly odd ingredients together led to us producing heatmaps showing how library users occupied physical spaces, to redesigning signage that reduced the time to find resources, to creating experimental spaces using inexpensive flatpack furniture and iterating on those physical spaces weekly in a sprint-like fashion measuring how people used the space constantly.
We published the results of this experimentation as a pattern language that would be applied to libraries across the University. That pattern language and the unorthodox methods used to create it would help us to win projects to design call centres, the new HQ for a bank and offices for tech firms.
Boldly going where no-one has gone before
If a conclusion could be drawn from this story and lessons learnt for the future, I would say it was pure madness to pitch time and motion studies as an innovation technique to a kitchen appliance manufacturer. That madness kicked off the most incredible journey. A journey that led to award winning appliances for that manufacturer and an award-winning workplace for a bank.
I would wholeheartedly recommend throwing those frameworks and playbooks out of the window once in a while. If you do what everyone else is doing, or repeat what you’ve always done then you’re probably going to all end up in the same place. If you really want to create something new, or be inspired to make something radically innovative then you might just need to take an unusual journey to get there.