IDEO’s David Kelley says that product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience. He shows video of this new, broader approach, including footage from the Prada store in New York.
David Kelley is a designer — of products, details, environments, his own industry-leading workplace, and now a groundbreaking design school at Stanford University.
Kelley was working (unhappily) as an electrical engineer when he heard about Stanford’s cross-disciplinary Joint Program in Design, which merged engineering and art. What he learned there — debate, openness to new approaches, a desire to solve fundamental problems with design — he has maintained in his professional life as a designer.
In 1978, he co-founded a design firm that ultimately became IDEO, now renowned worldwide for its innovative, user-centered approach to design. IDEO works with a range of clients — from fast food conglomerates to high tech startups, hospitals to universities — building everything from a life-saving portable defibrillator to the defining details at the groundbreaking Prada shop in Manhattan (IDEO designed those famous see-through dressing rooms). Based in Palo Alto, California, IDEO has grown to seven offices and 400+ employees worldwide.
Now chairman of IDEO, Kelley has also been teaching design at Stanford for more than 25 years. He’s now leading the university’s brand-new d.school — an interdisciplinary institute for educating innovative designers and thinkers.
