There is a discussion going on amongst some of my colleagues about the merits of minimalism versus simplicity.

My own view is that minimalism has come to represent a style and as such is limited in its usefulness. It represents a reaction to complexity whereas simplicity relies on an understanding of the complex. This is an important difference. One is about the surface, about the stuff. The other is about our experience and requires a deep appreciation of how things work so as to make them just simple enough.

Minimalism is often all too obvious while great simplicity can be practically invisible. John Maeda of course talks far more eloquently than I about simplicity in his book of the same name.

I often look back to design history to find the best examples of simplicity. Sometimes it is the result of great restraint on the part of designers but sometimes it is a result of the limitations of technology. One example of just such an historical example is one that I personally experience every time I drive my nearly fifty year old Porsche 356 in the dark. With any modern car I find night time driving a disembodied experience with a Times Square like display of instrument lighting acting as a barrier between me and the world through which I am driving. My ancient old Porsche has no such isolating display. Instead I can see two crescent shaped slivers of light emanating from the headlights on the front edges of the hood. These perfectly designed beacons help connect me to the world outside in an elegant and efficient way, as well as helping reassure me that both lights are functioning properly, and are a result of the careful positioning of the edge of the headlights. Simplicity at its best.

One of the most important ideas about design thinking is that it creates new ideas that provide new choices for business and society. As we move toward December and the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen I worry that we have far too few ideas to talk about. It is all too easy to argue over what we will have to give up in the search for significant reductions in carbon and yet there is very little discussion about what we might create as we try to resolve the most significant challenge humanity has yet faced.

At IDEO we have been thinking about this over the summer and today have launched a new site we call Living Climate Change that is intended to be a place for just such a discussion to take place. We have produced a few of our own scenarios to get the conversation started and we are trying to link to as many existing interesting ideas as we can. If you know of good design content that should be included then please let us know. In the meantime please check out the site and help us expand the conversation.

Apologies for the unabashed self promotion but for a first time author, today is a big day. Change By Design has finally hit the stores.

Again thanks to many of you who have contributed to the dialog over the last year as well as to those who have helped me with the book itself. I fully intend to keep this blog going and maybe even post a bit more often.

Writing and producing a book has been its own interesting exercise in design thinking. From planning the structure, to choosing the stories to working on the design has all been a fascinating process. To those of you who may yet embark on this journey I would say the following: the work involved in writing a book is nothing compared to the work involved in promoting it.

I spent last week at the Mayo Clinic symposium on health care innovation called Transform. It was excellent. A great group of speakers and an audience populated by some of the most important players in health care innovation.

You can check out the videos from many of the speakers at the Mayo Transform site. Unfortunately I can’t link you to the individual talks but I would recommend the following in particular:

Clayton Christensen on the Innovators Prescription. For those that have not read the book this talk makes a rigorous argument for how the business model of healthcare needs to be restated.

Amy Tenderich talks about the Diabetes Challenge. An attempt to get design thinkers engaged in improving the lives of diabetes sufferers.

Victor Montori, a Mayo physician, does a great job of showing how doctors get it wrong when they don’t consider the whole lifestyle of the patient when they prescribe remedies.

Denis Cortese, the current head of the Mayo, describes where the health care system is dysfunctional today and what Mayo plans to focus on to help resolve that.

Elizabeth Teisberg talks about health care policy and in particular the importance of focusing on value not cost reduction.

Frank Moss from the MIT Media Lab gives a great talk and demonstration (with one of his graduate students) on empowering each of us to be responsible for more of our own health care.

Patrick Garaghty, CEO of Minnesota Blue Cross Blue Shield, makes an impressive argument for how it is in the interests of payers to focus on wellness programs. Given the bad press that insurance companies have been getting in the recent debates it was good to see some real leadership coming from them.

As always, Larry Keeley makes an eloquent and urgent case for innovation based on showing how Leonardo got things wrong.

The three ‘i-spotter’ award speakers all gave great short talks on their projects - Jaspal Sandhu, Jeff Belkora and Alexandra Carmichael.

I headed up the last session which was specifically on design thinking. I was followed by three wonderful talks by Karl Ronn of P&G, Christi Dining Zuber from the Kaiser Innovation team and Maggie Breslin from SPARC, the Mayo design and innovation group.

Overall I was very impressed by the level of the dialog about innovation and design thinking, particularly amongst the physicians. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a profession that is focused on making people’s lives better is so enthusiastic about a human centered innovation process.

The image is courtesy of Marc Koska at Safepoint. I included the story of Marc’s innovation, the auto-disable syringe, in my talk.

Sara Beckman of the Haas Business School has written a great article in the New York Times about Six Sigma and design thinking called Welcoming the New, Improving the Old. She talks with Chuck Jones of Whirlpool who gives a lovely analogy of design thinkers as quantum physicists and everyone else (including the Six Sigma crowd) as Newtonian physicists. Multiple possibilities versus defined measurement.

Sara makes the argument that businesses need to learn to build bridges between these two approaches. I have to admit that for a long time I was highly skeptical of design thinking’s ability to operate in a Six Sigma environment and I was once quoted in the Economist as saying that it was toxic to innovation.

I don’t think that anymore. Having spent more time studying companies like Toyota I have realized that high quality (the goal of Six Sigma) is a great platform for new ideas (the goal of design thinking). Similarly, as Chuck Jones implies, Six Sigma can help new ideas get better faster. Having been involved in several first mover products at IDEO I can attest to the fact that very rarely is that first iteration the best possible product in terms of quality or functionality.

Perhaps we should think of design thinking and Six Sigma being part of a cycle, each feeding the other to create new and improved products, services and experiences. Of course the biggest challenge will be to build business cultures that are agile enough to incorporate both.

I posted about the Human Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit back in December. Since then it has been downloaded over 6200 times. It is now available in its second edition. You can find out more about it on IDEO’s website (and download it for free) here and, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of priniting it, order hard copies from Blurb here.

Dan Pink’s talk is now up on TED.com. Here is what I said about it in my post about TED Global:

The last design thinking related talk of the conference was by Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Free Agent Nation. Dan is writing a new book on the scientifically proven point that intrinsic rewards are far more effective than extrinsic rewards for motivating creative, innovative behavior. Of course anyone who has run a creative organization has always known this but what Dan will no doubt do is get through to the 99% of leaders running companies who still believe that the carrot and the stick is the right way to promote innovation.

On my way from Chicago O’Hare airport to our office in Evanston today I saw powerful evidence of the state of the auto industry in this part of the world. As we drove along Dempster Street we passed a large auto dealer for Chevrolet and Toyota. The forecourt looked pretty deserted and there were relatively few new vehicles on the lot. What there were, however, were about a hundred old SUV’s and minivans, parked inches apart, all with the same word scrawled in large yellow letters on the them - CLUNKER. It was a surprisingly powerful site. On the one hand it was evidence of a shift in allegiance from the old gas guzzlers to new, presumably, more economical vehicles. On the other hand it was a sad image of what was once an all powerful industry that just got it wrong. As far as I could see almost every one of those clunkers had a Ford, GM or Chrysler badge on it. (Apparently the Ford Explorer was the top trade in during the first two weeks of the program.)

No doubt the cash for clunkers scheme has tipped thousands of people towards new, more sustainable cars but it as also served to underline how poorly the US auto industry has been managed for the last couple of decades.

Lego reported a 23% rise in revenues and a 60% rise in profits for the first six months of 2009. What is the secret that causes a company that sells toys to buck the economic tsunami that has afflicted everyone else? One clue is that in particular parents have apparently turned to Lego’s classic products in the downturn. Does this mean that parents are realizing the value of a toy that can be used many times over and adapted to many purposes as superior to products that deliver an entirely predictable outcome?

I credit Lego with introducing me to the idea of design. In the early 70’s England suffered a series of miner’s strikes that led to power cuts. In an effort to help out my mother, I built a flashlight from a collection of light emitting bricks that my Lego collection contained at the time. With this prototype I hoped my mother would be able to see well enough to cook my dinner. Whether or not it made the difference to our evening repast I don’t recall, but it did make me realize that I could build things that were useful to other people. In other words that I could design. I talk about this in the prototyping chapter of Change By Design.

I hope that this resurgence of Lego introduces more young children to the power of prototyping and the opportunities that design holds.

The Mayo Clinic is hosting a symposium on innovations in health care experience and delivery at their Rochester, Minnesota campus in September. I will be speaking on design thinking and health but should that put you off, their are some great speakers on the roster that will be well worth listening to. They include Clayton Christensen, Larry Keeley, Craig Barrett, Linda Avery (23andme), Denis Cortese M.D. (CEO pf Mayo), Karl Ronn (P&G) and Frank Moss (MIT Media Lab).

Check out the website if you are interested in the debate about where health innovation is going. It could be a refreshing change from the circular arguments we are hearing in the press about health reform these days.