School of Bright Ideas

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When SSM DePaul Health Center in St. Louis, Mo., hired Ideo to help make over a nursing unit, Ideo staff members deployed a technique they call bodystorming. Taking on the roles of real patients, they acted out the entire physical experience of a stay in the unit, with one hand on a crutch and the other on a video camera. They also gave disposable cameras to DePaul's nurses and told them to take pictures of anything that impeded them during their duties. The result? Dozens of small fixes--such as a room for families, a phone for every nurse, and pictures of trees in every patient room--that make for a less stressful and more healing environment. "When you get on the other side of the design process, you think, Gosh, this is just common sense," says Bob Porter, DePaul's executive vice president. "But because of inertia and conditioning, we quickly lose the perspective we need to see those improvements. You have to do things to provoke creativity, and Ideo is great at doing that."

So impressed is Porter that he's retaining Ideo's services again for the design of a new hospital. In fact, Ideo is developing something of an expertise in medical reform, also working with clients like the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., to create mini-Ideos--permanent design-research facilities that work like prototype factories within the organizations. The Mayo facility has already created one Ideo-like product: a check-in kiosk based on those e-ticket machines at airports so that Mayo patients don't have to wait in line just to sign in.

Most business leaders would have a heart attack if their companies started training clients not to need them, as the Mayo mini-Ideo is meant to do. But Kelley doesn't blink an eye. "We have no trouble giving away this week's ideas because we think we're going to come up with better ones next week," he says. "We're quite happy to see them ride off into the sunset."

Why is Kelley's outlook on business so different? To hear him tell it, being around academia--Kelley got tenure to teach product design part time at Stanford's engineering school in 1990--gives him the necessary distance and perspective. "If you always stay at a company, this barbaric businessness overtakes you," he says. "You're always in execution mode. Here [at Stanford] you get to think more strategically about your profession." Or, as he tells his students, "enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of flawed intellects."

That he still has another $15 million to raise to build the d.school isn't stopping Kelley from dreaming about the kind of human-centered, multidisciplinary church it can be--or the kind of bully pulpit it will serve as in his profession. "Designers are in a position to be the glue that holds collaborative teaching together," he says. The high priest of the new religion of design thinking has spoken.