Linguist Geoff Nunberg

DATE February 8, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Tom Kelley discusses designing products
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The first Apple Computer mouse, the Palm V hand-held organizer, the Polaroid
I-Zone instant camera and the Crest Neat Squeeze toothpaste tube are just some
of the products that the design company IDEO has worked on. IDEO has won more
design awards than any other company of its kind. My guest, Tom Kelley, is
the general manager of IDEO. It was founded by his brother, David. Tom
Kelley has written a new book that is about design and about creating the kind
of work environment that encourages innovation. The book is called "The Art
of Innovation." Let's start with something low tech, the design of the Crest
Neat Squeeze toothpaste tube which stands up, instead of lying on its side.

Mr. TOM KELLEY (General Manager, IDEO): A large part of that design was done
in-house at Procter & Gamble but when it came to us, they were looking at the
cap and the tip and they were trying to make it as ergonomic as they could and
they were trying to deal with the issue of toothpaste gunking up the tip of a
toothpaste tube. In fact, in the first meeting with Procter & Gamble, one of
the managers there said, `We're going to save marriages with this product.'
Because people argue about who left the cap off the toothpaste and it got all
gunked up. So looking at the cap and the tip, we said, `OK, let's get those
threads away from the tip of the tube because that's what happens. You get a
little toothpaste over the edge then it gets caught in the screw threads, you
know, that you screw that cap on with. So we made this nice smooth surface
there and moved the threads far away from it.

And then we had this idea that the, quote, "Best solution," was to have a cap
that just pops on and pops off. So no screw threads at all. So it's neater,
it's also easier for the customer to do. So we developed prototypes, as we
always do, and we show it to consumers. And we're sure it's the, quote, "The
perfect solution." Well, it's not the perfect solution for an American
customer because when we showed it to them, they try to screw the cap off
because they've been taking caps off of toothpaste tubes for 50 years, some of
them. And they know how it comes off, it screws off. And so they would twist
it and twist it and twist it and say, `What's wrong with this cap? It must be
broken.' And so even though it was the perfect solution in our minds--we have
this process we called user chooser, in which the people actually use the
products, kind of get to decide. And so since they couldn't figure out how to
use our cap, we did a modification so that it's a single twist. It's not the,
you know, six or seven threads that you see on a normal toothpaste tube. It's
a single twist to come off and single twist to go back on.

GROSS: So there's fewer threads gunk up.

Mr. KELLEY: Fewer threads, it's a much coarser thread and then just as
you--this is the kind out engineers and human factors people spend a lot of
time on--just as you're getting the cap closed, there's a little click--it's
what the engineers call a detent--that says, `OK, got you. It's closed. You
can stop turning now.' And so we spend a lot of time looking at the tiny
details like that. Especially a product like that that is going to be
replicated literally hundreds of millions of times.

GROSS: Now it's funny that you had to study how people use a tube of
toothpaste because I'm sure every designer who was working on that job has
used toothpaste all his or her life and knew the drill.

Mr. KELLEY: Right. Well, this gets back to what we call `Innovation begins
with an I.' Meaning you have to do observations even of things that are very
familiar to you. Now it is possible to observe yourself as you do something,
but we think it's better to watch people as they do things because you watch
with fresh eyes. Especially if you have a cognitive psychologist with you.
You will see things you have never noticed before. So in that similar
category, we worked on these toothbrushes. And, wow, you know, I had small
kids at the time, I never noticed all the things that kids do.

One of the things we discovered is that adults hold the toothbrush in their
fingertips but kids fist the brush. They grab it in their whole hand. And so
even though their hands are smaller, we discovered that kids need a fatter
toothbrush. We also noticed that kids grabbed the toothbrush so close to the
bristles sometimes that they can't even get the bristles on their mouth
because their fist is in the way. You know, it keeps bumping up against their
cheek. And so with that discovery, then we designed this toothbrush for
Oral-B called the Squish Grip toothbrush that directed them, that had a little
bump that kept them from sliding their hand all the way up.

GROSS: And it's a fat handle so that they can use it by putting their whole
hand around and not just holding it in their fingers.

Mr. KELLEY: Yes, it's a fat, squishy handle that has now been widely copied
but was really the first to come out. And it was very popular with kids.

GROSS: It's the same kind of principle as that fat-handled silverware for
people who have had strokes or other problems that have diminished their hand
strength or the control of their hands.

Mr. KELLEY: Yes, that's one of the things we notice, is when a product comes
out aimed at someone that has some form of disability or impairment, often
what is easier for them is easier for everybody. So the classic case is the
big cap on the liquid Tide bottle. They made it for people with arthritic
hands. It's really fat, round cap, probably four times as big as caps used to
be on liquid bottles. And what they discovered is arthritic people could open
it easier, but everybody liked it and so they've basically put it on all their
products.

GROSS: Now can I point out the one flaw of that squishy brush for kids. It
doesn't fit into your average toothbrush holder.

Mr. KELLEY: I knew you were going to say that. Yes, I have exactly that
problem and I'm sorry to say I don't have a solution. I wish that Oral-B
would ship with every fat toothbrush a little, you know, a little holder you
could like glue on your mirror or something. But, yes, you're right. We have
switched toothbrush holders in the Kelley household because it doesn't fit in
all of them.

GROSS: You know the Crest Neat Squeeze toothpaste tube that we were talking
about, that you participated in the design of, there's another brand that has
an upside-down version of that. It also stands up but it stands up on the cap
instead of standing up on the bottom. And the cap is not a stable base
because the bottom is larger and heavier than the cap is. And so you stand it
up on your sink and it falls over. Now your company did not design it. I'm
not sure if you're familiar with it and if you realize what a...

Mr. KELLEY: We did not design it and I have to confess I am not familiar with
it. But that's the kind of thing in the prototyping process. As you build
things and try them and fix them and make them better and go through a lot of
iterations before you go to market, typically you would discover that,
especially if you let real humans at your prototypes--as long as you only let
the designers and engineers at them and then you later show them to the
executives and you say, `It just sits like that. Just set it down
delicately.' Or you give them some kind of clue and they'll always get it
right. The problem is, when you put the product in the distribution in say,
Wal-Mart, there's no clue associated with it. And so people don't get it
right and it's really the designers' responsibility to anticipate those issues
and fix them.

GROSS: There's a feature that the folks at IDEO created that sounds really
good to me. I think it's one that hasn't actually been incorporated into a
phone yet. It was originally designed for a cordless phone but I think in the
cell phone era, this will be a swell thing. One of the things people hate
about cell phones it that, you know, people take cell phones everywhere and
they interrupt everything. They interrupt movies and shows and meetings and
private conversations. Tell us about this button that was created for
cordless phones.

Mr. KELLEY: Right. We designed this phone so, for men, you could slip it
into your pocket or for women you could have it in front of you and it doesn't
make an audible ring. It just flashes when it rings. So it's this silent
interruption. But most importantly for men, if you've got it in your top
pocket, sticking out of your pocket, is this big round button. When you push
the round button, what happens is it takes the phone off hook and it plays a
recorded message for your incoming caller that says, `Please hold on. I'll be
with you in a moment.' And so what that allows you to do, if you're in the
meeting, you see this flashing light that says you've got a phone call coming
in, you push the button and you can leave the meeting before you have to
speak. And so it's this great politeness feature that we designed into this
phone for a Danish company that has really not been fitted into phones in the
US, that I have seen at least.

GROSS: Now do you think that would work on cellular phones?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, yeah, I think there is no reason what it wouldn't. Now
recently everyone wants caller ID on your cell phone. And so we'd have to
redesign it from our prior design so that you could look down, see who's
calling and then decide whether to push the button or just the phone continue
to flash.

GROSS: My guest, Tom Kelley, is the general manager of IDEO, the design
consulting company. And he's written a new book called "The Art of
Innovation." Let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Tom Kelley. He is the author of the new book "The Art of
Innovation. He is the general manager of IDEO, the design consulting company
that developed the first mouse for Apple, the Crest Neat Squeeze toothpaste
tube and gazillions of stuff in-between.

One of the areas that your company's been asked to design for is medical
equipment. And, for example, IDEO was asked to redesigned an instrument used
on heart patients during angioplasty. Describe what the instrument does and
what problems your redesign answered.

Mr. KELLEY: Yeah, the product is for balloon angioplasty in which they insert
a catheter into the femoral artery in your leg and then you slip this balloon
up into the blocked artery in your heart. And then at a very precise moment,
you inflate the balloon, compact the plaque that is in the artery and it opens
the artery so that more blood can flow through to it. And so the part of the
product we worked on is the inflation device. In fact they call it the
indeflator(ph), it both inflates and deflates the balloon. When they came to
us, this company was very much a leader in their field, had the market share
leader product for balloon angioplasty. And they said they wanted to make a
better one. We like it when clients want to make their products better.

And they had their list of criteria and right at the top of the list was,
`Must be suitable for one-handed use.' Because they thought it was very
important--it was kind of a selling feature that their competitors had
launched in competition against them that this product could be used with one
hand. So we said, `Fine,' and we listened very intently. But then when we
got to the next phase of work--our second phase of work is called, `Observe,'
where we're out watching real people--we went into the operating room. And we
watched this technician who is doing nothing else other than inflating and
deflating the balloon. What we discovered is they're not doing anything with
the other hand. There was really no bonus. There was no real advantage to
having it be for one-handed use, and in fact the products that said they were
for one-handed use were really only suitable if your hand was the size of
Michael Jordan's. You know, you had to have this incredible reach of your
hand. And so people were using this essentially one-handed product with both
hands, but it wasn't designed that way.

So we said, `Let's design it for two-handed use. And so we got a big grip
surface so that even if you have gloved hands and there's moisture on your
hands, it's very easy to grip with--say if I was doing it--your left hand,
while you control the pressure on the balloon with your right hand. And we
believe we made a significantly better product because we threw that
specification away and went with what the observation suggested was
appropriate.

GROSS: There's another change you made. You said the old device made a
clicking noise as the balloon inflated. What was the problem with that?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, we really believe in designing experiences more than
products and we have something we call, `Verbs, not nouns,' that you should
look at the actions, not just the physical thing. And so if you look at this
balloon angioplasty procedure as an experience for the patient: The patient
is awake through the process and the surgeon will say to the technician, `OK.
Now inflate the balloon.' And this is a very delicate part of the process.
You are essentially creating a mini-heart attack. You are temporarily
blocking this artery in the heart and so there is some anxiety for the patient
associated with this moment. With the old product, at that moment what you
would hear is this loud ratcheting noise like some gear that, you know, was
spinning out of control or something. And it wasn't actually a problem, it
just sounded scary. And so looking at it from the patient's perspective in
trying to design the experience we said, `Let's take that scary noise away.'
Which we did.

GROSS: Was that hard to do?

Mr. KELLEY: No. We did a fundamental design on the product in which,
instead of pushing a plunger down--which had these ratchets on it which made
the ratcheting noise--we twisted a pump mechanism and it's essentially silent.
So it kind of came with the design once we decided that was something we
wanted to do.

GROSS: Well, while we're talking about medical equipment, let's go into a
hospital for a moment. Hospitals are a kind of--most hospitals, anyways--are
kind of famous for being these really unpleasant environments that are
difficult to feel healthy in, you know. They're sometimes not very conducive
to feeling good either for patients or for visitors. If you could design a
hospital, what would you most like to fix?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, most of my experience in the hospital has been in the
emergency room and in the emergency room, what you really lack is information.
You really want to know, `When am I going to see a doctor? Where am I on the
waiting list? What's the next step in my prop tests? You know, how serious
is this? You know, what's going to happen next?' And in the book, I talk
about the flying experience, which is parallel in some ways, where you're
waiting for your flight and you want to know, `Well, what happens next? You
know, am I gonna get upgraded? Am I going to get on this flight? You know,
when is it going to board?' And I think it's that similar kind of experience.
It's just that the stakes are so much higher when you're in the hospital.

GROSS: So what would you do to get patients the information that they really
want to have?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, you know, it's really the same as the airline situation.
You want to know, you know, where am I on the list? So that would be pretty
easy to display. Put a monitor up on the board and it says, you know,
`Kelley, you're third in line.' And, of course, if somebody comes in with
arterial bleeding, they're going to jump the queue, but meanwhile, I know
where I am. I know what my doctor's name is. I know what their specialty is.
I know what, you know, sort of my next step is. You know, just the simple
thing that used to be done well in hospitals and doesn't seem to be anymore is
the idea of a patient's chart, so you know what has already happened and
what's coming next by looking at a chart or an electronic equivalent of it.

GROSS: Do you think that would ever fly?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, in the medical industry, more so than almost anywhere we
work, there are these cost issues. There is--the doctor could want it. The
patient could want it, but there is this thing called the economic buyer,
which for all intents and purposes is an insurance company, and you have to
find a compelling economic reason to do this. Like all the patients are going
to the hospital down the street because they have this and you don't. That
would make people do it.

GROSS: But that's all that would make people do it?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, yes. They're unlikely to do it just because of improving
the patient experience. They do seem to be willing to do this in the
maternity ward. The hospital in which we had both of our kids was very, very
nicely done. You know, they made the room--as much as possible in this
sterile environment, they made the room feel a bit like home. And it was
acceptable, even in the economic buyer model to do that in the maternity ward.
It's not likely it's going to be done any time soon in the rest of the
hospital.

GROSS: Is that because the maternity visit is more of a planned visit? You
can choose your hospital and you will show up for the better environment?

Mr. KELLEY: It's partly that marketing and I think it's partly just socially
acceptable to spend a little more money or put a little more into the patient
experience at this very special visit to the hospital, because basically every
other visit you make to the hospital is about crisis or something bad
happening. It's only the visit to the maternity ward which is all positive
or, you know, most often all positive. And so I think that, you know, even
economic buyers either have kids or were kids or something and so they can see
through to spending a little more or to putting more energy into making that
space a little better.

GROSS: Tom Kelley is my guest. He's the general manager of IDEO, the design
consulting company. He's written a new book called "The Art of Innovation."

Are there bad designs whose failures you've learned or your company's learned
a lot from?

Mr. KELLEY: Are there bad designs? Have you used products? Yes.

GROSS: Yes. Right.

Mr. KELLEY: Sure, there are bad designs. And there are a lot of bad designs
out there and some of them are bad, have been bad so long that you don't even
really think about them. So one of my favorite examples of that design that's
been that way forever, fireplace dampers. What is the state-of-the-art
technology for determining whether your fireplace dampers open or not? I
think the state of the art is you stick your head into the chimney and you
look up. There's got to be a better way to do that.

GROSS: Yeah, right.

Mr. KELLEY: You know, steam irons. You know, the state of the art for
deciding whether your steam iron is hot or not is to put your tender fingers
on to the metal of the surface. I mean, I've seen people spit on it but it's
not very polite, so most people put their hand on it to see if it's scalding
hot yet or not. And it seems like it would be easily changed. I'll tell you
an off-the-wall one, men's hats. What's up with men's hats? I don't get it.
You know, we live in California where you pretty much don't need one unless
you go skiing. I was recently in both Chicago and Boston and it is like 15
degrees out and businesspeople, businessmen are not wearing hats. And I think
it's because there is not a socially acceptable design, and this one's not
even functionality. This has something to do with--I don't know what--style
or fashion or whatever. The businessmen will not wear stocking caps. They
don't, many of them, want to wear a fedora, and so they are just freezing
their ears off in downtown Chicago even as we speak.

GROSS: Is that the kind of thing your company would take on, designing a
wearable men's hat?

Mr. KELLEY: Oh, sure. We'd have to have a client somewhere in the loop, of
course.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. KELLEY: We don't do much on our own--off our own bat, as the Brits say.

GROSS: Tom Kelley is general manager of the design company IDEO and author of
the new book "The Art of Innovation." He'll be back in the second half of the
show. I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Credits)

GROSS: Coming up, designs that don't work and why. We continue our
conversation with Tom Kelley, general manager of the product design firm IDEO.
And linguist Geoff Nunberg tells us what makes him uneasy about the word
literacy.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Tom Kelley, general
manager of the design firm IDEO and author of the new book, "The Art of
Innovation." IDEO has worked on the design of the first Apple mouse, the Palm
5 hand-held organizer, the Polaroid Izone camera and the Crest Neat Squeeze
toothpaste tube. Kelley has learned a lot about good design by using things
that are poorly designed.

I'd like to hear what your offices look like at IDEO, how they're designed.
You want to create the most creative environment possible so that the people
on your teams can come up with new ideas and be comfortable and work together,
yet have some privacy. So what solutions have you come up with for your
office design?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, we try something new every time we do a new building; and
so if you look at every new building, there's something different. There's a
different approach each time. But we've found a bunch of things that work for
us. One that did not come down from top management by any means is we hang
bicycles from the ceiling. One of the things in Palo Alto, California, where
we're headquartered, space now--let's say flat space on the floor is as
expensive as Tokyo. It is now more expensive than midtown Manhattan. But
vertical space is more or less free. So we've got these spaces that have
very, very high ceilings that everyone seems to like. And somebody a few
years ago had this really nice bike that they didn't want to leave outside and
they didn't really have space for it in their office, so they hung it from the
ceiling. It's probably 12 feet off the ground. And nobody reprimanded them;
nobody told them that was a bad thing to do, and so a few days later somebody
else hung one. And the next thing we know, I bet we have 40 bikes hanging
from the ceiling. People think it's some sort of decoration or something.
It's just purely functional. If you have an expensive bike that you want to
kind of keep an eye on but don't have room for in your office, you can hang it
at IDEO. So a lot of people do.

GROSS: A lot of corporations no longer have many private offices where you
have your own room with a door that opens and closes. There's workstations
where there's, you know, rows and rows of tables with the PCs on it with maybe
little dividers separating each work space. But you really have no privacy;
you hear your next door neighbor's phone conversations, they hear yours; so
there's quite a din in the area. I wonder what you think of workstations.

Mr. KELLEY: Well, there are a lot of variations on the approach and so one of
the things we have done is made spaces that is a way of achieving some level
privacy. We have these translucent doors that you can slide closed. And it
doesn't give you total visual privacy, but what it does do is sends this very
clear signal like, `I'm working on something that requires a lot of focus
right now. Please don't bother me.' And so people in the social ecology of
IDEO, people get that signal and they will not open this sliding door to
bother you.

If you are in a totally open work space like that, what we would recommend is
to have a lot of what we call enclaves around so that you can have small rooms
that you can use that are not reserved that are just available all the time.
So if you need to make a private phone call, if you want to meet one-on-one
with somebody on a matter that requires some privacy, you can just kind of
duck into the enclave and have that private meeting and then come back to your
kind of open-air workstation.

GROSS: Why do you have translucent doors? Why not opaque doors so that
someone can't see through?

Mr. KELLEY: Gee, a very good question. It was probably a design decision.
It is nice to know--if you're looking for that person, it is nice to know that
they're in there. You know you can't bother them right now, but you know
they're in their office today; and so it's handy in that respect. But other
than that, couldn't say for sure. It was a decision we made when we were
building out the space.

GROSS: So tell me, IDEO is located in Palo Alto, California. How are you
dealing with the rolling blackouts?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, we have turned out all the overhead lights in our main
offices so that we're cutting down our power consumption. And we are turning
off computers pretty religiously and things like that. And then some of
us--and I'm about to expand this--some of us have this product called a Power
Pincher made by Steelcase that will turn off your task lamps as soon as you
walk out of the room. So we are conserving everywhere we can. We've not
really been hit too hard with the actual blackouts. I think we had one pretty
briefly, but we just have our fingers crossed for the hot months of the
summer, because, you know, the cold months in the winter is not the peak
period for energy consumption.

GROSS: In your book, "The Art of Innovation" you have a lot of suggestions
for how to encourage creative thinking in a group of people working together;
and you talk, in part, about brainstorming, what works and what's going to
kill creativity, the brainstorming process. First of all, make the case for
brainstorming. What is it and what's the point of doing it?

Mr. KELLEY: Yeah, the problem with brainstorming when I talk to our clients
is they all think they do it. And so they view it as just like a threshold
variable like riding a bicycle. Do you know how to ride a bicycle? Yes. End
of story. Do you do brainstorming in your organization? Yes. And they kind
of check the box. But we really believe that brainstorming is more like
playing a piano; it's something you can get better and better at and as you
really get skilled at it, you can get more and more rewards from it.

So one of the things we would say is never confuse a brainstormer with a
regular meeting. In a regular meeting, the boss gets to frame the problem and
probably have the last word. In a regular meeting people critique ideas that
come up. In a regular meeting you might go around the room and have people
speak in turn; whereas none of those things would happen in a brainstormer.
In a brainstormer you would cover the walls with paper so that there's plenty
of space to write. You'd have lots of colored marking pens and chocolate chip
cookies and whatever it is that adds energy to the group. And people would
build on the ideas of others. They'd have a bunch of wild ideas that no one
would criticize 'cause there's this rule called `defer judgment.' And later,
you do want to do some critique; but in the brainstormer you're going for what
we call fluency and flexibility, fluency being as many ideas as possible.
We're talking about 100 to 150 ideas in a one-hour session. And then
flexibility is approaching the problem or the issue you're working on from
many different directions as opposed to the kind of small, medium and large
version of the same idea.

GROSS: And when do you weed out the bad ideas? When do you make editorial
judgments like that?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, after the brainstormer is done, typically the person who
facilitated the brainstorm will try to summarize the ideas into some form of
report or document. And the filtering of ideas begins then. So there'll be
150 ideas; they won't put all of those into the report. They'll say, `Gee,
that was really a wild idea, but, look, it led us to this new one. I'll just
use the new one that has some merit to it.' And so the distillation begins
then. But in our setting where we work with clients you then present the
brainstorming report to the client, and they say, `Well, we tried that one
last year. We don't think we can make that one cost-effective. But, gee,
here's three ideas. Let's pursue these.' And so that's what the screening
process looks like.

GROSS: In one example that you give of how to kill creativity at a
brainstorming session is be totally democratic, go around the room in
clockwise order, giving each person two minutes. What's wrong with that?

Mr. KELLEY: Yeah, the most painful brainstormer I ever went to was in this
organization where they said, `OK, we're going to do a brainstormer on'--I
think it was marketing opportunities on this new product they were working on.
And they went around the room, yes, as you said, two minutes for each person.
Really painful, because it violates all the rules of brainstorming.
(Technical difficulties) build on the ideas of others. Well, if I'm 15th and
I really like what the second person said, I've got to wait half an hour. By
the time you get to me, I've forgotten or the group has forgotten what that
idea was. There's no building on the energy. And I think that's one of the
key points is there's no energy to doing it that way. And to me,
brainstormers are all about energy. It's about drawing out ideas that people
didn't even know they had in them because they're trying to kind of outdo the
person next to them. `Yeah, we could do this. We could do the pure digital
one. Yeah, it could live on the Web. It could do this.' And they're just
piling on, kind of, to get every idea better so that you just kind of
crescendo of ideas and somewhere in there may be a fabulous idea.

GROSS: What...

Mr. KELLEY: So if you go around the room, you don't get that energy. You get
each person thinking about what they're going to say next. Because people
have this little performance anxiety. It's a little presentation. If I'm
eighth on the list, I don't hear what the seventh person is saying because I'm
thinking, `OK, here it comes. I got to talk. I got to talk.' You know how
people are that way.

GROSS: Yeah, yeah. Tom Kelley is my guest. He's the general manager of
IDEO, the design consulting company and author of the new book, "The Art of
Innovation." Let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Tom Kelley is my guest, general manager of the design consulting
company IDEO and author of the new book, "The Art of Innovation."

What's the worst environment you've ever worked in? You don't have to mention
the name of the company or anything, but you could just describe it.

Mr. KELLEY: Well, the worst environment I ever worked in, that might be hard.
But I'll tell you about a job I turned down.

GROSS: OK.

Mr. KELLEY: I got out of business school at Berkeley, and I interviewed--I
had an all-day interview with this very reputable firm. And at the end of the
day, I'm thinking, `Gee, this is sounding pretty good.' And I asked this very
innocent question. I said, `Well, gee, as a new associate joining the firm,
where would I sit?' And there was this awkward silence; and their first
reaction, which had not come up in my all day of interviewing was, `Do you
know, Tom, you're going to be traveling quite a bit on this job.' And I said,
`What does that mean?' `Well, you don't exactly have your own dedicated
desk.' You know, and this was before the idea of `hoteling' came up, which
is actually quite common in offices now. But `don't really have your own
desk.' And I said, `OK, well, where do I put my stuff?' `Well, you put your
stuff in the back room.' `Well, can I see the back room?'

And so there's just--I'm meeting all this resistance. And so finally, because
I kind of insisted, they took me into the back room. And here in the back
room is this set of shelves; and I don't mean nice shelves and I don't mean
wood shelves, I mean the cheapest, nastiest gray metal utility shelves that
you can buy at Home Depot, you know, was there in the back room for the
associates to put their stuff on. And then the crushing blow. I'm not saying
this is rational, but this put me off so much--but the crushing blow for me
was even on this cheap metal utility shelf I didn't get my own shelf. On the
left of the shelf they took a cheap piece of masking tape and wrote on it with
a blue pen, `Henderson.' And then on the right, they would have written
`Kelley' had I joined this prestigious firm.

And, you know, that space just spoke volumes to me about what the firm felt
about new associates. You know, I knew that if I joined this firm I was going
to be a cog in the wheels of industry, you know, that they really didn't care
about me. And you know what? I turned down that job. So I think there's a
message there somewhere for companies. Maybe, you know, I'm so quirky, it
doesn't matter; no one else ever had that same impression. But if it keeps
talented people away because you've got something toxic in your work
environment, gee, that's pretty bad because I think almost every CEO in
America, that's top of their list is attracting and retaining talented people.

GROSS: That's a great story. Do you have a personal pet peeve that you
haven't mentioned?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, I do have one that is fading. It will go away soon. But
it's airline tickets. Did you ever look at your airline ticket and try to
find out what time does my flight leave and what time does it arrive at its
destination? The departure time is buried somewhere in all that messy text.

GROSS: That is so true.

Mr. KELLEY: The arrival time, I believe, is not on there anywhere. There's
all sorts of codes and 17-digit numbers. And so those are for somebody else
other than me because I can't hardly (technical difficulties) my flight number
or the departure time.

GROSS: That would be easy to fix, wouldn't it?

Mr. KELLEY: That would be very easy to fix.

GROSS: But I guess the tickets are more for the people at the airlines than
for the passengers.

Mr. KELLEY: That's true, but, you know, I'm the person who just paid $2,000
for my flight from...

GROSS: That's because the food's so good.

Mr. KELLEY: ...San Francisco to Chicago. Yeah. Right.

GROSS: Oh, would you redesign the bathrooms on airplanes while you're at it?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, you know, the bathrooms on airplanes are actually pretty
amazing, if you think about it. They have such an incredibly small amount of
space to deal with, and this thing's got to be durable, you know, for years of
the life of the aircraft. I would say, yes, there are things we could
improve. But it's not on my bug list. It is pretty good, all things
considered, if you figure out all the constraints that are on that product or
that environment.

GROSS: I'm not sure whether this is more of a design problem or an ethical
problem, but on planes and on some trains the passenger in front of you can
relax by putting their seat back, thus completely cramping you. So like one
person's comfort is at the expense of another person's ability to, you know,
have any leg room at all. How would you solve that problem?

Mr. KELLEY: Well, this gets at the social aspects of innovation or design;
and these can be some of the trickiest issues to deal with. For example, with
cellular telephony, if everybody's got a cell phone and everybody's got caller
ID, you have to explain to me why you're not taking my call. You know,
there's this social inhibition that's gonna come up, you know, when technology
gets ahead of society. And so this thing with the airline seat, it's really a
question of social ecology or protocol or whatever. And so, yes, we could
certainly design a seat--well, you know, you can add more space. You know,
there are these seats now--and United Airlines has just launched them--where
you can sit back as far as you want and you don't impinge on the other
person's space. But in doing so, they fit fewer seats on the aircraft. And
so if you want to pack the aircraft as much as possible, which airlines want
to do and we as passengers want to do because we want the tickets to be as
cheap as possible, then it's inherently a tradeoff. It becomes a kind of zero
sum game and the only way to do it would be to make it so that your space kind
of overlaps with their space in a way that is more comfortable than the
current approach.

GROSS: I have a question for you. I have a digital watch. The watch that I
recently bought can only do about three or four things. It can tell you the
time; it can be a stopwatch, which I really need it to be; and it can be an
alarm, all good things. The watch I had before that could also be a phone
book. You could store all kinds of other information in it. I could never
comprehend the instructions well enough to make any of those other functions
work; and I vowed that I wouldn't waste all that kind of extra money and
whatever on those features that just frustrated me and served no function
'cause I couldn't figure out how to use them, and I probably wouldn't have had
the time to program in all the phone numbers anyway. Is that what you call
feature creep where there's more features than anyone's really going to use?

Mr. KELLEY: That's exactly what we call feature creep. And you really do
have to resist the temptation of that. It's particularly prevalent in the PC
industry where reviewers make these big grids, these feature grids. And so
they've got four products they're reviewing and then they've got these 152
features and you either get a check mark or you don't get a check mark in that
box. And so everybody wants to get a check mark on that box. You know, `does
automatic translation into Arabic,' check; you know, `allows for time to be
moving in a negative direction,' check. And so it's just so tempting for
companies. They just want to check off the box. But we think that customers
will reward them for making simplicity in these products.

My current pet peeve is alarm clocks. We have this wonderful alarm clock, had
it for 20 years. It had kind of set the alarm, set the time or just run. And
that was all it had and that was all it really needed. Now I cannot find an
alarm clock that doesn't have the A alarm and the B alarm. And so my wife got
one that has the A and the B and we can't set it to save our lives. In fact,
the only solution we've come up with as an interim solution to throwing it
away and buying a new one is we've turn the volume on the radio down so that
you can't hear it. Otherwise, it just seems to wake up at random times in the
middle of the night. And I do have National Public Radio, by the way, on the
alarm clock on my side of the bed. But on her side of the bed it is totally
silent because we can't figure this thing out. We've just literally thrown
away two alarm clocks that our kids got as presents for the same reason. They
would just randomly wake us up in the middle of the night. I even unplugged
them and that didn't help because it had some sort of fail-safe mode that
says, `OK, when (technical difficulties) power, I'm not gonna run the CD, I'm
not gonna run the radio; I'll just run this incredibly annoying beeping noise
at 4 AM.' So there's an opportunity for somebody. I hope somebody out there
is listening.

GROSS: Thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. KELLEY: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Tom Kelley is the general manager of the design company IDEO, which is
based in Palo Alto, California. He's also the author of the new book, "The
Art of Innovation."

Coming up, linguist Geoff Nunberg tells us why the word `literacy' makes him
uneasy. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Commentary: Use of the word `literacy'
TERRY GROSS, host:

The Bush family has always treated literacy as a personal cause, and the
president has made it a central element in his new education package. Our
linguist Geoff Nunberg thinks this is all to the good, but he's troubled by
the use of the word itself.

GEOFF NUNBERG:

For the last 150 years or so, Americans have regarded literacy as an absolute
public good. I'd be the last to quarrel with that; it's only the word
`literacy' itself that makes me uneasy. Actually, `literacy' and `literate'
have been around since the Renaissance as a way of describing an educated
person which usually meant somebody who knew Greek or Latin. But `literate'
and `illiterate' were pretty recondite words until the late 19th century when
Americans started to use them to classify people according (technical
difficulties) the basic ability to read and write. That was the moment when
literacy became a civic virtue, the key to creating the responsible public
that a democracy required.

As one reformer put it, `Universal education is the lever that will elevate
the social state of the poor, assimilating them in habits, thoughts and
feelings to the rich and the educated.' That was the great age of the
American public library movement and the time when people started to measure
literacy rates as the best indicator of social development. Ever since then,
literacy and illiteracy led double lives in English. They referred both to
basic skills and to broader culture and intellectual achievements. And over
the course of the 20th century, Americans have extended the notion of literacy
to cover skills and knowledge that don't seem to have any immediate connection
to basic reading and writing. The phrases `media literacy' and `economic
literacy' first appeared about 50 or 60 years ago, and in the following
decades people began to talk about geographical literacy, scientific literacy,
computer literacy and mathematical literacy.

By 1987, the critic E.D. Hirsch could coin the term `cultural literacy' to
cover all the information that Americans need to know in order to function as
informed citizens. Who was Horace Greeley? What was the Stamp Act. Where is
Stuttgart? When was the Thirty Years' War?. And shortly after that, William
Bennett started talking about moral literacy, by which he meant the ethical
standards that all American children ought to be taught, the values they could
presumably pick up from the uplifting tales in Bennett's "Book of Virtues."

There's something very curious about the way we use the word `literacy.' At
least I don't know of any other language that has a single word that covers
this range of territory. When the French or Italians want to talk about the
basic ability to read and write, they use terms based on the word `alphabet.'
Somebody who doesn't have those skills is called analphabetic. (Technical
difficulties) illiteracy campaigns are called alphabetization campaigns, and
so forth. But when it comes to describing the other kinds of knowledge that
Americans call literacies of one kind or another, Europeans use other words,
like `learning' or `culture.' If you want to translate computer literacy into
Italian, you'd say something like (Italian spoken). And if you wanted to talk
about cultural literacy, you'd have to say something like (Italian spoken),
though that expression wouldn't make a lot of sense.

Of course, there are a lot of words in English that don't have exact
translations in other languages; `smug,' for example, or `empowerment.' But
that's often a sign that some cultural sleight of hand is going on. The fact
is that there's nothing natural or obvious about using the same word to
describe the basic ability to read and write and the general knowledge and
values that we want our citizens to have.

In part, all this talk of literacies reflects the skittishness that Americans
have about using the word `culture' as a positive term. We have no problem
using `culture' to describe the traditions and mores of particular groups and
communities, like when we talk about hip-hop culture or the culture of people
who travel around the (technical difficulties). And there's a growing
tendency to use the phrase `the culture' to refer to the customs, values and
prejudices that we're all swimming around in. But we're uncomfortable about
using the bare noun `culture' all by itself.

A phrase like `a person of culture' has an elitist public television ring to
it. And no (technical difficulties) very far trying to argue that the schools
are failing in their duty to turn out cultivated citizens. That would be a
perfectly natural thing to say in French, but in American English, the
adjective `cultivated' is reserved for seniors who are trying to describe
themselves in a personal ad.

Since the 19th century, the word `literacy' has been our way of getting
culture in through the back door of the school room. Literacy strips culture
of its connotations of class and refinement and turns it into a civic duty and
a subject matter, something you can objectify and measure. At that point, it
becomes natural to start compiling lists of all the things that people ought
to know, particularly given the American passion for quantification. If
learning about citizenship or morality is the same sort of thing as learning
to read and write, then we ought to be able to set down the subject in a
dictionary the same way we do with words and spellings. Of course, as soon as
anybody publishes one of these lists, people start to quibble with its
contents. Why list Horace Greeley rather than Marcus Garvey? But that's how
people always greet the appearance of a new dictionary. And in the long run,
the disputes just validate the appropriateness of treating culture as an
exercise in lexicography.

There's always been an element of social control in the way Americans think
about literacy. The 19th century founders of the public library movement
believed universal literacy was the best way of inoculating the working class
against the blandishments of radical orators. But there was also a sincere
hope that once people learned to read and write they'd be exposed to a world
of experience where everything wasn't codified in advance. That idea is a
little blurred in the way we use literacy now, where we make the (technical
difficulties) basic reading and writing the model for everything that ought to
happen in the classroom. It runs the risk of reducing the whole of education
to a spelling bee.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist at Stanford University and the Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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