Bonus: Design Visionary Patrick Whitney

Intro

Welcome to ID events. A series on the With Intent Podcast from the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech.

On May 31st the ID community came together to honor Patrick Whitney. As ID’s longest serving dean, PW introduced the world to human centered design and pioneered its development here at ID. At the celeb his own teachers colleagues and students reflected on his transformative impact on design.

Here we share Patrick Whitney’s remarks from the event.

Patrick Whitney 00:38

Okay, thank you. Thank you very much and thank you for coming this evening and thank you for the key words, the kind words you said. I think back to the phone call I got from Jay Doblin. I was working on the conference that Mike and Kathy talked about and he said, can you do me a favor? Can you come down and teach a course? And I said, are you Jay? Sure. I wasn’t really looking forward to it. I said, when does it start? He said, next week. So I went up to his house on Cleveland Avenue up in the Lincoln Park and he brought out a Bayer color maps. Herbert Byer was a master in the German Bauhaus and was brought here by Walter Paepcke who Pep the Container Corporation was giant in the field and he made this leather, leather volume and says, talk to the freshmen about this. He didn’t tell me that the freshmen are the hardest students to teach, not because they’re not hungry, but they’re hungry for so much. It’s hard to keep them like herding cats.

And anyway, I went home that night. This is very, you can tell it was very vivid in my memory and I was tired after talking to the freshmen or afternoon. So I lay down, clothes are still on for half an hour. I get up at 7:00 PM and make supper. I woke up at six in that morning still on trying to figure out what I got myself into. And surprisingly the freshmen stayed with us through the whole semester. I’m sure I was making all sorts of mistakes, but Jay asked me back and I said yes, because I discovered that I enjoyed helping students grow even more than helping projects grow. It obvious that would be the way it would work, but nothing seemed obvious at the time. Anyway, jumping forward design is a hard thing to teach for reasons that Roger mentioned this morning, keynote address companies, it turns out like measuring money and the potential for having more money

And they put up with these people called customers because they’re a source of money. Money’s a good thing. Our economy wouldn’t work very well if we were still trading chickens for potatoes at the marketplace. But Roger points out how the predictions of how much money you’ve got now is going to grow into how much money you have in the future is what your word for it. Fantasy and design deals with the fantasy issues of giving people a better life. It measures value not in money alone, of course we pay attention to money, we measure value in how much people laugh or smile or have social interchanges when they’re working in the kitchen or when they’re working in an office, when they’re driving a car. Making those things better doesn’t get measured.

All companies think they do user-centered design. They didn’t use the term before, but they said the customers are at the center of what we do. But the example of that, that put American industry in the wrong direction, I’m not letting grow all the time that Raj didn’t take in talking about the details of IIT, I’m going to take my remarks, money where things go wrong, I couldn’t agree with Roger Moore is in prediction. They want to predict how much money they’re going make. They know how much money they made last year and then all sorts of calculations and formula go work and figuring out how much money you’re going to make next year. And there’ll be several ideas for that.

All of them are wrong as you pointed out, but they pick one and they agree to get behind it and that becomes the strategy that’s fantasy, the end as you pointed out, right? So this is coming at an important time. You described IIT being formed the forces on it and it was to do with the industrialization of the United States Industrial Revolution was hitting us hard and we’re at a similar point of view. This point of change and design can play a phenomenal role in it. The economy of scale is what drove the changes going on in the time that IT was formed. The term we use here reflects back to you again, Roger. We used the term the economy of choice is what we believe we’re in. And the way we try to achieve choice is to make mass production processes and organizations and technologies pretend they’re flexible, but we haven’t seen it, only just the first glimmer of flexible production.

And it’s not going to be a pretty night to see what happens if design doesn’t get involved in it. And that doesn’t mean that they have to be invited in, they need to earn their way in. But I believe that there will probably be a crisis in the predictability business that companies do and that we’re going to have to do things rather than predict. We’re going to have to demonstrate. And I think the big idea is that I came into design drawing was viewed as the core capability of diner, but now I think it’s prototyping combined with abstraction. Abstraction is saying, you play the kids’ game. Why do we have this? You get an answer. Why do we have that? Why do we have that? You get up to because it’s good for human beings and you’ve gone one step too far. You want something a little concrete.

Then you’ve got this array of stuff of ideas that are much more prevalent than you had before. Coffee Shop is an office, a place for socialization is a place for people to retreat. Those are three different ideas. And having that array of ideas as options for strategic direction, you follow up with questions like how are you going to do that? I’m going to assembly lines that we’ve got. How are you going to do that? And you take the five steps down again and all of a sudden rather than three or four alternate ideas that you’re not sure why they’re connected. You have 50 ideas and you know why they’re connected and that doesn’t tell you what to do, but it sure gives you better choices to make than if you don’t do it. I don’t know what the crisis is going to be, but I think this disinvest in companies that are over-reliant upon making great prediction. You can make predictions when the company is strong and the industry that surrounds it isn’t changing. How many of you are in an industry or work with clients in industries that aren’t changing? So that’s where we are. The challenge is figuring out how to get quality measured in different ways and to not do in a complete accounting system. So you count the cost of supplying materials and the cost of disposing of products into the total cost of the product. So that’s your challenge, not mine. And I wish you luck.

Outro 11:34

This event was recorded live at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to WIT for more discussions about design and its impact on the world around us. Thank you for listening.