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David Kelley: Thinking Design (Dwell)

Most days, David Kelley rides his bike from the Palo Alto, California, offices of Ideo, the design and innovation firm he founded in 1990, to the Stanford campus, where he directs the university’s fledgling Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or d.school. The ride is about a mile, but to Kelley it’s getting shorter every day. Ideo and Stanford have long been “joined at the hip,” as Kelley says, but recently the intensity of their relationship has increased  —  not just because of the 18 Ideo designers currently teaching at the university, but because Kelley has led them in the shared service of a singular vision, which he calls “design thinking.”

Design thinking is a methodology, but it’s also a way of seeing the world: a cosmology, even a kind of gospel. Design thinking insists that “design” is as much a verb as a noun, a somehow as much as a something, a process as much as a product. As an idea, it’s landed Kelley on the cover of BusinessWeek, helped raise $35 million toward a new building for the d.school at the center of the Stanford campus, and guided Ideo in its award-winning designs of organ transport systems, hospital waiting rooms, the Palm V, and hundreds of other products, places, and experiences. In fact, Kelley’s twin perch—at the helm of arguably America’s most successful design firm and within the walls of one of the world’s most innovative universities—not only speaks to his influence in communicating the promise of design thinking, but is its source as well. Both in the academy and in practice Kelley is at the forefront of pushing design closer to the center of our lives—and using design to make our lives better. On a recent visit to Ideo headquarters, Dwell tried to keep up with Kelley’s kinetic mind.

The Remote Home (Dwell)

In the future, everything will be on the grid--lights, music, A/C, even your body itself. The trouble, of course, is that the grid has no edges. Dwell, October/November 2005

My wife and I recently drove the entire length of Interstate 80, from San Francisco to New York. After a few nights spent in roadside motels, we stayed overnight with friends in Chicago and experienced the wonderful feeling of home. Arriving at their apartment just in time for dinner, we discovered that there was chicken in the oven, a mole sauce on the stove, the A/C blasting away the Chicago summer heat, and a cozy guest bedroom ready for us--one free of paper-wrapped cups or stiff, starchy sheets. And yet for all that, what really made it feel like home was their WiFi. I guess it's come to that: for me, home is where the broadband is.

Design=Everything (Dwell)

A Bruce Mau exhibit in Vancouver takes on the role of manifesto, rethinking design on a grand scale. For today's world of global uncertainty, Mau's fascinating, sometimes perplexing declarations offer unexpected solutions.

When Kathleen Bartels became the director at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2001, she wanted to rethink the way the museum puts on design exhibitions. At about the same time, the Toronto designer Bruce Mau wanted to rethink design itself. The results of their combined ambition are on view until January 3 in the exhibition "Massive Change: The Future of Global Design," which abandons the notion that design shows in art museums must feature polished objects set gently upon spot-lit pedestals. Most design exhibits intend to change your teacups--this one intends to change your life.

My Father, The Architect (Dwell)

July/August 2004

“So tell me about your relationship with your father” does not typically count as small talk. But the children of famous architects pictured here know why we might be interested: Because they co-opted their father's buildings as playgrounds and were dragged on endless architectural pilgrimages, they've acquired a heightened psychological relationship with architecture--a near instinctual sense for the way it orders our experience.

Nathaniel Kahn recalls in his Oscar-nominated film My Architect that his father, Louis Kahn, "left no physical evidence that he'd ever been in our house, not even a bow tie hanging in the closet." The same can't be said for this group; the houses they grew up in often epitomized their fathers' work. And yet they all would certainly relate to Nathaniel's quest to better understand his father--and perhaps himself--through his father's architecture. While none of them are architects now (a key criterion for this admittedly haphazard sampling), all recognize architecture as a consistent subtext in their lives.

And yet that doesn't mean their homes are genteel modern showplaces furnished with hand-me-down Barcelona chairs and failed project models. On the contrary, this group exhibits a low-grade restlessness with the spaces of their lives, a calculated introspection about their domestic environments. Having been immersed from an early age in ceaseless architectural searching, they find it a tough habit to break. As a result, the portraits that follow catch their subjects where they are--in the midst of moves, renovations and domestic sabbaticals. What materializes is a different sort of modernism, not of furniture and line but of vision and personality.

Rough Not Rustic (Dwell)

In Arthur Erickson's Smith residence, modernity is rustic. Massive fir beams support a glass-walled living room that bridges over the entrance to an open-air central courtyard. 

Gordon Smith knows landscapes. As one of the most prominent Canadian painters of his generation, the 84-year-old has a reputation for not-always-easy abstract expressionist depictions of the wilds near his British Columbia home. So it's fitting that his house, designed by Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey in 1964, be both in the forest and of the forest, yet still a work of art

Erickson and Smith were friends with mutual interests: European high modern design, abstract expressionism, and the new regional identity being forged in the Pacific Northwest.   In 1953, Gordon and his wife, Marion, gave Erickson his first residential commission--a painting studio surrounded by living quarters. But as their Vancouver neighborhood grew throughout the '50s, the Smiths sought greater seclusion. They found it near Lighthouse Provincial Park in West Vancouver, on a wooded promontory overlooking the Straight of Georgia.

The second time around, the Smiths offered Erickson no brief. "They said, 'You know what we want,'" the architect recalls. "Gordon being a painter and Marion being a weaver, this was the one opportunity where I could use rough timber, because they'd both be interested in texture and not so fussy about things like splinters."

The massive Douglas fir beams may be rough, but the house is not rustic. Erickson arranged the building as a spiral of boxes around a courtyard, with each wing stepping up from the last. A sky-lit white studio--the only room not finished in wood--anchors one corner of the house, while the living room bridges a cleft in the site's solid granite, rising up to get the view. Both there and in the bedroom, huge expanses of glass define the wall, opening the house to the landscape, their smoothness contrasting with the roughness of the wood. The central courtyard serves a similar function, both confronting and illuminating the forest--Erickson once called it "an architectural reiteration of the forest clearing."

The house has been both home and studio to the Smiths for almost 40 years. "It's a very genuine house," Gordon says. "There's nothing pretentious about it. It's just simple post and beam, mostly all windows, looking out onto the park, onto the sea. It is the most honest of houses."

Winnipeg Whiteout (Dwell)

In Winnipeg, Manitoba, 24-year-old Sotirios Kotoulas designed a starkly modern house that makes John Pawson look like a maximalist.

Sotirios Kotoulas--like most artists and architects whose work begs for the term--hates to be called a minimalist. But looking at the house Sotirios designed for his family on the outskirts of Winnipeg, Manitoba, it's a tough label to avoid. At 6,000 square feet, the Kotoulas residence a cavernous expanse of highly polished pure white marble, interrupted only by a couple pieces of furniture by Donald Judd, and a few of Sotirios' own designs. Otherwise, all the typical household clutter--from the piano, to the spice rack, to his little brother's Playstation--is hidden within the massive closets that comprise nearly every wall of the house, except those made of glass. But like most minimalists, the 24-year-old Cooper Union graduate insists that amid the rigid geometry and strictly unadorned surfaces there's really quite a bit happening here: the camera obscura reflection of the woods outside, the play of shadows on the vast, empty floors, and the powerful psychological impact of a house with a fun-house sense of scale.