The nursing home of the future

Business Innovation Factory has undertaken some excellent work on how innovation and systems thinking can help re-architect the nursing home. The BIF work shows how inadequately most nursing homes address the challenges the elderly face. How the physical space is designed - how long the hallways are, how adapted the sinks and counters are to wheel chair use, etc. - is key to the well-being of the residents. But it is not only the home itself that is important - the home and its residents are part of the local community and ensuring accessibility to the community is also an essential component of the elderly care system. As a doctor notes in one of the videos, before moving into nursing homes most residents could probably access some green space - either their back garden or nearby park, etc. Once inside that ability is drastically reduced thereby depriving residents of the joys of being outdoors (and the physical and psychological pleasure that is derived from it). BIF's work shows how important it is to re-think and redesign not only the home itself but also the home's place in the community and local environment. The welfare of the elderly in our societies has been grossly neglected and this work, and work undertaken by Participle for example, are important steps to building environments and communities in which the elderly can thrive. Such initiatives need to be encouraged, at local and national levels - after all, we all become elderly eventually.

The breadth and depth of innovation

Once in a while one stumbles across an article or commentary that gives dimension and/or context to one's interests and endeavors. For those who interested in innovation in all its facets, and particularly those looking at the changing nature of innovation, a brief article by Lawrence Husick, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, outlining the "25 most important innovations" (of all time) is a fascinating read. The list is broad and varied, and breaks down roughly into 3 groupings: the first directly related to developments in sciences and technology, the second to organizational and skills related change, and the third to developments in ideas and thinking.

Husick's definition of innovation is particularly apropos to today's discussion of the role, value and need for design and innovation. He talks about innovation as "a process of making changes by introducing valuable new methods, ideas, or products. “Innovations” are the things themselves--the ideas, methods, and processes. It’s not simply that better mousetrap; it’s different ways of thinking and doing. Innovations may of course be inventions, but they may also be beliefs, organizational methods, and discoveries."

When one considers developments in the design space it is all about new areas of application - no longer just product/industrial design, but design across services, systems, structures and organizations. Humankind has been innovating and designing in these spaces since the dawn of time (as the list so admirably shows) driving and deriving value from innovations that are not easily traded or bartered. With a 20th century value system (value in the sense of both belief and price) that is based on the individual and not the group (or the community), we have lost any notion of the value of that which is important to society. The systems (e.g. education) and structures (e.g. infrastructure) upon which society is dependent are woefully under-resourced and the time for the application for efficiency and efficacy-driven transformation design approaches, among others, is nigh. After-all, innovation should not just be about "high" technology (a very blinkered 21st century view) but about the evolution of the entire economic, political and societal construct within which we live our lives.

Off-season: the predictable recession

A wintry January day in the beach resort of Scheveningen provided wonderful photographic material. But when looking back over the images an analogy between the off-season and recession started to form. In many ways seasonal businesses cannot survive without looking for opportunities to build or sustain the business in the off-season. They cannot afford to be idle, lay off employees and just ride out the inclement weather. They get creative, they build stronger customer relationships and brand loyalty. They prepare for the better weather that will assuredly come and invest in their assets and infrastructure, rebuilding or improving those critical business drivers that keeps the business thriving and the customers returning. They prepare for the on-season in the off-season, just as those in the throes of a recession need to prepare for the recovery. Businesses should take a leaf from the seasonal business entrepreneur's handbook and invest for their future in these difficult times.

Re-engage and redesign first

Yes, the inclination in hard times is to slash costs and headcount. However, this is counter-productive longer term as it does not provide for a springboard for success when the upturn comes. So how does a business ride out the storm and increase its opportunity for growth when fair weather returns? Before implementing drastic measures that could impact performance in the future, consider re-engaging and redesigning.

To re-engage means to getting back in touch with those that make or break the business: customers (retain them, above all), employees (empower them to bring about change), suppliers (reassure them), etc. Recession brings retrenchment and fear, so re-engaging with these communities is essential to business survival. To re-engage also means looking anew at the brand, positioning and how well the organization tells its story - see here for an interesting take on consumers and brands in a recession.

To redesign means to look anew at products and services, and at the systems and processes that allow for the functioning of the organization. Why? Because any organization, in good times or bad, should be seeking both greater efficiencies in terms of resource use, manufacturing processes, logistics, overall operational costs, etc., and greater levels of consumer centricity (user centered design) in the redesign of products or services. Its just good business sense.

So re-engage and redesign before knee-jerk cost cutting and headcount reductions. Reinforce relationships with those communities that are critical to business success. Find efficiencies across the organization that will not only lead to cost reductions but will put the business in better stead going forward. A recession can be an opportunity to build a more resilient and better-positioned organization for future growth. It was in the 1930s!

(Notice that the "I" word (innovation) was not used once. But, for an excellent read on innovating during the recession see here. )

Further reading on design and the recession: Design Council

"Attacking the recession"

In December, NESTA, the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, released an important document entitled "Attacking the Recession" in which it proposed that the UK needs

a strategy to attack the recession, not just to respond to it. Innovation – in business, communities and public services – needs to be at the heart of that attack. The UK should aim to emerge as a more innovative, greener, more sustainable and diversified economy.

This document puts innovation squarely back in center court and helps dismiss the mutterings of the "innovation is dead" crowd. And it goes further, suggesting that innovation in other areas is equally important:

The biggest gains for society will be found in those sectors that both offer the most immediate growth potential, drawing on the UK’s existing strengths, and help meet long-term challenges: green energy, environmental services, biotechnology, and services for an ageing society.

As has been mentioned in earlier posts, rethinking and redesigning services and systems, from infrastructure to public services, is key not only to national economic recovery, but also to longer term economic advantage. Investment and innovation are building blocks of growth and competitiveness and are all the more critical in hard times.

Regroup, Rethink, Redesign

Welcome to 2009 - a year that will, according to pundits, prove a challenging and lean one. One that will test us on many fronts - financially, socially, economically... Some commentators in the design space are already looking for new buzzwords that will light our way forward in these dark times. For certain, innovation (the term du jour in recent years) has been sullied. Paul Krugman in the International Herald Tribune put it succinctly: "How did things get so opaque? The answer is 'financial innovation' - two words that should, from now on, strike fear into investor's hearts." Of course innovation is not dead - to innovate is one of humankind's greatest capabilities - but perhaps it has been talked to death.

So let's agree that for 2009 there will be no more buzzwords. Instead lets use our communal energies and time to regroup, rethink and redesign community, services, products, etc., that are essential to our future welfare and wellbeing. Of course innovation is a key ingredient, in the way we redesign products and services to be more efficient, more environmentally friendly, more user centric, more community oriented. Innovation has an incredibly important role to play in ensuring that products and services are better suited to this age of scarcity (whether scarcity of credit, natural resources, food and shelter, etc.) that we have stumbled into. While innovation is no panacea, it is an essential element to moving beyond short-term band aid mentality approaches that typify public and private sector responses in hard times. As individuals, communities or businesses, we thrive when we change, innovate, transform, etc., and in 2009 and beyond we will need to do so more than ever.

Design and recession II

Some very interesting discussions on design thinking over on Tim Brown's blog (IDEO) and in particular on a nascent approach to innovation called restorative innovation. This was an output of a recent conference in Dubai that Brown and other design luminaries such as Bruce Nussbaum (blog BusinessWeek), and Alice Rawsthorn, IHT, attended. The term restorative innovation is an interesting one, and I'm pasting here my comment on Brown's blog entry on the issue:

A restorative is something that an individual would take to make them stronger, to bring them back from ill-health, etc. Restorative thinking is about going back to some point of stability, balance or equilibrium and taking another look, another think. It is, in a manner of speaking, a mental regrouping, so as to allow for time to think anew. Restorative innovation is getting back to a known point and looking at the challenge(s) with a fresh eye, considering new facets, data, perspectives, etc. The known point is important as it has to be one at which one can breathe and reflect - a point of relative stability. I suppose that the analogy in today’s world would be a “getting back” to the basics, or fundamentals, those elements that most can agree upon. Specifically, and in terms of the ongoing financial crisis, it might be getting back to good conservative banking practices and refocusing the banking industry on being a cornerstone of community.

Following up on the earlier entry on design and recession, the idea of seeking a point of balance and stability so that future innovation has a solid foundation upon which it can thrive, whether it be in services, products or systems, seems entirely apropos in an environment in which nations are reeling from financial wizardry run amok. Restorative innovation (or whatever one might call it) could well be the ticket for design in times such as these. It never hurts to get back to the fundamentals.

Design thinking and infrastructure

The cry for a longer term focus on, and funding for, infrastructure is recurrent and warrants attention, all the more so because it is a mundane yet critical contributor to a nation's competitive advantage. An earlier posting suggested that the nation's moribund physical infrastructure is ripe for design thinking - yet how does one apply design thinking to something as essential, complex and yet ordinary and under-valued as infrastructure?

Part of the challenge is of course understanding what exactly design thinking is. Much discussed, there are few good definitions, although the following are quite useful: Luke Wroblewski's article does a nice job of comparing business and design approaches to problem solving; Tim Brown's blog overs the subject well (albeit in a somewhat diffuse manner); and, David Burnley, Red Hat's VP of Brand Communications and Design, provides a very good overview. In a generic sense, design thinking is 1) about addressing challenges in ways unconstrained by accepted wisdom, existing "solutions" and narrow parameters; 2) looking at challenges as opportunities rather than problems; 3) looking at challenges holistically, taking into account the user and other stakeholders, as well as dimensions and considerations, etc., that would typically be considered beyond those associated with the challenge at hand; and 4) looking at longer term (innovative and value building) solutions rather than short term fixes. When applied in the context of transformation design - which "seeks to create desirable and sustainable changes in behavior and form ... of individuals, systems and organizations" - there appears to be an opportunity for design thinking to suggest innovation in infrastructure development and deployment.

So where does one start? In addition to the resources listed in an earlier blog, this piece by Gregory Fenves, Dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, entitled Innovating the 21st Century Physical Infrastructure is incredibly useful. In it Fenves outlines some overarching themes including sustainability, safety and security, economics and scalability, and then goes on to identify key areas for what he calls "frontier research" including materials, flexibility and adaptability, distributed sensing and control, modeling and simulation and economic operation and risk management. He notes that infrastructure systems are siloed and work to date has been largely on patching what exists, while what is really needed is an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses, inter alia, nano-engineering, the study of socio-economic systems and cyber infrastructure, and one that puts an emphasis on innovation and breakthrough opportunities.

It is hard to get excited about infrastructure, but it is crying out for a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, innovative and longer-term perspective, one that can evolve and meet our needs rather than the current band-aid approach that has resulted in a crippled infrastructure not much evolved from the last great build period between the 1940s and 1960s. What is missing is strategic innovation: consider, for example, the impact of intermodal freight transport and how that revolutionized the movement of goods; or the development of the electric power grid, and how it revolutionized energy provision and use. What new systems are required today? What new systems will be required for tomorrow? Infrastructure also needs to be looked at in the context of some important related issues such as sustainability, climate change (concrete production produces significant green house gases), migration (new centers of population, urban blight, etc.) and local natural resource availability.

Taking a design thinking approach would encourage a truly collaborative multidisciplinary initiative - bringing together engineers, urban planners, architects, social anthropologists, economists, policymakers, transformation designers, etc. - that would likely result in a comprehensive exploration of the opportunities for building an infrastructure that evolves with need and use, embraces innovation in systems, processes, structures and materials, and, most importantly, safeguards global a nation's competitive advantage.

No infrastructure, no competitive advantage

Infrastructure performance is an essential contributor to a nation's economic development and competitive advantage. Those individuals responsible for infrastructure upkeep have a heavy burden: economic advantage in today's world is defined by agility and responsiveness and if the infrastructure underpinning the delivery of goods and services is not up to the task then economic advantage is squandered. For example, not only is the aging electrical grid in the US threatening the economy and the livelihood of individuals and community through the increased threat of blackouts, but a NYTimes piece illustrates beautifully how it is also thwarting innovation through bottlenecking the profitable development of renewable energy. A similar issue is playing out in telecommunications infrastructure where telcos are throttling (aka "traffic shaping") growing Internet usage so that they do not have to invest in new infrastructure. But here's the rub: no infrastructure, no competitive advantage.

The challenge is that we take infrastructure for granted. Anything taken for granted is likely suffering from disrepair or abuse. In times of recession investment in basic services is likely to be curtailed, resulting in even greater future challenges. The spend in the US is $400B but its largely used to prop up an existing infrastructure model, as is outlined in a global study by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst and Young. This study paints a dismal picture of a truly under-appreciated yet critical element of a nation's economy that is in desperate need of innovation. World Changing has an inspired piece on new ways to think about infrastructure, what infrastructure requirements may look like in the future and rightly calls for a much more substantive debate on this matter. Whether nations can move from archaic systems based on physical distribution routes dating from the 19th century and earlier, to innovative systems that actually evolve and grow to meet and anticipate demand, will determine which nations retain economic advantage and which do not in this increasingly competitive global economy.

Design and global priorities

Three design principles will increasingly underpin design strategy and design generally in the future: sustainable design, inclusive design and transformation design. Why are these three principles so important? They broadly correlate (from a design perspective) with a range of critical issues related to energy, resources, the individual and society that are the focus of considerable debate both today and for the foreseeable future.

Simply (and crudely) put, sustainable design ensures that a product or a service's environmental impact is minimized through the use of "innovative design and industrial practices"; inclusive design ensures that "goods, services and environments are accessible to more people" through understanding and meeting user needs; and, transformation design looks at the application of design skills and processes to bring about change in systems and organizations (even segments or structures of society).

Issues related to the environment, the individual and organization/society are at the nexus of many of the increasingly complex pressing global priorities we face, whether global warming, resource depletion, population growth, etc. In the past design has been perceived as largely unconcerned with global issues but this is changing, led by some impressive exponents such as Architecture for Humanity, and through the design of increasingly relevant products and services and the application of design processes to key problem areas.

The challenge, however, is that none of these considerations - environmental, individual or societal - can be addressed in isolation: the linkages between them are becoming more acute. Any single strand in this interwoven world is hard to isolate: a design success or failure may be a catalyst of change, negative or positive, unimagined by the designer. We now recognize that the impact of an energy inefficient design goes far beyond the product or service itself and has a bearing on issues such as climate change and economic welfare and therefore on the individual and society.

Which leads us to an obvious but important statement: no product or service (even the most trivial) should be designed without taking into account resources and materials involved, its impact on the local environment, its accessibility for users and the impact it may have on society from its use, etc. To design in a vacuum is to be singularly out of touch with societal, environmental and economic trends and is to ignore the increasingly interrelated nature of our planet.

If, as many suggest, design is going to contribute to addressing global challenges - whether related to resource management, population accommodation or key societal concerns such as more effective education, more innovative public services - then it needs to reflect the underlying principles embodied in sustainable, inclusive and transformation design. In many ways this boils down to a set of simple questions that every designer should be asking: how is my design - whether for a new utensil, new low-income housing, or a new public service - going to impact the individual, society and the environment?

A more holistic approach embodying sustainable, inclusive and transformation design needs to be adopted in this increasingly challenging design environment. There is an incredible opportunity for design - through innovation, new technologies and processes - to help address some of the critical global priorities we face today, from water and housing shortages to overflowing landfills. But for this to occur there has to be a commitment to these three underlying design principles and to their holistic application: considerations related to the individual, society and the environment must underpin all design, no matter how trivial or inconsequential it is perceived to be.

The "bio-foolish"

Time Magazine's April 14 European issue has a wonderful article on "The Clean Energy Myth" in which it notes that the USG "props up the biofuels industry to the tune of $7 billion a year". Not sure whether this piece is being carried in the US edition but it certainly should be. Worth a read! And, the article confirmed a point made in an earlier post - that investment in energy research and university led innovation in the sciences would be a far greater contribution to the energy future of any nation. $7 billion would go a long way!

Subsidize research and education not biofuels

The IHT has a useful piece on the need to get beyond caps on green house emissions and to enable technology, and specifically energy related technology and innovation, to flourish and substantially contribute to alleviating global warming. Now clearly technology and innovation alone won't be enough - major changes in the way we source and consume energy, and manage our energy dependencies are needed - but creating an innovation drive in the area of energy tech is the right thing to do.

Innovation in this space is already underway but not nearly to the degree that is necessary, which of course will require funds. Governments are spending vast amounts to find alternatives to oil, but the value of that investment is questionable: subsidizing biofuels only diverts crops from food production to energy production, and causes significant increases in food raw materials costs. Instead, we should be using these subsidies to encourage academic research into extracting better energy efficiencies from oil, coal, etc., AND, more importantly, better ways of harnessing energy resources that have gone untapped so far - solar, wind, bio-mass, etc. The benefits would be many fold: monies for additional research and researchers, a renewed focus on the sciences in basic curricula, and the further strengthening of the education infrastructure of the nation.

A no-brainer right? Particularly as many innovations in this field are coming from universities! So how come policies so far are merely further disadvantaging the individual by increasing costs of food on top of already exorbitant prices for fuel? Where's the logic in that? Lets make a real investment in our energy future by building our educational institutions and getting more kids into college studying the sciences!