What is "Design Thinking"?

Design is a pursuit that requires you to be very methodical, logical and smart. You must be able to spot patterns that are not obvious, see things from many different perspectives and bring together seemingly disparate ideas. There is a need for great attention to detail as well as having the ability to abstract something down to its raw components, and being able to sense how it fits into a wider ecosystem.

That beautiful object, interface, gadget, or tool is highly practical as well. You enjoy touching it, you enjoy using it, you enjoy looking at it and having it in your life. It enhances your day, and makes you react emotionally. You love it. It solves a problem, and delights you at the same time. In fact, thinking about it now, it just seems like an obvious solution and you really can't imagine life without it. Someone however did have to sweat the details and work on many many prototypes before you even knew it existed. Why didn't you think of it?

This is where "Design Thinking" fits in. It is a method that allows you to deconstruct a problem, view it from all possible angles, and then craft a solution for it. It is a highly potent recipe for innovation, bringing together people from varied areas of expertise an intellectual and cultural persuasions, to solve a wicked hard problem together. Design Thinking can be applied to any sort of problem from running a hospital to evolving a product and anything beyond and in between. It applies the way that designers  think about problems to just about anything.

Design is not a beauty parlour. It is not where you go to pretty things up. It's where you go when you have problems to solve.

The backstory 

Design Thinking is a user-centered process for innovation based essentially around observation, collaboration between individuals from different disciplines and user group, rapid learning, focus on visualising ideas through prototypes, business analysis and strategy. When I mention "innovation" I don't mean having a lot of ideas, I mean actually making good ideas a reality. Innovation requires action or else they're just ideas. Design Thinking in my mind should be applied to all software development pursuits and can easily integrated with Agile and Lean methodologies. To some extent there's quite a bit of overlap. Using Design Thinking in your software teams will help you get the results you're looking for from a product perspective.

User-centered design is not design by committee

You must develop a deep understanding of your user-base. You must develop empathy for your users, and determine what the best way is to gain insights into unarticulated needs. You need to gain the experience, knowledge and ability to frame the real problem.

Many people mention Henry Ford who reportedly said that "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". There's no evidence that he actually said that, but it is clear that he believed it. Ford made the T-model in black only, and dominated the market for nearly 20 years. Ford's mistake was to stop innovating, and to refuse to understand what the market wanted. Harley Earl was GM motors head of Colour and Trim from 1927 to 1959. He not only introduced the idea of the clay prototype (still used to this day), but carried out user centered design by understanding what Americans wanted from their cars. This led to the strategy "A car for every purse and purpose". GM made 5 distinct brands from the Chevy to the Cadillac, and dominated the market. Ford was forced to shut down and re-tool his factories. (You can read more about Henry Ford and the "faster horse" thing on HBR)

This story is sadly still repeated in many industries and companies today, from Kodak to sony and beyond. If you fail to balance your portfolio, failure is a high likelihood.

Companies like Patagonia for example, have continuously innovated and listened to their customers to ensure they were responding to their needs and growing in the right direction as a company. Listening to users does not mean that you should act on every demand, but rather that you get good at sorting the wheat from the chaff, and making well balanced design, business and technical decisions. This is not easy to do, and there are a lot of great tools and techniques to help you get it right. This is the discipline of user-centered design, and it sits at the heart of Design Thinking. It overlaps a great deal with sociology and anthropology. We use ethnographic methods where we seek to understand people by observing, listening, discussing and through open-minded collaboration. If you think you already know what your end-user wants...you're starting to sound a lot like Henry Ford.

Take the time to do it properly and you will be leagues ahead of where you hoped you;d be. Do it wrong and it will cost you dearly as Target found out. They asked consumers in a survey whether they would prefer the aisles to be less cluttered. That was a 1.85 billion dollar mistake. Surveys have their place and this was not one of them. Asking leading questions will also never get you good results. User-centered design is a science, and if you want to do this yourself, then you need to learn how it's done. Learn from the mistakes of others first. Here's a quick overview on surveying to get you started.

The Method in a nutshell: Think - Make - Check

This very same cycle is being seen all over the "Lean" software methodology at the moment. It has been around for at least 50 years, and is finally being popularised and applied to all sorts of different industries by companies like IDEO, who drive large scale innovation in almost every industry that touches our lives.

Think:

During the "Think" stage you should be ideating, encouraging a lot of blue sky thinking, introducing yourself to the box so that you can think outside of it, and imagining all of the possibilities. It is a time to think big and broad. Invite specialists from different areas of expertise and give them a voice. Invite end-users to your workshops and brainstorms. Get all of the ideas on the table and then converge towards a few key directions that work from a business, design, and technical perspective for you and your market.

Tip: Include users by interviewing them, observing them using your current product or a competitor's product, visiting them in their environment.

Make:

It's time to think with your hands. Make some rapid prototypes of the directions that have emerged from your "Think" phase and try them on for size. A prototype can be anything from a role-play (like the Google checkout one for example), to sketches, 3D models made out of cardboard and tape or a user journey draw on post-it notes. Made sure that you only do enough to learn what you ned to. Once you have learned that, it's time to move along and throw this prototype away. You'll be iterating on it many times before you get to your end product. When I say this I don't mean that it is going to take a long time, I mean that in a week or even a day you can make many iterations on a single prototype. Don't get attached to anything, stay open-minded.

Tip: Include users by getting them to participate in collaborative design sessions. Invite them to show you what they are thinking by drawing, role-playing, acting out and modelling.

Check:

Check that your ideas so far are actually in line with what end-users need and want from your product. You can test with humans (anyone who is human) to test if basic interactions and flows are going to work. You should test with end-users and gradually more and more specific user groups, the more you have evolved your prototype. This is a time for stopping a direction dad in its tracks, adapting it to be something else more useful, or giving it the OK. Remember that you may still decide to not go ahead in future, so keep it as rough as you need,and don't waste time on cosmetics and documentation. The documentation is the learning. It is the prototype.

Tip: Include users by getting them to evaluate your prototype, but also by inviting them to tell you what they would change if they were in your shoes, and why.

Rinse and repeat:

You will go back through Think-Make-Check many more times, however many times you need to be comfortable with the result. The early Think-Make-Check cycles are gross and the later ones subtle. The key here is learn quickly whether an idea has legs and what is needed to make it a reality if it does. Learn by making it. Don't waste your time on long meetings where you endlessly discuss the same small details or where groups disagree and theorise over things. Put every to the test. Get people making rather than talking. Call out facts and assumptions. Check the assumptions. Make informed decisions.

A few tips to put it in place:

You don't need a lot of time or effort up-front to get Design Thinking working for you. You just need to do it.

• Start by getting the people you need together, being mindful to include people who view things from different perspectives
• Timeboxing all of your workshops together and keeping the focus and momentum rolling will help you greatly
• Make sure everyone is heard by using different facilitation techniques
• Don't shut down ideas,  build on them. Encourage groups to say "Yes, and..." rather than "No, but..."
• Don't allow any "Devils advocates" to exist in your groups, encourage people to speak for themselves. As Tom Kelley says "Devil's advocates can go to hell". It's too easy to shut ideas down and hide behind the devil.
• Having direct responsibility for your thoughts and ideas in a safe environment where failure is ok, will speed things up
• Prototype all the time. Every time we fail, we learn something important. When we make a paper prototype that fails, we didn't put a lot of time and money into making it, so we are less attached to it. If you have ever spent months working on something and polishing it only to find it isn't what users want anyway...you will know how painful and costly a lesson that is. You can learn those things in a matter of days at little cost. Focus on learning quickly through rapid prototyping
• Don't try to avoid the mess, the failure and the chaos that can sometimes ensue - keep moving towards a solution do not lose momentum. Those spaces of high emotion are where creativity lives.

Different environments will have their own challenges that you will need to deal with of course, and I am confident that it can be done. This is a really short intro to Design Thinking, I encourage you to delve deeper starting with the resources below and to experiment. If you are in a software environment you can work to iterations and soundly incorporate Design Thinking practices within the Agile or Lean framework you are using. More on that soon.

Some useful resources:

"Change by Design" - Tim Brown (book)

"Design Thinking" - Thomas Lockwood (book)

"The art of Innovation" - Tom Peters (book)

"The 10 faces of innovation" - Tom Kelley (book)

D-School Standford - Stanford school of design (website / course)

Tim Brown on Design Thinking - HBR (pdf)

Design Thinking - The movie

Ways to keep your smart team innovative

  Is this you?

I've seen teams start out by making big long lists of tasks and deliverables at the beginning of a project. This assumes that they know exactly what the product is going to end up being. I think that this kind of way of thinking goes entirely against a culture of creativity and innovation, and of the Agile philosophy. By deciding on all of the tasks up-front and by setting up an infrastructure for the team to work in (process, tools, tracking, tickets...), we actually restrict the potential for innovation.

What it takes to innovate:

Innovation requires serendipity and creativity. If we impose a tonne of rules and processes, we throttle both. Before deciding on what the product is and how to get there, you should start with a creative brief and well thought out elevator pitch, that allow the team to think for themselves, and have focus without being dictated to. If you have a team of very smart people, they will most likely feel disengaged if you give them requirements and impose goals and a path to follow. Each of them come with a wealth of expertise and experience that should be allowed to flow through the product, fully. To do this effectively and to set yourself up for the highest likelihood of immense success, you need to get comfortable with the gaping voids that inevitably exist in projects, and in fact allow them to be much positively palpable. When you set up processes and tools, you are filling up the void, masking it with man-made certainty that doesn't really exist. If you are after a cog for your machine, then this will work fine, but if you are after a whole new dream machine, then this won't do. Drop the rituals and face the discomfort of the unknown square in the face. If you are feeling uncomfortable and so is your team, then you are in a good place. If chaos ensues...then this is extremely good news.

The voids on a project are like unchartered territory, which can lead to great discoveries. There were those that thought that the earth was flat and there were those that wanted to check. The latter were forced to innovate simply to make the trip possible. They had a starting point and went from there. This is often how the most inspiring projects are started. Even the most mundane projects can be fertile ground for innovation if you allow for the circumstances to be exist.

A quick checklist:

• Make sure your team has mastery around the work you are planning to do (everyone)
• Only set up enough structure around the team to allow them to gain focus and begin to be productive
• Don't use Agile tools and methods to minimise uncertainty and discomfort
• Trust your smart team to be in charge and self-organise
• Give a creative brief to provide focus
• Impose frequent playtime on the team and make sure they stay fit, rested and healthy
• Be clear about constraints (budget, time, resources...) - constraints are conductive to innovation
• Be prepared to be surprised and to bend your mind into different shapes
• Don't get attached to your idea of the product - the team is going to shape that
• Remember, there is no such thing as an end-product - there is never an end.
• Be brave

Stick these up to keep you clear:

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking." — Walter Lippman

"It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date." — Roger von Oech

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." — Dr. Linus Pauling

"We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." — T. S. Eliot

"The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail." — Edwin H. Land

"The achievement of excellence can only occur if the organization promotes a culture of creative dissatisfaction." — Lawrence Miller

"Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." — Picasso

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." — Howard Aiken

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things." — Theodore Levitt

Happy doing...

Are you really being innovative?

A lot of people talk about innovation, and a lot of people describe themselves as innovative. You probably know some too: "innovative problem solvers", "innovators", "innovation machines", "creative problem solvers", "Creative innovators"... but few people actually do innovate. What was your last innovative act? Was it an idea? If it was that's good, but realising that idea is just as important, and sometimes where your greatest chance at innovation lies. If all you have is a big list of ideas that never became reality...you're dreaming. Imagination is a really important part of innovation, so you are part of the way there, but innovation comes from making it happen. That's where it gets really interesting.

A few places to start:

Creativity is "the defeat of habit by originality". How often can you be original in your every day work? How often are you? Do you think you can be? Whether you fit kitchens or speak in court for a living, you can be innovative.

Here are a bunch of ways you can be invite innovation in:

- See the bigger picture; Step away, then step away some more...

- Flip the problems around to see different perspectives

- Stop colouring inside the lines

- Solve the problem rather than being right

- Deconstruct first, then construct

- Start with the desired effect/outcome (rather than the minimum requirements)

- Throw out the obvious

-  Rebel Intelligently against rules; those you set yourself and those imposed on you.

- Let go of what you know (and be ok with the uncertainty)

- Have vision, don't change things for the sake of change

- Hang a question mark on all of those things you take for granted

- Change lives, not companies, businesses, products or processes

- Have great ideas and execute them ; Get it done

- Challenge complacency around you and your own

- Demand innovation: "What if..."

- Disrupt habitual thought patterns

- Question why, when you do things the same way as last time

- Be curious and excited about challenges

- Try new things all the time

This will open your mind and your life in ways that you never imagined possible. It's easy to read this list, and easier to not attempt any of the things on it.

Treasure the limitations:

A lot of people talk about innovation in ways that seem elusive. It's almost as though you need to wait for the perfect alignment of the stars, the perfect team, the perfect conditions to be able to create something, or hatch an idea. Remember this quote when you start to think that way:

"Whom the gods wish to destroy, the give unlimited resources" (Twyla Tharp)

The more money you have in the bank, the more control you have, the more time you have, the more everything you have, the less you are likely to innovate. Innovation is borne out of limitations, out of need. Constraints mean that you have to be creative, that you have to find a solution. The best thing to have in the world if you want to innovate, is a good set of limitations. A chance to really dig at something and keep at it until you have it solved in a way that will surprise even you.

If it feels unsolvable, walk away. Mix it up and do something completely opposite to what you think you need to do. It'll change your perspective and cheer you up. When you least expect it, you'll see a few more ways to solve this one.

Persuasion and vulnerability:

If you're really innovating often, you're probably ok feeling vulnerable. When you're breaking new ground, you have a lot of people to convince before you can get your idea actually built or created. A lot of people will tell you it's too expensive, too insane, too "out-there", "nobody will like it". You need to be a master in persuasion and thick skinned at that. Howard Aiken rightly said:

“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.”

If lots of people are agreeing with you, and you're not getting enough pertinent questions, it should send your alarm bells ringing. Anything truly original looks ugly at first, so be sure to watch for that strange weird idea that doesn't sit quite right. That stands out. Give it some time, look at it again. Picasso knew how to do this really well. Something really original can be unsettling, Be sensitive to that.

Move in unfamiliar circles:

It's pretty tough to invent something completely novel. Sometimes great innovation comes from applying some method to a totally new field or combing a few things together that have never really been thought of in that way before. That's why it's so important to learn things outside of your field. That's why great innovators have passions in many fields. Steve Jobs loved art, Richard Feynman loved music, as did Einstein, Benjamin Franklin influenced physics, Isaac Newton, Isaac Asimov..where do I even start? Move in unfamiliar circles.

Leonardo DaVinci (another awesomely productive and curious mind) said:

“Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.”

And that my friend, is a good place to begin and end :)

Seriously, play.

photo credit: desbiens_jean "The essence of serious play is the challenge and thrill of confronting uncertainties...The challenge of converting uncertainty into manageable risks or opportunities explains why serious play is often the most rational behaviour for innovators". (Michael Schrage)

As a society, we are finally beginning to give play time the attention it deserves. It is being recognised as serious business, and so it should be. Play is how children learn social skills, make sense of the world they live in, discover new things about it, and invent, create and dream. There's nothing childish about those things. In fact all of that stuff is fundamental to innovation in businesses, factories, studios, hospitals, schools, banks...everywhere. There's even a conference for it.

Play for teams:

If you think that playtime is for kids, go out and buy a box of lego play dough and set an hour aside to re-discover the joy and importance of play. Then bring it into your workplace. It will make staff more productive, happier and more relaxed. It also leads to learning better team skills like voicing an opinion,giving feedback,taking the lead,letting someone else take the lead, for example. It gives permission to think without boundaries, considering weird and crazy ideas that end up making a lot of sense, and others that don't but were fun to play with. It gets people who don't work well together to address their differences and to learn to celebrate them. It's productive time.

I have often turned a workshop into playtime, and seen 40+ year old depressed, tired or annoyed looking C-level executives light up at the sight of lego and coloured pens. The meeting is then productive because we have a common language to work from. Because we can explore ideas without asking for permission. Because we can discover personal traits about each other. Because we can connect. If people in your meetings are not connecting, they're not productive. A whole host of hidden problems is about to rain down on your project. Get everything out in the open, all of the ideas, all of the concerns, all of the opinions. Address them all. And do it in a positive and fun environment.

"Being playful means taking risks, and risk takers sometimes fail". (Jon Kolko)

Ah yes. It does come with a price. Sometimes you will pick the wrong idea. Sometimes you will fail. This is why it's important to fail as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible. We can't help that we will fail sometimes, but we can get better at it. It means not having a culture of blame and dealing with things as a team. It's about learning from every mishap and adding to the body of knowledge and experience of the team. In fact trying things is often the only way to grow and improve. A bad idea can out to be a real winner in a different context. Be open. Be brave. Dare to try things. Prepare well. Set yourself up for success, and work fast. If you fail, recover quickly. Learn to do this, rather than being too afraid to try.

Play to be healthy:

“If we don’t take time to play, we face a joyless life of rigidity, lacking in creativity. The opposite of play isn’t work, but depression. If we’re going to adapt to changing economic and personal circumstances the way that nature armed us to do, then we have to find ourselves having some play time virtually every day.”

This is serious stuff. It can help clear your mind and give you perspective. If you have lost yourself in drawing silly little aliens for 20mins or modelling a car out of blu tak for an hour, you have probably succeeded in calming down. That in itself is a great thing. No pills required. No special method. Nobody else. If you play often enough, you can start to practice creativity, having new ideas, and being happier. There's no question that it will improve your life. It will help you think about things in new ways. And the best thing is, you are already an expect at it, you just have to remember how to play. It's beautifully easy and rewarding.

Play for innovation:

"Serious play is not an oxymoron; it is the essence of innovation." (Michael Schrage)

Lego has created "Serious Play" which is described as "an innovative, experiential process designed to enhance innovation and business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities, Lego serious play deepens the reflection process and supports an effective dialogue – for everyone in the organization". It's well worth a look. At ThoughtWorks we use a variety of games we have invented ourselves, or adapted to a situation. The "lean Lego game" is used to teach the Agile methodology, for example.

Play is fundamental to innovation and creative thinking. The principles of play behaviour and development can be directly applied to business. Check out the Stanford class on play and innovations, the handouts are pretty cool, and easy to use in our own environments.

Play for effortless work:

"When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity. So play with your intuition". (Linda Naiman)

It occurred to me after working very very hard for a few years, that I wasn't shining despite all the hard work. More importantly I wasn't enjoying myself. I took some time out and thought things through. It became apparent to me that there is no "play time" and there is no "work time". Both of these things need to overlap, more or less at different times, for me to be at my best. My yoga practice includes fun postures to explore, I doodle often, I make stuff out of other stuff, I take the time to go "wow" when I see something beautiful. I climb on top of things. I make faces at my friends.

And some days when I need more inspiration than usual, I'll skateboard instead of getting the train.

I'm a 33 year old woman with a Ph.D in computer science and a job as an experience designer that I take very seriously.

Play is serious stuff.

If you're not convinced (and if you are), Tim Brown has more food for thought - Enjoy.

Creativity in action

I watched the following videos this morning, and thought they were really uplifting, for different reasons. I thought I'd share these with you, and leave you to imagine how you could combine them all into something quite horrible or into something bloody marvellous! Enjoy. The wooden ball travels along a giant xylophone, and plays Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, by J.S. Bach. The incline of the xylophone ensures that tempo is respected. It's all in the name of advertising (to sell a mobile phone), but surely this is advertising at its best. (thanks to Rachel for sharing this)

Alexander Chen made the following awesome little video, using the NYC subway map to create music, each route intersection behaving like a sting on an instrument. Super creative as a concept, well thought out and beautifully executed:

Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Although this isn't the most imaginative or well executed round of real-object dominoes, it awakens the child in me, and makes me definitely want to do this one day...for fun and smiles. The coolest thing for me is the sound each different object makes.

I'm not usually a fan of the accordion, although I do appreciate the man who plays at St James station once in a while. This is really badass though.

What is a creative technologist?

photo credit: RDECOM

There are a lot new roles and job titles emerging from our changing times, especially in this technological landscape. The one I have seen around most of all these last few months in particular is "creative technologist". There's a good few advertising agencies, digital shops, start ups and other organisations all requesting this new breed of technologist. Everyone seems to have their idea of what it is which is fine, but I'm also seeing marked inconsistencies. We're getting to the point slowly, where companies are saying "I want one of those!" but will they really know what to do with a creative technologist when they get one? Would you?

Creative technology

First of all we should cover off what we mean by "creative technology" to begin with. It sits at the intersection of science, technology, humanities and arts. The entire goal of this discipline is the pursuit of innovation. It may well feature a collection of difference technologies that work to achieve something useful, artistic or fun for example. Innovation comes from addressing a need, or from getting a wide range of different ideas from a highly multidisciplinary team. This isn't a new idea, creative technology has been around as a concept for many years. Some of the areas we commonly work in are social innovation, Eculture, digital arts, computing, robotics, psychology, basically anything that can contribute to a new invention (be it social or technological). "Creative technology" doesn't exist as an academic discipline in its own right. It's not really in our interest to make it one, because we need experts from different fields to come together to work on different projects, some completely out of their usual remit. Collaboration is probably the most important keyword in creative technology. In fact, we talk of "extreme collaboration".

Claudia Eckert uses the department of trade and industry's definitions of "creativity as a thought process, design as an articulation of creativity and innovation as an output of the process" to explore the wisdom of separating technical design domains from artistic ones. She says in this article:

"Artistic design domains, such as graphic design, furniture or fashion design, have a very strong artistic component in the training designers receive and sell their products largely on their aesthetic appeal, rather than a functional distinction to other products. Technical domains, such as engineering or software development, have scientific and mathematical foundations. Products are usually distinguished by their functions or features. Many design domains and projects combine both aspects. For example architecture and construction span everything from the purely artistic to the functional and good buildings need to excel in both".

Creativity

I define creativity as " having ideas and solutions that are completely novel", so in this I include discovery of new knowledge (in science, medicine, law and so on), technical innovation, insightful analysis (in any field), composition of art and music in new ways. My experience is that few people tend to think about lawyers or scientists when they think about creativity. To properly understand "creative technology", these associations are fundamental.

Sternberg's Theory of Creativity shows us that the most creative people have a particular type of intelligence and abilities:

- Synthetic intelligence (the ability to combine existing information in novel ways)

- Analytic intelligence (the ability to evaluate ideas and recognise truly novel ones and the ones that need a whole lot more work, and also the ones that aren't worth pursuing)

- Practical intelligence (the ability to communicate the ideas, make things, test things and so forth)

They also have knowledge, in that they have enough context and history around something to be able to avoid reinventing the wheel. They also know when to stop taking in knowledge, to avoid blocking their creativity. They also question everything. This style of thinking can put them into situations of conflict, which is something they need to be resilient to. They're not afraid to take risks, be it looking silly or trying something very hard. Creativity is a full-time job, it's not something you turn on and off depending on what you're working on. We've just looked at some important skills and attributes that make a person creative, regardless of what field they work in.

In this paper, Sternberg says that if you're really creative you "Buy low, sell high" in the realm of ideas. He means that you pursue ideas that are unknown or out of favour, but that have high potential. This is another area where he mentions that the truly innovative encounter resistance.  A quote that I always remember when I think I've hit the jackpot on an idea and nobody else thinks so:

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." (Howard Aiken - computer scientist)

Creative technologists

The creative technologist has a strong technological background (read computing, engineering, or whatever is appropriate for the organisation). They have a very logical, rational, analytical, scientific and objective outlook and are highly left-brain active. They are however also very right-brain active and are intuitive, subjective, holistic, and synthesizing. This sort of combination is partly learned but I believe you are also naturally pre-disposed to it. Interestingly Prof. Ronald Standler says that highly intelligent and creative people often get average grades. I think that a certain amount of distraction is natural, because you are able to look at something in such a large number of ways.

In many agency environments, the creative technologist bridges the gap between "creative" and "technology". Personally, I don't think this is the best use of these excellent skills, and this unique viewpoint. I think that bringing together people who are capable of having lots of ideas at many different levels, and who can also be very practical about them necessitates a certain kind of freedom from a set recipe. IDEO and Jump Associates are the prime example of innovative companies that bring together multidisciplinary teams in an ideal way. I would argue that everyone from the psychologist to the engineer is a creative technologist there (to some degree). The briefs are around pure innovation and everyone's ideas are taken into consideration. Often the outcome of a project is a good mix of everyone's ideas from what I can tell.

Creative technologist Mark Avnet has a nice definition of creative technologist:

"CTs understand the business of advertising, marketing, and branding, take a creative, strategic and people-centric view of how to connect people and brands, and understand the kinds of mediating technologies that can best be used to make those engaging experiences where the connection happens. They sketch with technology, just like a visual creative can sketch with a pencil. They’re steeped in strategy, so the things they come up with make sense – it’s not about technology just for the sake of technology. The experiences they design address real needs of people and brands".

On the iAB blog, Randall Rothenburg interviews RG/A chairman Bob Greenberg:

"There are critical creative needs that didn't exist in the old advertising," says Mr. Greenberg, who counts 130 technologists in his New York office. "Advertising is no longer just about the display ad or the TV commercial or the banner; it's about creating meaningful tools and architecting user experiences. Our technology group, they can keep up to speed technically with the top people at HP or IBM. But they also understand how to work with others to create an application that will lead to community."

It's good that agencies across the board are recognizing the advantage of hiring creative technologists, and their importance in a fast changing ecosystem. We're in a place where innovation is key to the equation and where technology is the main driver. Start ups and idea incubators are popping up all over the place, putting pressure on the older, more established creative agencies worldwide. The focus however needs to remain on innovation and extreme collaboration rather than an industrial race.

None of these things are new for the field of computer science in particular, and also physics for example. The best scientists are all right-brain + left-brain dwellers. Einstein played violin, Richard Feynman the bongos, and Leonardo da Vinci was probably an early example of a master creative technologist. Science is only about discovery and innovation.

Looking after your creative technologist

Here are 5 things you should do to ensure you get the best out of your CT.

Once you get a CT in your team, ideally you'll be looking to find him/her a fellow creative technologist to hang out with and bounce ideas off. The danger of having a sole person responsible for creative technology in your team, is that they are likely to get overloaded with projects that need to be done, and:

- Do not get them involved in production and operations (you'll burn them out on tasks not requiring idea generation, which is what you want)

- Let them read, research, and ponder to their hearts content (Good ideas come from having knowledge, remember?)

- Don't try and measure their output (4 bad ideas can combine to produce one awesome idea)

- Don't rush them (well, not all the time. A little pressure can be beneficial, but requesting things by yesterday is just going to shut down their creativity)

- Do send them to conferences (the more exposure they get to different people, ideas and technologies, the better)

And lastly, if you can create a positive, interesting, fun environment to work in, you'll keep them.

Here is the team at IDEO re-inventing the shopping cart